Category: Media

Random notes from podcasts, YouTube, tweets, and books

Here are notes in no particular order and with no particular focus, just random things I’ve learned and wanted to share, from all the content I’ve recently consumed.

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David Perell with the mind bombs:

Ken McElroy on the Peak Prosperity podcast

  • Property taxes will rise; low hanging fruit and much needed revenue for cash-strapped governments
  • Plenty of opportunities during this recession: Airbnb and Uber were started in the last one
  • Believes campus real estate will be a great investment once universities begin to shutter or reduce their footprint

From the book Nature’s Mutiny:
The improvisational, free form of the essay, which Montaigne invented for himself, was the ideal vehicle for observations not only of the world around him but also of himself and his own thoughts, without pressing them into a fixed system or any grand thesis. For Montaigne, good questions were more important than good answers, and he was mainly interested in describing and understanding the fabric of his own life. “It is many years ago,” he wrote, “that I set myself as the only goal of my thinking and that I am not looking at anything or investigating anything but myself.”

I started using Quad9 as my primary DNS after reading this article:
The total winner of this test is Quad9. Blocking 96% of everything I tested in this review. All 12 phishing domains where block and only one malware domain did it let go through. Very impressive results!

Paul Stamets’s amazing YouTube talk on mycology and mushrooms:

  • Largest organism in world is mycelial network in E Oregon, 200 acres, 1 cell layer thick
  • Fungi generate soil
  • Stoned Apes theory: pre Homo sapiens 200k-2m years ago wandered plains hunting, found psychedelic mushrooms in poop of large mammals / prey, ate them, and stimulated neurogenesis
  • Takes psychedelic mushrooms 1-2x each year
  • Lions mane – stops / slows dementia, promotes neurogenesis
  • Interestingly low dose psilocybin led to faster behavior change in mice than high dose (the behavior change was to dissociate bells from shocks, to remove a learned fear response

From the BBC on why and how people disappear in Japan and start new lives:
In Japan, these people are sometimes referred to as “jouhatsu”. That’s the Japanese word for “evaporation”, but it also refers to people who vanish on purpose into thin air, and continue to conceal their whereabouts – potentially for years, even decades.

And finally, a great presentation for interested newbies on machine learning and the algorithms behind it.

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…all mistakes mine! Til the next notes update!

A very thoughtful long essay: Jeff Lonsdale’s 2020 predictions

Below are some of my favorite bits, and here’s the full essay.

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A very small subreddit will have experts happily engaging with neophytes, while a place with a large commentator base will often put discussions around tribal dynamics first and foremost.

You can say things about people you could never say on Twitter or in blog format. This makes for a golden age of podcasting that might not last as long as we would like.

In a move called the yellow economy, protesters are using apps that lets them know which businesses are in favor of the protests so they can support them and ignore the so-called blue businesses that are owned by people who support the CCP and current establishment in Hong Kong.

There will be a continuing fight between governments who want cheap telecom technology and are willing to expose their infrastructure to the Chinese and those who want to stick to systems that implicitly allow surveillance by the US and its allies.

Korea already implemented a Cinderella law, doesn’t let kids under the age of 16 play between midnight and six o’clock in the morning. But that wasn’t enough for some mental health professionals in Korea, who saw games as a cause of problems among young men, and they lobbied the World Health Organization to add an internet gaming disorder to its International Classification of Diseases. The WHO announced in 2019 that it will include the disorder in the its 2022 ICD.

Making games is expensive, and anything that can be done to derisk games is going to be done. This isn’t new. Farmville, the first major success on social, was really just a remix of Harvest Moon. League of Legends is a version of Dota, modified to increase the twitch gaming and remove aspects that overly complicate the game.

One thing that has been underrated this past decade is that most people were only cancelled after they let themselves be cancelled. Trump is the politician who blew this open, he didn’t let any allegation, true or false, bring him down. The people most at risk from cancel culture are the individuals and institutions who have enthusiastically wielded the tools of cancel culture.

the court of public opinion is stronger than before and it is vital to come out swinging against false allegations that other people see as credible. Making a lukewarm apology and then disappearing from public life is the equivalent of ceding the field to your enemies. For those looking for a non-Trump model for how this plays out, Carlos Ghosn’s very public pushback on the allegations made against him by Japan’s prosecutors and Nissan will serve as a template for others who have been unjustly accused.

A funny writer teaches us how to write well (and funny)

This was a great and easy advice-interview on how to write, from a corporate blog of all places. The advice comes from Scott Dikkers, The Onion’s longest serving editor in chief. If you don’t know The Onion, please read this piece of genius.

Below are some verbatim nuggets of gold:

1. Concept is king

“Your concept — and I would equate that with your headline or title — is the flag you’re raising, it’s the shingle on your door. And if it’s not a good concept or the right concept, then you’re sunk before you’ve even written a word.”

2. The key to quality is quantity

“This is how professionals work,” said Dikkers, “because they understand that most of what they write is dreck.”

[…]

4. Ruffle some feathers

“Thing is, Horatian satire isn’t really remembered because it’s toothless,” said Dikkers. “It might get a lot of laughs today but it’s not going to live in our cultural memory. Only satire that angers or offends people will be remembered.”

[…]

10. Know your joke and make sure the reader knows your joke

“Readers want to know they’re in the hands of a master who is going to manipulate them,” he said, “the way Spielberg does in his movies. He takes you on a ride, through the highs and lows.

8 bits of Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

Source: Syfy.com

A great list from a great writer and thinker. His book What Technology Wants permanently re-framed how I understood the internet and tech innovation.

Original article here.

Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.

To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.

“Not one syllable of what Hemingway has written can or will be missed by any literate person in the world.”

I enjoyed this NYT collection of terrible reviews for now-classic books. Of course hindsight is 20-20, and honest critique in any form is difficult – but it still feels good to poke some fun at those silly critics.

For something similar in the VC world, check out Bessemer’s famous anti-portfolio.

Favorites below:

“Shall we frankly declare that, after the most deliberate consideration of Mr. Darwin’s arguments, we remain unconvinced?” On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (1860)

“The average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it … save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.” Ulysses, by James Joyce (1922)

“This Salinger, he’s a short-story guy.” The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (1951)

“As discouraging as a breakfast of cold porridge.” Collected Poems, by W.B. Yeats (1896)

“There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.” Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (1958)

“Not one syllable of what Hemingway has written can or will be missed by any literate person in the world.” Across the River and Into the Trees, by Ernest Hemingway (1950)

“‘Catch-22’ has much passion, comic and fervent, but it gasps for want of craft and sensibility.” Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (1963)