Brad's Brief - Improving Productivity, Investigating Bitcoin Crimes, Business Travel, The iPhone, and The US Dollar's Reserve Currency Status
Hey everyone,
I spent the last four days snowboarding in Montana at Big Sky Resort. It lived up to its reputation as being "the biggest skiing in America." At its busiest, Big Sky has over 2 acres of skiable mountain per person. With very few people traveling, the mountain wasn't very busy and at times it felt like we had it to ourselves. If you like to ski, put Big Sky on your list of places to visit.
The biggest benefit to traveling is the shift in perspective on your day-to-day life. Changing your surroundings causes a shift in your thinking and I didn't realize how much I had missed that with the lack of travel over the last year.
Coming off of a few days in the mountains, this week's Brief was refreshing to put together. I hope you enjoy it and get to take a much need vacation yourself sometime soon.
Brad
What I'm reading
Business travel may never fully recover from covid-19
The likelihood that lucrative business travel will rebound more slowly than leisure is a blow to airlines that depend disproportionately on companies picking up the tab. A permanent decline will make life harder still. Yet for the executive who has had to spend weeks of every year on the road the chance to leave the wheelie-bag in the cupboard more often and settle down in front of a computer screen instead may come as something of a relief.
It has been almost a full year since the US ground to a halt from COVID-19. Being on a plane this week had me thinking about what business travel is going to look like in the coming months and years. This article in The Economist lays out a pessimistic take on the future of business travel. The argument makes three points:
Companies badly hit by covid-19 will be under pressure to cut costs—and travel is an easy target.
A blizzard of pledges to cut carbon emissions and hit climate-change targets make cutting flying “low-hanging fruit”, says Paul Flatters of the Trajectory Partnership, a consultancy.
Even though vaccines may reopen borders to many travellers, so long as covid-19 is at large firms will be reluctant to sanction trips not strictly required.
I think that business travel will resume faster than most people think once vaccines are readily available. Sales is competitive and as soon as one competitor starts travelling again, so will everyone else. It's more a matter of when not if.
How to Do a Weekly Reset to Improve Your Productivity and Wellbeing
Success is about what you do, not what you say you’ll do. A weekly reset will help you be more productive while also having more time to take care of yourself.
For the past year and a half, I have written out a weekly plan on Sundays. It started out in a physical notebook and is now something I record electronically in Notion every week. The most important part of my weekly plan is identifying the 3 most important things to get done that week.
This has helped me stay focused on what's important instead of getting sucked into the day-to-day tasks that may or may not be important. I am always looking for ways to improve my process and this article by Sinem Günel led me to add computer desktop cleanup and a physical desk cleanup to my weekly plan. If you don't plan your weeks out, this article is a good place for you to start.
Clubhouse's Inevitability
Clubhouse, meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s hottest consumer startup, feels like the opposite case: in retrospect its emergence feels like it was inevitable — if anything, the question is what took so long for audio to follow the same path as text, images, and video.
Clubhouse is a hot topic in the Brief right now. This week is no exception, with this great essay from Ben Thompson. Ben believes that Clubhouse as an app was inevitable, just like the shift from blogging to Twitter, from website publishing to Instagram, or from YouTube to TikTok. Clubhouse continues to be something I keep my eye on. I think it has the potential to hurt Spotify since they bet heavily on podcasts, which could be similar to betting on blogs in 2007.
What I'm listening to
Katie Haun on the Dark Web, Gangs, Investigating Bitcoin, and The New Magic of “Nifties” (NFTs) | The Tim Ferriss Show
Katie Haun is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. She is a former federal prosecutor that led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force. She now serves on the board of Coinbase and HackerOne.
This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show didn't disappoint as it was really interesting to hear the stories behind Mt. Gox and Silk Road. These are the stories that everyone refers to when they say that “Bitcoin is only used by criminals.” It is very telling to me that the prosecutor that uncovered these schemes is as bullish as anyone on the technology and even left the government to invest in it.
The Future of the US Dollar as the Global Reserve Currency | Village Global's Venture Stories
Whenever I see a podcast with Lyn Alden, Luke Gromen, Brent Johnson, and Nic Carter all in one episode, it's a must listen for me. The group has varying opinions on the future of the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency and its always interesting to hear their back and forth on the subject.
The most interesting thing I learned in this episode is Triffin's Dilemma:
The Triffin dilemma is the conflict of economic interests that arises between short-term domestic and long-term international objectives for countries whose currencies serve as global reserve currencies. The country whose currency, being the global reserve currency, foreign nations wish to hold, must be willing to supply the world with an extra supply of its currency to fulfill world demand for these foreign exchange reserves, thus leading to a trade deficit.
In other words, it is impossible to have a trade surplus and simultaneously be the world's reserve currency.
What I'm watching
Steve Jobs iPhone Launch 2007
Nothing has changed our day-to-day lives more than the iPhone. 14 years ago, Steve Jobs launched this product to the world. This video is a masterclass on how to build and launch a great product. I was shocked by how many of the features are virtually the same after 14 years.
Tweet of the Week
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