July-August 2025 Favorite Reads

90+% value comes from 10% of what we read. Here’s what stood out in July & August

Books 

1. Good Strategy Bad Strategy
   1. A good strategy is focused.
      • Most people spread out resources too much
      • You should focus investment on key things as spread out is mostly unsuccessful
   2. True strategy is not every year at the same time.
      • It occurs more in some times than others and is episodic
      • Moments of change in an industry are really all that matter
   3. Any long list isn’t a strategy
   4. Most companies don’t really have clear strategies that everyone can clearly describe
   5. I also quite enjoyed some of historical examples of good strategy (Nelson at Trafalgar, Hannibal, IKEA, General Electric in heyday) 
2. 80/80 Marriage by Kaley and Nick Kemp
   • The core idea is that each partner should strive to give 80% in marriage. Trying to split 50/50 and worrying about fairness all the time brings conflict
   • Focus on radical generosity to your partner and consistently appreciating them 

Articles

1. Morgan Housel: Different Kinds of Smart
   • 5-10 minutes
   • There’s tons of different types of smart and none are better
   • Having confidence to try something, but paranoia you’ll go out of business so having cash on hand behind it (this is his never risk what you can’t lose principle)
   • He emphasizes stories are more important than facts and this is worth realizing: It’s hard to overstate this: The main use of facts is their ability to give stories credibility. But the stories are always what persuade. Focusing on the message as much as the substance is not only a unique skill; it’s an easy one to overlook.
   • Realizing you don’t know everything and having the humility to listen to others
   • The ability to focus your attention elsewhere when its productive
     • In the marshmallow test, the kids who held out the longest were actually those who sang a song or did something else other than stare at the marshmallow
     • Strategically switching your attention improves your ability to not overfocus on one bad thing
2. Colossus Review: When will Robots go Mainstream
   • Long form (45+ minutes) from Colossus and is a heavy deep dive analyzing the robotics industry
   • My summary of their summary is
     1. Only two uses of robots so far (robot arms in manufacturing and robot vacuums)
     2. Their belief is biggest bottleneck is actually in software for robotics to make hardware more adaptable
     3. Believes that robotic startups in AI will stagnate unless they build a sufficient data foundation
3. Colossus Review: Kevin Kelly Flounder Mode
   • Long form (45+ minutes) overview into the incomparable Kevin Kelly 
   • My favorite parts
     • Kevin Kelly focuses first on learning: I learned that Kelly doesn’t think in outputs. For him, doing is part of learning. “I don’t really pursue a destination,” he said. “I pursue a direction.”
     • He doesn’t think money is the reason you should be interested in something. I think one of the least interesting reasons to be interested in something is money,” he said, and cited Walt Disney. “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”
     • Kevin Kelly has no interest in extremism which is often what the biggest entreneurs have ““Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”
     • Kelly focuses on how you follow your interests “ “The more you pursue interests,” he told me on the good day we spent together, “the more you realize that the well is bottomless.
4. Paul Graham: Life is Short
   • Medium article 15-30 minutes that will really sit with you  
   • You can define life is short by how magical moments you have with people you love
   • Once you define life is short, you want to eliminate the bullshit from your life
   • Jumps into the Tim Urban (the tail end) point of how life is short means time with others is short
     • Hardest is when other people die and you can’t ask them the questions
     • The best way to address this is to be impatient and do the things you want to do now
       • Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don’t wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don’t need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn’t wait. Just don’t wait.
     • Savor those moments with those you love and be fully present in them
   • Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.
5. Derek Thompson: The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters
   • Medium article 15+ min
   • Mirrors other declines in socialization as Americans are partying and interacting with others less
6. Derek Thompson: What Caused the ‘Baby Boom’? What Would It Take to Have Another?
   • Medium article ~15 min
   • Fertility has steadily decreased over past 225 years in US and the baby boom from 1920s-1950s is the only example of fertility jumping up 
   • It’s not conclusive why this happened, but he points to three reasons
     1. it’s because of home tech made having kids easier
        • First, between the 1920s and 1950s, the modern home experienced a mini industrial revolution. The share of households with new electric appliances—such as refrigerators, stoves, vacuums, and washing machines—exploded upwards.
     2. Because maternal death dropped like crazy
        • Second, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, according to Sarygulov and Arslanagic-Wakefield.
     3. Houses were cheaper
        • found that the introduction of low down payment, government-guaranteed mortgages in the 1930s and 1940s led to dramatically higher rates of home ownership among young couples. “Mortgage insurance programs led to 3 million additional births from 1935-1957, roughly 10 percent of the excess births in the baby boom,” the authors conclude.
   • All of these seem like plausible major factors to me as it’s literally easier to have kids, but I don’t get why you’d still see a drop after them
     • He basically says this is because adults are now prioritizing career/fulfillment and not marriage anymore which may be the real reason why we see a consistent decline
   • This also leaves it fairly open on what can we actually do to promote fertility 
7. Emily Oster: Making the Case for More Research on Pregnant Women
   • 10 min article
   • Behind a paywall, but makes core point that pregnant women normally excluded from trials so we don’t have good data on them
     1. Most women are not excluded from use of drugs, but we just don’t have good data on them (use animal trials or women who accidentally took it while pregnant data) 
     2. This can lead to many poor recommendations as we don’t really know and she argues risk can be lowered overall if we include women in trials
8. Derek Thompson: How AI Conquered the US Economy: A Visual FAQ
   • Medium article 10-15 minutes
   • Derek lays out how it’s not AI as a future economy, but it’s already taken over in the US
     1. In the last two years, about 60 percent of the stock market’s growth has come from AI-related companies, such as Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta. Without the AI boom, stock market returns would be putrid.
     2. Spending on AI is already more than it ever was during .com era and only historical analogy on spending vs GDP is railroads (though it’s far below that so far) 
   • Then dives into a quick bull case (AI isn’t as impactful today yet) and bull case (Stripe has seen AI startups growing like crazy)
9. Howard Marks: The Calculus of Value
   • Longish article (~30 min) diving extremely deep on market today
   • His overall point is that the market multiples now are extremely high especially compared to in January
     1. Fundamentals are worse while assets are higher (historically high PE multiples, Buffett ratio, etc.) 
     2. Believes since no one under 35 investing has seen a true bear market, there’s much more focus on upside/FOMO than the chance of a prolonged bear market
     3. Basically makes the case for a bubble with these 3 thing
        • Today I see elements that include the following:
          1. the positive psychology and “wealth effect” resulting from recent gains in markets, high-end real estate, and crypto,
          2. the belief that, for most investors, there really is no alternative to the U.S. markets, and
          3. the excitement surrounding today’s new, new thing: AI.
   • Similar to Derek Thompson above, it seems like the market is betting everything on AI. Historically this leads to bubbles and busts and with Howard Marks calling the top, this caused our family to rethink our investment strategy and to be more cautious 
10. Noah Smith: The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis
    • 10+ min articles 
    • Basically he argued earlier that we overproduced college graduates
      1. This now could be the case with STEM majors too as they’re struggling to get jobs early in their career with the introduction of AI
      2. Since Happiness = Reality – expectations, people who thought they’d get a STEM job and get a solid job aren’t seeing this, this could cause social upheaval 
11. Emily Oster: A Strategy for Dividing Household Labor More Equally
    • 10 min article introducing idea of total responsibility transfer
    • In total responsibility transfer if someone is going to do a task they do all of it
      1. Idea is there’s two parts of tasks
         1. Invisible work
         2. Visible work
      2. Invisible work is often the planning while visible work is the execution
    • Her idea is you hand over full responsibility to other partner on something
      • If wife is in charge of bedtime, then she does everything needed related to bedtime
      • When you fully transfer responsibility over to another party (for example, my wife planning her family trip) then you just go along with whatever happens