📚 #240 Tom Whitwell’s 52 Things, Tyler talks to Blake Scholl, Story of Stripe Press, Request for Curiosity

The Loop, Bento Box Theory, How Sandwich Consumed Britain, Interview with Santa Claus, Story of Bata and more

Hello,

Welcome to Stay Curious #240.

Writing is a way to escape your mind’s default setting.

I found this line in Tom Whitwell’s annual list of things he learnt this past year, and it hit me hard. I have felt this many times. When I put something down on paper, it suddenly becomes more real. I am pushed to look at my assumptions again and challenge myself to be accurate. The final output may help me or help others, but the process always helps me.

I do worry about how to keep doing more of this, and not slip into lazy thinking by handing everything over to LLMs. Whiteboards and a notebook are great enablers, and I need to find ways to bring them into the world of LLMs so that I can use the best of both.

Have you found any tricks that work for you? Do share.

And now, let’s have a quick look at what we are covering today:

It’s a lot to cover, let’s get going…

✨ Tom Whitwell’s 52 Things

It is the season for year end lists, and I am kicking it off with one of my favourites: Tom Whitwell’s 52 things I learned in 2025.

He is endlessly curious and it shows in every list he publishes. It is packed with interesting nuggets, and you are sure to find something that will spark your curiosity and pull you into a new rabbit hole.

Here’re some of the pieces that I found interesting.

• In the 2000s, at least 20% of the phones used in Sub-Saharan Africa physically passed through one building on Nathan Road in Hong Kong.

• Every receipt for every purchase in Taiwan includes a lottery number worth up to £250k. It’s a tax compliance scheme with benefits.

• When returned Hewlett-Packard printers are refurbished, a printer cable is added to the packaging. This solves the most common cause of returns — people who can’t get the Wi-Fi to connect.

He has been doing this for over a decade now; here’s some of the recent ones from Stay Curious archives: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021

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✈️ Tyler Cowen talks to Blake Scholl

It has been a while since I covered a Conversations with Tyler episode. Tyler Cowen has been publishing at full throttle, but I could not keep up. Time to break the pattern. His conversation with Blake Scholl dives into shower time solutions for traffic, airports, and aerospace dysfunction.

Here is a quick look at what you can discover in just forty minutes:

Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what’s wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what’s wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.

What an episode! It’s content like this that makes my morning commute fun and exciting!

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📚 Story of Stripe Press

I loved The Story of Stripe Press for many reasons.

1. Tamra Winter explains why a payment business even has a publishing arm. How does it make sense when every project is measured in terms of adjacency to core product and financial ROIs?

2. She talks about the obsession behind creating their beautiful books.

3. She and the hosts also discuss some of my favourite creators: Brie Wolfson, Kevin Kelly, Brian Potter, and of course Tyler Cowen. It feels exciting and a little validating to see a clear pattern in the people whose work I admire and want to learn from.

This hour-long conversation moves across ideas on talent, craft, and building what matters. I highly recommend it to any builder.

Who in India is building something like Stripe Press, or has the same passion for craft and storytelling as Tamara and the creators above? I would love to talk to them and explore any ways to collaborate. Please let me know.

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🤓 Request for Curiosity

I am not done with the lists yet. Here are two more that I love and look forward to every time they come out. The good thing is that they are not annual. They show up more often.

1. South Park Common’s Requests for Curiosity

2. Works in Progress’ Pieces we would like to commission

There is nothing to learn here except this: curiosity has no bounds. Asking simple questions and chasing random ideas can lead to crazy discoveries, unmatched learning, and unbelievable fun.

What better ways to live!

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🍱 Bento Box Guide to Reshuffle of Professional Services

The bento is a collection of constraints that defines the structure of an entire industry behind it.

The box fixes the shape of the meal. Those constraints determine the workflow of the kitchen. And that workflow fixes the architecture of the entire supply chain.

It is a simple premise, and one that pulls you in quickly. That is exactly what Sangeet Paul Chaudary does in his essay “The bento box guide to the reshuffle of professional services.” He extends the bento box analogy to explain how professional services like law and audit function. The idea of constraint shines through his writing and helps you understand why things work the way they do.

The most exciting part of his essay comes in the later half where he applies the same lens to the movie making industry. He shows how changing constraints over the years have created new types of movies and fresh forms of storytelling. Yes, there is an AI angle in the mix, but the essay is enjoyable even without worrying too much about that part.

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💡 The Loop with Rands in Repose

Michael Lopp has a flair for weaving compelling narratives that carry rich insight. His latest piece The Loop is a perfect example. It describes a world where you can dream big and make something meaningful. The journey is not a straight line. It moves in a loop where feedback guides every step. You learn from the people around you, and you learn from your own progress along the way.

It is a short story, but a powerful one. Each character, Jason, Laura, Terrance, Stewart, Sarah, Maria, Eliza, and Eric, exists around you in some form. You only need to spot them and let them play their part in your own dream adventure.

Here’s a bit about Jason.

Dream a Bit. Nothing innovative was created by committee. You have to stumble on that odd idea at 3:15a and recognize that you’ve never seen it before. Maybe no one has seen it. Let it bump around your head a bit. Stare at it from a couple of different angles. Do whatever you do to let it stew, but pitch Jason at some point. Pitch him because he’s just as crazy as you, and he won’t shut it down because he knows what you know: innovation is a fight. He’ll raise an eyebrow when you make no sense, but he’ll still ask insightful questions. Keep talking with him. Soon, he’ll believe more than you.

Brilliant stuff!

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🥪 How the Sandwich Consumed Britain

In the spring of 1980, Marks & Spencer, the nation’s most powerful department store, began selling packaged sandwiches out on the shop floor. Nothing terribly fancy. Salmon and cucumber. Egg and cress. Triangles of white bread in plastic cartons, in the food aisles, along with everything else. Prices started at 43p.

So this is where the seeds were planted, as Sam Knight explains in his insightful and fun read about how a simple food product became a staple of British meals — breakfast, lunch, and now even dinner.

It is packed with fascinating stories and sharp observations like these:

Why food-to-go works

A young economics graduate named Roger Whiteside was in charge of the M&S sandwich department by then. As a young buyer, Whiteside had come up with the idea of a set of four peeled oranges, to save customers time. He had read that apartments were being built in New York without kitchens, and he had a sense of where things were going. “Once you are time-strapped and you have got cash, the first thing you do is get food made for you,” he told me. “Who is going to cook unless you are a hobbyist?”

Deconstructing a sandwich

Whiteside immersed himself in questions of “carriers” (bread), “barriers” (butter, mayonnaise), “inclusions” (things within the bread), “proteins” (tuna, chicken, bacon) until they bordered on the philosophical. “What is more important, the carrier or the filling?” he wondered. “How many tiers of price do you offer in prawn? How much stimulation do people need?”

I can go on and on. There are so many interesting pieces that made me go ‘wow’. Just go for this one.

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✨ Everything else

1. The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner Interviews Santa Claus. This is McSweeney’s so a lot of smiles are guaranteed.

2. There is a Batanagar in India. You may remember this from the General Knowledge books we read as kids. Many of us still believe that Bata is an Indian brand. But is it really? Juggernaut shares the origin story and the eventful history of this legendary shoe company.

3. Ok, some more lists before we go. TIME’s Top 100 Photos of 2025 and The Best Inventions of 2025. A few more are expected in the coming editions. But that’s it for today.

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ICYMI, here is the link to last week’s post:

📚 Stay Curious #239

Benedict Evans’ ​​AI Eats the World and Naval’s Curate People are my favorite picks from the post. Don’t miss them.

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That’s all for this week, folks!

I hope I’ve earned the privilege of your time.

See you next Monday.

Pritesh