This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
Happy Monday!
I published a short piece over the weekend: Making Money, Making Happiness, about the different psychological effects of making money different ways, and how we can seek out more satisfying forms of income.
I also updated my mega post on Roam with a new section on how I use it as a Personal CRM. It's much, much better for creating a CRM than Airtable or other solutions. It's the first nearly effortless solution I've found.
And I added three books (!!) to my Brain notes! Two books on branding: Building a Story Brand, and Obviously Awesome, as well as a few quotations I liked from the fiction book Three Body Problem (highly recommend).
Alright, on to the Medley!
🤓 This edition of the Medley is sponsored by one of my all-time favorite SEO tools: Clearscope! If you have a blog and you want more search traffic, Clearscope is the best tool for the job. It lets you easily assess the SEO strength of a post before you publish it, and we use it for every single article we write at Growth Machine. My site gets 500,000+ visitors per month now, and I owe much of that growth to using Clearscope.
🍎 I liked the simplicity of Peter Attia's "Nutritional Framework." Here's how he puts it: "It comes down to three forms of restriction. Whether it’s what you eat or don’t eat (i.e., dietary restriction or DR), how much you eat (i.e., caloric restriction or CR), or when you eat and don’t eat (i.e., time restriction or TR), virtually all of the dietary schemes you can think of can be distilled into these three elements in some combination."
💆♂️ And on the topic of Mental Health, this article was a fun challenge to the popular Minimalist and Marie Kondo ideas. One quotation: "Kondo promises the illusion of choice. You decide what stays in your house, but she tells you exactly how it should be folded, stored and displayed – in other words, how you should relate to it."
🥩 Here's an interesting study from Japan: meat consumption only plays a weak influence in the difference in carbon footprints between households. The factors that drove most of the difference in carbon footprint were eating out, confectionary, and alcohol.
👩💻 I enjoyed this article from David Brooks on the "Bernie Sanders Fallacy," despite how much pushback it got. I agree that he might have gotten some details wrong, but the core message is important: There's a significant and growing productivity gap between top people and companies and the bottom, and that productivity gap is creating a greater income gap. If we want to reduce inequality, one method would be to find ways to help everyone take better advantage of the dramatic productivity gains provided by intelligent use of technology. From the article:
"The job of public policy is to make it easier for everybody to do what successful people are doing. Productivity is the key to national prosperity. Every time we increase productivity for one person, we all thrive a little more, together."
🤑 Nick Maggiulli whipped out some cool research in his article on The Investor's Fallacy. Supposedly if history were to repeat itself, based on past trends with market drawdowns and rallies, we could see the S&P 500 in 2030 at 4x where it is today. That's a pretty big difference from all the speculations on the looming recession.
💡 Good Businesses Have Margins, but the profit margin is less important than the other ones: margin for your time, sanity, physical health. "You're a human, and humans need breathing room."
♟ Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex shared a fascinating short piece about how a text prediction program was able to play decently good chess simply by being fed millions of written chess games. What other kinds of rudimentary AI could be made just based on text prediction? Probably a lot of very basic customer service roles, for one.
🔪 I really enjoyed the second season of YOU on Netflix. You can see how much higher the production value is now that Netflix has taken it over, the supporting characters in this season were much stronger.
🧘♀️ It's disturbing, but the Bikram documentary is also quite good. It feels like there are a lot of parallels to the Cosby story. Insane fame, crazy personality, this idea that other people are dying to give you what you want... not a good combo.
🤬 If you need a video that keeps on giving, check out this... preacher? Gracing the fine people of Wal-Mart.
🤳 And this story of a bunch of 17-22 year olds buying a mansion in LA to do Tik-tok together is wild. Nothing crazy happens in it, I just can't believe this is a thing now. Good for them though.
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Have a great week,
Nat