A Few Things: The Rot in American Banks, Britain's Decade of Early Deaths, The Tao of Charlie Munger, Designing Your Life, Of Boys and Men, The Economic Impact of AI...
A Few Things: The Rot in American Banks, Britain's Decade of Early Deaths, The Tao of Charlie Munger, Designing Your Life, Of Boys and Men, The Economic Impact of AI...
March 24 2023
This email is a summary of the most interesting things I learnt this week.
I spent a couple of hours reading, listening and learning and then synthesising and curating. I wanted to share it 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: Attia on Longevity, What You Need to Know About SVB and The Banks, Learning Machine, News You Might Have Missed, The Fourth Turning, GPT-4, Reid Hoffman on AI, The Trouble with AI....
Believe it or not, that “♡ Like” button is a big deal – it serves as a proxy to new visitors of this publication’s value. If you enjoy this article, don’t be shy :)
Quotes I Am Thinking About:
“Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses.”
- Margaret Millar
"Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own."
- Scientist Donella Meadows on intellectual humility
“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
- Bertrand Russell
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.”
- Albert Einstein
A. A Few Things Worth Checking Out:
1. The Economist had a piece titled: How deep is the rot in America’s banking industry?
Key final paragraphs:
The result of all this is that the banking system is far more fragile than it was perceived to be—by regulators, investors and probably bankers themselves—before the past week. It is clear that smaller banks with uninsured deposits will need to raise more capital soon. Torsten Slok of Apollo, a private-equity firm, points out that a third of assets in America’s banking system are held by banks smaller than svb. All of these will now tighten up lending to try to strengthen their balance-sheets.
That medium-sized banks can be too big to fail is one lesson regulators should learn from svb. The episode has upended other parables of post-crisis finance as well. “After 2008 investors thought deposits were safe, and market funding was risky. They also thought Treasuries were safe and loans were risky,” says Angel Ubide of Citadel, a hedge fund. “All of the post-crisis rule books were written on that basis. Now the reverse looks to be the case.” One parable remains intact, however. Problems in the financial system never emerge from the most closely watched places.
2. Last week’s Economist had a sad and thoughtful piece asking: Britain has endured a decade of early deaths. Why?
Key bits (emphasis is mine):
Britain has endured a grim decade during which perhaps a quarter of a million people died younger than expected. By our calculations, that is the number of extra deaths Britain has suffered, compared with similar countries such as France and Denmark. The reason is that, in the early 2010s, life expectancy stalled in Britain compared with long-run trends and other countries. This slowdown in life expectancy struck all age groups, not just the elderly. And it disproportionately affected the poor.
The burden these deaths place on the living is not just weighed in grief. When more people are dying and life expectancy is stagnating, a greater number of people are also living in ill health. Life expectancy in Britain, as in almost all other rich countries, had been rising for nearly two centuries. But something went wrong in the early 2010s. Life expectancy at birth today, at 81, is just eight weeks longer than it was in 2011.
Two features make this figure even more worrying. Death comes mostly when people are old. But the slowdown in life expectancy has occurred across all age groups.
Although the deaths have been spread across generations, they have not been spread across the income spectrum. Life expectancy has fallen among the poorest in society but risen for the richest. A poor English girl could on average expect to live 6.8 years less than a rich girl in 2011, but 7.7 less in 2017. For boys, the gap increased from 9.1 to 9.5 years over the same period.
Working out what has gone wrong is not easy. First, diagnosis. Poorer Britons are 20% more likely to be diagnosed with cancer at a later stage, when the disease is more complex and expensive to treat. Having more NHS diagnostic centres would help, as well as cutting the pandemic-related backlog. Prescribing more statins for those at risk of heart attack or stroke would be good, too.
Next, prevention. Individuals bear responsibility for their own decisions but public-health interventions, from vaccines to anti-smoking and weight-loss programmes, can improve things.Yet funding for the public-health grant, which is allocated to local authorities by central government and amounts to a mere 2% of the NHS budget, has been cut in real terms in recent years.
Ultimately the greatest improvements will come from raising the living standards of the poor. Their lower life expectancy has many causes, from less money to spend on home insulation or nutritious food, to the stress of financial insecurity.
3. Founders Podcast: What David Senra learned from having dinner with Charlie Munger and rereading The Tao of Charlie Munger. Super episode.
If you don’t have time for the podcast, here is David’s twitter summary:
4. I was reminded of one of the books that has helped me think about my career and life over the years (and one I have recommended to others when they are thinking about their futures) is Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. They both teach at Stanford.
The book is filled with tools to help you design your life and career.
Bill Burnett was on the Scott Galloway podcast this week discussing: Designing Your Life and Finding Your Talent.
This article by Bill titled: How to use design thinking to create a happier life for yourself is a great summary of the book.
Designing your life idea #1: Connect the dots
Designing your life idea #2: Recognize your gravity problems
Designing your life idea #3: Brainstorm your possible futures and make three Odyssey Plans
Designing your life idea #4: Build some prototypes
Designing your life idea #5: Choose well
Great way to discover (and re-discover) direction in your life.
5. This is the deepest conversation this week…..Dr. Michael Shermer is the founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101.
For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth.
He spoke with Richard Reeves on his podcast. Richard is a senior fellow in Economic Studies and the Director of the Future of the Middle Class Initiative at the Brookings Institute. His research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and family change. Prior to joining Brookings, he was director of strategy to the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister.
Richard’s book is titled: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.
I think we can all see that boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have led many to lose ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family. While the lives of women have changed, the lives of many men have remained the same or even worsened.
Reeves looks at the structural challenges that face boys and men and offers fresh and innovative solutions.
They cover education, work/labor market, family, marriage, divorce/custody/spousal support/child support, the impact of race and income to outcomes, solutions, men in STEM and HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) and fatherhood as an independent institution.
Have ordered the book and listening to the conversation a second time.
6. Thoughtful twitter post by Demetri Kofinas of Hidden Forces on where credit is headed, ties in with what Marko Papic and Russell Napier have been saying.
7. Michael Rosenfeld and team at Stanford released a paper in 2019 looking at how heterosexual couples initially met. The released new data including 2021 came out last week.
This graph shows of current heterosexual couples what % met through different mediums. The online number is staggering!
B. The Technology Section:
1. If you are wondering what transformer and large language models are, this piece by an AI founder (Rafie Faruq) does a great job of simplifying and explaining it as only a real practitioner can.
Disclaimer: I am investor in a company founded by Rafie called Genie AI.
2. Invest Like the Best Podcast spoke with Avi Goldfarb on The Economic Impact of AI. He’s a Professor at the University of Toronto and the co-author of Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence (2022) and Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (2018).
They cover the pace of AI's development compared with other technologies, the transition from a world governed by rules to one governed by decisions, and the disruptive effects of AI on existing businesses and professions.
A lot of good bits and I’ve ordered the latest book too.
(00:07:08) - Prediction Machines; The impact price has on how much something is used by humans
(00:11:07) - The shift from steam powered factories to electric ones and the transition between the two in regards to systems and application solutions; Power and Prediction
(00:19:10) - What application, system, and point solutions feel like today in the world of AI
(00:27:03) - The transition from a world governed by rules to one by decisions
(00:30:58) - How the power of prediction moves us from a binary to a decimal framework
(00:34:48) - Ways power disruption will occur as we navigate the emerging AI frontier
(00:47:18) - How we should be thinking about the generation of information and data
(00:51:32) - A future where technology either desimates or empowers specific industries
(00:54:16) - What he’s most excited and worried about given the emerging frontier of AI
3. By now everyone has played with ChatGPT, but my children prefer Character.AI. You can speak to different AI characters and even create your own. In the near future, it will be hard to tell the difference between AI and human on the internet.
Believe it or not, that “♡ Like” button is a big deal – it serves as a proxy to new visitors of this publication’s value. If you enjoy this article, don’t be shy :)
thanks always interesting