Hey there,
Greetings from San Francisco!
I’m here to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family. Now, I’m sticking around for a jam-packed week of podcast interviews with some exciting guests.
Samo Burja (Sociologist who studies the causes on societal decay and flourishing).
Michael Shellenberger (Environmental policy and nuclear energy expert).
Grant Sanderson (Creator of 3Blue1Brown, one of the world’s largest, math-focused YouTube channels).
Gillian Morris (Former CNN journalist focused on the Middle East and Founder of Hitlist).
Patri Friedman (Political economy theorist and founder of the Seasteading Institute.)
Keith Rabois (Former executive at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square).
Erik Torenberg (Co-Founder of Village Global and first employee at ProductHunt).
I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
As you may know, I’m on a mission to accelerate the spread of interesting ideas. In 2019, I will help 1,000 people start writing.
On that note, I have something exciting to share with you. I’ve published a page with my favorite links from around the internet.
It's a work in progress, so please pass along your favorite books, articles, and YouTube videos. If the quality is sufficient, I’ll add them to the website. I hope this page will help you spend more time learning and less time searching.
Enjoy!
Fresh Ideas
North Star Podcast: Kevin Kwok
On Tuesday night, I had drinks with Kevin Kwok. I can’t recommend Kevin’s podcasts enough (also check out this one with Erik Torenberg). I interviewed Kevin during the summer and in case you missed it, I want to share the conversation with you.
Topics of Conversation:
A/B testing cities in China.
Saudi Arabia and the future of democracy.
What Uber can teach us about network effects.
Why we have democracies in countries and dictators in companies.
Lessons from the Robert Caro biographies about Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Coolest Things I Learned This Week
Uber Decreases Alcohol-Related Crashes in New York
Animal Sight and Behavior
“Eyes, as we know them, came into being in the Cambrian era, which began 540 million years ago. Before the Cambrian there were animals, mostly small, and some would have had eyes like those of present-day flatworms: no more than a handful of receptors in a shallow cup. When the Cambrian explosion occurred, caused ultimately by climatic changes, animals got bigger, faster and, crucially, they stared to prey upon each other. To be a predator you need eyes, and the better they resolve the further away you can see prey. Similarly, as a prey animal the better your eyes are the easier it is to spot danger and take evasive action. A visual arms race developed, which resulted in most of the kinds of eyes that are found in modern animals. At the same time the major animal phyla came into existence, or at least became recognizable in the forms of the animals we know today.
Some of the ways that animals with small brains manage to identify others are extraordinary. Jumping spiders use unique scanning eye movements to establish whether the object they have just detected has a pattern of legs that signify it is another jumping spider (to be mated or avoided) rather than an insect (to be eaten). Fiddler crabs use the timing pattern of their claw waving, rather than physical appearance, to demonstrate which species they are facing. Mantis shrimps again use scanning eye movements coupled with an elaborate color and polarization vision system to determine whether another mantis shrimp has the appropriate distinguishing ‘badges’ on its body. All these animals avoid the “difficult” problem of pattern recognition by using specific features that code species identity.”
Writing Tips from Jason Zweig, the Legendary Wall Street Journal Columnist
The best writing takes a complicated topic and explains it in a way your grandma would understand.
Credibility is everything so be liberal quoting people smarter than you.
If you want to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader.
Good sentences, like good people, come in all shapes and sizes and types.
Good writing is full of wonder; it marvels at the glory and stupidity and frustration and pain and beauty of being alive. You can’t write anything if you don’t feel something. You have to want to tell people what you feel, what you care about, what you believe, what you know; if you don’t have something you’re on fire to tell us about, you shouldn’t be writing.
The State of Advertising
Advertising has historically hovered between 2-3% of GDP. But now, the internet is taking a larger and larger share of ad dollars.
For what it’s worth, I think television and billboard advertisements are under-rated by the general public.
How to Ask Better Questions
A good question is energizing. It’s an inviting challenge, it’s something that’s interesting and fun to pursue. It inspires a new way of seeing things, a new way of ordering information.
A good question is an act of pointing. First you survey the idea-scape in front of you – maybe it’s shared territory between the two of you, or maybe it’s you looking over your conversation-partner’s shoulder – and then you try and identify the most compelling, interesting thing, and point to that.
“Funny” or “interesting” is a sort of compass or gyroscope that guides you away from stale questions.
How Maps Distort Reality
This distortion is due to the Mercator Projection, which distorts the size of countries as they inch away from the Equator and towards the poles.
Evolution and Death
"The most important component of evolution is death. Or, said another way, it’s easier to create a new organism than to change an existing one. Most organisms are highly resistant to change, but when they die it becomes possible for new and improved organisms to take their place.
This rule applies to social structures such as corporations as well as biological organisms: very few companies are capable of making significant changes in their culture or business model, so it is good for companies eventually to go out of business, thereby opening space for better companies in the future."
— John Ousterhout, Stanford professor
An Incredible Aerial Image of New York City
Photo of the Week
Here’s a photo of me on the basketball court at the Warriors stadium as a kid. During my freshman year of high school, I attended every single Golden State Warriors home game.
Tonight, the San Francisco madness continued! I spent the night at Oracle Arena, where Kevin Durant dropped 49 points, and the Warriors beat the Magic 116-110.
Have a great week,
David Perell