Talent Acquisition with Scott Galloway & Tyler Cowen🎙- 9 books that may change your life 📚- BacktoSchool for creators 🎓- Will AI kill artists?🖼- Building your web3 developer stack 📐
"Imagine creating an entire painting by typing a few sentences".
Episode #79. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼
This Sunday, The Timestamp is here again to help you! Get your weekly dose of summaries from the articles, books, or podcasts you may have missed in tech & culture.
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#1. Talent acquisition with S. Galloway & T. Cowen
Big up for Patrick Kervern who shares some key learning from listening to this podcast 👇
Professor Scott Galloway hosts renowned economist Tyler Cowen on his podcast :
1- Take care of “soft networks”: you don't want to search for talents you want to have talents searching for you.
2- In recruitment, we generally overestimate intelligence vs other factors like grit or endurability. Smarts overestimate Smarts.
3- Avoid bureaucratic recruitment and excess credentialism, and engage with people conversationally. Be willing to take chances.
4- The difference between students now and the previous generation: they have higher mental health problems but they are also better informed and more curious.
#2. 9 books that may change your life 📚
I will let you judge if some of these books changed your life but I can certainly add some comments and takeaways to the 3 books I picked from this list 👇
Antifragile. The author Nassim Taleb explains in this book that some systems like the human body become better under conditions of volatility and turbulence. Which I would call stress.
For example, run 1km then the next day 2km, etc. Your body will likely develop an aptitude to run longer distances over time.
Building resiliency in an organization means creating a system that is able to adapt to change and small crises. Being flexible will make you stronger.
Sapiens. Yuval Harari summarizes in his best-seller, the history of all of mankind. The author explains the combination of factors that allowed humankind, originally the Homo Sapiens to become unique. What led us to cooperate on massive scales (which is the ultimate form of intelligence of our kind)?
Elon Musk. Ashlee Vance probably wrote one of the best bios I ever read in tech (and I read a few of them). We discover Musk from the inside with a number of private situations where we understand how different Elon Musk is. Fun facts like test driving the very first Tesla models in the street with fake exhaust pipes or building the very first SpaceX rocket launcher with very little budget compared to NASA cannot be less than inspiring for any entrepreneur. A must-read.
I will let you discover the other 6 books from this list. I am not a big fan of the 4-hour workweek but most of the other books from this list seem worth a read.
#3. BacktoSchool for (online) creators 🎓
There are new methods and courses available for learning that are worth mentioning while we are still into the back-to-school moments of the year.
This thread uncovers 10 online courses that also draw my attention at some point in time.
Building a second brain by Tiago Forte. This course teaches "a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential". My understanding is that it may focus on a note-taking habit you have to organize with the right tools starting by capturing anything you find interesting.
Ship30for30. This writing class is a cohort-based course that will teach you the compound habit you can leverage by writing every day for 30 days in a row. "Teaching over 4000 students the fundamentals of writing on the internet".
The thread is obviously a gold mine for anybody wanting to give a try at becoming a creator and ultimately make a living out of it. I did not know of the "Part-Time YouTuber Academy", "Build Once, Sell Twice" by Sahil Bloom, or "Digital Economics" (learning to build a brand, produce original content (fast), and get well paid in 30 days ) but the ideas look good. I hope that these courses will truly help you build new skills (and not build further on the saying that creators have a hard time making revenues while creators’ tools are a gold mine.
#4. Will AI kill artists? 🖼
Sharing my takeaways from this newsletter article by Peter Yang 👇
"Imagine creating an entire painting by typing a few sentences.
That’s exactly how Jason Allen, an entrepreneur, created AI art that won first place in a recent competition. The internet exploded after hearing this news, with some claiming that Jason joined “a marathon and drove a Lamborghini to the finish line.”
What can AI create in 2022? "AI tools like DALLE-2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion can generate detailed images from text prompts."
But will AI hurt art and artist in the long run? At the same time, these tools are giving access to more would-be artists to create digital art lowering entry barriers. But... It may also become trickier to get recognition or compensation for artwork.
It is likely that "Traditional artists will start to explore new movements that AI can’t easily replicate." which could spur a new movement of creativity.
Artists "should keep an open mind and give AI tools a try to avoid getting left behind."
#5. Building your web3 developer stack 📐
My takeaways from this article from Coinbase’s blog👇
« Despite the rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum, along with the emergence of new categories like DeFi, NFTs, GameFi and DAOs, web3 developers represent less than 1% of the 31.1M software developers globally. »
Tools and infrastructure available for web3 are still much less robust than in web2. Splitting the view between front/back ends and the database (where critical data is stored), the difference between web3 and web2 sits mostly in the back end (which the user can’t see) and in the data layer.
« Where web2 applications largely rely on centralized databases, web3 applications are built on decentralized databases (blockchains). This requires entirely new backends and new primitives like wallets. »
The first 2 questions a web3 developer will have to answer when starting:
which blockchain protocol? Bitcoin vs Ethereum vs Solana... Depending on the type of application, a layer2 protocol (Optimism vs Artbitrum...) or cross-chain bridges to port value from one chain to another may also be considered.
how the interaction will happen with the underlying blockchains? Select infrastructure primitives made of building blocks like node infrastructure (Ex. Coinbase Cloud), wallet & key management (Ex. Web3Auth), identity (ex. ENS), decentralize compute (ex. Akash Network), decentralized storage (ex.IPFS), oracles (ex.Chainlink) connecting blockchains to on-chain and off-chain data sources, interoperability protocols (ex. LayerZero).
The web3 developer is summarizing also a number of developer tools that will help you capture the state of web3 for developers.
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