In case this is the last Good Tokens of the year, have a great holiday season and end of 2025. See you in 2026!
A message from my sponsor
Christmas is just 7 days away. If you’re here, you already know about my dear friend Uri’s hit new game Person Do Thing, but out of love for the game and it’s creator, I have to say one final time, this is a perfect stocking stuffer and a great way to spend time with your friends and family without a screen. Highly recommended!
The Lost Generation. This one is controversial because it deals with race and DEI, but if you can distance yourself from that a little bit, it’s really informative. It made me believe more in the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis.
The story of the fight over Romansch. Particularly enjoyable for me because the Engadin is among my favorite places in the world.
Things I learned
The average boomer will get paid out significantly more in medicare and social security than they paid in taxes — Russ Greene. Soon we’ll need a Boomer Corner.
The EU makes more from fines on US tech companies than it does from taxes on all EU tech companies — David Fant
Lebron James has played against 35% of players in NBA history — CBS Sports. To be fair, he has played in 28% of the league’s seasons. I think this makes him the Queen Elizabeth of athletes.
Musings
I feel like the Grinch saying this, but we’ve got to cut down on the number of special clothing days (e.g., pajama day) that are happening in schools or daycares. All it does is create stress for me as a parent and I don’t get the sense that my kids actually enjoy these. Who is this for?
LLM corner
Some shameless self promotion: The latest episode of —dangerously-skip-permissions: How Penny Schiffer works. Penny is another technical product manager turned AI software developer who I think has really mastered creating with AI.
GenAI created ads outperform human created ads by 19%… unless they are disclosed as created by AI, in which case the performance goes down by 32% — Eric Seufert
Best enjoyed this week in a sunny corner of a park
Worth your time
If you’ve ever wanted to buy a life sized dinosaur, now is your chance. Someday my son is going to find out I had this opportunity and didn’t take it and will never look at me the same way again.
The Quiet Ones by Nikunj Kothari. An ode to the people that do the little things to make a company or a team effective.
I now realize that everything I lorded over other people—all the things I gatekept without consciously understanding that this was what I was doing—I didn’t need to do that. It really didn’t help anything. For some number of people who interacted with me, Iwas the problem. I could’ve been more tolerant or forgiving, I could’ve said “let’s find out together,” I could’ve let other people have the fun once in a while.
I’ve become obsessed with the tops of trees, in particular in the morning or the evening when the sun is hitting them. For some insect or bird or leaf that spot is the center of the world.
Let’s see if I can land the plane on this one. I’m surprised that there isn’t more nostalgic fiction about growing up in evangelical Christian circles. There’s satirical stuff like Saved but nothing that I’m aware of like The Big Sick that both pokes fun at being a child of immigrants while also on some level clearly feeling affection for it. Is this out there and I just don’t know about it?
Are we at the point where “yes, and…” is overrated? If not, how long until we get there?
Something I struggled with this week: for someone like you and me, in 2025, what does it mean to live a good life? At 19, it was easier for me to articulate an answer to this question I actually believed than it is now in many ways. If you feel like you have a good answer to this, consider this me humbly requesting that you write it and share it.
Things I learned
Apparently Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake”, according to a recent Rest Is History Bonus episode. I’m a sucker forthings we think that aren’t actually so. Also from a RIH bonus episode: apparently the US now requires people to share their social media handles to get a travel visa. What are we doing here people?
China installed more industrial robots last year than the rest of the world combined. This is one of those stats that a 17 year old is going to be citing in an AP History Exam in 2084 about why China won the war for Taiwan.
Adding an age check reduced online porn traffic in the UK by 47%. Whether or not you believe it is right, I believe it is unlikely that ten years from now people will be unable to get porn online without verifying their age in some way.
I’m in love with the conspiracy theory that the terra cotta warriors are fake. I don’t believe it is true, but I love going down the rabbit hole. Someone make the definitive YouTube video on this!
Product / Market Experiments:“Experimentation is a skill developed via learning-by-doing, and angels have a skill advantage in that domain because of having more operational experience”. Filed under “we all experiment too little.”