Medley 140: CRM, BIG, Leukemia, Bounties, Marriage, Produce, Salary, Easter...
Happy Monday! I hope you had a good first full workweek of 2019. Let's get into the Medley for this week...
New Article : “An Easy, Fast, Personal CRM for Making and Maintaining Friendships” I started using Airtable to keep track of everyone I’ve been meeting and interacting with, so I can stay in touch better. Here’s how I have it set up right now, and a template you can copy.
New Interview : And this week I was on the Quuu podcast to talk about content marketing and SEO, and growing Growth Machine over the last year.
This video of B.I.G freestyling in Brooklyn when he was 17 (!!) is insane. I want to watch the whole documentary now.
Here’s a terrifying story of how easily someone like a bounty hunter can gain access to your phone’s location data and track you down… for only a few hundred dollars! All of the telecom companies are responding by saying they’re going to prevent things like this from happening in the future, but we’ll see.
In another demonstration of antifragility, this doctor believes that not exposing kids to enough toxins and bacteria at a young age could be increasing their susceptibility to Leukemia, among other diseases. He even came up with a sort of “bacterial cocktail” you can give kids to help stress and develop their immune system.
Related to that, the Joe Rogan and Johnathan Haidt interview is fantastic (check your podcast app), and Haidt mentions how he lets his 8 year old daughter walk six blocks to buy bagels on Sunday morning, since she has a special watch that lets her call home and him track her. As he points out, it’d take something like 100,000 years for your kid to get abducted if you left them in the car in a parking lot in a normal neighborhood, so the risks are way overblown.
Okay one more thing on that note: I can’t remember which podcast I heard it on now (maybe Peter Attia’s) but apparently the immune system is designed to be a learning system, so if you don’t stress it the way the doctor in the Guardian article is talking about, it literally does not develop the strengths it needs to protect you. It doesn’t work “out of the box,” so to speak, and it needs to be challenged.
I’ve been getting Imperfect Produce for a couple months now and really love the service. You select a bunch of fruits and vegetables they send you each week from whatever they have in stock that “failed spec” for selling in grocery stores. Usually it’s the surplus, or funny looking foods, but it still all tastes the same, so you’re getting perfectly fine produce for a lot less and you’re forced to mix up what you order.
Here’s a depressing statistic: if a woman makes more than a man in a marriage, that marriage is more likely to break up. Apparently men are insecure about making less money than their wives, which isn’t a huge surprise, but it’s sad to see that it affects marriage and divorce rates as much as it does.
A cool analysis: these cities give you the biggest delta between your expected salary and the cost of living. A lot of them are secondary cities outside growing metropolitan areas. It lends credence to the idea of savable income, that your salary isn’t what matters, it’s how it relates to the cost of everything else.
And here’s a cool theory about the head statues on Easter Island: they may have been used to mark the locations of fresh water.
Have a great week!
Nat