June 2024
Books, articles, podcasts, and thoughts throughout the month
June 28
🎧 Conversation With Josh Wolfe — Where to Be Bearish and Bullish in 2024 via Prof G Pod
Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 - nobody died. Which is a good example of fault safety. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
📰 Finishing 1st Draft & Traveling as a Parent via
Writing this book allowed me to reinterpret my life.
It wasn't until I started "morning pages," a habit of writing three pages in a stream of consciousness every day, that I began to see that I needed to value my independence again, and no one was holding me back.
📰 Overthinking It? via
Our brain might be useful for decisions that affect profitability or the bottom line. But it is our hearts that help us make better decisions that bring us closer to each other, no matter how difficult the decision.
June 27
📰 How I Learned How to Trust via
when everyone is too busy getting ahead, buying the next million dollar fixer upper in the right neighborhood and planning the next generative AI investment, who’s got time to talk about the existential angst that has driven thousands of years of philosophical inquiry?
As the old saying goes, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
📰 Ode to an Inside Joke via
It has been fifteen years now, and the joke has evolved to suit our mid-thirties. The party is now, we remind each other. As in: the party is, in fact, not later. As in: the party has been, in fact, happening all along.
“At last she is, like, partying.”
And yet it will be my greatest achievement if my epitaph reads: Later Finally Came.
📰 Ultimatums: Do They Actually Have a Place in Relationships? via
A boundary, unlike an ultimatum, clearly defines what someone feels is acceptable in a relationship and what isn’t while maintaining their independence and autonomy.
the “ultimatum” can be phrased in a manner that actually defines it as a healthy boundary. With healthy boundaries, the other person is still able to make a fully informed decision where they know the results of either choice they make.
📰 The OARB Framework: Why Appealing to Self-Interest Is Better for Everyone via
Three truths about human nature:
People care about how they look. No one wants to look bad, be embarrassed, or get kicked out of the tribe for being a loser.
People want to get their fair share. Humans are wired to care about fairness, especially as it relates to getting what they feel they deserve.
People care about themselves first, then others second. We can put this in the bucket of “things I wish weren’t true, but are.” There’s no judgment here.
OARB Framework
Observation: “When you say/do X….”: Describe their specific behavior or words
Assertion: “It makes you look/seem [bad thing]...”: Describe how they’re coming across negatively
Repercussion: “Which isn’t great because [impact on you]...”: Describe how they’re making life harder for themselves
Benefit: “If you do [suggested action], these good things might happen.”: Appeal to how they can make life easier for themselves or get more of what they want
📰 More Human Possible via
When I lived in San Francisco, I often introduced myself with name and role in tandem, already subtly sensing how non-human it felt to willingly identify as just my job title.
📰 An Awful, Strange, and Bittersweet Space via
One speaker at the service shared words of wisdom from her father: With everyone, we hold on to our memories of them until we get to see them again and then we make new memories. With the deceased, there aren’t opportunities to make new memories so we can only hold onto the ones we already made.
📰 The Best Way to Start Learning a New Skill via
Cohort-based courses by contrast are engaging and brimming with life. It’s why they offer the best approach to ensure your success.
To this day there’s a part of me that, in the moment of excitement just before a new course starts, thinks that learning new skills alone will transform me into a new person. I have to remind myself that change only happens with practice.
June 26
📰 Transparent Tuesdays by
The work I want to be doing—the work that fills me up with energy—is writing, reading, editing, and podcasting. What if I could grow my audience by focusing on those things?
📰 On Writing Better: 43 Things I Learned From My Insane 2 Years of Study via
Adjusting from Article Writing to Book Writing
if you're going to write a book, write a fucking book. Don't try to bang something out in a few months, don't try to find shortcuts using Chat GPT or whatever to do the outlining for you, don't put it off until the last few months before your deadline with your publisher, write a fucking book.
A Book is Not a Series of Articles One of the first mistakes I made was thinking that if I could write a 2,000 word article in a day, writing a 70,000 word book was simply doing that 35 times.
It is much, much better to leave some detail out and upset the top 1% of people in the field who will think you dumbed it down too much than to give a complicated topic the full treatment and alienate the other 99% of readers. If they want to learn more, they can always do it after.
You have to create a book-reading experience, which is hard to do if you're still locked into your Internet concision-optimization mindset.
You Might Have to Let the Articles Go (for a bit) As I got more into writing the book, I found writing articles was actively impeding my book writing.
But article writing is also a very different creative act than book writing, and it was hard to be in both headspaces at once.
some of your best writing will happen when you're not writing.
Your subconscious is incredibly smart and incredibly dumb. It will spit novel insights out of the ether as if they were shuttled to you by God, but it will spit out those insights about anything you feed it with.
The more stimulus you let into your life outside the book, the more junk your brain will spit out when you're in the shower or at the gym. So protect your subconsciousness's inputs at all cost. More on this in "The Art of Fermenting Great Ideas"
A shitty draft is much better than an unfinished draft.
If you want to trad pub, you have to make a proposal anyway. But even if you self-pub, you should make a detailed proposal for your book. The proposal explains what the book is about, why now is the time to write it, why YOU should write it, who’s going to read it, how you’re going to market it, etc.
The idea of "discovery" writing where you just start and see where the book goes sounds sexy and artistic and fun, but you'll probably end up going around in circles and never get anywhere that interesting. At the very least you need a high level outline of where the book is going and how it's going to get there.
If you want to maximize impulsive creativity you could keep the outline concise, and only list the top ~10 major scenes that you plan to navigate through so you can figure things out along the way. Or you could go to the opposite end of the spectrum and outline every single scene and every single beat within the scene and then start chugging through it.
The outline is an extremely helpful starting point, but you’re only going to end up following ~50% of it at best. As soon as you start writing, you’ll realize something needs to be tweaked.
Proven Story Structures Are Helpful Scaffolds. Looking for some proven story structures to try to fit your book into can be very helpful for creating the initial scaffolding. It will make sure you're hitting important major points like the inciting event, the climax, the midpoint (which does not mean middle, it means when the protagonist goes from being reactive to proactive). There's the three-act structure, a classic most people are familiar with (though not that helpful for structuring). There are more complex ones like The Snowflake Method. There is the 7-point Story Structure (I rather like this one). And of course the Hero's Journey.
📰 It's Your Birthday via
I was so enamored, I took you to my second grade class as my show and tell.
📰 October 7 via
The Christians of the 14th century regularly murdered people for imaginary crimes, like blasphemy and witchcraft. Studying this history, even in a Christian context, provokes amazement and horror.
if we would condemn the monstrosities of the past, we must condemn the monstrosities of the present.
And yet it is easy to see why many people are confused about the war in Gaza— because they have been inundated with misinformation about it. Judging from social media, billions have been told that the Jews are settler colonialists, that they have built an apartheid state in Israel, and that they are guilty of genocide. These lies didn’t start on October 8th. They’ve been promulgated for decades, and it seems that no matter how patiently they get corrected, nothing changes. Of course, the photos and video coming out of Gaza haven’t helped. This is one of the many liabilities of social media. There simply is no political analysis or philosophical argument, however correct, that can make emotional sense of images of dead children being pulled out of rubble.
📰 A Special Newsletter: Finding Jeju. via The Korean Vegan
Quite frankly, I've seen more emotion at an M&A closing than evidenced in those photos.
While I'd walked into this photo shoot wanting some nice photos of the entire family, the photographer assumed we were there to honor my parents and their near-50-year union. Anthony and I, along with my brother and his family, would merely be accessories to the main couple. As I watched the soft light in Omma's eyes gleam through her glasses while she fingered the pearl beading of one couture gown after another, I thought, "Sure. Let's go with that. Why not?"
Note: do a family photoshoot the next time I reunite with them.
But even as this prayer ran like the final spin cycle of a laundry machine round and around in my brain
🎧 Kara's Ketamine Trip, Meta and Tesla Earnings, and the FTC Bans Non-Competes via Pivot Pod
Non-competes are a transfer of wealth from young workers to older shareholders. Scott hopes Lina Khan goes after non-solicitations next, where if you start a new business you can't hire from your previous firm.
June 25
📰
: Reclaim Your Procrastination and Relabel It as Leisure and You Have a Nice Little LifeJune 24
🎥 I surprised her with 500 Drones for my Wedding Speech via Mrwhosetheboss
The purpose of life is love. Nothing cures like love. Nothing protects like love. Nothing endures like love. What can the objective be but to give and receive as much love as you possibly can in the time that you have? To not try and change the universe but to see it as your canvas to paint your love story.
🎧 Modern Love via
NYT does not allow pseudonyms
39 Submission Tips for Modern Love - #21 - Writing About Other People
Slamming the other person in our writing puts them in a position where they’re defenseless
In the prosecutorial essay we are trying to blame someone for acting badly or hurting us or ruining our relationship, and this can make readers feel like they’re serving on a jury for a trial that has no defense attorney. The more the prosecutor hammers away without rebuttal, the more the jury, aware of the unfairness of the proceeding, starts to think, “Not guilty.”
Charlie: Glorification in writing is boring
Be a tour guide instead
The other tool that can help is self-effacement—“stepping aside” in the essay to let scenes, dialogue, and concrete details carry the freight for a while. There is an urge in personal essay writing to always be front and center, controlling the narrative through summary and explanation like a tour guide who never shuts up. But this controlling voice can sound more judgmental and unfair than a scene that, while still composed by the writer, will probably feel more transparent to the reader. Often I find myself saying to writers: “This is where we could use a scene.” This is particularly true in the second half of an essay, where we’re already oriented and want our tour guide to keep quiet so we can see this world for what it is and judge for ourselves.
As long as it happened, people are allowed to say that it happened
June 23
🎧 The Hammer You Use to Smash Your Old Life Apart via Beautiful/Anonymous
Teaching could change you forever or maybe it's "the hammer you use to smash your whole life apart"
June 21
🎧 We Picked Our Sperm Donor via Staying Up with Cammie and
When seeking input on donors from friends and family, Cammie & Taryn asked to not give input on appearance (he's so hot) or slamming one (that's not definitely the guy) but more of the "which one is the vibe that would fit with us more" and "who looks more like one of our siblings".
June 20
📰 Starting a Memoir Might Be the Last Thing on Your Mind via
Running forward, away from our experience as it occurs, is a perfect recipe for dragging the past behind us, incomplete, and then repeating the same mistakes.
The practice of memoir doesn’t have to lead to a published book. It can start in the next five minutes by starting a list of notable life experiences and then taking some time now and then to reflect on them.
🎧 Prof G Markets — GameStop & Market Manipulation + Is AI Becoming a Bubble, and Is Nvidia Safe?
Almost everyone has access to the same news. Real news is very hard to find. It's hard to differentiate a media product on news. We [Prof G Show] don't differentiate on news. We take news from others and try to provide some insight or perspective, which is Latin for voice. Most people go to a media outlet for voice, and that is a take on things, or insight, or humor or no voice. Reuters is just the news, all facts. The Economist is dry and provides news from a capitalistic lens.
Scott: AI boom is Reminiscent of dotcom boom in 1998 when valuation is shooting high. Is Nvidia the Cisco of 2024?
June 19
🎧 Conversation With Claire Hughes Johnson — Building Great Teams, Managers, and Self-Awareness via Prof G Pod
One tip for management is to set people around you up for success, try to make them look good. Then they will want to stick around and be around you.
The 20s are about finding what you’re good at. You don’t have to like it but don’t hate it and try to be in the top 10%.
Have some forced savings. Use acorn, max out company-matched investments, preferably before they even hit your bank account. Capitalism will try to entice you and say “hey it’s an investment in yourself”. Use that instead to invest in your future (delayed gratification & time value of money).
Say the thing you think you cannot say. Be direct with your communication
A homogeneous team when immediately formed will perform faster and better. They have the common information effect. Can finish each others' sentences. They have shared experiences. But over time they will not have outsized performance. They will have speedy & fine performance.
A diverse team run w inclusive practices meaning they value differences and challenge assumptions of diff team members w respect. Those team can have 3-5x performance.
Claire: I get identified as a woman in business. I get invited to speak in events because I'm a woman. That's not who I am and why you should invite me. That is a characteristic I have. Nobody likes to be treated like their one characteristic. Should we move away from it? We should add to it and not treat that one thing as the whole ball game.
🎧 The Future of Entrepreneurship Part 1 — What Makes a Good Entrepreneur? How Do I Raise Capital? Is Balance Ever Possible? via Prof G Pod
Expenses don't make a business. Revenues do. Expenses = cool office space, hire a bunch of people, have a cool website, have a glossy brochure
🎧 TikTok Ban Approaches, China's App Crackdown, and Guest Dana Mattioli via Pivot Pod
Dana Mattioli, author of The Everything War
Amazon cuts 6% every year.
Hire woman from trader Joe's and there's a blacked out room to figure out what to source to compete with trader Joe's.
📰 Packing Supplies for Ten Days in Spain, and Another Retreat in 2025 via
My philosophy is to bring what you love and what you know you will use, and anything else you will either just miss a little bit, in a fleeting moment, or not even think about in the midst of creating. We overthink and often overpack. The basics are all you need when moving about on your journeys. Why have more weigh you down?
how fun is it to seek out an art supply shop in a small town or big new city and buy a few things if you really find you are in a bind?
Here is what I am bringing for this trip:
My handmade sketchbook (I often make one specifically for a trip)
Two drawing pencils with pencil point protectors so they don’t get my bag messy
A plastic eraser
A few disposable fine-line permanent pens like Pigma Micron
My assortment of Lamy Safari fountain pen with an ink converter that I fill with Platinum carbon ink. (I have a fine tip with black ink, a broad tip with black ink, and another fine tip with sepia ink). If I make sure that they are all fully loaded with ink, they will last the whole trip, but I do have tiny jars with extra ink just in case.
Two extra small sets of watercolor paints - I am bringing the Draw Your World palette that I created with ArtToolKit and Greenleaf & Blueberry (we are working on a re-release, so stay tuned!) and this small set with bright florescent colors.
My Derwent Inktense Paints, set of 24.
Derwent Push-Button Waterbrushes, set of 4. I use these with all of my paints.
A small ziplock bag with an assortment of Caran d’Ache Neocolor II pastels and Museum Aquarelle colored pencils. I like these because they are all water-soluble so I can add water if I choose to or work with them on top of my paintings for added texture and free-play.
A few rags for blotting and cleaning the brushes
A pile of small watercolor paper for postcards
Travel folding scissors (TSA safe) and a glue stick
June 17
📰 The Day My Kids Made Me a Dad by
A lot of earth comes out of a six-foot hole. But labors of love have never shied away from moving mountains. (View Highlight)
there were three of us, together, working to fill the hole in the ground and in our hearts.
🎧 Easy Conversation Starters via Staying Up with Cammie and
Be fun stupid, not stupid stupid. It's okay that you're doing something crazy. 20s is for making mistakes.
On giving advice: not thru the lens of your learning (don't get hurt) but thru the lens of how the advisee is experiencing it (go have fun)
Icebreaker questions: What's your ideal Saturday? Sunday is for when you know people better
In a tough situation, just look at the person right now and go "if nothing changes, then what?" It's the only certainty we have because the future can get better or worse. And the person in the future is just a potential but what you know is the person that's in front of you. Is this person's behavior a phase or is it her norm?
June 16
📰 Is Competition Good for Artists? by
the Prix de Rome — very properly restricted to Frenchmen. It is something like a prize — the winner has free quarters in the art capital of the world on a liberal allowance from the state.
A man may get outside help, and bring in a work that is only half his own; and even if he does every bit of it, he may still have fed his invention on the contraband of borrowed ideas. So, to prevent all that, they put him in a kind of monastic cell in the school itself, and there for three mortal months, until his task is done, he has to live and work, with no communication from the outer world. He is what is called en loge. He brings in his own traps, and he is as effectually under lock and key as any Chinese scholar competing for the prize of Peking.
In my experience, the most productive kind of competition is friendly competition among colleagues. You aren’t competing for a prize, just the esteem of your group of allies. There are no winners or losers, no rules, no entry fees, and no judges. I think it can bring out the best in everyone.
📰 Useful and Overlooked Skills by Morgan Housel of Collab Fund
a useful and overlooked skill: Accepting a certain degree of hassle and nonsense when reality demands it.
This is not an enjoyable skill, which makes it overlooked.
A few other useful and overlooked skills:
Calibrating how much you wanting something to be true affects how true you think it is.
Respectfully interacting with people you disagree with.
The ability to have a 10-minute conversation with anyone from any background.
Sitting with someone you’ve never met, looking them in the eye, and carrying on a conversation – what used to be so common it wasn’t considered a skill – is now a competitive advantage.
Getting to the point.
Diplomatically saying “No.”
“No” is often delivered in two damaging ways.
A diplomatic “no” is when you’re clear about your feelings but empathetic to how the person on the receiving end might interpret those feelings. It’s critical in private investing like venture capital, where the pass rate on potential investments approaches 99%.
Respecting luck as much as you respect risk.
📰 Surviving Suicide via Anna Akana
Diary entries from Anna after the suicide of her sister.
🎥 How to Make YouTube a Source of Income? | Revealing My Adsense Revenue by Peter Lindgren
Whenever you start a YouTube channel don't do it for the money start because it's fun and then keep doing the fun videos
June 15
📰 Epochs of Ecosystems by
find moments to root yourself in timeless history.
• Sit by a stream
• Hug a tree
• Plonk yourself down on a rock
A Rock. A River. A Tree. Ground yourself.
📰 Real Confidence Is Status Fluidity via
There’s an old story of a young man shouting slurs at Buddha while he was teaching a crowd of villagers.
Buddha turned to the young man with a smile and asked, “Tell me, if you buy a gift for someone, and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?”
The man, surprised by the question, thought a moment and answered, “It would belong to me because I bought the gift.”
“That is correct. And it is exactly the same with your anger. If you become angry with me and I do not feel insulted and reject it, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy. Not me. All you have done is hurt yourself.”
📰 An Economist’s Rule for Making Tough Life Decisions via Quartz
“The data from my experiment suggests we would all be better off if we did more quitting,” Levitt said in a press release. “A good rule of thumb in decision making is, whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo.”
Status quo bias is predicated on our hesitation to make a change unless we’re sure that the benefits outweigh the risks.
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:
Trimmings of the turning tide
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At the start of every year, I’m tempted to add a habit that will improve my life. But just by 1% every day, which will compound to being 37x better at the end of the year, per the tech bro manifesto. In 2023, my goals included sleeping 8 hours daily, eating fruits every day, and running 1-2x a week. I’ve failed miserably at all of that. Most days I slept…
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:
All talk, no work?
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I wouldn't have to deal with this if I was home. Christina cornered me in the office pantry and now I'm stuck in a conversation about how her son got sunburnt in soccer practice on Sunday. As an aspiring DINKWAD, I couldn't care less about her tomato-like little human. I just came to the pantry for some crappy coffee because I need the caffeine.
📰 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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Wow - I’m amazed by your reading list, and what you’ve distilled! Thank you for including me in your reading and distilling!
Hi Becky! Thanks for including me in this amazing list. So great to put all you liked in one place for others.