Stand by me my apprentice. Be brave. Clench fists.
The ten best things I found this week.
1. The Three Sides of Risk, by Morgan Housel
“Well, let me take this to a dark and tragic place,” I said before telling a group of 500 strangers a story I hadn’t talked about in almost 20 years.”
2. Mouse of Silver, The Midnight Gospel
The most moving thing you’ll watch all weekend will be this animated podcast. I promise you, five minutes in, you’ll be doubting me. But stick with it. The feelings from the final episode of Duncan Trussell’s Netflix series The Midnight Gospel will stay with you a long time.
“Clancy: There's no way to stop the heartbreak. How do you... What do you do about that?
Deneen: You cry.
[pause]
Deneen: You cry.”
3. The Miracle Sudoku. If you trusted me on the animated podcast, let me stretch the friendship a little further and recommend you watch this Sudoku puzzle getting done.
4. Why Amazon Is Betting You’ll Buy a Million Dollar Prefab Home
“With this combination of a vertically integrated business model, design star power, and the holy aura of tech, Glenn is hoping that maybe, just maybe, he’ll finally get the timing right.”
5. What should you watch now that ‘The Last Dance’ is over?, by The Ringer
‘Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks’ would be my pick.
“I prefer the Miller who wrapped his hands around his neck while staring down Spike Lee, the Miller who exasperated Patrick Ewing, the Miller who scored eight points in 8.9 seconds against New York in the 1995 Eastern Conference semifinals.”
Related: This is the funniest NBA tweet of all time, but you need to have watched E9 of The Last Dance, and have two important bits of context - this, then this.
6. Michael Jordan’s Sneakers Fetch Record $560,000 at Sotheby’s
One of the most interesting companies in the world is Otis, started by my dear friend, and Elephant, Mike Karnjanaprakorn, and backed by Union Square Ventures.
The idea behind Otis is that culture has tangible value, and that you should be able to buy it, hold it, and sell it like you would an investment in a public company. The problem is that cultural assets are too expensive and inaccessible for most people to own, and that unlike a stock certificate, which doesn’t mind being filed away in darkness, cultural assets are experiential.
Which is where Otis comes in. Otis purchases cultural assets, fractionalises them into shares you can own, and then (when COVID’s over) displays those assets in physical spaces where you can interact with them. Eventually, you will be able to sell your fractional ownership in these assets to others who want to buy them.
Let me make it more tangible.
In February this year, through Otis, I was able to purchase 3% of a collection of five 1985 Nike Air Jordan sneakers. The whole collection would have been beyond me, obviously, but to be able to access ownership in a small part of one of the iconic moments in basketball, sneaker, and modern pop-cultural history was a no-brainer to me. And as a financial investment, I expect The Last Dance was to Jordans as COVID was to Zoom.
Related:
7. Tragedy Made Steve Kerr See the World Beyond the Court
“The last time Steve Kerr was in Beirut, his birthplace, with the bombs pounding the runway and the assassination of his father six months away, he left by car.”
Buried in The Last Dance was the fascinating story of Steve Kerr, a Jordan teammate, and now coach of the Golden State Warriors.
Not only is Kerr’s life a fascinating study, his sporting arc, from the Phil Jackson-coached, Jordan-led Bulls, to the Gregg Popovich-coached San Antonio Spurs, to coaching the Warriors as they eclipsed the Bulls’ for the winningest season of all time is an epic. Far from the most talented player, through drive and determination, he spent his career surrounded by greatness, and took all those lessons to lead the Warriors to dynastic heights.
8. The Coach In Your Head, by Michael Lewis
My friend Ed texted me this Michael Lewis podcast this week with the simple message “This ep is for you”. Boy was he right.
First off, on the Mt Rushmore of self-help books, is Timothey Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. Hearing Gallwey speak about the origins of the book was so good.
“A good listener is one who helps us overhear ourselves.”
Second, the deep-dive into the power of coaching, which I’ve been rambling on about for a long time, is awesome. Lewis expanded on the power of coaching so well in his Tim Ferriss interview.
"As I’ve gotten older—I would say starting in my mid-to-late 20s—I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves.
There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that they tell. Always on the receiving end of some injustice. There's the person who’s always kind of the hero of every story they tell. There's the smart person; they delivered the clever put down there.
There are lots of versions of this, and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are—in the way you craft your narrative—kind of crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, “I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative, that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.” And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is."
9. The Practice of Practice, by Jonathan Harnum
“To see talent as a gift of natural ability instead of perceiving the long hours of practice that creates talent is nothing new. Michelangelo said, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”
10. The Day the Live Concert Returns, by Dave Grohl
“There is nothing like the energy and atmosphere of live music. It is the most life-affirming experience, to see your favorite performer onstage, in the flesh, rather than as a one-dimensional image glowing in your lap as you spiral down a midnight YouTube wormhole. Even our most beloved superheroes become human in person.”
Most clicked link last week (16% of readers): How Complex Systems Fail:
Complex systems require substantial human expertise in their operation and management. This expertise changes in character as technology changes but it also changes because of the need to replace experts who leave.
Real quick:
To the 65 people who subscribed in the past seven days, welcome! I hope I lived up to my promises with this first edition.
As some of you know, I am on a search for the world’s best non-alcoholic beer and I think I’ve found it in Heaps Normal. Sign-up here to try some when it launches in July.
The 1975’s new album ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ finally came out. I did my first listen last night. You can skip the first two songs, but the rest are unfurling beautifully. The 1975’s last album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships was my favourite of 2019.
Eucalyptus, a healthcare company I’ve invested in three times now announced its Series A this week.
Let’s push things forward.