Election, Digital Diet Hacks & Tech Round-Up
What I Learned at School this Week
Hey y’all!
I wish we could show the real-time spike in Twitter usage this week. Not a great time for me to be trying to spend *less* time on my phone.
Anyway, below are the things I learned this week that I thought were worth sharing, in case you need more things to read, in between refreshing news sites every 60 seconds (and your Bitcoin price tracker).
Election Update
It’s not officially over, but not looking good for the Red Team. Trump has filed lawsuits in a three states.
Trump and Biden spent $107M and $92M on FB ads alone, respectively. Fascinating. And $14B total was spent on the 2020 election.
IMHO - it’s time for our Nation to start acting as one. McCain’s concession speech from 2008 says it all.
Bernie is objectively pretty radical. But you gotta give it to him, he is very consistent. Here was his pre-election take last week:
Digital Diet Weekly Digest
Here are a few things in my exploration around my digital consumption (addiction).
Hack #1 - Badge Icon Disabled
I moved my email app from the main screen to the second screen, and disabled the “badge” altogether.
The Badge is that (intentionally) red little flag on an App’s icon that shows the number of new things in the App (in this case, unread emails). It’s stressful seeing it. And it pulls you in (intentionally engineered this way, of course). So I disabled it for my mail App.
Now, I go to my email when I want to, not when it wants me to.
Hack #2 - Black & White Mode
I set this up years ago, but had forgotten about it. Stolen from this very long article, written in 2018: How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You - The Very, Very Complete Guide to Productivity, Focus, and Your Own Longevity.
I enabled B&W Mode again this week. It’s a native feature on the iPhone. It’s scary how much a lack of exciting colors affects the times you want to pick up your phone — and — keep it in your hand.
Now when I turn the colors back on (I set up a home screen triple-click to easily enable colors when necessary) it feels like I’m holding the Las Vegas Strip in the palm of my hand — it’s wildly overwhelming and feels absurdly unnecessary.
The Light Phone
This week, I was tempted again, at the thought of getting The Light Phone (if that iPhone Mini doesn’t win me over — pre-orders available, starting today).
Here’s the script from the video on their website, it’s pretty compelling:
“It’s a choice. How will you choose to spend your life’s time? We call it, ‘going light.’ You see, our time and attention are the two most important things, we often take for granted. Does being so connected, actually make us any happier? It’s why we’ve designed a phone, to be used as little as possible. It has a few essential tools, a thoughtful interface, and a black and white matte display. It’s a phone, that actually respects you. We’re humans, and we’re taking back our lives.”
Tristan Harris on: The Social Dilemma.
He talks in depth with Joe Rogan this week about the making of the film, and expands on a lot of the topics discussed in the documentary.
But, with only 12 minutes left in the interview (scroll to 2 hrs 8 mins), Joe asks about Tristan’s take on people’s fear of AI. It was one of the most simple and compelling takes I’ve heard on the subject. The whole episode is worth listening to if you want a deeper dive in The Social Dilemma, but this last bit was a layer deeper.
In response to the fear of AI taking over:
We have already gotten there…
Humans have to fight back to reclaim our autonomy and free will from the machines.
- Tristan Harris
Enjoy:
Naval - Weekly Round-up
I’m going to start doing a “Weekly Naval Round-Up” going forward.
Just kidding.
But I do have a few fun nuggets from the world of the Zen-Tech Monk, Naval.
1) This week he did an impromptu AMA he did on Twitter. There’s a lot of great questions and answers in the thread.
2) Here’s a link to a podcast clip he put together about the Principal-Agent Problem. But the thing that stuck out to me, was this quote:
If you want it done, then go.
If not, then send.
ICYMI
Bitcoin Flirts with $16K - up 67%, since this time last year
Ant Financial Delays its IPO - potentially for as much as 6 months
Some context on Ant, if you didn’t know (I just learned this!); TLDR:
Ant is the parent of the widely popular Chinese payment platform Alipay. Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) set up Alipay in 2004 to help Chinese buyers pay for online purchases. From our perspective, this is similar to what eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) did with PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) a couple of decades ago.
In 2011, Alibaba spun off Ant, but kept a 33% ownership stake. Ant initially started as a payment company, with users accessing Alipay (their mobile phone application). Once it built out a strong user base, it then branched out into other financial services. Over the last decade, it has added numerous services to its platform, like food delivery, transportation, entertainment and asset management.
One final note, Ant makes PayPal (Venmo’s parent co.) look miniscule. Ant’s Payment TPV (total purchase volumes) in 2019 was $16.1 trillion, compared to PayPal’s “puny” $712 billion.
Space Race: Bezos vs. Musk
The space race continues to heat up between the two tech billionaires. Both have claimed their companies are simply a launching pad (pun intended) to get humanity to become multi-planetary. Couple fun updates this week.
This week, Bezos sold 1M Amazon shares, worth about $3B. Totaling $10B liquidated this year. A lot is going to his space company, Blue Origin.
Tuesday, Elon tweeted about the funding round in 2008 that almost didn’t happen, when Tesla was three days from going bankrupt. Full thread here (worth the quick read). And in the end, he says: “reason for the stock options is that they’re needed to help pay for humanity to get to Mars in 10 to 20 years.”
Remember everyone freaking out about what company would buy ByteDance (owner of TikTok)? Oracle and Walmart are still trying to make it happen. But until the do, ByteDance needs some petty cash to tide them over: just two Bills.
Here’s Fortune’s take, from Thursday’s Term Sheet:
Quote of the week that I’ve been pondering:
Build for yourself, then find people like you. (easy)
Build for others, then find people not like you. (hard)
How did you feel about this week’s post?
(All feedback is 100% anonymous)
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading until the end. I appreciate you.
See ya next week! And until then, just keep breathing. We got this.
Cheers,
Brendan J Short
[Written while listening to Kayne — in honor of his cute presidential run. But actually, 60K votes across 12 states ain’t bad!]