My Top 10 Media of 2023
I get the sense that after I put this out, I would remember a piece of media that was my absolute favorite. So this is the top 10 I can remember as of the time of publishing. I got kinda lazy writing this so some pieces have more description than others.
There is a lot of crypto stuff, I would like you to check out some of the crypto pieces (especially if you are a skeptic and let me know what you think).
I am writing some of this on route San Francisco, just saw someone reading an actual newspaper, now that’s what you call media.
Articles
- Relentlessly Resourceful — Paul Graham
This has become my life/professional philosophy. Be Relentlessly Resourceful!
- Web 3.0 and the future of trust — Ali Yahya, a16Z Crypto
A lot of people tend to view crypto/blockchain primarily through the lens of financialization and speculation. However, there is a much deeper philosophical dimension to it. This piece serves as a simple explanation of the philosophy and meaning behind this technological revolution, focusing on the fundamental human motivation of trust. It explores how this technology enhances the efficiency of trust. I consider this exploration important because the ultimate goal for humans is survival. As a social species, cooperation towards the common goal of survival necessitates trust. Traditionally, trust has been a challenging problem to solve, and we all have trust issues to some extent. The article perfectly describes the interplay between Web 3 and trust.
- How to Do Great Work —Paul Graham
As the name implies, a pretty long piece but one that should be read if you have aspirations of doing great work or being a master at your craft.
Classic!
Don’t think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you a “big break.” Even if this were true, the best way to get it would be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential people.
And don’t take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection committees are only meaningful to the extent that they’re part of a feedback loop, and very few are.
- How To Be Successful — Sam Altman
Similar to the Paul Graham piece above, PG’s mentee Sam Altman with his own meditation on what is takes to be succesful. Way shorter than How to Do Great Work.
I think the biggest competitive advantage in business — either for a company or for an individual’s career — is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.
- Modern Meditations: Ann-Miura Ko— Mario Gabrielle
Ann-Miura Ko has become one of my favorite investors, I loved this piece. Modern Meditations is such a good series where Mario Gabrielle from The Generalist asks interesting people meditative questions. She spoke about Yale’s great former CIO David Swenson, who I read when I initially got interested in investing and really shaped my views on the topic.
- Modern Meditations: Reed Hoffman — Mario Gabrielle
The philosopher king — jokes that’s Marcus Aurelius. Reed Hoffman the philosopher investor, the perfect person for Modern Meditations.
- My techno-optimism — Vitalik Buterin
A gem. The first of many Vitalik, I see this as the perfect balance of being a technology optimist while still being thoughtful about what path you take and what that means for humanity as opposed to moving forward at all costs or slowing down at all costs. Vitalik is an intellectual tour-de-force.
- The Techno-Optimist Manifesto — Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen as impressive as ever.
- ASML: A Monopoly on Magic — Mario Gabrielle
The most important company you have never heard of. They are an actual monopoly being the sole provider of EUV lithography machines. These machines use extreme ultraviolet light to create the world’s most powerful semiconductor chips. These machines are used by TSMC to make the chips that run the modern world.
- Why AI Will Save The World — Marc Andreessen
Mark Andreessen here makes a compelling case about why we should accelerate AI development and presented interesting arguments against AI doomerism. I do not know where I stand on this debate, somewhere in the middle? I definitely think we should continue to develop our technologies as a society but it would be helpful to watch out for negative externalities.
I am interested to see the effect an AI driven world would have on consumer welfare. As argued in this piece I believe the effect will be positive.
As per usual, Marc Andreessen impresses with his knowledge of history.
Third, California is justifiably famous for our many thousands of cults
Definitely my highlight of the piece lol.
Books
- How Will You Measure Your Life — Clayton Christensen
Clayton Christensen of The Innovators Dilemma fame wrote this soulful text before he passed. The book examines the question in the title, I 100% recommend this read. Clay also shows flashes of his legendary business writing in the book. Great stuff.
- There Was a Country — Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe’s memoir from the period of the Nigerian Civil War was especially interesting because he was Igbo, aligning him with the Biafran side during the conflict. We know history is written by the victors but it was important to get an account from the side that did not win the conflict. As a Nigerian, this was significant to me, offering the most vivid recollection of a monumental part of Nigeria’s history. The memoir directly and indirectly examines the effects of colonization and amalgamation on the then-state of Africa (Nigeria), and it still holds parallels today. I loved it. I would also recommend Achebe’s African Trilogy, which includes Things Fall Apart, the novel that won him a Nobel Prize.
- Proof Of Stake — Vitalik Buterin
A lot of Vitalik here, this book is a collection of Vitalik’s essays. I would consider it a philosophy book. It covers topics like what a blockchain is and its philosophy, the founding of Ethereum, Proof of Stake, Proof of Work, governance etc. If you are curious about why blockchains/crypto should exist and want a not so technical answer, this is the book. Loved it.
A blockchain is a magic computer that anyone can upload programs to and leave the programs to self-execute, where the current and all previous states of every program are always publicly visible, and which carries a very strong cryptoeconomically secured guarantee that programs running on chain will continue to execute in exactly the way the blockchain protocol specifies.
- A Monetary and Fiscal history of the United States, 1961–2021 — Alan S Binder
As the name suggests it goes through monetary (federal reserve) policy and fiscal (government) policy through that 60 year period. What especially made this book great is how much it paints the characters (presidents, federal reserve chairs, treasury secretaries and other big players in economic policy) and how the interaction between the characters and their personal/ political ideologies shaped the country’s economic policy. Even though this is a factual book with a lot of economic data within it, it was a great story.
- The Information: A history, A Theory, A Flood — James Gleick
This was a great book; it provided a history of information, tracing our evolution from communicating with African talking drums to the information theory/Bell Labs era and the digital age of today. The book offered a compelling mix of the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind our collective urge to collect and transmit information, as well as the ‘how’ — the systems we use to pursue and, in some cases, achieve this goal. As someone who works extensively with data, this was an excellent philosophical text that validates the work I do.
- 7 Powers — Hamilton Helmer
The best book on competitive strategy, it simplifies the thinking about your competitive positioning into seven easy-to-understand categories. It provides a clearer path to understanding your competitive position succinctly. Having interacted with Porter’s 5 forces and SWOT analysis, when compared to the framework presented in 7 Powers, they don’t seem as well-equipped to lead you to a more conclusive idea of your business’s competitive position.
Hamilton Helmer has spent his whole career being a business strategist and also a Ph.D in economics.
- Benjamin Franklin: An American Life — Walter Isaacson
What a guy! A journeyman and innovator at heart. Ben Franklin was a true polymath from his experimentations with electricity to his experimentations with nation building. I loved every second of this book.
- Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. — Ron Chernow
A fascinating story of the Grit and force of nature John D Rockefeller. Apart from being a fascinating story there are some major historical events like the beginning of the first major trust (Standard Oil company) and also anti-trust regulation that ended up breaking up this trust. This is a long dense book but boy was it a treat.
- The Creative Act: A Way Of Being — Rick Rubin
A meditation on creativity, such a soulful read. If you do not think you have a creative bone in your body, read this and be inspired.
Classic!
Honorable Mentions
- Trust — Hernan Diaz
The only fiction book to make the list this year. Was a great book exploring a particular relationship around the great depression. It’s really nice of you like psychoanalysis. I can’t think of any details that won’t give away the story so I strongly reccomend you pick this one up.
- The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI — Marcus Du Sautoy
This book was written before the proliferation of LLM based products like Chat GPT so it is prescient. The writer being a mathematician also theorized about how AI and computational machines will begin to take the place of all manual proofs and I think this can open mathematics to more people, by removing the mundane parts mathematics can them become subject to pure creativity. I am not traditionally great at mathematics but if you can eliminate the mundane, I believe I can use creativity to begin to try things out in mathematics — so I hope. For a book that is about computation and mathematics, it was very soulful. Great writing
How do we develop the skills to navigate the complexities of language? Our human code is shaped and fashioned by years of verbal interaction with other humans. As children we are exposed to the way language works, we make mistakes, we learn. With the new tools of machine learning, could algorithms finally learn to process natural language? The internet has a huge data set of examples in use. So why can’t we just let an algorithm loose on the internet to learn for itself how to navigate the ambiguities inherent in these sentences?
- Hackers and Painters — Paul Graham
A collection of Paul Graham essays, pretty good stuff. I especially enjoyed his musings on programming languages
Podcasts
- A conversation with Charlie Munger & John Collison — Invest Like The Best
RIP Charlie, a facsinating conversation with the co-founder of Stripe. I always love the opportunity to hear Charlie talk. This particular interview is prescient since it was recorded shortly before Charlie passed and released shortly after.
RIP to every nerds spiritual grandfather.
- Philosophy of Web 3 — Things to Think About
As the name implies, always love hearing Scott Duke Kominers talk.
NVIDIA Part I & II were great on their own; their story is truly fascinating (I think those came out last year). This episode was a masterpiece as well, providing a brief history of how we entered the LLM era of AI and highlighting how NVIDIA, partly by chance and partly by design, became leaders in chips for AI workloads.
- Ben Horowitz on What Traditional VC Gets Wrong — Turpentine VC
I am fascinated with a16z so it is always a treat to hear musings on how the firm is built and how they firm looks to evolve in the future.
- Holiday Special 2023 — Acquired
I love this episode because it was reflective. I enjoyed Ben and David discussing the evolution of Acquired from its beginnings to the business it has become. I always love hearing the ‘why’ of things, and they spoke a lot about the ‘why’ of Acquired, how it is interwoven with their history, and the decisions about their future. Loved it!
I am an information enthusiast; the transfer of knowledge is crucial for our collective survival and prosperity. It is of the utmost importance that information is preserved and passed down from generation to generation. This is precisely what Sam Williams and Arweave are striving to achieve — the digital library of Alexandria. Arweave is designed as a permanent web within an open ledger, ensuring that all data and applications deployed on it are stored indefinitely. Williams delves into the philosophical significance of this endeavor and what not — Definitely recommend.
- Vitalik Buterin on Cryptoeconomics and Markets in Everything — Conversations with Tyler
I always love to hear Vitalik talk, he is a tour-de-force. In this conversation with Tyler Cowen they go into cryptoeconomcs and some philosophy. Treat!
- Vitalik Buterin’s Philosophy: d/acc — Bankless
This was basically the interview version of the piece I listed above My techno-optimism by Vitalik. It is definitely a good companion to the article.
- The business of football — Business Breakdowns
I am a huge football (soccer) fan, I would take any opportunity to listen to the business behind the game I love — nuff said!
- Brandon Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla and Brave — Lex Fridman Show
I am currently learning how to code and I have gravitated towards JavaScript. The ‘why’ behind things helps me better understand it so it was interesting to hear the story of why JavaScript was made and how it has developed. It was also a nice bit of tech history. He also spoke about Brave browser which is interesting in its own right
I wish you all a happy new year!
