Firstly, you need to get out of your own way. Most people start editing before they finish writing, which short-circuits the process of exploring ideas.

Getting feedback from other people is usually helpful but slow. And unless you have a professional editor, there are only so many requests you can comfortably make of friends and family.

AI completely changes the feedback landscape for writing. It is faster and has unlimited patience – not to mention being trained on the entirety of language. For the vast majority of people and circumstances, AI editing is superior to soliciting human feedback.

The challenge with AI editing – like getting words down initially – is not to short-circuit the exploration process. It is dangerously accessible to dump a paragraph into ChatGPT and ask “what do you think?” But seeking immediate feedback can crowd out the mental space needed to figure out what we are trying to say.

As with other deeply personal disciplines, the key to using AI in writing will be figuring out how to use it as a thought partner rather than an executor. We now have the tools to design infinitely better feedback loops, if we’re thoughtful about how we use them.

• Take care of my body: This definitely includes exercising more, but more broadly, I’d like to pay attention to how I’m feeling. For example, this year I realized sugar was causing me to crash hard, so I’ve cut it out as much as I can during the day (and save it for dessert).

  Exercise makes me feel great, so I need to discover which types of movement work best for me.

• Write more: After struggling to get back into the practice for a few years, I started First Draft Club as a way to force myself to write – and I’m now on a 20+ week streak of sharing something publicly.

  I want to keep pushing myself here. Quantity leads to quality, so I’m not upset about the consistency, but I do want to take some bigger swings. At the end of 2025, I hope to have a few essays I’m proud of.

• Read more: This past year wasn’t as good for reading. I spent too much time online, and most of the “reading” I did was short-form. In 2025, I’m hoping to carve out more time for deep reading.

  Since I tend to finish fiction books more consistently, I’ll use novels to rekindle my joy of reading. For non-fiction topics, I’ll focus on essays and articles, which better match my learning style than books with a lot of fluff.

• Engage with my local community: While I’ve built a strong online community, this year I’d like to deepen my real-world connections in New York City. This means connecting with both people and places – from neighborhoods to local institutions.

  I want to be a more active presence in my neighborhood – getting to know the baristas at my local coffee shop, showing up to weekly game nights at the bar on the corner, and becoming a “regular” in a few places.

  Beyond the neighborhood level, I want to build on my growing interest in city politics. While I’ve started paying more attention to what’s going on, this year I want to put “boots on the ground” and find ways to contribute to positive change in my city.

One company that I think could and should exist is a social network for residents in large apartment buildings. You could think of this as “Nextdoor for Gen Z.”

The motivation here is both practical and idealistic. For the visionary: this could be a meaningful way to combat the loneliness epidemic and help people build community, especially in relatively transient environments. For the operator: this a large population with distinct needs and strong potential network effects. Plus, there’s optionality with monetization down the line.

Opportunity

In 2022, more than 20 million U.S. households lived in apartment buildings with at least five units. About one third of that total lived in buildings with at least 50 units – and that population grew 8% from the previous year.

There is no platform that is designed specifically for the social needs of the urban tenant. The current “competitors” in this space – to the extent that they are used at all – are general purpose tools like WhatsApp or Facebook groups, or clunky forums run by building management.

A successful platform would make it easy and fun to connect with neighbors, focusing on use cases that provide value. Make it easy to host a shared Halloween party on the roof or organize a Super Bowl watch party. Empower residents to share resources like printers and vacuums or split bulk orders from Costco. Help neighbors find someone to walk their dog or even watch their kids for an evening.

How I’d do it

I think the go-to-market would be relatively straightforward, especially compared to other “consumer social” ideas. Just as Tinder and Bumble targeted fraternities and sororities on college campuses, founders of a “Gen Z Nextdoor” would benefit from network effects and a repeatable playbook.

Target one building at a time, learn what works, and move quickly to the next building. Find natural community leaders, listen to their feedback, and build for them. Figure out what types of buildings make the most sense.

Eventually, once you have traction across multiple buildings, you can start working with the building management companies. Integrate the network with building infrastructure to create a more tenant-friendly living experience. When the network becomes popular and valuable enough, it becomes its own amenity – one that management companies will purchase to attract new tenants.

This weekend, a friend of mine showed me how he was using a custom GPT to help him develop characters for a video game. He had already established the core of these characters, but wanted to further imbue them with spiritual knowledge. (The custom GPT he used is aptly named Daemon, referring to a supernatural “guiding spirit” in Greek mythology.)

(GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.)

The use of custom GPTs or tailored chatbots may be old news for some, but to me it was the first time I had a visceral experience of dynamically interacting with someone else’s knowledge.

The printing press was revolutionary because it allowed people to encode their knowledge and widely distribute it for others to engage with. However, in our modern society, books are faulty mediums for learning. They are static texts that do not adapt to our context or answer our questions directly.

ChatGPT and other large language models, on the other hand, are interactive but not specific. They are trained on a massive trove of text, not designed to facilitate learning within a specific domain.

In the past year, I have seen some chatbots trained on focused text, such as the work of Naval Ravikant or the writings of Lenny’s Newsletter (and friends). I am sure there are others. But I believe we are just scratching the surface with GPTs. Anyone who writes a book should have a complementary piece of software for readers to engage with – and I suppose in many cases, this software will replace the need for a book altogether.

Beyond chatbots, there is an emerging design space for encoding knowledge into interactive software. Lex, an AI-enabled writing processor, is developing a Prompt Builder & Library that serves as a marketplace for writers to leverage the expertise of others to inform their writing.

If the printing press – and later, the internet – unlocked “reach” for knowledge, then trained language models will unlock “engagement” for expertise.

I’m looking forward to exploring custom GPTs in the coming weeks. Please let me know if you have any favorites or recommendations!

What is an Angel User?

Just as an angel investor provides initial capital for founders, an angel user provides early product feedback and support, often above and beyond what a regular customer would provide.

Being an angel user means using and supporting products that you want to exist – even if they aren’t the best products at that moment.

Angel Users can come in many forms, with varying levels of formality and responsibilities: ambassadors, affiliates, advocates, beta testers, community leads, evangelists… (to just start at the beginning of the alphabet)

The once-sharp line between employee and customer is dissolving. As the evolving Community movement has demonstrated, users can be a key function for growth, marketing, and product support. An angel user might mock up new features, moderate a forum, or even ship their own code. In the case of Farcaster, a technical protocol, angel users can be builders and founders themselves!

An evolution of User Research

Angel users represent an opportunity for startups to learn and build more effectively.

In my earliest days as a user researcher, I was shocked to learn how little companies were listening to the people using their products. I don’t subscribe to “the customer is always right”, but I do believe that teams are generally under-investing in users as a source of learning and ideation.

There is an art and science to “listening to users” (that’s the craft of user research). But I believe there is an under-explored discipline of working with the earliest adopters of your product.

Early users are more willing to experiment, take risks, and help explore the problem space. Personally, I like being early to projects because it presents an opportunity to have an outsized influence on its development. Being early is an opportunity, not a status signal.

But by the time a larger company is on to its Nth users, there are fewer opportunities for meaningfully shaping the product vision.

My experiences as a researcher have made me a more enthusiastic and helpful user; I pride myself on giving helpful feedback. I love being able to share my experiences as a user and also help teams think more strategically about how they continue learning.

In the future, I hope to see more creative and structured ways for founders and angel users to work together. I have some ideas, but that’s for another post :)

If none of that makes any sense, you're not alone. In talking to sports fans across the country, I found that most people had only the vaguest sense of what NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) were. A few had invested in some cryptocurrency, but nobody – including myself – really understood the use cases for most of this technology.

Now, I think there's a clear example.

We the $PEOPLE

One of the 13 remaining copies of the United States Constitution is going up for auction in a few hours1. It's been more than 30 years since an original copy has been auctioned, and there's only one other that is privately owned. This copy is expected to fetch up to $20 million.

That high price tag is why auctions are traditionally a sport for the super rich. But the internet – and now crypto – changes that.

One of the hallmarks of web3 is the trusted coordination of money between strangers. Instead of letting eBay or Visa or Facebook handle a transaction, both parties are trusting an open-source set of code. ("Blockchain" and "smart contracts" are the buzzwords here.) Imagine Kickstarter, but nobody ever gets scammed because the money automatically gets returned if they don't receive the product.

Just as you might receive benefits from funding a Kickstarter campaign, there are unique aspects to a web3 crowdfund. In this case, your contribution grants you access to a proportionate share of $PEOPLE tokens. These are "governance tokens", which give the owner a voice in decisions, such as, um, what to do with the Constitution after purchasing it, or what the group should do with surplus funds in the case of winning the auction. In theory, these tokens power a Decentralized Autonomous Organization ("DAO").

Amendments

In the previous sentence, you’ll notice I said, "in theory."

The entity in charge of this effort is named ConstitutionDAO, but it’s not technically a DAO. The entity isn't authorized to place bids at Sotheby's – nor is the auction house capable of accepting cryptocurrency – and current securities laws make it prohibitive for contributors to actually own the Constitution. (Thus: "governance tokens")

Ironically, this watershed moment for web3 requires a certain amount of trust. A key promise of crypto is the ability to coordinate money without needing to trust other people; you just trust the code.

In a “real” DAO, there would be no uncertainty about how decisions get made. There wouldn’t be a temporary LLC that can legally ignore the wishes of the DAO contributors.2 But all of this is new. It’s going to be messy for a while.

As the NYT put it yesterday,

Buying the Constitution, it turns out, is a hard, weird project, made even harder and weirder by the choice to do it in less than a week with a bunch of internet strangers, inside a new, complicated organizational structure that nobody outside the crypto world fully understands yet.

A More Perfect Internet

Many of you may still be wondering what the point is. Why would someone willingly spend money on this?

1. Because it’s fun.

I think this is always a good reason. There have been so many memes.

It’s been a blast watching this project come together over the past few days, especially as it blew past the original $20million target.

2. Because it’s symbolic.

I really don’t know what happens next. But I think what has already happened is significant.

The U.S. Constitution has tremendous significance in our modern society. Alongside their contributions, people from around the world left notes of what this moment meant to them:

Every person contributed for their own reason. Immigrants, crypto enthusiasts, paranoid patriots, and trolls all participated in this crowdfund.

But even more than the What and Why, the How is historic.

As stated on the ConstitutionDAO website:

“Decentralization and cryptocurrency (web3) have created structures that allow people to self-govern with unparalleled levels of autonomy and freedom. It’s fitting that we use this technology to honor and protect the greatest historical tool for human governance: the U.S. Constitution.”

As I said at the top, I think a crowdfund to buy the Constitution is one of the clearest “use cases” we’ve seen for web3 technology – at least for those who haven’t already been crypto-pilled. Unlike most NFTs, the Constitution is a physical, recognizable object that has obvious value. That familiarity and mainstream appeal was why I suggested this weekend that ConstitutionDAO could be an inflection point for the web3 movement.

In less than a week, the project likely got thousands of people to set up Ethereum wallets for the first time, and the mainstream coverage (including the front page of the WSJ today) will draw many more closer to doing so.

As with all new technology, we don’t know how it will be applied in the future. The founders of this country could never have predicted how American democracy would evolve.

ConstitutionDAO is a fun example of people coming together, but there are other ways to coordinate “financial flash mobs". Crypto transactions are public but also have the potential to be anonymous.

New tools are fun, but we have to learn how to use them.

Or, to quote George Washington in Hamilton:

“Winning is easy… governing’s harder.”

Audiobooks, podcasts, and now, narrated articles.

Companies like Audm and Curio produce audio versions of work from established publications like Rolling Stone, WIRED, and The New York Times.

But what if I want to listen to my favorite blogger?

Yes, there’s text-to-speech technology, but it’s crude and impersonal. It doesn’t compare to hearing someone read their own memoir or articulate their own argument.

Here’s my idea:

1. Writers record their voice over a set of training data (perhaps a few of their articles).

2. The platform auto-generates an audio version of each post, in the “voice” of the writer.

3. Writers can edit snippets of the audio files that they’d like to improve. (This would also help train the platform.)

4. Users pay a monthly fee to have written work accessible as listening (if the author has opted-in1).

5. Writers receive a royalty based on how many people listened to their “voice”.

I first thought of this when I realized how much time some writers were spending manually narrating their work. (Most don’t even bother.)

Why this works

• Writers: make their content more accessible, receive royalties on their voice

• Users: get the convenience of listening and the improved experience of hearing the author’s voice

• Platform: build a profitable business

Obviously there are questions around intellectual property, ownership, and technical integration. But those are for someone else to figure out :)

Quick Brainwaves

Olympics

The Olympics are always such a positive and unique experience. Compared to all the junk we try to keep up with, the Olympics go by way too quickly.

I shared some additional thoughts in this thread.

What’s your favorite part of the Olympics?

Masks and Numeracy

I’ve noticed more people seem to be wearing masks outdoors recently. Of course, I definitely prefer people be overcautious than be reckless, but it’s still a little confusing to me: we knew at this point last year that contracting COVID was significantly less likely outdoors – and that was before we had vaccines!

I understand there is concern around the Delta variant. But for the fully vaccinated (which describes 78% of my zip code), there is a much smaller risk than before.

Again: better safe than sorry. But I’m not sorry for walking down the street without a mask.

Until next time!

The rise of streaming video services has inspired many people to abandon cable television. A major reason not to cut the cord? Live events.

Netflix and other companies disrupted serialized video by making content available all at once. Instead of waiting for Thursday night to watch your favorite show, you could binge an entire season, without ads.

Even in a world of hyperpersonalized recommendations, though, there are still some events we all tune in for. Perhaps it’s the Olympics, an awards show, or a big political speech.

So many of us watch these events. And yet, there are so few options. If you watch the Super Bowl this Sunday, why should you have to listen to Jim Nantz and Tony Romo on CBS?

What if we could watch a different stream?

What if live broadcasts could be personalized like other content?

What if we could watch our favorite YouTubers and podcasters host these events?

This is the idea behind co-streaming.

The Path to Co-Streaming

It would be amazing if everyone had the tools to produce their own Super Bowl broadcast.

We may get there eventually, but it won’t happen all at once. The good news is we’re on our way.

The NFL has started experimenting with multiple broadcasts during this year’s playoffs. Most notably, there was an experimental “kids’ version” on Nickelodeon, full of animation, friendly metaphors, and yes, that good ol’ slime.

Check out some of the highlights:

The same game was shown on a few other channels as well, including a Spanish version and streams focusing on analytics and film breakdown.

By offering multiple versions of the same event, the NFL made their content more accessible and engaging to diverse audiences.

To get an audience in today’s fragmented media environment, you have to meet people where they are. There are very few events that can take their audience for granted.

For now, the Super Bowl is one of them.

Until then, I’m with Megan.

Shoutout

My first introduction to co-streaming was through this piece by Eric Jorgensen, via Mario Gabriele’s fantastic newsletter, The Generalist. (You should definitely subscribe: click here, then tell Mario I sent you.)

Language as Technology

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a (good) podcast is worth a million brainwaves.

This is why the [[a16z Podcast]] is my favorite. I may learn something new from listening, but I’m usually left with more questions than I know what to do with.

Some questions from a recent episode on language are still bouncing around my head:

• How does the meaning of words change as they enter the mainstream?

• Why are metaphors powerful?

• How can we design better experiences for communicating online?

• Is language a meme?

Check out my notes, give the episode a listen, and send me back some brainwaves.

More here

DeFi

The main reason you didn’t get an email from me last week was because I was knee-deep in the GameStop/Robinhood/Wall St saga. (I wanted to write something about it, but it kept getting crazier…)

I’m not interested in discussing what happened, but I am intrigued by the longer-term consequences. Robinhood was universally slammed for halting the buying of specific stocks like GameStop, and many retail investors felt like the company betrayed its mission and name.

There are parallels to last month’s debate about social media and deplatforming. Who has power to make the rules? Who gets to control others’ actions?

Many saw the Robinhood saga as a rallying cry for decentralized finance movement (DeFi).

As I mentioned in my last email, decentralization is going to be a big theme for the next decade. Finance seems like a particularly intriguing use case for decentralization (Bitcoin, anyone?) so I’m interested in learning more about DeFi.

I’ve collected a few links to explore, but if you have more recommendations, shoot them my way.

Tweet of the Week

I wish I had created this account

+1 for an extra week

✌️

– Mark

In a sense, it was the inevitable conclusion to years of disinformation on social media platforms. We finally found out what it would take for Twitter to ban the president.

More interesting, though, the new chapter that opened. Foreign leaders saw American companies hit the kill switch on their own president, then thought, “what could they do to us?”

Thus, the beginning of Internet 3.0 – according to Ben Thompson at Stratechery. Global leaders, in addition to companies everywhere, will want to establish technological sovereignty, taking their fate out of the hands of a few powerful platforms.

Some additional brainwaves here.

Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

The site turned 20 this week. It’s still not allowed in your bibliography, but compared to what you’ll find on social media, the crowdsourced info on Wikipedia is basically the word of God.

Founder Jimmy Wales talked to The Economist about his own “Big Tech” platform, the challenges of disinformation, and how he feels about Twitter banning Trump.

Here are my notes from the conversation.

More Questions

What are the risks of funding mental health startups with venture capital? (here)

How does the commodification of relationships influence our identity? (here)

What if you could de-escalate conversations on Twitter? (here)

Tweet of the Week

See you next week!

Mark

I’m trying something new for 2021, and I’m really excited about it.

Early last year, I started using a new tool called Roam Research.

Roam allowed me to explore my thoughts in a way I had never experienced before. Instead of navigating files, notebooks, and pages, I could create my own “graph” of ideas.

I felt I had finally found something that worked like my own brain.

Looking back, it’s not surprising that I began sending fewer emails when I started using Roam.

It felt impossible to pull ideas away from their connections in the graph.

Then I realized the best way to share was to just invite you in.

For 2021, I created a new graph solely dedicated to Brainwaves.

I’ve spent the past week logging thoughts, questions, observations, and ideas.

(And what a week it’s been!)

I’ll add older brainwaves – my favorites from the past year – in due time.

But this is just the beginning.

If you’re not familiar with Roam, that’s okay. It’s a complicated product and honestly not very intuitive. The product itself is very much a work in progress.

(I can say this sincerely, as a member of the company’s support team.)

For now, I suggest you just explore. More coming soon :)

Check out the database here

As always: feedback, questions, and greetings welcome.

Chat soon,

Mark

Handwriting is slow, which requires the notetaker to process the information before writing it down. There is an act of translation, which doesn’t occur when copying words verbatim.

It’s easy to feel like we understand things we’ve just interacted with. But how do we know?

It’s not enough to underline sentences in a textbook. To truly understand, we must be able to break information down and store it in our brain, outside of the context in which we learned it.

That is, we need to be able to put it in our own words.

“If you can’t understand it simply, you don’t know it well enough.”

— Albert Einstein

The greatest test of understanding is teaching. Can you explain a concept to a child?

Pop Quiz

Don’t scroll up.

What did you learn? What will you take away from this post?

(Try doing this after reading articles. You’ll notice how little we’re actually encoding.)

Our minds are suited to find patterns in the world. There’s a limit to how much raw data we can process, so we simplify.

Simplicity is seductive but not always objective. Models are simply a language for further conversation. They cannot be mistaken for the truth.

A Myers-Briggs test cannot accurately split the world into 16. Taking the test, though, might make you become aware of some of your tendencies. The four letters do not define you, but they can guide you.

Our models contain truths, but only for those who seek them.

By definition, you must be different than others to be above average.

The greatest returns go to those who take the most risk.

Risk-taking is a core tenet of capitalism, but it also holds in creative domains.

Art is a balance between novelty and consensus: too unusual, and nobody has any framework to evaluate it; too banal, and it fails to spark any intrigue.

Challenging paradigms is necessary for transcending them.

Corollary

If taste is always evolving, the hits of the past will eventually be looked down upon.

I thought of this recently when I noticed a similar pattern: The United States has 4% of the global population, yet is responsible for roughly a quarter of the world’s:

• prisoners

• COVID-19 cases

• cumulative carbon emissions

On July 4th, we celebrate this country’s exceptionalism. The United States has an outsized effect on the world’s economy and culture.

Yet we must also remember that with great power comes great responsibility.

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

– James Baldwin

Especially in a period of social isolation, deprived of collective sense-making, we rely on our portals to the rest of the world: social media.

We already know that these platforms are designed to serve us polarizing content. But when the stakes are highest, and the pull is strongest, we must remain vigilant.

Kate Curtis, via the New Yorker

A reminder from Wired:

Feeling informed can be a salve, but being overwhelmed by tragedy serves no purpose. The current year is nothing if not a marathon; trying to sprint to the end of one’s feed will only cause burnout and a decline in mental health among the people whose level-headedness is needed most.

If thinking determines behavior, then habits of mind are more important than habits of action.

Practices like meditation and gratitude journaling may not seem like important uses of time. But they train our minds, which influence everything else.

They don’t get used up or die. They don’t run away.

In fact, ideas grow.

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

– George Bernard Shaw

I started writing publicly in order to share my ideas, to hear yours, and grow them together.

No electricity meant no Wifi –and our phones couldn’t access cellular data either.

All of a sudden, the whirring of the world came to a stop. Without the internet, there were only downloaded files and what physically existed in my house.

I’ve been reading more since quarantine, but this was the first time I truly felt I had “permission” to read.

It felt similar to the experience of your phone dying while being out for the night. Maybe you were planning on meeting up with a friend later, or you were going to look up the best bars in a nearby neighborhood. But with your phone dead, your world of possibilities shrinks. All that exists is what is directly around you.

The freedom from connectivity is sometimes refreshing, but not for long. After a few minutes with the power off, the question inevitably set in: how long could this last?

In my house, nobody can do their job without the internet. Without electricity, we have no refrigeration, drastically shrinking our viable food supply.

Of course, we’re already in a delicate situation. We’ve never been this aware of our food and toilet paper supply. It’s no longer an abstract concept that we rely on complex, international supply chains and regulated networks of governments, hospitals, and banks.

It’s only when the system starts to show cracks that we notice the weak links.

Thankfully, our power was only out for 20 minutes. But it was long enough to remember how reliant we are on the systems that we’ve collectively built. 

A Thought Exercise

The power outage reminded me of one of my favorite thought exercises:

Imagine, with the flip of a switch, that all man-made objects – buildings, computers, and machines of all sorts – vanished, and the earth returned to its pre-human state. All living people are unchanged, and have the knowledge they have at this very moment.

The world returns back to its modern state if and when humanity can rebuild an iPhone. How long would it take?

(I paraphrased for brevity. The full exercise can be found here from Wait but Why.)

Your first instinct is likely to underestimate the herculean nature of the task.

First, we would need to find food, water, and shelter. There would also certainly be a struggle for power. (Everyone’s titles would be irrelevant, as we wouldn’t be able to communicate more than shouting distance. The emperor would, literally, have no clothes.)

Assuming we could keep people alive, there’s also the iPhone problem: 

“While all of this is happening, we’d have to hope really hard that somewhere in the forests of what used to be Cupertino, California, the naked spear-wielding employees of Apple are somehow figuring out a plan. I have no clue how they’d do it, but the challenge at hand is unthinkable. How many different kinds of raw materials go into making an iPhone? In what parts of the Earth are they found, and how deep underground? Who at Apple or elsewhere even knows this information? If you somehow figure that out, how do you get those materials? You need mines, which you can’t dig and without serious construction equipment. You then need mining equipment and miners that know how to use it. Even if you had all the right raw materials, they come from different parts of the Earth—how do you transport them to one place? If they need to cross oceans, how the hell do you do that?”

There’s no correct answer to the problem, but I’d like to hear your thoughts! If you’d like my personal answer to this thought exercise, reply to this email.

Labor Specialization

Thankfully, the above scenario is hypothetical. What I like about the question, though, is how it highlights the power of labor specialization.

Most of us are doing jobs that wouldn’t exist if that hypothetical flip was switched. We would be tasked instantly with tending to the most basic human needs.

Today, all of us eat, but few are farmers. New technologies empower more of us to take on new roles in society.

We learn to build new things. With time, our roles become completely unrelated to life in the past. How would you explain software engineering to someone who never knew the computer?

But as we learn, we collectively forget. Progress liberates us from the past, for better and for worse.

• For better: Nobody has to learn how to use rotary phones anymore (I wouldn’t do much better than these kids.)

• For worse: “Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows.”

Parting Question

Large external events (like a pandemic) threaten the stability of our systems.

How can society progress without losing balance?

Did a friend forward this to you? (How thoughtful!)

You can sign up for future editions by clicking the button below.

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Follow-up to last week

(You can find last week’s post here.)

Thanks for sharing your ideas for creative Zoom gatherings.

My favorite was the cast of this ESPN show competing to get the most famous person on the call.

A theme I really liked: sharing knowledge with others. Kind of like show-and-tell on interesting topics!

Here’s the Atlantic talking to some teens about these “PowerPoint Parties”.

(Plug: my friend Nikhil runs events like these called Get Smart. The next one is this Thursday.)

Tweet of the Week

Thoughts? Feedback? Just want to introduce yourself? Simply reply to this email. Connecting with readers is my favorite part of this whole thing.

If you liked this piece, feel free to click the heart below or forward it to a friend you think will like it.

Talk soon!

Mark

We’re in a bit of a temporal vortex. Stripped of the cadence of regular life, it’s hard to distinguish between the days of the week or even the time of day.

Our perception of time slows down in an unfamiliar reality. The brain spends more time processing new information, unable to fall back on the normal cues that help us efficiently move through our day.

As Lenin said, "There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen."

Time is a funny thing. It can be stretched and compressed in several directions at once, yet it’s the one true constant in our lives.

Let’s spend some of that time on space.

Everywhere is Anywhere

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about our phones’ ability to transport us to different places.

In the smartphone era, any lull in stimulation is temporary.

On the subway? See what your friends have been up to. Waiting in line? Watch your favorite show!

As Seth Godin recently put it:

Something's more interesting than this

And now, that’s always true.

Whatever you’re doing.

No matter who you’re with.

Something, somewhere, is more interesting than this.

And it’s in your pocket.

All the time. As long as the battery lasts.

There’s an alert, a status update, breaking news. There’s a vibration or a text, just waiting. Something. Right now.

Until infinity.

Unless we choose to redefine whatever we’re doing as the thing we’ve chosen to do, right here and right now.

With our phones, we can escape boredom by transcending our physical environment. No matter where we are, our phones can act as a portal.

Almost anything can be done from anywhere.

This means we're capable of not just task-switching, but instantly swapping environments.

When Slack interrupts Netflix, the office invades the theater. When we flip from Twitter to Amazon, the pub becomes the store.

This phenomenon was recently profiled in an Atlantic piece titled "Every place is the same now":

The office is a suitable place for tapping out emails, but so is the bed, or the toilet. You can watch television in the den—but also in the car, or at the coffee shop, turning those spaces into impromptu theaters. Grocery shopping can be done via an app while waiting for the kids’ recital to start. Habits like these compress time, but they also transform space. Nowhere feels especially remarkable, and every place adopts the pleasures and burdens of every other. It’s possible to do so much from home, so why leave at all?

We're a few weeks into taking that challenge literally.

Is it possible to boil life down to the essential elements: Grubhub (food), Netflix (entertainment), Zoom (socialization), and Amazon (household basics)?

Be careful what you wish for.

Screens are not spaces

Here's a joke I just came up with.

Q: How do you tell the difference between happy hour and a birthday party?

A: The title of the Zoom invite

In another time, the difference might be more pronounced. One happens somewhat spontaneously; the other on a specific date, invites sent far ahead of the event. Norms dictate you either bring a gift or pay your friend back next time. Is there alcohol or cake? (Both please.)

Gatherings can't be reduced to a participant list. Context matters.

Zoom does a decent job at approximating socializing, but it works more like a phone call than actually hanging out together. Information can be exchanged, but there's little shared experience beyond being on the call.

Instead of inhabiting a common environment –complete with an ambiance of sounds, smells, and movements in the periphery– we view each other in disparate exhibits. She’s in an elegant home office; he’s in a messy bedroom; you’re at the kitchen table in pajamas.

In some ways, video calls represent the "uncanny valley" of communication. We absorb most of the verbal and non-verbal cues, yet we're not truly together.

As one tweet put it,

The goal is not to share each of our realities with each other, but to share the same reality. It makes more sense to inhabit a completely different world like Animal Crossing than to broadcast the lonely worlds each of us are isolated in.

Hacking Zoom

So, what can we do now? Outside of places like Fortnite and Animal Crossing, we have to create our own environments.

Think about the time you normally spend with people. Chances are you aren’t focusing only on each other. You might not even be facing one another!

You’re eating a meal, taking a ride, watching an event. There’s something that both facilitates and distracts from conversation.

It’s possible to do this on Zoom with some creative screen sharing. Just as teachers share lecture slides over video calls, we can play Codenames online to reimagine game night. (I’m scheduled to play Family Feud with some strangers this week.)

There’s even a browser extension that lets friends sync their Netflix video and group chat for a “Netflix Party”.

I’m excited to discover more creative ways people have powered-up their video calls.

Have any fun ideas? I’ll share my favorites with the group next time.

Media Diet

📰Read

• “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake”: In order to predict the future, you have to understand the past. In last month’s cover story for The Atlantic, David Brooks chronicles the history of the “family unit” and living patterns across the past century. The sociological factors explored touch every part of society: race, gender, religion, wealth… if you’re interested in humans as social animals, it’s a must-read.

📺Watch 

• Westworld: If you’re bummed about the state of the world we live in, you can distract yourself with some thrilling existential questions: what makes us human? Does free will exist? Will artificial intelligence technology overtake humans, and if so, when? This show is not for passive viewing – the creators make sure to keep you on your toes, and you may need to go back to rewatch some episodes after the twists…

  Season three is airing Sundays on HBO. If you get up to date, let’s trade theories about how this all turns out.

🎧Listen

• Business Wars: I’ve listened to a few different series of BW, which details the history of iconic companies and their competition. I find the show to be a nice balance between informative and entertaining, and the quasi-fictional dialogue makes it a relaxing listen compared to a dense, fast-paced interview.

  I just finished the series on Starbucks vs. Dunkin, but have also done Facebook/Snapchat, Xbox/Playstation, and Coke/Pepsi. There’s likely a show for you.

Tweet of the Week

Thanks for reading!

As always, I welcome feedback and any brainwaves of your own. Just reply to this email.

Until next time,

Mark

I think it's time we embrace the opposite.

I. The Decade of Showing

The past decade has been massive for visual content.

It’s been a golden age for long-form video like TV. The 2010s birthed the "streaming wars" and brought gaming to the mainstream.

The greater impact on society, though, has been the democratization of showing. Anybody can now easily capture, create, edit, and share visual content.

Instagram, arguably the most influential company of the past decade, was invented in 2010. Snapchat was founded in 2011. And the most noticeable difference between iPhones in 2010 and 2020 might be the number of cameras.

We started the decade uploading blurry pictures to Facebook and ended with the ability to "deepfake" ourselves into videos.

This was a decade of GIFs and animations, emojis and avatars, filters and lenses. And of course, memes.

Memes in 2010 were altering text layered on top of stock photos. Now? Memes are embodied by the waves of videos participating in global and subcultural trends. (I actually spent half an hour trying to find the “top memes of 2019” before conceding that memes turn over so quickly now that they’re almost impossible to pull out of context –like trying to catch salmon in a stream with your bare hands.)

"Planking", one of the early photo challenges, went global at the beginning of the decade. A few years later, in the summer of 2014, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went viral on Facebook. Imagine what happens daily on TikTok, an app designed specifically for video virality, five years later.

My point is to illustrate how much progress we’ve made with visual communication. I support any technology that enables us to be creative and express ourselves, and the Snapchats and TikToks of the world have certainly done that.

However, I think the currency of (moving) pictures has been devalued. What once was worth a thousand words now commands only a few neurons of our working memories, soon to be displaced by the next flittering GIF that’s algorithmically pushed through our visual field. Meaningful connections can –and still are– made through video, but our eyes are overstimulated.

It's time for something new.

II. The Audio Revolution

If the previous decade was about video, this one may be for audio.

There are a couple of reasons to be bullish on audio. In particular: voice technology and "voice technology".

1. AirPods and Alexa

Anyone who has worn a pair of AirPods knows how amazing the product is. (I don't own a pair, partially because I'm afraid how much I'll wear them.)

The data seem to support the hype: sales of AirPods are growing at almost exactly the same rate as iPhones during the initial years. (The growth rate is still increasing!)

While sales don't automatically equal influence –and I'm not necessarily saying AirPods are the next iPhone– I wouldn't dismiss the impact they'll have on culture in the next decade.

The most impactful use cases for new technology are usually not those that were predicted. Just as the iPhone enabled a world beyond its initial [iPod + phone + browser] paradigm, there will likely be a new generation of companies that are built on top of AirPods.

I don't think Apple had in mind, for example, that AirPods could be used to silently "pass notes" in class.

It begs the question:

If everyone had the capability to send and receive audio at all times, what could we do?

While AirPods have been a hit right out of the gate, "smart speakers" like Amazon's Echo haven't lived up to the initial hype. They might still be underwhelming, but don't expect voice assistants to go away anytime soon.

In fact, the growth of voice assistants might also be accelerating. Amazon recently announced that "hundreds of millions" of Alexa-enabled devices have been sold, while Google stated that there are half a billion monthly users of its own voice assistant.

Right now, Alexa may only be good for setting timers and fetching weather data. But tech companies are investing heavily in voice-operated functionality. As more devices become connected to the internet, we will be able to control more with our voices. The major players in "smart home" tech –Apple, Amazon, and Google– are even collaborating to ensure this future becomes a reality.

As with AirPods, the ultimate use cases for voice-operated systems are likely years out from even being conceived.

(Unless we're talking about Disney's 1999 film "Smart House" – they already had the idea of manifesting smoothies out of thin air.)

The exact future may be uncertain, but it certainly sounds like there will be more speaking and listening in our future.

2. The Original Communication Method

Vocal communication is, in itself, already an incredible feat. (Producing and interpreting vibrations in the air according to a complex system of language? Close to a miracle.)

Speaking is the most instinctual form of communication. As easy as it's become to show, it's still more natural to tell. As Charles Darwin noted,

Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.

If you gave a baby an iPhone, it would likely throw it on the ground and wail before it would create an Instagram story.

Photos and videos require capturing the external –often removing ourselves from the present moment. Speaking, in contrast, is an act of expression: our voice comes from within.

Perhaps this is why audible speech is also more effective than other forms of communication. (The simplest reason why babies wail: it works.)

As described by Alex Danco in his essay, "The Audio Revolution", audio is a medium with an incredible density of information.

Audible speech burns hot with information. Intonation, accents, innuendo, vocal phrasing, emphasis, pauses, all communicate far more than a transcript can. Audio is the format for “You all know exactly what I’m talking about, because of the way I’m saying it.”

This explains why texting people feels like a chore, but talking on the phone is a treat. Email is for transmitting information, while meetings are for getting on the same page.

I have too many relationships that are kept alive by infrequent exchanges of written text. We keep up to date on the facts of our lives. But the connection isn't as rich as I'd want it to be.

When one of us inevitably calls the other (or, if we can somehow pre-schedule a chat), new life is breathed into the relationship. Even a few minutes on the phone will drastically change how close I feel to that person.

As Danco says, "information isn't what we're told; it's what we understand."

If speaking is natural and listening is effective, we should try to use our voices more!

III. Hear Me Out

My personal fascination with technology is related to the paradox of connection. It's easier than ever to connect with others, yet we feel increasingly isolated.

I've been thinking a lot about voice and audio technology for a bit, which naturally led to the big question behind this post:

How can we use audio to make it easier to connect with friends and family?

I have some ideas, but the question itself is more important.

To get your own creative gears spinning, I'm leaving assorted thoughts below.

But I'd like to hear your thoughts! Reply to this email and we can do some brainstorming.

I'll share some of (y)our ideas next week.

Parting Thoughts

• One of the existing problems with audio communication is the difficulty of synchronization: a phone conversation requires both people to be available. I believe this is one of the reasons texting became so popular; whereas a call might interrupt, texts can be responded to at convenience. We all could benefit from picking up the phone more, but the issue of convenience isn't going to change. We should have a voice-first system that's asynchronous.

• What about voice messaging? It's popular in China and other countries outside the U.S. but it can often be inconvenient for the recipient. Even if they have AirPods in, it can be awkward to divert one's attention to digest the message. Unlike a text, which can be scanned, a voice message in a conversation thread brings uncertainty: does this need to be listened to now? (More on this here.)

• What if there was a medium that was, by default, for non-urgent communication? What if, instead of getting lost in the noise of the day, we could send voice messages that people would only get when they check their "inbox"? That sounds a lot like... voicemail on a landline phone. I actually had this thought more than a year ago: What if Alexa was the new landline? Amazon already has a "drop-in" feature that allows you to communicate directly with another Alexa-enabled device. You could theoretically call someone this way, but why should both people have to be in front of their devices?

(SNL's contribution to the discussion: the Amazon Echo Silver)

• What would voice "stories" be (the audio version of Snapchat)? Probably something like a podcast. The ability to share one-to-many isn't something we've seen with social voice technology yet, save for podcasts.

Media Diet

Each week, I share some of the things I’ve enjoyed reading, watching, and listening to. You can learn more about my media diet here.

1. “The Audio Revolution” (24 min read 📖)

I cited this essay in the above piece, but it’s worth reading in its entirety if you’re interested in the theory of information & media.

Questions explored:

1. How does information density vary across mediums? Why is audio a "hot" medium?

2. How has the medium of audio changed in recent decades?

3. What are the implications for a culture driven by a "hot" medium like audio?

2. Explained: Diamonds (23 min watch 📺)

I’m a big fan of the Vox: Explained miniseries (plural) on Netflix. This one is a fun exploration of economics & marketing, geology & chemistry, and consumer psychology.

Questions explored:

1. Why do so many people buy diamonds, and why are they so expensive?

As a fan of game theory and signaling, I found this quote particularly amusing:

"There's something deeply touching about doing this for somebody, about wanting to be very public about how you feel about somebody, and in a way, burning a pile of money is a pretty compelling argument that you feel what you say you feel."

3. Writers Writing, Readers Reading, Creators Creating (40 min listen 🎧)

One of my favorite podcasts (a16z) on one of my favorite topics. (I’ve written previously about Substack and aligning incentives.) The conversation featured a creator, investor, and founder (of Substack) and had insights from various perspectives. A must-listen for anyone interested in the “creator economy”.

Here are some notes from the conversation:

• A more direct relationship between readers and writers (or creators of any kind) increases the quality of content. The business model of direct patronage makes the writer's job to create value and relationships instead of generating views and impressions.

• Who would you rather trust with your attention: an individual that relies on direct contributions or a media company funded by advertisers?

• Direct subscriptions allow completely different types of work to be feasible. Creating for thousands instead of millions empowers people to make a living writing about their interests.

• In an ecosystem with niche publications serving smaller numbers of readers, there is a great potential for developing community. When you have like-minded people gathered in the same space (i.e. a comment section), there is another level of value for the creators and audience.

  • Psssst: l want to do this with this “ideasletter”. If you enjoy these emails, why not share with a friend? Two minds are better than one!

    Share Mark's Brainwaves

Thought Starters

Some conversations I’ve started having with myself and/or others. (Links are to Twitter)

1. Monday was the 10th anniversary of the iPad launch. How disruptive was it?

2. The powers and responsibilities of authoritarian governments during crises (i.e. China during this Coronavirus outbreak)

3. Netflix recently started reporting viewership metrics by the number of people who watched a few minutes of a piece, instead of the number of viewers that watched at least 70%. What long-term effects could this have?

Cartoon of the Week

(Ellis Rosen via WIRED)

Looking forward to your thoughts, feedback, questions, and ideas!

See you next week,

Mark