I am sharing this weekly email with you because I count you in the group of people I learn from and enjoy being around.
If you missed last week’s discussion:
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Hi from Dubai today, on my way to Riyadh.
Quotes I Am Thinking About:
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
- Umberto Eco
"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
- Wayne Dyer
“Many fail to finish, but many more fail to start. The hardest work in any work is to start. You can’t finish until you start, so get good at starting.”
- Kevin Kelly
"We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past."
- Miguel de Unamuno
"A simple recipe for finding opportunities:
Be pleasant
Ask questions
Engage daily
It's hard for a warm and pleasant person who is asking a lot of questions and engaging in their industry daily to not come across interesting opportunities."
- James Clear
A. A Few Things Worth Checking Out:
1. Sprezza had a good post titled: “Take your losses without taking it personally”
It’s a thoughtful discussion on how to handle losses in life and markets. Highly recommended since we all lose at something, whether relationships, jobs, markets…
2. Classic Arthur Brooks piece on How to Be Less Busy and More Happy.
The Key Section:
For most people, the trouble with busyness is that they are far below the sweet spot of discretionary time in their average workday. This may be unavoidable in part, and some people have a lot less control than others over their schedule. But as the research suggests, many people seem to be inflicting greater busyness on themselves than is necessary because of a fear of idleness.
The solution starts with knowledge of this tendency and a willingness to confront it. Carefully monitor your work patterns and commitments for a week. If you have a hole in your schedule, do you jam it with a low-priority meeting or tasks you would ordinarily avoid? When you unexpectedly find yourself with a free hour because of a cancellation, do you fill it with make-work such as calls and emails that aren’t immediately necessary? These are telltale signs of idleness aversion.
One remedy is to create a list of discretionary tasks that are creative and attractive to you but do not involve a deadline. For me, this means sketching out book ideas in a notebook I carry around with me. When I have unfilled time, I pull out the notebook and start brainstorming. This inevitably induces a pleasurable “flow state,” which gives me energy and refreshes me—and creates an incentive to block out more discretionary time. At one point in my career, when I was running a large organization, this observation led me to ring-fence two hours a day in the morning, when I know that my brain chemistry is best for idea work.
Beyond being fun, such a practice can be revolutionary for your career. Google reserves 20 percent of engineers’ time for projects of their own choosing—literally whatever they want to work on. This free fifth of their time has generated more than half of the company’s highest-revenue-generating products, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Earth. If your employer doesn’t go in for a similar program, see if you can do it for yourself by being very strict about getting your official work done within specific time limits, leaving you time for your creativity and passion.
Perhaps you try to follow this advice and still find yourself hopelessly busy. I have one other technique, which I learned some years ago from an efficiency expert. She told me to make a list of the 20 things I felt I had to get done the next day, in order of priority. Then she instructed me to take the top 10 items and list them according to how much I looked forward to doing each one. Finally, with that order, she told me to take my pencil and cross out the bottom 15 items. The top five would be my actual to-do list.
“What about the others?” I asked, dumbfounded. Her response: “You won’t do them, and no one will really notice or care, because everything else will be so good.” Obviously, there are limits to this strategy: If an emergency appendectomy isn’t in your top five because you’re not looking forward to it, you should definitely still get it done. For the most part, though, she was right—and my life improved as a result.
3. Interesting Question from George Mack - What Ideas are underpriced in 2024?
My favourite 3 were:
Hidden metrics vs Visible metrics - Money is a visible metric. Clear score and multi-player going up and down.
Time with family or peace of mind is a hidden metric.
It's easy to spend so much time optimising for visible metrics... Because they are visible.
The hidden metrics only become visible when it's too late... They hit 0. Someone dies or lose your sanity.
Only the irrational behaviour survives - If you study the biographies of the greats or attend the funerals of people you care about — the normal rational behavior is never mentioned.
It’s filled with stories that make the individual unique. It’s all the times they broke out of the median distribution of human behavior.
If you want to create behavioral assets that tell stories for you in the future, you have to pay the price of appearing weird in the present moment.
Your personal brand is defined by your weirdness, eccentricities, and irrational behavior.
If you remove them in order to fit in with the tribe, you remove all future stories and memories that tribe will tell about you.
The forgetting paradox - Wordle outperformed every headline in society's consciousness for 2022. All the news everyone was worried outlasted by a novelty game... that has now faded away. We forget how much we forget because we've forgotten it. Everyone will move onto the next current thing... And forget how enraged they were about the previous current thing.
4. Is Net Zero 2030 impossible to achieve - and is it a mistake to pursue it? Should governments be more brutal with climate investment? Are events like COP a waste of time?
5. Demetri Kofinas at Hidden Forces spoke with Victor Haghani about his book “The Missing Billionaires” and what a growing body of literature has to say about sensible wealth management and how to invest for the long term.
Victor Haghani started his career at Salomon Brothers in 1984, where he became a Managing Director in the bond-arbitrage group, and in 1993, he was a co-founding partner of Long-Term Capital Management. He founded Elm Wealth in 2011 to help clients, including his own family, manage and preserve their wealth with a thoughtful, research-based, and cost-effective approach that covers not just investment management but also broader decisions about wealth and finances.
4 Key Insights:
Victor Haghani advocates for a long-term, low-cost, diversified index fund investing approach tailored to an individual's risk preferences and personal situation. This contrasts with his prior experiences trying to generate alpha at Salomon Brothers and LTCM. He believes most investors, even sophisticated ones, are better served by not trying to beat the market.
Making rational investment decisions requires understanding key concepts like the risk-return tradeoff, volatility drag, personal risk aversion, and maximizing expected utility rather than just expected monetary value. Even without a true risk-free asset, modern portfolio theory provides a useful framework.
An investor's human capital (their future earning potential from work) is a significant asset that should be considered when making investment decisions, especially for younger investors. The riskiness and bond-like or stock-like nature of one's career should inform their portfolio asset allocation.
Standard inflation indices like CPI tend to significantly understate increases in cost of living over long time periods. Investors should assume their spending needs will grow faster than CPI, likely at a rate closer to per-capita GDP growth, when planning for retirement and intergenerational wealth transfer. But CPI+ remains a useful mental shortcut.
6. Peter Thielspoke to Tyler Cowen, this one is focused on religious and political thought. It may give you a whole new way of looking at things.
4 Key Insights:
Political theology is about integrating different aspects of life to make progress, rather than becoming hyper-specialized. It involves asking big questions and starting with the human scale to gain insight into the larger picture. Thiel contrasts this with both Calvinism's predestination and rationalism's reductionism, arguing for the importance of human agency and critical thinking.
Thiel believes that history has a linear, progressive character rather than being purely cyclical. Each moment is unique, and the stakes are higher than ever due to the impact of science and technology. He worries about existential risks from technology and the potential rise of a totalitarian one-world government trying to control those risks. The concept of the "katechon," a mysterious restraining force against evil, is discussed as a provisional way to resist centralization.
Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, will be highly disruptive. Thiel predicts that AI will have a more significant impact on mathematics and coding than on verbal and creative fields, potentially leading to a rebalancing of society's current bias towards STEM. The geopolitical implications of AI are uncertain, but it may advantage the United States over China.
The modern world has become too focused on STEM fields at the expense of the humanities. Thiel argues that as AI automates mathematical and analytical tasks, there will be a shift back towards verbal and creative skills. He emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions about AI's implications rather than having a narrow, tech-centric focus.
7. Fareed Zakaria with Malcolm Gladwell: Age of Revolutions at the 92nd Street Y.
B. The Science and Technology Section
1. WIRED and HSBC had a joint report on the Frontiers of Biotech.
5 Key Ideas:
The biorevolution, driven by advancements in fields like genomics, artificial intelligence, and bioengineering, is poised to transform multiple sectors, from healthcare and agriculture to energy and materials science. This new era of innovation, likened to the early stages of the digital revolution, holds immense potential to reshape our world and tackle pressing global challenges.
DNA-based data storage could provide a sustainable, long-term solution to the exponential growth of digital information. With the ability to store around one exabyte per cubic inch, last tens of thousands of years, and consume minimal energy, DNA has the potential to replace traditional data centers for archival storage needs.
Enzymatic recycling using plastic-eating bacteria is an emerging frontier in the fight against plastic waste. By breaking down plastics into their fundamental building blocks (monomers), this approach enables the creation of new plastics without relying on fossil fuels. As the technology matures, it could lead to decentralized recycling plants and even help address the issue of ocean plastic pollution.
CRISPR gene editing offers new hope in combating the looming crisis of antibiotic resistance, which threatens to claim millions of lives annually by 2050. By targeting resistance genes, re-sensitizing bacteria to existing antibiotics, or directly neutralizing bacteria, CRISPR-based approaches could help to circumvent the need for constantly developing new antibiotics and provide a more sustainable solution to this pressing global health challenge.
Rejuvenation science is experiencing a golden era, with significant investments and research efforts aimed at understanding and controlling the aging process. From cellular reprogramming techniques that can rewind the biological clock of human cells to the repurposing of existing drugs to target aging mechanisms, scientists are making notable progress in extending healthspan and compressing the period of age-related decline. While ethical and social questions remain, the field holds immense promise for improving quality of life in later years.
2. Mark Zuckerberg did his best interview ever on the Dwarkesh Podcast discussing Llama 3, Open Sourcing $10b Models, & Caesar Augustus.
The main idea: AI winter is here. Zuck is a realist, and believes progress will be incremental from here on. No AGI in 2025. He thinks the bottlenecks start appearing soon for energy and they will be take decades to resolve. AI growth will thus be gated on real world constraints. Believes they will be able to move from Nvidia GPUs to custom silicon soon.
But maybe incremental AI progress is fine?
3. Doug McLaughlin at Fabricated Knowledge (my favorite blog about the semiconductor industry) had a great post titled: The Data Center is the New Compute Unit: Nvidia's Vision for System-Level Scaling.
3 Key Ideas:
Moore's Law is fractal-like and applies not just at the chip level, but also at the data center rack level. Nvidia is intelligently pursuing better systems by moving components closer together, using copper interconnects, and liquid cooling to achieve multiple generations worth of improvements in performance and power efficiency.
The shift to liquid cooling enables putting significantly more power (up to 300kW+) into a single rack. Combined with denser HBM memory and larger silicon die areas enabled by panel-level packaging, this allows scaling compute capacity at the rack level before having to rely on optical networking - providing a cheaper, more efficient solution.
Nvidia has a sophisticated, visionary approach focused on rack-level integration and innovation in areas like networking (NVLink, Quantum-X), cooling, and semiconductors. This contrasts with hyperscalers who rely more on slower-moving open consortiums and off-the-shelf components. The author believes Nvidia's competitive advantage here is underestimated by the market.
Not investment advice.
Believe it or not, that “♡ Like” button is a big deal – it serves as a proxy to new visitors of this publication’s value. If you got value out of reading, please let others know!
