Archives for 2023

Deep in the belly of London’s Underground, passengers rush to get on their trains. Just before the doors close, there is a often a flurry of people jumping in or out of carriages.

A family of four sat across from me. A mother, father, and two boys between the ages of nine and twelve. As we sat at Warren Street Station, the father realised that it was their stop.

He jumped up from his seat, and his family followed suit. They dashed for the door, but only the father and the eldest son got out. The doors closed leaving the mother and the youngest in the train.

Through the door’s windows I first saw the wide grin on the face of the eldest boy. Followed by the chuckling of the father. I could hear the laughter of the two stuck in the train. Between the glass they made hand gestures signalling they’d meet at the next station. And as the mother and youngest sat down, they were smiling and giggling.

There was not one hint of annoyance, frustration, or anger on any of their faces.

This moment, perhaps 30 seconds in total, told me so much about this family. It’s easy to imagine them supporting each other after a tough day, having patience with one another, and smiling regardless of the weather; literal or figurative.

I’ve had a personal trainer for almost two years now. Julian has been an immensely positive influence in my life. He has helped turn health and fitness into a core part of how I live, rather than a chore that I try and fit in.

I realised after today’s session that Julian has never been late, he’s never been absent, and his energy has always been at 100%.

This level of consistency is admirable. Mostly because in the past two years, he almost certainly has had an off day, he’s just never let it impact his work. He cares deeply about what he does, and he turns up with an amazing attitude every time.

Turning up a bit like Julian is a good thing to aim for.

Today I learnt about Quaero. It was a company set up in 2005 to be Europe’s answer to Google in the search market. It was jointly funded between the French and German governments.

It didn’t last long. The French and German governments went separate ways in 2006, each investing in their own search technology, and sinking in the range of 100 million euros a piece. Quaero closed down by 2013; years too late.

Their vision was grand, but the execution was poor, and the market was terrible. In the case of Quaero, the recipe of a big government organisation handing money to a private company to try build a new search engine was always going to come out undercooked. Not to mention Google already being lightyears ahead with their technology investment and innovation.

The context within which I discovered Quaero was commentary in the Economist on how Europe should avoid being knee-jerky in its reaction to American subsidies supporting the rollout of renewable energy and electric vehicles. If Europe chooses to go down a similar protectionist pathway—which is at odds with it foundations as an open, free-trading economy—European nations could end up in a messy subsidy race.

Quaero serves as an interesting example—and one not talked about enough, in my opinion—of how throwing public money at a problem can result in more headaches and waste than gain. In a world that’s desperate to decarbonise, it’s hard to see mistakes like this not being made.

I’ve seen a tonne of chatter over the past year for Athletic Greens (through both ads and organic posts), and I recently decided to give it a try.

I currently don’t take any vitamins or supplements, and when I’ve tried to in the past, I usually end up forgetting and abandoning the habit.

Athletic greens, also known as AG1, is a scoop of green powder mixed with 250 mls of water, taken first thing every morning. It’s touted as having “75 vitamins, minerals, and whole-food sourced nutrients in one convenient daily serving”.

The thing that pushed me over the edge to finally try it was a twitter thread where someone asked what was the most valuable / useful thing people bought for less than $200 (or something to this effect). A number of people chimed in that AG1 transformed how they felt, and that they wouldn’t go back.

The fact that the company was founded and still runs out of New Zealand was another motivating factor—I love supporting businesses from home.

I’ll try it for 30 days and report back with how I’m feeling!

I cringed a couple days ago when I opened one of my email-delivered posts to find three typos.

I had a bunch of excuses at the ready: I was jet-lagged, barely slept on my return flight to the UK, and I was short on time.

Yet deep down I knew all of them were poor excuses.

The expectations I set for myself—the standard of care, effort I put into the craft, and quality of the output—should be constant; unchanging despite what may be going on in my life.

Some will say that it’s not important, that this is a small-fry blog, that the odd typo here or there doesn’t matter.

But how we do anything adds up to how we do everything.

Caring, a lot, is how we get better.

The human body wasn’t designed to be sedentary. For almost all our history, we’ve constantly been on the move. Yet in modern, developed societies, many of us spend the majority of our days seated. This is dangerous. One study found that people who sit for 12-13 hours per day—regardless of whether or not they exercise—are more than twice as likely to die compared to people who sat the least.

But if our jobs and livelihoods depend on us being sedentary, and being sedentary is a risk to our health, it begs the question: what is the “minimum effective dose” of movement per day in order to stave off the risks of a sedentary lifestyle?

That’s a question a recent study in the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal aimed to answer. In particular, they wanted to find out how often sedentary people should move, and for how long.

They asked participants in the test group to take regular breaks from sitting (e.g., a break every 30-60 minutes), and to walk for a short period of time (e.g., between 1-5 minutes). They focused on measuring changes in both glucose levels and blood pressure, because poor scores in these numbers are correlated with higher prevalence of heart disease.

What they found was a substantial decrease in both glycemic response as well as blood pressure for participants who took a 5 minute break every 30 minutes when compared to the control group. The key thing was achieving an increase in heart rate for those 5 minutes. So this can be achieved with anything from hopping on a stationary bike, vacuuming, or even dancing around the house.

There are lots of caveats to this study, of course. It’s a small sample size, and there could be a novelty affect that wears off. But intuitively, it makes sense. Even if it feels disruptive to a productive day, it’s made me think about how I can incorporate more movement into my day.

In one, two, five, or ten years from now, what’s the value of being able to say, “This is the life I’ve chosen, not the one I’ve settled for.”?

And what needs to happen today for us to be able to say it then?

I often read about the cost of healthcare and health insurance in the United States, but it feels distant to my life and experience in the United Kingdom, so I don’t give it much thought.

A couple days ago, though, I was in a pharmacy in Orlando and overheard a conversation between an employee and the woman in front of me in the queue.

The woman was picking up three different medicines. One was $30, the second was $45, and the third was $420. The employee asked if the woman had insurance. She didn’t. She paid for the first two, but couldn’t afford the third—despite saying she needed the medicine on a daily basis.

It then occurred to me that I’ve never seen this situation play out in the countries I’ve lived; not in New Zealand, Australia, nor the United Kingdom. I’ve grown up with my baseline assumption being that people should be able to access the medicine they need at a reasonable price. Yet the one time I’m in a pharmacy in the United States, I see someone have to walk out without the medicine they need. I was dismayed and saddened at the situation. It felt all sorts of wrong to me.

I don’t know enough about the US healthcare system to make any broader commentary on the subject, but sometimes it’s a single data point or anecdote that can serve as the most powerful of lessons.

My bet is most businesses run on “good enough”.

That new product, service, upgrade, refresh, rebranding, or release is good enough.

But, we can almost always do better.

And if we can do better, why don’t we?

If we choose to not invest further, that’s OK. But we should have a deliberate, specific, and clear reason for doing so.

Google’s stock dropped 8%—or $120 billion—after a live demo of its new chat-based AI assistant, Bard, went pear-shaped.

The question for Bard was simple enough: What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?

Bard offered a number of answers, one of which was “took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”

Astrophysicist Grant Tremblay followed up on Twitter by saying”Not to be a well actually jerk, and I’m sure Bard will be impressive, but for the record: JWST did not take ‘the very first image of a planet outside our solar system’”.

This mistake has shone a light on the credibility risk inherent within chat-based AI and their underlying Language Learning Models. However, I’m confident these wrinkles will be ironed out relatively quickly. What’s more interesting is (1) how fickle the market can be, and (2) the importance of checking, and double checking, and triple checking before any demo—let alone one of the most important demos of the decade.

Google’s stock will bounce back, I’m sure of it. But they’ll definitely sense check better next time.

Embrace the constraints
With practise; we get better
A new perspective

With more than 1.4 billion people, India has recently passed China as the world’s most populace country.

One thing that stands out to me in the analysis is the population growth trajectory for each country.

China reported its first population decline in 2022; despite the one child policy ending in 2016 and all restrictions on family sizes being lifted in 2021.

On the other hand, India is set to continue growing and should surpass 1.5 billion people in the 2030s.

I’m not going to attempt to predict what may happen as a result of this turning point, but it certainly feels significant that for the first time since the UN started collecting population data China has been overtaken.

Getting a product to market may feel like a victory, but it’s just the beginning.

Whether it’s product returns, bugs in the code, or maintaining a reputation for good service, things will always go wrong. And if left unattended, small issues will snowball.

When deciding whether or not to bring something new to the world, it’s important to not just calculate the upfront cost, but all the work that follows.

I’ve been giving Magisto a go. It’s an AI-based video editing software for iOS and Android.

Whenever I’m on family trips, I film parts of the journey with the intention of making a small highlights reel.

Unfortunately, the highlights reel never happens. For all my good intentions, the friction of after-the-fact editing on a computer is just too much.

So I went hunting for a very specific type of software: one that would automatically select the best parts of my footage, stitch them together with music, and produce a small highlights reel with minimal effort.

The important thing with Magisto is providing it with high quality input video. No amount of AI is going to make bad clips better.

Magisto really shines when it is fed short-ish clips with significant movement or audio; it really feels like it can sense the right moments to put into the final video. I also like the feature to limit the final output’s length. This forces the software to be more discerning with its clip selection.

The cool thing is that instead of a random collection of clips sitting in my Google Photos, I can now have a highlights reel in less than 10 mins! That’s useful.

Maru and I almost missed our flight to the US on Friday morning. All train services across the UK were closed due to strikes by rail workers, so the only way for us to get to London’s Gatwick airport was a 2-hour Uber! Add to this an error on my part where I almost sent us to the wrong airport… and we were on struggle street.

As the Uber schlepped through central London’s treacle-like traffic, we constantly checked our phones for the updated arrival time. We were looking up travel insurance coverage and discussing what we’d do if we needed to book an alternative flight.

Those were the headwinds.

Then came the tailwinds.

Our Uber driver was a hero. He avoided the clogged motorway, snaked his way through back roads, and I’m sure broke a number of speed limits on the way. Once we arrived, there was no one in the visa check or bag drop queue. We got lucky again with almost no line at security. Of the 65 gates at Gatwick, ours was one of the closest. We got on the flight.

Some days we’ll only get headwinds, others only tailwinds, and sometimes a bit of both. I like to pause and appreciate the tailwinds. Especially when a specific combination of events had to go right for the final outcome to be a success.