"You don't want to do things that are necessarily really hard for you or really lean into your disadvantage even if it would make a better story..." ~ Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on leaning into your unfair advantage... Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/who-makes-the-nba-ep-250 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLxgFHzHLU&t=3s
"If you're under six-foot tall, you have less than one-in-a-million chance of making the NBA. If you're seven feet or above, you have a one-in-seven chance..." ~ Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on why tall basketball players don't need to be that talented... Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/who-makes-the-nba-ep-250 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLxgFHzHLU&t=3s
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist and bestselling author, is known for his brilliant use of data to upend conventional wisdom - often with humorous, surprising, and occasionally shocking results. His latest book, Who Makes the NBA, uses data to interrogate some of basketball’s biggest questions, consistently yielding unexpected insights. Here’s…
“Look again at the universe. Is it behaving like a bag of chemicals randomly chosen with random properties, or is it behaving like a f*cking dog? It's behaving like a dog.” ~ Julian Gough 🐶 Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/the-egg-and-the-rock-ep-249 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5inYnDWWA&t=3s
"They don't have stars in the sky. They don't see a sun, they can't see planets. Would they ever dig through the ice a hundred miles and then fall into space?" ~ Julian Gough on the strange life of subterranean ice aliens... Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/the-egg-and-the-rock-ep-249 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5inYnDWWA&t=3s
“Eventually, we're going to tap anything that doesn't break the laws of physics.” ~ Julian Gough on why human progress bends toward man-made black holes... Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/the-egg-and-the-rock-ep-249 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5inYnDWWA&t=3s Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5inYnDWWA&t=3s
“The scientific method is in conflict with human nature. [...] So what you end up with is social ape dynamics inside scientific fields, that can lock them off from truth over time." ~Julian Gough on how new sciences descend from "start-up energy to corporate bloat..." Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/the-egg-and-the-rock-ep-249…
Julian Gough sums up his career as follows: “ I just sit in my room and write.” Well, I think being an acclaimed children’s author, novelist, radio and stage playwright, poet and top ten Irish musician is a little bit more impressive than he’s letting on… Oh, and I didn’t…
"The thought goes, if something is valuable to the world, you should be able to capture enough of its value to make it a good investment...” Here's Ben Reinhardt on why tech people don't do philanthropy... Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/speculative-technologies-ep-248 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49KOKVnGJAg&t=2426s
Here's Ben Reinhardt on Andrew Carnegie's lessons for government + philanthropy partnerships... "Carnegie would go to these towns and he'd say, 'Hey, I will pay for this library to be built, but you, the town, need to commit to paying operational expenses for this library.'" Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/speculative-technologies-ep-248…
“Many people in tech made a lot of money because someone in the past did really important research. And that person is not going to be able to capture the value of their research, because often there'll be someone who tried something, it failed, but it gave someone else the…
"It's ultimately an outgrowth of philosophy [...] And so there's this heavy focus on novelty. There's this heavy focus on, 'Oh, what's interesting?' [...] It's not well suited for what I would call invention or the creation of new useful technologies where it doesn't matter how new the idea is."…
Ben Reinhardt is the founder of Speculative Technologies “a nonprofit industrial research lab that’s working to unlock a wonderful, abundant future through technologies that don’t have a home in other institutions.” He has previously worked at NASA and Bay Area startups/VC firms, founded a startup building robotics for eldercare, and…
"...So I think that's one of the core learnings having built consumer companies over the last 15 years and invested in them too, is how do you build something and/or invest in something that is growing organically or that can grow organically, and how do you put those levers in…
Optimising for 'Aha' moments - the key to building successful consumer products🔑 More from Jay Reno in this week's episode of Infinite Loops. Watch the entire episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYs0i5GGTw4
If you've ever been curious about the whimsical world of credit card points, this week's episode of Infinite Loops will be treat...✈️ You won't find a better guide into this world than @jayjreno, Co-founder and CEO of Pointhound, whose mission is to help consumers get the most out of their…
In this week's episode of Infinite Loops, Jay Reno offers a masterclass in picking the right investor-partners... Watch the entire episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYs0i5GGTw4
My guest on Infinite Loops this week knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur from the time he was buying and selling things on eBay. Jay Reno claims he didn’t know what the word ‘arbitrage’ meant back then, but if you tug on the colourful threads of his career, you’d…
"I do think that learning how to get better at reallocating our attention, and at telling stories that excite ourselves and excite other people, is a far better way to engage with the daunting complexity of the world that we have made for ourselves.” ~ Michael Garfield... Links, highlights &…
“High turnover organizations are not enough. You can have a huge flow of talent through a building [...] and they can keep having amazing ideas that somebody had last year." ~ Michael Garfield on how to design an effective institution... Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/playing-the-mind-jazz-ep-246 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PL1XZ0a_V4&t=8s
"If we're going to optimize for anything, maybe we should optimize for a world in which we are capable of allocating resources to idle thinking and boredom and curiosity..." ~ Michael Garfield Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/playing-the-mind-jazz-ep-246 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PL1XZ0a_V4&t=8s
"Specialization is for insects." ~ Robert A. Heinlein Michael Garfield explains why weirdness is a perk... Links, highlights & transcript: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/playing-the-mind-jazz-ep-246 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PL1XZ0a_V4&t=8s
My guest today is Michael Garfield, a paleontologist, futurist, writer, podcast host and strategic advisor whose “mind-jazz” performances — essays, music and fine art — bridge the worlds of art, science and philosophy. This year, Michael received a $10k O’Shaughnessy Grant - https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/meet-our-2024-merchants-of-light) for his “Humans On the Loop” discussion…
"Stay in tune with the reality in front of you, which is not the baby crying on the plane. It's the fact that you are able to hurtle above the Pacific at 600 miles an hour to Asia, thanks to technology and thanks to capitalism.” ~ Max Meyer on resisting…