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May 2024 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

May 2024 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

“Everything That Moves Will Become Robotic”
Horsepower. Raw horsepower. After watching NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, I couldn’t help but think about it. 

While all of the GTC conferences have centered around artificial intelligence since 2015, this year stood out. It’s all about power this week — computing power… and having the “horses” to accelerate even faster.

Three things to remember in times like these
The key takeaway for me is that the economy is too good to expect a rapid cooling off anytime soon. The faster disinflationary fall we’d been enjoying since the middle of 2023 has now trampolined on us and the data is coming in warmer and warmer. When people are working, people are spending. Almost everyone is working. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

Ed Thorp: Survival of the Fittest Mind
Are you incentivized to chase deals and put money to work, or is there time to follow curiosity and investigate thoroughly? What are you optimizing for: short-term returns or making good decisions?

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March 2024 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

March 2024 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

Why you, personally, should want a larger human population

Resources are not static. Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age.

Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out
Something’s changed in the past few decades. After the 1970s, American dynamism declined. Americans moved less from place to place. They stopped showing up at their churches and temples. In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down.

Ancient Greek antilogic is the craft of suspending judgment
In Syracuse, 2,500 years ago, there was a famous teacher of rhetoric named Corax. This new discipline was in high demand: mastery of persuasive speaking, it was hoped, led to fame and wealth.

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January 2024 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

January 2024 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What Will Happen In 2024
As we enter 2024, the capital markets have found their footing and are moving higher. The Fed has taken interest rates as far as they want at this time and inflation has come down. It seems that a “soft landing” is likely. That is good news for the innovation economy because healthy capital markets are a necessary support system.

Ice baths boost sex drive
A group of 17 male and 8 female Czech Army soldiers who participated in 2 min freezing cold water immersion, followed by light exercise for rewarming, reported improvements in sexual satisfaction, reduction in waist size, and reduction in anxiety, compared to controls.

Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You
From social disruptions like economic recessions, pandemics, and new technologies to individual disruptions like getting married, career transitions, and becoming a parent, we undergo change and transformation—both good and bad—regularly. Change is not the exception, it’s the rule. Yet we endlessly fight it, often viewing it as a threat to our stability and sense of self.

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December 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching, and Listening To

December 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching, and Listening To

The Roman Empire Fallacy - by Frederik Gieschen
Have you ever looked at the US and thought 'man, this looks a lot like the late stage Roman Empire'? Powerful but divided. Rich but corrupt. Glamorous but dysfunctional. A source of marvelous technological achievements but unable to build things as it used to. Ruled by incompetent politicians, owned by a small elite, its masses trapped by unsustainable debt and distracting themselves with endless mind-numbing entertainment.

Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
Every investment plan under the sun is, at best, an informed speculation of what may happen in the future, based on a systematic extrapolation from the known past. Same as Ever reverses the process, inviting us to identify the many things that never, ever change. With his usual elan, Morgan Housel presents a master class on optimizing risk, seizing opportunity, and living your best life. 

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August 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

August 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

The hottest new programming language? Biology

mRNA is just one example of a synthetic biology technology. As we speak, people around the world are bending biology to all sorts of precise, ambitious, and (at times) controversial ends. A quick list: resurrecting wooly mammoths, reversing disease, growing meat in a lab, editing genes, producing waste-free materials.

The Secret Tool of Elite Athletes for Achieving your Career Goals

The difference between those who succeed and those who fail in their goals is the transformation of identity. "The act of stepping into a new identity that you're unfamiliar with is a surprisingly effective brain shortcut to change. The human mind is wired to protect its identities, even in the face of irrefutable contradicting facts…

The case for reading all of your emails, according to Tim Cook

“I religiously start looking at customer notes every morning, starting around 5 am or so,” he says. It’s not uncommon for him to forward them to other Apple employees, the feedback having sparked an idea.

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June 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

June 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

Octopus time

“We humans are forward-facing, gravity-bound plodders. Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas about time?”

For when someone says “I’ve seen this before, it didn’t work”

“If you’re a founder you’ve probably heard someone say “oh, I’ve seen this idea before - it didn’t work” or “isn’t this just like that other thing that person/company X tried?”

As a founder, I heard this dozens of times. It’s likely to come from investors, but you hear it from other founders, potential employees, advisors, customers, even family members. Like it or not, pattern matching is strong.”

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Failure Is an Option, Actually

Failure Is an Option, Actually

For every successful business I’ve started, or investment I’ve made, there have been multiple failures: businesses that never took off, investments that went to zero, and times when I was super gung-ho about something, only to have it end up in my Bad Idea Hall of Fame. Want to know more? Let’s take an honest trip down memory lane.

The Kickoff

The first one that comes to mind takes me back to my college years, when I was about 20. I was still in school at the time, and really into kickboxing, which was just becoming popular, with studios popping up everywhere. One day, I had a lightbulb moment for how I could monetize the kickboxing trend.  

I bought the domain name Kickboxing.net with the plan of building an online directory of kickboxing studios. To fill out the front end of the site, I put up a bunch of content around the sport, but that was the easy part. The more labor-intensive work was creating the software that would pull information from a database about different locations. During my limited free time, I programmed the whole thing, spending probably about four months on it. 

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May 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

May 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

Perception is the foundation of human experience, but few of us understand why we see what we do, much less how. By revealing the startling truths about the brain and its perceptions, Beau Lotto shows that the next big innovation is not a new technology: it is a new way of seeing.

In his first major book, Lotto draws on over two decades of pioneering research to explain that our brain didn't evolve to see the world accurately. It can't! Visually stunning, with entertaining illustrations and optical illusions throughout, and with clear and comprehensive explanations of the science behind how our perceptions operate, Deviate will revolutionize the way you see yourself, others and the world.

With this new understanding of how the brain functions, Deviate is not just an illuminating account of the neuroscience of thought, behavior, and creativity: it is a call to action, enlisting readers in their own journey of self-discovery.

April 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

April 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI

After three years, Elon Musk was ready to give up on the artificial intelligence research firm he helped found, OpenAI.

The nonprofit had launched in 2015 to great fanfare with backing from billionaire tech luminaries like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who had as a group pledged $1 billion. It had lured some of the top minds in the field to leave big tech companies and academia.

But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google, people familiar with the matter said.

And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.

Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company — and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that’s changing the world, and the company at the heart of it.

March 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

March 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

The Art of the Good Life: 52 Surprising Shortcuts to Happiness, Wealth, and Success

The Art of the Good Life is a toolkit designed for practical living. Here you'll find fifty-two happiness hacks -- from guilt-free shunning of technology to gleefully paying your parking tickets -- that are certain to optimize your happiness. These tips may not guarantee you a good life, but they'll give you a better chance (and that's all any of us can ask for).

Crazy Train

Semper Augustus Client Letter 2022
PROFITLESS PROSPERITY; INVESTING IN FLATION; AND – BERKSHIRE: GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME 

The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works

It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule so to speak: You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos, in my opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who have this ethos win in life and they don’t win just money, not just honors. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with, and there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.

February 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

February 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

First Ever Recording of Dying Brain May Shed Light on Our Final Moments

“Scientists gain an accidental glimpse into an age-old question about what happens to the human brain as we die.”

After The Fact

“Everything has a price, and prices aren’t always clear. The price of exercise isn’t just the workout; it’s avoiding the post-workout urge to eat a ton of food. Same in finance. The price of building wealth isn’t just the trouble of earning money or dealing; it’s avoiding the post-income urge to spend what you’ve accumulated.”

NightLife Lessons: Why I Wrote My First Business Book

NightLife Lessons: Why I Wrote My First Business Book

A lot of people ask me why I wrote my first business book, NightLife Lessons. The answer is simple: it was mostly a bucket list item for me, and not about making money. Sure, I wanted to help myself by looking back and writing down what I’ve learned over the years, in the hopes of helping other startup entrepreneurs on their journeys. But for the most part, I just wanted to see if I could write a book…and then hold it in my hands.  Below, I'll share a bit about the process of writing my book and what it was like for me.

Telling Stories 

I’ve been funding and advising startup founders and entrepreneurs for almost a decade now. As part of that role, I often find myself telling stories from my own experiences building startups, to help founders not only deal with their current struggles, but also avoid pitfalls that might lie ahead of them. 

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December 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

December 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

Bear Market Investing Strategies
“Harry Schultz has been identifying bear market warning signals and teaching people how to prepare a profitable survival portfolio in light of these signals for over thirty-five years through his highly acclaimed newsletter, The International Harry Schultz Letter, which reaches subscribers in over ninety countries. The 1960s' classic book Bear Markets has been fully updated and revised to reflect the unprecedented changes taking place in today's volatile economic environment-making it extremely relevant to the current financial market. This book provides the necessary tools for investors to construct a portfolio that will allow them to protect and grow their money under the most severe bear market conditions through technical analysis and models of numerous bear market variables. Bear Market Investing Strategies offers practical and approachable strategies that every investor needs today.”

How scientists want to make you young again

“Research labs are pursuing technology to “reprogram” aging bodies back to youth.”

Old Frugal Habits Die Hard: Why I Force Myself to Spend More

“Why enjoying your money is so damned hard!”

October 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

October 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

You weren’t supposed to see that

“Widespread prosperity, it turns out, is incompatible with the American Dream. The only way our economy works is when there are winners and losers. If everyone’s a winner, the whole thing fails. That’s what we learned at the conclusion of our experiment. You weren’t supposed to see that. Now the genie is out of the bottle. For one brief shining moment, everyone had enough money to pay their bills and the financial freedom to choose their own way of life.

And it broke the fucking economy in half.”

We now know the big bang theory is (probably) not how the universe began

“The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.”

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity.

Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.”

September 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

September 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

Five Things I Know about Investing

In this essay, Dartmouth finance professor Kenneth R. French explains five investment principles that he uses as the foundation for a holistic approach to portfolio design.

The Key to Behavior Change is Identity Change

Use the psychology of self-image to transform your habits for good.

How Unboxing Elaborate Packages Became an American Pastime

American consumers can’t resist the lure of a well-designed container.

What I am Watching:

Who made these circles in the Sahara?Deep in the Sahara, far from any towns, roads, or other signs of life, is a row of markings in the sand. There are dozens of them stretching for miles in a straight line in central Algeria, each consisting of a central point surrounded by a circle of 12 nodes, like numbers on a clock. And when we started making this video, no one seemed to know what they were.

August 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

August 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

The Power of the Marginal
“If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.”

The Tacit Knowledge Series
“Tacit knowledge is ‘knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone’.

This series explores how expertise is tacit, why the research around extracting tacit knowledge is more important than the literature on deliberate practice, and how to go about acquiring tacit knowledge in the pursuit of skill acquisition.”

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Give Your Heirs Some GRAT-titude

Give Your Heirs Some GRAT-titude

Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts, commonly referred to as GRATs, are a financial instrument that allow a property or asset owner to pass appreciating assets to their heirs with minimal, if any, estate tax consequences. Affluent taxpayers often turn to GRATs (and capitalize on the higher estate tax exemption eligible under the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017) as part of a creative, proactive strategy in planning their estates.

So how can you benefit from a GRAT? The first step is for you, the grantor, to contribute an appreciated asset(s) to an irrevocable, fixed trust. You would then be entitled to receive an annuity from the asset during the term of the trust. Keep in mind, this annuity is not the same as the income generated by the asset. The grantor of the asset is eligible for an annuity based on the fair market value of the asset at the time it was put in trust, not simply the income generated from the asset.

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July 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

July 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

Interview: Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer
“M.A.: Don’t follow your passion. Seriously. Don’t follow your passion. Your passion is likely more dumb and useless than anything else. Your passion should be your hobby, not your work. Do it in your spare time.

Instead, at work, seek to contribute. Find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy you can and figure out how you can contribute best and most. Make yourself of value to the people around you, to your customers and coworkers, and try to increase that value every day.

It can sometimes feel that all the exciting things have already happened, that the frontier is closed, that we’re at the end of technological history and there’s nothing left to do but maintain what already exists. This is just a failure of imagination. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re surrounding by rotting incumbents that will all need to be replaced by new technologies. Let’s get on it.”

4 Rumi Quotes That Will Boost Your Confidence

“You are searching the world for treasure, but the real treasure is Yourself.”

Zoroastrianism And Persian Mythology: The Foundation Of Belief

“Zoroastrianism was the main faith of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Attributed to the prophet Zoroaster, this Persian religion was a key influence on both Christianity and Judaism.”

What I am Watching:

The Explainer: Solving Problems by Starting with the Worst Idea Possible

Sometimes wrong thinking can lead to the right answer. 

Bionic Eye Cures Blindness
“First Bionic Arms- Now Bionic Eyes! Last week the FDA gave approval to the Argus II, a bionic eye that could potentially cure blindness in 15,000 people in the US. The Alpha IMS, a new implant in early testing, has cured blindness in eight people so far. Anthony gives us a sneak peak at this amazing new tech.”

Muppet Babies
My four year old son can’t stop watching and I’ve been strangely captivated by watching it too.  I guess it’s because I loved watching The Muppets so much growing up.  We’re now saying “Waka Waka” after every joke we tell just like Fozzy the Bear 🤣!

What I am Listening To:

ROLL ON:

CASE STUDIES IN MENTAL FORTITUDE: THE IRON COWBOY & MINNEAPOLIS MAYOR JACOB FREY

“Success in all forms demands mental fortitude—a capacity honed through consistently placing yourself beyond comfortable confines. When practiced with daily rigor, an increasingly sturdy mindset becomes a superpower—and the foundation for the purpose-driven life you aspire to inhabit.”

June 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

June 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

Why Start-ups Fail
Most start-ups don’t succeed: More than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors. But why do so many end disappointingly? That question hit me with full force several years ago when I realized I couldn’t answer it.

The Tail End
What I’ve been thinking about is a really important part of life that, unlike all of these examples, isn’t spread out evenly through time—something whose [already done / still to come] ratio doesn’t at all align with how far I am through life: Relationships.

Curiosity Is the Secret to a Happy Life

What exactly does it mean to be curious? “If you go by the typical dictionary definition, curiosity is simply a desire to seek out new knowledge or experiences,” Kashdan says. While this definition is a useful starting point, he says curiosity also involves a willingness to engage with complex, unfamiliar, and challenging concepts or endeavors.

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