📚#242 Howard Marks on Bubbles, Stewart Butterfield on Product Love, When Numbers Lie, Nerds Are More Clippable

Complete Guide to Nano Banana Pro, There is No ‘There,’ Size of Life, Magnetic Folklore and more

Dec 22, 2025

Hello,

Welcome to Stay Curious #242.

Many of you are probably on a Christmas break, or at least in a break-like mood. If you have opened this mail and are still looking for something useful, I salute you. 🫡

I am still figuring out how to juggle work, travel, and my urge to discover interesting ideas. I have had very little time to read or chase rabbit holes. Still, I managed to stumble upon a few exciting things and consumed them in small pockets of time.

Most of today’s picks lean toward the nerdy side, so click at your own risk.

Here take a quick look:

If you’re still in the mood to go further, grab a hot cup of your favorite drink, find your coziest corner, and then go, go, go.

🫧 Howard Marks on Bubbles

Let’s start with the latest memo from Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital. In “Is It a Bubble?” he shares his thoughts on the growing debate around an AI bubble.

True to his style, he does not just comment on what is happening right now. He looks back at history and pulls out lessons that still matter today.

It is a brilliant read, also available as an audio version if you prefer listening. The memo is packed with thoughtful observations. Here is one that really stayed with me.

Most novel technology doesn’t just appear ex nihilo [i.e., from nothing], entering the world fully formed and all at once. Rather, it builds on previous false starts, failures, iterations, and historical path dependencies. Bubbles create opportunities to deploy the capital necessary to fund and speed up such large-scale experimentation – which includes lots of trial and error done in parallel – thereby accelerating the rate of potentially disruptive technologies and breakthroughs.
By generating positive feedback cycles of enthusiasm and investment, bubbles can be net beneficial. Optimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Speculation provides the massive financing needed to fund highly risky and exploratory projects; what appears in the short term to be excessive enthusiasm or just bad investing turns out to be essential for bootstrapping social and technological innovations . . . A bubble can be a collective delusion, but it can also be an expression of collective vision. That vision becomes a site of coordination for people and capital and for the parallelization of innovation. Instead of happening over time, bursts of progress happen simultaneously across different domains. And with mounting enthusiasm . . . comes increased risk tolerance and strong network effects. The fear of missing out, or FOMO, attracts even more participants, entrepreneurs, and speculators, further reinforcing this positive feedback loop. Like bubbles, FOMO tends to have a bad reputation, but it’s sometimes a healthy instinct. After all, none of us wants to miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build the future.

🥰 Stewart Butterfield on Lenny’s Podcast

Next in the lineup is Lenny’s podcast episode with Stewart Butterfield on his mental models for building products people love.

If you care about product building or culture, this one is an easy recommendation. Stewart does share a few frameworks, but what really stood out for me were the examples. He treats products like working toys, takes them apart piece by piece, and uses them to teach lessons in craft and judgment.

His sense of what feels right in a product is remarkable. It shows in how quickly he spots even the smallest friction in an experience and explains why it matters.

Here’s the lineup Lenny shared. Every one of these segments is worth listening to and packed with lessons.

Hyper-realistic work-like activities
The owner’s delusion
Utility curves
“Don’t make me think”
“We don’t sell saddles here”
Tilting your umbrella
When to pivot

Just go for this one!

🌡️ What Numbers Really Measure

In “When Numbers Lie,” Dr Sumit Chowdhury explains how measurement is not just technical. It is moral, political, and deeply human. This forty five minute conversation surfaces many overlooked ideas about numbers and measurement, ideas that have quietly shaped our collective trajectory.

I have always relied on metrics and processes as core building blocks for operating systems and decision making. This piece challenged that mindset and offered some sharp counterpoints that made me pause and rethink.

Here is one snippet from the FoundingFuel post that covers the conversation. I highly recommend watching the video itself to fully appreciate it.

📺 Why Nerds Are More Clippable

I am geeking out on what the team at a16z is putting out on new media and content businesses. Their thinking and coverage are worth studying.

A recent piece by Alex Danco caught my eye with a great title: Why Nerds Are More Clippable. The essay lives up to the intrigue. Its core idea is simple and sharp.

A new dominant media format has emerged in the last decade: the combination and integration of longform source material into shortform clips. The “Podcast into posts” pipeline is now a standard way that news and entertainment gets prospected and packaged, and we take it seriously at a16z as a leading indicator of not only where media is going, but more generally, “who is influential, and why.”

It is a short essay, but it spans a wide range of ideas. Nerds. McLuhan’s laws of media. Word documents. Old school pamphlets. And more.

If you are a content creator, a brand builder, or simply curious about the business of content, this one is worth your time.

💡 Modern Meditations with Immad Akhund

Mario Gabriele speaks with Immad Akhund, CEO of Mercury, in a wide ranging conversation as part of his Modern Meditation series. The discussion flows through thoughtful questions and sharp reflections, making it a rewarding listen.

Here are a couple of snippets that stood out to me.

Once you get to the far edge of excellence, I really feel like the stories are fairly similar. It’s all about perseverance through difficult times and overcoming self-doubt. There’s this societal idea that creativity is something you just wake up with. One day, you wake up with a song in your head, or something. It’s cool to see that whether you’re building technology or writing music, it’s about waking up and grinding for ten or eleven hours, and then doing it again the next day. It really comes down to working extremely hard and being unwilling to give up when others would.

and

🍌 Complete Guide to Nano Banana Pro

If you’ve still not mastered your Nano Banana Pro game, then here’s “The Complete Guide” to using it like a pro for professional asset production.

Here are two small tips that I found instantly useful.

This post comes from the folks at Google AI Studio, and they have done a solid job focusing on real, useful use cases. No AI slop here.

🧑‍🚀 There is No ‘There’

Josh Mitrani’s short post, Lessons from 2025, is one of the sweetest things I have read in a long time. It touched me on many levels.

Also, young kids - especially ages 1-4 - are amazing. They’re essentially puppies: full of energy, sweet, and never boring. They think you are the most amazing thing in the world and their life revolves around you. At some point, this ends. Their world gets bigger, and you become a smaller part of it.
I spend most of my parenting time with our 2, 4, and 6 year old. The 2 year old needs constant attention: otherwise he’s painting the floors with yogurt or trying to destroy any of our consumer electronics. Last week, I was alone with the 4 and 6 year old for an afternoon. Still fun, but nobody was licking my face.
The best way to explain it is Toy Story. The movie isn’t about being a kid – it’s about being a parent. Like a toy, you want your kids to want to play with you. You want to be a source of joy for them. But they get bigger and grow out of things. There’s also a scene where Woody explains to Buzz that being a toy is more important than being a “space ranger” – whatever your non-kid identity, being a parent of young kids is so much more. So I’m trying to enjoy it while I can.

There are life lessons woven through it, but without a hint of preachiness. I absolutely loved it.

✨ Everything else

Size of Life. It’s from Neal. I don’t need to tell you more.
Open Reel Ensemble composes ethereal ‘Magnetic Folklore’ using reel-to-reel recorders. So many unknown words in one sentence. Click to find out. I guarantee you will be amazed at what you hear and see.
Sound Designing a Life. A sweet short film that shows how a Foley artist would sound design an ordinary day. You might be surprised to see how they even create the sound of washing hair.

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