Saying No More Often, Juicero’s Dysfunction, & Plex’s Bold Plan – Link Roundup

Articles

• Q&A: Melinda Gates on the World’s Missing Data About Women – I really enjoyed this Q&A:
  There’s a line right at the end of your letter that says, “The future will surprise the pessimists.”
  Despite the things that people read in the headlines, the world is getting better. Poverty has been cut in half—in half—in 25 years. We talk about the fact that 122 million children are alive because of the malaria vaccine work that’s happened and bed nets getting out there. I travel to the developing world three times a year, and I’m out in remote, rural, dusty villages. Farmers are hooked up to markets; they’re having more income; they’re putting their kids in school. You have to look at the numbers, to rely on the facts, but it’s palpable when you’re out on the ground.” [Businessweek]
• Plex’s Bold Plan To Take On The Streaming Goliaths – I’m an avid Plex user myself, I have a media server set up at home with my old DVDs ripped to it. Paired with a Chromecast and the iOS or Android app, it’s like having an in-house Netflix. I’m rooting for them, but I’m not too confident in their strategy to serve up their own unique content. [Fast Company]
• Why You Should Learn to Say “No” More Often – this is something I’m always trying to get better at doing well. I particularly like the quote “The ability to communicate ‘no’ really reflects that you are in the driver’s seat of your own life.” [NY Times]
• Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable – “IT is now official. Scholars have analyzed the data and confirmed what we already knew in our hearts. Social media is making us miserable.” [NY Times]
• The Mad King of Juice: Inside the Dysfunctional Origins of Juicero – I’m always a sucker for a good failure story, and this one does not disappoint. For example, “Nearly everyone Gizmodo spoke to painted a portrait of their former CEO as a micromanaging tyrant and a demeaning bully.” [Gizmodo]
• Why We Are Raising Our Prices – I’m a Tuft & Needle customer myself. Not only did they post this to their blog, but they proactively emailed everyone on their newsletter list. Their honesty and directness is admirable. [Tuft & Needle]
• My kind of contract – simple, edgy, direct, and kind of funny. [Signal v. Noise]
• Paying a Price for 8 Days of Flying in America – Ugh, flying is THE WORST. [NY Times]

Podcasts

• Phil Keoghan — The Magic of Bucket Lists and Amazing Races – sometimes you hear an interview with someone you don’t have much in common with, but you greatly admire their approach to life. This was that kind of interview. [Tim Ferriss]
• Shrimp Fight Club – the messy reality of cutting government spending. Something as seemingly frivolous as fighting shrimp can have a huge impact on our future. [Planet Money]
• The Prisoner’s Solution – a rerun from a few years ago with an update at the end. It’s the story of how an incarcerated marijuana entrepreneur developed the business Pigeonly, a better way for family members to communicate with prisoners. [Planet Money]
• How I Built This – I really enjoyed interviews with the founders of TOMS, Five Guys, We Work, and TRX [NPR]
• Amazon and Avocados – Ben has a unique take on Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods – it’s all about the grocery infrastructure that Amazon Fresh and other services can potentially tap into (think AWS for food). [exponent]

Books

• Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley – I bought this after hearing the author on the Note to Self podcast The Man Who Invented Facebook Ad Tracking Is Not Sorry. I was hoping for some inside baseball on Facebook Ads, which wasn’t quite what I got. Facebook isn’t even in the picture in the first half of the book. It is, however, an incredibly well-written story of how messy startup life is in Silicon Valley. [Antonio Garcia Martinez]
• The Reducetarian Solution: How the Surprisingly Simple Act of Reducing the Amount of Meat in Your Diet Can Transform Your Health and the Planet – short essays about how reducing meat consumption affects our health, the environment, the economy, and of course the animals. There are some, especially those pushing veganism as the healthiest diet, that I don’t agree with, but the overall concept that the world would benefit by everyone reducing their meat consumption slightly is something I am on board with and have been trying to be mindful of in my own consumption. It is much easier to get everyone to reduce meat by 20% than it is to get 20% of the population to be vegetarians, yet the global impact is the same. The author did a great interview on the Lifehacker podcast too. [Brian Kateman]

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