I’ve been thinking a lot about the net value of social media. The Pro’s v.s. the Con’s. Some would say that if you catch yourself making a pro’s and con’s list, you’ve already lost. And I think that’s mostly correct for two-way doors - reversible decisions - but deleting social media is kind of a one way door. It is at least in the sense that re-making it wouldn’t be the same.

So headlining the con’s is obviously the wasted time and energy. Studies come out all the time saying it increases neuroticism, depression, etc.. and to be honest I don’t even really think it’s a debate.

But there’s a pro - connection. It helps people stay connected and keep up to date with each-other. We used to be 6 degrees separated between one person and another. In the age of social networks we are 4. Probably closer to 2 when you account for people in your industry, education level, etc…

Thats a pretty mind blowing fact that I don’t think can be understated. In a sense, the world has become smaller, literally everyone on earth over 8 billino people are within FOUR degrees of separation from you.

It is actually an asset. I’m sure everyone has heard some guy say “your network is your net worth” and thought what a tool…but there’s just enough truth to stick around.

There’s also a question of the strength of connections. Is it just an illusion of building a network, when in reality it’s just building parasocial relationships with strangers on the internet? Is watching someone else do things tricking you into thinking you don’t need to do things?

I think that is the real risk honestly. It’s the illusion of being productive by learning little factoids on twitter, or the illusion of being social by sending posts to your friends on instagram. But it’s just entertainment. Not education, not being social.

My sense is that it’s largely a net negative unless you’re making $$ off of it in some way. For every ounce of value it provides there are multiple pounds of dead weight.

But it’s honestly addicting, and it feels like it would be isolating to not have social media.

Where I stand is that i’ve heard a couple people have success with this brick thing that blocks the apps on your phone. If that helps, I probably wont take any other steps. If not, I’ll probably just delete Instagram and Twitter.

What you’re looking at is a Bomb Calorimeter. Not the type of thing you want to whip out at an airport.

Did you ever wonder how they get the number on the label for different foods? Look no further.

This is the standard tool of measurement for energy - one source of which is calories, though they also use it for oil, coal, etc..

In the most simple terms, you burn whatever food you are testing in an oxygen rich atmosphere. That flame heats up the water above - and each incremental degree warmer the water gets equates to one calorie.

If the water moved up 20 degrees, it was 20 calories.

OK I know what you’re thinking. Why call it a Bomb calorimeter? Its a sealed metal container that has the sample + high pressure oxygene. It kind of resembles one, you don’t even need to squint.

Best,

Kieran

My 3 big takeaways from the whole thing are:

1. Christopher Nolan’s casting really got everyone talking, and maybe that was the whole point. The meta in modern media economy is to elicit a response. All press is good press. Rage-bate, vague-bate, as long as there’s some bate. He built distribution (bate) into the product (film).

2. People care about film directors more than I thought. I was listening to TBPN on the way home and they said (and the internet confirmed) that the vast majority of people, when asked, said Christopher Nolan was the reason they went to go see the Odyssey.

   Not the start studded cast of Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom holand, Zendaya, the list goes on… AND also not because it’s one of the most famous old stories in human history. Getting an S tier Director drastically de-risks a film. As someone who’d like to see Hollywood take more risks and make less re-makes / sequels, I hope that this becomes a playbook for how to do it.

3. Rotten Tomatoes is fake news. Maybe I’m the only person that wasn’t aware of this, but when you see a Rotten Tomatoes score of 90%, that does not mean the average rating was 90%. It means that 90% of people rated the movie positively - meaning above a 50%. So a movie with 100 ratings of 60% will have 100% rating, but a movie with 7 100% ratings, and 3 49% ratings, will have a rating of 70%. Feels fake and dumb, but who am I to judge!

Thanks,

Kieran

What an absolutely incredible year for the sport of running. Today Josh Kerr broke the world record in the mile - just a mind blowing achievement. That is over 16 miles per hour. Obviously this post has to be running related then.

Earlier this year Kenyan Sebastian Sawe of Kenya and Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia became the first two athletes to break two hours at the London Marathon.

People have been eyeing the two hour barrier for years, so what changed with these two?

Just to get it out of the way, obviously these two guys are freak athletes from a work ethic and genetic perspective. They were also wearing the new Adidas race shoes that weigh 97 grams, less than half half the 218 gram Nike Alphafly 3’s that previous record holder Kelvin Kiptum wore.

But what I found most interesting was the 115 grams of carbs per hour these athletes inhaled during the race. Thats four cans of coke worth of sugar.

They didn’t land on 115 based on vibes, Sawe worked with endurance fuel company Maurten to measure exactly how many exogenous carbs per hour he could absord using Isotope tracing.

Imagine you dye a batch of sugar cubes with a food coloring so faint it's invisible to the naked eye but detectable with a special scanner. You feed someone those dyed sugar cubes, and they go for a run. Their body burns some of that sugar for fuel and breathes out the "exhaust" as CO2. You hold up your scanner to their breath and look for traces of that specific dye in the exhaust. If you see a lot of dyed exhaust, it means the sugar cubes you fed them got used quickly. If you see very little, most of it is still sitting undigested in their stomach.

That’s important because if you take in too many carbs that go undigested, you’re liable to… deal with stomach problems. Think Davis Clarke at the Boston Marathon.

But when done right, it allows runners to sustain these insane paces for a much longer time.

Was it just the high carb thing? Probably not. Did it have something to do with it? without a doubt. Is it hard to not be long humanity when we’re breaking records left and right? You bet your ass it is.

Onwards,

Kieran

I had the idea to write a blog on “How We Measure” like three years ago but never really followed through. Was thinking last night that I should start it back up.

How We Measure lies in tension between these two quotes:

1. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” by Peter Drucker

2. “ When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Goodhart’s Law)

Because at first glance, it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Anyone that’s managed a project, a team, or an outcome knows that flying blind with no metrics to go off of is probably worse than leaving it up to chance.

Actually, some of humanity’s greatest inventions were actually downstream of novel ways of measurement. The Wright Brothers, for example, invented a more precise wind tunnel to test the lift and drag coefficients of different wing shapes. Applying this novel form of measurement allowed two bike repair guys to do what every renowned physicist said was impossible.

But the other side of the coin is that metrics can and will be gamed. Think of public companies using shady accounting practices to hit a quarterly earnings target, the student replacing “because” with “due to the fact that” in an essay to hit 2000 words, or your buddy who claims to bench 225 but the range of motion is like three inches.

How We Measure is an interesting problem situated between the empirical and the human. If you’d like to follow along I’ll be posting something short on it every day.

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