“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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Should you confront your worries or try to banish them?
If you have a distressing thought, shoving it out of your mind will only work for so long. It will camp out in the unconscious, biding its time until it can emerge again, often through physical sensations, behaviors, emotions or dreams.
This Investor Raised Billions by Making Complicated Ideas Simple
Want to build influence with great ideas and simple writing? Look no further than Howard Marks. Most smart people use big words and plastic jargon to reinforce the barrier between themselves and “the common folk.” Howard, on the other hand, breaks down this barrier, and that’s why his ideas are so influential.
What is a Family Office and Why Does it Matter? by Ron Diamond
There are roughly 15,000 Family Offices around the globe which currently control approximately $10 trillion in assets. In comparison, there is only $6.5 trillion globally in the entire hedge fund world. But even more important than the size Family Offices currently are, we are about to experience the largest transfer of wealth in history.
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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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Scientists Destroy Illusion That Coin Toss Flips Are 50–50
“We can be quite sure there is a bias in coin flips after this data set,” Bartoš says.
What happens to the brain during consciousness-ending meditation?
There’s a meditative state described in ancient Buddhist scriptures that is hard to imagine because it is not something – but nothing. Referred to as nirodha-samāpatti, it roughly translates as ‘the cessation of thought and feeling’, and it is the highest meditative state possible in Theravada Buddhism
This vibrating diet pill may trick the stomach into feeling full
Device cuts food consumption in pigs by 40%, but some experts say it’s unclear whether it will work for humans
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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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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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What I Am Reading:
Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results
Rationality is wasted if you don't know when to use it. What I've learned from watching real people in action is that, just like the angry CEO, they're often unaware circumstances are thinking for them. It's as if we expect the inner voice in our head to say, "STOP! THIS IS A MOMENT WHEN YOU NEED TO THINK!" And because we don't know we should be thinking, we cede control to our impulses. In the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason to the situation. Or you can cede control and execute a default behavior.
Why a Failed Startup Might Be Good for Your Career After All
Go ahead and launch that venture. Even if it fails, the experience you gain will likely earn you a job that's more senior than those of your peers, says research by Paul Gompers.
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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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What I Am Reading:
Scientists Reconstruct What You're Looking at by Enhancing Reflection in Your Eye
Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed an eerie technique that can reconstruct 3D images from the reflections in your eyes, by building on a neural network model called neural radiance fields (NeRF).
Astronomers detect largest cosmic explosion ever seen
The explosion is more than 10 times brighter than any recorded exploding star - known as a supernova.
The Impact of Stress on the Well-Being of Startup Founders
Startup Snapshot's insightful and provocative research sheds light on the big picture of founder mental health needs and solutions.
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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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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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hat I Am Reading:
Planning Ahead Is the Key to Living With More Spontaneity
“It may seem counterintuitive, but spontaneity often can’t happen without a bit of advanced planning”
23 semi-controversial predictions for 2023
The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works
“To get what you want, deserve what you want. Trust, success, and admiration are earned.”
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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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What I Am Reading
Same As It Ever Was
This is a few short stories about things that never change in a world that never stops changing.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
“Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.”
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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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When I started middle school in sixth grade, I mostly loved Doritos, Nintendo, baseball, and playing Dungeons and Dragons all the time. But the craze of remote control cars was headed my way, and looking back, I can see how much I gained from being immersed in that world.
Serious Fun
When you hear “remote control cars” you might be thinking of the dinky, pre-built kind that you buy in a toy store: the kind that go less than a mile per hour and have a range of approximately one living room floor. They’re fun for kids, but not what my friends and I were growing obsessed with.
Instead, we were getting into hobby-grade RC cars, the kind that come disassembled with hundreds of parts and take anywhere from a week to a month to build (and not to mention, come with a pretty hefty price tag—anywhere from $100 to $200, back in the early 90’s). We got a real adrenaline rush from racing those cars, at speeds of over fifteen miles an hour, in parks, backyards, and empty parking lots.
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What makes an investment promising, from the perspective of a venture capitalist? As any VC will tell you, it's not so much the idea being invested in; rather, it’s the team behind the idea, and most specifically, the founder.
A Smart Bet
VC investment is very much like gambling. Even having the best team and idea does not guarantee any level of success. That’s why many VCs spread their bets across a number of different companies; the way the math works out, you only need one outsized win to more than make up for all of your losses (or mediocre wins). But how do you optimize your chances of getting that outsized win? How do you know what to look for in a startup?
Well, there are many immeasurable factors that go into the success of a company, and to be honest, luck is probably one of the most important. Other factors, however, are much more concrete. And over the years, I’ve found that finding businesses with great founders significantly increases my odds of success.
What I Am Reading:
The Ultimate Guide to Liars and Lying: Everyone Falls Into These 4 Types
“There are various ways of classifying lies: by their consequences, by the importance of their subject matters, by the speakers’ motives, and by the nature or context of the utterance.
Perhaps the most useful way to classify lies is by to the people who tell them. Understanding lies and liars can help us avoid getting duped as well as protect us from drifting into dishonesty ourselves.”
Corn Mazes and Mental Models
“We habitually view the world through a series of mental models that shape our understanding of our circumstances, our relationships and ourselves. [2] And while these mental models are essential tools in allowing us to navigate through life, they can easily lead us astray. Philosopher Alford Korzybski said "A map is not the territory it represents," and a mental model is not the reality it seeks to depict. [3] But we can easily mistake our mental models for reality and apply them inappropriately.”
'Smallest reptile on earth' discovered in Madagascar
Scientists believe they may have discovered the smallest reptile on earth - a chameleon subspecies that is the size of a seed.
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In 2000 I founded JoonBug.com with the idea of bringing together the offline events world into the online digital world. In the pre Facebook, Eventbrite, and smartphone camera era, we were the first ones to go around the NYC nightlife scene taking photos every night of party goers living their best life at all the hottest venues and events. If you went out in NYC then chances are you were “bitten by the JoonBug”. From 2000-2009 before the advent of modern social media, JoonBug was the ultimate online resource for party photos and nightlife information on the web. Unfortunately many of those hundreds of thousands of photos are lost somewhere on a hard drive that I misplaced during a move. But luckily I was able to dig up a few hundred random nights of archives (about 100,000 photos) from 2004 to 2009 with the help of Pako Dominguez, one of our most prolific and long standing JoonBug photographers.
Below are many photos from the year 2004 to 2009 mostly from venues and events I have forgotten (including places like Pangaea, B’Lo, Rehab, BLVD, Flow, Bed, Duvet, Centrofly, PM, Cain, Au Bar, Home, Guest House, Guastavino’s, LQ, Pacha, Spirit and many more). If you know any info that can help me place some of these photo galleries please help out by putting notes in the comments.
Enjoy taking a very nostalgic ride through memory lane!
What I Am Reading
Why the ‘paradox mindset’ is the key to success
Although paradoxes often trip us up, embracing contradictory ideas may actually be the secret to creativity and leadership.
Revealed: British accents are the world’s sexiest
Sorry, France: in our latest global survey, accents from the UK swept the world off their feet
Why Do We See Dead People?
Humans have always sensed the ghosts of loved ones. It’s only in the last century that we convinced ourselves this was a problem
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