📚 Accidentally Wise, AI’s Taste, Fears in Strategic Planning, Measuring Dysfunction

Malaysian Fryer Oil Arbitrage, Titanic's Best Lifeboat, The Bear S3E10 and more

Hello, this is post #218.

Last week, I picked up the pace on exploring new ideas shaping our lives and the world around us. Every conversation opened my eyes to what’s happening behind the scenes — things we often miss. Each one brought a surprise, but also a sense of familiarity. I could connect dots, then find the next node to chase.

I’m beginning to see the benefits of two habits I’ve built over the last few years:

1. Working in the trenches and at the edges, where experts and passionate folks are quietly creating magic

2. Collecting dots. Staying curious, chasing the unknown, and pausing to capture what sparks interest

Whenever I dive into something that excites me, my internal battery seems to last forever.

I’d love to talk to more people and learn from their journeys. If this sounds like you, ping me. It would be great to catch up.

This week’s curation has a lighter feel; a small reset after the last couple of deep dives filled posts. Here’s a quick peek at what’s inside:

We’ve a lot to cover today, let’s get started.

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📖 Accidentally Wise with Ranga Jagannath

My friend

Ranga Jagannath

just published his first book Accidentally Wise, and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with you.

I first met him as a member at Cult. His complaints & feedback on our services and product landed on my plate, and I learnt quite a bit about customer satisfaction through our discussions. What started as customer conversations quickly turned into a source of inspiration. His curiosity is endless. His drive to learn, contagious.

Over time, I saw something special: Ranga has this uncanny ability to distill sharp observations about everyday life in ways that feel deeply relatable. His posts and conversations always left me thinking — sometimes smiling, sometimes pausing to reflect. This book feels like a super-sized version of those moments. Packed with insight. Full of perspective.

Here’s a small snippet that captures his signature style — curious, thoughtful, and grounded. It’s a great preview of what’s in store.

Hats off, Ranga. I’m constantly amazed by the paths you choose to explore. Keep going, keep sharing, and keep inspiring.

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🤖 When AI has Better Taste than You

Julie Zhuo

talks about three elements of human value — the ways in which we contribute to the world.

Once you through this lens, it is easy to conclude that AI is winning the capability race on many fronts already.

Taste is the next frontier. Many believe that’s where humans will continue to hold an edge. Julie disagrees. She argues that AI can, and likely will, get better at building taste too.

If excellent taste operates through pattern recognition across vast cultural knowledge, then it isn’t a stretch to imagine that AI systems can replicate this process. They can absorb the same foundational context the best tastemakers do; they can track the preferences of frontier communities and learn to predict with increasing accuracy what a discerning individual will value. Seen as a prediction engine, human taste is far more vulnerable to AI competition than we'd like to admit.

Her definition of taste is unique — it’s not just about knowing what’s great, but also about taking risks and sparking a movement.

That said, at the highest echelons, taste is not just prediction, it’s also movement making. The most significant tastemakers take social risks. They might champion work that others find unfamiliar and stake their reputation on bold judgments that initially seem out of touch. [...] In a landscape of shifting cultural winds, these people didn’t just conform to existing preferences but convinced others of entirely new ways of seeing and valuing greatness. This dimension of taste, which requires cultural courage and a willingness to be wrong, may prove more resistant to AI replication than mere pattern recognition.

She believes the one area where humans may still lead is agency. There’s a lot to unpack here. But her argument is sharp, and for now, I don’t see any cracks in it. As AGI evolves, we’ll know more.

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😱 Five Fears that Derail Your Strategic Planning

In “The Silent Killer of Your Operating Practice: Fear,” Amanda Schwartz Ramirez outlines five fears that quietly derail strategic planning — and offers sharp, practical ways to work around them. A former PayPal strategy leader and now a trusted advisor to startup COOs, her lens is spot on.

The piece hit home. Amanda’s fictional scenarios felt more real than reality — I’ve seen each of them play out around me. The fears she unpacks are universal: fear of failure, fear of losing control, fear of conflict, fear of losing credibility, and of course, fear of missing out.

Here are a couple of her suggestions that really stood out for me.

For reducing the fear of failure:

Get specific on definitions: Most execs come into goal-setting with their own assumptions (and baggage). You can speak to four different leaders and you might get four different philosophies regarding what it means to achieve a goal. For example: 1). All goals need some margin for error (success = 70%). 2). Goals and plans are interchangeable – you either achieve, or you don’t (100% or bust). 3). Shoot for the moon! Land amongst the stars! (50% is a massive success). 4). Set modest targets and wildly outperform (150% is celebrated). There’s no one right answer — what matters most here is consistency. Pick one definition of success and ensure everyone knows it.

For overcoming the challenges of conflict

Rip off the bandaid for org changes. If you have any upcoming org changes that you’re planning to make (shifting one team into another, moving operating responsibilities from one exec to another) – be decisive about whether you’ll do it now, or after the goal-setting cycle is complete. You’ll be deciding between possible pain today (change), and pain tomorrow (churn) – but the point is to make the decision. Don’t auto-pilot into the process and hope for the best.

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📈 Metrics to Measure Dysfunctions

Andrew Chen

opens up about his nerdy side and shares a few quirky metrics he’s thought about (and probably measured) in both his personal and professional life. Some gems from the list: Micromort, Cost per Hour of Pleasure, Complaints per Second, Phone Pickups per Hour, and % Conversational Autopilots.

Here’s how he defines Micromort:

Micromort: a 1 in a million chance of death

The rest are just as eclectic and oddly relatable. Once you unpack what each metric stands for, you’ll find yourself thinking, “Oh yes, I’ve been there,” or “Why didn’t I think of it that way?”

He doesn’t stop there. Andrew also shares a set of equally fun (and slightly painful) business metrics. These hit even closer to home. Think about your day if you could track: Lies per Second, Time to First Excuse, PowerPoint per Launch...

Here’s one of those, explained in more detail:

Fun, right? But behind the humor is a sharp lens on the tiny dysfunctions that often plague our work lives.

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✈️ Malaysian Fryer Oil Arbitrage

Matt Levine is at it again — unpacking Malaysian fryer oil arbitrage, meta-acquihires, investment bank fees, and whether AI is the new securities fraud. You can find an archived copy in case the Bloomberg paywall gets in the way.

Here’s the crux of fryer oil story:

You can fry your french fries, toss the used oil, and fuel a jet. Not a metaphor. Literally. That brown, grimy oil at the bottom of your fryer? Turns out, it’s worth more than the fresh stuff — at least to European refiners looking for sustainable jet fuel and a good story to tell regulators. In Malaysia, where palm oil is plentiful and cooking oil is subsidized, this has created a strange little arbitrage loop: buy fresh oil cheap, fry some food, and then sell the used stuff at a profit. Because now, we don’t just trade on energy — we trade on impact. The dirtier your oil (with proof), the cleaner your carbon math looks. What a wild, wonderful world.

Wild. Wonderful. Totally human.

This is one of those stories where you just sit back and admire how good we are at gaming systems. I may not have done justice to it, but Matt? He nails it — even when the topic is finance or economic weirdness. You’ll love this story.

And before I forget — he also has a brilliant explainer on those eye-popping $100M+ AI researcher deals. It’s a story that’s dominating both the business press and the meme feeds. Trust Matt to break it down in a way that makes sense in both worlds.

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🏬 A New Monumentality

Rob Stephenson

’s The Neighborhood is a fascinating newsletter. Here’s how he describes it:

[It] is a not-so-deep dive into every neighborhood in NYC in an effort to create some sort of photographic document of modern-day New York, or at least a record of what I find interesting* on any particular day.

You can already guess why I love it — history, people, stories, photographs, and plenty of sharp observations. What more could you ask for?

In his latest post, Rob takes a detour from the usual neighborhood deep-dives and explores what he calls “A New Monumentality.”

Wait, what’s “a new monumentality”?

In his essay Towards a New Monumentality, architecture critic Sigfried Giedion proposed a new conception of what makes a building a monument, suggesting that it should have a "clear and easily comprehensible form that expresses its underlying structure and function."

And the structure Rob spotlights? A storage facility.

Now, if you live in India like me, you probably haven’t seen these giant, monolithic boxes that hold people’s excess stuff. But in the U.S., they’re everywhere — and they’re oddly beautiful. Rob captures them with a quiet drama and gives us a visual tour that’s both unexpected and deeply human.

Also, there’s a fun little lore around the origin of these modern fixtures.

Check out the post for photos; and if you enjoy this sort of exploration, go ahead and hit subscribe.

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💡 Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws

Roger’s Bacon

compiles The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws: those pithy, often sarcastic observations or rules of thumb that capture some universal truth of human experience. Murphy’s Law is probably the most well-known example.

Like Roger says, you’ve probably seen versions of this before — but it’s still a fun challenge to gather them all in one place. Save this for a day when you want to marvel at the genius (and predictability) of human behavior. So many of our actions can be explained with just a few sharp observations.

A couple of new ones here really stood out for me.

Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.”

Layne’s Law(s): “A) Every debate is over the definition of a word, B) every debate eventually degenerates into debating the definition of a word, or C) once a debate degenerates into debating the definition of a word, the debate is debatably over.”

Streisand Effect: “The phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.”

Putt’s Law: “Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.”

This list feels endless — and it’s a goldmine of sharp musings and thought starters, if you're in the mood to dig in.

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✨ Everything else

1. When RMS Titanic took its maiden voyage in 1912, the ship was believed to be unsinkable, so it didn’t carry enough lifeboats. And when disaster struck, over half the passengers died simply because there wasn’t enough space on the boats. At least, this is what James Cameron’s movie seems to tell us.

   In “The Titanic's best lifeboat,” the team at 99% Invisible digs a little deeper into the history of lifeboats and how they were actually used to suggest that the story isn’t quite that simple. Fascinating listen!

2. “A garden of sleep: Tracking the emotional distance between two bedtimes” by Or Misgav shows how data can lead to beautiful storytelling and some meaningful discoveries. You have to read to experience this one, totally worth the time and effort.

3. I’ve caught The Bear bug again. The last episode of Season 3 — S3E10 Forever — reminded me exactly why I love this show. The silences, the perfectly chosen words, the eyes that say everything, and the weight of what’s left unsaid. The new season kicks off strong, and I’m taking it slow, savoring every bit.

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ICYMI…

Last week’s post had an unintentional theme - beautiful writing and a culture that can promote it. I had a lot of fun compiling the masterpieces from

Sarthak Dev

,

Mumbai || Paused

,

Cate Hall

,

Brie Wolfson

, Shane Parrish,

Rahul Sanghi

and more. Don’t miss it!

📚 Taste, Are You Stuck in Movie Logic, The Forgotten Text, Anna Wintour’s Unreasonable Standards

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That's all for this week, folks!

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

If this piece sparked something for you, I’d love to hear what stood out—leave a comment and let’s keep the conversation alive. And if you know someone who’s always asking "why?" or "how come?", pass this along to them. The world gets more interesting every time a curious mind shares what they’ve found.

Pritesh