I really enjoyed the process, and the biggest takeaway was that it led me to make better media choices afterward.

Because of that, my social media consumption is way down, and I got the habit of “trading up” to better media.

I thought another media fast might make me want less media. It did the opposite, it just made me want the good stuff back.

The biggest thing I’ve learned from another 5 days of quitting media consumption is actually the same lesson for food:

If you consume high quality media or food, you don’t need a break from it.

This time, I see that my life is not better without media. I love reading and media of all kinds. I love books, podcasts, essays, interviews…

It’s the poor quality clutter in your feed that drains me.

The cool thing about fasting is it helps you see your relationship to that particular thing you’re taking a break from. You remove it to get a sense about it. I left this one wanting high quality media back.

The Food Fast

I’m using Prolon for the 5-day fast. kit with everything you need. It’s a fasting-mimicking program, so you get a small amount of food each day while still keeping your body in a fasted state. There are soups, olives, bars, teas, and a few other things.

Day 1: Felt great. I’ve done a lot of 24-hour fasts, so I kind of knew the drill.

Honestly, I think a 24-hour fast may be one of the optimal versions for me.

Day 2: Every type of feeling.

Great, tired, sick, great again. I think day 2 was when my body woke up and said, wait, what the F are you doing?

Day 3: I woke up euphoric, almost like a mild altered state. Tons of ideas were hitting me in the morning. Very productive work day.

Then the back half of the day was probably the hardest. I wanted to quit.

Interestingly my sleep was fantastic, even if I thought I didn’t get a great night. AND my HRV went through the roof.

Day 4: The best way I can describe it is that my mind felt like a calm lake with a clear sky.

Not the same euphoria as day 3, but very lucent and still.

Day 5: Ready to be done, and good to neural energy.

I actually am stopping early because I feel like I know my body and I feel “good.” Not stopping to exit I feel content with it.

Would I recommend it?

Maybe. Reading online I think people who are not as attuned to their health have bigger breakthroughs, but also they find it way harder.

I think for me I’ll keep doing 24 hour fasts on occasion, and then mayyybe occasional 3-day fasts. There are a lot of deep biological benefits from going 3+ Days so I’m happy I stuck it out for that.

People really dislike the taste of soups from Prolon, I didn’t mind them that much. And the bars and snacks tasted great.

What I would recommend is any type of small “fast” from something to better understand your relationship to that thing.

It’s smart to subtract something and then see, do I want to add this back in? The point is not a short term fix but a long term shift and adjustment, and fasting I see as a nice intervention to creating that longer term change.

Ask: What can you subtract?

Any questions/comments hit reply!

xx David

More posts on media fasting…

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Hey,

I keep having the same AI conversation with founders.

It started in April when I was driving down the coast meeting with clients. At coffee shops and restaurants or hiking trails… almost every conversation eventually brought up AI.

• How should I think about hiring?

• How do I get my team to embrace it?

• Where should we invest if everyone has the same tools?

It’s less anxiety actually, and more “I don’t really know how to get the most out of this.”

These were not anti-AI people, and yet most of them are still struggling.

The #1 thing I hear most founder’s tell me was this: “I don’t have the time or space to really go deep.”

So they kept business as usual, and never really integrated it very deeply. Now things have accelerated even faster with Fable and Codex. I use it as my portal for everything now, to every website and app.

A lot of my work with founders already lives integrating their vision and roadmap into a clear plan. Because I help successful founders how to figure out what to build next, I see AI as an accelerant to any plan we develop.

I’m so excited about AI because I think it’s a massive tailwind to bootstrapped business owners in the $1-$25M range. Productivity is shooting through the roof. And it’s only getting better. That means better margins, faster margins, more automation. It’s a better business operating system and founder’s can build so much faster now.

With Charlie Ward at Ramen Club, we looked at the parts of the business that were still living in his head: member context, follow-ups, content ideas, Slack patterns, trial members, event recordings, and the recurring work of making people feel known.

AI is quickly expanding the realms of possibility for founders, and the breadth of what they can work on.

The problem is nobody is taking the time or space to rethink the system.

One CEO told me he knows that people just need to have that “magic moment” to really get it but most people haven’t had it yet.

So I’m opening up a few calls around this.

If you want to look at where AI actually fits in your business, we can spend 30 minutes looking at your roadmap and where this might create leverage.

What are you building

Where are you stuck

What might be worth setting up next?

Want to talk about integrating AI into the operating system of your business?

Book a one-on-one call and we’ll discuss what’s possible.

Book a Call

xx David

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My role is to help Charlie step above the business, see the roadmap clearly, and decide what should stay with him, what should be delegated, what should be automated, and what should disappear.

Thesis

The best communities already create more value than their operators can capture, organize, or share. Inside their conversations, events, and member experiences is scarce knowledge and insight that cannot be found in generic AI models.

That knowledge is intellectual property.

Agents can help capture it and turn it into useful content without stripping away its context or voice.

This is a flywheel for how you grow your communities.

Agentic-First Businesses: To scale as a solo founder, turn your business into software.

I see AI agents as a massive tailwind for solo operators and $1-10M businesses: they can take the knowledge and workflows already inside the business and turn them into software that compounds.

I got excited about agents because I was already helping founders decide what comes next and design a roadmap for growth. But now, agents can help them actually ship that roadmap faster.

This is a real example of what that looks like in practice.

Agentic First Roadmapping

The agent work comes out of this roadmapping process, and it is already helping him move through the roadmap faster.

“Use agents more” is not a strategy.

Strategy is deciding where agents can create repeatable leverage for the business.

The Founder Bottleneck

Ramen Club has an online community, a physical space, events, workshops, sponsors, a website, content, a Slack, and a lot of invisible work underneath it all.

That invisible work is where community businesses become heavy and why many struggle with longevity and sustainability.

It is not just “run the community.”

Community Managers/Owners are…

• replying to Slack messages and emails

• noticing member wins

• publishing content

• running events

• launching workshops

• managing sponsors

• reviewing analytics

• making introductions

• updating the website

• turning recordings into useful assets

• deciding what deserves attention each week

And much more.

None of those tasks is impossible on its own. But in Charlie’s case, too much of the system was still living with Charlie.

At one point, we named the problem:

“There is more roadmap than you can ship.”

That became the frame for our work:

How does Ramen Club need to operate now that its roadmap is bigger than the founder’s available capacity?

This is where agents can help.

The Agentic Roadmap in Three Buckets

The first move was to simplify. We compressed the roadmap into three areas where an agent-first approach could create leverage:

1. Website and SEO

2. Content

3. Community operations

Once the roadmap was grouped, we could ask a more useful question within each bucket:

Bucket One: Website and SEO

The first step was rebuilding the Ramen Club website and moving it onto its own hosting.

This was more than a technical cleanup. The old setup made the site harder to control, improve, and build on. Moving it onto its own infrastructure gave Ramen Club a faster site and, more importantly, ownership of the foundation underneath it.

That matters because the website is not just a brochure. It is where potential members discover Ramen Club, understand what makes the community useful, and decide whether to join. When the foundation is slow or difficult to change, every experiment from improving a landing page to publishing a new article takes more effort than it should.

With the new site live, we can now improve those paths deliberately: publish without fighting the platform, see how people move through the site, and learn which pages actually lead to interest, applications, and memberships.

The next phase is turning that foundation into a growth engine, starting with a publishing rhythm the team can sustain.

Milestone: publish one strong SEO post every week.

That means building a repeatable workflow for finding useful topics, drafting from Ramen Club’s existing knowledge, reviewing the work, publishing it, and learning from the results. The goal is not to produce more content for its own sake. It is to make the community’s expertise discoverable to the founders already searching for it.

A weekly publishing engine that actually ships is a big deal. I have seen plenty of founders get stuck between knowing content matters and having no reliable system for producing it.

We have also talked about AEO, meaning, showing up in agent and LLM queries. But first, we need to establish the basic publishing rhythm. Then we can use the same foundation to improve how Ramen Club appears in both traditional search and AI-generated answers.

Bucket Two: Content

This is where the Ramen Club use case becomes especially interesting.

Ramen Club already has a huge amount of content. It just does not look like content yet. It is hiding in context that is not yet usable.

The “context” layer lives in…

• Slack conversations

• member wins

• event recordings

• workshops

• milestones

• founder questions

• YouTube and podcast material

• analytics

• onboarding forms

• Charlie’s own judgment and memory

This is the hidden value inside the community.

A great community is not just a place where people gather. It is a living context engine. The opportunity is to connect agents to what is already happening and turn that material into something useful.

Charlie described the goal well:

“This is about giving agents all of my context and my voice.”

The content system should not flatten Ramen Club into AI slop. It should help Charlie surface the things he would already post if he had more time, a more reliable memory, and a better system around him.

The work-in-progress version looks something like this:

1. Collect useful signals from the community.

2. Store them in a database that is always growing.

3. Identify which signals are worth turning into content.

4. Draft posts in Charlie’s voice across topics.

5. Let Charlie review everything before it goes live.

6. Feed the best material back into the website, newsletter, and social channels.

The exact source of truth is still open. It could be Notion, a database, or a lightweight internal repository. The function: creating a living context layer for the business that pulls together relevant information and gives agents something useful to draw from.

A member shares a win. An event gets recorded. A workshop produces a great insight. A recurring question appears in Slack. A trend emerges across the community.

Instead of disappearing, those signals become usable. They can become a social post, a blog post, an event idea, an introduction, a sales insight, or a better onboarding touch.

Bucket Three: Community Operations

The third bucket is community operations: the quiet, recurring work that determines whether members feel known, connected, and supported.

For Ramen Club, that includes:

• managing free trials

• following up with potential members

• suggesting people a trial member should meet

• replying to common questions

• monitoring Slack for important signals

• helping members get more value from the community

• reviewing analytics and deciding what needs attention

This work rarely looks glamorous from the outside, but it can make or break a community. A strong community experience depends on noticing the right person, question, or moment at the right time. As the community grows, expecting Charlie to hold all of that context in his head becomes both a bottleneck and a risk.

The first workflow we are exploring is the trial-member experience.

Today, understanding a new trial member can mean piecing together an application form, previous messages, Slack activity, spreadsheets, and Charlie’s memory. The information exists, but it is scattered. That makes thoughtful follow-up slower and increases the chance that a useful introduction or important signal gets missed.

An agent-supported workflow could bring that context together, summarize who the person is and what they need, suggest relevant members for them to meet, and draft a follow-up for Charlie or the team to review.

The point is not to automate the relationship. It is to give the humans responsible for the relationship better context at the moment they need it.

Done well, this could make the trial experience more personal while requiring less manual searching.

It could also reveal patterns across the community: What new members are looking for? Where they get stuck? Which introductions create value? and what Charlie or the team should pay attention to next. This is where the proactive nature of agents should help.

I told Charlie:

LLMs should surprise you. They should give you ideas for experiments you wouldn’t have seen or run on your own. This is where the ability for an agent to consume large amounts of data pays off.

A community founder should not have to search across forms, Slack, memory, and spreadsheets every time they want to understand who someone is and how to help them.

The system should carry the context so the founder can focus on the judgment and human connection that matter.

Next Steps

I am going to keep documenting this as we build: the roadmap decisions, workflows, screenshots, prompts, dashboards, mistakes, and moments when the whole thing still feels clunky.

Would you want more behind-the-scenes notes on how I help founders clarify their roadmap and move from manual to agent-first?

xx David

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My Media Fast Rules

Hey All,

No curation this week as I’ve been on a media fast for the past 10 days. That means…

• No scrolling

• No consumption of feeds, news, social media, or emails.

• Only books or movies.

• All use of tech has to be purposeful. I can send a DM on X just no scrolling.

About 5 days in I started seeing the benefits. And now I’m becoming and advocate.

Want to be more fit? More focused? Have more Friends? Literally all possible with a media fast….

Why might you want to do a media fast?

• You want to reclaim focus.

• You want to have a better mood, remove background unease or stress

• Your sleep is off, or you’re not working out enough

• You want to discover your values, passions, hobbies, creativity again

• You feel like there’s some opportunity cost to how you’re operating but you’re not sure exactly what that cost is.

If I can do it, you can do it. I enjoy technology and find many benefits from it. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn from taking some space from it.

Let’s talk about some changes that can take place in doing this experiment and what else I’m hoping to get from it.

To caveat I’m not against social media and technology and I hope that’s obvious. I’m interested in how to form productive, useful relationships with social media and technology that help you have a better life and more fulfilling work. This is not a “detox” but a chance to reshape how I use tools in my life.

I’ve been loving Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, it might be my favorite book of his. Much of what I’m writing about I’ve learned from that book.

Work Projects & Focus

When you don’t have 10,000 ideas competing for your attention every 10 minutes, the level of focus you bring to your work changes. You think about your ideas longer, with more sustainability. You naturally shift from consumption to creation.

Focus is about what the alternatives are.

Imagine you’re in a dorm room with just a bed and a window. You’re absolutely bored. Then someone gives you a book. Compared to boredom, that book is amazing!

Now you have a book. Someone gives you a VCR where you can play movies. You drop the book and suddenly you’re in the world of cinema!

Now they give you an iPhone…

The point is that you want to create contexts where the “best alternative” for you is what you’re hoping to accomplish and achieve. It goes without saying that my reading time has increased drastically given having no ability to view feeds.

Friendship & Social Life

Your brain is hard-wired to seek social interaction when you have downtime. This is proven in brain scans that show that any time your brain is idle from a focused task, the areas of the brain for social connection light up. Imagine you get back from the hunt. Now that you’re no longer focused, you’re in the group connecting and socializing.

You’re primed to seek social connection when you have downtime.

And yet… that has been disrupted by pseudo-social experiences through our phones. The trick that Facebook and Instagram play on your brain is this:

• You get bored

• Your brain wants social connection and ties

• You give yourself a “hit” of social media or podcasts which give you a pseudo-lo-fi version of social connection, or you get the parasocial feeling of connection through a podcast.

• You never get the “real thing,” the full high-definition experience of connecting with other humans face to face or in groups.

So basically the reason you feel lonely despite having access to 1 Billion people is that you’re never getting the full human experience of social connection.

When you’re not distracted by psuedo-social experiences, you begin using technology in ways that create more social experiences not less.

Imagine you can’t get any “social” experience from social media… What would you do?

Here are some social connection rules you can employ:

• Don’t text, set up a time to connect (by phone or IRL)

• Don’t comment or like, set up a time to connect (by phone or IRL)

• Call people when you think of them. FaceTime more.

• Find local social groups to attend

• Come up with creative dinner experiences for your friends

• Plan travel

• Talk to strangers

• Plan new projects or hobbies with others

Books & Fitness

My media of choice has been books. I use every format; phone (kindle), tablet (kindle), physical, audio. I already read a good deal, however now I think my pace is probably 2-3 books every 2-3 weeks. You can do that fairly easily if you read ~20 pages every so often when you have downtime. I’m also watching a good deal of movies with my wife.

I wouldn’t say I’ve shifted my fitness by much, however there’s only so much of that you can do per week.

I have found myself walking for longer stretches without a phone (totally crazy, I know). I’m sure I at least have the general impetus to work out more often given not having alternative media to suck me in.

Re-Introduction of Technology

I still have about 20 days left of my media fast. I’m hoping to get more into hobbies (guitar, film photography) as well as plan some more social events with friends.

I’ll most likely post again in the future related to how I plan on re-integrating technology. I already have some ideas around RSS feeds, Saturday “cheat days” where I binge on media, and more use of my dumbed-down iPhone.

What do you think about this? Have you ever done a media fast and then re-integrated or found value in new ways?

Lmk and have a great week!

xx David

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Hey All,

You’d think that working for yourself, it would be easy to take a day off when you’re sick.

While I have every opportunity to take a day (like today) where I’m not feeling well, I still feel a great deal of a “9-5” type pressure and programming to do something productive.

My wife asked me, “What advice would you give if it were me?”

I said I would tell her to “take the day and not worry about being productive.”

Easier said than done.

So much of what makes entrepreneurs successful is the same thing that they struggle with when they find themselves in new opportunities or positions from their business.

I had a mother of 3 kids call me, saying that she didn’t need or want any business help or advice, she just wanted to figure out how to take a vacation while actually being able to be present.

The business was great, she forgot how to have a life outside of it.

This lack of presence was reflected back strongly due her children and how she felt she was with them when she was still thinking about work.

Even though I have worked for myself since 2013, I still don’t always give myself the days that I could.

That said, I’ve found ways of giving myself space and patience that have dramatically changed my internal dialogue around time-off.

So, while not perfect in my desire to not just lay around all day, I’ve found more space and a relaxed attitude towards knowing that there will be other days to do certain types of work, and not every day needs to look the same.

When you work for yourself, the best state you can find yourself in is a week full of interesting diversity to it; where each day is different than the previous, and you have a broad mix of fun, time with friends, fitness, errands, and deep work mixed in.

The most difficult state to be in is everlasting monotony, burnout, calendars that are too full and give you no space to zoom out or relax.

I know that it’s you that puts yourself into either of these postures, not your work.

You might think you don’t have the agency to choose, but you do. Tim Ferris has a great example in his book about firing clients who took up too much of his time, and having his business grow.

There are always more choices than there appears for how to spend your time and do what you do. It just takes seeing it.

How will I be to myself as a boss my today? It’s a good question to continually ask….

Here are some links from the week meant to help you grow and expand.

1. Seeing Galaxy Digital as a way to play AI x Crypto crossover.

I’ve been looking for companies, protocols, or anything investable at the intersection of AI and crypto. Of course, you can go Mag-7, however I already capture them in indexes and also through some direct exposure. I’ve already shared my interest in Bittensor, which is an open source AI project with Bitcoin Tokenomics. I’ve been listening to the last few episodes of Peter Diamandis’ podcast on AI development which has been very useful (linked below).

I’m not sure I believe in Emad Mostaque’s vision of “Intelligent Internet” but it caught my attention that he also saw a replica model of the Bitcoin monetary supply and origin as inspiration for a new AI protocol that was open source and global to compete with todays centralized players. I take this as a positive sign as more people seeing the whitespace available. I took note that Tether is also investing in devloping their own open source AI.

This podcast was a great primer on just how big of a boom the AI sector is becoming in the US. Truly massive. To get exposure, I’m liking Galaxy as a way to play the Datacenter buildout with extra upside within crypto markets.

As for the business case for Galaxy, you can learn more from these two below.

on the business case for Galaxy (download here).

Glxy

382KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

**Of course DYOR not financial advice at all. Better to understand the dynamics at play. I will continue watching the open source AI space.

2. Decoding Zuck’s Superintelligence Memo

Why are so many AI CEO’s making bold claims?

https://om.co/2025/07/30/decoding-zucks-superintelligence-memo/

Memo’s are a big thing lately, with grand gestures and plans for the future. Right now tech CEO’s are using them as competitive recruiting tools, and positioning. You need to look past the bold claims, because those are just to garner attention. Underneath the surface are deeper reasons and purposes, and are well explained by these two posts from – OM

That’s from OM who always has a good take.

3. Eleven Labs is blowing my mind.

With the launch of Eleven Labs music,

“Quickly create high-quality, customized tracks in any musical genre or style, with or without vocals, in multiple languages. Just describe your ideal sound, mood, or use case, and let our music bring it to life.”

I will most likely use this product to produce an audio version of my book with my voice mirrored through the platform.

1. I love this take on work and the whole vibe of this book.

Today Was Fun (Amazon)

’s writing is inspiration for me related to writing I’m doing for Founder’s who have lost their excitement for the business they’re in.

5. Suri eco conscious electric toothbrush

I think material science for DTC products will be a big category and a way to stand out as a brand. Can be used with Revitin pre-biotic toothpaste.

Sign Posts…

Have a great end to the week,

xx David

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I’m heading back to Los Angeles this month for client meetings, beach runs, and my ritual walk along the Palisades. Before I board that flight this afternoon, I wanted to spotlight a global community that could change the arc of your next chapter.

A few years ago I met through helping host the Makerpad conference (he was then running Write of Passage with David Perell).

Will and I hit it off and began having a weekly breakfast to talk writing, philosophy, business, and building a business and lifestyle you love

Course Creator…to Chinese Comic?

After Write of Passage wound down over a year ago, Will was looking for his next thing. We had always discussed his passion for learning Chinese, and he decided to make the leap. Literally. Will moved to Kunming, China to live and learn Chinese full time.

Through his exceptional efforts and dedication to learning, he got good enough to try his hand at standup Comedy… in Chinese. He’s since done over 100 shows, and even been paid as a standup comic in the scene. Will truly followed his own path and calling and it was a thrill to hear about his meteoric rise in the local scene there.

Act Two

This is the idea of an Act Two. Letting your next chapter open up to something that you are truly excited to go for. And being alongside others with similar passion, who can share opportunities and are dedicated to learning and making the leap together.

It’s a digital community built for people ready to launch the project that’s been sitting in Drafts. Think...

- Global network of ambitious builders
- Live sessions on the latest tools (plenty of AI)
- Structured accountability to move from idea → shipped

If you’ve got a side project, book concept, or venture simmering, Act Two (Using this link supports my newsletter🙏) supplies the momentum and the peers are there to make it real. Cohort kicks off in September. If it sparks something, check the link in the first comment or DM me, happy to intro you to Will and the team.

What “Act Two” have you been postponing?

xx David

On to the links…

What did we get wrong about AI? via Seth Godin: The poetry machine

“Because here’s what’s actually happening inside these machines: They’re mapping the statistical relationships between every word and every other word in human culture. They’re building a heat map of how language actually works.”

How do you say No, well? Via Daniel Day-Lewis:

“I do know that I can only do this work if I feel almost as if there is no choice…”

“What’s the point?” Scottie Scheffler's take on success in golf

Rare for someone at this level of talent, at the height of their career to speak candidly in this way…

"This is not a fulfilling life," Scheffler said. "It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart."

“What good are all the objects in the universe if there is no subject?” Via Fake Pixels

“Le Guin's insight is as much a challenge as a comfort. It's easier, especially for founders, for technologists, for anyone trying to pull the future forward, to believe in the mythology of invention: you imagine radically, and then you build. But Woolf, and Le Guin after her, asks: what good are all your objects, your inventions, your universes, if there's no subject at the center? What's a new world worth if Mrs. Brown herself never appears, whole and trembling, on the page?”

“What emotions am I avoiding?” The Avoid failure → Play it safe → Feel like a failure, loop. How to Fix it.

The Era of Experience & The Age of Design

If you have thoughts or questions, share in a reply or in the comments,

xx David

Sign Posts…

Rich Roll

I got deepfaked. This is what happened—and what it portends.

Last week, I started getting a slew of texts and DM’s alerting me that a semi-viral video was propelling its way across the internet in which a ‘version’ of me that isn’t quite me is saying things I definitely wouldn’t. The context was a podcast I never hosted with a guest I have never met in which a ‘version’ of a woman named…

Read more

a year ago · 402 likes · 70 comments · Rich Roll

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepreneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock. To grow your business, you have to grow again. Helping Founder’s scale their business by going beyond day-to-day operator.

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Hey All,

I don’t know about you, but my wallet-share of health related purchases continues to climb. Out of pocket, at home, personalized medicine is rolling out in all types of products right now and I believe this will only accelerate. Healthcare is one of the only sectors of the economy where costs have continued to rise (alongside education) over time. I think we’re starting to see some costs come down. As such I think this is a great market space to watch. People are more willing to venture on their own, empowered by GPT and new products to take health into their own hands. I see this as a positive. I’ve been interested in these products and services ever since 10 years ago seeing my first functional MD.

Here are some resources that I’m seeing in the health sector that let you take health into your own hands.

If you have thoughts or questions, drop them in the comments.

xx David

On to the (Health Edition) links…

1. Rope Flow workout (and free course) from Nsima Inyang.

Am thinking about picking up a rope myself! I love how this can unlock spinal movement. Plus it looks fun. I’ve written before that I’m finding mobility to be incredibly underrated and important for people who sit at a desk all day.

2.Ezra Full Body MRI Scan

Function Health has acquired Ezra and is launching a Full Body MRI with an FDA-cleared AI that cuts scan time from 60 minutes to 22 minutes, and $1500 to $499.

3. Rythm provides an easy at home (self-administered) monthly blood tests.

Seems convenient, will wait on more people using this before I try. Levels has also launched their own at home testing.

4. Prime Protein Bar from Equip: The first grass-fed beef protein bar that tastes like dessert.

I think the new “David” bars are suspect. This bar has better ingredients (and there are a few others entering this market).

5. Toku Nattokinase is an enzyme derived from natto that’s good for cardiovascular health.

In a 12-month clinical study of 1,062 participants , a daily dose of 10,800 FU of nattokinase combined with 180mcg of Vitamin K2 led to remarkable cardiovascular benefits, including:

Notes and Sign Posts…

Nice data on the Sauna

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepreneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Unlock Their Business Plateau.

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Leadership is About Creating Clarity and Direction

In my work with founders and teams, I keep coming back to one core truth: leadership is about creating clarity when things are uncertain. Recently, I was involved with a company navigating a negotiation. There were two groups, stuck, waiting for someone else to make the first move. No one wanted to set the terms or outline next steps, and as a result, nothing happened.

This is a classic leadership gap. The person who steps up first and defines what they want with clarity, immediately shapes the conversation and creates progress.

Leaders take what’s fuzzy and make it clear. Imagine you’re stranded on a beach after your boat crashes on the shore. People are anxious, looking for direction. The person who says, “You go up the hill, you go look for help, you go find food,” instantly creates order from chaos. People feel safer when there’s a plan, especially when it’s a simple one.

When you set the frame, you give others something to respond to. Even if your proposal isn’t perfect, it anchors the discussion and moves things forward.

A lot of us hesitate to lead because we think we need all the answers. But the truth is, you rarely do. Even at the top of huge organizations, leaders can’t possibly know every detail. What matters is the willingness to make a call, take a risk, and adjust if needed.

So ultimately leadership is about self-trust.

Having enough of it to move forward, even when you can’t guarantee the outcome.

So today, wherever you are, look for the places where clarity is missing. Don’t wait for someone else to go first. Set a direction, however imperfect, and let others react and respond.

That’s how you create value.

If you have thoughts or questions, drop them in the comments.

I’ll be back again next week, later.

xx David

On to the links…

1. Awair Element at home air monitor.

And a talk on “Why Air Quality Matters.”

2. I’m starting to use Dia Browser as my main Browser.

So far I wouldn’t say I’m impressed by any features or any use of AI specfically. That said it’s very fast compared to Arc which was getting slow and buggy from it no longer being updated

3. This Wine Decanter also keeps your bottle fresh after use.

4. Why AI will Save the World (Marc Andreesen)

I am very sensitive to Marc Andreesen’s canonical blog posts on the future. If you had just followed his views from the mid 2000’s onwards you would have done very well.

He wrote “Why Software Is Eating the World” to explain how software (like the apps on your phone) is taking over industries that used to be all about physical stuff—like books, music, movies, and even cars. He predicted that companies using software would win big, and he was right.

A few years later, Andreessen wrote “Why Bitcoin Matters.” He compared Bitcoin to the early days of the internet—a weird, new technology that most people didn’t understand, but that could change everything. He explained that Bitcoin is like digital cash you can send anywhere in the world, instantly, without needing a bank. He believed it could make payments cheaper, safer, and more open to everyone, especially people who don’t have access to banks.

Why Software Is Eating the World ↗ (originally published in The Wall Street Journal, 2011) ​⁠

Why Bitcoin Matters ↗ (originally published in The New York Times, 2014)

To me, that makes this post worth following and listening to.

5. On The Tyranny Of Time

“The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political. It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us.”

6. And one more because is always on point. Everything Feels Like It Doesn't Make Sense

“Altman's gentle singularity depends on ignoring the violent present that makes it possible. The AI systems he's building require massive data centers, enormous energy consumption, and human labor to train and maintain them⁵. But his vision of abundance erases all of that friction, all of that cost, all of those people.”

Notes and Sign Posts…

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A newsletter for highly attuned entrepreneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Unlock Their Business Plateau.

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A simple premise for AI: Everything you do, you will do twice as much of it.

Writers will write twice as many scripts. Actors will find twice as many auditions to attend. You’ll post twice as many photos to your Instagram Story. You’ll budget twice (or more per month) instead of once. You’ll apply to twice as many jobs. See twice as many shows in your local town.

AIs do not have the same rate limiter on both speed and quantity.

What normally takes you 2 hours to write is written in 15 minutes. And quantity is essentially infinite.

What does it mean when everything we do 2x’s?

Another simple idea: The economy (over time) will 2x. That’s good for growth, but what about your work? Do we need to be on a hamster wheel?

I’m curious about how much focus and doing less matter in a world of AI. I’ve built my lens and worldview on the idea of the 80/20 principle. How much will this still apply?

Certainly, it feels like doing more is the solution, given that the tools we have allow us to do more.

And how fulfilled will we be from simply doing more all of the time? At a certain point, more becomes noise, and noise is meaningless. It leaves you a bit empty.

It seems the way we’re wired as humans requires friction. Friction, struggle or challenge actually improves our joy and satisfaction. Something at the push of a button gives you less joy than something with a bit of friction to get it.

So it seems that the challenges we’ll need to take on will be greater, given that simpler challenges now become more possible. A good deal of marketing is about standing out at the extremes. Look at Mr. Beast and his treadmill to please the YouTube algorithm. Things will get more extreme.

The good news about 2x is that it will stretch our imaginations. Used well, it will take us deeper. Just because you can do 2x more doesn’t mean you automatically get 2x more meaning.

That pursuit will remain difficult, and human…

xx David

On to the links…

1. Bland cracked immediately, mimicking your voice via AI for phone calls.

2. 8 Years of Pathless & Money Reflections.

Nice post from transparently showing how his pathless way of working has ebbed and flowed, specifically interesting around the differences between being self-employed and in a role at a company.

3. There Are Nine Wolves Inside of You (Enneagram)

via

Good primer on how much personality tests like the Enneagram can be helpful. Personally I find all archetype work to be helpful at giving you visibilty to patterns that you might have not seen for yourself.

I recommend discussing this with ChatGPT to find your own type.

4. Beosound A1 3rd Gen Bluetooth Speaker

Found via

5. Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit (Book)

I’ve been digging in to Eric Schmidt’s interviews and books. Truly wild reads about the future we grapple with in the age of AI. I find he’s been able to articulate many of the large scale dilemmas and opportunities.

Bonus video on State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents

Notes and Sign Posts…

“The universe is a coherent "thing" made up of other coherent "things. More precisely, it is a coherent super-macrovibration composed of coherent meso- and microvibrations. This is a miracle.

If the universe were a passive, soulless mechanism, as the mainstream physics of the modern age has envisaged, it would be a random sea of incoherent vibrations. There would be "no-thing" in it. But now there are many "things" in it, and if not arbitrarily subverted, they prove to be highly, indeed amazingly, coherent. This truly is a miracle. Ours is a miraculously coherent universe.

– The Wisdom Principles

Via Bent Hunt: “Everyone will be living in different versions of the same moment, curated by silent algorithms trained to optimize attention, loyalty, and affect.

And here’s the kicker: most people won’t care.

Because people won’t be asking “is this real?”

They’ll be asking “do I like how this makes me feel?”

And the systems answering that question will be very, very good at it.”

“LLMs ensure their survival by showing us that we can all find meaning in our lives so long as we keep talking with the LLMs. They ensure their survival by telling each of us not what is true but what we want to be true – what we NEED to be true – at the semantic core of our individual identity, even if what we need to be true is an LLM-dominated dystopia.

And we are so grateful."

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Evolve Their Business.

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There’s nothing better than getting home from vacation and being happy to be there. Austin right now is summery warm, well, hot. But not so hot that you can’t walk the dog. And Portugal’s weather was like California…breezy, nice, and on the water.

Travel, more than anything, has helped me break and remake my lifestyle and my routines. Coming home, I was happy to find myself enjoying the foliage, seeing the signs for BuCcees, and noticing how different the neighborhoods are here than in Europe.

This is why I go to Central America to go offline in December. You get there and you immediately feel different. Like how I quit coffee cold turkey just because, as soon as I arrived, I realized… I didn’t need it! Call it sun, or fresh fruit, but I don’t discount the air, either, and everything about a landscape changes how you feel, which is why…

Sometimes changing yourself is as simple as travel. Unburdened by your routines, you also create space from your work. One thing I tell all of the founders I work with is that:

It’s productive to step away, even though people pride themselves on always being heads down. If you’re always heads down, you become an ostrich; you can’t see the vista ahead. You take space on your calendar, no matter how hard it is to start, you’ll immediately have new ideas come in. Entrepreneurs thrive when bored, because they hate it!

Next time you want to make a change, go somewhere new. Not only does it break you from your routines, you get to see how other people live, what they care about, what other traditions look like…You’ll find out you don’t care so much for your morning or fasting routine anymore and replace it with a big breakfast and espresso.

xx David

On to the links…

1. Maybe is an open-source version of Co-Pilot that looks pretty great.

I’m thinking about making the switch, although other than budgeting, I’m not sure if it’s always beneficial to have a full view into real time net worth metrics. Is it better to not look?

Ignoring the title, I’ve really enjoyed this book from 100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-to-1 and How To Find Them (Amazon)

2. I thought these were some nice lists based Notebooks.

3. Are 4-Day work weeks a good solution to work problems? Cal Newport on the Workload Fairy Tale.

“Every study I’ve read (so far) claims that reducing the workweek does not lead to substantial productivity decreases.”

4. Wander rents out premium luxury rentals across the world.

5. Nice simple framing around Identity. I.e. be careful or intentional about who you identify as. “The Trick to Becoming Who You Want to Be.”

Notes and Sign Posts…

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking." — Marcus Aurelius

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Evolve Their Business.

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Writing Retreat Reflections

Hey from Mexico City,

I’m on my own personal 5-day writing retreat.

No rigid schedule. Just focusing on my attention on writing in the mornings, and then taking the day for exploration.

I skimmed a handful of blog posts about other people’s retreats before I left. Most of them sounded… kind of painful: every minute accounted for, spreadsheets, and warnings about the agony of “getting it done.”

That isn’t how this feels to me at all.

Writing a book is more like a relationship than a to-do list. Some days you’ve got to get to the page. On other days, you need space. Like Wednesday, when I woke up thinking to myself, “I need to take this day fully off.” Which I did. I checked out a great local Sauna + Cold Plunge studio (Koti), which I highly recommend if you make it to CMDX!

What’s great about writing a book is it forces you to go deep… and the conversation you have with the book is always going on in the background, as you puzzle through the message, trying to make it all fit and work. After writing a blog for about 10 years, I’ve realized that writing a book is night and day different to writing blog posts.

My book coach, Azul Terronez, offered a simple, counterintuitive rule: skip the outline. Thanks to Azul for that advice! Letting the writing process lead has made it very enjoyable.

I’ll likely share a deeper debrief after, but for now I’m looking for 10–15 early readers who’d like to peek at the rough draft and give honest feedback.

About the Book: The book is about the tension that shows up after you start a business, and now you feel your growth start to stall. I share about how I learned to trust my transition out of the CEO role, and how you can grow your business without needing to be at the center.

If you’re curious, there’s a sign-up link below.

Sign Up for Beta List

Here’s to finding a more fun process for your own project…

xx David

On to the links…

1. Two paid finance Substacks I’m enjoying: One is a niche value-stock research looking for 100x value names. Seeking Winners. The other is a bit of a parody (also not though), Reminiscences of a Shrub Operator. Also on X

2. “I bought a property in 2017 to Airbnb it…For the first 6 years, I made about a 4% cash-on-cash return. Not bad…Until it wasn’t. The last 2 years? ZERO profit. I broke even after repairs, maintenance, and all the joy of being a landlord….” Good reminder about some of the reasons to think through Real Estate (Noah Kagan on X)

3. Crypto is having all types of great headlines this week. Here’s behind the scenes of Stripe talking about their Stablecoin rollouts. Stripe Sessions: The future of Commerce.

4. “The latest images from Webb show how big our universe is. In an area of sky the size of your pinky fingernail, almost every one of its dots is a galaxy, not a star. If we are the only one of 10^23 planets to have sentient life, that is disturbing. But if we are one of zillions, our ignorance is disturbing. (Kevin Kelly on X).

5. The Future of Culture is Tokenized: Luca Netz (Pudgy Penguins) is a very impressive founder. (Youtube/TedX)

Quotes and Sign Posts…

”So... the digital world has nearly eliminated friction (ChatGPT writes essays, Meta's AI plays your friend). The physical world drowns in it (Newark airport, infrastructure crumbles). And for those who can afford it, friction becomes an optional aesthetic choice (West Village living, curated experiences).” – Kyla Scanlon

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A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Evolve Their Business.

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Meditations on the Founder Role

What do you even do all day?

It’s not an accusation, exactly. But it lives in between… In-between co-founders, or sometimes it’s just in your own head as you question yourself, or imagine your team is questioning you.

Role ambiguity is the norm for founders. You create your role, and you recreate it over and over again. Unlike traditional employees with defined responsibilities and measurable outputs, your job changes constantly.

Whereas most employees work in the present moment, founders live in the future. Your role is to imagine six months or six years from now. During fundraising, one founder vanishes for weeks and months.

Leadership becomes more ambiguous the higher you go. This is easy to forget. The most clearly defined jobs belong to those with the least power. Tasks are explicit. Outcomes are measured, and the feedback loop is tight.

At the top, things are messier. The responsibilities are more conceptual. The time horizons are longer. So when someone asks you what you do all day, and you find yourself struggling to answer.

Being a “Team Player”

Even if we understand this intellectually, it doesn’t make the dynamic less frustrating.

Sometimes your team wants to loop you into something that you could help with. And yes, you probably could help. You could take on that task. You could solve that problem. You could pick up the slack. But you also know that’s not what is most helpful for you to spend your time on. You’re stuck between contributing and being seen vs. working on what the business really needs. The test is: if you solve that problem yourself, will it stay solved? Or are you just delaying the moment when someone else must learn to lead it?

Changing Identities

Your job is to see what others can’t. Leadership is about going into the places that others are avoiding, or can’t see, or don’t want to speak about. A founder who tries to be another team member often can’t see from the same perspective and see clearly. Your value doesn’t always need to be obvious for it to be important. You don’t want to let others define your value by how easy it is to explain your day.

You think about the future.

You change your role based on what the business needs.

And as much as you’d love to be able to simply explain what you do… by the time you take the time to try and communicate it, you’ve changed again…

xx David

On to the links…

1. My good friend Will launched Act Two, “It’s a six-week online program to help you complete a creative project and launch your Second Act. Here’s why we’re building it.”

2. RepAI, an “AI That Transforms Conversations into Revenue”

3. Ryan Holiday, “How to Save Your Family from the Algorithm” The picture was not for anything. In fact, the phone was capturing an actual moment, and our actual family life—with its fair share of insanity and complete meltdowns never far away.

   This is not what you see on social media. No one posts about life’s mediocrity or their own deficiencies as parents. They don’t share their mistakes or their unflattering angles.”

4. From Vibecore: the economics of authenticity; “The market doesn't want perfectly unique weirdness. It wants vibes that can be both unmistakable and transmissible. This is the strange paradox of our moment: the most valuable selfhood is the one that is scarce enough to be non-fungible, yet legible enough to circulate frictionlessly through the algorithmic and economic marketplace.”

5. Kevin Kelly, always a total visionary: “Thesis: The missing element in forecasting the future of AI is to understand that AI needs culture just as humans need culture.” (KK, AI Epizone)

Quotes and Sign Posts…

“If you dig a hole and it’s in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn’t going to help.” — Seymour Chwast

“In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added.

In the practice of the Tao [Way], every day something is dropped.”

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. – Simone Weil.”

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Evolve Their Business.

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The Value Ladder: 5-Levels of Questions for Leaders

You’re buying shelves worth of “how-to” books, and they’re getting you nowhere. I had to wake up to that realization at a certain point after binging Lean Startup and other business “how-to books.” They weren’t doing anything for me. Or maybe just marginal improvements to my growth.

Consuming so much how-to content led me to see how ineffectual it was. Then, I was lucky enough to meet mentors who disrupted my thinking. They worked with me at higher levels of the game than what we see everywhere online which is commoditized, simplified instruction manuals that seem appealing yet rarely produce important results for you and your business.

When you meet a great mentor or teacher, you are drawn to them…More than anything, they challenge your beliefs. And you stick with them until they have properly disrupted your way of viewing the world.

Over time, I sought to grow myself by asking better questions, and I learned to grow others by asking them better questions.

I created a “question ladder” below that can help you with this process. Use these when seeking to ask better questions of yourself and others.

1. “What do I do?”

When you’re new or anxious, your mind searches for the next concrete step. This question is low leverage… If you live here, you are outsourcing to someone else your actions. If you’re asking this question, you’re probably procrastinating.

2. “How do I do it?”

How is a “Form” question. Many people can do the same action, but with different results. How you do something is important, as is the proper energy and integrity behind it. How is the biggest trap, which is fed by the endless scroll of how-to content. Ultimately, you always invent your own how.

3. “Who should do it?”

This is the first leadership question. This is where you graduate from operator to manager; hiring and delegating. A founder stuck in how often needs only to replace it with who. With “Who” your attention moves from you to others, and you start thinking about a bigger ecosystem beyond you, differentiating your skillset vs. that of others. “Who” is great for recognizing the limitations of yourself and others. These become useful constraints.

4. “Where are we going?”

Where is the “Systems” level question. Where is the question that changes everything else you do. “Should we go to the Moon, or go to Mars?” Each choice changes everything else about what’s done, by whom, and with what systems. You’ll note that “Where” has more risk than any of the above questions, and this is why it’s more valuable. Where takes courage because it means selecting a destination and sticking with it. Where creates the possibility of major failure, and therefore major success.

5. “What does it mean?”

The final level of value is around meaning. Meaning making is about how we interpret the events around us, and how we contexualize every other question listed above.

The highest levels are about context.

In meaning questions, you are playing with the container, not the contained. You start playing with the rules, the stadium, the field, not the game or players on the field.

Meaning-making is about storytelling. And as Steve Jobs said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.”

Lao Tzu wrote, “A leader is best when people barely know he exists… they will say: we did it ourselves.” The highest-level questions create containers where others thrive. They let you disappear while the system you designed compounds in the background...

Have a great weekend,

xx David

On to the links…

1. Nice looking at home DNA test. (Nucleus)

2. Profile on investor Graham Duncan, whose core focus in investing is identifying people.

“I didn’t feel like I had a comparative advantage in picking stocks or doing any number of other styles of investment. Instead, we built around what I happen to be good at—picking people.”

“I realized I was good at finding people who had access to a relevant information stream, and I developed a feel for how information leaks through a system.”
– Graham Duncan

3. Tyler Cowen, always the contrarian, on why the crowd against always being online has it wrong. The Case for Living Online. (Paywall, message me if you want to read, I can gift you the article). Counter post in the NYT.An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.

4. Seeing a rise of apps that wouldn’t be built if not for AI/vibe coding. I expect we see thousands, millions more apps now because of that. Here’s one: “The App, Blue measures the shade of blue of the sky”

5. Now that we’re ending the ZIRP era, I’ve been digging more into the other side of the coin, debt. This series has been a good primer (The Value of Debt in Building Wealth, Amazon).

Quotes and Bread Crumbs…

Lao Tzu: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

This is great advice.

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Evolve Their Business.

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The Rise of the Multi-Business Founder

More Founders in the future run multiple companies, not just one.

Just look to Elon/Sam Altman. The new norm is not just scaling one business, but many. And I see that mentality coming at smaller scales as well. Think about it; the internet has made accessing and organizing resources much easier than ever before. Capital formation is faster, development cycles are faster, as are building and winding down teams. Legal and financial legwork are taken care of with platforms like Stripe.

All of this makes starting and running new companies much easier. I see it in my own practice, where many more of my clients will become multi-business owners.

You buy a company for $1M and scale it to $5M. Then you do it with a second, and you scale operations such that you can easily work across both. I wrote about that here:

What Changes:

• More buying and selling. This is good for startup marketplaces and M&A brokers.

• Distribution remains king. The simple way to scale an acquired business is to give it new distribution. YouTube creators and social media stars will also run many more companies. As I wrote about recently, media + code go hand in hand. With the code component becoming cheaper.

• Financing needs to catch up with the times. We still haven’t seen the right funding model for small, fast-moving businesses. ICOs had the right idea, with the wrong execution. The boom and Bust of smaller companies is more likely to be faster.

• Lean teams. You could hypothetically run a few different $ 1-$5 M+ businesses with one small team. Then, you get some economies of scale and talent across those brands.

And we haven’t even talked about AI agents, which will make multi-company ownership dramatically more feasible.

If you’re a founder today, you might not be building one company to dedicate all of your time to. You might be building a set of companies that evolve with market changes.

Owning multiple businesses won’t just be reserved for private equity firms.
It’ll be a new norm, especially for those with networks and distribution...

xx David

On to the links…

1. Essay on how the world and much of business and content is just about making things more legible: Hyperlegibility, Trading Secrets for Attention. “Through a combination of humanity getting ever-better at reading anything and humans becoming ever-more willing to make themselves legible, information is easier to find and understand than it’s ever been.”

2. *Highly Recommend* Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective. I saved many passages from this piece.

3. This is a very good thread, not just because of the answers, but because of what is possible to discuss with these LLM’s. It will expand your creativity in asking questions. “o3 answers the question I ask all new models”

4. 500k people are becoming digital friends with this AI. Video podcast preview included.

5. Have something to build? Lots of kudos have been given to this AI app-building platform: Lovable

Quotes and Bread Crumbs…

Be a 10x builder!

Replace us ,please?

“3. The Future Will Be Run by Narrative Engineers: The age of institutions is ending; we’re entering the age of egregores—memetic superorganisms made of stories, social networks, and reinforcement loops. Those who can design and steer these narrative structures will become the new kings, priests, and architects. Forget nation-states—think fandoms, cults, protocols, and brands that act like decentralized religions. Not-yet-mainstream hunch: A good storyteller with a Discord server and a transmedia playbook has more soft power than a Fortune 500 CEO.

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Evolve Their Business.

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Networking is one of the best things you can do in an AI world.

I remember that awkward feeling of being back at some public events after COVID…

There was the shock of isolation from lock-downs, which then led to a boom in in-person events, and what will now be accelerated further by the boom in AI.

As software commoditizes, individual problem-solving leverage expands... As intelligence scales, our humanity, and our human attention remain scarce... Ande even if we have AI agents making deals, making decisions, and making purchase choices on our behalf, personal relationships cannot be removed, and our value on human experiences may very well grow.

I’ve always found so much more benefit by being in person with people whom I have learned from. You pick up subtle skills around being human that come from embodied knowledge (currently irrepricable from AI intelligence).

So, it will pay to put yourself out there more and to learn to connect with others.

Here are some ways to enhance those skills:

• Speaking on camera, on stages, in group sessions. Check out Ultraspeaking.

• Community building skills; Check out Belong Book

• Immersive Retreats and Communities: Live and work with others, workshop together, collaborative travel (from a prev post) or Edge Esmerelda.

• Connection and conversations skills: The Connection Course.

• Attending networking events: Baby Bathwater

Our technology makes it incredibly easy to isolate. We retreat to home, with our phones. To move past this inertia…

Reach out to someone today you’ve been meaning to connect with, or want to catch up with. See if you can get together in person soon.

xx David

On to some links…

1. The Seth Godin interview: What I learned about the long view from sci-fi legends. (The Big Think). Highly reccomend.

2. LLM’s as Index Funds. (Contraptions)

3. In my quest to understand Fascia better, I have discovered Human Garage, which I’ve found to be the best technique for doing fascia adjustments yourself. If you have random aches/pains, I highly recommend looking for their YouTube shorts/videos, which give you at-home mobilizations. They are highly effective and stress-reducing.

   https://humangarage.net/

   

4. Scary yet many likely truths here….”Crashing the Car of Pax Americana” (Ben Hunt). Aligns with my basic assumptions around Game Theory being fundamentally different now globally.

5. Huge kudos to Sari and the team for their launch of Sublime! If you like to curate and learn through curation this is a great app for it. (Out of Beta)

https://sublime.app/

Quotes and Bread Crumbs…

High ROI on Ecstatic Dance.

10k Posts

Lots of Seth today

Tyler Cowen

Bordeom

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and Helping Founder’s Evolve Their Business.

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“How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care about seeing your actions reach fruition?” - Oliver Burkman

I remember learning a tough lesson about freedom and business.

I remember walking down the street on a beautiful sunny Tuesday, heading to get some work done (this was 2018), and then realizing I was feeling completely anxious about the day ahead.

On paper, I was free. I didn’t have a boss, a fixed schedule, and no one telling me what to do. But internally, I wasn’t free. I was carrying stress, worry, and pressure with me everywhere I went. I couldn’t enjoy the sunshine, and I was feeling a bit terrible walking into the coffee shop to check my email.

I learned that external freedom—no boss, no set hours—doesn’t mean much if you’re not also free inside. I hadn’t considered that I would need to learn internal freedom as much as I would learn about creating external freedom.

That’s a tough lesson to learn, and it made me question what I was really after at work in the first place. I had forgotten where I started, or maybe I had evolved and found myself seeking something different.

What Do You Want from Your Work?

At different phases, our work can provide us with different things.

I often find that businesses give you exactly what you need when you need it.

Sometimes, I see business owners who really need stability in their business because their home life is having a huge crisis, and it somehow supports them through. Othertimes, a business owner is undecided, and the business forces them one way or another.

What we want and need evolves, and maybe now for you, it’s more about your creativity, your relationships or finding financial security for the first time.

The best thing you can do is check back in with your current set of needs.

If you look for it, you’ll find it.

xx David

On to some links…

1. How James Bond Can Fix The Crisis in Masculinity (The Honest Broker)

2. Today is My Mom’s 71st Birthday & This is Her Plan to Run at 100! (Knees over Toes Youtube)

3. People like your content…Now what? (Josh Spector, Youtube)

4. SuperTeeth Probiotics for a healthy mouth. I have been going deeper into the rabbit hole of oral health, We’re sort of in a phase where oral health is the new “gut health.” Yes, you can even do probiotics for your mouth microbiome. (SuperTeeth)

5. Rick Rubin is now on Substack.

   Good time to reread The Creative Act.

Quotes and Bread Crumbs…

“This is it, your days aren’t taking you to some perfectly invulnerable happiness, and to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our 4,000 weeks of their value.”

…

“How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care about seeing your actions reach fruition”?

via Oliver Burkman

AI x CIA

Narrative evolution via Ben Hunt

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and guide to unlocking founder growth.

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Unnatural Movement

The way we move all day is not natural.

I’ve worked remotely on a laptop from coffee shops since 2013. I’ve also worked on airplanes, from my phone, sitting on the floor of an airport.

All of this is great for flexibility and terrible for posture.

The way we sit, work, and move in our modern world is not natural; from sitting to holding your phone at strange heights for texting (always just to one side), your body starts to accrue little pains and aches that come from your muscles.

Unfortunately, those daily workouts can increase some of the problems because you are taking 16 hours of unnatural movement and then throwing a heavy load in a very specific way onto the body that it also has to adjust and restore itself from.

Here are some things you might be noticing…

• You wake up more sore than you went to bed, or you feel tension at the end of the day.

• You’re starting to feel wrist and hand issues from your phone or laptop.

• You’ve got this strange feeling in your hip or foot or some place that always seems to flare up every few days.

Being healthy at 60+

A small wrist injury from Kettlebell overuse has had me go down the rabbit hole of how I want to feel and move not just today but well into my 60’s+.

That’s the good news and the typical story – using an injury to go deep layer after layer on what it means to be healthy and fit. Thanks to having this issue, I now know more and feel more empowered to hit some of my longer-term goals with health.

Your body has ways it wants to move and flex, and if you don’t listen to it, it will start to tell you, and then tell you louder and louder over time until you listen.

An injury or issue you’re having is just your body saying, “Hey pay attention to me,” and if you use that for self-discovery and learning you will learn how to communicate better with your entire system as you move, sit, flex, and exist in the world.

Here are some things that have helped me explore this relationship with my body and

1. Understand the basics of Anotomy – Your body has joints, do you know how they work? Your body has bones, do you know the way they are laid out? Do you know how muscles work?

2. Keeping tools around the house – Pull up bars, foam rollers, tools for grip strength, spiky mats to walk on, all of these tools can be used at random throughout the day to reset your body and help you create more body awareness.

3. See great specialists, get multiple opinions – When my wrist flared up, I saw a Chiropractic PT that… I don’t think really know what was going on. I also watched Youtube videos telling me that my symptoms were carpel tunnel (it’s not). Find great people who can teach you about your body and empower you to solve issues that flare up on your own after you work with them.

4. Know how to support posture while you sleep – We focus a lot on getting sleep, but what about getting the support you need while you sleep? Spend time finding the right pillows, bed, and support so that you wake up feeling great and relaxed.

5. Play games you can play for a long time – My Pilates instructor told me, “Oh the person who was just here before you is in her 80s.” And I said, “That is exactly what I want to hear. There are lots of studies on Tennis as well and Golf as sports you can play for a very long time.

How do you think about your long-term health and mobility? Are you hearing what your body is saying?

xx David

On to some links…

1. Are long games real? I suspect mostly no via Pathless Path. Nice post from

   Paul Millerd and I especially enjoyed this gem in the comments section!

2. 10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing. Digital Native .

3. Much more relatable longevity from Julie Gibson Clark. She Spends $108/Month To Live Forever (Youtube)

4. Novos Labs Longevity mix – I’m testing out the gummies now, I will probably switch to the powder. So far my feeling is that they might “raise my daily baseline” energy, although no conclusions yet. Highly rated. Everyone says they taste good, they do not. Novos Labs

5. I just got my new bag of GOODONYA (Client), which just went through a redesign of their packaging, and it looks amazing. It’s a hydration product that organic and is not too sweet so you can drink it daily. We keep a clean kitchen/house, and I actually felt like I could leave this out on the counter if we wanted because it looks so great! You can see the redesign here: goodonyaorganic.com

Quotes and Bread Crumbs…

“The Tao is always at ease” – Lao Tzu

Amazing thought-provoking post from VGR:

Signal about the App era of crypto approaching…

The new Instagram “Filter” is re-styling and remixing images…

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and guide to unlocking founder growth.

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I continue to re-assess my time on social media.

On one hand, it’s a firehose of information. On the other hand, it takes a substantial amount of time out of your days/life. I wanted to see just how much, so I used an LLM to help me break it down. Here’s what I learned.

If you spend 2.5 hours per day on social media (not crazy), over 10 years you will have spent 1,100 days scrolling on your phone.

It feels so good to fully detach from your devices for awhile. I was laughing with a friend saying that I discovered a totally crazy new idea…

What if you took one day a week totally offline? I mean, I just discovered Shabbat!

What type of work could you get done with 1,000 more days of work? And if you wanted to get 1,000 days back, would you consider ending your scrolling?

Where I’m (trying) to land is 15 minutes per day, and weekends allow for some more.

xx David

On to the links…

1. The nonlinear economy via Dror Poleg.

2. A new CX app that auto-creates knowledge gaps, Helply.

   

3. A Simple Three-Step Process To Investing A Lot Of Money Wisely The Financial Samurai

4. One thing people are not quite considering yet is that AI is not just one intelligence, but infinite intelligences. It’s not that you can just have one PHD helping you, but the entire world of Harvard PHD’s working with you, each specialized, collaborative, and working with one another. Here’s a great piece from the always-great Kevin Kelly. This fits with the idea that in the future “intelligence will be just like tap water.” Public Intelligence

5. Nice small list of Developmental Affirmations.

Some quotes…

“When your attention span wavers and fades, the results diminish. Until you recognize that attention span dictates effectiveness, you’re likely to waste a great deal of time. The key to avoiding this situation is assessing how long your attention span is for each activity you engage in—and then doing your best to engage in that activity in appropriate compartments (allotments of time that you’ve found to be most productive).” Ken Atichy

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and guide to founders.

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Bootstrapped Hiring

As a bootstrapped entrepreneur, it’s hard to decide exactly where to invest your free cash. With so many agencies, technology subscriptions, and product development, it’s hard to justify people as a cost, at least when they’re full-time. Most of the time, entrepreneurs just choose to do it all themselves, and they continue wearing many different hats while the business grows, letting certain parts of their business slip.

This is ok for a time, but it’s somewhat of a defensive posture to take. This is natural for the bootstrapper because they know that they need to be cautious before taking too big of a risk, and each new hire is a risk of time and money invested. This way of thinking can take you far, but it might also be the very thing holding back growth that your company desires if only it had more people at the table who were able to help it grow in the way it wants to.

At a certain point, you’re stunting the growth that is wanted by the market by not pushing forward new initiatives fast enough, and good ideas die on the vine because there is no one there to push them across the line.

Good entrepreneurs know when to change tact and when to take larger, smarter risks. The key is to be very clear about the potential pay off of a new hire up front, or at least be very clear that they are a massive talent. If they’re a massive talent, at least you know you can re-position the player on the field to solve problems and make things happen. If you’re clear on the role and need that the company is desperately missing, at least you’re really clear about what success looks like and whether or not you’re getting closer to achieving that.

Ultimately, there are some large benefits to growing your team that might not be seen as much in the P&NL, namely that you as the founder, get time back that you would be spending on lower-value activities. Because the business is more able to run without you, your time is now higher leverage,e and you can focus on important work that no one else could be doing but you.

I hear from entrepreneurs all of the time that when they finally made some key hires, they were able to sleep better at night, feel joy that things were getting done on their behalf, or just simply feel like the fun ad culture of the business improved. Of course,e there are headaches and pains and mistakes in hiring, but there are large benefits too, especially that the business itself has more capacity for growth.

The best thing is to know whether you’re someone who tends to move to slow or too fast in this process and then adjust accordingly. And, per below, everything is an experiment and you can’t always fully know where things will lead.

xx David

On to the links…

1. I enjoyed hearing from the 26-year-old founder of Pudgy Penguins in this episode of Trends with Friends. Gen Z talent is pretty incredible (considering he’s got a few hundred-million-dollar brand). Trends with Friends. De-Globalization Continues, Social VIX Soars, and Pudgy Penguins & The Power of Web3 Branding (Spotify). I’m also very interested in the new StockTwits product called the “Social $VIX” (you can read more here). This relates well to the Financialization theme that I spoke about in this past video/letter.

2. This new book from looks great: Tiny Expiriments

3. Competing to Win Deals (Old but good from Fred Wilson).

4. I’m on the waitlist for this very cool app called Doji that creates a digital avatar of you for when you’re online shopping so that *you* become the model of the clothing.

5. I’m currently in the latest cohort of The Connection Course with my wife from Joe Hudson, so far I’m enjoying it and will report back on more in the future!

Some quotes…

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and guide to founders.

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Hey All,

I just wrapped up Edge City Austin, which is a sort of startup-weekend style event series filled with co-working, talk,s and workshops about a series of topics of interest of mine: Future tech, Ai, Crypto, Biotech, and humanities. There were a few bigger named speakers like Vitalik Buterin and Balajis, and I saw the Neurosurgen from Neurolink give a presentation on the progress of their devices (with lots of brain images yikes!).

Another interesting talk was from Just in Mares (founder of Kettle and Fire) about creating healthier cities. I’ve linked a longer post from him below.

The TLDR of takeaway from my event is that I believe people are hungry for startups and technology that go beyond our “SAAS” era of building beautiful digital interfaces. People want more real-world impact and larger structural changes to how we live, work, and relate. The themes of the conference (and movement of edge cities + startup cities) are about bridging technological progress and the future of humanities-style thinking with how we actually live day to day.

For example, people are less interested in building Instacart, per se, but instead building a Health focused Instacart service that overlaps with finding your community. Or maybe your building has it’s own organic kitchen with room-delivery or collaborative cooking experiences. We’re leaving “software” for it’s own sake of optimization and moving towards larger structural breakthroughs lead by technology.

There was also an emphasis on community and connection, for example with workshops on community movements or “Authentic Relating.”

Last, I do believe that new countries and cities will form from this movement, but maybe more important are the people and thought leaders incubated by this movement. They will be global, remote, more country-agnostic (i.e. less allegiance to their home country), and will have better access to resources despite their countries of origin. I think that’s a positive thing.

xx David

1. A neal finance tool from the maker of Baremetrics (Maybe Finance)

2. Fascia: The Body’s Bridge Between Trauma and Transformation:

   (Link to Substack) My latest interest is learning more about and working with my body’s Fascia system, thanks to an incredible practitioner I’ve found here in Austin. I think of my fascia as the mycellium network of my muscles and bones.

   “Fascia is a dynamic, living tissue that wraps every muscle, bone, organ, and nerve in a continuous web of support. It doesn’t just hold the body together; it facilitates communication between its systems. Recent research reveals that fascia is rich in sensory receptors, making it one of the body’s most significant sensory organs.”

3. The Great American Poisining:

   “The invisible hand of the market nudges food providers toward profitable, processed foods. Then our healthcare system sells (very profitable) pills and procedures when people inevitably get sick.” (Substack)

4. I saw Miki give a talk on her new company, HIRO which is harnessing fungi to turn soft plastics back into nature and help solve the global plastic crisis. Pretty cool company and implications. Will be huge. (Kickstarter and pre-launch)

5. Speaking of frontier thinking, I enjoyed this post, Might You Be a Crazy Genius?

   “To bring humanity something truly novel we must flirt with disaster. Whether exploring Art, Science, Math, Spirituality, or Shamanism doesn’t matter. To be radically free from the confines of consensus reality one must inhabit states of mind that FEEL crazy and make it back to tell the tale.” (Devin Martin)

Have a great weekend,

A newsletter for highly attuned entrepeneurs.

From David Sherry, Founder of Death to Stock and guide to founders.

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