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April 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

April 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI

After three years, Elon Musk was ready to give up on the artificial intelligence research firm he helped found, OpenAI.

The nonprofit had launched in 2015 to great fanfare with backing from billionaire tech luminaries like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who had as a group pledged $1 billion. It had lured some of the top minds in the field to leave big tech companies and academia.

But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google, people familiar with the matter said.

And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.

Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company — and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that’s changing the world, and the company at the heart of it.

March 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

March 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

The Art of the Good Life: 52 Surprising Shortcuts to Happiness, Wealth, and Success

The Art of the Good Life is a toolkit designed for practical living. Here you'll find fifty-two happiness hacks -- from guilt-free shunning of technology to gleefully paying your parking tickets -- that are certain to optimize your happiness. These tips may not guarantee you a good life, but they'll give you a better chance (and that's all any of us can ask for).

Crazy Train

Semper Augustus Client Letter 2022
PROFITLESS PROSPERITY; INVESTING IN FLATION; AND – BERKSHIRE: GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME 

The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works

It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule so to speak: You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos, in my opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who have this ethos win in life and they don’t win just money, not just honors. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with, and there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.

February 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

February 2023 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

First Ever Recording of Dying Brain May Shed Light on Our Final Moments

“Scientists gain an accidental glimpse into an age-old question about what happens to the human brain as we die.”

After The Fact

“Everything has a price, and prices aren’t always clear. The price of exercise isn’t just the workout; it’s avoiding the post-workout urge to eat a ton of food. Same in finance. The price of building wealth isn’t just the trouble of earning money or dealing; it’s avoiding the post-income urge to spend what you’ve accumulated.”

December 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

December 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

Bear Market Investing Strategies
“Harry Schultz has been identifying bear market warning signals and teaching people how to prepare a profitable survival portfolio in light of these signals for over thirty-five years through his highly acclaimed newsletter, The International Harry Schultz Letter, which reaches subscribers in over ninety countries. The 1960s' classic book Bear Markets has been fully updated and revised to reflect the unprecedented changes taking place in today's volatile economic environment-making it extremely relevant to the current financial market. This book provides the necessary tools for investors to construct a portfolio that will allow them to protect and grow their money under the most severe bear market conditions through technical analysis and models of numerous bear market variables. Bear Market Investing Strategies offers practical and approachable strategies that every investor needs today.”

How scientists want to make you young again

“Research labs are pursuing technology to “reprogram” aging bodies back to youth.”

Old Frugal Habits Die Hard: Why I Force Myself to Spend More

“Why enjoying your money is so damned hard!”

November 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

November 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

Scientists are using AI to dream up revolutionary new proteins
“Huge advances in artificial intelligence mean researchers can design completely original molecules in seconds instead of months.”

The Crypto Story

“What follows is his brilliant explanation of what this maddening, often absurd, and always fascinating technology means, and where it might go.”

How to complete an impossible challenge

“There’s no need to hide under the bed covers – with the GOD principle you’ll be able to achieve your goals, big or small”

October 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

October 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

You weren’t supposed to see that

“Widespread prosperity, it turns out, is incompatible with the American Dream. The only way our economy works is when there are winners and losers. If everyone’s a winner, the whole thing fails. That’s what we learned at the conclusion of our experiment. You weren’t supposed to see that. Now the genie is out of the bottle. For one brief shining moment, everyone had enough money to pay their bills and the financial freedom to choose their own way of life.

And it broke the fucking economy in half.”

We now know the big bang theory is (probably) not how the universe began

“The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.”

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity.

Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.”

September 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

September 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

Five Things I Know about Investing

In this essay, Dartmouth finance professor Kenneth R. French explains five investment principles that he uses as the foundation for a holistic approach to portfolio design.

The Key to Behavior Change is Identity Change

Use the psychology of self-image to transform your habits for good.

How Unboxing Elaborate Packages Became an American Pastime

American consumers can’t resist the lure of a well-designed container.

What I am Watching:

Who made these circles in the Sahara?Deep in the Sahara, far from any towns, roads, or other signs of life, is a row of markings in the sand. There are dozens of them stretching for miles in a straight line in central Algeria, each consisting of a central point surrounded by a circle of 12 nodes, like numbers on a clock. And when we started making this video, no one seemed to know what they were.

July 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

July 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

How to Understand Things“what we call 'intelligence' is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about 'raw intellect”

The Benefits of Optimism Are Real“Having a positive outlook is the most important predictor of resilience.”

Why Talking to Strangers Is the Best Thing You Can Do for Your Mental Health

“If we can only break through the awkwardness barrier, striking up conversations at random is the cheapest form of therapy there is.”

Fecal Transplants Reverse Key Signs of Aging

“Scientists from England’s Quadram Institute and the University of East Anglia have found that transplanting fecal microbiota from young mammals into older ones may help reverse key signs of aging in the gut, brain, and eyes.”

More….

February 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

February 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

I can only promise you that it's going to get weirder

“Technology is always changing the nature of human life.”

Keanu Reeves Knows the Secrets of the Universe

“Guy’s always working—sixty-eight movies in thirty-five years. Playing killing machines, doofuses, romantics, messiahs, and devils. But always Keanu. Which always means something more.”

How to Remember You’re Alive
“One way to appreciate virtually any moment of your life is to pretend that the whole thing is already over.”

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January 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

January 2022 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

Same As It Ever Was

This is a few short stories about things that never change in a world that never stops changing.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
“Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.”

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November 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

November 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

This is how your brain makes your mind

“Your mind is in fact an ongoing construction of your brain, your body, and the surrounding world.”

The New Science of Clocks Prompts Questions About the Nature of Time

“Studies of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations — as well as insights into the nature of time itself.”

You'll Never Login the Same Way Again

“Wallet-based authentication will dominate in the next decade because it puts the user in control, where we want to be. The wallet replaces the username, the password, and the cookie.”

More ….

August 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

August 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

The Power of the Marginal
“If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.”

The Tacit Knowledge Series
“Tacit knowledge is ‘knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone’.

This series explores how expertise is tacit, why the research around extracting tacit knowledge is more important than the literature on deliberate practice, and how to go about acquiring tacit knowledge in the pursuit of skill acquisition.”

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July 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

July 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

Interview: Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer
“M.A.: Don’t follow your passion. Seriously. Don’t follow your passion. Your passion is likely more dumb and useless than anything else. Your passion should be your hobby, not your work. Do it in your spare time.

Instead, at work, seek to contribute. Find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy you can and figure out how you can contribute best and most. Make yourself of value to the people around you, to your customers and coworkers, and try to increase that value every day.

It can sometimes feel that all the exciting things have already happened, that the frontier is closed, that we’re at the end of technological history and there’s nothing left to do but maintain what already exists. This is just a failure of imagination. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re surrounding by rotting incumbents that will all need to be replaced by new technologies. Let’s get on it.”

4 Rumi Quotes That Will Boost Your Confidence

“You are searching the world for treasure, but the real treasure is Yourself.”

Zoroastrianism And Persian Mythology: The Foundation Of Belief

“Zoroastrianism was the main faith of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Attributed to the prophet Zoroaster, this Persian religion was a key influence on both Christianity and Judaism.”

What I am Watching:

The Explainer: Solving Problems by Starting with the Worst Idea Possible

Sometimes wrong thinking can lead to the right answer. 

Bionic Eye Cures Blindness
“First Bionic Arms- Now Bionic Eyes! Last week the FDA gave approval to the Argus II, a bionic eye that could potentially cure blindness in 15,000 people in the US. The Alpha IMS, a new implant in early testing, has cured blindness in eight people so far. Anthony gives us a sneak peak at this amazing new tech.”

Muppet Babies
My four year old son can’t stop watching and I’ve been strangely captivated by watching it too.  I guess it’s because I loved watching The Muppets so much growing up.  We’re now saying “Waka Waka” after every joke we tell just like Fozzy the Bear 🤣!

What I am Listening To:

ROLL ON:

CASE STUDIES IN MENTAL FORTITUDE: THE IRON COWBOY & MINNEAPOLIS MAYOR JACOB FREY

“Success in all forms demands mental fortitude—a capacity honed through consistently placing yourself beyond comfortable confines. When practiced with daily rigor, an increasingly sturdy mindset becomes a superpower—and the foundation for the purpose-driven life you aspire to inhabit.”

June 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

June 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

Why Start-ups Fail
Most start-ups don’t succeed: More than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors. But why do so many end disappointingly? That question hit me with full force several years ago when I realized I couldn’t answer it.

The Tail End
What I’ve been thinking about is a really important part of life that, unlike all of these examples, isn’t spread out evenly through time—something whose [already done / still to come] ratio doesn’t at all align with how far I am through life: Relationships.

Curiosity Is the Secret to a Happy Life

What exactly does it mean to be curious? “If you go by the typical dictionary definition, curiosity is simply a desire to seek out new knowledge or experiences,” Kashdan says. While this definition is a useful starting point, he says curiosity also involves a willingness to engage with complex, unfamiliar, and challenging concepts or endeavors.

More…

March 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

March 2021 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading:

The Ultimate Guide to Liars and Lying: Everyone Falls Into These 4 Types
“There are various ways of classifying lies: by their consequences, by the importance of their subject matters, by the speakers’ motives, and by the nature or context of the utterance.
Perhaps the most useful way to classify lies is by to the people who tell them. Understanding lies and liars can help us avoid getting duped as well as protect us from drifting into dishonesty ourselves.”

Corn Mazes and Mental Models
“We habitually view the world through a series of mental models that shape our understanding of our circumstances, our relationships and ourselves. [2] And while these mental models are essential tools in allowing us to navigate through life, they can easily lead us astray. Philosopher Alford Korzybski said "A map is not the territory it represents," and a mental model is not the reality it seeks to depict. [3] But we can easily mistake our mental models for reality and apply them inappropriately.”

'Smallest reptile on earth' discovered in Madagascar
Scientists believe they may have discovered the smallest reptile on earth - a chameleon subspecies that is the size of a seed.

More…

December 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

December 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To

What I Am Reading

Why the ‘paradox mindset’ is the key to success

Although paradoxes often trip us up, embracing contradictory ideas may actually be the secret to creativity and leadership.

Revealed: British accents are the world’s sexiest
Sorry, France: in our latest global survey, accents from the UK swept the world off their feet

Why Do We See Dead People?
Humans have always sensed the ghosts of loved ones. It’s only in the last century that we convinced ourselves this was a problem

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November 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening to

November 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening to

What I Am Reading

The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money―investing, personal finance, and business decisions―is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

The Science of Wisdom
As it turns out, wisdom doesn’t vary only between people who read about hypothetical scenarios in a laboratory. Even the same person typically shows substantial variability over time. Several years back, researchers asked a group of Berliners to report their most challenging personal issue. Participants also reported how they reasoned about each challenge, including meta-cognitive strategies similar to those described above. When inspecting the results, scholars observed a peculiar pattern: for most characteristics, there was more variability within the same person over time than there was between people. In short, wisdom was highly variable from one situation to the next. The variability also followed systematic rules. It heightened when participants focused on close others and work colleagues, compared with cases when participants focused solely on themselves.

These studies reveal a certain irony: in those situations where we might care the most about behaving wisely, we’re least likely to do so. Is there a way to use evidence-based insights to counter this tendency?

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October 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching, Listening to and Downloading

October 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching, Listening to and Downloading

What I Am Reading

First hint that body’s ‘biological age’ can be reversed

“A small clinical study in California has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body’s epigenetic clock, which measures a person’s biological age.”

Here's Why Uncertainty Makes You So Miserable

“I suspect that some meditative or religious practices which extoll the virtue of acknowledging only the present tense, or accepting our fate, might help reduce stress by attenuating our sensitivity to uncertainty,” he says. “Since uncertainty is about what’s going to happen in the future, if you’re completely absorbed in the present, then it seems likely that uncertainty will impact your stress less.”

Energy firm says its nuclear-waste fueled diamond batteries could last thousands of years

A cell phone power source that lasts nine years. An auto-battery pack that lasts nearly a century. A pacemaker that is powered to last 28,000 years. These surreal claims are being made by a California-based battery company that says successful early test results recently competed on a nano-diamond battery brings them closer to realizing such claims.

The key to their revolutionary batteries is radioactive nuclear waste. There are massive quantities of leftover nuclear waste from nuclear plant facilities. Such waste is extremely toxic, lasts thousands of years, and poses a challenge when it comes to disposing of it (burying and encasing it) safely.

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September 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching, Listening to and Buying

September 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching, Listening to and Buying

What I Am Reading:

Comfort Is The Silent Killer Of Your Happiness

My motto is to always make myself uncomfortable. This article explains why a lot more eloquently than I ever have been able to. Things you’ll learn:The Nasty Things Comfort Does To UsYou’re Robbing Your Kids Of What They Need Most

Against Busyness and Surfaces: Emerson on Living with Presence and Authenticity

Two millennia after Seneca admonished against how living with haste and expectancy constricts our lives and more than half a century before Hermann Hesse made his case for the most important habit in living with presence, Emerson writes:

“Life goes headlong. Each of us is always to be found hurrying headlong in the chase of some fact, hunted by some fear or command behind us. Suddenly we meet a friend. We pause. Our hurry & embarrassment look ridiculous. Now pause, now possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of our own heart until it supersedes sun & moon & solar system in its expanding immensity. The moment is all, in all noble relations.”

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