5-Bullet Friday

Hi All!

Here is your weekly dose of 5-Bullet Friday, a list of what I’m pondering and exploring.

This edition is brought to you by Coyote, the bestselling and award-winning card game​, which I co-created with Exploding Kittens. It’s like a combo of charades + hot potato + brain fun. Start playing and laughing in minutes. Grab a copy here​!

What I’m listening to

“Cleopatra in New York” (YouTube, Spotify) by Nickodemus.

Book I’m reading

​Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples and Peter Ziebelman. Mike Maples Jr. (@m2jr) is the man who first taught me how to angel invest in startups. He’s one of my favorite people in Silicon Valley and a co-founding partner at Floodgate. He has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade, was named a “Rising Star” by Fortune, and was profiled by Harvard Business School for his lifetime contributions to entrepreneurship.
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In particular, I loved his exploration of inflection points as well as his questions and checklists for assessing startups. These apply equally to founding or investing in a tech company. In fact, many of his frameworks can be applied to investing in public tech stocks.
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Here’s the book description: “Startups like Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft had achieved extraordinary success despite their disregard for ‘best practices.’ In contrast, other startups deemed highly promising often failed, even when they seemed to do everything right. Seeking answers, Maples and coauthor Peter Ziebelman set out to discover the hidden forces that drive extraordinary startup success. Pattern-breaking success, they reveal, demands a different mindset and actions to harness developments others miss or that may, at first, seem crazy.”

Podcast episode I’m listening to

“The US vs. China in the 21st Century” on the Invest Like the Best podcast with Patrick O’Shaughnessy, in conversation with Dan Wang, author of Breakneck. From the description: “Dan is a technology analyst and author who spent six years living in China studying its manufacturing ecosystem and tech development, best known for his new book Breakneck. Dan offers the most nuanced framework I’ve encountered for understanding US-China competition. We explore a critical asymmetry: it’s far harder for the US to rebuild manufacturing capacity than for China to improve scientific research, with profound implications for AI, national security, and investment returns. For investors, Dan explains the ‘ByteDance problem’—why exceptional Chinese companies trade at massive discounts due to Communist Party unpredictability and geopolitical risks. He argues China is a ‘high agency’ society that executes relentlessly while America deliberates endlessly, yet also reveals the societal cost.”

Documentary I’m watching

​The Thinking Game. I recently asked many of you for good documentaries, and you didn’t disappoint. The Thinking Game hooked me instantly. You can watch the entire documentary for free. A lot of the milestones were familiar to me, but the archival and behind-the-scenes footage is what makes it super special.
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From the description: “The Thinking Game takes you on a journey into the heart of DeepMind, capturing a team striving to unravel the mysteries of intelligence and life itself. Filmed over five years by the award-winning team behind AlphaGo, the documentary examines how Demis Hassabis’s extraordinary beginnings shaped his lifelong pursuit of artificial general intelligence. It chronicles the rigorous process of scientific discovery, documenting how the team moved from mastering complex strategy games to the ups and downs of solving a 50-year-old ‘protein folding problem’ with AlphaFold.”
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Hat tip to Dave Gambrill, Matt Mullenweg, and others for the recommendation!

Quote I’m pondering

“Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2005 at Emory, real life is not college; real life is not high school. Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high. The world that you’re about to enter is filled with junior high adolescent pettiness, pubescent rivalries, the insecurities of 13-year-olds, and the false bravado of 14-year-olds.”
​— Tom Brokaw, Emory University Commencement Address (2005)
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You can complement this edition of 5-Bullet Friday with my brand-new interview with Dr. Fei-Fei Li, aka “the godmother of AI,” on asking audacious questions, civilizational technology, and finding your North Star.
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And, as always, please give me feedback on X. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all.
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Much love to you and yours,
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Tim