Weekly Brain Food

Below are some articles and ideas I am processing this week. This list goes out only to Premium Subscribers. I am experimenting with the format, so let me know what you find valuable and what can be added/reduced.

🗞️ In The News

Most tech workers no longer work in tech. More than half of America's 6.4 million "tech workers" are now in banking, law, manufacturing, and elsewhere.

Shopify is "conducting a 'calendar purge,' removing all recurring meetings with more than two people 'in perpetuity,' while re-upping a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays."

US public transit journeys are stabilizing at 35% lower than pre-pandemic.

Office REITs are now trading lower than their 2019 lows. The market is even more pessimistic about offices than during the worst days of Covid lockdowns.

Related to this, more tech workers got laid off in November 2022 than in April 2020, when the market crashed due to Covid-19.

📚 Books

The Model Thinker: Scott E. Page has a gift for explaining complicated ideas simply. In this book, he goes through a laundry list of statistical and data analysis models and describes how they apply to various real-world problems. The book includes some math but does a great job explaining key concepts, even to those who aren't going to build actual models. (You might remember Scott from the runner-up quote of the year for 2022).

Poetry and Zen: A short biography and the collected letters of R.H. Blyth. Blyth was an English teacher who found himself in Japan during World War II. He was in jail in England for refusing to fight in World War I and then interred in Japan for being an Englishman during World War II. After the war, he became a confidant of Japan's imperial family and Japan's American "Supreme Commander," Douglas MacArthur. In between, Blyth wrote one of the most incredible books ever written, collecting and explaining the best bits from Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and English literature.

Paved Paradise: How parking explains the world. A soon-to-be-published book by Henry Grabar. It promises an "entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot." I have not read it yet, but I heard good things from a couple of friends who have. Eliminating street (and other) parking is a key to making cities and suburbs more attractive, affordable, healthy, and environmentally friendly.

🎧 Podcasts

• Michael Sandel was on the Jolly Swagman Podcast (Spotify) to discuss The Tyranny of Merit, his book about why successful people deserve far less credit (and money) than they think. I don't see eye to eye with Sandel and could discern what alternatives he recommends to our current system, but it was still worth a listen.
• I was on the Bubble Trouble Podcast to chat with Will Page and Richard Kramer about scalable careers, empty offices, Ponzi schemes, and what I'm most worried about for 2023. Will is the former chief economist of Spotify and wrote a great book about the economics of the future.

🍿 Bits & Pieces

• Teenagers spend whole days on Discord, doing things together and alone while sharing their screens and soundtracks, and chatting. This thread offers a few examples of how this works in practice.
• What if 15-hour weeks were only 9 hours away? Ethan Heppner slices and dices historical labor data to explore various questions.
• "Parking" used to mean space saved for trees at the side of the road. An interesting history of sidewalks and land use in American cities.
• Until the 1920s, hit songs made more money selling sheet music than selling albums.
• When life gives you lemons... Midjourney AI generated the cover image for this post. I spent a lot of time playing with it over the past few weeks (it's a piece of software that generate images based on text prompts). I might run a short webinar to explain how to set up and use it. Would that be of interest?

🔔 Reminders

Can offices become housing? On January 18th, I'm hosting a live conversation with Gensler's Steven Paynter to discuss his analysis of more than 300 potential conversions. Sign up on LinkedIn here. It's free.

Seven hundred people have already signed up, so it should be a lively conversation. And yes, it will be recorded. Sign up to get access to the recording.

❤️ Quote of the Week

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

— Gustav Mahler

Have a good Wednesday.

Dror