I haven’t been posting about my reading lately. While I continue to read at my typical pace, I think I was a little tired of writing book reports, but that has passed. Last night I read The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Kaley and Nate Klemp have written an excellent book that can help any married couple improve their relationship. This is especially true in the time of Covid, given all the additional dynamics about being home together most of the time.

We are running the Venture Deals Online Course from March 7, 2021 – April 30, 2021. We’ve moved the Venture Deals Community from Slack to Mighty Networks where we have much more functionality and flexibility. Once again, we’ll do a weekly AMA with a variety of people participating. For now, registration is open. Please sign up if you want to take the Spring 2021 Venture Deals Online Course.

I used to love the Matrix’s Red Pill / Blue Pill metaphor and still use it occasionally to try to make a point around dealing with reality in an entrepreneurial context. Several years ago, I became deeply bummed out about how this metaphor was being used in politics and gender equity situations. It’s gotten worse since then, and I find many of the cases it is used in and the people who use it reprehensible, so I don’t use it much anymore.

On my run yesterday, I listened to Tim Ferriss interview Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy. I know both Tim and Naval. I have a mostly virtual relationship with each of them (I think I’ve been in the same physical space with Tim twice and never with Naval), but they are two people I’ve learned a lot from over the past decade. When I run, I listen to one of four things.

I expect we’ll be exploring, unscrambling, pontificating, and dealing with what is happening with GameStop (GME) for a while. If you are reading this in the future and want some historical context for the rest of this post, this chart from the last 30 days of trading is instructive. At the end of 2020, we start at $20 / share. 30 days later, it’s at $238 / share with a high of $482 / share.

The Covid crisis has generated an extraordinary amount of what I like to call “false reassurance.” Consider how many times you heard something general like the following some time in 2020. Everything is going to be ok. We will get through this pandemic. Things will go back to normal. You’ll look back on this as a unique time in your life. Or, consider all of the messages you heard about the severity of the disease over the past year. Most of the messaging, until recently, was not “79,000 people in the US are going to die of Covid in the first 26 days of 2021.”

Last week I participated in a virtual tour of the Media Archaeology Lab. Amy and I are financial supporters, I gave them my vintage computer collection several years ago, and we’ve underwritten their acquisition of several collections. I believe the Media Archaeology Lab is now one of the largest collections of working vintage computers. “Working” is an important part of the phrase. The team at the Media Archaeology Lab, including Dr. Lori Emerson and Dr. libi rose striegl are magicians who, along with many student volunteers, loving take care of, well, everything.

I’m working on a new book with Dave Jilk, my first business partner. It is titled The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors. We are in the home stretch (it’ll be published sometime in the second quarter), and I’m adding a little connecting tissue to the major sections this morning. The third major section (of five) is called Free Spirits. Dave had already written the section introduction, which meant that I had 20% less writing to do this morning than I expected.

Poetry is complex, beautiful, and mysterious. My wife Amy writes poetry. So does my first business partner Dave Jilk (Rejuvenilia, Distilled Moments). There is a lot of poetry in my house. Both Amy and I had tears in our eyes after listening to Amanda Gorman yesterday. I knew America had a national poet laureate, but I didn’t know we had a national youth poet laureate. We’ve now had four; Amanda was the first.