Hello friend,
Sorry for the month-long radio silence. Things have been crazy busy, and I've been thinking of possible new directions for this newsletter. I will share more in the coming weeks. For now, I'm playing with a new website and have put together a page with the best learning resources and tools I've used this year.
To make up for my absence, I've included more goodies this week. Here's what you'll find:
- How technology shattered our shared reality,
- Why what we pay attention to matters more than ever,
- How to think for yourself and discover novel ideas,
- Why streaming alone can't be the future of entertainment,
- Future trends for creators and their hierarchy of needs,
- Creative work from Nike, a list of classic YouTube videos, how to write an effective landing page, and how to learn from a bad creative brief.
π§ Brain Food
2020 shattered our shared reality.
As we enter the third decade of the Twenty-first Century, we enter with less a common sense of what is real than at any other point in modern history. Our failure to agree on some basic sense of βwhat is trueβ permeates almost every aspect of our social lives.
Technology liberated us from the failures of a single, national narrative, but in so doing immersed us in a chaotic, kaleidoscopic dream world of new stories, new identities, and new faiths, with an ever-accelerating trend toward total social fragmentation. This is more than a period of confusion. Our civilization has transitioned to a new state of being.
ππΌ Tether, Part I | Pirate Wires | 8 minute read
What we pay attention to matters more than ever.
In this new world, the battleground of the present and future is for our attention. The tech companies get it, the influencers and ad agencies get it, and the people now do, too. Attention is the scarce resource that is at the center of government and business.
As we are all now producers and consumers, paid to share ideas, paying for ideas to spread by giving our attention, we can choose to use this power wisely.
ππΌ Where attention goes, money flows | Art $ Attention | 4 minute read
To discover new ideas, don't just do what you love. Do what you're curious about.
Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones.
So this game should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking "Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads to follow than too few.
ππΌ How to think for yourself | Paul Graham | 13 minute read
Streaming alone can't be the future of entertainment.
On a purely practical level, theaters act as a filter, a way of separating out a small handful of the hundreds of movies released every year, and although the system by which they end up there is riven with biases and blind spots, on balance, the movies that end up there are better than the ones that donβt, and their limited runs create a sense of occasion and urgency that the boundless availability of streaming canβt match. (There are movies in my Netflix list Iβve been meaning to get around to since 2009.)
The world without movie theaters isnβt a world without gatekeepers. Itβs just a world where the gatekeepers arenβt human, and instead of urging you to watch what they love, they serve up whatever seems most like the last thing you liked.
ππΌ We Have Glimpsed Our Streaming Future, and It Sucks | Slate | 6 minute read
Thereβs an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.
ππΌ What comes after smartphones? | Benedict Evans | 5 minute read
Talent will increasingly own their audience.
If youβre a content creator of any kind, you can now spin up a community to gather your audience and spawn all sorts of offshoot services to delight (and monetize) your base. In such a world, the Instagram and YouTube type products simply serve as top-of-funnel marketing initiatives. The goal becomes simply converting everyone you reach on other platforms to your own privately owned and managed channel. We will see a massive acceleration of this trend in the years ahead.
ππΌ 8 Themes For The Near Future Of Tech | Scott Belsky | 12 minute read
Creators have a hierarchy of needs as they grow. Understanding these needs helps you build products that creators love:

ππΌ Creator hierarchy of needs | Peter Yang | 7 minute read
π Box Of Random
A list of classic YouTube videos.
A reminder from Tim Urban that a lot of people not liking your stuff is the price to reach people who actually love it:
If you create art/contentβsongs, YouTube videos, articles, podcastsβthink about people who come across your work as 4 categories of reactions:
— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) December 17, 2020
1) Didn't like it
2) Thought it was solid / fine
3) Really liked it
4) Absolutely loved it
(1/3)
You can learn a lot from a bad creative brief.
You can learn a lot from a bad creative brief.
— Julian Cole (@juliancole) November 23, 2020
I found this brief today and it helped drive home four important points about brief writing. pic.twitter.com/8z6Lyfeclh
Jovan Todorovic directs βThe Future Isnβt Waitingβ for Nike:
A great resource on how to write an effective landing page.

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Stay classy,
-Gian