Unpopular opinion: social media is a net-good.
Social media is still in its infancy, and when it’s all said and done, it will improve relationships and make us much more social. People crave stronger relationships with friends and family and social media will enable that.
With that said, I worry about its negative effects. I subscribe to Balaji’s Srinivasan’s one-liner about the future:
“More upside, more downside.”
The question is: Why haven’t we had more innovation in social media?
The structural dominance of Google and Facebook is inhibiting innovation in social media, and venture investment in seed rounds and initial follow-ons is down considerably. App stores are slowing consumer innovation. Apple’s app store takes a 30% cut on every transaction, which takes the oxygen out of niche content services and communities who don’t have 30% margin to give up. As Tal Shachar wrote:
“The promise of niche media doesn’t work in a world with a centralized monetization choke point.”
Innovation has been starved. We spend most of our time on large platforms, where our words are broadcast.
Right now, the vast majority of the world’s smartest people share nothing on the internet. For most people, the downside of sharing ideas outweighs the upside of doing so. By reducing the tail risk of sharing ideas, we can massively accelerate the spread of interesting ideas.
As one friend says:
"Every word you publish on the internet is a liability on your personal balance sheet.”
I’m frustrated by how little knowledge is transferred between close friends. We can do so much better. Technology hasn’t meaningfully improved interactions between small friend groups — yet.
A glance at the tenor of conversations around the big social media platforms reveals how much we long for something else — small communities without likes and comments, where we can be ourselves and explore controversial ideas in ways that won’t come back to bite us down the road.
Technology for small group friendships is stagnant, so I’m taking matters into my own hands. Here’s how I’ve added structure to my friend groups:
I’ve organized small group chats focused on podcasts, YouTube videos, online marketing, and the future of education.
Every week, I work with Chris Sparks, a professional poker player and an excellent productivity coach. One week, I help him with marketing. The next, he helps me with productivity. It's been a smashing success.
I host a group in New York called Things We’ve Never Done Before, where we do — you guessed it!! — things we’ve never done before like New York City architecture tours.
I host multiple dinners every month where I create spaces for high-quality conversation by bringing ambitious friends together. Good news! Over the weekend, I discovered that two of my closest friends, who met at one of these recent dinners, are going to start working together.
And now… an annual review!
For an annual review, six of us are renting a van and driving up to a house in upstate New York. Pooling everybody together makes the weekend affordable. The weekend will be rigorous but introspective, challenging but meaningful. There will be a mix of small group discussion, personal journaling time, and 30-minutes on the hot seat where one person receives individual support from the entire group. I can’t wait.
As always, I’ll share what I learn with you.
Fresh Ideas
New Article: That is Marketing
Marketing is the Galapagos Islands of human behavior. In the world of marketing, emotions trump truth. One powerful signal is worth one-thousand facts.
In this article, I offer eight ways of thinking about marketing. Some are funny, some are weird, and some are peculiar.
Here’s my favorite line:
“Human evolution depends on marketing too. Low-pitched voices are an adaptation to exaggerate body size. Men are, on average, 10% taller and 20% heavier than females. Yet, there is a twofold difference in pitch between the sexes. Since humans base their size estimates on voice pitch cues, low-pitched, deep-voiced speakers are perceived as being larger.”
You can read the article here.
North Star Podcast: Michael Shellenberger
Michael Shellenberger, the Founder and President of Environmental Progress. A recent candidate for Governor of California, Michael is one of the world’s leading pro-nuclear environmentalists.
Conversation topics:
Nuclear Energy and the big misconceptions around it
The virtues and drawbacks of wind and solar energy
Why 17% of teachers in California can’t afford a home
The fascinating impact of Proposition 13 on housing in Silicon Valley
How media shapes narratives
Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | Website
Naked Brands Interview Series: Dan Runcie
Dan Runcie is a writer who studies culture and breaks down the business side of hip-hop at Trapital.
The business side of hip-hop is often overlooked. Traditional media outlets often scratch the surface when assessing hip-hop. Trapital digs deeper. Each story breaks downs and identifies the strategic moves and principles that shape the culture.
Conversation topics:
Why Drake is Everywhere
Business Models for Musicians
J.Cole vs. Kendrick
How the Internet Transformed Hip-Hop
Will Smith’s Comeback and the Rise of Independent Artists
You can read the interview on my website.
Coolest Things I Learned This Week
Insane: Voyager Reaches Interstellar Space
NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has entered interstellar space, becoming the second man-made object to reach the edge of the solar system, the U.S. space agency announced on Monday after a 41-year-long journey.
Voyager 2 is now more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Data sent by the spacecraft moves at the speed of light and takes about 16.5 hours to reach scientists back on Earth.
Its twin, Voyager 1, entered interstellar space in August 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide the first-ever observations from this gateway into interstellar space.
While the probes have left the heliosphere, they have not left the solar system, which extends until the outer edge of the Oort Cloud. It would take 30,000 years for Voyager 2 to leave the solar system.
Amazing….
The End of Photography as Evidence
None of these faces are real. All made up by AIs. The end of photography as evidence.
When U.S. President FDR Met Winston Churchill
Morgan Housel’s favorite lost in translation story:
When, FDR and Winston Churchill met in Casablanca in 1943, the Secret Service worried the Germans would find out.
In fact, they did. Nazi intelligence knew there was a meeting in Casablanca.
But they assumed Casablanca translated to "White House," Washington.
“The security concerns were agonizing. Casablanca was filled with Vichyites and Axis agents; if the Germans discovered the site of the conference, protection could not be guaranteed. Indeed, it was later determined that the Germans did find out, through a coded message in Berlin, that a summit meeting was taking place at Casablanca, but fortunately, because the word “Casablanca” was translated literally as “white house” instead of the Moroccan city, Hitler assumed the meeting was in Washington.”
Hot Takes on Productivity from an Excellent Twitter Thread
My favorites:
It's better to stop all public speaking and stop going to any conferences. They aren't actually useful for professional networking or personal brand building. Everything digital is better.
Being super organized is a bad thing. Means there's no room for serendipity, deep thought, can make you overly passive on other peoples' use of your time, as opposed to being focused on outbound.
Where you sit/set up for work matters more than most people realize
Print out your calendar every week, highlight everything that gives you energy in green and everything that takes away energy in red. trim the red
The secret to productivity is managing energy not time. You can get more done in less time using the mental equivalent of high-intensity interval training: alternating between eustress sprints (hyperfocus, high arousal) and recovery (inward focus, low arousal) to prevent burnout.
Scroll Up and Down for This Optical Illusion
It looks like it’s moving!!
Where do wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans come from?
Wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans make up 60% of the world’s crops. These maps show where production of those crops are highest.
Welcome to the Future: Cyberpunk Taxis in Hong Kong
Predictions For the Next 10-15 Years
Sizhao Yang, the co-creator of Farmville shared some predictions about the future over the weekend. These ideas were most interesting to me:
Real age will replace biological age as more tests allow you to test your aerobic capacity, skin quality, internal organs (i.e. vo2max) and is able to judge the long term effect of your habits. "How old are you?" "My biological age is 40 but chronological age is 30."
Ecommerce has fundamentally been organized around reviews and ratings. The next generation is organized around transparency and experience using sites like Labdoor, live streaming, and community generated products like Glossier.
China will likely usher in the era of CRISPR babies that are genetically modified to have less disease, stronger, smarter, faster and this will usher in an arms race with parents pushing the best for their genetics causing a Sputnik moment.
The genetic foundations of IQ, cancer, and diabetes won't be found instead realizing that it's almost all behavioral and environmental.
Psychedelic drugs will come to the forefront to treat untreatable diseases like PTSD.
The new Facebook is going to be Discord. As public shaming causes public identities to go into semi private groups. This will cause polls and the effectiveness of other items to go down as people manage their public/personal personas.
Badges from Harvard will decline in relative importance as badges from triple byte and work based badges (YC). Your resume will consist of Udacity, Coursea, Triple byte, YC, Techstars as signaling. This is adult education in the future.
The new startup hub will be in Toronto as more angel investors emerge from exited AI startups and foreign grad students apply to Canada and not the US due to taxes, immigration, and finding jobs.
Takeaway: A famous VC once said the role is not future prediction but to see the present clearly. Put in another way. What do you see in small populations around the world that you think will be wildly distributed? The future is here, you just don’t know where.
Photo of the Week
Something crazy happened last week. I was at dinner with friends, chatting and laughing with friends, when SANTA WALKED IN.
I mean… what are the chances? Santa flew all the way down from the North Pole, and trekked through the frigid New York City winds, just to take pictures with guests at this restaurant. Incredddddible!
Happy Holidays,
David Perell