Life Update: April 2022
[S04 E01] links, funemployment, and substack
Hey friends and happy Saturyay!
It’s been … quite a while since my last newsletter and a lot has happened in those more than five months. When I first started writing, I forced myself to write daily no matter what. This burned me out and led to stale and uninspired work. I’ve since found a middle ground through an on and off approach in which I only write if truly compelled by something. This has made a huge difference and I’ve realized that my best writing comes after living life a little bit.
One structural change is that I’m migrating to Substack. The thot.substack.com subdomain shockingly wasn’t taken so I scooped it up and moved my subscribers and old posts over.
As I continue to evolve my writing over time, here’s how I’m segmenting my output:
Substack for more personal writing, updates on my life and ideas I’ve been thinking about.
Second Brain for workshopping and exploring interesting ideas in their incubation phase before they’re “ready” for the public eye.
Main Website for showcasing the fruits of my labor with polished posts, projects I’ve worked on, and the assemblage that is my online presence.
🗺 Personal Updates
In the past few months…
Mack moved to SF!
I spent a few weeks in Salt Lake City on the slopes, modeled for a stock photo at an Ethereum conference in Denver, and won a snowboard at a Solana hacker house (???)
My sister turned eleven so I spent a few weeks with the fam in Florida.
Saw Tom Misch in concert.
I also left my job at WhatsApp.
It’s been a long time coming, but still feels unreal. I have a lot of reasons, but they all revolve around wanting to do something more meaningful and higher-leverage with my life. Some ideas I eventually want to explore include tools for mental wellbeing and knowledge augmentation. In due time.
In the interim I’m taking a little sabbatical while I figure out my next steps and am spending my time catching up on sleep, learning interesting things, exercising, and reconnecting with friends. Highly recommend it.
✍🏽 Artifacts
Monitoring my Blood Sugar as a Non-Diabetic: I used a continuous glucose monitor for a month and wrote what I learned about metabolic health.
Why I’m Addicted to Saunas: Self explanatory — an exploration of the history and science of sauna usage and my personal protocol of using heat for wellbeing.
My Second Brain: A platform for me to workshop, prototype, and think about various ideas publicly before they’re complete.
My Favorite Podcasts: I’ve been keeping a running list of the podcasts that have had the most impact on me over the years and figured I’d share it publicly.
Smoov: If you like music that makes you feel like you’re spreading creamy peanut butter over a warm piece of crunchy toast, this playlist is for you.
🍯 Best Finds
A few of the coolest things that I’ve found in the past few months (actually past few weeks because I barely remember what I did yesterday, let alone last month):
🎥 Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order: A video summary of Ray Dalio’s new book, which condenses and interprets 500 years of history and its economic implications in an entertaining 43 minute video.
If you enjoy this, you’ll also love his previous video from 2013 in the same format, which explains how the economic machine works.
🤖 How to prevent the coming inhuman future: Erik Hoel masterfully portrays four possible futures for humanity that take the philosophies of Nietzsche, Turing, Chardin, and Shakespeare to the extreme, as if they all got involved in a scuffle at the pub.
🏁 How to Start a Startup: This is no doubt the best resource for someone looking to start a startup (which is a defined as a company seeking growth above all else).
💞 The Polyamory Post: I didn’t understand what polyamory was before reading this, but now I do. Turns out that some people (myself not included) are just naturally more inclined towards polyamory.
📝 Foster: I’ve been looking for a better way to find people to read my writing before I publish it, and that’s what Foster aims to do with a Google Docs integration, a great community, and interesting incentive mechanisms.
🧠 Programmable Notes: What if our note-taking tools were creative collaborators rather than blank canvases? This post explores a few interesting techniques for getting out of your own head while writing.
🎤 jeen-yuhs (A Kanye Trilogy): Before Kanye became famous, his old friend Coodie recognized his talent and recorded his rise in an ongoing documentary for decades. The result of this long-standing and intimate access is this gripping trilogy that chronicles the rise and fall of Kanye West.
👋🏽 Conclusion
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of any of the links mentioned, and if you have any thoughts on the ever-evolving structure of this newsletter.
You can either tweet at me or reply to this email — replies go straight to my inbox 💌
బై (see ya)
— Thot