In November, we moved back to Australia after 7 years in America.
My next thing is being an investor at Blackbird Ventures.
I am proud of the way Blackbird works with founders (Sessions was the 4th ever Blackbird investment), and proud of the companies we get to work with.
You can read about Blackbirdās Mission & Values here.
Venture at its best is a seamless web of deserved trust between totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.
Being a partner, in the fullest sense, to the founders in the arena and connecting them to that web of trust is whatās most interesting to me now.
On to the excellent things.
The Oasis movie is worth seeing, if only for the Gallagher bros. dialogue/banter.
āDonāt Think Twiceā was genuinely warm and funny.
āAmerican Honeyā is perfectly scored at 7.4/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, but two things:
1/ I couldnāt stop thinking about it for weeks after, for the way it resolved almost every scene in an unexpected way.
2/ The soundtrack (not the songs themselves, but the way the songs change the movie) is staggering.
I saw Bon Iver tour his new record ā22, A Millionā at The Fox Theatre in Oakland on a Tuesday night and I went back on the Thursday to see the same show because it was so good.
āCreeksā live was one of my top-three all-time live music experiences.
Itās hard to explain, but just imagine the low-end of that vocoder being so loud it affects your breathing.
And then imagine the silences. 3,000 people in a room and every gap is dead quiet. Itās shivers.
You can relive a pale imitation of the experience by skipping forward to 23:36 here:
Watch Bon Iver Perform Live In A Brooklyn Warehouse
On Dec. 4, just before Bon Iver took the stage at Pioneer Works, an old ironworks warehouse turned nonprofit arts andā¦www.npr.org
I kept putting Frank Ocean āBlondeā on in the background while I worked.
I bought some crystal glasses at a second-hand store and didnāt have anything to drink with them, so I bought some expensive port and put the new Leonard Cohen record on and it all worked perfectly.
About 1/4 of the new Weeknd record is great (especially āSidewalksā).
Some reads:
Lucky lastā¦ Only rarely do great new tennis racquets come on to the market. Babolat, in my opinion, have just released one.
This was a surprising and unnerving quarter in many respects.
If you believe āthe arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justiceā, this was the quarter to start wrapping your head around how to withstand the ālongā part of the arc.
I keep thinking, the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy.
I keep thinking about the Gandhi quote: āFirst they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.ā
Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republicanāāāwhich is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.
I still canāt believe this is the American President now.
Presidential Election 2016: An American Tragedy
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy forā¦www.newyorker.com
So itās bad. But we donāt know how bad, yet.
#51 - The Most Powerful Clown - Waking Up with Sam Harris
In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris talks about the results of the 2016 presidential election and theā¦overcast.fm
And itās more complex than it looks.
#41 - Faith in Reason - Waking Up with Sam Harris
In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Eric Weinstein about the relationship between faithā¦overcast.fm
I left America a week before Election Day. Some people said, āyou must feel lucky you got out when you didā but there is no American silo and I donāt feel lucky at all.
On the bright side thoughā¦
I measure the strength of a spirit by how much truth it canĀ take.
For past editions of this series, see: