Trevor McKendrick - Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Wherever & whoever you are, I hope you have amazing family & friend relationships to invest in & spend time with.

Trevor

Explaining Christmas (article)

Christmas is the main holiday of America - it’s the one most people want to “get into” - why is that? Why do we feel sacred feelings about Christmas even without any connection to religion?

Martin Shkreli strategizing on Sam Bankman-Fried’s prison strategy (youtube)

I listened to 100% of this, the entire thing is interesting.

Martin goes into detail on things like: prison culture, plea bargain/trail strategy, what to worry about going into prison, and many other details that only a former inmate would be able to theorize on.

Related: Martin remains one of today’s underrated public personas. He’s terrific public speaker if nothing else.

Rent the Backyard post-mortem (article)

Rent the Backyard was a startup that built extra housing for home owners on their home’s land. They recently shut down.

Spencer Burleigh, the CEO & cofounder, wrote an article on why they shut down, what happened to the company, what they would have done differently, etc

Huge, huge shoutout to Spencer and the entire company for making a go at this. We need more status for startup founders, especially those trying the most ambitious ideas that solve the biggest problems (like building more housing).

When childhood was discovered (article)

I believe we all drastically underestimate how different the past was from today. One example is how differently we used to view children:

“Humans were thought to be born with corrupted souls and harbored within them the nastiest and meanest of instincts. Childhood, as a time of innocence, is a modern creation. As pointed out by French historian Phillipe Aries, in Centuries of Childhood, before the 17th century children were thought to be merely small adults, possessing the same qualities and natures as grownups. Children weren't little darlings or cute cherubs, as we often refer to children today. Rather they were fallen angels, like Lucifer.”

I read a biography on Talleyrand, one of the people who survived the French Revolution to end up working with Napoleon. He came from a high status family, and my understand is when he was 2 or 3 years old he was shipped off to grow & be raised by people who weren’t his parents, kind of like boarding school for kids.

The Story of VaccinateCA (article)

The story of how a grassroots group of tech people built & organized the main source of information for where vaccines where in America.

Very long, very detailed, very worth your time for anyone who wants to know the real nuts & bolts of how we need to improve our institutions.

Be less scared of overconfidence (article)

“This thought pattern—throwing away most information in fear of using it to make overconfident judgments—shows up all the time. I’m here to tell you why I hate it.”

Note to self: reread this every day!!

See also: Nat Friedman’s website with its comments on the efficient market hypothesis:

• “The efficient market hypothesis is a lie

- At best it is a very lossy heuristic

- The best things in life occur where EMH is wrong

- In many cases it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion

- ‘Most people are other people’”

I don’t believe the efficient market hypothesis is a lie, but I do think many people like me undervalue the information they have because “I can’t be the only person who thinks/see this.” Nat’s point about seeing the word as 500 people instead of everyone is spot on.

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