I had a very calm New Year. Usually, we celebrate it with friends, but logistics ruled it out this year. So instead I was able to simply not think about anything. Was even bored at times. And it's good!

You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why.

If there's one thing I could wish you in the New Year is to be bored. Seriously.

I started listening to podcasts all the time. Training, running, walking the dog. What I noticed is this eliminated my inner voice. Now I try to do those things in silence. And the difference is staggering.

I hope you had a great Christmas! I certainly did, and now fully committed to the upcoming New Year, which is the "real" holiday in my culture.

A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth

We have a complete coverage of Earth with satellite imagery. Which allows scientists to do interesting things. For one, they can find the correlation between the volume of light and GDP of a particular country.

Turns out, the signal is extremely strong with good predictive quality, but as long as you're looking at a democracy. Authoritarian countries seem to have less lights than their official GDP figures would suggest. China is a perfect example.

A lot of left-leaning people refuse to value the economic growth on its own. To many of them, growth is something negative. A poisoned concept used by capitalists to justify their terrible capitalist things.

“Why do we need more growth and isn’t it impossible a finite planet?” they ask. “Why can’t we just stay where we are and focus on helping people?”

Because living in an economy that doesn’t grow is a terrible fate. Growth and GDP aren’t some imaginary concepts that have no bearing on our lives. In fact, GDP correlates pretty well with happiness until around $70,000, where it plateaus (pretty late as you can see). GDP isn’t some fake number, it’s a metric of the economy which is produced by a multitude of value-creation processes where people produce and trade goods or services.

A hole in the Pan-American Highway, CIA lost a nuclear device, and the rest is history.

Darien Gap

Do you watch Pluribus? If not, you definitely should. It's a TV series by Vince Gilligan who used all his reputation from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul to create a beautiful sci-fi show that actually breathes.

We should be in a recession. Interest rates jumped after COVID, the war and tariffs ruin global trade, while western countries are struggling with expensive energy, social spending, and competition from China. But the economy is growing and markets are breaking records. This is happening because of AI: it explains roughly 85% of US equity gains this year, and about half of the S&P 500 stocks are associated with AI.

Everyone comparing it to the dotcom bubble either doesn’t know about what happened in 2000 or misunderstands it. Even though the internet was early, for some reason people believed it’d change everything in a year or two. Investors poured millions into any companies with the world “internet” in their boilerplate despite little to revenue, relying on users alone. And by users I literally mean “signups” because nobody tracked Daily or Monthly Active Users back then.

Most of Mark Cuban’s fortune came from his dotcom project Audionet, a streaming platform for audio and video that he sold to Yahoo! for $5.7Bn in 1999, just in time before the party ended. You know what revenue they had? $13.5 million in the last quarter before the sale.

The unknown minority, exploding Haribo, and what if the US invades The Hague.

Cagots

In medieval France there was an oppressed minority known as the Cagots. And there is one interesting detail about them.

The JDM phenomenon, giant tube TVs and why all steel is radioactive.

Quick update: I've decided to switch the publishing day for Five Finds to Monday. My birthday prevented me from writing this issue last Friday, but Monday seems like a more reasonable option anyway: much calmer and easier. Hope you don't mind!

What Happened to the World's Largest Tube TV?

Tech people adore Stripe. Linear’s old branding infected GenAI so much all its landing pages look purple. Arc Browser received glowing coverages from top-tier outlets even for basic features.

Some companies get viral while their competitors struggle to break through the ice. Why?

This is a question that bothers many founders and marketers wishing to promote their companies or clients. What’s curious is it often have little to no connection to the financial success. Adyen is as big as Stripe, but only the latter is the Silicon Valley darling. There are immensely successful tech companies out there, entire unicorns whose founders have only a few hundred followers.

Turns out writing a regular newsletter is hard, which is why I had to skip Friday. But here's your regular issue for this week anyway!

How One Pig Becomes Hot Dogs, Bacon, Salami, and More

Don't watch this if you're vegan! But I've always been curious how most of these meats are made, from hot dogs to salami, and this is a perfect demonstration.

Bot Appetit is a fantastic community on food with great recipes, if you ever need one.

YouTube is full of videos with people trying to replace their iPhone with half a dozen devices. They carry an iPod for music, a dedicated camera to take photos, a Kindle for reading, a notebook for thoughts, sometimes even a flip phone for calls.

Companies are selling minimal phones, like the $599 Light Phone that can do only a few things and won’t let you get you an Uber. The market for old point-and-shoot film cameras is so hot that Pentax and Lomo are now making brand-new film cameras and some people are buying up old digital ones. Kylie Jenner and Zendaya made Contax T2 so popular it costs $1000 now.

A used iPod Classic in good condition can sell for $200 on eBay and there are now dedicated companies that repair and retrofit them on-demand, like Elite Obsolete and Retrospekt. Batteries, screens, buttons, cases: all third-party parts are easy to find. The only limiting factor is the motherboards, so they depend on how many iPods Apple originally made.

The marvellous Concorde, why nobody can ban tobacco and people with no imagination

When Imagination Fails You

Aphantasia is a condition in which people are unable to create mental visual images or picture things in their mind’s eye.

Man loves surfing so much he lives on a beach and capitalism brights back film cameras.

A secret beach house inside a box truck

A few weeks ago I fell down into another YouTube rabbit hole of camper vans. Lots of people are recording themselves camping in areas where it's technically illegal, like their university parking. This one is less about being stealth and more about being awesome, literally the most beautiful and comfortable camper build by a guy who just wanted to be close to surfing (so he lives at the beach for half a year now).

Zuckerbeg. Nadella. Benioff. An exclusive announcement from Microsoft.

TBPN has been blasting from all corners of tech Twitter lately. It’s a technology daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming live every weekday for about three hours. Sometimes I wonder who has that much free time to listen to it.

Both hosts take it immensely seriously and first got the accolades of tech Twitter and now gathering Magnificient 7 CEOs one by one. They also secured top-tier sponsors like Figma, Brex, Linear, and Public. It all started just over a year ago and has grown tremendously since.

SR-71 was built with Soviet titanium, modern cars look the same and beavers are cool.

Drowning under work tasks, so forgive me for not adding much of a prelude here! Enjoy!

SR-71 Blackbird Was Built With Russian Titanium—And They Never Knew

The uglification of the world, what animal to look for on the wine bottle, and how Uniqlo got to $20Bn in revenue.

Have a great Friday! I know I will, since I’m driving from Lisbon to Porto for an extended vacation I’ve needed for a long time.

To avoid some possible envy, I’ve prepared the usual package. Enjoy!

The worst year to be alive, lofi anime, and overachieving kids.

Fabulous Friday to you, friends. Here’s my catch for this week — hope you’ll like it!

Year 536 was the worst time to be alive

Primitive tribes still live on practically all continents, the story on how phones lost their antennas and should I buy an old iPod?

***

Hey everyone! Meet the latest Friday edition of Five Finds, a newsletter where I share the most interesting things I stumbled upon.

Primitive Forest Tribe Meets Modern Man for the First Time

Yesterday, I found myself sitting on a cliff with a brisket sandwich, wondering when this would end.

Thankfully, today it's Friday!

The Vela Incident

This is one of my favorite stories.

Have a great Friday and the most perfect weekend!

When Sweden switched sides

Most countries got stuck with whatever side of the road they started using for driving, but some changed. Sweden did so in 1967:

• All traffic stopped at 4:50 am. At exactly 5:00 am, cars carefully moved from the left side of the road to the right. Strict speed limits were enforced for the next week.

• Overnight, crews had swapped out 350,000 road signs and repainted intersections.

• They bought buses with doors on both sides to prepare in advance.

Last week, Apple relented and introduced the Sleep Score for the first time since adding sleep monitoring to the Apple Watch. This is huge, since they were always extremely careful about giving out assessments like this.

Apple dominates the concept of personal fitness trackers, but other options have been getting a lot more attention, right to the point where you can pick up an Oura at Walmart and a half of the F1 paddock wear a Whoop through the race.

Unfortunately, both of these devices come with a hefty subscription and are basically unusuable without it; Oura provides just a bit of data but that’s the least they could do to avoid saying it doesn’t work.