Category: Thinks

Zoya Hasan: “India is a thriving democracy when it comes to elections but a diminishing democracy when it comes to equality and freedoms.”

Arnold Kling: “The [US] Federal government spends money on many things. It regulates many areas. One may think of it as a sprawling conglomerate. Because government is not a business, we do not think of it as having management problems. But it does. When FEMA is disappointing, when the CDC has lost focus, when the Obamacare web site crashes on introduction, these are all reflections of management problems. From a management theory perspective, the Federal government is a nightmare. There are agencies with overlapping responsibilities. There are agencies with goals that are in conflict, and there is no formal mechanism to resolve such conflicts…We would move in the direction of having a government that does a few things well rather than many things poorly.”

Pilita Clark: “Out of the blue earlier this year, a man I have known for years sent me an email introduction to one of his work contacts that was such a striking example of the genre that it has stuck in my mind ever since. In the space of a few charming words, he conveyed the brilliance of the contact, who was copied into the mail, and larded his description of me so lavishly that I barely recognised myself. He promised both of us we would have much to gossip about and would undoubtedly hit it off, all of which proved to be true when we duly caught up in person.  This, I thought later, did exactly what an email introduction should do. Produce a meeting that is useful, mutually beneficial and fun.”

Debashis Basu: “India’s economy has long been characterised by modest growth cycles, rarely experiencing recession, but also failing to achieve sustainable acceleration…Right now, both private consumption and capex are weak and declining, despite strong balance sheets. If the government wants to know why this is so, it will have to get industry to talk frankly and implement many radical steps. This hardly seems probable. More likely, the economy would continue on its natural course of modest growth, as it is supposed to.”

The Hindu: “It is a fact that all parties endorse the freebie culture, then struggle to fulfil their promises, or fulfil them leaving the State in a financial crisis. The problem is that parties often confuse freebies with welfarism: while freebies are meant solely to attract votes and do not strengthen the public good, welfare initiatives, such as the public distribution system, are meant for the long-term benefit of society. Freebies may be smart politics and certainly help parties get immediate gains, but exemplify bad economics.”

Lord Acton: Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active. [via CafeHayek] Donald Boudreaux: “Power is so persistent because it is the only means by which the greedy and the arrogant amongst us – of whom there are many – can get us to do their bidding without them having to give to us at least equal value in return. Even the private corporation that currently ‘dominates’ some industry classification must offer workers wages that workers find attractive, and offer its customers bargains that customers find attractive. In contrast, people with genuine power are able to get other people to do their bidding, not by offering to make these other people better off, but by threatening to make them worse off if they disobey the power-holders’ commands.”

FT: “Steve Ballmer…has made it his mission to build a better democracy with data. Ahead of next Tuesday’s US election, he has been trying to turn USAFacts, a not-for-profit civic initiative, into a source of dispassionate statistics to inform the country’s enraged debates. “I think of . . . the twin towers of America as democracy and capitalism — and they both have to work well,” the self-styled centrist said…“This is a small contribution we might be able to make on the democracy side.” USAFacts has its roots in Ballmer’s efforts to understand where his own tax dollars were going. He launched it in 2017 as an effort to “understand government by the numbers”.”

Oliver Burkeman: “In an attention economy, the truly valuable commodity isn’t the news itself but your eyeballs. Even the most responsible media organization, activist group or political campaign is incentivized to present each story or cause as even more alarming than the next, in an effort to win the attentional arms race. It’s easy to find yourself, metaphorically speaking, living inside the news cycle — treating the latest campaign developments or polling data as somehow more real than your home, career, neighborhood or friends. It’s a grim irony that many people thus mesmerized by the news feel themselves to be fighting for democracy’s survival, when the total colonization of inner life by politics is a traditional hallmark of totalitarianism. It would be one thing if this nervous fixation at least helped us make a difference in the wider world. And it can seem that way: Scrolling, sharing and refreshing on social media certainly simulates the feeling of efficacy, as if you’re acting on the news, not just watching it in slack-jawed panic. But the attempt to care about everything impedes taking concrete action on anything.”

Jason Lemkin: “So as we head into a New Year, it’s time.  To build 3 fairly straightforward plans: Your base plan (C60), your stretch plan (C10/20); and a “worst case” plan (C90). C = Confidence You’ll Hit It.”

FT offers a tutorial on bonds: “Pretty much everyone involved gets a bit stressed by rising bond yields — both bondholders and bond issuers. How can rising yields be bad for both? It’s a jam today versus jam tomorrow thing. If you own bonds and yields are rising, the prices of your bonds are falling. So if owning bonds is your way to make a quick buck, rising yields are a bad thing. But if you don’t yet own bonds, rising yields offer the chance to lock in better future returns. If you have issued bonds and their yields rise/ prices fall on secondary markets, you may not care — especially if you don’t intend to repay the old bonds with new bonds. But for everyone else who needs to issue fresh bonds to repay maturing ones (like the, erm, UK government), rising bond yields will translate into higher coupons being set on the new debt. From this perspective, rising yields look like a bad thing.”

Fabricio Bloisi: “The only valuable thing in a business is its people and its culture — the way it innovates, communicates and adapts. What makes a company special is not what it can invest in or its products, but how it moves and adapts. It is very important that one has a very good team that can envision the future together, and they can make it happen and they can be in power and keep innovating. The biggest barrier will be to not have a strong team. That is my biggest objective.”

John Jumper on the big scientific problems he is most excited about tackling: “Really two things. I think one is simply that protein structure prediction will take us into drug development, be it small molecule or via protein design. This is just really, really exciting — that we will get qualitatively better at these problems in the next few years. The other one is really how AlphaFold can be used to inform how we understand more and more of the cell. And we’re seeing things like figuring out how proteins come together. We’re seeing larger and larger systems studied with AlphaFold and really creative uses. We’ll keep doing this, and it’ll get us out to really understanding the cell in a way that changes our science. That is really exciting to me.”

NYTimes: “Over decades of research, [Adam] Przeworski developed a theory that has become part of the bedrock of political science: that democracy is best understood as a game, one in which the players pursue power and resolve conflicts through elections rather than brute force. Democracies thrive when politicians believe they are better off playing by the rules of that game — even when they lose elections — because that’s the way to maximize their self-interest over time. To create those conditions, Przeworski found, it is crucial for the stakes of power to remain relatively low, so that people don’t fear electoral defeat so much that they seek other methods — such as coups — of reversing it. That means winners of elections need to act with restraint: They can’t “grab too much” and make life miserable for the losers, or foreclose the possibility that future elections would allow the losers to win. “When these conditions are satisfied,” Przeworski told me, “then democracy works.””

McKinsey: “Marketing leaders must deliver across four pillars of marketing excellence. They need to execute a clear marketing strategy with insight-led growth, produce best-in-class efficiency and effectiveness via marketing performance, and champion the latest and highest-impact tech-enabled marketing use cases, all while building a fit-for-purpose operating model. These pillars aren’t new, but success now requires that leaders build new capabilities that were once considered beyond the remit of the traditional marketing organization.”

NYTimes: “Many people naturally gravitate toward ambitious goals that are the traditional markers of success, like landing a dream job or winning an award. These kinds of targets can be highly motivating, said Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. But, she cautioned, whether you actually achieve them is usually at least partially out of your control. That’s not all bad. Outcome goals can get you off the blocks, she said. But if you miss your target, she said, falling short can be profoundly disappointing. Had I been singularly focused on running a certain time in Boston, for example, “Well, that may be your last marathon,” she said. Instead, she recommends focusing on the work you do to set yourself up for success.”

George Will: “Most Americans probably would recoil from living in a hypothetical country where: Payments from government entitlement programs — transfer payments — are the fastest-growing major component of citizens’ personal income. Such transfers are the third-largest source of personal income: In 2022, the average citizen received almost as much from government transfers ($11,500) as from investments ($12,900), and more than one-quarter as much money as was obtained from work. This average citizen received six times more (adjusted for inflation) in government transfer payments than in 1970, during which span income from other sources increased less than half as much. Transfers’ share of total (inflation-adjusted) personal income has more than doubled since 1970, from 8.2 percent to 17.6 percent in 2022. Actually, this is not a hypothetical country. It is the United States.”

NYTimes: “For all of human history, the natural sugars in fruits, vegetables and other plants have served us well. They have provided essential fuel for our body’s most important processes. But now that sugars have been processed into more potent forms and added to so many foods and drinks — sodas, candies, breakfast cereals, salad dressings, breads — most of us are getting more sugar than our bodies were meant to handle. Over time, excess consumption of these added sugars can increase the risk of health problems…On average, people in the United States consume about 67 grams of added sugars per day. Nearly two-thirds of that amount comes from sugary drinks, sweet snacks, desserts and candy. But added sugars are also found in many packaged products like condiments, pasta sauces, sliced breads, granola and sweetened yogurts. You can check the “added sugars” line on nutrition labels to see if any are present. You may be surprised by what you find.”

David Henderson: “Free trade causes us to produce the goods and services in which our producers have a comparative advantage, which is really nothing more than a cost advantage, and to buy the goods and services for which producers in other countries have a comparative (or cost) advantage. Moreover, those who worry about a trade deficit need to realize that the counterpart is a capital surplus. The larger our trade deficit, the greater is the net amount of foreign capital coming into our country.”

WSJ: “I picked up a book called “Why Buddhism Is True” by the journalist Robert Wright. I’m not sure why it suddenly caught my attention. It had been in our house for years. But there it was, collecting dust. I read it in a weekend. Wright weaves his own story of embracing Vipassana—widely known as “insight” meditation—with a survey of how reams of research in neurobiology and psychology all confirm what the Buddha and his disciples have been saying for centuries: Our torments, like our hopes, are illusions. Anxiety can be controlled through concentration. There are paths to contentment within the mind.”

NYTimes: “A.I. software, though, changes all the accounting. By using every available frame of Hanks’s movie career to capture his facial movements and the look of his skin under countless lighting conditions, physical environments, camera angles and lenses, Metaphysic’s artists can generate a digital Tom Hanks mask with the click of a few keystrokes. And what we see onscreen is just one factor in A.I.’s ascendancy. “It’s the quality, and it’s the speed, and it’s the cost,” Ulbrich said. No six-month production lag, no fortune spent.”

WSJ: ““The Inner Clock” [book] offers a rich history of what makes us tick, so to speak, paired with fascinating modern discoveries about how circadian rhythms influence our daily lives. We now understand that sleepless nights erode our health, leading to an increased risk of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, depression and more. We’ve also learned how to optimize our biological clocks: There are “right” times of day to take medicine, pass tests, exercise and eat. Our ancestors were not meant to be up and working after dark, and so we have digestive systems designed for lengthy downtime; even our gut flora rhythmically fluctuate during the day. Time-restricted eating has been called a life-giver, a means of enhancing longevity. Which is why a pizza at midnight is never a good idea.”

FT: “Almost 20 years ago, Intel made a decision that changed the course of computing history. Soon after Apple started putting Intel inside its Mac computers in 2005, Steve Jobs pitched the chipmaker’s then chief executive, Paul Otellini, on its top-secret plan to break into the mobile phone business. Intel turned down Jobs — and what would become the iPhone. One result of Intel’s decision was to hand UK-based tech group Arm an effective monopoly on the chip designs that now power virtually every mobile phone, a $500bn market that is more than twice the size of the PC industry. Thanks to its uniquely energy efficient technology, Arm is now using that same platform to outpace Intel again in the era of artificial intelligence, as Big Tech companies spend billions of dollars to build massive new power-guzzling data centres.”

The Generalist: “The worst thing a VC can do is miss an outlier business. You should beat yourself up for these mistakes, dissect them from every angle, and conduct a post-mortem. Why did you pass on Uber at the Series A? What was the rationale that talked you out of Square at the seed? Spend more time on these misses than on the deals you backed that never took off…Stay close to startups you wish you’d invested in. If you prove your worth, they may invite you to invest ahead of the next round or in a future financing. Even if that doesn’t transpire, you’ll have a relationship with a promising entrepreneur who may deliver useful introductions or start another business.”

Scaling Through Chaos, a book by Martin Mignot of Index Ventures. “Living through high-growth is highly uncomfortable. And it should be. Founding a startup that scales rapidly is not a common path. If you choose to walk it, you’ll be breathing rarefied air. We haven’t written Scaling Through Chaos to make the journey easy for you. No one could do that. But what we can do is systematically break down twenty years’ worth of data and insights into how the world’s fastest growing and most successful startups have scaled the mountain, taking the kernel of a crazy idea and turning it into a highly impactful company…What this book gives you is a set of best practices and shortcuts about how to hire people, how to stretch them, how to organize them—all of which helps you achieve scale faster. It relieves you of the mental burden of reinventing the wheel of people management, so you can play with the stuff that demands creativity—things like product, growth and technology. It frees you up to innovate where it matters.”

WSJ: “A nuclear power plant creates energy by splitting atoms, a process that creates heat that then generates steam to generate electricity. Nuclear power plants typically use uranium-based fuel for this process. The process initially requires an external source of neutrons to split uranium atoms. Once the process starts, atoms start releasing heat, radiation and more neutrons as they get split—a chain reaction. Small modular reactors do the same thing but are produced in a factory. They are typically under 350 MW. Some can be as small as 1 to 10 MW…SMRs come with the potential to solve some of nuclear energy’s biggest headaches: Cost, safety and time—at least, in theory. That is why tech companies’ backing is so crucial. The industry needs to test and learn before it can prove out the benefits.”

VentureBeat: “”Autonomous agents are one of the hottest topics and perhaps one of the most hyped topics in gen AI today,” Gartner distinguished VP analyst Arun Chandrasekaran said at the Gartner Symposium/Xpo…Four key trends are emerging around gen AI — autonomous agents chief among them.” Among other trends: multimodality, open-source AI, and edge AI.”

John Cochrane: “Every bit of economics says that the common market, the European Union, and the euro should have boosted European economies. Why should one, big, integrated market languish 30% or so behind the US, and now fall behind? The hard to quantify drag of over regulation is an obvious answer.” [via Arnold Kling]

McKinsey: “Leading a global organization in today’s fragmented world is difficult—perhaps more difficult than ever. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 and the acceleration of geopolitical tensions, leadership teams have faced an increasing number of uncertainties and disruptions. These include the sudden emergence of upending technologies, such as generative AI; the energy transition; and a global workforce seeking more autonomy, empowerment, flexibility, and mobility. There is a compounding and interconnected effect across all these disruptions—and less and less time for leaders to react to them. We estimate that ten years ago, CEOs and top teams typically focused on four or five critical issues at any one point in time; today, the number is double that.”

Tufan Erginbilgiç: “There’s a big difference between restructuring and transformation. Transformation, to my mind, is more ambitious. It’s taking the company from point A to point B, where getting to point B opens more potential for the company.”

NYTimes: “Starbucks is also a victim of its own success. It pioneered the customized coffee drink, allowing customers to add an extra espresso shot, two pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup and matcha cream cold foam to top it off. A simple cup of coffee became an expression of individualism or caloric abandon. But those eight-ingredient drinks can take a couple of minutes to make. And with more than a third of transactions in recent quarters coming from mobile app orders, that can lead to long waits for customers who order in person. “The traditional Starbucks experience is being greeted by name, having a friendly conversation with the barista and given a drink that tastes good,” said Ari Bray, a barista…“When there is a 15-minute wait and nobody can talk to you because they’re so slammed, that’s not a good experience for anyone.””

Vinod Khosla: “Imagine a world that operates by public transport in which your ride arrives the moment you need it. You travel directly to your destination — no stops, no transfers — at a fraction of the cost and environmental impact of both individual cars and high-speed trains. Best of all, this kind of system doesn’t require us to tear up our streets. It fits within the margins of our existing infrastructure, and would only require marginal incremental infrastructure investment. Self-driving, on-demand robotaxi pods could change the way we move around cities and dramatically increase throughput of our congested streets. We should be building fleets of these lightweight, low-cost electric vehicles. Known as personal rapid transit systems (PRT), they can travel along narrow, dedicated pathways closed off to all other forms of transport and passengers can get on and off them anywhere they choose.”

Rama Bijapurkar: “There are strong consumer-based reasons to explain the poor urban sales in mid-market categories. The Reserve Bank of India consumer confidence survey, which is (surprisingly) a large urban towns survey, shows deteriorating consumer perceptions compared to last year on almost all counts. Households in the third- and fourth-highest income quintiles have very little surplus income, and in high inflation times this is wiped out. They buy less, sadly for some companies, or “down trade”, happily for others, whose sales equity analysts may not be tracking. The Indian consumer market is getting more complex.  Old paradigms and dominant logics need to be replaced with deeper, more nuanced understanding of cause and effect.”

Cremieux: “For almost the entire time humans spent dispersing throughout the world’s major landmasses, they roamed as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Before the advent of sedentism and the closely-related phenomenon of agriculture, hunter-gatherers lived everywhere man can be found today, from its more resource-poor, desolate locales to the places we might have once considered Edenic. Where man could go, man went, and he subsisted much like man anywhere else. Then, suddenly, in a five to seven thousand year burst, no fewer than seven locations independently developed agriculture. These locations did not adopt agriculture from one another, were not engaged in long-distance trade with each other, and weren’t even related by conquest; there was no cultural exchange that explains how all of these places took to the plough and the field simultaneously, and yet they did…Man started farming because the motions of Jupiter pulled the Earth into a stellar situation that made proto-farming desirable and, from there, it was a hop and a skip to real farming. Farmers established states to make life possible when nature threatened their ability to farm. After the Chinese state unified, it tended to stay unified because of the constant threat of steppe nomads invasions. Finally, the unity of China was its downfall because premodern state capacity was limited in ways that disposed its dynasties to massive population shocks that critically impaired the process of knowledge accumulation.”

Vernon Smith: “Government supplies money in proportion to failure, the private sector supplies money in proportion to success.” [via CafeHayek]

Ben Thompson: “A world of content abundance is going to benefit the biggest content Aggregator first and foremost. Of course Meta needs to execute on all of these vectors, but that is where they also benefit from being founder-led, particularly given the fact that founder seems more determined and locked in than ever. It’s also going to cost a lot of money, both in terms of training and inference. The inference part is inescapable: Meta may have a materially higher cost of revenue in the long run. The training part, however, has some intriguing possibilities. Specifically, Meta’s AI opportunities are so large and so central to the company’s future, that there is no question that Zuckerberg will spend whatever is necessary to keep pushing Llama forward. Other companies, however, with less obvious use cases, or more dependency on third-party development that may take longer than expected to generate real revenue, may at some point start to question their infrastructure spend, and wonder if it might make more sense to simply license Llama (this is where the “ish” part of “openish” looms large). It’s definitely plausible that Meta ends up being subsidized for building the models that give the company so much upside. Regardless, it’s good to be back on the Meta bull train, no matter what tomorrow’s earnings say about last quarter or next year. Stratechery from the beginning has been focused on the implications of abundance and the companies able to navigate it on behalf of massive user bases — the Aggregators. AI takes abundance to infinity, and Meta is the purest play of all.”

Arnold Kling: “No business tries to do everything. A corporation is lucky if it can do a few things well. Every business puts a clear boundary on what it will do and what it will not do. Corporations ruthlessly shut down poorly performing units and unsuccessful initiatives. They carefully choose which new initiatives to undertake. There seems to be no limiting principle on what the government will try to do. And almost never does government back out of an activity once it gets in. If running an organization without limiting principles and never shutting down a unit were a good way to be effective, we would not observe millions of separate businesses. Instead, one big firm would manufacture everything, market everything, handle the distribution of everything, and provide every service. Such an all-purpose enterprise would obviously be unmanageable. Why should we expect government to be successful with such broad scope?”

Rene Haas on the AI future: “The difference, I would say, between the internet of 1990 to now and AI to 30 years later is that it’s not going to take that long. It’s going to happen much, much faster, probably five to 10 years. That’s going to simply be around AI helping things like drug research. If you think about the failure rates of drug research — 95% failure, 10 to 12 years to develop a new drug. AI is going to be able to shave those times down, potentially in half. It’s going to be quite, quite dramatic.”

Amelia Ibarra: “Over time, the dominant pricing structure in B2C and B2B applications is like the cell phone plan. You get a base number of minutes for a particular price. You might buy 500 extra minutes at a cent per minute. You pay an additional 2.5 cents per minute if you want more than that. That’s called a 3-part tariff. Many SaaS companies have copied this for a long time as a two-part tariff: a base platform fee upfront then the incremental cost of additional users as you go. But now there’s been a broad shift toward usage-based pricing or seat-based pricing, or a combination of the two. If you look at the net dollar retention change, the top quartile used to be 130% pre-2020. Now, it’s about 120%. If you look at NDR with the combination pricing model of seats plus usage, you see 3x growth compared to any other form of pricing. The idea with a three-part tariff is that you’re able to charge for value. You generate 10 million worth of marginal ROI, and you’re able to capture 15, maybe 20, maybe 25 percent of it. So the combination pricing strategy of a base platform fee plus a usage-based component plus value is what’s driving the market today.”

The Daily Economy: “Understanding why countries are courting protectionist worldviews is crucial to revitalizing international trade, reducing global poverty, and easing foreign policy tensions. There are countless theories that could explain such an inward shift, but I’ve whittled them down to what I believe are the three best explanations that capture our current moment: Fall in Global Economic Inequality, Special Interest Groups, Identity Crisis.”

FT: “The Chess Revolution provides an entertaining and instructive overview of a game in the throes of reinvention. A decade ago it would have been quite possible to view chess as a fading sport, as its mysteries were solved by computers and its audiences tempted away by video games and other less taxing entertainments. Instead, by embracing a heady mix of technology and globalisation, it has been re-energised — providing a lesson for other human intellectual pursuits far beyond the sixty four squares.”

Benjamin Rapoport: “The way a brain-computer interface works is that there is a set of tiny little electrodes. In our case, it’s tiny little platinum electrodes. We work in groups of about 1,000 at a time. Each of these little electrodes is about the size of an individual neuron. There are a thousand tiny little dots of platinum embedded in what is a very thin film that’s about a fifth the width of your eyelash. That film conforms to the surface of the brain without doing any damage to the underlying brain. And it basically listens. Each one of those platinum electrodes listens to the electrical activity of the brain underneath. Thought actually has a physical manifestation, and it is electrical in nature. The precision device basically takes an electrical video in real time of the thoughts that are taking place on the brain surface. It records them, amplifies them, digitizes them and then wirelessly transmits them out of the body.”

WSJ: “We all need to move more. The sedentary behavior of the average American presents a health risk. One of the simplest and least expensive ways to get more active is just putting one foot in front of the other. Walking at a brisk pace for at least 150 minutes a week can help you sleep better, improve your memory, reduce the risk of serious conditions like heart disease and diabetes, boost bone health and curb weight gain, according to research from the American Heart Association. What’s less clear: the right way to pack in those 150 minutes. It’s time to revisit how to walk. Yes, you mastered it back in your toddler days. But when you’re walking for exercise, proper form is essential. When you put thought into the mechanics of your gait, your footwear and your routine can make a difference in your fitness.”

McKinsey on the high-growth arenas of the future. “E-commerce, Artificial intelligence software and services, Cloud services, Electric vehicles, Digital advertising, Semiconductors, Shared autonomous vehicles, Space, Cybersecurity, Batteries, Modular construction, Streaming video, Video games, Robotics, Industrial and consumer biotechnology, Future air mobility, Drugs for obesity and related conditions, Nuclear fission power plants.”

Harish Damodaran writes why aspiration is dead in India: “Multiple indicators — reverse migration, two-wheeler sales, rural employment — show that Indians increasingly have less confidence in the future. The animal spirits of millions need to be revived.”

Ted Sarandos: “The more time you spend watching Netflix, the more you value the things you watch on Netflix, is in direct correlation to how much we can charge for Netflix. If you don’t think Netflix is valuable to you at that price point, you just click one button and you’re off. So, we are constantly in search of adding more value. Every once in a while, we come back to members and ask for an increase so that we can..Our business was always going right to the consumer with an instant-feedback model. So, we’ve always been focused on that: Are you happy with what we’re providing you? I have found that there’s no better measurement of joy than engagement, because I’ve never seen anybody turn off a show that they love unless they just have to go to bed and they’re going to watch more tomorrow. And I’ve never seen one stick around for a show that they hate. keep that cycle going. But I don’t think we can do it unless we continue to add to the value.”

FT: “The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage. It’s true that speaking in public is difficult, even risky. But the best way to view it is as an opportunity to define yourself and your ideas. If you are being handed a microphone and placed at the centre of an audience’s attention for 20 minutes, you’re much more likely to flourish if you aim to seize that opportunity. Everyone is watching; you’re there for a reason. So . . . what is it that you really want to say?”

Manny Skevofilax: “[A] joke I was taught in banking: No one ever went out of business from having too much debt. It was the inability to service that debt that caused their demise. That’s like saying that it’s not the fall from a tall building that kills you, it’s the sudden stop! The key consideration about debt is that it has to be paid off, usually with interest and even penalties. A great many students thought the government was going to erase their student debt, but they were wrong. Even debt in a family that’s “forgiven” can create ill will and resentment. And that debt didn’t disappear, someone else paid it off. Borrow for the short-term, e.g., to hire a new salesperson who will be productive short term and enable you to quickly pay back the loan, or to improve your technology so that customers can order online faster and in greater quantities. Don’t borrow for ego or “show.””

WSJ: “I recently asked [Brian] Chesky to explain the benefits of product releases—and his eyes lit up with excitement…“I’m very, very passionate about this,” Chesky said. These releases are not just PR stunts. He makes a very, very impassioned case for product announcements as a management strategy—a way to focus a company’s attention and even accelerate the pace of innovation. After all, if you commit to showcasing products once or twice a year, you have to actually come up with products worth the showcase…Apple-like product launches can be an effective management strategy—whether you’re in the business of tech or tacos.”

Morgan Housel: “There’s a Russian saying about nostalgia: “The past is more unpredictable than the future.” It’s so common for people’s memories about a time to become disconnected from how they actually felt at the time. I have a theory for why this happens: When studying history, you know how the story ends, which makes it impossible to imagine what people were thinking or feeling in the past. When thinking about our own lives, we don’t remember how we actually felt in the past; We remember how we think we should have felt, given what we know today…The past wasn’t as good as you remember. The present isn’t as bad as you think. The future will be better than you anticipate.”