Medley 110: Hidden Motives, Interviews, Tech Migration, Remote Work, Mediterranean Diet, Myopia...
Happy Monday! People seemed to like the greater number of recommended reads last week, so I kept it up for this week.
New Cast : Neil and I dug into “The Elephant in the Brain” by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. It’s a fantastic guide to how we lie to ourselves about our true motives, and how we can better understand politics, education, laughter, relationships, talking, and much of our social life through these hidden motives.
ALSO : we now have a Patreon for the podcast so we don’t have to run ads. Joining gets you access to a place to discuss the show with us, our bonus recordings, book notes, and more, so check it out if you enjoy the show 🙂
New Notes : This week I added my notes on The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle. It’s one of the first works of virtue ethics, and was a big influence on pretty much all ethics that came after it. The beginning and end are excellent, the middle is kinda dull.
Interviews : I was also featured on “The Empowered Marketer” to talk about using SEO for ecommerce, as well as on “Wake Up to Freedom” to talk about lifestyle businesses and being a digital nomad.
I’ve really been enjoying the “Exponential View” email newsletter. The best endorsement I can give it is that it’s the only one that I consistently read every week, and click on multiple links from. Check it out here.
If you want to improve your copywriting, either for the web or for the real world, this slideshare on “how to write good” by ReferralCandy is fantastic. One of the better copywriting resources I’ve found.
Tiago Forte from Forte Labs has a new post out about the “Digital Productivity Pyramid,” and it’s a great way to think about personal output by going beyond just effectiveness or efficiency, and rather seeing the different tiers of your life and how working on the foundational levels feeds up into higher level but higher leverage abilities.
I’m planning to move out of NYC in the end of July, and this piece on “Tech’s Great Migration” captures some of the reasons. Basically, there’s really no reason to pay absurd NYC prices if you can be equally happy and successful somewhere like Austin. I think we’ll see a lot more people leave major cities in the coming decade, especially as self driving tech, ridesharing, and even more fringe stuff like hyper loop and self-driving helicopters get more popular.
If you’re looking for a reading list, and already finished all the Made You Think books, this collection of 50 books to understand everything in the universe looks promising.
For people who work on remote teams, or who are planning on trying remote work, this article covers some of the research that’s been going on around how well remote teams work. Two parts I thought were particularly interesting were that remote work reduces race & sex biases, and also that it works better when the work is well understood, less when there’s uncertainty about what’s going on.
That big study on the Mediterranean diet’s heart benefits was recently retracted for using too strong of language about the purported benefits.
Short-sightedness has gotten insanely common around the world, and it looks like sunlight might be the culprit. Kids may need ~3 hours of sunlight per day for their eyes to develop properly, but with all the focus on school, and indoor activities, they’re not getting it.
Two short ones: this guy stole mail from UPS just by filling out a USPS change of address form to move their corporate headquarters to his house. And the Washington Capitals took out a great ad in Vegas newspapers after winning the Stanley Cup.
Have a great week!
Nat