Spending an extended amount of time with someone — in an unfamiliar setting — is forever under-rated. It’s the best way to build relationships.
As children, we spend lots of time with friends. However, once we begin working, we spend much more time alone. When we do see friends, our interactions are brief. As a result, it’s hard to build friendships in “the real world.”
Rather than spending two or three hours with somebody, I prefer to spend two or three days with them. More, if possible. Time has the effect of pushing conversation deeper. After 24 hours, the smalltalk disappears, and after 48 hours, philosophizing is inevitable. The quality of conversation and the persistence of shared memories increases exponentially with time. If you’re in a weird or unpredictable place, the relationship builds even faster.
I’m increasingly interested in spending extended time with friends and family. With each tick of the clock, new depths of trust and rapport emerge.
Fresh Ideas
North Star Podcast — Daniel Gross
Daniel Gross is a partner at Y Combinator, the world’s top startup accelerator.
Daniel was born in Jerusalem, Israel and was accepted into the Y Combinator Program in 2010. At the time, Daniel was the youngest founder ever accepted. In 2013, Cue was acquired by Apple. At 22, Daniel was leading several search and AI efforts across the company spanning iOS, OS X and Apple Watch.
In 2017, Daniel joined Y-Combinator as a Partner. He launched YC AI, Y-Combinator’s first vertical dedicated to investing in AI companies. In 2018, Daniel founded Pioneer. Pioneer is a search engine for the millions of “Lost Einstein’s” — extraordinarily creative people around the world who have the talent, but lack opportunity.
Themes of the episode:
The power of seeing life like a video game
Lessons from John D. Rockefeller on business and decision making
Why is Israel such an innovative country?
You can listen to the podcast here.
This episode was a massive, massive hit.
Coolest Things I Learned This Week
The Story of Hollywood
The reason Hollywood is in LA is because the independent film makers were trying to escape Edisons film trust and LA was close enough to Mexico that they could skip the country if legal battles got too nasty.
Likewise, Palm Springs became the getaway of the stars because it was the exact number of miles they were allowed to roam while under contract to the big studios.
The US Now Produces More Crude Oil than It Imports
I spent the weekend watching Peter Zeihan videos. He’s a geopolitical strategist, who specializes in global energy, demographics, and security.
"Nearly every major expansionary power of the past has been based in a temperate climate zone, and why all those that have lasted have been riverine-based. This doesn’t make the people of these zones better or smarter. It simply means they have more and more sustainable resources, fewer barriers to economic development, and economic and military systems that allow for greater reach."
If you’re interested in this stuff, I recommend this video. Geo-politically, America’s new role as a net oil exporter seems very important.
Woah, This Optical Illusion is Crazy
How Maps Distort Reality
Most of us seriously underestimate the size of Africa.
Why?
Because, as Tim Marshall explains in his book Prisoners of Geography, most of us use the standard Mercator world map, and “this, as do other maps, depicts a sphere on a flat surface and thus distorts shapes.” A world map always has to be distorted, with a bent toward the view you are trying to present.
Even though Africa looks roughly the size of Greenland, in fact, it is actually about 14 times larger.
The Cookbook Theory of Economics
Try looking for foreign cookbooks in any American bookstore: The shelves will be littered with French and Italian fare, East Asian and Indian selections, and only a few from places south of the equator.
Countries blessed with good soil and stable agrarian societies tend to develop richer and more interesting food culture than nomadic societies from hardscrabble lands.
Consider how cooking evolves: It starts in the home and then eventually spreads to restaurants and on to cookbooks, along the way transforming a recipe from oral tradition to commercialized product.
Once a cuisine proliferates, people want to be able to cook it at home.
But that doesn’t mean the Mexican mole you’re preparing in your kitchen, for instance, is necessarily like what you’d get in Oaxaca. Mexican food, as it is cooked in Mexico, still straddles being perfect for cookbooks and not being ready for cookbooks at all, depending on where you are. This reflects a deeper inequality and imbalance in the Mexican economy: In the United States, Americans tend to get a lot more northern Mexican food than southern (blame proximity), as well as food that would be more often found on tables of the wealthy or middle class in, say, Mexico City than in a rural village in Chiapas.
Cookbooks — the more practical kind — also turn out to be good guides to which countries and regions are on the cusp of economic progress.
Look at chef Marcus Samuelsson’s African cookbook, The Soul of a New Cuisine, or Naomi Duguid’s Burma: Rivers of Flavor, both of which are vast improvements on earlier offerings in their respective regions. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Africa’s economies are booming at near double-digit growth rates or that Myanmar is going through a fundamental economic and political revolution, moving from a closed society to a globalizing developing country.
Cookbooks follow a rise in economic development.
Photo of the Week
In high school, my friend Zander and I enjoyed lots and lots of golf together. We snapped this photo at the Palm Springs airport before 5 days of golf at PGA West (one of my favorite places in the world).
Zander and I haven’t lived in the same place since 2012. And yet, six years later, our friendship has only grown stronger. I attribute this to all the extended time we spent together. Oh, and Zander is also an excellent writer.
The benefits of undistracted, one-on-one time with somebody pay off for years and years. Friendship and time have an exponential relationship. Lesson learned.
Until next week,
David Perell
P.S. Palm Springs is so, so beautiful.