Brad Feld

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Masks, Distancing, Thinking, and Diversity

Aug 11, 2020
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I got a lot of interesting and helpful feedback from yesterday’s post on The Sameness. To everyone who emailed me or commented, thank you. It felt good to write it out, and was extremely helpful to me to ponder the responses and suggestions.

I continue to be baffled by the US response to masks. Every time I write something about it, I get responses about why masks don’t work, how to talk about them differently, political comments, and some cheering.

Today, I stumbled on a great video around an experiment with masks. I was thinking about starting to run outside my property and I grabbed some of my lightweight gaiters to wear as a mask when I was near someone. Through this video, I discovered that the gaiter could be worse than not wearing anything, but at the same time wearing a cotton mask is better than not wearing anything.

Washington Post Video: Researchers create visual aid to test mask efficacy 

Nothing like lasers, an experiment, and data. It’s worth three minutes of your life to watch.

Scott Galloway wrote an outstanding post the other day titled The Great Distancing. I nodded along with pretty much all of it. Here are a few images to encourage you to go read the article.

@ProfGalloway weekly blog post on No Mercy / No Malice is a must-read for me. Want some more of him? His rant on higher education the other day with Anderson Cooper is spectacular.

Next up is Howard Marks of Oaktree’s memo from the other day called Time for Thinking. You’ll deeply enjoy (and learn) from this if you are as perplexed as am I (and apparently he is) about the public markets as evidenced by his punchline:

Also, you’ll learn why many aspects of GDP are meaningless, especially annualized quarterly-over-quarter changes in GDP.

Finally, I’ll end with Heidi Roizen’s superb post titled We aren’t going to increase diversity in the boardroom unless we’re willing to appoint first-timers. Why is that so hard to do?

I’ve made a personal commitment to getting at least one non-white board member, and preferably at least one female and one non-white board member, on every board I serve on, even if it means giving up my board seat. I’m giving myself through the end of 2020 before I measure my progress on this goal, but I’m comfortable stating it out loud at this point.