✈️ S03 E02: The Fall of Flights
microblogging, travels, and many links
Hello friends and happy Thursday!
It's been ~1.5 months since the last installment of Thot's Thoughts and it felt like the right time for a new one, as I enter a new "life chapter".
These past weeks, I've been moving around a lot and writing about my experiences. Creating the affordance on my site to write shorter-form posts as "notes" has been game-changing, as I feel more comfortable expanding on certain ideas without the pressure to make them perfect or evergreen.
Though, there's still a long way to go before I find what I'm looking for, which is a direct connection from my brain to a public page with minimal friction. Twitter has too much noise, and us creators do not have ownership of our audiences, — thus it doesn't feel like the right platform for "microblogging" in its truest sense. Web3 promises a direct creator-consumer relationship, but until the plumbing is fully built out I think I'll need to build something else this purpose. I like the notion of a stream and would like to build a system that can transfer my thoughts to a public page with just a text message.
Thoughts on https://streamofthots.com anyone?
🗺 Personal Updates
I started off September in Madrid, where I ate lots of tapas, drank lots of sangria, and enjoyed a proper dose of lad culture. Afterwards, I spent a few weeks in the most manic city in the entire world, New York City, and then decompressed in my cozy San Francisco apartment. Finally, I spent a week exploring Montréal and embraced the Web2 bf x Web3 gf meme during Mack's company offsite.
Now, I'm in Florida where I'll be for the rest of the year. I plan on driving around the state to re-acquaint myself with the place that I spent most of my childhood, and to catch up with some friends that are scattered around the state. After that, I'll be with my family for the holidays before gearing up for what I'm sure will be a wild 2022.
✍🏽 Artifacts
While in Madrid, I wrote a few notes about lad culture and my experience of being able to speak Spanish again, as if it were like riding a bike.
Also, while I was in New York, I write about what I considered to be an unsustainable level of energy that pervades the incredibly dynamic city.
A product that I led & built during my time on Facebook Marketplace got some PR exposure both in and out of
FacebookMeta! Here's an official newsroom post and a couple of other links about the project.I've extracted some of my more popular newsletter posts into their own notes, like my thoughts on career goals and my self experimentation protocol.
Finally, the infinitely talented Carl has created some new assets for my site including a new avatar (with more accurate hair) and a surprise on the bottom of posts. Check it out!
My time spent in Florida for the holidays has tended to be prolific, in terms of writing. Time off of work, coupled with the focus of my childhood bedroom enables some amazing output. Look forward to some longer-form posts on using continuous glucose monitors (CGM) for improving metabolic health, and a confessional on my sauna addiction. 👀
🍯 Best Finds
In previous newsletters, I've limited the links I've shared to just 5, but that'll be more difficult over the course of multiple months. I'm trying something new now, and will instead share everything I found to be dope, with a short description rather than personal commentary. Let me know what you think of this!
Aftershokz Xtrainerz — Bone conducting, internal-memory only headphones you can wear while swimming.
Gatheround — The best platform I've found for having virtual socials.
Futurists have their heads in the clouds by Erik Hoel — A more "realistic" set of predictions for life by 2050.
The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App — A blog post from Readwise about their upcoming read-it-later app that makes me unreasonably excited.
An Interview with Maggie Baird (Billie Eilish's mom) on The Rich Roll Podcast — Maggie's approach to creativity, parenting, activism, and living an intentional life is truly inspiring.
If You Want to Learn, Ignore the Details — On why high-level thinking might be better for learning than focusing on details.
The General Index — A bunch of tables that serves as a searchable index of 107 million science articles according to Vice, serving as a map to the paywalled domains of scientific knowledge.
What Humans could be — "Imagine if we were all taught about the depths of joy that are possible? This would include not only the joy that comes from the relief of our deprivations, but the deeper joys that can come from being inspired to reach outside of ourselves."
Why Judaism? from The Pull Request — A fascinating exploration of the value of religion, specifically Judaism, with regards to finding meaning.
Research as Understanding — Research is not churning out papers. It's following curiosity to the edge of human understanding and deciding to go a little bit further than what's already known.
Sauna use as a lifestyle practice to extend healthspan — A paper by Rhonda Patrick exploring all of the research and knowledge around why saunas are dope. I'll be referencing this a lot in my upcoming post.
TESLA: The Life and Times Podcast — If you want to learn more about the legendary Nikola Tesla, this is the most engaging and informative resource I've found.
Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant on Tim Ferriss — If you needed any reason to be further bullish on Web3, Crypto, and NFTs, well here you go.
👋🏽 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