A Few Things: Raising Great Children, Your Life as a Network, Chip War, Eating Ourselves to Death, Tudor Jones on Markets, What Happened to Gilts?, Getting More Awe In Our Lives......
A Few Things: Raising Great Children, Your Life as a Network, Chip War, Eating Ourselves to Death, Tudor Jones on Markets, What Happened to Gilts?, Getting More Awe In Our Lives......
October 11 2022
I am sharing this weekly email with you because I count you in the group of people I learn from and enjoy being around.
You can check out last week’s edition here: Galloway on America, Papic on Markets, Huberman on Lifestyle, Dalio and Rubenstein, Scott Wilson on Non-Traditional Endowment Investing, Doomberg on Europe, DALLE2, The Future of AI
“Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”
– Augusta F. Kantra
“I have never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A little bird will fall dead, frozen from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
- D. H. Lawrence
“You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.”
- American psychologist Timothy Leary
A. A Few Things Worth Checking Out:
1. This is a thoughtful and wide ranging piece from a parent (Packy McCormick) on how he thinks about educating his children. The world is changing so quickly, it's hard to know exactly what to teach. And it's also clear that the traditional system is quickly becoming outdated.
Here is where he landed, I 100% agree:
Stoke curiosity. Help your children find the things that excite them and then help them explore these areas.
Encourage spikes. When your kids find the things they really enjoy, help them go deeper in those areas.
Leave room for solitude and play. Avoid screens as much as possible. Go outside. Read books.
Set an example by being good people.
Celebrate hard work. Nothing good comes easy. If we want our children to be successful—however they define it—we need to teach them to work hard.
Prioritize happiness.
You can listen to it here.
2. Your Life Is Driven by Network Effects. An illuminating deep-dive on the unseen hand of network effects that impact nearly every aspect of our lives by the venture firm NFX.
This will help you see networks and network effects everywhere in your life and how best to use them to your advantage.
3. Prof. Chris Miller has written “Chip War”, which chronicles the geopolitical history of a decades-long battle to control the modern world’s most critical resource: the microchip (or semiconductor) and the commercial industry that supports it.
On this Hidden Forces podcast, they discuss the technological, commercial, and distributional characteristics of the existing semiconductor supply chain.
Chris explains the various steps involved in the production process, the incentives that operate in the industry, the technological imperatives that inform investment decisions, and the role of government subsidies and regulations, all of which explain the globally distributed and highly efficient nature of the semiconductor industry and why it is more vulnerable than ever to geopolitical disruption.
You will leave the podcast understanding just how big this market is, the complexity of both the supply chain and manufacturing process involved, and huge western dominance in the design and manufacturing process.
Here’s a shorter written interview from the Vox, in Sept 2022: Chips are the new oil. There are no reserves.
4. 74% of Americans today are either obese or overweight. And yet, we’re no longer talking about it.
The national conversation around health and weight has turned away from things like good nutrition, weight loss and the importance of physical fitness, and instead adopted phrases like “fat acceptance” and “healthy at any size.”
Americans are heavier than ever, sicker than ever, dying earlier than ever, and... it's all preventable.
Bari Weiss spoke with Dr. Casey Means, a Stanford trained physician who left the traditional medical system behind to solve the one problem that she says is going to ruin us all: bad food.
Great discussion on the human body and our food.
Thank you Yaser for flagging.
5. Paul Tudor Jones discussing deploying their recession playbook.
6. Here is a thought experiment: What if the FED’s actions today given transmission lag don’t have any impact on inflation till 2024 and what if the CPI data we see today is simply a function of actions from 2020.
If nothing breaks, will the FED just keep hiking and the USD keep spiking. As the FED tightens, capex falls apart, supply problems get worse. And the USD keeps spiking since USD supply is further reduced as leverage and liquidity both come down.
Do we end up in not just a recession but a depression. Most market participants expect a FED pivot in Q1 2023.
This is the thesis laid out on this MacroVoices podcast with Alex Gurevich, CIO of HonTe Advisors and previously trading prop at JPM.
7. UK financial assets just experienced once-in-a-generation type moves in the wake of the government's mini-budget announcement. Not only did both gilts and the pound sell off dramatically, they rebounded just as dramatically after intervention from the Bank of England. What does it all mean?
And how did pension accounting contribute to the massive volatility?
On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Toby Nangle, an economics and markets commentator (who spent several years running asset allocation at Columbia Threadneedle) explains why we saw such a dramatic move and what the whole thing taught us about market structure.
8. Great Guardian article on “How getting more awe can improve your life – and even make you a nicer person”. I am not a religious person, but I enjoy feeling awe.
Some key bits from the article:
Despite centuries of philosophical fascination, awe has only been studied properly in the past 20 years. It is now a hot topic. The physiological experience of awe – goosebumps, dropped jaws, caught breath – is wonderful in itself, but research suggests that regularly feeling wonder can have a range of benefits for our physical and mental wellbeing as well as increasing our compassion, generosity and critical thinking ability. In the words of psychology professor Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, awe “sharpens our brains”.
9. One of the books that helped me a lot was James Clear’s Atomic Habits.
Here is a good summary of the main ideas:
10. Some weekend entertainment:
Idris Elba narrates this amazing documentary exploring the origins and evolution of play across the globe, from age-old rituals to billion-dollar businesses.
The pain episode was the best.
and if you want something much darker:
B. A Couple of Charts I Found Interesting:
“Only those who are asleep make no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active.
The fear of making mistakes is the root of bureaucracy and the enemy of development.
It is always the mediocre people who are negative, who spend their time proving that they were not wrong. The strong person is always positive and looks forward."
- Ingvar Kamprad