Friday Ideas 1/3/25: Bob Dylan on touring, John von Neumann on Oppenheimer, Garry Tan on courage + Bench Accounting, Bell Labs, PlasticList, Calm Fund, Jimmy Carter's White House Jazz Festival + more
Welcome to Weisser’s Multitudes.
Every other Friday I share a wide range of things I enjoyed in the last two weeks ranging from podcasts to articles, books, and music.
Curious to see what you think. If you enjoy any of the ideas in particular please let me know.
I recently did a gig in Denmark, and Bob Dylan wanted to talk to me about touring. So I met him where all the buses are parked, at this big festival, and we eyeballed each other and smiled in the darkness. It was pissing with rain, two hooded creatures in a blacked-out car park, and I said to him: “Hey, man, you never stop!”
He looked at me, smiled and said: “What’s to stop for?”
- Robert Plant
Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.
- John von Neumann
Startups, if they are going to make it, have a set of things they need to do that don’t need “more time” but instead mainly need courage.
Quick Links and Ideas
Absolutely loved reading this sentiment from one of Dhruv Bindra’s mentors who he met via cold email:
We should always encourage those who inherit the mess we made.
Putting a cheap air filter in a classroom leads to roughly the same increase in student test outcomes as the best charter schools in the country ($18k/y)
How Employer.com acquired Bench Accounting in under 48 Hours
“What used to take five years or six years and tens of millions of dollars in VC can be done in six months and very limited amount of money now with a very good team with all the open APIs and products you can plug into. There's a bit of a buy-versus-build inflection point in the last two years where tech valuations were very much inverted off of historical norms.”
A reminder that you can significantly reduce the plasticizers in your body by donating blood or plasma!
There are a lot of similarities between the Internet and the electric industry. They are both thin, horizontal enabling layers that go across lots of different industries — check out Jeff Bezos’ recent interview
These horizontal layers like electricity and compute and now artificial intelligence, they go everywhere. There is not a single application that you can think of that is not going to be made better by AI
Tyler Tringas of Calm Fund wrote a public post about pausing on new investments:
I’m switching my primary focus to building my own products, operating businesses, and compounding cashflow.” We’ll see more of this in the months and years ahead.
The scope of what problems can be truly tackled by one founder or a very small team has expanded so much that it includes virtually all SaaS businesses.
Peter Thiel on Tetragrammaton
There's an argument I've made that maybe at some point the network effects can shift from being positive to negative. So you have positive network effects where you have the wisdom of crowds and you're connected with all these people and you have these positive externalities and you communicate and you get ideas.
And then maybe there's a point where network effects become negative and the wisdom of crowds becomes the madness of crowds and it's dominated by group think or political correctness.
I’ve recently been thinking and reading a lot about public goods. I found this excerpt from The Art of Doing Science and Engineering interesting:
As a regulated monopoly, cautious of a Federal Trade Commission which had not yet been declawed, Bell Labs imposed upon itself an unusual responsibility—its workers saw themselves as bound to operate in the public interest. And what fruits that restriction yielded.
Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite.
SQLite does not have a Code of Conduct (CoC), rather Code of Ethics derived from "instruments of good works" from chapter 4 of The Rule of St. Benedict
PlasticList
Finding out how many plastic chemicals all of us really eat seemed like a good point to start, because (1) we could test that with precision and (2) if it turned out we don’t eat plastic chemicals, then maybe we shouldn’t care about their alleged health harms. So we got to work.
PlasticList launched a week ago and announced they had detected plastic chemicals in 86% of the foods tested. I sat down with 1/4 of the team — Yaroslav Shipilov — for a wide-ranging conversation about the project (we pull up lots of results and studies on screen) and the meta idea of pursuing interesting and ambitious projects.
The episode is coming next week and marks the launch of Weisser’s Multitudes show where I’ll be hosting conversations with builders, scientists, and artists you should know.
That’s it for this installment of Multitudes. Have a wonderful weekend.
Jimmy Carter’s White House Jazz Festival
This event in 1978 featured an unparalleled lineup of jazz legends.
Remarkably, a full recording exists from an old radio broadcast. Enjoy not only the performances but also the audience noise and the dialogue between tracks:
You’ll be glad to know that the White House food menu for the festival was jambalaya, salad, and pecan pie.
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?
The second time I visited New Orleans was when David Bowie passed away. I was traveling around the country playing music and had spent the night before searching around in the dark on an island off of Pensacola looking for free camping.
I woke up the next morning to learn that Preservation Hall Jazz Band was leading a second line for Bowie later that day. I jumped into the car and headed west on Highway 10 to the French Quarter.
I caught up with the band (and, randomly, Arcade Fire) and felt myself lifted off the ground the by the crush of humanity as we made our way around the quarter mourning in the joyous way only New Orleanians seem to have perfected.
The recent act or terrorism in the French Quarter is only the latest in an unnecessary, unjustifiable, and seemingly unending tragedies afflicting the city. Regardless, the strength and soul of New Orleans will never die.
Enjoy this wonderful song about New Orleans from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday.
That’s it for this installment of Multitudes. Have a wonderful weekend.