Monday Seven No. 017
Back to School, Self-Love, and Shrinkage
Hey Friends 👋🏼
Last week’s email on generating ideas had a 50% open rate. The top two links were Trends.vc a newsletter for new startup ideas and Sam Altman on idea generation.
Love for Toronto grew stronger this weekend after a 66km bike ride along Humber River. This city is underrated. If you call Toronto home hit me up anytime for a ride.
Just like my bike ride, we’re going all over the place in this week’s post. I touch on two areas I’m super excited about, K12 education and psychedelic research (not together). I’m sharing self-love from my journal, wrapping my head around the economy, reading about memory championships, and listening to more dope music.
Let’s ride…
No. 017 — Back to School, Self-Love, and Shrinkage
1️⃣ Back to School? — It’s a mess for parents right now, particularly in the U.S. With a lack of federal leadership, parents have been left on their own to figure it out. Pandemic Pod Facebook Groups have grown to 40k members in a couple of weeks as parents and teachers try to self organize around the new school year. The uncertainty has led to a slew of entrepreneurs launching Learning Pod companies that have negative second and third-order consequences, TBD on the fall out of white flight 2.0.
On the other side of pain is reason to be hopeful that we are finally beginning to see what could be lasting innovation in K12 education. The pandemic has accelerated a handful of companies that were working on education long before it was cool. You should know about three startups I have been watching closely and I’m particularly excited about. Zipschool is live education and entertainment, think Bill Nye for the 21st century. Primer is homeschooling, but that’s only the start and a perfect wedge. Prisma is on an online school with in-person communities. If they execute right, each of these companies has the chance to radically transform K12 education and become a unicorn along the way.
Thinking a lot about how we can put more power in the hands of teachers. What if our best teachers taught all our kids? What if teaching could be a lucrative career where you can earn $200,000+ a year? Seems crazy but it’s already happening.
I’m revisiting Thibau’s advice to future students, reading the 1994 book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, and watching Steve Jobs on education.
2️⃣ A cause I’m watching closely — Big news this week in psychedelic medicine research as Canada approved compassionate use of psilocybin for the first time since it became illegal in 1974.
“Four Canadians battling incurable cancer have been approved by the Minister of Health, Patty Hajdu, to use psilocybin therapy in the treatment of their end-of-life distress. These 4 patients mark the first publicly-known individuals to receive a legal exemption from the Canadian Drugs and Substances Act to access psychedelic therapy, and the first known patients to legally use psilocybin since the compound became illegal in Canada in 1974.”
Another important movement in Canada is this petition to the House of Commons to decriminalize psychedelic plant medicine. The petition is still open but unclear for how much longer.
3️⃣ Self-love — Wrote this in my journal, in case anyone else needs to hear it:
“You’re a star. Your job is to shine, no matter what anyone says or does. It is not your job to judge how brightly you shine. Your job is to share your light from where you stand. The sun does not compare it’s light to the other stars in the sky. Your job is to be a star, your brightness undiminished.”
4️⃣ Understanding economic shrinkage — A friendly reminder to be wary of headlines, especially financial ones. Howard Marks’ latest memo Time for Thinking helped me better understand what the numbers in the headlines really mean. ICYMI, last month the papers reported a 33% decline in GDP. That’s a level of shrinkage we should all panic about. Turns out, annualized quarter-over-quarter changes are quite meaningless. So what do the reported numbers actually mean?
The 32.9% deterioration of the U.S. economy in the second quarter is the highest annualized rate in history. What this actually means is that if (and this is a massive if) GDP were to decline in the next three quarters at the same rate it did in Q2-2020, then Q1-2021 GDP would be 32.9% below Q1-2020 GDP. We would essentially need three-quarters of pandemic-level GDP decline for this to happen. That is highly improbable and unreasonable to expect. So what’s the point of annualization? It’s helpful under normal circumstances for comparing a quarter to recent prior years. Of course, comparing anything 2020 to recent prior years is a fool’s errand.
5️⃣ Book I’m reading — Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. TL;DR Joshua Foer is a journalist researching an article for the USA Memory Championships. His curiosity leads him to train his memory with a contestant as his coach. A year later, Joshua goes on to compete and win the same championships he set out to research. I’m only a couple chapters in but it’s a fascinating and entertaining read. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
London’s cabbies are required to memorize 25,000 streets and 1,400 landmarks. The training takes two to four years and upon completion, they must pass “the Knowledge” exam to become a certified cabbie. The exam has a 70% failure rate which means only three out of ten people get certified. In a 2000 study, neuroscientist Eleanor Maquire used MRI scans to examine the brains of sixteen London taxi drivers. The study found that the right posterior hippocampus was 7 percent larger than normal. The more experienced the cabbie, the larger this area of their brain appeared. Macquire then studied mental athletes and found that when they were learning new information, they were engaging the same right posterior hippocampal region as the London cabbies. 🤯
6️⃣ Track of the week — Kamakumba by Mop Mop (YouTube, Spotify). Listen to this if you’re into steel drums, saxophone, hand pan, and chimes.
7️⃣ Quote — Steve Jobs on Education in a 1995 interview (emphasis mine).
One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn’t have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids’ school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids’ education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down.
Last Words
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Until next week,
Yashar