Week 2: Reading, Fruits of Friendship, and Recency Bias

Welcome to Week 2 of my weekly newsletter, where I share interesting ideas I’ve come across for the week. This is different than my Substack blog, which will primarily serve long-form essays, infrequently posted.

Personal Updates

This past week, I recorded my favorite podcast episode to date – the long-awaited conversation with my best friend (👋 if you’re reading this LOL). This was probably the most vulnerable I’ve ever been in a public video.

We talked about our past lives, travel, friendship, letting go and forging our identity, language learning, bucket list items, and much more.

This was originally supposed to be 3 hours, but the file got corrupted between 5-48 minutes. But still… 2 hours of juicy content for y’all haha.

Learnings

1: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant on Reading

This is probably one of my favorites, given the amount of wisdom crammed into a short, 150-page book. There’s so much to talk about, but here are some of Naval’s thoughts on reading:

• It’s not about the “educated” vs. “uneducated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.

• When you're reading a book and you're confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym. Reading builds mental muscles.

• When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very, very high quality.

• Books are very difficult to read as a modern person because of how we've been trained.

• The older the problem, the older the solution. Any book that survived for 2,000 years has been filtered through many people.

• It almost doesn't matter what you read. The best ones to read are the ones you're excited about reading all the time.

• We live in the age of Alexandria. The means of learning = abundant; the desire to learn = scarce.

I remember meeting my preschool teacher a long time ago at a buffet. You know the one thing she told me? “Read.” Charlie Munger knows it, too:

2: Beware of Recency Bias

3: How to Make Your Writing Memorable

I remember my 11th grade AP Lang teacher dove deep into the quirky rhetorical devices used in some of the great American speeches, and revisiting all of that in this podcast episode was such a treat.

What doesn’t get talked about in writing is the necessity of style. Great writing has great style. Here’s what I learned:

• Repetition builds rhetorical fire. It's a signal to the reader: "listen up."

• You need silence and buildup for the climax. Take the structure away and it becomes stale.

• If you want to emphasize something, create contrast. Every time you repeat the antitheses, you're dramatizing the fullness of what you're trying to say.

• Create a form so powerful it changes your memory. If you want something to be memorable, utilize rhetorical tactics to shape your ideas to fit into the slot of the human brain.

• Humans love symmetry (e.g.: the Taj Mahal). There's a form of clarity and elegance to a chiasmus that makes it resonate as truthful.

• The reader can't hear your tone of voice unless you tell what your tone of voice is. At the beginning, give the reader who you are and your tone of voice.

• The faster you write, the more your voice tends to show up naturally.

Conclusion

Relating to the topic of friendship and the podcast, here’s this week’s question:

See you in the next,

Jeston