May 2024
Books, articles, podcasts, and thoughts throughout the month
May 31
📰 WTF Is a Portfolio Career? by
A portfolio career can be made up of many things:
A part time job (eg. working 3 days a week for a company)
A part time business (eg. working 3 days a week for your own company)
A done-for-you service (eg. contracting, consulting)
A done-with-you offer (eg. coaching, mentoring, advising)
A do-it-yourself offer (eg. a digital product, online course)
Creative work (eg. writing, podcasting, Tiktok-ing, playing music)
Giving back (eg. volunteering, pro-bono work)
A mix of any or all of the above
May 30
🎧 Conversation With Fareed Zakaria — Revolutions & Global Affairs via Prof G Pod
US military spending - similar to Elle Griffin’s NATO as the world government piece
as a percentage of our GDP, our military spending is actually quite low relative to historically, But yet just whatever it is, 3% of our GDP is 800 billion, which is greater than the next 10 economies combined.
The country that leads in technology always ends up being the dominant power.
It's Netherlands in the 17th century. It's Britain by the end of the 18th century. It's the United States in the 20th century. In the 21st century, the United States leads in technology. It has never led before, like no country in the world has ever led before.
War is still delivered by waters.
Whenever kind of “shit gets real”, the first question [US presidents] ask is where are carriers? It's still really a battle of the seas and delivering violence and firepower via ocean waters.
On presidential candidates being real
I'm reminded of a memory of when Clinton, I think he was somewhere in Michigan. And he said, your jobs aren't coming back. I'm not going to lie to you. And I think he immediately got so much credibility among moderates like, well, finally, someone's going to be honest with us.
The fundamental advantage we have over the rest of the world is other countries, Singapore, and South Korea. They teach people how to do well at tests. We teach people how to think and problem solve. That is a fundamentally different way of approaching education. It's a deeply American way, and we do it very well.
Note: I doubt this is still true.
May 28
Question: Options on where to go after a career in military?
Getting a PhD
Are you good at school?
You find a domain, you go very deep, you become sort of an expert in a niche.
If you want to go back and do that, I will say that being a professor at a university is, I think, one of the most underrated careers in the world. I just think it's an incredible way to make a living, it flexibility. Generally speaking, I make fun of my colleagues, or I talk about higher ed and a disparaging life sometime. There's a really low asshole factor, at least then on why you and I bet that's true at most universities, they're generally like nice people, pre general people. And it's total flexible schedule. No one's, no one cares if you're there or not, they just want you to do good work. It's inspiring to be around young people all the time that are kind of fresh faced and you feel like you're adding value.
Working in a company
Not startup or pre-IPO company
Economically, the variance is enormous
A company like JP Morgan Chase, they attract world class talent. They have world class leadership.
🎧 Prof G Markets — First Quarter Review — with Aswath Damodaran
Raising minimum wage will add more to the economy
For every dollar additional dollar, you give a low wage worker, about $1.21 is added to the overall economy because the multiplier effect is greater when you put more money in the pockets of low and income workers because they spend it all.
AI needs immense investment capex so only the big guys (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) can do it.
need immense processing power
need control of data
will be really hard for a newcomer to venture in
Dividend initiation is a sign of maturity. Recognizing the stock price will be higher.
Some US companies are bigger than some economies, so there will be wider income disparity in the future.
Corporate governance is dead at tech companies
Dual-class shareholders make the companies a dictatorship
Catastrophic risk is being ignored in investing
Nobody prices in climate change
But if climate change happens, portfolio won’t matter anyway
May 27
🎧 Prof G Markets — Trump’s Memestock Goes Public, the Problem With DEI, and Daniel Kahneman’s Legacy
Instead of DEI, focus on economics.
I don't think it should be DEI. I think the metric should be economics. I think if corporations really want to focus on making America a better place, a more equal place, they should have a skills-based assessment as opposed to a certification-based assessment. What do I mean by that? Whites and males have had too much privilege and quite frankly, people who have opportunity to go to college have such an advantage over poor people who don't have the opportunity to Go to college. And corporate America has essentially become a place where there's a zero chance you'll get into a professional job if you don't have a college degree. And the greatest indicator of whether you're going to get a college degree is how wealthy your parents are. So I think the ultimate DEI initiative for corporations would be to say, we're going to allocate 10, 20, 50% of our professional track jobs based on a skills-based assessment, right? Test, psychological test, skills-based test. Whether or not you have the certification that has largely been sequestered to the children of rich people. But I just don't think race-based affirmative action or DEI is working. And I think there's a lot of evidence that is not working.
Workforce demographics being socioeconomically and geographically homogenous
Race and gender, are no guarantee of a diversity of viewpoint.
Daniel Kahneman worked with a younger academic that challenged him instead of shitposting him
The challenge: that there is a limit to how happy money can make a person.
This is not only a wonderful testament to Professor Kahneman, but to the academic field. And that is, it is regular practice to let other academics challenge your work. And then to celebrate them when they find that your work actually needs updating.
May 26
🎥 I Quit Digital Photography for 365 Days. This Is What I Learned. by Peter McKinnon
Pursuing something full-time
I made a video called quitting digital photography cuz in a sense I did I figured the only way I would be able to commit to this and put both feet in is if I truly put both feet in. That principle has applied to many things in my life YouTube, including back when I was deciding to be a full-time YouTuber, a full-time Creator. I had my interest split and I knew that if I wanted to pursue this full-time and really give it the best chance it has, I needed to put both feet in.
Sunseeker app
I stood there for 40 minutes with my Sunseeker app watching the sun and the clouds knowing that like in 25 minutes I would have a very brief opening where a pocket would come through and I could get that shot and fire off 10 on a medium format roll using Kodak Gold [200] because I knew I wanted it to be warm.
Intentionally upskilling
I'm obviously going to just keep getting better the longer I've been doing this, but without actually investing in myself and looking inward, that was never going to happen. I was just expecting to get better because I've been doing it for so long. Don't expect results you have to go get them. You have to go make them sometimes. That's hard, sometimes that's easy, but it's always worth it.
May 24
🎧 Disney's Victory Lap, Online Privacy, and Guest Ruth Ben-Ghiat - Pivot Pod
Very rarely does a CEO let a shareholder vote go to a vote if they're not going to win.
Good CEOs embed succession planning
He's not the leader. You can't run a company of this size and complexity when one person is in charge with leading it. His job is to create an environment where there's great leadership across all the divisions and an atmosphere of success and innovation. So he's about creating an environment and it's not easy to create an environment when quite frankly, as nice as he is, you're seen as someone who keeps executing the people who get near The iron throne. Really good CEOs in board meetings. I love the succession strategy we do once a year with the CEO. You can always tell who's a good CEO or one of the ways is they come in and they're really thoughtful about giving the bench playtime in the board meeting. Then you have other CEOs who want to make it clear that there's me and everybody else. Without me, this thing doesn't work. That's when you know you got to start thinking about finding another CEO.
Dictators and communication technology
Mussolini, you know, was he's just stimulating and he started in the age of silent cinema, used newsreels. Now Hitler, of course, he had the radio and he ran to it and the Nazis invested in like state of the art, audio technology, so that when he had rallies, his voice would reverberate in ways that made him feel seem more godly because that's part of the personality cult. Modi used holograms when he ran initially for office so he could be everywhere and nowhere like a god. Berlusconi who owned TV networks use satellite TV to be everywhere and Trump used Twitter. So that's one thing they do. They have these bonds with that people feel they're speaking directly and only to them, which hasn't changed for 100 years.
May 23
📰 Small Spaces by
It is tempting to think of culture — and new ideas, and all the spirits of genius — as something created in big places.
Jazz originated in New Orleans, but it did so by stitching together blues, folk spirituals, work songs, and the lineage of polyrhythmic cadences preserved from African heritage. These ferments were not a product of the city — they emerged in more remote places. I believe this is a pattern: culture is not created in cities so much as assembled and discovered there. It is created in smaller spaces.
A trillion-dollar market cap is of course an arbitrary distinction. New York is no stranger to wealth. But it’s worth stopping in Palo Alto for a moment to wonder why, if the largest metropolises ought to have all the advantages in the world, the tiny suburb of a tiny city¹ has been so successful at creating technology companies for decades, while New York has been a comparative failure. Population and density are benefactors to many things, but the denser cities seem uncompetitive, or even technologically stunted, compared to a few suburbs of San Francisco or San Jose.
Note: Goes against Scott Galloway's advice to move to a city
Frederick Terman, born in Indiana in 1900, moved to Palo Alto when his father accepted a position at the relatively new Stanford University (founded in 1891). Terman determined to settle in Palo Alto himself, becoming a Stanford professor like his father, and eventually became dean of the school of engineering. But Terman did more than settle: He encouraged his students to settle, and start companies instead of leaving for elsewhere after graduation. In 1937, David Packard and William Hewlett were the first to heed this, creating Hewlett-Packard in a garage, which is commonly considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
Superstar cities may court talent, but a much more compelling crucible is found when there’s drop-dead rents, too.⁵ Greenwich Village still exists today, as one of the most expensive zip codes in the United States, and unsurprisingly it is more of a museum than a bed of living culture. A portal has closed.
Large places may be culturally successful not because they are large, but because they are capable of drawing out the exceptional from smaller places.
I worry that modern urbanization is a lot more one-way, and many countries are experiencing a one-time sort.
Remoteness, in some sense, seems to be an advantage.
When the traveler wants a big experience, he goes to a big city to see big things. But when he wants an “*authentic”* experience, he must eschew the most well-trodden places, possibly the cities themselves, to find it. He must seek out places that have not yet been touched by “tourism”, he must find the people and places that still have remoteness — places that continue to live in a world of their own. Big places and small places each have their own insularity, but they look to very different things.
Ecologically, remote places produce rare specimens.
As a cultural and technological locus, Silicon Valley began very small, and 80 years later it still isn’t a top-10 metro area.
📰 How to Succeed by
But if you're having to force yourself often, or you've got recurring doubts, then there probably is no doubt that you're on the wrong bus.
So jump off! There’s plenty more back at the station. New routes. New views. New passengers. There’s whole new cities! Shit! There’s trains and helicopters and fucking submarines!
📰 Friendship 101 by
“A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble.” — David Whyte
Becoming a better listener is the number one coaching skill and the number one skill that will make you better friend material. You will create trust, make people feel heard, and foster authentic connection like a pro.
📰 What if NATO Became a World Government? by
NATO is a pact between countries that if one is attacked, all will defend. As a stipulation for being part of it, NATO countries are expected to contribute 2 percent of their GDP to building out their own militaries.
What’s interesting is that the more countries join NATO, the more beneficial it is to join NATO.
If we can somehow use NATO as a motivator to economically develop member countries and ensure their participation, eventually that 2 percent invested in defense could go down to 1 percent or 0.5 percent.
After all, the combined military only needs to be large enough to deter whatever country is the largest threat.
📰 Reclaiming Our Silence and Stillness by
We may not be able to rewind the passing of time or transform Earth back to its once quieter version, but we still have agency over our internal stillness.
On most days, I live a normal life, sheltered in an insulated box, hunched over a pixelated rectangle.
If I was on my phone or thinking about the future, I might’ve missed the 15 minute window when Denali peak became visible. Apparently only 20% of visitors end up seeing it.
Back then, I believed that if you strip away the external voices and digital distractions, then what’s left is boredom.
The boredom that I once feared as an adult was a sense of incompleteness.
My sense of time started to shift as my mind emptied. Instead of the anticipated boredom creeping in, I felt whole.
It takes time to untangle past stories, shed old identities, and recover from undiagnosed burnout. But all too often, instead of intentionally creating space for silence and stillness, we trudge onwards.
📰 Holes, Scratches, Patches and Painting by
Patching is done through psychotherapy, deep reflection, returning often to the same major sources of our issues. It’s not always the immediate fix but it’s essential to fixing before you can finish the job. It’s sticky, and takes re-filling the hole until it’s filled adequately with the proper healing substances. / Painting is done through psychotherapy, conversations with friends, light reflection and more immediate conflict resolution. It’s shorter term and shouldn’t be over-addressed. It’s more immediate and clear as to how to fix it. It takes an intentional yet brief act. It’s more like a unlearning and relearning process of more linearly understanding the wrong and seeing how to make it right.
📰 The Art of Healing by
It occurred to me that while I hadn’t achieved any mass success externally, I’d made tremendous strides in personal growth and expansion. Ultimately, that was worth more.
I embraced my healing journey as a personal pottery project—Kintsugi in human form.
📰 Finding Freedom and Clarity From a Power Cord by
I recently realized that I give my laptop battery more care and attention than I do my own battery.
Charging a laptop battery is pretty straightforward: plug it into an outlet and get power. I can’t simply plug myself into an outlet to get to 100%, it’s more complicated than that. I need to know what recharges me and then find the resources to do it – the opposite of having an abundance of outlets.
Note: I find that my phone battery is an indicator of my social battery. Being at my home/desk is alone time so I have time to be in the zone while charging my phone. When I'm out and about, there's no way to charge my phone and my social battery also gets drained.
🎧 Why Writing Is the Path for Self Discovery -
via How I Write PodcastAs soon as I started the draft, I'm seeing things everywhere, everything sort of being filtered through that. So the conversations, the books, the like people I'm talking to, I'm seeing ideas everywhere. And every time I'm talking to them, I'm basically like taking notes and dropping them into specific chapters. Like the book is just chaos.
A lot of my writing is just rewriting. I rewrote some chapters 50, 60 times.
Reread book draft on iPad
I was actually doing that this morning. I put my book in ebook format, brought in an iPad, and then I'm highlighting stuff I wanna revisit, then I'm going back to the document, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Writing is very verbal, too. So at the same time I write, I read it out loud. And so I'm feeling, how does this feel in my body? Does this one feel true? Does it feel like it's flowing? Does this something that sounds true to me? And if it sounds, I don't believe it, or it doesn't even feel good to say, like I know it's not there yet. So my entire book was just a process of just paying attention to that feeling. And then just chipping away like slowly, all throughout the book, over and over and over again.
A model of the book is Tuesdays with Morrie.
It's a story about Mitch album, and it's a story about Morrie Schwartz at the end of his life. And it's an incredibly powerful book that has stuck around because it's actually two transformations in one. One is Mitch album. He was, he opens the book with, he's working all the time. He got the better car, the better house, and he was obsessed with the work. I think he was newly married and not really present at home. He was getting book deals and getting his name all across sports publications. And then he sees his professor, this person had a powerful impact on him in college. And it was his opening. He sort of documents his own personal transformation while sort of unloading the wisdom of this guy at the end of his life, which to me is really inspiring. Like he was living on his terms. He has this idea like, don't buy the culture. And we live in a world where people complain about the culture all the time. Well, like don't buy it. Don't open your phone and scroll. But the thing is you have to create your own culture. You have to flip it and take responsibility. And that's hard. And it might be lonely, it might suck. Other people might not join you on the journey. It might be financially costly. And that book stuck around because follow Mitch albums life now. He's adopted people from orphanages in Haiti. He volunteers. He started writing about like religion and spirituality and awakening and all these things. He slowed down his career. He pivoted away from sports. And so the book is true in the deepest sense, right? And I wanted to write a true book, right? Not a research-backed book.
When writing online, you can just link to another article or to a YouTube video. When writing a book, you have to actually describe stuff.
Writing felt like consulting. Going into the data and trying to figure out the story and then going down and getting more data and popping up and going back down. And it's the same thing I was doing with the book.
David’s metric of writing success
It's really easy to think about how many words did I write or did I figure something out. But I think a more interesting way to evaluate is how much was I able to surprise myself?
Business books are not good
One of the reasons that business books aren't better is very simply that the people who write them don't have space. They’re working full time. The good business books tend to be when people retire and they look back.
Editing the book
I don't ask for feedback for 99% of the things I write. I only had five people read my book before I published it. All I had them do was say, what do you love? And I told the editor, don't delete any of those.
Writing a true book
You need to go into your personal story because your personal story is where the power is. Like when you talk about how frustrating school was, like that is so powerful. That is the truth that gives the credibility. To the journey, the writing, the sharing ideas, all that.
The best niche is the niche of you.
I'm just writing about what I'm curious about this week. Some stuff resonates some don’t. I'm just going to keep going.
Creativity is hard to do in rational mode
If teaching a writing class, everyone will go on a three-hour walk.
The mission there is really just to sit with the discomfort and see what comes up because if you want to write that is a creative act and a creative act is very hard to do in rational mode.
You need to awaken the heart, a phrase you say, hearts on fire. No, you need to know that that state exists and play with your state and try different experiments and see how you can get closer to that state.
How do you know when you're writing from the heart?
I think eventually you cry. I think eventually it breaks you because you get so deep. And this is sort of one thing I might tell people. I actually did this exercise a couple of years before I wrote my book, where it's you write your life purpose until you cry. You write, you write it, you write it, you write it. And it took me about 21 times to write it and then I cried. And the mission I came up with, I won't get it correct exactly. But it was like explore ideas and creativity that matters to me. And share them with friends. Right. And it was all about like something around connecting with friends and helping people realize that things matter to them. It's exactly the phrase that appeared in my book that I sort of had to re-learn. And yeah, I think if you haven't cried yet, like you haven't written enough.
May 22
🎧 Election Predictions, Trump Media’s Dip, and Guest Host Jon Favreau - Pivot Pod
The off-work “schedule” of Jon Favreau, co-host of Pod Save America
Get home at 5:30-6
Leave phone in home office until 7:30-8 when kids go to bed
Stay up a couple of hours and do work. Not a lot happens because 8pm in California is night-time in New York/DC.
Get up at 4-4:30 to consume everything. Only quiet time.
🎧 Future of Work: AI - Pivot Pod
The challenge for professors when teaching is how to still teach students but make sure that students understand the conceptual parts, not just using AI to solve the problem.
How to prepare for an AI future?
Understanding logic
Understanding second order effects or equilibrium effects
Jobs with bigger barriers of entry may open up thanks to AI, esp if those jobs don’t have enough qualified people. E.g. lawyers.
May 20
📕 Finished reading The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway.
It was tough to get through the markets bit. I wonder if finance is indeed that complicated to understand, even though I have a decent understanding of it after an undergrad degree in finance and six years writing finance.
May 19
In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011), Daniel Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, argues that people do not have good intuitions when it comes to basic principles of statistics: “We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once,” a task that is not spontaneous or innate. We tend to assume that irregular things happen because someone intentionally caused them. “Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events,” he writes.
For one baby, the diagram showed Letby working a night shift, but this was an error: she was working day shifts at the time, so there should not have been an X by her name. At trial, the prosecution argued that, though the baby had deteriorated overnight, the suspicious episode actually began three minutes after Letby arrived for her day shift. Nonetheless, the inaccurate diagram continued to be published, even by the Cheshire police.
England has strict contempt-of-court laws that prevent the publication of any material that could prejudice legal proceedings.
📰 The $1 Billion Test by Khe Hy
With all this time freedom you’ll have to find joy in everyday-ness of life.
A question I ask myself every day is: If $1 billion dollars showed up in my bank account, would I still have the same day I’m having today? I want the answer to that question to be an emphatic “yes” as often as possible.
Walking is the best way to experience the wilderness.
May 18
🎧 The Couples Game - Staying Up with Cammie and Taryn
Taryn: The next day I was feeling anxious again… And then I was thinking to myself, what if I just really picture that my heart is like bubble wrapped, like totally safe, comfy. It can't get hurt. It's this perfect little thing.
Their favorite restaurant is Nobu
🎧 Beautiful Follow-Ups - Succeeding at Failure
Follow up on Parade Girl
Using a producer mindset, she gets her friends on the show by selling the story as best as possible
Has background in documentary filmmaking and pitching
Knows that Chris’s goal is entertaining his audience
The best story will be chosen by Andrea, the producer
Recklessness and productivity are not mutually exclusive
A bit of recklessness can push you to do things you wouldn’t have otherwise.
Younger and bolder version of self.
Put on a stage show - treated it as her expensive hobby
At the end, she had “special thanks” and “spiteful thanks”. Angry at those people but grateful.
🎧 Life Lessons From Tech Titans with Brené Brown by On with Kara Swisher
Kara studied propaganda in university
Many TV shows for adults are on YouTube - there isn’t a monetization strategy around that
May 17
📰 The Unraveling of Old Family Scripts by
As we spent time with my parents’ siblings, parents, and extended family, I began to see traces of who they were when they were young and before my brother and I entered their worlds.
It dawned on me they were once children too — with their own hopes, dreams, fears, and unmet needs. I began to find myself far more attuned to what was triggering them — running behind schedule, being exhausted, etc. — which in turn used to trigger me. Many of their assumptions and reactions were a direct result of the culture and environments they were raised in.
📰 How the Tech Industry Soured on Employee Activism by Casey Newton
In the early aughts, a dominant cultural philosophy in Silicon Valley, at least from an employer branding perspective, was “bring your whole self to work." Popularized by a 2015 Ted Talk, the sentiment was not intended to be taken literally: your whole self needed to be productive, and professional, and not *too* radical in its politics. But the idea stands in stark contrast to the one that has replaced it: that only the part of yourself that gets work done should come to the office. Those who bring in anything else may be promptly shown the door.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that employees should engage in activism only during non-work hours. But separating work and life isn’t always easy in a post-pandemic world, where many people work from home and routinely feel each sphere of life bleeding into the other. As the war in Gaza continues to roil workplaces across the country, I find myself doubtful that such a neat separation is possible — and curious about what the downstream impacts will be on both employees and the companies they work for.
In 2020, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published a memo dictating his company’s new attitude toward workplace activism. “Be company first,” he wrote. He encouraged his staff to put “the company’s goals ahead of any particular team or individual goals.” Later, he added that Coinbase would not focus much on issues outside its core mission. It also wouldn’t engage on broader societal issues or “advocate for any particular causes or candidates internally that are unrelated to our mission.” Armstrong encouraged employees who didn’t align with this approach to take a severance package and leave.
“Why stay and put effort into this work if it’s just tokenized into recruiting points and not actually improving the sense of belonging and psychological safety,” wrote a Coinbase employee on Slack, according to messages viewed by the New York Times.
The policy makes sense on paper — but it misses what happens when politics become personal.
One current Google employee I spoke with said the “mission first” policy stifles important discussions and limits worker power. He asked for anonymity as he’s not authorized to speak publicly about the company.
Apple, unsurprisingly, has had no such workplace demonstrations over Gaza. Among the tech giants, the company stands out as being proudly hierarchical and unabashedly hostile toward employee speech. In the weeks following October 7, a handful of Apple employees who weren’t previously engaged in large Slack channels related to Jewish and Muslim employee resource groups started popping in and posting antagonistic messages toward each other. Apple promptly shut down the channels, Platformer has learned.
Employees I spoke to weren’t particularly upset — or even surprised — at the move. A likely difference here is in employee expectations. For the most part, Apple workers don’t bank on being able to speak freely about politics or even working conditions. When they’ve tried to push back against policies like returning to the office, those attempts have largely been quashed by management. Apple routinely shuts down Slack channels, citing breaches to its employee code of conduct.
In 2022, I predicted that Apple’s corporate culture had permanently changed in the wake of return to office activism. I was wrong. Small pockets of resistance remain, but they’ve gone quiet; unwilling or unable to risk their jobs. Those truly resistant to Apple’s stance have largely left or been fired.
And as long as the steady drumbeat of layoffs continues, this strategy will likely succeed. Tech companies are happy to serve as platforms for many things, but employee activism no longer appears to be one of them.
May 14
🎧 Walt Mossberg & MKBHD Break Down the Art of the Tech Review via On with Kara Swisher
On volumes of tech reviews nowadays, MKBHD:
Anyone can review anything they have. But I think the challenge is when a phone comes out, for example, I mean, there could be 50, 100 videos that day all about that device reviewing it. You have to give people a good reason to watch yours instead of just reviewing it like anyone else. You need this additional extra, whether it's production value or entertainment value or something to give people a reason to look at your thing. So that feels like a little extra challenge on top of like just the regular review part of trying to be honest about a product.
Taylor Swift as a product
MKBHD: Taylor Swift is a lot of people's favorite products She's entertaining. She's everywhere. She almost defies language. She can go to any country and people want to see her perform. She is a lot of people's favorite product.
May 13
📰 Make Something Wonderful - of Steve Jobs
One of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.
His mind was never a captive of reality.
His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility.
For about three months. I just read and sat. When you are a stranger in a place, you notice things that you rapidly stop noticing when you become familiar. I was a stranger in America for the first time in my life, and so I saw things I’d never seen before. And I tried to pay attention to them for those three months because I knew that gradually, bit by bit, my familiarity would be gained again.
But here’s the key thing: let’s say I could move a hundred times faster than anyone in here. In the blink of your eye, I could run out there, grab a bouquet of fresh spring flowers, run back in here, and snap my fingers. You would all think I was a magician. And yet I would basically be doing a series of really simple instructions: running out there, grabbing some flowers, running back, snapping my fingers. But I could just do them so fast that you would think that there was something magical going on. And it’s the exact same way with a computer. It can do about a million instructions per second. And so we tend to think there’s something magical going on, when in reality, it’s just a series of simple instructions.
We have a shot [at] putting a great object there—and if we don’t, we’re going to put one more piece-of-junk object there.
We have a chance with this new computing technology meeting people in the eighties—the fact that computers and society are out on a first date in the eighties. We have a chance to make these things beautiful, and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves.
We’re trying to get away from programming. We’ve got to get away from programming because people don’t want to program computers. People want to use computers.
It’s sort of like in 1844, the telegraph was invented, and it was an amazing breakthrough in communications. And you actually could send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. And some people talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity.
Fortunately, in the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell filed the patents for the telephone—another radical breakthrough in communications that performed basically the same function, but people already knew how to use it. The neatest thing about it was that, in addition to allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics.
Things get more refined as you make mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes.
Good aesthetics result from just your eye. An instinct of what you see, not so much what you do.
If seeing Big Brother in 1984 connotes IBM to a large number of people, that says more about IBM’s image problem than our intentions.”
He told a reporter in an uncharacteristic flash of pessimism—his world was also expanding beyond his work. He treasured his privacy, saying of his public persona, “I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me.”
If you really look closely,” Steve liked to say, “most overnight successes took a long time.”
I was forced to go to humanities lectures—it seemed like every day. I studied Shakespeare with Professor Svitavsky. And at the time, I thought these were meaningless and even somewhat cruel endeavors to be put through. I can assure you that as the patina of time takes its toll, I thank God that I had these experiences here. It has helped me in everything I’ve ever done, although I wouldn’t have ever guessed it at the time.
Character is built not in good times, but in bad times; not in a time of plenty, but in a time of adversity—and this school seems to manage to nurture that spirit of adversity, and I think does build some character. So I thank you for teaching me how to be hungry and how to keep that with me my whole life.
Most large companies and medium-size companies (and even small companies) are starting to look at the web as the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution chain, bypassing all middlemen, going directly from the supplier to the consumer.
You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there.
It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac. It’s that the Mac was a sitting duck for ten years. That’s Apple’s problem, is that their differentiation evaporated. Unlike Compaq, or others who play in the Intel-Microsoft standard space, where they only … Compaq only has to be 5 percent better than its competitors for everyone to want to buy their computers. Apple has to be 50 percent or 100 percent better, because when you buy something that is out of the mainstream a little bit, you take a risk, and you want a much bigger reward for taking that risk.
That’s why cost-cutting and other things at Apple are not going to be the cure. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. There’s a lot of good people left at Apple that are capable of doing that with the proper leadership, which is what’s been missing.
Science and computer science is a liberal art. It’s something that everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It’s not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It’s something that everybody should be exposed to, everyone should have a mastery of, to some extent, and that’s how we viewed computation, or these computation devices.
📰 The Day the Dinosaurs Died via Douglas Preston, The New Yorker
Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale.
In 2004, DePalma, at the time a twenty-two-year-old paleontology undergraduate, began excavating a small site in the Hell Creek Formation. The site had once been a pond, and the deposit consisted of very thin layers of sediment. Normally, one geological layer might represent thousands or millions of years. But DePalma was able to show that each layer in the deposit had been laid down in a single big rainstorm. “We could see when there were buds on the trees,” he told me. “We could see when the cypresses were dropping their needles in the fall. We could experience this in real time.” Peering at the layers was like flipping through a paleo-history book that chronicled decades of ecology in its silty pages. DePalma’s adviser, the late Larry Martin, urged him to find a similar site, but one that had layers closer to the KT boundary.
Paleontology is maddening work, its progress typically measured in millimetres. As I watched, DePalma and Pascucci lay on their stomachs under the beating sun, their eyes inches from the dirt wall, and picked away. DePalma poked the tip of an X-Acto into the thin laminations of sediment and loosened one dime-size flake at a time; he’d examine it closely, and, if he saw nothing, flick it away. When the chips accumulated, he gathered them into small piles with a paintbrush; when those piles accumulated, Pascucci swept them into larger piles with a broom and then shovelled them into a heap at the far end of the dig.
He noted that every fish he’d found in the site had died with its mouth open, which may indicate that the fish had been gasping as they suffocated in the sediment-laden water.
In the nineteenth century, Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, the nation’s two leading paleontologists, engaged in a bitter competition to collect dinosaur fossils in the American West. They raided each other’s quarries, bribed each other’s crews, and vilified each other in print and at scientific meetings. In 1890, the New York Herald began a series of sensational articles about the controversy with the headline “Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare.” The rivalry has since become known as the Bone Wars.
📰 What Phones Are Doing to Reading by Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker
There’s something about scrolling and tapping that leads to a quick calcification of muscle memory. You start to tap on the same things not out of familiarity or comfort but out of sheer habit.
Writers are not entirely different from the large language models that are supposed to replace us: we take in words with our eyes, sort them in our heads, then spit them back out in a sequence that mimics a voice.
What’s particularly distressing to me is that, although I can imagine a world in which careful regulation and avoidance of algorithms makes phones less addictive, I cannot imagine myself freed from such stubborn vanities.
📰 The real winner in the Kendrick-Drake beef via Khe Hy
J. Cole got attacked when he bowed out of the beef during the early stages. He got called many mean names. He was turned into vicious memes questioning his manhood. But maybe he was prescient. Or just lucky? But while Drake and Kendrick are out doxx’ing each other and having their homes sprayed with bullets. J. Cole’s got plans of his own. Here he is straight chilling on a beach listening to music by himself.
Fun Fact. You may be sitting on a tiny piece of Nîmes. This city was the center of textile development. It has been home of the silk stocking among other claims to fame. And the fabric so many of us rely on is “de Nîmes” <from Nimes> … or as we know it deNim.
🎧 Conversation With Jonathan Haidt — The Kids Are Not Alright via Prof G Show
Your job as a friend, boss, spouse is to notice their life. Give evidence to them. Listen to them.
If they’re upset:
Acknowledge the issue
Take responsibility
Overcorrect
The biggest cost of phones is social deprivation
The time spent on devices is time not spent on developing social skills
Attention spans get developed in puberty, and phones get in the way of that
10-15% of kids are addicted to phones. There’s no other consumer product with that high of an addiction rate.
Decide what kind of son you want to be. And just be that son. I started being a generous loving son and not measuring it against my perception of what my dad did or did not get right or his relationship with his second wife, my mom.
So what is your dad want? Your dad literally just wants time with you. A trick I do now because I can't be with my dad physically and because he's having a difficult time on the phone. I send him videos. I just record a video. I'll just literally be on the couch. I did this to the dogs. I'm hanging out. I'm watching this show. And also, to the extent you can or you're comfortable, err on the side of asking your dad for help and advice. That's what we want. We want to know that our kids, that we can nurture them, that we can help them. I would kill for my kids and they do.
May 11
🎧 SBF Sentenced, OpenAI's New Voice Tool, and Guest Ari Wallach - Pivot Pod
In the West, we have death anxiety. And in more Eastern cultures, there's more death awareness that's deeply tied into kind of cultural and religious underpinnies of how they think about death.
May 10
📰 Communication in Relationships by
If Ross and Rachel (and Logan and Rory) communicated what “on a break” actually and fully meant, both would have had a better understanding of where the other person was at as far as their relationship was concerned.
The key to true and effective communication is that it is a dialogue.
📰 Dear Hipster Consumer Brands by
This year marks the 15th Mother’s Day without my mom and these bullshit trigger warning emails that started arriving a few years ago do nothing other than point out to me that this holiday is something that I should consider “muting” for myself–something I might feel bad about. When I receive regular celebration emails for the holiday, I think of myself as a mom. I think of my friends who are moms. I think of all the women in my life who have shown up to mother me when I needed someone over the years. I think of joy and community. Beautiful memories.
📰 Microdosing Joy by
A framework called ‘save the day’, which simply suggests to do one tiny joy-filled thing a day that’s solely for you. By saving each day, we take back moments for ourselves no matter how crazy life gets.
🎧 Future of Work - Why Remote and Hybrid Are Here to Stay - Pivot Pod
Tech will make it more appealing and effective to work hybrid and remotely
In fact, we have data, amazingly going back to work from home in the US back to 1965. So if you go back looking back about 50 years, what you can see is it's been doubling roughly every 15 years.
Companies that are somewhat remote are going faster. But this isn’t a correlation or causation, because tech companies tend to be more remote and also happens to grow faster as an industry.
Work from home needs to be focused on performance - is my output good? It’s best for the company.
May 9
📰 In Search of the Non-Motif by
Anything that excites me for any reason, I will [document]; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual." (Paraphrasing photographer Edward Weston)
Elevating commonplace subjects goes back to the Realist movement in France in the mid-19th century. Emile Chartier said of Balzac: "His genius consists in taking the commonplace as his subject and making it sublime without changing it."
Everyday subjects have a weird luminous power over my imagination.
Tips for Succeeding with Non-Motifs
Start out with an idea of the light, color or compositional effects you want to achieve, and plug the forms into that idea.
Use a viewfinder, a mirror or a camera to give you a fresh eye on the scene.
Do a thumbnail sketch
Try to key into an emotional reaction that you have about a place, something you love or hate about it, a juxtaposition that seems bizarre or somewhere that you enjoyed hanging out as a child.
Stay local. Paint the subject at different times of day, and if you can, different seasons of the year.
If you’re traveling, paint an ordinary street, not the Instagram spot.
“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
📰 Why You Should Start Living in the Past by
I decided if I wanted to become a speaker I’d need to start writing to legitimize myself as a thought leader. I’ve always been prone to extremes, especially under stress. So, of course, my solution to being a man of few words was to write an entire damn book.
“flotilla of forgotten adventures”
The truth is, life moves too quickly to fully appreciate or craft its meaning as it occurs.
I thought I had invested in writing a book, but I’d actually invested in a way of looking at life—through the lens of conscious storytelling.
Each of us are already storytellers, but often we’re not the authors of them.
🎧 Prof G Markets — Reddit Reignites the IPO Market, Microsoft’s AI All-Stars, and Private Equity Perks
Unilever can potentially divest ice cream
Ozempic users cut back on ice cream the most
Ice cream is an energy-intensive operation
Ice cream is the worst-performing business for Unilever last year
May 8
🎥 Photography Is Dead by Peter McKinnon
Being able to reset that job to the day when it felt like a hobby is an absolute must
May 7
📰 I miss you and I’m happy you’re gone by Esther Perel
It’s taboo to acknowledge that some deaths are liberating.
“You loved her AND her absence made room for choices you would not have dared make if she was there.”
For years, I thought I would not become a mother until I was certain I wouldn’t be like her, which of course led to her blaming me for delaying her becoming a grandmother.
Humor is one of the best tools for diffusing conflict.
📰 Which Artists Have Influenced You? by
When I was a student, I read everything I could find about Salon and Royal Academy artists like Lawrence Alma Tadema, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904. Below, his 1872 painting Pollice Verso.)
I also adore painterly realists like Ilya Repin, Peder Krøyer, Joaquín Sorolla, and Anders Zorn. From a young age I was aware that all these artists were part of a tradition that continued unbroken through the Golden Age illustrators, particularly in the work of Norman Rockwell, Dean Cornwell, and Tom Lovell.
I studied editions of the Famous Artist’s Course from the 1950s, where great story illustrators shared the secrets of their craft. I also read avidly about the life in the ateliers, particularly the Prix de Rome images and the history paintings. I was very curious how they painted such lifelike scenes from their imaginations. I’ve also been extremely inspired by the the drawings and the gouaches of Adolph Menzel, and I edited a book of his work for Dover Publications.
I’m always trying to pass through the surface. It’s easy to make a painting look like paint. The challenge is to dissolve the surface and see into the depths. If people praise my brushstrokes or my canvas texture, something is wrong with the painting.
May 6
📰 Raising Future-Ready Leaders via
Via
’s essay High Agency Children: How do I equip my children to live life in world system that constantly stretches the boundaries on what is possible? How do I raise a generation of Future-Ready Leaders?Eight factors that she has researched and observed that help us preserve the natural agency that all small children are born with:
Doing useful things. No demarcation between children games and adult activities. This section reminded me of the findings in the book Hunt, Gather, Parent.
Taking Risks is encouraged, (and our obsession with Safety is re-examined)
Unconditional Love surprisingly includes a link to an NVC (Non Violent Communication shared by the father of Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin
Linking things the kid is learning to what is important to him
📰 Triumphs, Tunes, and Think Weekends: A Dive Into April's Adventures by
A Think Weekend
On the last weekend of April, I had myself A Think Weekend. It’s a ritual I love. I intended to have a container of time with myself to read and write with less technology. No Internet, watch, or phone for 48 hours. So no googling, Spotify playing, Google Mapsing a new beach, or phoning friends. Defintitely different from how I usually fill a weekend. The technology I allowed myself was my pen and paper, a car, my Sony camera, and uke.
I usually have a think weekend somewhere between twice a year to once a quarter.
📰 Chased by a Monkey by
Overconfidence is a dangerous drug, which, with wildlife, can prove catastrophic.
Then he charged. Seven kilograms of angry monkey barreled at me. His bared canines meant business. His shrill screams of 'Kree! Kree! Kree!' shattered the silence.
Parenting is storytelling, not prompt engineering.
Children don’t remember prompts. They remember stories. Stories are 20 times more likely to be remembered than facts alone, according to multiple studies. Humans think in narrative structure. Prompts are useless without stories. Take that, Elon!
isn’t the story explaining our existence the most important one of all? The story of how we claimed a place in our families? In our community? In the world? If there was one gift I could give every child in the world, besides basic food and water, it would be knowing: You are loved. You are wanted. You are worthy.
📰 The Best Things I Read or Watched in April 2024 by
What to say when your child asks for a smartphone by
My daughter is now able to ask for TV shows by name and has started to doodle on an app on my phone. My wife and I talk a lot about screens and how we will handle it when our daughter wants to use a tablet or computer more often.
We will keep being the parents and letting our kids be the kids. We will make decisions that our sons don’t always like. It’s part of the parenting job description. Instead of bragging about being the last in the class to get our kids smartphones, let’s be the first to give our kids the freedom and joy of a smartphone-free childhood.
What If We Placed Friendship at the Center of Our World? by
I would want people to have a book of questions that they could manage and somebody standing in the wings who could counsel them if they were dealing with complicated decisions or conflict because right now it's just like everybody for themselves. Right now, the default is just to not ask, to let things go unsaid, and to expect that the friendship is not going to be a relationship that you can put that kind of work into.
📰 Fifty Late Bloomers by
Viola Davis spent decades playing mainly supporting roles before becoming a television, and now film, star later in her career.
The movie director Ava DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until she was thirty-two.
📰 The $200 Challenge by
To make this exercise more grounded, I decided to set a budget for each category. I tracked how much I usually spend on each one and then multiplied it by up to 10X my current spending.
Experiences: From P12,000 to P48,000 every quarter (4X)
Self-Improvement: From P1,500 to P15,000 monthly (10X)
Health: From P4,000 to P16,000 monthly (4X)
May 5
🎥 "Photography Is Just Problem Solving" | a Day With Joe Howard
Gear
Joe loads his camera with Portra 400 & 800
Saw on Instagram on June 8 that he bought a pack of Kodak ColorPlus 200 and Ilford HP5 Plus 400
Lens on his Mamiya7 is 50mm and on his Leica is 28mm
The art of noticing
The difference between me and somebody else taking a photo of the scene is that I saw something that somebody else might not have seen. That's why I got that photo. It's not because I'm a gifted, technically good photographer. It's because I saw that and somebody else didn't see.
The challenge is finding the really good photo not actually taking it.
Take photos of friends
I'm forgetting about taking photos of my friends. I look back at those photos and I look at photos of my friends when we're younger.
I've been taking photos of him since we first met I've got photos of him through our entire youth and up until now. He's got two kids and I've taken photos of him with his both of his newborns. So one day I'll just have a project all just called Louis or something like that. I look back at those photos like oh I really don't want to get to 50 and look back at my 30s and not have any of those photos. I've been making a conscious effort to like I take another camera with a flash to the pub. I didn't have all that the ending wouldn't mean so much but I think when I'm like 50 and I'm going to continue taking photos of him.
Composing people
I really hate it when people overlap so it I moved around like panning into until I got to the point where everybody was in their own little positions.
The price of film now is 4x before
You don't shoot slow. You just shoot at the speed you can. The only reason people are shooting slow now is because it's four times the price of it used to be, not because it's like a personal choice.
Favorite photography books
Pictures from Home by Larry Sultan. It's from this book which is just like I think this project is unbelievable just photos of him and his parents.
Influence is good but too much influence kind of restricts you.
Go and make work without thinking about where you're putting it and what it's being used for and who's going to see it.
Just try not to take it so seriously. You don't know what kind of photographer you are until you kind of try all a bit and don't take it so seriously.
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Please continue these digests, Becky. This is better than any algorithm that Substack, Instagram, Medium etc funnels me down. I am continuously exposed to ideas like and around my own topics of interest and broaden my reading list. It is like opening a newspaper and realizing I might also like Gershwin (opera) because I like jazz. This month's find? Prof G.
You inhale content!
(And thanks for including my work on your list)
appreciate the shout out, Becky – love this books / article / podcast curation!