A Few Things: Why Kids Aren't Alright, Ackman on Investing, Media, DEI, How To Read +80 Books a Year, 37 Pieces of Career Advice, Ignoring The Crowd & Beating The Market, News & Charts You Missed....
February 29, 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.
Here is last week’s discussion: The Beauty Of Life, Reading People, Why The World Makes No Sense, Goodhart's Head Hand Heart, Gurley on AI & Nvidia, Compound AI Systems, Programming Biology, News & Charts You Missed...
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Quotes I Am Thinking About:
“Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“I’m passionate about wisdom. I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”
- Charlie Munger
“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”
- Albert Einstein
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
- T.S. Eliot
"Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.”
- George Bernard Shaw
A. A Few Things Worth Checking Out:
1. The most interesting thing I listened to in February is probably Bari Weiss speaking to Abigail Shrier on a conversation titled: Why The Kids Aren’t Alright.
American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an alarming 14 percent.
What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of parents hyper-fixated on the mental health and well-being of their children.
Take, for example, the biggest parenting trend today: “gentle parenting.” Parents today are told to understand their kids’ feelings instead of punishing them when they act out. This emphasis on the importance of feelings is not just a parenting trend—it’s become an educational tool as well.
“Social-emotional learning” has become a pillar in public schools across America, from kindergarten to high school. And maybe most significantly, therapy for children has been normalized. In fact, there are more kids in therapy today than ever before.
On the surface, all of these parenting and educational developments seem positive. We are told that parents and educators today are more understanding, more accepting, more empathetic, and more compassionate than ever before—which, in turn, makes wonderful children.
But is that really the case? Are all of these changes—the cultural rethink, the advent of therapy culture, of gentle parenting, of teaching kids about social-emotional learning—actually making our kids better?
Best-selling author Abigail Shrier says no.
In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, Shrier argues that these changes are directly contributing to kids’ mental health decline. In other words: all of this shiny new stuff is actually making our kids worse.
2. Bill Ackman was on the Lex Fridman podcast in a conversation titled: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech.
4 Key Insights:
Staying emotionally detached is an essential skill in investing. Ackman hammers home how crucial it is to analyze companies, stocks, and market movements dispassionately. Letting volatility or hype sway your judgment can lead to poor decisions. He credits his ability to tune out short-term noise as key to his long-term success.
Establishing credibility enables activist investor victories. Ackman notes that for activists like himself, the ability to convince other shareholders is paramount. Your track record, principles, and capacity to communicate impactful ideas is what compels institutional investors, boards and other stakeholders to put their support behind you. It's a campaign, much like politics.
Incentive structures and governance policies shape organizational outcomes. Ackman spotlights high-profile controversies at places like Harvard and OpenAI that he argues stem largely from problematic governance frameworks. Boards and leaders shape checks and balances, accountability, decision rights and incentives that dictate behaviors across institutions for better or worse.
Lacking accountability mechanisms, media conduct standards are deeply concerning today. Ackman details at length grievances with how outlets like Business Insider handled coverage about his wife. He argues their journalistic practices were tantamount to defamation. Such experiences have shaped his view that decentralized platforms like Twitter can newly empower those mistreated by media institutions to respond. More transparency and public scrutiny is now possible around how outlets conduct themselves.
3. I re-read an old GQ article titled: How to Read 80ish Books a Year (And Actually Remember Them), with advice from Shane Parrish.
Key Ideas:
First of all, figure out why you’re reading.
The first step towards optimisation? Reading the right things.
Develop a system of note-taking.
Don’t treat your reading as background noise.
Be a quitter.
4. 37 Pieces of Career Advice by Ryan Holiday was a good read.
My Favourite 3:
The thing that’s wrong about imposter syndrome is that for the most part no one is thinking about you at all. They’re too busy with their own doubts and their own work.
All success is a lagging indicator… all the good stuff (and bad stuff) is downstream from choices made long before.
Talking about what you’re going to do makes you a lot less likely to actually do it. Keep your plans to yourself.
5. William Green spoke with famed investor Bruce Berkowitz, whose Fairholme Fund has beaten the S&P 500 by 529 percentage points over 23 years.
Bruce, who was named Morningstar’s Domestic Stock-Fund Manager of the Decade in 2009. He speaks about the ups & downs of his volatile career, how he changed his investment strategy after three costly losses, why he likes cash as a kind of “financial valium,” & why 80% of his fund is riding on one stock.
Five Key Insights from the conversation:
Bruce focuses intensely on cash flows and valuations to determine if he has a long-term edge. He tries to deeply understand businesses, following the cash flows and coming up with simple valuation methodologies.
Bruce believes having significant cash reserves is critical - it keeps you "cool, calm and collected" during market turmoil and provides flexibility. He always keeps 3 years of cash so his family will be fine.
Bruce has become more focused over time on having control and running businesses he invests in. After painful experiences losing money due to factors outside his control like regulations, he wants more certainty.
Bruce emphasizes the importance of concentration and not overdiversifying. He says most investors want diversification within funds but then diversify across multiple managers and funds, diluting returns.
Bruce tries to invest his clients' money the same way he invests his own. He eats "his own cooking" and is the largest shareholder in his funds. This alignment and long-term time horizon shapes his approach.
6. BBC Radio podcast has new series titled: The Rise and Rise of the Microchip.
Here’s their introduction:
Inside all the world's electronic devices, there's a story of innovation but there's also a tale of espionage and the battle of nations and corporations for technological supremacy. It's the story of the microchip and it will go a long way in determining who comes out on top in what some call the new Cold War: China or the West?
The broadcaster and writer Misha Glenny takes us from a Soviet bunker on the brink of nuclear war to the inner workings of Europe's most high-tech facilities. He encounters spies, entrepreneurs and quantum conundrums en route to discovering how something that can now be as small as a single strand of DNA may determine the fate of nations and perhaps, even of humanity itself.
7. Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out by The Atlantic.
"People in their 30s and 40s have less leisure time than they did two decades ago. As Anne Helen Petersen has said, Americans have a tendency to spread out, and the built environment of the U.S. housing market forces many people to move away from friends and family, which means they ultimately buy a bit of loneliness with their money.
…
We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends—a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family—spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection."
B. News and Charts You Might Have Missed
1. Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe. The record-breaking quasar has a black hole at its heart that's so big and growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun every day.
2. Half of Gen Z workers trust ChatGPT for career advice more than their managers, new report says.
3. Reports say teen subcultures are fading. What teens today have instead is “a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics” (think: preppy, cottagecore, Tomato Girls) by way of TikTok and Pinterest that often change within weeks of appearing.
“Part of what makes it hard to describe is that it is not rooted in any specific culture; it seems to be largely about being fun and a girl and buying things packaged with a bright color on a white background. There is no deep ethos to it, no shared experience other than posting videos of shopping hauls or makeup routines, pastimes usually engaged in alone, in your bedroom.”
Ask your daughters about “aesthetics”, you’ll learn a ton. I did.
4. A startup is looking to use an enzyme food additive to transform sugar into fiber during digestion to reduce the negative health impacts of sugary foods:
“The enzyme Zya is developing comes from a family called inulosucrases, and is naturally made by a strain of bacteria found in the human microbiome that’s capable of converting sugar to fiber in the gut environment. This enzyme acts on sugar before it can be broken down and absorbed by the body. It works by rearranging sugar molecules into inulin fiber, a type of soluble fiber found in plants such as chicory root that fosters the growth of beneficial gut bacteria.”
5. The internet used to be driven primarily by search, but AI-powered “answer engines” will soon become the norm, analysts say.
This shift is already changing traffic to websites, but this could also create an opening for startups to challenge Google. Another issue is the influx of dubious AI-generated content taking over search results, Google Maps, shopping listings, and other “featured snippets.”
The recent surge in low-quality AI-generated content poses significant challenges for Google’s search quality, with spammers leveraging generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, to produce content that, usually temporarily, ranks well in Google Search. This may lead to a rising distrust among the public.
C. Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World:
Recently read the "The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World" by Scott Hartley.
The book tries to integrate liberal arts (fuzzie) and technical skills (techie) in the context of the modern workforce. The term "fuzzie" refers to those with backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, while "techie" denotes individuals with expertise in technology and computer science.
It challenges the traditional dichotomy between the two domains and highlights the value of their complementary nature in driving innovation and solving meaningful human problems.
The main message of "Fuzzie and the Techie" is the importance of integrating liberal arts and humanities with technology and computer science. Scott argues that a balance of "fuzzie" and "techie" skills is essential for solving meaningful human problems and for success in the digital world.
The book emphasises the value of a multidisciplinary approach, advocating for the recognition of the unique contributions of the liberal arts in fostering empathy, imagination, and critical thinking in the increasingly technology-driven society.
Here are the Five Key recommendations from the book:
Embrace a Multidisciplinary Approach: Scott advocates for a balanced education that includes both liberal arts ("fuzzies") and technical skills ("techies"). He argues that this combination is crucial for developing the creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills needed to address complex challenges in the technology sector and beyond.
Value Soft Skills and Leadership: The book emphasizes the increasing importance of soft skills such as leadership, empathy, and self-confidence, which are often cultivated through a liberal arts education. Scott suggests that these skills are becoming more recognized and valued across various industries, not just in technology.
Promote Liberal Arts Education in STEM: Scott calls for greater awareness and integration of liberal arts education within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. He points out that the current education system has become overly tech-centric, leading to a decline in enrollment for liberal arts programs. The book argues for reversing this trend to ensure a well-rounded education that prepares individuals for the complexities of the modern world.
Develop Ethical and Human-Centered Technology: One of the central themes of the book is the need for technology that serves humanity rather than dominating it. Scott recommends the development of algorithms and technological tools that prioritize ethical considerations, address biases, and bring contextual relevance to data and code.
Prepare for a Future Shaped by Liberal Arts: Scott suggests that as technology continues to advance, the demand for the critical thinking, creativity, and ethical reasoning skills associated with liberal arts education will only grow. He envisions a future where these skills are essential for navigating the complexities of a digital world and for leading innovation in various sectors.
Here’s a talk he did at Google:
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 got value out of reading, please let others know!
This has been a good watch:
Good stuff! Thank you for putting it together and sending A Few Things out regularly.