The Curious Mind: Becoming a Meaning Maker, Living Longer Healthier Lives, The Future Of Civilisation, Is Reading Over-Rated?, The Future of GLP1s, Meta's AI Abundance, News And Charts You Missed....
The Curious Mind: Becoming a Meaning Maker, Living Longer Healthier Lives, The Future Of Civilisation, Is Reading Over-Rated?, The Future of GLP1s, Meta's AI Abundance, News And Charts You Missed....
October 31 2024
I am sharing this weekly email with you because I count you in the group of people I learn from and enjoy being around.
What did you enjoy learning this week?
If you missed last week’s discussion: Power of Strategic Reading, Marko on Markets, Scott Bessent on The Road Ahead, Setting The Table, The Paranoid Survive, Khosla on The Improbable, Doudna on Gene Editing, Humanoids...
This email takes many hours to put together, including hours of sourcing, curating and writing. If it is helpful to you, then do me a favor and hit the “heart” button so I know it’s useful to you.
Quotes I Am Thinking About:
“Live life as if everything is rigged in your favour.”
- Rumi
“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
- Albert Einstein
“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
- George S. Patton
A. A Few Things Worth Checking Out:
1. Invest Like the Best Podcast hosted Boyd Varty, in a new conversation titled: Becoming A Meaning Maker.
His book, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life is beautiful.
The 5 BIG IDEAS:
The art of storytelling is fundamentally about transforming raw experience into meaning. Great storytellers serve as meaning-makers for their communities, whether those are traditional villages or modern organizations. This goes beyond mere narration - it's about helping people understand how to feel about situations, creating frameworks for processing experiences, and turning seemingly ordinary or even frightening moments into something profound.
The most compelling stories come from people who live "inside-out" rather than "outside-in." These are individuals who build their lives around internal pulls and genuine interests rather than external expectations. Such people become natural storytellers because they're living stories worth telling - they've broken free from conventional paths to become "self-authored" individuals who generate meaning through their unique way of being in the world.
Strong organizational cultures are built on this same foundation of authentic storytelling. The key insight is that while cultures begin with clear narratives, they must be continuously lived and protected from drift. Cultural storytelling isn't a one-time event but a constant practice of reinforcement, correction, and evolution. The ultimate sign of success is when people naturally begin telling the organization's story without prompting, having internalized not just the words but the deeper meaning and identity. This is how narrative becomes culture, and culture becomes self-perpetuating.
The practice of "story hunting" requires a delicate balance between solitary contemplation and active engagement with the world. It demands periods of quiet reflection and writing to process experiences and discover their meaning, but also the courage to be "someone stories happen around" - someone who actively seeks out new experiences and characters. This dual nature of the practice explains why great storytellers must develop both the capacity for deep internal work and the willingness to venture into unknown territories, following their curiosity without necessarily knowing the destination.
Finally, there's a fundamental tension between comfort and aliveness that shapes all meaningful narratives. Stories that resonate require some element of stakes or challenge - what Boyd calls "the edge." Too much comfort and familiarity can deaden meaning, while too much intensity can overwhelm it. The art lies in finding the sweet spot where stakes are high enough to demand full engagement but not so high as to paralyze. This principle extends beyond storytelling to life itself, suggesting that maintaining meaning requires regular reinvention and the courage to "melt down" old identities when they've become too rigid.
2. My friend Sami shared a great deck titled Become The CEO of Your Health: How to Prepare Your Mind and Body to Live a Longer, Healthier Life by the team at Next Health.
They have great resources on their site.
Key 6 Slides:
Lots of variables to think about:
The 4 Goals help simplify where to focus:
Loved these 4 Action Lists:
3. David Murrin (Global Forecaster) was on the Grant Williams podcast with a deep, controversial and illuminating conversation. I hadn’t heard of him before, but he seems to be a 1st principles thinker and arrived at some interesting conclusions.
It may anger you, but I feel like the questions are worth asking and pondering.
I particularly liked the discussion around linear and lateral thinking.
The 5 BIG IDEAS:
The fundamental dynamic in human systems is between entropy (disorder) and anti-entropy (organization). Empires represent successful anti-entropic systems that create stability and growth, but eventually face challenges from new, more effective anti-entropic systems. China represents a new form of anti-entropic organization that threatens not just Western hegemony but the entire concept of individual liberty and democratic values.
Modern warfare has fundamentally changed with the rise of missile technology and industrial capacity. China's strategy combines overwhelming industrial capacity with new military technologies (especially missiles) and asymmetric warfare (including biological, economic, and social weapons). This comprehensive approach makes traditional Western military advantages potentially obsolete.
Western decline is manifested through multiple interconnected failures: the dominance of linear thinking over lateral adaptation, the elevation of wealth distribution over wealth creation, the erosion of service in favor of self-interest, and the preservation of failing leadership through monetary manipulation. These represent not just political or economic problems but fundamental organizational failures.
The collision between rising Eastern and declining Western systems is occurring within the context of a larger cycle (Kondratieff wave) that suggests increasing conflict through 2030. This timing aligns with China's economic and demographic pressures, creating a potential window for conflict that mirrors historical patterns like Nazi Germany's four-year plan.
The West faces an existential crisis of both capability and awareness. While China has developed comprehensive strategies for global dominance combining industrial, technological, military, and social control elements, Western societies remain trapped in "war blindness" - unable to recognize or respond to emerging threats due to long-term peace and prosperity. This crisis is exacerbated by leadership failures and social division that prevent effective response to obvious dangers.
4. Rise of AI Agents: Why Reading Books is a Waste of Time by Jordi Visser.
What’s the point of reading books, are there far far better ways to learn?
Jordi presents a provocative argument that books have become outdated for information gathering, advocating instead for modern methods like podcasts that offer diverse, dynamic perspectives.
This point is illustrated through their exploration of the rapidly emerging field of AI agents - autonomous digital assistants that can perform complex tasks 24/7 across business functions without constant human oversight.
He warns that those who stick to traditional learning methods like books risk falling behind in understanding this revolutionary technology that's poised to dramatically boost productivity, increase revenue per employee, and fundamentally disrupt traditional business models across industries.
5. Oliver Burkeman wrote Four Thousand Weeks, and now he’s written: Meditations for Mortals. I haven’t read the new one yet.
Here’s a good twitter summary of the book.
6. Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan wrote a new piece on moats and value creation.
The 3 BIG IDEAS:
Sustainable value creation occurs when a company achieves and maintains a return on invested capital (ROIC) above its cost of capital. This is remarkably difficult - competition, market maturity, and regression to the mean all work against sustained high returns. However, some companies do achieve this through establishing real competitive advantages. The key is not just achieving high returns temporarily, but sustaining them through deliberate strategic choices that create genuine barriers to competition, whether through consumer advantages (differentiation) or production advantages (cost leadership).
Industry structure shapes but does not determine a company's destiny. While industry forces like rivalry, barriers to entry, supplier power, buyer power, and substitutes matter significantly, individual companies can transcend their industry's economics through unique strategic positions. The evidence shows that company-specific factors explain more variation in performance than industry factors. The most successful companies don't just try to be the best at what everyone else does - they make deliberate trade-offs to be different in ways that are hard to copy and create lasting value.
Competitive advantage manifests in two main ways: increasing customers' willingness to pay (differentiation) or reducing suppliers' willingness to sell (cost leadership). Companies can increase willingness to pay through network effects, complementary products, reducing search costs, or creating switching costs. They can reduce willingness to sell through data sharing, productivity improvements, economies of scale/scope, or creating intrinsic employee motivation. The most powerful moats often combine both types of advantage. Understanding exactly how a company creates value - rather than just observing that it does - is crucial for assessing sustainability.
B. The Science and Technology Section:
1. Exponential View had a great piece titled: GLP-1s and society and the 3 scenarios ahead:
The 3 BIG IDEAS:
GLP-1s mark a potential inflection point in human biological control - offering unprecedented ability to regulate not just weight but fundamental aspects of desire and behavior, with implications far beyond medicine
The economic and social transformation could be comparable to major technological revolutions - potentially affecting everything from GDP ($400B+ savings) to core societal issues like addiction and crime, while forcing adaptation across multiple industries
The drugs represent a unique case of rapid medical innovation meeting broad societal needs - combining scientific advancement with immediate practical benefits and minimal stigma, potentially enabling unprecedented adoption rates and societal change.
2. Stratechry had a great piece titled Meta’s AI Abundance about Meta’s business looking ahead:
The 3 BIG IDEAS:
Meta has an immediate, proven path to AI monetization through advertising, uniquely differentiating it from other tech giants. Its "black box" advertising system, which already uses machine learning, can be supercharged by generative AI to create and test unlimited ad variations while keeping higher margins. This is especially powerful for Meta's long-tail advertisers who previously struggled with creative production.
Meta's evolution beyond traditional social networking allows it to leverage AI content generation in a unique way. By moving to show users content from across its entire network (not just friends), Meta can now seamlessly blend AI-generated content, user content, and advertising. This creates infinite inventory for advertising and potentially allows every piece of content to become "shoppable" through AI image recognition.
Meta has a three-horizon AI strategy that builds on itself: near-term advertising optimization, medium-term content generation and business messaging AI, and long-term XR/metaverse development. All these areas benefit from the same AI infrastructure investments, making Meta's heavy AI spending more justified than competitors who may have less clear paths to monetization.
3. My friend Erik Markowitz at Nightview Capital had a great Q3 letter discussing autonomy.
In their opinion, autonomous transportation stands at the cusp of revolutionising global commerce and daily life, with Tesla and Waymo emerging as the primary innovators using distinctly different approaches.
Tesla's vision-based FSD system, backed by billions of miles of real-world data and proprietary AI training infrastructure, positions it for potentially exponential growth and broader market adoption, while Waymo has already proven the viability of autonomous ride-hailing services in major U.S. cities using its sophisticated LIDAR-based approach.
This technological breakthrough, which the market currently appears to be undervaluing, is poised to transform multiple industries through three key revenue streams: consumer software sales, licensing fees, and ride-hailing services, representing what could be one of the most significant shifts in transportation since the invention of the automobile.
C. News and Charts You Might Have Missed:
1. Great AI tools and prompts to learn faster.
2. Small Habits with Huge Returns!!
3. Interesting chart of Gold from 13D WILTW.
P.S. Could you do me a favor ? This email takes many hours to put together, including hours of sourcing, curating and writing. If it is helpful to you, then do me a favor and hit the “heart” button so I know it’s useful to you.
Wishing you a good and beautiful life.
i really look forward to your thoughtful curation every week!
Great stuff, thank you. I especially appreciate the prompts to learn anything faster. If I could add one idea to that, one has to learn, but then apply what you've learned. If you apply learnings, you'll retain them. Thank you.