👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and relentless like-bait drum. No fluff, and signal > noise⚡️
📚 Reading
🤯 Andy Warhol, Clay Christensen, and Vitalik Buterin walk into a bar:
NFTs and meme stocks are out at the bleeding edge of this betting economy, because they are largely untethered from traditional notions of value derived from profits in the operating economy. They might best be described as the tokens in a futures market for attention. Like tulips in 17th-century Holland, they represent a challenge to the very notion of “intrinsic value.”
20-minute read by Tim O’Reilly
🎮 Why You Should Ignore the Metagame:
[I]f you went to a top 10 university a decade ago, the career metagame was to go into management consulting or investment banking. However, in recent years this metagame has changed such that graduates from top universities are now joining big tech companies or tech startups. And now with everyone talking about web3, maybe future graduates will join DAOs instead of traditional centralized organizations. Once again, I’m not sure.
5-minute read by Nick Maggiulli in Of Dollars and Data
🧐 Class 1 / Class 2 Problems:
Whereas once the problem was “not everyone has this technology that doesn’t work very well” now the problem is “everyone has this technology that works very well.” [..] These kind of system challenges require a suite of extra-market levers, such emerging cultural norms, smart regulation, broad education, and reframing of the problem. These are soft, slower moving forces that are currently not given the attention they deserve.
6-minute read by Kevin Kelly
🎧 Listening
🧠 Neuroscience for Your Physical & Financial Health:
[W]hen you really understand the brain, you understand that the brain comes first. The brain comes first before the body. The brain tells the body what to do. And we weren't learning about the brain. My coach wasn't telling us about the brain [..] The thing that got me back into racing wasn't the fact that I regained my fitness. It was the fact that I had to train my brain to overcome the thoughts, or if you will, the past thoughts of getting hit
71 minutes with Louisa Nicola on Infinite Loops
🚀 Taking ownership, increasing velocity & cultivating talent:
Great products all start with great architecture [..] It sounds obvious, right, but when you look at what really happens in technology is that people approach things very, very incrementally. In other words, they take legacy technology, and they try to sort of roll that thing forward in terms of newer features and newer platforms and so on [..] Start with a clean sheet of paper, envision a great product and then work back to "well, how do we do this".
70 minutes with Frank Slootman on This Week in Startups
🤘 Interview with an Icon:
As society changes, and as technologies change society, and as (frankly also) society changes technologies: how much of what we experience as new is actually new versus how much is old? How many of the behavior patterns of societal change that we experience as brand new turn out to be quite old patterns [..] the further back I read the more universal things I find, and the more things I think are remarkable and unique to our own area turn out to be quite universal.
80 minutes with Marc Andreessen on The Knowledge Project
📬 Suggestions?
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