It's tempting to get swept up in news about gadgets, apps and gimmicks that the technology sector pours out on us daily. So this time we turn our gaze beyond the delusion of the day in search of insights that can improve our lives. With fewer links, but references to longer articles, videos and podcasts: in short, less to more. Starting with the most important problem: how do we spend more time on the important things and less time on nonsense?

On a typical workday, it can feel like everything needs to be done immediately. The Eisenhower matrix helps us categorize the onslaught by organizing tasks by importance and urgency. If revisited regularly, the matrix can help us clarify our goals and values as well as how we should spend our most valuable resource — time. President Eisenhower never seems to have literally phrased it that way, but this way of thinking named after him leads to very effective productivity gains. A real productivity hack, in millennium speak.

Laugh and learn about tech

The mainstream media, even the comedy shows, have discovered technology as a subject on which there is much to report and, not insignificantly in the era when Google and Meta are gobbling up hundreds of billions of advertising money worldwide that used to be reserved for media companies; it's clicking like crazy. The Daily Show (Comedy Central) and Last Week Tonight (HBO) devoted extensive airtime this week to the impact of technology on our lives. With relevant warnings and tips.

Jon Stewart is back on Monday night on the Daily Show, tackling the AI revolution. Not so much the technology as the annoying habit of tech leaders to promise everyone a better future, while at the same time building technology that plays a major role in our lives in an opaque way.

Watching the item one wonders if the gentlemen at the top of the tech companies would pass the neighbor test: would you appreciate it if this guy (Zuckerberg, Altman, Pichai) moved in next door?

John Oliver describes meal delivery services as "the milennial lifestyle subsidy." He rightly concludes that many restaurants and delivery drivers suffer because of the delivery services, which nevertheless barely make a profit. So who wins? The consumer, but there are raw edges to that victory. Something to think about when the next delivery guy is at the door. Oliver calls for a five-star rating by default, including a nice tip.

Elad Gil may not be a familiar name but he has invested in and advised over forty unicorns, companies with a market value of over a billion dollars, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Pinterest and Stripe. In this video, Gil provides insight into his method of analysis from which we can all learn something.

Writing is better than talking

Stewart, Oliver and Gil clearly have a knack for conveying their opinions on complex topics simply and clearly to the public. The Basecamp software creators shared in a blog post how they "keep everyone in the company informed, without interfering with everyone else."

It's a long piece, but worth reading, especially if you're working with people in different locations. Things I take from it: writing beats talking and asynchronous communication (not live) is more effective than live.

Those who follow the advice and write more while working than talking will benefit greatly from these tips for editing yourself. Everyone has a colleague, especially a manager, who should follow these tips.

GaryVee deserves all the attention

This newsletter also appears in English on LinkedIn, and the gifted conversationalist Gary Vaynerchuk explains in his podcast why LinkedIn is crucial for your organization in 2024. Vaynerchuk struggled to finish high school and then worked in his father's liquor store, where he began making videos about wine that he posted on a then-unknown site: YouTube.

That experience formed the basis for a lightning career as a marketing guru, after which Vaynerchuk revealed himself as a successful investor (Facebook, Twitter and Uber, among others) and a kind of life coach avant la lettre. The writings of "GaryVee" sometimes seem clichéd but are actually thought-through, on any medium. Especially in the US, a cry like "how you make your money is more important than how much you make" is an extraordinary thought, especially as the son of poor immigrants from Belarus.

Learning from failure

Sometimes you learn more from a blunder than a success, which is why this article about how Hertz blundered with its transition to electric cars is downright fascinating. Customers barely charged cars after use, leaving too few available, and in addition, Tesla cars were found to be as much as four times more likely to be involved in accidents than traditional cars running on dinosaur blood.

When everything goes wrong, this is the article to have around. Useful in times with more extreme weather and for me, living in an area of Asia with several possible natural disasters, it's useful advice to keep the go bag better packed with practical tech gadgets.

Spotlight 9: warranty until the corner!

To my no small shock, a reader reported yesterday that she was disappointed "in my tip to buy Snowflake stock, as it had fallen significantly." Therefore, I want to emphasize again that I do not give investment advice.

Reader in question turned out to have purchased my entire AI Spotlight 9. When I came up with that completely arbitrary AI index, I wrote the following:

"These companies are either a driver of AI developments like Nvidia and Super Micro, or a big 'profiteer' of AI technology, think Palantir and Snowflake, for example. AMD, Broadcom, Crowdstrike, Gigabyte, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palantir, Snowflake and Super Micro were up an average of 48% this year already!

Note: I do not give investment advice, I just try to follow developments and if I'm feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed on Sunday morning, I interpret them as well. These are emphatically not buying recommendations. So much for my public service announcements."

Incidentally, the rest of these stocks appeared to have outperformed the Nasdaq Composite and the S&P 500, but again, think of it as a match analysis of a football game. If I were to write that a certain wide receiver scores remarkably easily, that is not an incentive for any team to go out and buy that player. Please only invest with money you don't need to live on and realize that you can lose on investments. And never listen to me.

Notable: Ethereum was a better investment than Nvidia

Every day I am bombarded with questions about crypto and tech stocks, whether Solana is better than Ethereum and which memecoins I hold myself. Precisely because people tend to blame you when something goes down, and congratulate themselves every time something goes up, I never respond to these questions.

I am, however, working with a friend to create a sort of investment section where people can follow our investment portfolios, but like this newsletter, we will do so "for the purpose of learning and entertainment" and not as investment advice. 

That being said, Grandpa Frackers especially wants to point young readers like my smart nephews to the performance of the biggest crypto versus the biggest tech stocks in the world over the last five years.

Even Nvidia stock, the absolute smoking hot stock among tech companies, has underperformed Ethereum. I don't know anyone who predicted in 2019 that Ethereum and Nvidia would dominate this list, so what lesson can be drawn from this? In any case, not that ETH and NVDA will experience the same rise in the coming years.

The mistake often made is trying to predict the future based on the past. I used to get the comment in the 1980s as a water sports reporter (water both in liquid and frozen form), 'Who does snowboarding? Nobody knows about that weird gadget, people like skiing.'

In the 1990s I started as an Internet entrepreneur and for five years I heard, 'Who has a computer and what do you want with the Internet? You can already fax.' I had to listen to the same rant from small minds about cell phones ('only drug dealers use cell phones') and for the last ten years about crypto: 'what can you buy with crypto?'

So once and for all: the average person does not need to buy anything with crypto. Just as the average person does not throw an Nvidia Hopper GPU into their basket at the super market on Saturday afternoon.

But those who can withstand the delusion of the day and have a slightly longer investment horizon than the next summer vacation, are not shocked by a downturn more or less like last week.

I am convinced that in the long run, and I mean years and not weeks or months, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana are lucrative investments. Just as I expect Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia to remain solid investments. The main question is which other crypto and tech companies will break through in the next five years. To that end, before you invest with your wallet, I recommend investing in lots of reading and listening. And not to base your investments on solicited or unsolicited advice from others.