Medley 157: Selling Fast, Staying Rich, Aging Workers, Instagram, Pizza, Bread, Data, First Principles...
Happy Monday!
I'm headed to Mexico City on Wednesday for a long weekend, have any recommendations? I've never been there before but I've only heard great things so I'm excited to check it out.
I've been swamped (in a good way) with hiring work, so my publishing output has been a bit lower. It's exciting to be working on adding this many people to the team, though.
Last week Neil and I published our Made You Think episode on Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I wouldn't worry about spoilers if you haven't read it — there honestly isn't that much to spoil in the book, and we left the juicy theories for a follow-up episode. This one was fun to record, albeit a bit weirder than our other episodes.
And on the topic of hiring, Growth Machine is also looking for an Austin-based executive assistant if you know anyone who might be a good fit.
On to the Medley!
The World of Money
🚕 With the Uber IPO, a few people made a disgusting amount of money. Here are some rough estimates of how much. One theory I heard last week that I really like: part of the exodus from Silicon Valley to Austin, Seattle, and a few other states can be partially explained by people owning shares in companies that were going to IPO, and they wanted to establish residency in a state with no state income tax.
📊 Buying slow and selling fast is apparently bad advice. The first half is good, but selling fast makes investors much more prone to acting from their biases. In this study, investors would have done better to sell their holdings randomly , since the way they sold was so influenced by bias compared to their buying strategy. Goes to show the power of sunk cost and the endowment effect.
🏦 I like the ideas on investing discussed in this piece on "staying rich and maybe getting richer." Two ideas I particularly liked: one, that having more liquidity than recommended in a traditional portfolio is good for letting you buy things during a downturn. And two, the idea of optimizing for the "regret minimization" factor, that we can regret both large losses and foregone gains:
"We should build portfolios as regret minimizers and not utility maximizers. Note that regret minimization is subjective. We can regret both realized losses AND foregone gains."
🤳 This is a very small dataset, but it mirrors what I've been seeing with companies advertising investments. Instagram is dominating the share of ad spend, way above Facebook for many consumer products. I wonder what will come after Instagram?
👵 The American labor force is aging rapidly, with people working into older age than before and fewer young people coming into the labor force (and exiting it). This could be a leading indicator for economic stagnation, and a strong case for allowing more economic immigration.
🛩 When is the best time to buy a flight? The data for 2019 are in. Particularly interesting was how much the window shifted depending on what season you're flying in, though it makes sense once they explain it.
The World of Food
🍎 Here's a fun piece of news: top influencers give bad health advice 8 times out of 9. But, wait, there's more. This study used a whopping 9 influencers.
🙄 To be clear, I think most influencers in almost every industry are selling snake oil based on what has the highest affiliate commissions, but critiques like this are ridiculous. Taking 9 pieces of data and then using it to make broad generalizations about the industry is as bad as the Kardashians advertising a certain blend of teas is the secret to their good looks.
🍕 Pizza makes up about 61% of all food delivery. Andrew used to work with Uber, and I suspect that he's right that as Uber Eats and other delivery services get better, we'll see more and more foods become more "deliverable." Pizza has reigned because it keeps so well while being delivered, but when you can vertically integrate a food delivery company (kitchens, cars, storage, etc.) you could probably get food to people's doors at the same quality as if they got it in a restaurant.
🍞 You might have seen some shocking data on how wages have stayed stagnant over the last 30 years while the price of bread has massively increased. Financial Twitter was quick to point out that the data in the original tweet were horribly manipulated to show nominal prices vs. real wages. Here's the real data, and the news is good!
The World of Tools
📈 I spent a lot of time last week working on automating some of the SEO reporting work we do for Growth Machine, and one tool I'm absolutely loving now is Accuranker. It's kind of like Ahrefs without the keyword research stats, but with much more detailed specific rank tracking, and it has an API that other tools can plug into which has always been a huge weakness of Ahrefs.
🔮 The other new tool I'm really enjoying playing with is Google Data Studio. It gives you a canvas to pipe in data from a bunch of different sources to make custom dashboards, and it's been fantastic for creating high-level views of how our different clients are performing. I'll share one of those dashboards sometime in the next week. Also, we have a bunch of other tools we're using for content marketing, SEO, and general agency life in our tools post on the GM blog.
The World of Minds
🌁 What might immortality look like? Here are some interesting thoughts on it in a way that only Lou Keep can do.
🤝 Humans might not be so special in their ability to economically cooperate, according to this roundup of research from the team at Freakonomics.
🤔 This study found that saffron supplementation may be as effective in the short term as ADHD medication. It's interesting to think about why this might be. Anyone who's tried ADHD medication knows there's absolutely an experience of being on it, so did the saffron just provide a placebo effect? Did it provide some other stimulus that was interpreted as focus-providing (a sort of semi-placebo)? Were many participants misdiagnosed with ADHD?
🧠 First principle thinking is so hot right now, but it's usually a bad idea. Here's a good analysis of why it's overhyped as a panacea to innovation, and when to actually consider using it.
"The intuition behind first-principles reasoning is sound: there probably are coherent rules you can use to live a better life. Figuring out which rules will actually work is hard; figuring out which ones fail, though, is doable."
💪 There are many useful skills that are overlooked as being worth developing, usually because they're harder to measure or evaluate people on. Here are a few from Morgan Housel.
End Note
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Have a great week,
Nat