Here’s a full list of podcasts I’m subscribed to. It’s a lot, but I try to be judicious about archiving and prioritizing…at times it feels like a new email inbox.
I’ll try to share favorite episodes each month. Currently favorite is Wondery’s Billionaire Boys Club series.
Disunited Nations is my second Peter Zeihan book. The first was Absent Superpower. I also shared favorite highlights from that one; there was so much information and nuance that I reached Kindle’s limit on same-book highlights.
All highlights below are copied verbatim from the Kindle version:
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Near the end of the Imperial Age in 1920, there were about fifty countries. As of 2020, the count is over two hundred. Remove the Order and what has enabled many of these countries to form, survive—even thrive—will fade away.
Dozens of assets contribute to national survival and power, but these are the big four:
-Viable home territories, with usable lands and defensible borders
-A reliable food supply
-A sustainable population structure
-Access to a stable mix of energy inputs to participate in modern life
There can be a darker side too. If it’s easy to move goods and people and ideas, it’s also easy to move troops. Cultural merging, or assimilation, is not the only way to “unify” a territory. Hunting down dissident and minority groups is more straightforward. Again, the American Midwest is a premier example. The Native Americans never had a chance. Similar unification-via-obliteration unfolded in most of the world’s countries with flatlands, most notably in the North China Plain, the Northern European Plain, and the vast open spaces of North Africa and the Middle East.
Many make light of what it means for the Chinese population to have an extra 41 million men under age forty who will never marry. The two most common concerns are how unmoored males might threaten social stability (legitimate) and how the Chinese government might be willing to throw a few million extra men into a military meat grinder just to get rid of them
Women are now more likely to live in cramped, coastal, urban quarters where they hold upwardly mobile white-collar or light manufacturing jobs their entire careers, while men are more likely either to live in different provinces in the poor interior or to work as undocumented migrants in China’s economic underbelly.
About the only thing that encourages people to have more kids is for people to have more space. That’s why Germany did have a baby boomlet during a period they understandably don’t enjoy discussing: the Lebensraum era of the late 1930s, when Germany was busy annexing its neighbors and getting physically bigger.
As Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, so famously put it, the alliance’s raison d’être was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
Europe now faces simultaneous, interlocking crises: currency, finance, banking, monetary policy, supply chains, inequality, migration, oil, natural gas, electricity, demographics, consumption, exports, imports, Libya, Syria, Turkey, Russia. (Perhaps even America?) It gets worse: Any response requires that all European states agree on how to prioritize and address each problem.
A cohesive French identity as early as the fifth century, a full half millennium before the English and twice that before the German. From the French core in the Beauce,
The longest, most successful, and least bad-blood-ridden foreign relationship the Americans have ever had with anyone has been with the French.
Fourth, for the four new regional powers—Turkey, Iran, Japan, and Argentina—allaying American concerns and courting American goodwill will be essential to long-term success.
I was going over old TED talk notes and found this gem. Seems especially relevant today:
Here are my notes:
Advice from the legendary Andy Rachleff (Wealthfront, Benchmark) on how to find product market fit:
See @daveambrose twitter thread for the complete list and more! :-)
My personal bible is a pdf doc where I save my favorite article excerpts, book highlights, and wisdom notes. I try to read a little bit of it every day.
Here’s an explanation of why I do this. And here’s the latest copy you can download.
Below are all of my recent additions to the bible since the last major update.
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The Onion founding editor’s writing rules [source]
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.”
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from Roger Dickey’s blog [source]
Unsurprisingly, many great consumer products were experiments, side projects, or pivots:
Twitch spun out of Justin TV
Slack was an internal tool for a game called Glitch
Twitter was a podcasting network called Odeo
Zynga originally wanted to be a toolbar company
Instagram was a Foursquare competitor called Burbn
Youtube started as a video dating site
Pokemon Go was originally Field Trip, a startup within Google to test location based functionality
Facebook evolved from FaceMash, a “Hot or Not” for Harvard college students
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The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth [highlights]
As my friend Thuan Pham, the chief technology officer of Uber, recently said to me over breakfast, “I am a firm believer that talent is distributed evenly around the world, but opportunities are not.”>
The only thing driving growth in the world today is easy credit, which is being created at a pace that is hard to comprehend.
Deflation, put simply, is when you get more for your money—just as inflation is when you get less for your money.
As the theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile, “we notice what varies and changes more than what plays a larger role but doesn’t change. We rely more on water than on cell phones, but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do.”
Deflation is being caused by technology and, because of that, it will ride the same exponential wave that technology does. That means that the rate of deflation (without printing more money) will only accelerate from here.
The government doesn’t actually have more assets; it’s just representing its assets with more units of currency, which means each unit of currency is worth less—like cutting a pizza into twelve slices instead of eight, or dividing an estate between ten heirs rather than nine.
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Octalysis gamification framework by Yu-kai Chou [source]
1. Epic Meaning & Calling – the feeling of being chosen to do something greater than yourself
2. Development & Accomplishment – when you’re challenged to develop skills and make progress
3. Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback – the infinite creativity and possibilities of Legos
4. Ownership & Possession – the drive to collect, accumulate, customize
5. Social Influence & Relatedness – the need to meet and impress people
6. Scarcity & Impatience – when you want something because you can’t have it
7. Unpredictability & Curiosity – surprise & delight, variable rewards
8. Loss & Avoidance – fomo, fear of something gained being taken away
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8 bits of Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice [source]
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.