Good Positioning, Tactical Mindfulness & More

Happy Sunday!

Spooky season is upon us, the Elon Twitter deal is back from the dead, and this week, we have articles on positioning, mindfulness, and the ethics of AI image creation. But first, a quick announcement: 

Our very own Dan Shipper is hosting a panel on the future of writing on Tuesday, October 11 at 5PM. If you’re in New York and are interested in attending, you can register here. 

Now, on to the posts! 

Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier 

When Nathan first joined Substack in 2018, it was hard to explain what product category the company was competing in. It wasn’t until they started positioning themselves as a newsletter platform that everything changed. Lesson learned: choosing the right market frame for your product is essential. In other words, good positioning makes everything easier. 

Resources on positioning that are out there today are useful up to a point. They’re great for telling you how to execute on a position—but when it comes to choosing the right position, they have less to offer. In this post, Nathan unpacks the secret to choosing the right positioning from a strategy perspective. 

Read.

Tactical Mindfulness

In physical fitness, there’s a difference between “exercising” and “training.” Exercise might help you break a sweat, but it’s not necessarily structured in any particular way. Training, on the other hand, is a deliberately structured approach to fitness that enables you to progress toward a specific goal.

Casey Rosengren believes that the same distinction can be applied to mindfulness: there’s meditating, without any specific goal or outcome in mind, and then there’s what he calls tactical mindfulness: training the mind toward a particular desired outcome or goal. In this piece, Casey breaks down the three core components of tactical mindfulness, and how to utilize them to deepen your meditation practice. 

Read.

The Face That AI Built

This week, with 15 minutes, negligible technological acumen, and a 2018 MacBook Pro, Evan was able to generate 5 AI images of himself. Easy peasy. And that’s what makes AI so exciting—now, anybody can create an image out of almost nothing. But at the same time…anybody can create an image out of almost nothing. 

AI is exciting because it has the potential to remake the power structures of software. But that power is also frightening. Who’s to say that those who harness it will always have the best of intentions? In this post, Evan considers the ethical implications of the world that AI image generation is building. 

Read.

This week on Ordinary Astronauts: 

This week we've got something special!

Loyal listeners may recall an episode we recorded a few weeks ago where we discussed Nathan's review of a new bestselling book called Slouching Towards Utopia. If you liked that, you're in luck, because this week we talk to the author himself, Brad DeLong!!

This was a super wide-ranging conversation, which should be fascinating to anyone interested in economic history, progress, and technology. Enjoy!

A Business Insight for the Day

Bloomberg this week published a report arguing that autonomous vehicles were dead in the water. There has been roughly $100B spent on this tech with nothing to show for it (so far). Twitter had a field day with it and it caused our team to wonder if Bloomberg’s reporting was accurate. We looked at Tegus to find out. This is an excerpt from an interview from someone who has been working as a leader in autonomous vehicles since 2012. 

Note: Evan worked on consulting projects in 2016 where all the big autonomous companies were promising that the tech would be “ready in 2-3 years” That…did not happen. 

Yes. So I'd say maybe it's a controversial statement, but I do think that the better players, the ones that are best positioned may be the one that currently own the customer going good, and that would be Lyft and Uber. I think I firmly believe that you're not going to see large-scale or commercial-scale robotaxi-only services for some time, minimum five years.

And why? I'll give you an example. Waymo, as you pointed out, has recently deployed or expanded their pilot into SF. But what may not be very well known is that their deployments, some reporter came across a map of before they actually operate in the city. And they operate everywhere except the Northeast corner, the quadrant, that is the densest part of SF, which is a place that really matters.

So they operate where it's simple, and there's almost no demand. If you look at the heat map of demand on Lyft, for example the vast majority of the demand is in that quadrant where Waymo does not operate. So my point is that they have a service that has no hope of being commercial success. It doesn't go with you. So I think the model we'll see succeed in the near term is a hybrid model where you essentially deploy AVs alongside drivers, right, for any particular service.

And these AVs are only able to operate certain regions, certain ODDs that are similar. But anytime there's a situation that is a bit more complex, the pickup is somewhere weird, the ODD doesn't match what AV you can do, you always fall back on the driver and you have the drivers. So that's why I think that model is going to be the winner in the near term.

A Few More Recommendations

Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet? | The Atlantic

A new ruling out of Texas has the potential to change the Internet as we know it. In short, the law states that big social-media companies can’t moderate the content on their platforms. So what does this mean? Charlie Warzel explores. 

How to Become an Expert | Psyche

We all feel the urge to be an expert: to become as good as we can be, at whatever we’ve chosen to do. It’s not just about external markers of success—it’s about pushing the boundaries of our abilities, expanding our horizons. In this post, surgeon and educator Roger L. Kneebone explores what it takes to become an expert. 

Are You the Same Person You Used to Be? | The New Yorker

Personality is one of the most persistent puzzles of humanity. Are we the same person today as we were last week? Last year? Five years ago? This piece probes the depths of what makes us who we are.

The brain loves a challenge. Here’s why. | Washington Post

Scientists call it the Effort Paradox: the human tendency to love doing hard things, even though they make us feel bad. So where does that paradox come from? And is it possible to train yourself to love effort, even if you don’t? New research suggests that the answer is yes. 

That's all for this week!