November-December 2024 Favorite Reads

90+% value comes from 10% of what we read. Here’s my favorites from November-December. 

Books 

1. Great Mental Model series from Shane Parrish
   • Goes through simple models from different disciplines to develop what are repeatable things we can learn and apply in our day to day lives
   • One of my favorite series of all time and Shane Parrish and Farnam Street have been my own personal MBA 
2. The Family Firm by Emily Oster
   • Summary: As children get older, you need to be deliberate and thoughtful about what you’re optimizing on. Maximizing logistics becomes a big part of it. 
   • Emily Recommends a four step approach (p 15)
     1. Frame the Question – what are you asking? (ex: where to send our child to school or school A or B)
     2. Fact-Find
     3. Final Decision – document your decision (ie use decision docs)
     4. Follow-Up – check back in to see if you made the right decision
   • Critical decisions you make will have ripple effects to the rest of your day and life
     1. Do we do family meals?
     2. Where do we send our kids to school?
     3. Do we send our kids to camp?
     4. What extracurriculars
   • Emily does a great job taking learnings from the business world and teaching people how to make these decisions thoughtfully. 

Articles

• A Message From the Past (Thoughts on Nostalgia) by Morgan Housel
  • Morgan looks back at when he graduated college
    • He views that time with nostalgia saying it was “peak living”
    • Then he talked to his wife and she talked about how he was more anxious, depressed, and scared than ever
    • In my head, today, I look back and think, “I must have been so happy then. Those were my best years.” But in reality, at the time, I was thinking, “I can’t wait for these years to end.”
  • Morgan’s theory is when you looking back, you don’t know how you felt, but you think instead about how you should have felt
    • You were worried at the time
    • But when you look back you think you’ve got nothing to worry about old me, things like that would be great now
  • Even though the market has gone up for the past 15 years when you were in the thick of it things were pretty scary
    • Lists a ton of examples (Great Recession, US debt downgrade, wars, etc)
    • We know how the US story over the past 15 years ended so we forget how scary it was in real time for people holding equities
  • So much of what matters in investing – this is true for a lot of things in life – is how you manage the psychology of uncertainty. The problem with looking back with hindsight is that nothing is uncertain. You think no one had anything to worry about, because most of what they were worrying about eventually came to pass.
  • Nostalgia papers over the fears of what could potentially happen as you only think about what the positive things were and not the fears of the future
• Prejudice And China by Louis-Vincent Gave
  • Reviewing why did companies miss the ball so much on China and goes through reasons why
    1. People stopped visiting China after COVID
    2. Good ol fashioned prejudice → east vs west prejudice occurred many times before and US is particularly prejudiced of communism
    3. Anchoring to the lost decades in Japan
       • Talks about particularly how different the Chinese trade balance is and how they’re still building a bunch outside the world
       • The property bust hurts, but says since bank lending is staying high there will still be growth
    4. The least happy people in China are millennials in first and second tier cities, but this is who Americans hear the most from
    5. In equity obsessed culture, China gets less attention than it should
       • Even though China has jumped up in industrial robots or building nuclear, this doesn’t get reported
       • Instead what gets reported is the stock prices of which China hasn’t had a ton of public companies match their insane progress
       • Interestingly the US has actually fallen behind China in life expectancy too
       • The scary part is that China graduates more engineers than the rest of the OECD combined
  • Says there are three Chinas
    1. The China you read about in Western media where everything is awful
    2. The vision of China you get from millennials in tier 1 and 2 cities
    3. The China that’s leapfrogging the west in a bunch of industries
  • Best meme about don’t trust the everything is awful story
• Google DeepMind open-sources AlphaFold 3, ushering in a new era for drug discovery and molecular biology
  • Google released all the weights for deep mind and open sourced it
  • Similar to Meta’s Llama approach where Google open sources it, but then is requiring a commercial license
• A Brief Rant on Future of Interactive Design
  • 2011 article on interactive design 
  • Like his definition that a tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities
  • Gives example of how your hands offer a bunch of rich signals and you manipulate in a bunch of ways to do things
    • His rant focuses on how the feedback you feel with hands is missing from the 2011 vision of the future
    • There is an incredible amount of dexterity in your hands
  • His plea then becomes that the future should allow much more dynamic interactions with your hands then just single swipes
    • Hands can express us and pictures under glass (ie phones/ipads) just don’t
    • Makes compelling point of the the dynamism of your hands
• Debanking (and Debunking?) by Patrick McKenzie
  • 1+ hour article on what choke point was and how “choke point 2.0” for crypto mostly isn’t anything nefarious
  • Talks about how you need to “see like a bank” and many who had accounts shut down were part of a pre-existing process of financial risk controls 
• The Gen AI Bridge to the Future by Ben Thompson
  • Argues that as devices evolve so does input method. Ben believes it’s clear the next device will be wearables
  • Thinks of GenAI as the one that’ll pair with wearables
  •