470: Danaher & Roper, Netflix's Endgame, OpenAI, Honda, Amazon, Kuiper vs Starlink, Musk University, Nuclear, and Artificial Enamel

"It’s not that complicated!"

⛸️ 🕹️ Over the New Year holiday, my youngest boy learned to ice skate (that’s him above, on a frozen lake at my parents’ place — I know, very 🇨🇦).

When you’re learning to skate, you fall a lot. So it’s easy to get discouraged.

To help motivate him, I turned it into a video game. I’ve been telling him when I think he’s “leveling up”.

You just got to level 3! Keep going!

Now you can stand without holding on to someone or something, that’s level 5!

I think it really helped.

He may have done well without this, I don’t know, he doesn’t have a twin brother to act as a control group, but instead of leaving gamification to the scumbags trying to get your grandma to buy more gems in Candy Crush or whatever — we should harness it to positive ends.

It’s not just a kid thing.

One of the reasons why I track my weight training and running in apps and spreadsheets is because I know it motivates me to see progress — and I don’t want to get worse or break streaks, so it also makes failure more visible and creates a faster feedback cycle than just realizing randomly that “hey, it has been a while since I went running” which I know would happen if I was trying to track everything in my head.

Of course, everybody’s different, and what works for me may not work for you. The lesson here is to figure out what works for you — and do that!

📗 Speaking of which, the book I want to read is:

“How To Do What You Know You Should Do”

Can someone please write that?

🚗📹🚙 Every car should have a built-in dash cam.

The technology is now trivial, thanks largely to all the R&D and scaled manufacturing from the consumer electronics world (ie. smartphone cameras and chips).

It wouldn’t add much cost to a vehicle and the personal and societal benefits would be quite large. Just the insurance fraud avoided would probably more than pay for it through lower premiums for everyone.

But it should also be done *right*.

When you log in to your car’s app, you should be able to set a password so that whatever is recorded gets encrypted and can remain private.

The car's owner should be the one with control over exactly what gets shared, and with whom. The carmaker or your insurance company should not have access to anything without permission, and you should be able to check boxes for different types of permissions (ie. insurance claim, self-driving AI training purposes, etc).

🎧🫸💥 Here’s something close to magic that we take for granted: noise-cancelling headphones.

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🦋 Same Name, Different Things (Danaher & Roper) 🏭👩‍🔬

One of the big ideas that I keep coming back to is that it’s not because something keeps the same name that it’s the same thing.

Super obvious, right?

Yet most people overlook this important detail…

Sometimes, a thing can undergo many changes while staying pretty much the same. The Ship of Theseus, where every plank has been replaced. A nuclear power plant, which gets refurbished every few decades and basically lasts forever because every part got replaced or upgraded.

However, there are times when the changes are more profound.

In the past, I’ve used the example of market indices: the Dow Jones or S&P 500 may have the same name and be the same line on a graph, but most of their component companies have changed over time (companies get swapped AND the companies that remain can also change internally over time).

In episode 57 of Infinite Loops with Brian Muraresku, he gives the example that in ancient texts like the bible, the word “wine” is mentioned, so we naturally think of wine as we know it. But ancient wine was likely very different — possibly including some psychoactive ingredients like mushrooms.

Or you can think of cities: New York City has changed quite a lot since 1750, even if it has the same name. Or languages: It would likely be hard for an English speaker from a few centuries ago to understand an English speaker of today. Or vehicles: They both are “cars”, but there’s a wide gulf in technology and performance between a Model T and a Model S…

A good recent example from the world of business & investing is Danaher: