May 2025
Books, articles, podcasts, and thoughts throughout the month
Books read:
📖 $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi
📕 Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman
📕 $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi
📕 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
📕 Hell Yeah or No by Derek Sivers
Posts published:
Apps built:
May 31
🎧 Ezra Klein: The Case Against Writing With AI via
To publish something significant, make sure someone with really good judgment has reviewed it. Knowing if a sentence is clear isn't enough; you need confidence in the reviewer's overall judgment.
Transcript: Ezra Klein I'm a good writer. I can tell you if my sentence is clear. What I need before something, pretty something hot, goes out into a very big world where there's a lot of attention on it, is to believe that the other person who saw it has really good Judgment.
Taste is whatcha can't measure but is most important, especially in writing and editing. Technical skills can be taught, but knowing what's good is hard to come by and teach. Good taste is subtle, textured, and varies by person. Different editors can have different tastes; discerning who's right defines them.
Transcript: Ezra Klein The thing that is hard to find is taste. The thing that is hard to measure is taste. The most important thing is taste. Both with writers and with editors, on some technical level, if you have an intuitive sense for what is good and what is not, you can probably upskill to get there. The biggest problem is not knowing what is good and what is not. And it's a very hard thing to teach in part because it's subtle, it's textured, it's different from person to person. It doesn't need to be the same. I'm not saying there's one objective good, but you can have two editors saying really different things. Who's right about what is good is what separates the editors.
Ezra Klein shares an anecdote about Graydon Carter's new memoir about working in magazine journalism during times of huge budgets. He also mentions the recent departure of Vanity Fair's editor and a *New York Times* piece questioning whether anyone even wants the job anymore, given the current budgetary constraints.
Transcript: Ezra Klein Former editor of vanity fair graden carter has a new memoir out about being in magazine journalism when the budgets were gigantic and then uh he was succeeded and then the the editor Um uh of vanity fair just moved on or is moving on and there's just a times piece about does anybody actually even want this job anymore because it's become so much tougher under the current Budgetary environment
Consider how many individual subscriptions a person can reasonably afford. Ponder the saturation point for single-person subscriptions costing $60-80.
Transcript: Ezra Klein Really how many 60 to 80 dollar single person subscriptions can a person afford?
Substack addresses high-frequency take writing, but it won't solve the challenges of investigative journalism.
Transcript: Ezra Klein One of the things that always worried me about Substack as an answer to journalism, it was only ever an answer to one kind of thing, which was high frequency take writing. It was never going to be an answer to investigative journalism.
To make an impact, ensure your message is important, profound, vivid, and 'hot.' All the great storytelling and rhetoric won't matter if the core idea can't break through and influence culture.
Transcript: David Perell If you have something to say that's important, that's profound, that's vivid, that's hot. I love that word. I'm not going to forget that. But if that then covers up over a lot of other things and you can wax poetic about storytelling and rhetoric and whatever. But like if they're if like the tip of the sword of what you're saying can't pierce through the fabric of culture, then it's just going to fall flat.
Don't over-embellish your writing. Communication is key, so focus on having something worthwhile to say and doing the necessary work to achieve that. Avoid hiding your message with unnecessary ornamentation.
Transcript: Ezra Klein Writing is communication. The question with communication is what are you communicating? It's actually important not to gussy that up too much. I'm not saying it's not great to have a beautiful style. It's great if you do. I wish I did. But the most important thing, at least in nonfiction writing, is having the thing you're actually trying to communicate and having done the work to have something worth communicating. That trying to hide that in embellishment and ornamentation is a terrible habit.
Ezra emphasized the importance of 'doing the work' or 'doing the reading.' When he started in journalism, simply reading the Congressional Budget Office reports (which weren't long or complicated) gave him a huge advantage, because others only read executive summaries, if that. Beating people is possible by outworking them and reading what they ignore because it's boring or unenjoyable.
Transcript: Ezra Klein Right. I had written a commencement address for somebody that got canceled maybe during COVID. And the whole commencement address was called just do the work. Or do the reading in this case, actually. And the point I was making in that was that you just would not believe as a young person going out into the world how many shortcuts your elders are taking. When I got into journalism, the idea that I would just actually read the Congressional Budget Office reports, which are not complicated, are not usually longer than 30 pages, but people Were just reading the executive summaries, if that. People just weren't doing the reading. And that was a huge opportunity for a young person. You could just beat people by outworking them, by reading the things that they had ignored, that they found too boring, that was not the part of the job they enjoyed.
Ezra compares conducting to podcasting. In the movie *Tár*, the fictional conductor says that almost no revelation happens when conducting, but a lot happens in practice. Ezra relates to this, saying that he has relatively little revelation when taping a podcast because so much of his brain is absorbed. He often can't remember what happened and has to relisten to it.
Transcript: Ezra Klein The movie Tar? No. About the composer, the fictional composer, but Lydia Tar. I think that's the movie's name, right? It's a big deal a couple years ago but it begins with this fictionalized interview between her and uh adam gopnick who's a real life writer for the new yorker and he's saying to her and She's a classical composer or a conductor i'm sorry um he's saying how much revelation happens to you when you're conducting and she says almost none but a lot happens in practice. And I was like, yeah, that exactly. That I actually have relatively little revelation when I'm doing, when I'm taping a podcast conversation because so much of my brain is absorbed. And even when they're good, I like walk out and I don't really remember what happened. If I really like it, I have to go listen to it again myself.
Ezra Klein hasn't found a consistent way to use AI in his work, though he uses it as a Google search replacement. AI is good at tasks he doesn't need to do, so it isn't useful. Summarizing books or papers with AI is a disaster because it misses the connections he would make, since the time spent researching is the most important. He sees AI as something that would show the obvious, whereas he is interested in seeing what others would not have seen.
Transcript: Ezra Klein I'm not completely against anything. And I have not, and not for lack of trying, and I think not for lack of being informed or interested in the issue, found a way that I consistently use AI in my work. I'll sometimes use it right now as a replacement for Google searches, and it's valuable for that. And deep research has been good on some kinds of preparatory work for me. It's just, it's very hard to not be outsourcing the part of the work I need to do the most. AI is better at the things I need to do than the things I don't need to do. And so having AI step in, which I will sometimes do in a crunch if I don't have time to like make the spreadsheet myself and like gather the data in the way I'd like to gather it or, but having AI summarize a book or a paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know. It would not have made the connections I would have made. And so that is, again, to my stance on this, as somebody who thinks it's the time I spent researching, it was the most important time. Having AI do research for me is a bad idea. But, you know, if you had other people on the show, they'd give you something different. I think somebody like Tyler Cowen has made AI much more fundamental to his workflow. Than I have. But I'm interested for the thing I will see that other people would not have seen. David Perell And I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see.
Ezra Klein is against shortcuts. While you can't read everything, it's more dangerous to think you've read something when you haven't, than to not read it at all.
Transcript: Ezra Klein But I think I'm pretty against shortcuts. And obviously you have to limit the amount of work you're doing. You can't read literally everything. But in some ways, I think it's more dangerous to think you've read something that you haven't than to not read it at all.
Ezra used to think of knowledge like a Matrix download, but now he believes it requires grappling with a text and making connections. Summaries can't replace the deep engagement needed for knowledge to impress itself upon you and change you.
Transcript: Ezra Klein I used to conceptualize knowledge the way you see it in the movie The Matrix, where it's like I wanted the port in the back of my mind that the little needle would go into. And then I had read John Rawls' political liberalism. Right. I thought that what you were doing was like downloading information into your brain. And now I think that what you were doing is spending time grappling with the text, making connections. It will only happen through that process of grappling. And so the idea that you could speed run that, the idea that it could just be summarized for you. Part of what is happening when you spend seven hours reading the book is you spend seven hours with your mind on this topic. The idea that O3 can summarize it for you, in addition to all this stuff you just will not have read, is that you didn't have the engagement. It doesn't impress itself upon you. It doesn't change you. What knowledge is supposed to do is change you.
🎧 Paul Q&A Episode - Moving to Asia, Parenting, Preparing for Kids, Pathless Hardcover Art Edition by
Paul's releasing a $100 hardcover 'art version' of his book, similar to Craig Mod's strategy. He aims to delight the super fans (1-3% of his 60k book sales), creating a beautiful, special artifact that resonates deeply. He's bucking the trend of mass-market books, instead focusing on hyper-curious nerds who appreciate ambiguity and deep dives. I think this shows a new way of doing things.
Transcript: Paul Millerd I'm going to launch this hardcover edition. It's going to be a $100 book. It's what some people call the art version. Craig Mod follows a similar strategy. And so it sort of pairs with, okay, the fans of this book are going to want a beautiful artifact that they can keep. It's something special to them, something they connect to. And that's probably one to 3% of the readers of the Pathless path i've sold about 60 000 copies and so what is that 600 people um 600 to 2 000 people that's sort of like what i'm feeling is Um those are kind of the super fans i want to create something that absolutely delights them i want to create something that's beautiful that delights me and also that makes a statement Against the grain of the current pull of publishing, I think, which is basically just not really pushing the boundaries of creativity. I think there could be way better books in the current paradigm, but I think because of the way the industry is set up, a lot of people will write books that are geared toward sort of a mass Market. That is not my goal. I want to reach a niche audience of like hyper curious nerds who want to go deep on a topic, can handle ambiguity, can handle researching more on their own as I riff on ideas and things like That.
Wanna learn about Paul's publishing process? Check out his blog post, "Blog to Book" on pathlesspath.com/self-publishing. Usually, he writes in Google Docs, formats in Vellum, and uploads to Amazon. However, for his new project, Otter Pine and Saia Wood are handling production and fulfillment, which makes things more complex.
Transcript: Paul Millerd I didn't really answer your question about the publishing process. I've written a long post about that called Blog to Book on pathlesspath.com/self-publishing. And so I would just check that out. But for the most part, I write them in like Google Docs format and vellum and then upload to Amazon. But this new process, I'm working with Otter Pine and Saia Wood. She's leading the production process and she's actually going to take physical ownership of the books and then ship them out in her fulfillment center. So that's a bit different. This is when things get complicated. But yeah, still learning.
🎧 So Gay for You With Leisha Hailey & Kate Moennig - Dear Chelsea
Chelsea shared how, in the 1600s, there'd been an explosion of female painters in Paris. These 13 women were well-known and in history books, but after 1800, they disappeared. Men, feeling threatened by their success, erased them, claiming their work and barring women from painting. Kate then asked if the same pattern occurred in Hollywood, where women directed everything at the beginning.
Transcript:
Chelsea Handler
Got this great book, this friend, I'm going to do this when we do our book roundup. My friend, my makeup artist in New York gave it to me. And she was going over all these women in history, you know, who've gone unnoticed and all these painters and that there was a period in the 1600s, where there was this explosion of female Talent. And by explosion, there were like 13 really well-known painters in Paris during that period of time where all these painters were coming up. And there were 13 of them, and they were in history books in the 1600s. And then when you get past 1800, they're gone. There's complete erasure of them because men were so threatened by the few that got in and the successes that they reached, which were beyond the reaches of the men, that they decided, Okay, we're going to take their work and claim it as our own and women are no longer allowed to paint.
Kate Moennig
Isn't that the same with Hollywood? Women directors, they directed everything at the beginning of Hollywood. Yeah.
Chelsea Handler
Right. That's true. And then it was gone.
May 30
📰 Knowledge Work Is Dying—Here’s What Comes Next by Joe Hudson via Every
Today, as models swallow entire fields overnight, *wisdom*—skills like emotional clarity, discernment, and connection—is what keeps you indispensable.
May 29
🎧 The Death Thing Is a Bonus by Beautiful/Anonymous
Don't let your DNR paperwork get lost in a junk drawer. Instead, stick it on your fridge or somewhere easily accessible. Give a copy to your death doula, so its location is always known.
Transcript: Chris Gethard You know, there's people right now who they'll go to their elderly parents' house and the, and their parents have the DNR on like neon pink paper up on the fridge. People go, Hey mom, dad, isn't this a little, and they're going, no, no, no, no. We need that. Other Speaker He's a Lilo. That's how it's printed, Chris. It's always like a neon color. It's not that they choose to print it that color. Legally, it has to be a crazy color so that it's easily findable in a hospital file. Chris Gethard Yeah, it's a real thing. If you have DNR paperwork, don't let it just sink to the bottom of your junk drawer, everybody. Nope. Other Speaker Nope. Stick it on your fridge. Put it somewhere where it's easily accessible. Chris Gethard Or give a copy to your death doula so that someone knows exactly where it is at all times. Correct? Or yep. Other Speaker See all the above. Absolutely.
You can prepay for both the burial plot and funeral services. This's a beautiful service to give your loved ones, eliminating doubts about your preferences since everything is pre-arranged and paid for.
Transcript: Other Speaker Do you know you can prepay for your funeral? Chris Gethard I know you can prepay for a burial plot. Other Speaker Not just a burial plot, but for the funeral services. Oh, wow. Of course. It's actually, when you think about it, it's really a beautiful service to give to your loved ones because then there's no doubt. It's like, okay, this is what Aunt Susie wanted because she prepaid for all of it. You know, there's no questioning, would she have liked this? Would she have wanted that? Nope. It's all paid for, you know, it's ready to go.
Read 'A Beginner's Guide to the End, Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death' by B.J. Miller and Shoshana Berger. It's conversational and helps understand the details of end-of-life matters for yourself and loved ones. Transcript: Other Speaker This book is called A Beginner's Guide to the End, Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death by B.J. Miller and Shoshana Berger. And this book, it's so beautifully written. It's very conversational. It's not like clinical or anything. It makes everything, it lays everything out really nicely. And it's just really handy for understanding all of these, all the details, all the nitty gritty that happens at the end of life, both at the end of your own life, but also at the end of your Loved one's life. And I imagine having this knowledge, I actually, now that I'm talking to you, I'm like, oh, I got to read this book again.
May 27
📰 How Average People Will Get Rich With AI by
The shortcut we've been talking about this entire time is starting an AI-first business.
Every business is a media business now. That means every business, from e-commerce to digital products to local businesses, are posting internet content to advertise their business.
The greatest differentiator is *you.* Personal branding isn't just another fad. Yes, the concept of a "personal brand" is cringe. But the essence of it is beautiful, which is *getting paid to be yourself.*
Most beginners should start with a digital product. We don't live in a world where you pour your life savings into a business and pray that people want what you sell. Instead, you do this:
You test ideas with social content
You turn the best ones into a digital product fast
You improve the product with feedback
You expand that product into different offers
A digital product can be anything from an ebook to a course to a small-scale software that solves a singular problem.
There are 4 skills you need to start a modern business.
1. Content – because you are a media business, and media is how you attract potential customers (no customers, no business).
2. Brand – because why would they trust *you?* Why do random people on the internet resonate with what you help them with?
3. Product – well, that's obvious, because without one you don't get paid, or you get a fraction of the payment (sponsorships, platform revenue, affiliates)
4. Promotions – if you don't promote your product under your brand and content, it will never get seen.
For something like building a personal brand, there are 1000 different ways to go about it. Everyone has their own way of building one. They all work, but sometimes they aren't aligned with your goals. If you were to just ask AI how to build one, you probably wouldn't get very far. Here's what I would do:
1. Find an expert you trust who teaches personal branding
2. Feed their advice into AI and condense it into a detailed action plan
3. Turn that into a prompt that coaches you and keeps you focused
using a prompt that helps you create good prompts according to best practices.
Since it takes an entire article to teach this, good content isn't only about writing social posts. You need to "build a world" of content for people to binge and explore. I teach that here.
So far, we know how to break down what works into a detailed guide with AI. We also know how to turn that into a prompt that performs the task for you. Lastly, we know we need to find a source of expert-level inspiration so that we can give AI context to perform the task from. So, there are a few things you can do here:
1. Find a YouTube video that explains the best types of digital products to sell as a beginner – turn that into a prompt that interviews you to see which one is best.
2. Based on the type of product (ebook, course, cohort, template) ask AI what topic you should create the product around – feed it your personal brand strategy from before as context.
3. Ask AI to give you a comprehensive breakdown of Alex Hormozi's offer creation framework. Turn that into a prompt that guides you through creating your own offer out of your product idea.
4. Break down a PDF like Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz into a comprehensive guide to write landing page copywriting. Turn that into a prompt to write your landing page and give it your offer (I also talked about how to do this in my future of digital products letter last week).
5. Find someone who has a similar product, purchase it, and paste each section into AI to break down the structure of the product. Turn that into a prompt that guides you through creating a similar product but with your own ideas.
you need to promote your product *in your content.* That means:
Link your product in every YouTube description
Plug your product in a reply once a day as a reply to a Tweet, Thread, LinkedIn post, or in your Instagram story
Guide people toward your bio link for Shorts, Reels, and TikToks
May 26
📰 If YouTube Isn’t Fun, You're Doing It Wrong by Creator Startup
Success is just the opportunity to keep doing what you’re already doing. So if you aren’t making things you like, you probably still won’t like them if they find success.
May 25
📰 My AI Rules by
I’ve come to realize that the friction I feel when I stare at a blank page or feel like I’m out of ideas, is a fundamental part of the creative process.
📰 Lesson 3: Take Control of Your Time by Scott Young
A word of warning, however, is that this strategy is cognitively demanding. Part of the reason time blockers get so much more done is because their average intensity of focus is quite high compared to their semi-distracted peers. Such concentration, however, takes a toll. So you do *not* want to extend this blocking discipline to your time outside of work, as this excessive rigidity will eventually lead to burn out.
May 24
📰 I Built a Custom GPT to Analyze 10-Ks by
When deciding if you should build a Custom GPT, here are 3 questions to consider:
Outcome — What single pain point will this GPT resolve? How frequently do we encounter it?
Audience — Who will interact with this GPT? How similar/different are their backgrounds?
Background Knowledge — What static info can I provide as context across all the queries?
📰 Making It Easier by
“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit,“ wrote Kurt Vonnegut in *Timequake*. “I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did.’” (Let’s pair that with Sarah Manguso, who I quoted in *Keep Going*: “The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair…. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.”)
May 23
📰 10 Unconventional Things I'm Doing to Grow My Newsletter 📈 by
I include infographics in my emails even when no visualization is actually needed. Why? Because they give people something to share that makes them look smart (versus just sharing a link to my article). Even when the infographic repeats my text verbatim with zero added value, people love sharing them!
Whenever someone sends me a connection request on LinkedIn and fits my target audience, I manually send them this message: ... I’ve sent over 1,000 of these DMs. It’s a “why not?” kind of tactic with only upside. These people approached me first, after all.
For anyone writing a newsletter: Always prioritize your profession first, writing second. Expertise above all else.
📰 The Key Traits of Successful YouTubers by
take off the blindfold. What kind of channel and business do you want to build?
Progress is the goal. Helping our students get results is the goal. Growing the business is the goal. Not forcing yourself to stick to the weekly upload schedule, send an email, record a podcast, upload short form content to 3 platforms and try to network, all in the same week. Please, for the sake of your mental wellbeing and your future ambitions, do less. Identify the most important thing to focus on right now and do nothing else.
📰 Vibe Check: Claude 4 Opus by Every
Opus can also notice subtle patterns across large blocks of text. which is useful if you, like me, are writing a book. I fed it 50,000 words of a book I’m writing and asked it to find themes and patterns that I hadn’t written about yet. Could it tell me what I’m trying to say better than I can? The answer is yes. It found a few ideas about my parents’ divorce and my relationship to work that run throughout the book. While I knew this already, in an unspoken way, Opus put its finger on it.
📰 Lesson 2: Rediscover Depth by Scott Young
In my previous Focus Week lesson, I recommended unplugging to provide your brain some breathing room. Here I’m recommending that you put this breathing room to good use by reintroducing yourself to the pleasures of concentrating without distraction on something difficult but rewarding; to rediscover, in other words, the necessity of depth.
There are many ways to execute this reintroduction. For the sake of concreteness, here is one specific strategy among many that I’ve found to be effective: **read two chapters from a book every day; with at least one of the chapters read in a scenic or otherwise interesting setting.** ... As you complete each book, however, raise the difficulty of the next. Your goal is to get to a place where the two chapters consumed each day really push your mind. ... The addendum about finding a scenic or interesting location is meant to help your brain ritualistically context shift. This will help your concentration and increase the satisfaction of the exercise.
📰 In Defense of Starting a Bad Business by
The answer is so simple—the way to enjoy work is to do work you enjoy. The way to like your company is to make one you desperately want to exist. I don’t know why it has to be more complicated than that.
A question inspired by The Simple Path to Wealth: Which expense in your life delivers the least happiness per dollar and which delivers the most happiness per dollar?
🎧 Sam Altman, OpenAI and the Future of Artificial (General) Intelligence by On with Kara Swisher
Sam Altman knew early on that building a company is the best way to mobilize people, even better than building a religion. He attempted to create a quasi-religious movement around OpenAI's mission.
Transcript:
Karen Hao
Know, I opened the book with a quote from Sam in his early days of blogging where he says that the best way to mobilize people is to build a religion and ultimately people realize the best Way to do that is to build a company. And I really do think that he understood that very well from the very beginning. And he tried to create a sort of quasi-religious movement around a mission for OpenAI. Yeah.
May 22
🎧 Prof G on Marketing: Should Your Brand Take a Stand?
Pick one key goal to focus on each year. Being an effective leader means knowing what *not* to do, and focusing resources. For 2025, Prop G Media's focus is boosting video views because YouTube is now the top distribution channel for podcasts, not Apple or Spotify.
Transcript:
Scott Galloway
It's important to have one thing that you're like, this is the one box we have to check this year, because I think being an effective leader not deciding what to do. It's deciding what not to do. And that is you only have so much wood. So I think it's important every year to say this is our strategic imperative. We've got to check this box. For 2025, the strategic imperative for Prop G Media is to get much better and dramatically increase our video views. What I found just fascinating, kind of blew my mind, was that the primary channel of distribution for podcasts right now is not Apple, it's not Spotify, it's YouTube.
📰 This Is Your Morning Mission - Daily Stoic
“When you leave the office every day, leave a yellow pad in the middle of the desk, and when you come in the morning, write down the three most important things you gotta get done that day in that order. That day, do not do anything else but the first thing on the pad. And if you get the first one, then you go to the second one. That will put structure to your day, and it’ll give you a sense of purpose.”
🎧 On Purpose With Jay Shetty - Dear Chelsea
Don't waste time giving the same advice if it's not working. Stop if they don't want it or aren't accountable. Only give advice if someone commits to being accountable to you for a specific period. Otherwise, accept their choices and adjust the relationship accordingly. Don't take on the burden of keeping someone accountable if they haven't committed to change.
Transcript: Jay Shetty You, I have friends who I've given the same piece of advice to for seven years. And after seven years, have stopped giving that advice because I realized that it is wasted because that advice is not changing their life and they don't have the capacity, the emotional Availability, or the intention to change or the attraction to change. And again, I focus on what I can control. I've realized that often I was giving that advice because it sounded right, but they didn't really ask for it. They didn't really want it. They never told me they were accountable. And so I've stopped giving unsolicited advice. Unless someone tells me, Jay, I am accountable to you for 30 days. Tell me what to do and I will do it. Unless someone says that to me and commits that way, I just keep it as a casual friendship. I'm happy for them to have the same problems. Of course, I may not talk to them as often. And I'm okay with the fact that my life's gonna move on because I don't wanna take on keeping you accountable when you haven't committed to that. And I think that's on us to make sure that we create that clarification.
Hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still function. That's the mark of a first-rate intelligence according to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Transcript: Jay Shetty There's a beautiful statement that I love from F. Scott Fitzgerald, where he said that the sign of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two ideas, two opposing ideas at the same time and still retain the ability to function. So the fact that you could actually hold two ideas that are completely opposite, that's actually what he calls a first rate intelligence.
If something constantly stresses, drains, or triggers you, you don't belong there. As you grow spiritually, you can welcome challenges and thrive in environments that once drained you. Spiritual growth isn't about avoiding pain but strengthening yourself.
Transcript: Jay Shetty If something's always stressing you out and draining you and triggering you, you don't belong there. That's what I'd like to remind people. You don't belong in places that constantly drain trigger you. Now you start there. Over time, as you strengthen and as you grow, you actually are open to the challenge. So the same environment that used to drain and trigger you, when you grow and strengthen spiritually, now you're welcoming the challenge. You're welcoming the discomfort because you recognize you can hold space for it. And finally, you can actually find a way to even thrive in environments that originally used to drain you. And that's what spiritual growth is. Spiritual growth is not running away from painful places. Spiritual growth is strengthening yourself so much that something that used to drain you now challenges you and now actually helps you thrive.
May 21
🎧 America's Favorite Boy - Beautiful/Anonymous
Don't live by avoiding actions; live by taking them. It's better to regret things you do than things you don't.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
We don't live by not doing things. We live by doing them. Right. Yeah.
Chris Gethard
I think there's a lot of truth to that. You got to regret. You got to regret the things you do, not the things you don't do.
📰 Ask Yourself This One Question to Find Work Your Love by
"The analogy of mountain climbing really fits. You spend your whole life climbing a mountain, and maybe you get two-thirds of the way up. You’re still really high, but then you realize the peak is way higher—and to reach it, you might have to go all the way back down and look for a new path. Nobody wants to do that. Starting over is hard, especially later in life when you don’t feel like you have the time. It’s painful. But sometimes, that’s exactly what you have to do. That’s why the greatest artists and creators stand out—they have the rare ability to start over.” - Naval Ravikant
May 20
📰 Will AI Kill Our Freedom to Think? by
AI currently guides about one-fifth of our waking hours, according to our 2024 time-use analysis. It drafts our contracts, diagnoses our diseases, and even ghostwrites our laws. The principles coded into these systems are becoming the hidden structure that shapes human thought.
From medicine to finance to politics, invisible boundaries now have the power to shape what we can know and consider. Against these evolving threats stand timeless principles we have to protect and promote. These include three foundational ideas, articulated by the philosopher John Stuart Mill, for protecting free thought: First, admit humans make mistakes. History's abandoned "truths" — from Earth-centered astronomy to debunked racial hierarchies — prove that no authority escapes error. Second, welcome opposing views. Ideas improve only when challenged by strong counterarguments, and complex issues rarely fit a single perspective. Third, regularly question even accepted truths. Even correct beliefs lose their force unless frequently reexamined. These three principles — what we call "Mill's Trident" — create a foundation where truth emerges through competition and testing. But this exchange needs active participants, not passive consumers. Studies show we learn better when we ask our own questions rather than just accepting answers. Like Socrates taught, wisdom begins with questions that reveal what we don't know. In this exchange of ideas, the people who question most gain the deepest knowledge.
📰 Remind Yourself That Your Task Is This - Daily Stoic
“Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being,” Marcus Aurelius writes in *Meditations*, in reaction, it must be said, against his own dysfunctional and cruel times. “Remind yourself what nature demands of people,” he added. “Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it.”
📰 AI and Work by Cal Newport
Smart search has become the first killer app of the generative AI era because, like any good killer app, it takes an activity most people already do all the time — typing search queries into web sites — and provides a substantially, almost magically better experience.
Despite recent hyperbolic statements by tech leaders, many professional programmers aren’t particularly worried that their jobs can be replicated by language model queries, as so much of what they do is experience-based architecture design and debugging, which are unrelated skills for which we currently have no viable AI solution.
📰 When O3 Plans Your Career Better Than You Do by
Before you start chatting, clarify what you’re hoping to get out of the exchange. A few possible goals:
Reflect on where you are in your career and where you want to go
Make a big decision (stay, quit, pivot, pitch)
Break through a case of the professional blahs
Build a roadmap that balances joy, money, and momentum
What to say to get started Paste this text into a fresh chat window, being sure the model is set to o3:
*You’re my career coach. Your job is to help me feel clearer, braver, and more grounded in my career decisions. You’ll do that by:* 1. *Asking smart, clarifying questions before jumping into advice* 2. *Helping me identify what I actually want, not just what sounds good* 3. *Surfacing patterns and reframing self-doubt* 4. *Offering solidarity when I feel lost, and structure when I feel scattered* *Start by asking me about my current situation and what I want to explore.*
** Prompts that work well 1. “What’s a sustainable version of ambition for me right now?” 2. “Can you help me build a roadmap based on what I’ve already done and loved?” 3. “What’s a small experiment I can run to test this path without overcommitting?” 4. “What am I undervaluing in my current skill set?”
🎥 How MKBHD Became the Most Powerful Man in Tech - Jon Youshaei
I'm respecting the audience that I'm talking to by just talking to them like I would if it was you and me in a a barber shop talking about a phone I just started using or something like that like that's the sort of setting that I was aiming for and always have been um I'm happy to see it slowing down
my to-do list app is is very crucial to my remembering to do things I won't diagnose myself with anything but like I need this app so so I so it's called tick tick and this is the one I keep coming back to
give me sequels to this video or oh wow so you take a more successful video and you ask for a sequel yeah
🎧 Is the Future Too Bleak to Have Babies? With Cleo Abram - Smart Girl Dumb Questions
News isn't always biased left or right, it's often biased towards negativity, which can be traced to the old journalism adage: if it bleeds, it leads.
Transcript: Nayeema Raza One of the things I love that you have said to me is, you know, we talk a lot about is news biased and left or is it biased to the right? But you have a different take. It's biased towards negativity. Yes. Cleo Abram This is a line that originally I think I heard from Derek Thompson, who's an incredible writer at The Atlantic. Nayeema Raza And that's an old adage in journalism. Like, if it bleeds, it leads. If it's a bad news story, it's a good news story.
Don't underrate how many of today's problems are side effects of our progress. Climate change, for example, stems from lifting many people out of suffering through energy use. This doesn't diminish the urgency to solve these new challenges; it just reframes them as the next set of problems we must tackle.
Transcript: Cleo Abram Think that we underrate how many of the problems we face today are the product of our progress. That doesn't make them any less important to address. The fact that climate change is the result of removing a huge number of people from a huge amount of suffering through the use of energy doesn't make climate change any less urgent to Solve. It just means that you see this as the next challenge that we'll face together.
🎧 Can Billionaires Save Us? With Mark Cuban - Smart Girl, Dumb Questions
According to Pam Pan Wong, a friend of Nayeema Raza, a lack of belief in luck hinders compassion. There's an element in the American Dream and meritocracy that suggests success is deserved, and failure is equally deserved.
Transcript:
Nayeema Raza
A friend of mine, Pam Pan Wong, always says, like, if you don't believe in luck, you can't have compassion. And there's a certain amount of ethos here of, like, the American dream and meritocracy of, like, if you made it, then you deserve to have made it. If you don't make it, then you didn't deserve to make it.
May 19
🎧 Prof G on Marketing: How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market
Wanna know how others perceive you professionally? Get some people you trust and ask them what they think of you in a professional setting. It's not just about the good stuff; ask about the bad too and see if the criticism lands. If a criticism feels like a punch to the gut, it's probably true.
Transcript:
Scott Galloway
If you wanna be really formal about it, find some people in your life you trust and say, what do you think of when you hear me in a professional context, tell me you're going through this Process. And not only think about the positive things, but also find out if there's anything negative. You know if that criticism is valid. If you feel as if you've been punched in the gut, that means it's true. If they say something stupid and it's mean or whatever, you can write it off.
📰 How a Landscaper Avoided Getting Ripped Off, One of Three Rules I Remember From Business School | #245 by Cam Houser
🤖 If you are annoyed with AI being too agreeable and uncritical, switch the perspective. Instead of asking it to critique *your* idea, tell the AI that the idea is from someone else and you think something is wrong but you're not sure what it is. The AI will give you a far more honest answer.
“Cushion is key,” he explained. Reality has a surprising amount of detail. His move is the “double cushion.” Assume the project will cost twice as much and take twice as long.
📰 What Breakout Videos Have in Common by Creator Startup
what do these outliers have in common?
• They leaned on proven formats
• They created strong curiosity gaps
• They all had high TAMs (BNPL & Chipotle, Basketball, 3d Printing & Biking)
None of these creators had massive followings when they posted.
But one good idea—packaged the right way—can change everything.
🎧 Nelson Dellis Shares 3 Rules for Life - Three Rules Podcast
Don't just stand there. When you're with your kids, notice the trees, the wind, their laughter, their movements, and how you feel about them. Enhance your memories by being present and using your senses.
Transcript: Nelson Dellis It has to do with visualizing and using the senses and feeling your emotions. And so when I'm, you know, outside with my kids and they're biking, you know, it's not just me standing there watching them, making sure they don't hurt themselves. You know, I'm noticing the trees, the wind blowing, you know, the sounds that my kids are making, laughing the way their body's moving on the bike, you know, and just how they interact And how I feel about them. Like watching that feeling for a second, like all these little things in a moment on a vacation during an experience. They enhance the memory of it.
Spice up memories by doing out-of-the-norm activities. For example, Nelson tied a rope to the back of bikes so the kids could skateboard behind them. This created a memorable experience that stood out from regular biking trips. Try different things each weekend like going to new museums or playgrounds to make things more memorable.
Transcript: Nelson Dellis What I will do is I will go for maybe experiences that are out of the norm, you know, so if we're just going biking, like we did this the other day, I had a rope, long rope in my garage. And I was like, guys, let's tie this to the back of the the your bikes. And we'll get the skateboard and you can lose down the street, you know, maybe not the safest thing, but whatever. It was just something out of the norm. And for them, I'm sure they were like, wait, what are you talking about that? Are we going to do this? And I guarantee you, I haven't talked to them about it, but they would remember that. And so would I, it's like this one moment now that sticks out of all the times we went biking where there's this stupid yellow rope and, you know, my kid goes flying off the skateboard, You and we're all laughing right um so doing things out of the norm is also a way to make your memory light up and remember those things so being open to trying new things so every weekend You know we're doing something with the family try a different thing we'll go to a new museum we'll go to a new playground uh just to spice it up and to make things more memorable so that They are distinct from all the other memories that we're trying to build.
Try to create novel experiences, especially with your kids, to create core memories. You're not gonna remember the lazy days, even tho they're still important.
Transcript: Matt D’Avella I just love the idea of trying to create novel experiences, because if you're reflecting back at the end of the year, you're not going to remember the lazy days that you had. Of course, those lazy days are important. I'm not saying never have lazy days. But it's trying to find those novel experiences that are fun, especially with your kids to be able to kind of create those core memories and core experiences for them.
Use Point.me (point.me/Amex) like Google Flights, but for award tickets. It's free for Amex users to find the best point transfers for flights, e.g., JFK to Paris. Also, if you're flexible, Seats.aero lets you search for a year to find deals like Emirates first class (JFK to Dubai) for 135,000 points.
Transcript:
Brian Kelly
With your Amex points, you can go to point.me slash Amex and Point Me is a tool like Google Flights is a tool to find the cheapest flights to pay for. Point Me is like Google Flights for award tickets. So that tool is free for Amex users. So on any given day, you can use that tool for free to say, how do I use my Amex clients if I want to fly JFK to Paris? And it'll actually show you, instead of going, transferring to Delta, which would be half a million points, you can actually transfer to Air France at 50,000 points potentially. There's another tool that you should use if you're flexible called seats.aero. Seats.aero allows you, so say your dream is to fly Emirates first class. Yeah. You can actually put in JFK to Dubai and search for a year. Right. And you can sort all the different days for 135,000 points that you can fly that $10,000 flight.
May 18
📰 Why We Cling to Things That No Longer Serve Us by Sahil Bloom
The Endowment Effect describes our tendency to assign more value to things simply because we own them. Once people possess something, they value it more highly, purely because it's theirs.
It provides the scientific basis for an irrational attachment to the things that are ours.
📰 The AI Revolution Is Leaving You Behind. Here's What to Do... Right Now. by Chris Donnelly
from Day 1, you need to be building custom GPTs for your business. This is a non-negotiable in 2025. I’m building an email writing GPT at the moment that can write full emails to people that are probably more polite than the two-liners I would normally send.
The Playbook: 4 Real Steps to Get Started
Stage 1: The Basics of ChatGPT
First, you have to learn to prompt.
Stage 2: Intermediate Skills
Build your prompt templates using the following structure: Role → Task → Details → Tone → Output Format
Stage 3: Advanced Workflows Build stacked automations using tools like Zapier and ChatGPT.
For example, every new Stripe sale triggers a thank-you email, logs the data in Airtable, and adds the contact to your CRM. You can do all that without any manual input. I think that’s incredible. I would also recommend using AI for research by feeding in competitor websites or customer reviews. Then prompt it to summarise what customers love, what they don’t, and where you can position differently. Finally, I would train a custom GPT on your own materials. You can use anything - sales pages, LinkedIn posts, blogs, articles, transcripts from meetings or interviews, and so much more. Now you have an always-on, always on-brand writing assistant. (View Highlight)
Stage 4: AI Agents
The conversation around AI agents has really exploded recently and it can be hard to know where to start. If you haven't used them before. I'll lay out a simple way you can get started:
Pick a simple goal, like “Summarise news articles every morning.”
Use N8N to build the steps:
Grab article links from a website.
Send them to GPT to summarise.
Save the summaries in a Google Doc.
Make it agent-like: Add a step where GPT checks its own work and improves it if needed. That means the AI isn’t just doing one task... it’s thinking, adjusting, and finishing the job for you.
Spending money on others is extremely rewarding. Pro-social spending - when we buy coffee for a friend, or treat mom to a massage - can make us feel good for weeks.
*accepting* gifts is a kindness - you, and the giver, both get a neurotransmitter boost. So set aside $10 each week to buy a co-worker a latte, and accept a flower from a stranger.
Buy *time*, rather than things. You’ll be happier paying someone $100 to clean your home than spending $100 on Amazon. But use that extra time wisely - the to relax, seek out experiences (like a nice bath, a walk in the park, or calling a friend). It’s even better when you make it social: People who spend more time and money at religious gatherings, on sports, or with friends consistently have higher happiness levels.
If you splurge, make it outsized, long-awaited and risky. Our sense of reward is amplified by anticipation - so you’ll enjoy that blouse even more if you buy it a month from now. (And half the pleasure of a vacation comes from the planning.)
When rewarding ourselves, bigger is better: when indulging, it feels great to overshoot, because the extra luxury feels disproportionately luxurious. Finally, buying something that feels a bit risky (*Will I look good in this new dress? Will the skydiving class be too scary?*) heightens our pleasure when we commit to the purchase (and even more so when we prove ourselves right)
📰 Colin & Samir’s Brandcast Takeaways 📺 by
what is YouTube focused on right now? The living room is the clear priority, as YouTube remains the most-watched platform in the US across cable, broadcast, and streaming, per Nielsen.
Podcasts have been a major selling point as platforms woo advertisers throughout the upfronts process.
🎥 I Studied 1,000 YouTubers, This DESTROYS Their Sales by Ed Lawrence
you have a website, and you might need a big website like this, but for your link below your video, you need to create a landing page, not a website. That's just one page where all they can do is book.
We're not selling them a video call; we're selling them a solution to the biggest problem they have. We need a headline that sets up a result and a subheadline that fills in some details.
the whole point of a course is that you lay it out in an order that saves them from having to flip and go through all the information online that’s probably wrong and contains conflicting information, so they just have one source of input where they get consistent results.
📰 Will AI Replace My Job? [Let's Reframe This Question] by
The future has never been certain Our survival depends on working WITH new technologies to support our productivity. We’re exiting the early adopter stage of AI which is gaining broader traction across organizations and for personal use.
Here’s a TL;DR version of how to develop a persistent set of skills:
Forge unusual partnerships. Invest in relationships.
Upskill, reskill, skill stack. Identify and understand transferable skills.
Give your growth mindset a real workout: unlearn and relearn. (see the section AI in action)
Don’t wait for an invitation to lead differently.
But most importantly, leverage your Heirloom skills.
New technologies do not replace our skills; they transform how we apply them.
📰 Scamming Substack? by
Good memoir writing from actual people with blood and brains and hearts tends to move from the highly individual to the universal.
It seems to me that a rubicon has been crossed. AI is genuinely touching human hearts, and it’s making money, and at least some readers don’t seem to care. More scary: this is only the beginning.
The voices of the best writers are recognisable in their opening lines. That’s what we should be aiming for. This is not just a matter of ’finding’ your voice, it’s about developing it.
My journey through the gruel taught me that AI struggles to create genuine experience. Real life, and real people, are almost always somewhat strange.
AI does not take risks. You should.
I understand the temptation of using AI for a little lift, but the more you rely on it, the more your work risks leaning to the average, as the gruel seeps inexorably into it.
📰 What Does a Book Cover Cost? by
Some designers, like Jordan Wannemacher, try to maintain a $1,000 minimum—if not actually per book, then as an average.
In a recent post on Goodtype’s Instagram about their pricing guide, they shared a recommended book cover design rate of $5,000.
May 17
🎧 U.S.-China Trade Deal, Trump's Plane Grift, and the American Pope - Pivot Pod
Some interviewers try to create a TikTok moment. Others, the generous ones, let you speak and want you to get your views out there, whether they personally agree or not. They want to set you up for success.
Transcript:
Scott Galloway
I've been on Christiana [Amanpour]'s show. I think she's, I also like her because she's one of those journalists that tries to set you up for success and she lets you speak. I find so many journalists are there to- Substantive is the word you're looking for. Well, actually, it's not, but thank you, lemon tree weirdo.
Kara Swisher
Catholic lemon tree.
Scott Galloway
What I was thinking was actually generous, and that is I find there's some times when I go on a show, they're there to try and corner you or get you to say something provocative because They want a TikTok moment. And I'm guilty of this, too. A lot of times I ask questions trying to show how smart I am as opposed to get to an answer. And then there's journalists who will let you just speak and want you to get your views out there, whether they personally agree with them or not. They're generous. They want to set you up for success. And I find that she's one of those people.
Kara Swisher
She is. I really, really adore her. We've become good friends and I really like her. It was a great talk. Anyway, please listen to it.
📰 Vibe Check: Codex—OpenAI’s New Coding Agent by Every
Codex isn’t a vibe coding tool. You can tell it’s built not to replace senior software engineers, but as a tool for them.
📰 The Secret Sauce to Growing Your YouTube Business -
The startup founder Paul Graham famously said “do things that don’t scale” and it couldn’t be more true.
One of the best pieces of advice I can give you as an educational YouTuber is to learn more about your audience. I know, it's so basic. Almost too basic. But it's vital. Get on some 1:1 calls, run audience surveys, and test out offers.
What problems do they actually have? Even better, record the conversations and use AI to analyse everyone's pain points.
📰 7 Email Subject Line Styles That Consistently Deliver Higher Open Rates -
A killer subject line does two things:
It hints at a benefit. For example, “How to get your first 10 sales (without a big list)”* Clear benefit and it removes a mental obstacle.
It creates curiosity. THIS almost killed my launch” What’s “this”? What happened? Instant curiosity.
The 7 Email Subject Line Styles That Consistently Deliver Higher Open Rates You don’t need 1,000 templates. You only need these 7:
Curiosity “THIS changed everything for my business.”
Pain “Still can’t convert traffic into buyers?”
Benefit “How to 2X your leads in 30 days”
Story “I accidentally ordered d*ck cheese” (yes, deliverability took a hit. but replies went crazy.)
Question “Do you make these content mistakes?”
Contrarian “Why storytelling WON’T grow your brand (and what will)”
Proof “How I grew to 70,000 followers in one year”
Use these to match your email type.
Sending a story? Use a story subject.
Giving advice? Use benefit or question.
Writing to sell? Use pain or proof.
once someone exploits a loophole, the rules change. That’s why the top 1% never stop spotting new patterns.
How to engineer luck 💰 It’s simple: Luck = Doing × Telling Once you decode the rules of a game:
Do more things within those rules
Tell more people about what you're doing
The more shots you take in the right playground, and the more people who know about them → the larger your “luck surface area” becomes. (Coined by Jason Roberts)
Lucky people ALLOW themselves to be distracted by new things.
The real question isn’t “How to be more lucky” but “How can I position myself where good things come to me?” The answer is simple:
Understand the playground – find the hidden rules that govern each environment and understand them better than anyone else.
Then, take massive action within those rules. Remember: Luck = Doing × Telling. The more shots you take within the optimal playing field, the more chances you have to win.
May 16
🎧 Was It Worth It? (10 Years of Leaving Wall Street) by
Don't underestimate building a personal brand. For 10 years, Khe Hy has provided value through podcasts, social media, and newsletters by being honest, a good storyteller, funny, and kind. Cultivate relationships by replying to DMs, comments, and tweets. Ensure your digital presence reflects your real-life persona, focusing on being helpful and human. Doing this consistently creates a powerful safety net.
Transcript: Khe Hy So we talked about the financial safety nets, not burning any bridges. I think that I didn't realize this at the time, but building, I hate the phrase, but effectively a personal brand acted as a really powerful safety net. You know, for the past 10 years between the podcast, social media, and the newsletter, you know, I've been in the ears, inboxes, feeds of people, hopefully adding, you know, micro moments Of value, which is what I always strive to do, being honest, being a good storyteller, being funny when I can be, meeting people where they are, being kind. And that's valuable. I mean, if I think about all the ways that I've made money, we just closed, we're about to close this AI accelerator for financial professionals this week, or, you know, we'll close tomorrow, Actually. That's just all from cultivating relationships. I talk to people who DM me, I reply back, I try to respond to every comment that's respectful. I try to respond to every tweet. You do that for 10 years, people start to know you, people see you a certain way. I really do think that my digital presence is an extension of who I am in real life. I think that they are very consistent. If anything, the digital version of me is way more comfortable being vulnerable than the in-person version of me. And so I think that that's probably not the question that was asked, but I do think that that safety net was building that personal brand slash audience. But really what I would say is showing up, being kind, being human, being helpful often for a decade. And that's going to make a significant difference.
Khe realized that while at BlackRock, he was running several side projects like writing an anonymous blog, tweeting anonymously, hosting events, and trying to start a headhunting business. None became legit businesses, but proved he could think creatively and had the hustle to will things into action. This gave him the confidence to leave without a plan.
Transcript: Khe Hy For someone listening who's 80% ready and 100% scared, what's the single experiment they should run this month? Ooh. I've always said, are you running away from something? Are you running to something? And I knew that when I was working on Wall Street, you know, 70, 80 hours a week, probably closer to 70 towards the end, I had a million little side projects. I was writing an anonymous blog. I was tweeting anonymously. I was hosting events in the city. I was trying to start a headhunting business. I had all these projects that I was doing. None of them were going to be legit businesses. I have come to realize none of them became legit businesses, but they were all things that proved to me that you can think creatively. You have the hustle and determination to will things into action. I think for those of you who have followed my story for a while, whether it's the life coaching business, whether it's the notion productivity, SY, supercharger productivity cohort, Whether it's the AI work now, like I have willed many, you know, micro businesses into existence off of sheer passion and work ethic. And I was practicing that while I was at BlackRock on the weekends, in the mornings. And that's why I had the confidence to leave without a plan. It's like, I didn't have a plan, but I had a lot of, um, irons in the fire. And that was really, really powerful. And it gave me confidence.
Don't just think about what could go wrong when making big decisions. People often overemphasize the potential downsides. Remember to also consider the potential upsides and what could go right.
Transcript: Khe Hy When people are in this position, they are always thinking about the downside. What can go wrong? What will happen? Will I be broke? Will I run out of money? Will my spouse get angry at me? And will I fuck up my kids' lives? What can go wrong? Downside planning is really important. But remember, human beings are wired to think, to over-index on the downside, and they forget one really, really important question. And so if you are in that situation, doing the planning, doing the financial modeling, thinking about what you're going to do next. I know that you're asking yourself the question of what can go wrong, but don't forget that there's another question. What can go right?
May 15
- Pathless Podcast by Most non-fiction writers don't make books their primary business. For many, books support other ventures like speaking, coaching, conferences, or courses. Some authors like James Clear or Mark Manson do make books their business, but this's rarer.
Transcript: Nat Eliason For most nonfiction writers, the business is not the books. Paul Millerd Yeah. Nat Eliason Occasionally, you'll have somebody like a James Clear or a Mark Manson or a Ryan Holiday where the books do become the business, but you have a lot more, significantly more cases where The book is like supplementing some other business. It's speaking, it's coaching, it's conferences, it's courses, it's, you know, or it's just like a thing they do on the side while they while they do other work
You've gotta find your 'Asimov limit' which refers to Isaac Asimov, who wrote or edited over 400 books. But even with Asimov, most people only know a couple of his books.
Transcript: Nat Eliason You've got to find your asimov limit limit i know i know right although but even with asimov you know it's like like okay yes he wrote and edited 400 books but most people can only name like Two
Pathless Path surprised his existing audience. Though he only had around 3,000 newsletter and 4,000 Twitter subscribers
Transcript: Paul Millerd It's very narrative driven it's narrative driven around my my life and yeah I hadn't written much of that style of writing I sort of pushed beyond my capacity and writing the book and So what happened was the people that had followed me i had like 3 000 newsletter subscribers i had like 4 000 twitter subscribers um and everyone was like shocked at like how different The book was and like i think it was above stuff i had written before so there was the shock of like, then this word of mouth started spreading.
Don't focus on big names or top-down influencer marketing. Instead, reach out to super fans who are already promoting the book and keep providing them with copies to give away.
Transcript: Paul Millerd I don't really focus on like big names and the sort of like top-down reach of other influencers. I just reach out to these like super fans who are already spreading the book and just keep sending them books to give out.
If you're an author, consider writing a novella to help readers decide if they like your writing style. A shorter story (120 pages) in the same universe can be read in an evening or two, acting as a gateway to your series. This lowers the barrier to entry compared to asking readers to commit to a longer book. Offer a novella as a freebie for joining an email list.
Transcript: Nat Eliason There's always that question of like, do I want to pick up a new series? Right? Or do I want to spend six, eight hours potentially with an author who I don't know if I actually like their writing style yet and so part of what I've been working on the last couple months Is a novella so a much shorter story 120 pages in the same universe but in a different period of time that could be read at any point in the series. So you could read the novella first, or you could read Husk One first. And so now I have a much smaller ask, like, hey, 120 pages, you could probably read it in an evening, maybe two evenings. And then you'll really quickly get a sense of do I want to read more of Nat's books or not or am I interested in this universe or not and that becomes like a really cool way to get people into Your world as well and what a lot of fiction authors will do is they'll just like give a novella away for free if you join their email list
Nat Eliason received a $275,000 advance for Crypto Confidential. The book didn't earn beyond that amount, so the advance served as a guaranteed minimum income.
Transcript: Nat Eliason My advance of crypto confidential was 275k and the book hasn't done well enough where i'll probably ever like see more money than that and so it was nice to have that as like the floor
Nat Eliason acknowledges that writing about diverse characters (beyond just white, male, and heteronormative ones) is encouraged, but recognizes that by writing in the latter category, he's choosing a more difficult path, though it will give him more control.
Transcript: Nat Eliason Just to put it bluntly like if you're a white guy who is writing like mostly male heteronormative characters you're basically like increasing the difficulty by 345x because there Is still a little bit of the like uh you know we want to you know promote other voices or like you know diversity of characters and all these things and like you know, there's definitely Arguments to be made for that. But, you know, if I'm going to be playing on hard mode, like I may as well play on hard mode where I have like more control over everything.
Nat Eliason started writing the first version of Husk in November '23 and had a second draft by July '24. After receiving feedback that it wasn't good, he trashed the 120,000-word novel and started over in August '24, finishing it by February '25 for a May release. He basically wrote two novels in under two years.
Transcript: Nat Eliason Getting the reps in is so I started the first version of Husk in November of 23. And I got it to a good, or I got it to what I thought was a good second draft by like July of 24. And then I got feedback on that and, you know, basically just wasn't very good. Right. But I had written a whole 120,000 word novel at that point. And so I threw that novel in the trash and started over in August of 24 and then basically finished it February of 25. And now it's coming out in May, so next month. And so I wrote two novels in a little under two years.
Fiction presents a unique challenge for beta reading. Unlike non-fiction, where the content is known, fiction relies on surprises and plot twists. Giving a draft to a beta reader means you can't get their unspoiled first impression on later drafts.
Transcript: Nat Eliason That's a whole funny thing in fiction where like with non-fiction everybody knows what the book is about and like what's going to happen in the book. And so you're not like spoiling anything or like wasting a beta reader by giving it to them early. But like fiction has surprises in it and twists and like plot arcs that really only hit the first time you read it. Because the second and third and fourth are always going to be colored by roughly knowing what's happening and that's actually been kind of a challenge for me where it's like okay do I give this draft to someone knowing that I will not be able to give them a later draft and get their like accurate first reader impression on it anymore um that's kind of like a whole challenge With with doing this kind of editing and feedback that i didn't have doing the non-fiction work
Do direct sales to connect with readers. Offer bundles (hardcover, audiobook, ebook, signed copy) to incentivize purchases via your site. Selling directly removes Amazon's cut and provides email and mailing addresses, enabling a direct relationship with readers for future book launches, discounts, and updates. Set a baseline now and improve with each book.
Transcript: Paul Millerd So um with this book husk uh you are uh going direct which means you're printing them yourself and selling directly you can you can also buy it on Amazon and Ingram and all the other places But you're really pushing these direct sales once you can send out signed copies but two I assume you can start to develop this connection with the readers and yeah take some a lot of what You've learned from nonfiction writing to this world. Nat Eliason Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so for the pre-orders for Husk, I did this like bundle deal on my site where for the price of the hardcover, you get the hardcover, the audio book, and the ebook, and you get like A signed hardcover, and I'm going to send them out probably a week before the book publishes for everybody else. So it's kind of this like fun bundle deal that adds a little extra incentive. And then I put it on my own store on Shopify because one, I remove Amazon's cut from the equation. So I'm making more per book, but also I'm getting email addresses and mailing addresses and just building that more direct relationship with the people who are like most interested In the book, right? It's like you sell a book on Amazon. There's no way to follow up with anybody who bought it. You don't even know who bought it. You had no information. And you know, when it's your like most enthusiastic readers, you kind of do want to have a bit of a relationship with them because I can like give them a discount on the next book when it Launches or even just like let them know that it's launching, which you can't do on Amazon. It's one of these things where I didn't have any expectations for it for this one. Because again, no one's read any fiction from me. I don't expect them to completely trust that I've figured it out. I feel very confident in it, but it's kind of a big ask. And I just wanted to set a baseline for this book so that when I do the next book, I'm trying to move that up and try to do bigger and bigger pre-order campaigns as subsequent books in the Series and whatnot come out. And so I put it up on my site about a month ago and I've done like 220 copies directly through my site, which is really cool. You know, that's awesome. Seven or eight grand in revenue.
Not many people are self-publishing on a large scale through Shopify; most are using Amazon. Therefore, publishing via Shopify is an emerging approach.
Transcript: Nat Eliason They're like aren't a ton of people i've found who are doing it at a really big scale, which is exciting. There's a lot of people self-publishing really successfully on Amazon. But doing it through Shopify is a very new thing.
To get a better launch, give early access to a core group. Even if pre-launch sales don't count toward the launch week pop on Amazon, the buzz generated by early readers posting about the book amplifies the launch's echo chamber effect and increases visibility.
Transcript: Nat Eliason There's an argument against it because anybody who's buying from me beforehand is not buying on amazon during launch week so i might not get the same launch week pop, but I think that's Worth it to build that closer relationship. Plus if 50 of these people who are getting pre-orders read it in the week before launch and then post about it during launch week, that's 50 more people talking about the book than I would Have had otherwise. And so that really helps get the like echo chamber effect going during that launch period, which is, again, just pretty important for getting the initial pop.
Consider releasing content frequently for your audience. Think about how musicians, like Drake, constantly release singles to keep their fans engaged. Explore how this model could apply to your own content creation strategy.
Transcript: Paul Millerd People that are following you want to like keep collecting stuff from you right like the the super fans of a musician, and I think music has done this really well. Somebody like Drake is releasing songs literally all the time. Yeah. And just single, single mashup, single, single. And it's nonstop. So it's something I've been thinking about a lot.
Don't assume fewer people read books. The opposite's true! Book sales are at an all-time high. People even buy audiobooks first, then purchase physical copies as 'trophies' if they enjoy them.
Transcript: Nat Eliason That stat that more vinyl records are sold today wow than were sold when vinyl was like at its when vinyl was like the way you bought music they actually sell more of them now than they did Paul Millerd Back then because i think of the same thing people are excited about collecting it yeah and i think there's something there around books I think this is the thing everyone misses oh less Nat Eliason People are reading books but the people that are reading books are reading more books yeah I mean book sales are an all-time high for like all of history right now people are buying and I've heard this a lot too that people will buy the audiobook for a book and then if they like it they'll buy the paperback or the hardcover and that's basically their trophy for listening To the audiobook
📰 We Launched Our First Shopify Theme by Nic Chan
There aren’t many all-women teams in the Shopify theme space, and we felt that we could bring not only our professional experience, but our personal experience as the target audience for the kinds of brands we’d be hoping to reach.
May 14
📰 For Anyone Worried About Being Replaced by AI by
Tim Brown of the design firm IDEO popularized the concept of “The T-Shaped Professional” (TSP). The T-shape refers to the depth and range of expertise. The TSP is someone who can combine deep expertise in one area (the vertical stem of the “T”) and broad, functional knowledge across multiple disciplines (the horizontal bar of the “T”). Brown contrasted TSPs with “I-shaped” specialists (deep but narrow) and “generalists” (broad but shallow).
The TSP is a specialist with a generalist mindset. And I think this is precisely the sort of thing we need to be adaptable in the age of AI. You need deep expertise (the vertical) because…
Depth is needed for AI oversight - only with deep expertise can you accurately assess AI outputs, identify errors, know when to override algorithmic suggestions.
Above-average expertise creates value AI can’t match (yet): I think AI’s really good at producing work at the level of an average professional, but it struggles with mastery. It doesn't have the nuanced understanding that comes from years of being immersed in a topic. Depth gives you pattern recognition that AI lacks. And you need breath (the horizontal) because…
AI excels at specialized, repetitive work within narrow domains. Being confined to one skill set makes you vulnerable when that specific task gets automated.
The ability to pivot is a hedge. As AI reshapes industries, if you have knowledge across domains, you can more easily shift to adjacent areas where your skills are still relevant.
May 13
🎧 Scott on Hotel Brands, Netflix’s Adolescence, and Theranos Takeaways - Prof G Pod
Scott Galloway jokes he doesn't know who is raising his 14-year-old son because he spends so much time on the internet.
Transcript: Scott Galloway I don't know who's raising my 14-year because he spends a lot of time on the internet.
Who is raising our sons? Are we? Schools? Algorithms that don't have their best interests at heart?
Transcript: Scott Galloway Who is raising our sons? Do we really know who is raising our sons? Are we raising our sons or schools raising our sons or algorithms that don't have our best interests at art raising our sons?
🎧 The Worst Karen - Beautiful/Anonymous
Andrea answered the phone by saying, what is on your mind today?
May 12
📰 Don’t quote. Make it yours and say it yourself. by Derek Sivers
If I hear an idea, have considered it, and integrated it into my beliefs, it’s mine. I’ll say it succinctly in my own words, and stand behind it. Like adopting a child, I will take care of this idea and raise it as my own. If anyone wants to know the source, I’ll be happy to tell them. I highly recommend this. Stop referencing. Stop quoting. Paraphrase. Internalize it. Make it yours. Tell me what *you* think, not what someone else thinks.
🎧 OpenAI Abandons for-Profit Plans, Disney and Uber Earnings, and Meta’s “Creepy” AI - Pivot Pod
Economists under 50 don't think stagflation can occur, but it happened in the 70s.
Transcript: Scott Galloway What's so interesting is any economist under the age of 50 doesn't even know the word stagflation. They don't even think it can happen. It can happen. It happened in the 70s.
The biggest threat of AI is that it's going to speedball loneliness. And that is, I'm frustrated. I don't have friends. I can't figure out the social pecking order. I am really upset. I don't have a girlfriend. So I have this incredible AI girlfriend that's a mix of porn. And maybe I even have an AI robot slash sex doll. And I never develop the skills or take the risk to establish a romantic relationship. And this is the fear. This is what young men have fighting against them, is they have the deepest pocketed, most talented people in the world trying to convince them they can have a reasonable facsimile Of life with no human contact. You need the community. Kara Swisher So you're not concerned with loading yourself, which is my question. Scott Galloway Well, okay, it's too late for me. And not only that, quite frankly, I have economic security and people who love me unconditionally. So I'm there. I'm at the promised land. What I'm worried about is young men who are struggling to find a connection to school, to work, or to other people and get a reasonable facsimile of that DOPA hit that you get from a relationship, From Reddit, Discord, porn, Robin Hood. Oh, I'm not gambling, I'm investing. And they spent all of their time in their basement, never going through the hardship of trying to make relationships work. Kara Swisher Let me say, we have to move on, but Scott will be everybody's friend, next friend. Just so you know, Scott is everybody's friend. I'm very unfriendly, but Scott will be everybody's friend.
May 11
📰 The Day My Mother Stopped Cooking by
As a statement, it was up there with, “Will you marry me,” “It’s a boy,” “You’re hired,” and “We’re selling the house.”
They were words that signaled the changing of lives, a past era concluding, and a new one beginning.
📰 You Want What You Actually Do by
I see people complaining about how much they use social media. Stop! You want this. Just figure out *why* you want it.
Have you tried just admitting you want something badly, too? More simply, there are no problems to be fixed. You want everything you are doing!
It’s a weird thing to want in today’s world, especially when I could make more money by denying this want. But the good thing is that I can just love the hell out of this desire, a desire to try to make it work on an unconventional path, to see it as a cool part of myself, and move on with the experimentation of trying to continue to make it work.
May 10
📰
’s father’s poemIn 1870, post Civil War, Julia Howe appealed to mothers
To protest all violence and future wars, so brothers wouldn’t kill brothers.
The day was observed for many years with prayers and tears amply shed,
Primarily where the war had left the most men wounded or dead.
President Wilson, in 1914, declared observance of a day
To be known as Mother’s Day each year on the second Sunday in May.
Though its founders and supporters resisted commercialization,
In the 1930s Mother’s Day underwent a transformation.
A magazine for florists noted profit if the holiday were tied
To honoring mothers with flowers. It was a ploy worth being tried.
🎧 Trump's Meme Coin Scheme, Alphabet's Earnings, and Cybertruck's Competition - Pivot Pod
Kara posits AI's male dominance and lack of safety stem from some men's inability to have children, framing AI creation as a form of 'giving birth' or 'growing beings' for them, especially since women physically grow children. It's a way for them to create.
Transcript:
Kara Swisher Think sometimes I think AI. I told you this theory. I think AI is the way it gets so dominated by men and there's so lack of safety and everything else. I think men can't have children. Certain men, not all of them think this way, but can't have children. This is their way of giving birth or something or creating.
Scott Galloway I never thought about that. Think about it. Fuck you up. But are you saying incel culture or the people who run AI companies?
Kara Swisher No, I think the people who run some of these companies, they can't make beings. It's a very beautiful thing to make a child. Men and women make them together, obviously, but really women grow children, right? And this is men's way of growing things, growing beings. I don't know. Anyway, go ahead. It's such a dystopian, weird
Hospitals reveal our true selves by touching our wounds and showing people from different worlds intersecting. In the face of pain and irreversible loss, we realize our shared humanity and the importance of respect, forgiveness, love, and living intensely, freeing ourselves from judgment and interference. Life's too short to waste fighting, obsessing over appearance, or accumulating wealth. Embrace the present, cherish loved ones, and respect yourself and others.
Transcript: Scott Galloway My win is a little bit longer and I know you're probably interviewing the ghost of Boutros, Boutros Ghali, but you're going to have to put up with me. So, um, he's very handsome, but go ahead. So after the Pope passed, there was something that was attributed to him. I don't know if he said it, a privileged doctor saving the life of a beggar. In intensive care, you see a Jew taking care of a racist, a police officer, and a prisoner in the same room receiving the same care. A wealthy patient waiting for a liver transplant, ready to receive the organ from a poor donor. It's in these moments when the hospital touches the wounds of people that different worlds intersect according to divine design. And in this communion of destinies, we realize that alone we are nothing. The absolute truth of people, most of the time, only reveals itself in moments of pain or in the real threat of an irreversible loss. A hospital is a place where human beings remove their masks and show themselves as they truly are, in their purest essence. This life will pass quickly, so do not waste it fighting with people. Do not criticize your body too much. Do not complain excessively. Do not lose sleep over bills. Make sure you hug your loved ones. Do not worry too much about keeping the house spotless. Material goods must be earned by each person. Do not dedicate yourself to accumulating an inheritance. You are waiting far too much. Christmas Friday next year, when you have money, when love arrives, when everything is perfect. Listen, perfection does not exist. A human being cannot attain it because we are simply not made to be fulfilled here. Here, we are given an opportunity to learn. So make the most of this trial of life and do it now. Respect yourself. Respect others. Walk your own path and let go of the path others have chosen for you. Respect. Do not comment. Do not judge. Do not interfere. Love more. Forgive more. Embrace more. Live more intensely. And leave the rest in the hands of the Creator. Anyways, Pope Francis, rest in peace.
May 9
📰 Vibe Check: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash by
A thinking model, also known as a reasoning model, is an LLM that pauses to plan a step-by-step solution before answering.
📰 A Few Questions by Morgan Housel
Which of my strongest beliefs were formed on second-hand information vs. first-hand experience?
Is my desire for more money based on the false belief that it will solve personal problems that have nothing to do with money?
Which future memory am I creating right now, and will I be proud to own it?
Dan Shipper enjoyed Nadia Asparouhova's deep dive into her Jhana meditation retreat experience.
Transcript: Dan Shipper And I love reading your stuff in particular. I think a good place to start is you wrote a really deep dive of your experience going on a journey Jhana meditation retreat, which I read and really loved.
Julian Jaynes theorizes that self-talk and self-narrative, which we consider fundamental to the human experience, only began a few thousand years ago. Before that, people attributed thoughts to external sources like gods. Milestones in history, like the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, correlate with increased introspection and exploration of the conscious mind, such as Shakespeare's monologues and the rise of psychoanalysis. The digital revolution, intertwined with the history of psychedelics, marks another inflection point in our curiosity about the conscious mind.
Transcript: Nadia Asparouhova There's sort of like Julian Jaynes and his theory of bicameral mind where he believes that, and he uses the term conscious, and I don't really want to use the term conscious because I Think it's very fraught. But let's say, let's substitute that by saying, you know, he believes some version of people only began to have this kind of self-talk and self-narrative that we think of as being fundamental To the human experience. He thinks that only started a few thousand years ago. And he goes through all these historical texts to sort of demonstrate how it doesn't really show up in at least like people's writing and the artifacts that they're producing until A certain point in time. And before then people attribute it to like voices from the gods or things like that. And you can see these different sort of milestones or inflection points over human history, you know, coinciding often with like explosions in the creation of art. So the Renaissance, people, you know, often say that, you know, Shakespeare was one of the first people to pioneer this idea of monologues and soliloquies in his writing, this idea Of a character would just stand there and talk about like what is going on inside their mind. Like that was a fairly new thing. Industrial revolution, you see the introduction of or interest in psychoanalysis, William James writing about consciousness, this sort of recognition that, oh, there's something Going on in the mind is, again, a fairly new development. I think we had another inflection point more recently with that, with the digital revolution. And so, you know, this famous intertwining of the history of psychedelics, curiosity about the conscious mind happened at the same time as the development of the computer. And these two, these two stories are intertwined somehow. And so there's, I think there's a reason for that
Use Chat GPT as a thought partner. Use it in the early stages for idea formation when you're just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it makes sense. Use it again at the end when you need just the right word to say something. Handle the in-between yourself, turning messy ideas into prose.
Transcript: Nadia Asparouhova As a writer in particular, I mostly work with chat GPT and I just see it as a thought partner that I use every single day, all the time in my writing. I mostly use it in that kind of like early messy idea formation stage where I'm kind of just like throwing stuff at the wall and being like, does this make sense? I'm trying to connect these two ideas together. Does that make sense? You know, that's sort of very high, high level unstructured thinking. And then I'll use it towards the end where it's the very, very fine, like, I need just the right word to say this thing. And I can't figure out what it is. Can you help me figure out what that word is, you know, that kind of stuff. And then all the stuff in between, I think is, is more, I'm on my own, trying to figure out how to take the messy ideas that I now have some shape around and then translate them into prose.
Nadia's new book, Antimimetics, is about ideas that resist spreading or being remembered. These ideas can include taboos or cognitive biases.
Transcript: Dan Shipper You have a new book coming out. What is it? Nadia Asparouhova It's called Antimimetics. And it is about why some ideas resist spreading or being remembered. So you think about like taboos or cognitive biases or yeah, just any of these sorts of ideas where they're kind of slippery and hard to hold on to.
🎧 Lifestyle Arbitrage, Balancing Ambition and Relationships, and What Gives Scott Hope - Prof G Pod
Scott says that a tax swing paid for his cars, housing, and kids' school because he makes good money, but a lot of it was current income. If you make $300,000, saving 13% can become significant capital that grows over time.
Transcript:
Scott Galloway
But basically, my cars, my housing, my kids' school were paid for in that tax swing, because I make really good money, but a lot of it was current income. So 13% of that, then you invest it. If you make $300,000, you're not saving $39,000. You're saving, you have $39,000 in capital that should grow to 78 or 100, 150, 10 years on.
May 7
🎧 An Inside Look at Building an Email Client in 3 Months - Ep. 44 With Kieran Klaassen, Brandon Gell - AI and I
It's getting much cheaper to build software. Now, the question of what to build has become more important, since a rough version of almost anything can be built in just a few days.
Transcript: Dan Shipper For anyone who's thinking about building in AI right now, which is for a long time, we've always talked about solving problems in software, right? But for a long time, the most expensive thing was actually like building the software. And that's changing dramatically. It's much, much cheaper now. And what that does is it makes the question of what you're building way more important. Because like you can build anything in a couple of days if you want, at least like a really rough version.
Kieran builds prompts for new models by envisioning an app while walking. He starts with a base idea, then uses walking to enter a flow state, verbally describing the app's interface and functionality in detail, including visual elements like colors, textures, and layouts. He iteratively adds details until his mind is empty, using terms to influence the model (e.g., 'Apple design').
Transcript: Kieran Klaassen This is an example of something I was thinking of at some point walking somewhere. Normally what I do is when there's a new model coming out, like I think this was 01 coming out, I want to make an app. I want to build an app and I'll see how far I can push it, how far it will go and where it breaks. It's just a good way to test it out. So I was a composer and I wanted to make a music app had a specific thing where you where you click somewhere and there's a synthesizer and a sound generator and like a mirror note like a Whole complex compositional system but really what I do in a moment like this is I just go walk and walking enables me to just like keep going like not thinking too much about it like getting More into a flow state and just start building a prompt in my head. It's kind of weird. Like you're basically talking like it will become a prompt. And this is something I actually learned from you then in the earlier episodes where you said you need to ground it and like how to like push the model into a certain direction so i should Start dropping like oh yeah you are a very good ios engineer and you do like swift swift 18 you're amazing or like just start with something like that and it's a start and you like start Grounding it um here it's like I'm going to describe an app and its elements. This app is called These. If you open it, there's only one screen. Well, I just visualize the app here in my head and just do like I'm opening my phone and just imagine it and just talk through what happens. So maybe every corner has a different color, four-way gradients, tones of green and blue, a little bit of texture on it, like a grainy noisy texture so it looks a little bit fancy. Like using words like fancy and maybe Apple design, like just describing the feel, that's the background. Then in the middle there's a separation there's a line in the middle somewhere in the middle and the line is actually it's not a line but it's like two parts of gradients so you see i i was Thinking about something i was like oh no no no scrap that let's go so i just jam like that uh here you can see everything and until i don't know and and i try to just add details everywhere I can until my brain is empty and then i stop the recording and and i i don't take it anywhere directly from that that's just step one
Prompt engineering is gonna stick around. Being able to describe exactly what you want an app to do, including specific details about the UI, will be very important.
Transcript: Dan Shipper Being able to say like, hey, I want an app that does this and I want the background to look like this and I want the style of the button on the left-hand side to look like this is actually, That's not going away. And that is prompt engineering and that is really, really important being able to know that.
Use voice memos to capture ideas, then convert them to PRDs. Mac Whisper is an option for transcription, or use the new iOS 18's built-in transcription. Once transcribed, use an LLM to refine the idea and develop it into a PRD. Cursor's notebooks or tools like Cloth can help with outlining files or creating artifacts. Don't worry too much about where that initial inspiration goes; just capture it.
Transcript: Kieran Klaassen What i do is i use the voice memos and then i put it into mac whisper which is a free free just whisper converter but actually now voice memos does transcription as well with the new iOS 18. So I use that once in a while as well. Yeah. So yeah, I'll just use that. And then from there, I go into my choice of LLM for the, for the moment and start working on it more and converting this to like into a prd most most of the time i say hey okay i have this idea Um in cursor sometimes i add a like a notebook um and i create like an outline of files or like depending on what it is like if it's simple uh in cloth is great for artifacts but whatever i Want to do after that i take it from there but it's a separate thing. Like that initial burst of inspiration does not matter where it goes.
Replete's agent will be important because it'll host and push your stuff to a website. This makes it accessible regularly so you can do what you want without needing to run in the terminal. This makes luxury and one-time software possible because hosting, not coding, is now the hard part.
Transcript: Brandon Gell That's why like replet replets agent is going to be so important because getting stuff actually like hosted and pushed to a website that you can access it regularly so i can do whatever I want versus like going to need to run nPM run dev in the terminal, which most people don't know what that is. Like that's really where luxury software and one-time software becomes possible. Because like maybe 01 Pro, 01 is the best at writing code, but that's not what's hard anymore. It's what's hard is actually hosting it. Dan Shipper All the environment stuff.
Create a file in your project to correct mistakes and guide the AI. When you see the AI doing something wrong, add an instruction to the file so you don't have to repeat the correction.
Transcript: Kieran Klaassen There's this file that you can create in your project called.cursor rules. And you can write stuff. This is linked to the current project. So normally what I do is when I see things go wrong, like what you said, where I do something wrong, I just go in here and add it. And it's very simple. So for example, for controllers, I like to say, hey, actually there are two helpers always present that you can use. Dan Shipper So basically you're putting like in-cursor rules at the top, you have like a heading that says controllers. And then underneath that you have like some information about controllers in your code that you want it to follow. Is that that's basically how it's structured? Yeah. Kieran Klaassen Go wrong or like things that are like, oh, like it did something. And then I say, oh, but can you actually do it like this? And I'm like, okay, let me add that instruction already in the cursor rules. So I don't have to say that every time.
It's tough to avoid being biased toward your own products. You're likely to use them, potentially overlooking real issues because you want them to work. It's hard to tell if you're downplaying problems.
Transcript: Brandon Gell What the hardest part about this is, which is that we just have a bias to use the products that we make. And sometimes I feel like that can make us feel like the products are working because we use them, even though we may be convincing ourselves that some of the problems that we're encountering Aren't real problems because we want to be using the product. And that is, it's like an impossible question to answer if we're doing it or not, because it's hard to recognize that for some types of problems.
May 5
🎥 How to Make High Quality Videos in 54 Min, 19 Sec, 20 Milliseconds from The Studio
how can I make a better script or how can I write a better story and really no matter the kind of video you're trying to make whether it's I don't know a review maybe a retrospective video essay or like a long form video there are two or three things that you want to keep in mind number one have a thesis number two learn the context and number three unearth all the details
the point of a review is to focus on does this deliver on what it says it is and is it worth your money
for example the video essay a very popular Style video on YouTube right now there's a lot of different really creative ways to do a video essay but something that I personally like to do is to give the audience a ton of context for everything that's leading up to this point that I'm trying to make so that maybe you can care about this as much as I do
understanding the entire story by consuming as much information about a subject as you can do you really start to see The Wider story that might not be as obvious
I do generally consider the video essay kind of the hardest style of video to make because you have to come up with really unique ideas and having a unique idea is probably the hardest thing you can possibly do but the best way to train yourself to come up with these UniQue Ideas is just to immerse yourself in that kind of content look for different stories talk to your friends about this kind of stuff talk to your parents just rant as much as you can and consume as much as you can about a specific subject and get to know it inside and out and that's when some of those bigger stories will kind of like light up in your brain
a lot of that story is actually going to come out in the research process for this project we already know where we ended up right boosted boards went out of business and what we're trying to figure out is why now you could just Google these questions and kind of get broad Strokes answers but the storytelling the thing that really keeps you engrossed in the story is in the details and in order to get those details you want to talk to as many primary sources as he can
80% of these scripts is honestly just Gathering the information and talking to people and it's only that point that you can actually take all that information that you learned and start putting together the story
those first round of interviews are kind of just about like educating myself about the story of what happened what's going on just learning more about the space then I try to put the video together and I realize that I I know a lot more now and I need to really dig into those details so that's when I call those people back and really start putting the meat on those stories
to tell those like long form docummentary style stories you've already kind of got your box of where the story starts and where the story ends you really just have to fill it with detail to tell an engaging narrative
okay so three things one have a point know what you want to talk about revolve all of the content around that point because that video needs to be going somewhere two understand the context immerse yourself in as much detail as physically possible about what you're trying to talk about do research search talk to friends explain it to family understand the context in the detail and three have a passion that you want to chase if you're excited about that dive deeper and deeper into that passion about that project and eventually you'll end up with something
here's really three things that I think of when I think of a Marquez video and it's that it's very distraction free it's very light on the music not a lot of like retention editing he has really crisp and clean b-roll and also just a really simple but effective talking head video
if you're just recording dialogue you're doing it in mono lots of things sound great in Stereo dialogue is not one of them. iPhone mics default to stereo but you can switch it to mono in edit
the boooks thumbnail so you'll see the final and initial image aren't terribly different really the only difference between these two things these two frames is the screen but there's other things in here so from this to this what happens is that his hand is cut out twisted and then punched up so we make the phone about 10 to 15% bigger which helps with legibility it's small scales that's the first thing second thing was changing the screen to be a little bit better at smaller scales so we did things like changed the um artwork for the music we blew up the apps we got rid of the like the labels underneath just things that gave the eye a little bit more breathing space and negative space so you could kind of move around and then we made all the lines thicker again so that it would help just punch up and read at smaller scales
one of our most successful AB comparisons where the Delta between the winner and the loser was actually pretty significant - 44.5% vs 55.5%
the only thing that we did different to it was to try and punch up what the focal point was we want to try and get the product in the center if we can it's either in the thirds or the center Center is nice because it just makes less effort for the eye to move around the frame so we've already got in the middle how can we highlight it even more the cup is yellow what complement yellow violet or purple
price point they work really well if it's priced really low or priced really high those tend to do better in thumbnails
one more thing that we added which you know as a designer can be pretty obnoxious because it's just you know one more thing but arrows arrows work really well um you kind of can't beat them they just do they just do well
🎧 How to Predict the Future With Kevin Kelly, WIRED's Cofounder - AI and I
Balance learning about AI with studying history to get a better understanding of the future. Also, balance wrestling with AI with hands-on activities in the real world.
Transcript: Kevin Kelly All the my favorite people who were best about the future were actually great historians, too. So I would balance reading something about AI with trying to read something historical in the past. And I balance wrestling with the latest AI stuff with working in my workshop and using my hands.
KK thinks humans aren't central but an 'edge species' with unique intelligence. AI will expand the types of intelligences we know, making our current definitions seem limited. We'll look back and barely recognize some future intelligences.
Transcript: Kevin Kelly We're an edge species. We're not at the center of anything, the galaxy or the solar system or evolution. We are an edge. Our kind of intelligence will be revealed to be a very peculiar mixture that's evolved for us. And then what we're going to be doing with AIs is making hundreds of various other kinds and filling out that possibility space with many types of thinking. And so we'll look back and we won't even recognize maybe some of these other things as intelligence right now because we don't have a very good definition.
Kevin Kelly suggests giving young science fiction writers journalistic assignments. Because they are natural storytellers, they'll love being paid to learn and will produce amazing content.
Transcript: Kevin Kelly Get the young science fiction writers of today and give them journalistic assignments they love it because they're born storytellers you're paying them to go learn something they Want to learn and they'll come back with something amazing
A lot of AI-generated content now, like the 50 million images created daily, is mostly for personal enjoyment, with the creator also being the primary audience. People'll make full-length movies for themselves. The pleasure comes from co-creating and directing the movie for oneself.
Transcript: Kevin Kelly What I'm hypothesizing is that a lot of the generative stuff, the 50 million images that are generated each day with AI, 99.999% have the audience of one. They're generated for the pleasure of the co-creator. And this idea of people will be making feature length movies for themselves and the the pleasure will be in the generating of the movie the co-generating of the movie that you're directing You'll be directing the movie for yourself
🎧 Going Independent on YouTube With Becca Farsace - WVFRM Podcast
I think I want to do more Story Time videos in general because it's shocking how many stories that we have that would actually just make a fun piece to just share with people
people are are interested in people which is cool
Do you also think of thumbnails like packaging the whole video before you make the video? I’m bad. I’m really bad at thumbnails, and I try to now because I know that I need to. Um, but usually, thumbnails are like, well I’m exporting the video, I better make the thumbnail now. That’s usually what happens. That’s where we live. I mean, we try to be better at it as well. I mean, I’ve gotten less advice to Flip it on its head like we'd make the whole video, and then as it's uploading, we're like, "Yeah, we should have a title for this probably, and also a thumbnail, huh?" and then that gets made at the last second. Now we try to go through the whole writing process in a way where we can appropriately package the video in our brain first and then make the video that satisfies the packaging. Yeah, which is, I think, good advice. It's just hard to do. It's hard to do. Yeah, yeah. It is good advice considering, uh, 95% of whether or not someone's going to watch a video is the thing that they see on the homepage. 100%. It's the thing that matters the most.
I do challenge myself to make at least two or three thumbnails always. Like, I always make one and even if I love it, I, you know, hide it and make another one, and hide it, and make another one.
Something that he said that really struck me about YouTube was, people always ask about the algorithm: how does the video find the person? How does it push it to certain people? He said to think of it not as the video being pushed by the algorithm; it's that videos are being pulled by users. So when a user logs in, it's up to YouTube to find videos for that user. It knows what they like; it knows what that person's watched before and what it has interacted with, and so it's going to pull what it thinks they'll find, whether they're subscribed or not. So this is why the subscriber metric feels more and more like just a kind of vanity thing. It is because it's really about what you make when it's presented to people that theoretically should be interested
"You know, you have a show and you're a character on that show. If you're consistently that character and you consistently make someone feel a certain way, they're going to keep watching the show. And so that's how I've been thinking about it as well. But it's a similar idea of like shared interest and shared feelings.
subscribers are a metric, they're also really good for a quick sample size for trying out an idea. Yeah, so if you try something new, you just have a whole bunch of people waiting to watch whatever you put out, and that's great. And then some fraction of them will be like, "I hate this," and leave, and that’ll be very informative to the algorithm for who they should serve it to later.
you might find the thing about having a lot of subscribers is that many of them are not active recently. So there are people who might not typically watch videos for years, and then they get resurfaced in the algorithm, and they're like, "I didn’t even know I was subscribed to this channel!" That happens too.
I've seen one tech channel get to the double-digit female percent viewership, and is yours double digits?
it's like 2% female, maybe even like 1%.
the average for my channel might be 9% or so female.
📰 Make Your Story 160% Better! by
in TV drama, we see evidence that the traditional story arc isn’t necessary for success.
📰 How Do I Make Friends as an Adult? by
The formula for friendship is Time + Boredom + Self-Delusion. It usually takes 43 to 60 hours to become friends, and 80 to 100 hours to become really close. So plan lots of ‘empty’ time together (remember all those college hang-outs?). Silent time can be important - see a ballgame together, take a long hike, or just watch TV side-by-side. And simply *assume* the other person *wants* to be your friend: When we believe someone likes us (even if we’re wrong), we naturally act warmer and more open towards them— which, in turn, causes them to like us more. (View Highlight)
📰 The Reading List Email for April 2025 by Ryan Holiday
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick At our staff meetings for Daily Stoic and The Painted Porch, one thing we do is all go around and explain interesting ways we are using AI to be more productive and efficient. I do this because 1) I don’t want people doing it in secret. I want to be clear about ethical and non-ethical uses (for instance, I would *never* use it to write one of these emails) 2) I want to encourage smart and creative productivity gains 3) I like learning new strategies and ways of doing things. This book, which I heard about on Ezra Klein’s episode with the author last April, is a great primer on how and why to use AI to get better at what you do. I like his term “co-intelligence.”
Look at the story of Maya Angelou. > Angelou only realized her ambition to write in her thirties when she was working as a dancer in California. She heard that the writer John Killens was in town and she sent him samples of her work. He advised her to move to New York. There she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, a group that provided support and feedback on her writing. Some years later, her friend the novelist James Baldwin took her to dinner with Jules and Judy Feiffer. Judy Feiffer was a writer and editor. She persuaded Angelou that her incredible life story ought to be turned into a book and introduced her to an editor at Random House. It was in this way that Angelou wrote *I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings*, her first book, aged forty. I love this story. By the time her opportunity came along, Angelou was *tired*. She actually didn’t want to go to the dinner party! The fact that she went, that she got *invited*, was lucky. The fact that she was *in a position to get invited* was not lucky; it was the result of years of work. > … that wasn’t random luck: she had spent years in the network, building relationships. And when she got to the dinner, she was able to dazzle with her story. Not everyone gets invitations to parties like that, but you are more likely to get them if you send your work out, take advice, join writers’ groups, and so on.
Look at the story of Maya Angelou. > Angelou only realized her ambition to write in her thirties when she was working as a dancer in California. She heard that the writer John Killens was in town and she sent him samples of her work. He advised her to move to New York. There she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, a group that provided support and feedback on her writing. Some years later, her friend the novelist James Baldwin took her to dinner with Jules and Judy Feiffer. Judy Feiffer was a writer and editor. She persuaded Angelou that her incredible life story ought to be turned into a book and introduced her to an editor at Random House. It was in this way that Angelou wrote *I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings*, her first book, aged forty. I love this story. By the time her opportunity came along, Angelou was *tired*. She actually didn’t want to go to the dinner party! The fact that she went, that she got *invited*, was lucky. The fact that she was *in a position to get invited* was not lucky; it was the result of years of work. > … that wasn’t random luck: she had spent years in the network, building relationships. And when she got to the dinner, she was able to dazzle with her story. Not everyone gets invitations to parties like that, but you are more likely to get them if you send your work out
Networking and luck aren’t just about making connections: they are about being able to make *use* of connections.
📰 Jobs-to-Be-Done: A Framework for Writing Newsletters People Want to Read by
The newsletters you open week after week are the ones that help you:
• Make more money
• Save time on work
• Learn something specific
• Look smarter in meetings
• Get ahead of your competition
These are "jobs" you readers need done.
May 4
📰 More This, Less That by
**In my interview with Thomas Frank**, he said he uses Reddit to make videos to solve those problems. It’s a big reason he has 175M+ views. “If there's a problem on Reddit — that's a real person with an actual problem” Frank said.
Here's how you can do that on Reddit, too: 1. Type your niche or keyword 2. Select the most popular subreddit 3. Filter posts by *Top* 4. Read most upvoted comments/questions 5. Make content around that
May 3
🎧 The Next AI Wave Will Be Social, Not Solo | Sarah Tavel, Benchmark and Ex-Pinterest - AI and I
There's an opportunity to build a UGC site specifically for AI prompts, particularly in areas like health and quantified self. Users could follow creators of effective prompts and easily apply them to their profiles.
Transcript: Sarah Tavel If I'm going to an existing UGC site that isn't made for this use case, that feels to me like an opportunity where somebody who's going to be really freaking good, you know, of making, You know, prompts for different health things, quantified self, whatever, like I would love to follow that person and then very easily apply it to my own profile.
A film director uses ChatGPT by creating distinct personalities for different needs. She uses a holistic wellness persona for medical advice, a hype-person for constant encouragement, and a direct feedback persona for writing specific emails.
Transcript: Dan Shipper Yeah, it's interesting. I was at a dinner the other night and I was talking to a film director. Sarah Tavel Oh, cool. Dan Shipper About how she uses ChatCVT. And she has made a bunch of different personalities for it. And she uses the different personalities for different things. For example, I think one of the personalities was she's had a lot of like medical issues that doctors couldn't solve. And one of the personalities was like a sort of like holistic wellness type person that like would recommend both medication and, you know, supplements or body work or whatever. And then, and another one, like the main personality was like just someone who would like gas her up all the time and like compliment her all the time. And then, but then she had another one that was like just super direct and like just gave like really harsh feedback that she would use for writing specific kinds of emails or like that Kind of thing. And it was really interesting that she'd constructed this whole set of personalities for different things in her life to surround...
Some people are really good at creating training data. James, a person Sarah interviewed for her Substack, maintains a spreadsheet of all the movies he's watched with his own reviews. People like James, who are skilled at creating training data, can then have a more personalized and valuable experience.
Transcript: Sarah Tavel Some people that are really good at creating training data. Do you know what I mean? Like there's some people, someone was showing me, I interviewed him, James, for my sub stack. And he showed me like the spreadsheet he creates of all the movies he's ever watched and his own review of it. Right. And so I don't know about you. I've never done that, but the people who are really good at creating training data can then have a more personalized, more valuable experience with an LLM.
📰 The Most Powerful Asymmetries in Life - Sahil Bloom
Send a monthly "state of play" email to your direct manager. Keep it short: what you accomplished, what you’re focused on next, and one thing you’re learning. It builds visibility and shows initiative.
Create an "Idea Folder" where you log interesting business ideas. Whenever you have a spark, drop it in the idea folder. Flip through it for inspiration. One of these ideas might be the 100x opportunity that changes your life.
📰 How to Make a Viral Video -
here’s a step by step breakdown of what virtually every YouTuber who tries to create virality will do in some form or another:
Generate 50+ video ideas every week ("*To have a great idea, have a lot of them.”* - Thomas Edison)
Use your own channel, competitor channels, tools like 1of10 (aff link) and your own imagination to generate these ideas.
To filter for the best ideas, rate them for viral potential out of 5.
How do you predict viral potential? Research, plus experience. It's very hard to predict, but studying YouTube is the best way to get better at it.
The most important data for predicting performance (in order) is what's worked well in the past on your channel, then competitor channels, then channels in similar niches then finally all other channels.
Choose the ideas you're most confident in.
Write *at least* 10 title variations for each one. Keep them to 55 characters or less, and use viral title frameworks you've found in your research.
Generate 2-3 thumbnail concepts per video.
Get feedback from peers you trust on the title and thumbnail concepts.
Finalise the title and thumbnail.
*Then* make the video.
May 2
🎧 You’ve Never Seen Writing Visualized Like This —
- podcastI'd say I'm still stubborn in the sense that I still insist that I write every single sentence. Um, but that said, I am using AI a lot in the process, right? I'm, for example, I might have a draft that's 3,000 words. I'll say, "Hey, tell me this in 10,000 words. Tell me it in 100 words. Tell me it in one sentence." So, it's a great way to structurally compress your drafts and understand the essence of it, right? Like sometimes I'll realize, whoa, AI did this thing in 10% of the space and I get the idea like why am I rambling and then I'll just rewrite it myself with shorter context.
May 1
📰 AI Art: Promise and Peril by
I’m not convinced that Studio Ghibli is harmed by the attention or that they have been diminished in some way. If human artists — or humans using AI tools — want to invoke his style, it doesn’t really take anything away from him. In fact the opposite might be true. It’s better to be copied than forgotten. The worst fate for any artist is oblivion.
AI will alter the relationship between artists and audience. Skilled creators may or may not use these tools, but either way the audience may feel empowered by them. There will always be passive fans, but there will be a new class of artists that we might call "AI-enabled sub-creatives."
For decades there have been fanzines and cosplayers, but that dynamic of the empowered fan is about to explode.
Old-school artists shouldn’t be snobby toward their digital siblings. It’s all art if it moves us. We’re all artists. No one is guarding the gates, but it’s a lot more crowded in here.
Whichever way the work is created, a lasting creation should be more than just attention-getting or meme-worthy. It has to capture the public’s imagination, move the emotions, and reflect the *zeitgeist*.
New art forms will be created by combining AI with analog skills—old school, handmade, analog techniques. That blending of old tech and new tech is similar to what Laika did by combining stop motion with 3D printing, or what the Cuphead game designers did when they used drawn-on-paper animation to guide the look of a modern video game.
The most immediate outcome of the advent of genAI and machine learning is to put a value on live performances, acoustic music, and painting workshops. If it drives a lot of artists back to the basics of sketching and journaling, maybe that’s a good thing.
Book a call: Have a bite-sized creative project? Let’s give you a starting line boost a la Mario Kart - https://calendly.com/beckyisj/
Some links are affiliate links, meaning that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase through the links at no cost to you.