Trevor McKendrick - My personal theme for 2022

Happy new year!

By coincidence and miscounting, this is issue #200 of the newsletter. January 2022 marks doing the newsletter for 4 years! Thank you to all of you for reading over the years.

Two quick announcements:

First, I got an advance copy of Jimmy Soni’s new book, The Founders. So far enjoying it very much - getting the details behind the creation of the PayPal Mafia is worthy of a book! I’ll be doing a review of it here soon before it comes out on February 22.

Second, I’m happy to announce my personal theme for this year: Future You ‘22. You can read the post on my blog explaining the theme here

Have a great week!

Trevor

Don’t Look Up (Netflix movie)

How the world would react today if we found out a planet-destroying comet was headed to Earth.

Don’t Look Up is a Rorschach test for what went wrong with Covid.

Not life changing art but great commentary on the world today. A must see IMO.

Vitalik tweetstorm on updates of his thinking over the past decade (twitter)

Interesting how much he wrote before he The Guy Who Created Ethereum, and how much he got right.

Noah Smith on Techno Optimism for 2022 (article)

Finally some optimism from Noah!

Siddhesh 2021 review (article)

I previously linked to Siddhesh’s very good post on what it’s like living as an Indian in the US, 2 month in.

His 2021 is also worthy of your attention! I was reminded that I still need to go watch Knives Out.

”How Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time” (article)

Watching Covid happen has 10x’ed my weighting of the importance of what I’ll call “social factors” in how people make decisions.

This is another great example of how a bad idea or meme can spread into the brains of millions of humans and alter their perception of reality & change how they live their life.

Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger on Web3/Crypto (article)

I’m becoming more convinced that something big will happen from crypto. Digital scarcity & the step change increase of decentralization beyond HTTP seem like bona fide inventions that are unique enough that it feels premature to assume nothing more will come of them beyond what we already have today.

That said, I make no predictions on the timeline.

Future You ’22 (article)

Linking one more time to my 2022 theme & manifesto.

And Finally…

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Have a great week!

Trevor