June 13
📰 The Remarkably Talented and Alienated Late Millennial Man by
The Remarkably Talented and Alienated Late-Millennial Male does complain about our feminized, therapy-driven culture. And yet his deepest need — which he can’t articulate because it sounds weak — is just to be seen.
📰 Bite-Size Lessons to Be More Agentic by
Filled with rage and anger, instead of leaving his past behind, Rudy manifests a McKinsey-like report on Auschwitz's atrocities, which then reaches Winston Churchill by smuggling it across Europe.
Wyndo’s fave new app: Sublime. I watched the video on the site. The founder: "Normal people don't wanna double bracket the internet."
📰 Was It Unethical to Secretly Record Justice Alito? via Tom Jones, Poynter
Windsor calls herself a journalist. But did she act like a journalist? Not only did she not identify herself as a journalist when talking to the Supreme Court justices, she lied about her views. Then she conducted what essentially were interviews without the subjects knowing they were being interviewed for a story.
Windsor said, “I do think it was the only way to do it,” and went on to explain that she is fighting for a greater cause — our nation’s future. And that’s an argument that many of her defenders are making; that Windsor is fighting for something critically important.
That sounds like activism, not journalism.
📰 Good Design Can Obscure Poor Logic by
I consider myself a skeptical person, so I was surprised at how much benefit of the doubt I gave the projects at first glance simply because they displayed the right aesthetic.
A shiny doc that offers little substance is still useless. When my direct reports sent me a well-organized Notion doc, my immediate reaction was often, Ooh this looks great.
📰 [Deluxe Essay] Slowness as an Ideal by
The people I admire most never seem to rush but are always where they need to be.
I forget all the busiest times in my life. They blur into one traumatic, technology-infused nightmare.
Slowness is a result of curating an environment that cultivates slack instead of speed, perpetuates ease instead of urgency.
📰 Did Someone Encourage You to Keep Going When You Wanted to Quit? by
It was one thing to wake up to a steady downpour, knowing that your day would be a complete write off. Disappointing, yes—but at least when it’s raining with commitment you can get on with enjoying a day of not working. Sort of rain can ruin your day in a much bigger way, because performing on the street requires a 100 percent effort.
The international community of street performers possesses an admirable work ethic. No written code or bylaws exist to govern the behavior of street performers.
One of the unwritten codes we shared as street performers was to give each and every performance our all, and never bail.
He waved the smelling salts of busking passion under my nose and basically called me on taking the easy way out of the day, telling me that he wanted to see me work.
📰 The Superpower You Didn’t Know You Have by
Recognizing strengths
Positive psychologists believe that there are some strong upsides to working on and expanding your strengths.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, frequently praised co-founder Larry Page's approach to innovation and called it ‘10X thinking’. I personally like to think of myself as a ‘dot-connector’.
You’ll be surprised how many strengths will show up if you simply listen for them, especially if you’ve primed your mind with some vocabulary in step 1.
Recognizing strengths in others is a superpower that makes you more valuable, especially when providing professional support. Helping people see, discover, or rediscover the strengths they often overlook is how you flex that superpower.
📰 No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn by Jack Nicas, The New York Times
“Many of the sites that distorted this detail are news aggregators, meaning their business model is largely designed around repackaging the reporting of other news organizations, with often sensationalist headlines to sell ads…To an informed internet user, their tactics are familiar. For the Marubo, however, the experience was bewildering and infuriating.”
📰 The Anatomy of a Wedding Invitation by
假座 (jiǎ zuò) is an archaic term to mean that the venue you use for the wedding dinner is not your house but a borrowed (“fake”) venue of a restaurant, a hotel, etc. There’s also the tone running throughout the invite that the hosts are putting themselves in a very humble position (i.e. sorry about my fake venue!) and their guests on a pedestal, something very common in ancient China, which might be familiar to those who’ve watched any ancient Chinese dramas (!)
📰 When Going Wide Is Out, Go Deep by
I feel differently about my remaining time. Quieter. I’m more interested in increasing my attention on what I really savor in this life; to use my time to go deep on the things I actually enjoy, and less on trying to impress myself, or someone else, or to seek novelty.
This approach seems less horizon-broadening. But by going vertical down a few treasured rabbit holes, you end up broadening your horizons anyway.
📰 What Was the Goal of Academic Training? by
Drawing plaster casts and nude models from observation was only a part of the French academic art curriculum in the 19th century.
The ultimate goal for most students, and the surest way to fame, was to win the Prix de Rome competition. If you won this contest, you were sent to Rome at government expense to study the old masters.
What skills did this competition encourage? Success in this competition required the ability to draw figures and compositions from memory and imagination. It also required a familiarity with hundreds of possible stories from the standard myths and biblical texts. Most ateliers offered some form of imaginative sketch practice. According to Albert Boime, “the results often reflected a verve and expression lacking in the other studies.”
June 12
🎧 TikTok Ban Fast-Tracked, Elon Pay Package Revived, and NPR Bias Accusations via Pivot Pod
Dual class shareholders were initiated by newspaper companies who don't want the pressures of a shareholder towards our editorial coverage. What changed was when Sergey & Larry wanted to do that and it was a big battle. But it's google and everyone wanted in. Since then every founder that has a decent amount of leverage pulls it off. Dual class shareholders stock have not underperformed single class. Because those companies do so well that founders have a lot of control and they're doing rly well.
From Kahneman's work: loss aversion theory. The reason insurance is the best business in the world is that people would rather have a guaranteed series of small losses than risk one big loss. And we overestimate the risk of extraordinary events. Insurance taps into this flaw in the human species.
June 11
🎥 5 Days of Photography in Spain via graincheck
Photography is really about noticing and seeing and waiting.
I want to show you this clip in real time uncut even though it is quite long. You can see I just flagged down Joshua who's filming me because I wanted him to keep the camera rolling since I felt like I might find a frame here.
🎧 Conversation With Cal Newport — The Key to Productivity Without Burnout via Prof G Pod
Women are judged unfairly on their looks. Men are judged unfairly on their ability to make money. Yet we objectify only women and never say "oh I get the sense you won't be economically successful".
Obsess over quality. The biggest allure against productivity is to get good at things. As you care more and more about craft, the more the idea of just being busy becomes an anathema.
AI can't empty your inbox because it needs future modelling to respond. AI can’t do scenario planning or predict the future.
We underestimate the cognitive load administrative overhead (forms, emails, messages) has on digital knowledge workers. We don't need AI emptying my inbox. We just need to reorganize work so that this task switching is not prevalent. There's a more proximate solution. but reorganizing work has more friction so maybe AI is needed after all.
I don't know if aggressively interacting w chat interfaces is going to be valuable in 2 years. Being good in AI = being a good prompt engineer? That doesn't sound like it'll hold up. Tools that are very disruptive tend to require less training and be very easy to use, like email.
Book he's reading: Fareed Zakaria - The Age of Revolutions
Books that changed his life:
Sapiens (gain so many diff things out of it)
Peter Drucker - Adventures of a Bystander (management theory)
Dune (rereading because he just saw the movie. Read it back in high school)
🎧 Prof G Markets — ByteDance’s Blowout Profit, Kalshi & Events Betting, and Dude Perfect’s Big Deal
Go-to around any dispute in business: money wins. Look where the most money would end up in people's pockets and that will be the course of action that company will do.
To young people, if you wanna take a stand, good for you. But your first obligation is to develop economic security for you and your family in a capitalist society. Vote for the people who will regulate towards your ideal world but do what you need to do for economic security.
Investing is an opportunity to buy a company and everybody wins. The population keeps growing. Tech and innovation bring everything up. The entire global economy grows meaning the value of the stock you have goes up. There's no loser. Investing is not a zero sum game. It's joining on the roller coaster ride that is the global economy. It's coming along for the ride.
It's hard to make a living in mono medium. Need to do video, podcast, etc.
Prof G show - revenues
YouTube - barely making money
Books - 7-figure plus contracts
Pods - mid-millions
Newsletter - not monetized yet but getting inbound interest from advertisers in hundreds of thousands of dollars
Speaking - multi-million dollar business
🎧 Conversation With Jared Cohen — The Macroeconomic Environment + Life After Power
You can't time death.
If you have a dying parent, have some semblance of normalcy.
Take care of the caregivers. Make sure they also have some semblance of life outside caregiving.
Go through old media. Old photos and old TV shows.
Be transparent. Say how upset you are that they're leaving.
Michelle Obama: you're practicing for the person you're gonna be.
So is the messy room etc the person you wanna be? Is you being stubborn the kind of boyfriend you wanna be?
June 10
And so a mission was born: to take every ferry and kaito on that list, and some other routes besides.
To take every one of these ferries is harder than you might think. There are about 40 official, regularly scheduled routes among more than 50 points in Hong Kong, linking more than a dozen of its 263 islands and two dozen locations on Hong Kong’s mainland.
June 9
🎧 Attachment Styles & Love Languages from Staying Up with Cammie and
You are not the person you are yesterday, and not the version of you tomorrow.
I just am like scared of who that person was entering that relationship. I don't feel like I know her. And [my therapist’s] like, well, because you're not her. She did something that she could with the information she had at the time. You have to be gentle with her. That version of you was doing her best, but she's not the version of you today. She’s not the going to be the version of you tomorrow. Stop putting so much pressure on yourself to have everything figured out.
June 6
🎧 Office Hours Special — the Future of Work Part 1 by Prof G Pod
Bonding with kids tip 1: spending time with kids when they’re not looking directly at him
When I sit down and talk directly to them —I think this is more true of boys. I think girls have an easier time making a social connection — I try to never miss an opportunity to be in the presence of my sons when they're not looking at me.
Walks, car rides. I don't mind being the Uber driver on weekends because I found that if you're in the car and you're not supposed to talk and they're not looking at you or you're not looking at them expecting anything, then occasionally some interesting things spill out of their mouth.
I like asking them to come to the store with me and taking walks with them, but trying to find situations where you're in their presence, but not necessarily doing an activity and not necessarily demanding or expecting any sort of engagement and things kind of come out.
Bonding with kids tip 2: lean into their hobby
Try and identify a hobby that they're into and then really lean into it. I couldn’t give a shit about sports and I am now leaning into the Premier League because my kids are into it.
Bonding with kids tip 3: carve a weekend with a kid
And then my final thing, try and carve out time, one weekend a year for each of them where it's just you and that kid. I take my kids to different champions like games or different football games across different cities in Europe and I say to them, all right, this weekend's coming up, you gotta pick it. And we do stuff, or it can be something else. My youngest really wanted to go to Universal in LA, but every year you're gonna have overnight somewhere with just that one kid. I find that the dynamic is so different, mostly when the kids aren't around their mother, but also when they're not around their siblings.
Underworked remote worker wanting to be more successful
Get ridiculously fit
Get one of these abs, get a personal trainer, whatever it is and take this period to just get insanely fit. For you, that might be different. You might decide I wanna be insanely flexible. I wanna be insanely lean or I wanna be insanely strong or have incredible endurance, whatever it might be. But there's no excuse for you right now to get in absolutely the best shape of your life.
Be a domain expert and learn
Is there an opportunity to go much, much deeper into your domain and take some of that spare time and either take online courses or I like the idea of going to school. Is there a place where you can go and start learning, you know, as an MBA and option, as a master's in anthropology. I don't know, what inspires you?
Be a master at something
Mastery or the ability, being young with the neuroplasticity you have, with the discipline you have, living in New York with the access to all this incredible domain expertise, think how could I become a master in something? Start writing and start trying to communicate and develop a brand in that domain. I started when about 15 years ago, we rented a house in the Hamptons for the summer and I thought, okay, this Twitter thing, I need to build my footprint and my profile. Every day, I'm gonna follow 300 people, which was the max at that time. And at that point, 60% followed you back. I started doing the same thing on LinkedIn, then I started doing the same thing on Instagram. And I started writing and creating a ton of content in my area, brand strategy, and then how technology disrupts traditional industry. What is your niche? Start writing about it, start posting about it, start doing videos.
Take that extra time to get ridiculously fucking strong and ridiculously present in your field.
Intersection between human capital and the workplace
If I were going to start over in academia, I would focus on the intersection between human capital and the workplace. How do you measure it? That's a really interesting thought.
Remote work is a fucking disaster for people under the age of 30.
Class A office space is sold out
Class A office space has actually never been stronger. The best office space is actually sold out, because people are coming to the reciting to get people back in the office, and they want it to be nice.
🎧 Prof G Markets — Scott’s Investment Portfolio — A Breakdown
Investments are a random walk.
Investment in Public, up 10x and then crashed
Invested in Post.News, thought it was going to be a great product, now marked down
Invested in NJOY, thought it’d be almost 0, then suddenly the company was sold off for $2.8 billion
That's why I never invest now other than a couple of homes. I've never, I don't invest more than 3% of my net worth in anything. If you looked at my portfolio now and said, something's going to go to zero in the next three months and something's going to go up 20x, I'd have almost no idea. I would literally be throwing darts at my portfolio.
Actively asking for IPO allocation
I think that the IPO market in the back half of this year is going to be really, really strong.
I don't just wait for people to call me and say, oh, you're awesome. I'll call people and say, I love your company. I'd like to invest.
June 5
🎧 Listener Gossip Stories — Poly Girls and Workplace Crushes via Staying Up with Cammie and
Gut affects so much of health. Even if everything is ok, an improvement in gut health affects other bodily functions.
🎧 Trump on Trial, Big Bank Earnings, and Guest Charles Duhigg via Pivot Pod
Awareness is literally the foundation in letter A of brand building. Unfortunately, it's been taken to a place where now, we have personalities online who decide, I'm going to wallpaper over my mediocre work with just awareness.
Storytelling is the competence that will stand the test of time
Charles Duhigg: When we're in a conversation, the reason it's powerful and communication is homo sapiens’ superpower. It is the thing that has set us apart from every other species. When we're talking to each other, our bodies start to match each other. During this conversation, without us realizing it, our breath patterns are matching each other. Our heart rates are starting to align. Most importantly, the neural activity, the brain activity that both of us have, all of us have, are starting to mirror each other. Within that neurology, that's known as neural entrainment. When you think about it, it makes sense. If I describe an emotion to you, if I describe an idea, you actually experience that idea or that emotion a little bit. That's what makes it powerful. That's our brains aligning.
When it comes to storytelling, the thing to keep in mind is my goal is not necessarily to tell you the most polished story on earth. My goal is to take you on a journey with me. Many people who when they tell stories, they focus on the beginning and the end. But it's the middle, the journey through the middle, that makes it a story. The movie Cinderella: the beginning is the parents, her father dies. That's two minutes. The ending as she lives happily ever after. That's like 45 seconds. The rest of the movie is the middle. And when we bring people on that journey, we invite them to align with us to to entrain neurologically. That's incredibly powerful.
I bought Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators after this episode.
June 4
Court reporters have a lot of patience. The sort of frustration of sitting in there. As she said, reliving stuff that we all knew and saw. And then trying to explain to people why they need to pay attention to something. Why they're going to learn something from this. I do think she's right that actually the process story, the story of the trial, the things the lawyers say does sometimes shed light on how folks think about themselves and honestly, how they think about us, the media.
Nayeema has a bedroom phone that’s just an alarm clock. She leaves her phone outside the bedroom, as most “wellness”-oriented millennials do:
June 3
📰 Digital Media and Cultural Memory by
With the rise of streaming services and digital publishing, physical media like DVDs, books, and records are becoming less common. At the same time, copyright terms have been extended, leaving large numbers of films, books, and songs unavailable to republication.
American Artist helped popularize Andrew Wyeth, Robert Vickrey, Tom Nicholas, Richard Schmid, and even Frank Frazetta, who had a cover feature in 1976. For many artists, an article or a cover feature cemented their reputation.
American Artist Magazine lasted until 2012, when its publications were sold to an LLC and folded The Artist's Magazine under the corporate banner of Golden Peak Media. What will happen to the publishing legacy of American Artist from 1937-2012? It’s still protected by copyright, but it’s not available anywhere online.
📰 From the Inside Out by
My relationship with nature was transactional. I was a tourist looking to take from the environment rather than be a resident.
📰 Conquering My Late Father-in-Law's Tiramisu by The Korean Vegan
This past week, I spent a few days in Puerto Rico with some friends. Don't get too excited--I didn't leave our AirBNB, other than to get in a couple workouts and visit the grocery store across the street. I know, I can be rather boring. Honestly, I would have been equally content if the BNB was located in Houston, Texas--I just wanted to be around my friends for a few days, while getting some work done (i.e., the Tiramisu recipe!).
📰 What Happened to Empathy? by Xochitl Gonzalez, The Atlantic
Think of all the people you used to interact with regularly: straphangers, baristas, coworkers, CVS cashier, bartender and yoga classmates. We now WFH, get our food and Amazon packages delivered to our porch and ride our Peloton. Has a lack of daily humanness ruined our ability to empathize?
Similar idea to why I go to the office daily:
📰 Keeping Promises to Myself from
It’s crazy that I’ve wanted this for so long and now I finally have it: an intentionally blank calendar to just read and write and live with slowness.
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Wah love this list! Inspired to do the same 🙌
yay! now i know where to look whenever i need something to read/listen to, in which the search can be time-consuming sometimes. bookmarking this! thanks for the mention too ^^