Artifacts
Content that has significantly shaped the way I think about the world
“What 5 ✨links✨ would you want if you were stranded on a deserted island?”
Sometimes I come across something that’s so well-written and so all-encompassing that it causes an internal paradigm shift. Post-discovery, these artifacts continue to stand out in the overwhelming sea of content that I spend my days drifting around.
Me, floating around in the Sea of Content, finding and collecting artifacts to put in my Little Pink Boat of Ideas™.
With so much noise out there (and as someone who is easily overwhelmed), I believe in ruthless curation. Your boat only has so much room before it sinks and your artifacts once again get lost at sea. To make sure the really good stuff doesn’t get drowned out by semi-interesting think-pieces, books that probably could have been blog posts, and clickbait videos made for short attention spans, you have to pick only a few.
I present this 5-artifact list to you. This is what is in my boat.
If you’re going to read anything, read these.
These artifacts were not sought out to confirm existing beliefs. Each of these has at some point forced me to take a serious pause to fold massive amounts of new information into my mental model of how the world works.
Because of this, I don’t recommend speedrunning through them to acquire knowledge as fast as possible. I instead recommend glazing over the high-level summaries today, and then returning to consume each one slowly, maybe even days apart, giving each artifact the time it deserves. Let the ideas simmer in the back of your mind on your daily commute, let them invade your #showerthoughts, and use them as a new lens through which you try to analyze the world.1
Artifacts:
The Tail End.
Tim Urban | Wait But Why, 2015
TLDR2 (but you really should read it, I promise most of it is pictures):
Time is finite (and extremely countable). Living in the same place as people you love matters, quality time matters, priorities matter. Don’t let unconscious inertia dictate how you spend your years, days, and minutes — time is precious.
How it’s impacted me:Being intentional with my time, trying to be “a person that shows up”, saying yes to new experiences, prioritizing meaningful friendships, collaborating with people I love spending time around, going dancing more, calling and visiting my family often, doing things for the plot, spending time only on things that are in line with who I want to be.
Side note: Tim Urban’s writing is exactly the silly-diagram-way that I like to think. If you’ve never stumbled across Wait But Why, you have such a delightful time ahead of you.
The way we think about charity is dead wrong
Dan Pallotta | TED, 2013TLDR (or watch on 2x speed if you must):
Society’s perception of ethics in the nonprofit sector is causing a misalignment in incentives that prevents us from solving our most pressing issues at scale.
“You put those five things together —
you can't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector;
you can't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers;
you can't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes;
you don't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector;
and you don't have a stock market with which to fund any of this, even if you could do it in the first place
— and you've just put the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector, on every level.
How it’s impacted me:
This talk:Made me gain the belief that things need to be profitable to scale. This belief is why I’m working in the tech/startup space, with my desire to make the world a better place leading me to work at companies that are building walkable cities, improving transportation, and making funding more accessible.
Was the reason I started thinking about the importance of incentive alignment in the projects that I pursue, and kickstarted an interest and appreciation for economics. Sometimes a nonprofit is the best vehicle for an idea — but I’m now very intentional when choosing the set of rules (explicit, social, financial) that I want to govern the projects I work on.
Made me angry that I am someone who is *in general* being incentivized to spend my 40 hours/week working on things that are profitable instead of things that are good for society, and that checking both boxes simultaneously has to be such a strategic and intentional effort.
Caused me to recognize how powerful for-profit CEOs are, and therefore try to:
a) create pathways for people in tech how to tactically use their influence to make their communities better and
b) remove barriers for caring and ambitious people to hold these positions in the future (especially if they are underrepresented or face disproportionate barriers to getting there)Was pivotal in my belief that grant money should mostly be given in the form of unrestricted funding (where the charity is trusted to decide which projects are most valuable rather than the funder). Diligence is still important, but I believe in investing in people > projects, and that the leaders of nonprofits could use at least a little bit of the faith given to 20-somethings on Twitter who get funding and mentorship to see if their crazy ideas just might work out. This is not an attack against 20-somethings on Twitter — I actually think this investment in great people needs to spread more broadly.
The housing theory of everything
John Myers, Ben Southwood, Sam Bowman | Works in Progress, 2021
TLDR:
The reason housing is so expensive is in fact a supply-and-demand issue. Due to constraints on supply (caused by zoning laws and NIMBYs lol), houses have become scarce assets — with rising demand inevitably leading to increases in cost. Populations are being driven out of city centres, struggling to pay for housing even with roommates and multiple incomes, experiencing homelessness, having fewer children, suffering from adverse health effects, loneliness, over-relying on cars and air conditioning, and becoming segregated and politically polarized — and it all starts with a shortage of affordable housing in the places people want to live. How do you make housing affordable? You make housing, period. Supply and demand baby 😎.
How it’s impacted me:Addressing the housing crisis (whether it’s in government, urban planning, for-profit, tech, policy, etc.) seems to be the #1 most important thing to do right now. Whatever your political beliefs are, we need more homes. I won’t butcher this incredible conclusion:
No good alone
Rayne Fischer-Quann | Internet Princess, 2023
TLDR:
You don’t have to be “fixed” to be worthy of love. Life, even though it’s messy, is best done together. Learning who we are and growing into the people we become are things that cannot possibly be done in isolation. Even if you aren’t perfect — and no one is — you deserve to love and be loved. It’s probably the only reason we’re here.Some incredible quotes:
Nothing real can make contact without friction.
Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.
It’s hard, certainly — it’s painful and exhausting and fundamentally terrifying to rip yourself open and leave the guts at the mercy of the people you choose to love. But if I know anything, I know this: It’s better than being alone.
How it’s impacted me:
Everything in this essay needs to be said, said often, and said loudly.
Read it, and when you need a reminder, read it again.
In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.
Matthew Desmond | The 1619 Project, 2019
TLDR:
Slavery and the cotton industry are the source of the phenomenal wealth that made the United States into what it is today. Corporate practices in data analytics, operations, and people management as well as concepts like economies of scale, spreadsheets, depreciation, and mortgages were techniques developed in plantations. The 1619 Project reframes United States history by emphasizing the contributions of Black Americans and explaining the lasting impacts of slavery on things like healthcare, policing, voting, education, and minimum wage.
Some quotes:Historians have tended to connect the development of modern business practices to the 19th-century railroad industry, viewing plantation slavery as precapitalistic, even primitive. It’s a more comforting origin story, one that protects the idea that America’s economic ascendancy developed not because of, but in spite of, millions of black people toiling on plantations.
The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design.
It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.
How it’s impacted me:
It’s almost impossible to distinguish between Canadian and American media (and by extension, people) — this means I’ve struggled my whole life to understand how the cultures could feel so similar despite vast differences between our two countries when it comes to things like healthcare, worker protections, subsidized education, and social safety nets.
Things started to make sense when I started to learn more about the history of slavery and racial discrimination (disclaimer: Canada is absolutely not perfect and its history is problematic in its own ways). Reading about the lasting economic impacts has made me think constantly about equity in today’s institutions, especially when it comes to consequences like the wealth gap (the median family wealth for white vs. black families is $171,000 vs. $17,600, respectively). The 1619 Project also helped me to realize that historical miseducation was carefully manufactured — it’s no mistake that I had never connected the dots.
A challenging part of learning this history is dealing with cognitive dissonance, which occurs when your values and beliefs are in conflict with the world you observe, participate in, and benefit from. In my experience, stepping out of blissfuly-engineered-ignorance is a shock to the system, and it can make you feel really small and powerless.
What’s important is recognizing the scope of your influence and taking action (even at a small scale) that is within your control. To start, reading and listening. Next, doing your best to address power imbalances in spaces that you’re a part of, and asking questions like “Who is not in this room and why?”. As your scope of influence levels up, you will likely have the ability to design inclusive policy, reduce barriers to participation (e.g. financial, transportation), be intentional with recruitment and referrals, enforce safe spaces, and use your network to foster connections between peers and mentors. Working through your discomfort and being open to learning is step one.
Honourable Mentions:
Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web - Jack Conte (longtime musician and the CEO of Patreon) talks about “True Fans” and the online incentives that encourage creators to make art and content. 1000 true fans paying $100/month is a $100,000/year business. This is a choice creators can make.
Are you serious? “I want… to be as serious as I can about the things that matter to me, to be encouraging to everyone else who wants to be serious too, and to be kind to everyone who doesn’t quite manage to be.” Bars.
Are Farm Antibiotics Destroying Our Health? - the use of antibiotics in our farming and food processing practices is destroying the microbiomes that keep our gut (and by extension, all other bodily systems) healthy. Strange and interconnected things have been happening to the human body over the past few decades — the median age of puberty has declined from 16.5 to 13 in only one century, obesity has gone from 12 percent to over 40 percent since 1975, and allergies, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, polycystic ovarian syndrome, diabetes, and eczema are all on the rise. How has this impacted my thoughts on food? I’ve really internalized that what you put into your body is quite literally your fuel for everything you do. When I can afford it, I try to buy local and/or organic food, especially when it comes to animal products (hormones, antibiotics) and produce (where pesticides are more of a problem).
Maid - A front-row seat to understanding the dynamics of abusive relationships. Such a powerful and important piece of education, and a topic most people are afraid to touch. Hard to watch but one of the best shows I’ve seen.
When They See Us - Ava DuVernay makes use of powerful cinematography to put a spotlight on racial discrimination in the legal system by telling the true story of five teenagers who were falsely accused and imprisoned for the attack of a jogger in Central Park.
VC Contagion & other articles by Kyle Harrison — awesome, nuanced, personable, highly-researched and yet extremely digestible takes on the VC industry & human nature. A great place to start going down internet rabbit holes.
Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break - Society needs to develop economic incentive structures that encourage the growth of profitable businesses that solve real, meaningful problems.
The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world - Air conditioning dependency puts extreme strain on our electrical infrastructure but for 50 years, there was no consumer demand — how did we get here? The rise of air conditioning was fuelled by utility companies looking to sell more electricity to consumers, construction firms and city planners who could build cheaply and compensate with AC. We are now left with permanently induced demand — population booms in places like Arizona mean that AC is a necessity consumers literally cannot live without — and increasingly severe heatwaves are causing critical electrical infrastructure to fail when we need it most.
The Social Dilemma - This movie paints an overarching picture of how social media exploits human nature to maximize profit, and how that has led to a polarized population suffering from unprecedented depression and anxiety.
Why young men join white supremacist groups - Former white supremacist Christian Picciolini describes his teenaged descent into white supremacy, the recent exponential rise of alienated and vulnerable people finding community and purpose in radical ideology, and his work on the Free Radicals project, where he worked to provide escape routes for people trying to leave supremacist groups. The links at the bottom of his website are also worth reading.
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - VC money is artificial fertilizer that has subsidized the economically inefficient business models of delivery platforms to the point of market dominance — and in this game, everyone is losing. Delivery platforms spend billions to earn millions, customers pay high fees, delivery drivers make low and unpredictable wages, and nefarious customer acquisition tactics are causing major headaches for business owners.
Supersize Me - Watching this in elementary school gym class scared me away from eating fast food for almost 10 years. I’ve just recently been having my first experiences at several burger chains. Not sure if this is personal growth? Everything in moderation. 😁
Meet the man who influenced your entire breakfast this morning - My family used to listen to Terry O’Reilly’s Under the Influence on road trips (podcasts about the history of marketing, this is my nerd origin story). This episode describes the life of Albert Lasker, who influenced a truly ridiculous number of brands that are still around today. Under the Influence gave me a genuine appreciation for innovative marketing and how a very select few individuals have been so influential on the brands that exist in the world today.
Vihart’s entire youtube channel - The older I get, the more confident I am Vihart is the reason I realized I liked math. With fun and silly doodle videos, she introduced 10-year-old Joss to concepts like infinite series, geometry, and logarithms without me even realizing it.
Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on Henrik Karlsson is one of my favourite Substack writers, and with this essay helped me structure my thinking around how to balance exploring new ideas with “going all-in”.
I know most of you won’t listen to me here — and that’s ok. You are in fact the ruler of your own universe. If you are hungry for ideas, put these on your little conveyor belt of knowledge and eat them right up. Do what you want queen. :’)
TLDR means “Too Long Didn’t Read” and is a fancy way of saying “summary for those who don’t have the patience to actually click on the link and read”. I’m including this definition because my dad didn’t know what TLDR meant. Kids these days. 🤡