#074 – Jet Lag & AI

Good morning everyone,

It’s been a while!

I arrived back in Sydney almost two weeks ago now and it feels great to be home. Really excited to be back into some sort of routine, feeling super focused and looking forward to what’s ahead.

Last time I updated you guys I was in Rapallo on the north-western coast of Italy, working my way up towards the south of France.

The last four weeks of my trip consisted of Menton, Nice, Bordeaux, Viscos, Donostia-San Sebastián, Madrid, and Bonn.

The entire four months was one of the most incredible experiences of my life and I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to have taken a pause from everything and immerse myself into a completely different part of the world.

Definitely not the last time I will be doing it but for now, it’s back to business with some new objectives on the horizon.

Let’s jump in.

read online on my website 

read time 3 minutes 

#074 at a Glance:

• Quote: Your instincts and the unexpected.

• Podcast: JRE x Gladstone AI.

• Video: Webinar with Viktor Shvets.

• Hack: 6-steps to avoid jet lag forever.

• Tweet: How to guarantee an extremely unproductive day.

Quote I’ve been thinking about:

Man, if everyone just started to adopt this philosophy in their own lives, how different the world would be…

Podcast I listened to:

The Joe Rogan Experience #2156 - Jeremie & Edouard Harris

Jeremie Harris is the CEO and Edouard Harris the CTO of Gladstone AI, an organization dedicated to promoting the responsible development and adoption of AI.

Some of my biggest takeaways from the chat:

• The AI model (artificial brain) contains artificial neurons that essentially do the thinking for the machine. With AI scaling, you can increase the number of artificial neurons it contains and simultaneously increase the amount of computing power that is being attributed to wiring the connections between those neurons.

• The ability to scale and improve AI became exponential after OpenAI released GPT-3 in 2020, where the only real barriers to AI advancement became the size of your model and the amount of computing power used to train it. In other words, two problems which can be readily solved with money.

• This created an intense competition between some of the biggest companies in the world (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, etc). To put this into context, Microsoft is currently engaged in the single biggest infrastructure build-out in history, spending US$50 billion per year on data centres to house their computing infrastructure.

• North America is running out of on-grid baseload power to supply data centres. Wind and solar don’t quite cut it for big data centres which require huge amounts of reliable power, hence why companies are starting to experiment with nuclear energy.

• Companies at the cutting edge of this technology are currently scaling AI systems to a level of intelligence that is fast-approaching (and surpassing) human intelligence, with no way of being able to effectively control those systems.

• A lot of AI companies have lost their agency when it comes to decision-making because of the fierce competition for short-term profits and exponential scale.

This podcast is absolutely essential listening and it is imperative that we stay well-informed as this technology continues to evolve at literally an exponential pace.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

[Podcast Length: 2 hours 22 minutes]

Video I watched:

Webinar with Viktor Shvets 

Last week, Melbourne-based investment firm Hamilton Wealth Partners hosted a live webinar with global strategist and author, Viktor Shvets.

Viktor is currently the Managing Director and Head of Global and APAC Strategy at Macquarie Group, based in their New York office with decades of experience in the finance industry. He is also a renowned author of two books: 'The Great Rupture: Three Empires, Four Turning Points, and the Future of Humanity’ and ‘The Twilight Before the Storm: From the Fractured 1930s to Today's Crisis Culture’.

These were my most significant learnings:

• There is an uncanny number of parallels to be drawn between the geopolitical and socioeconomic circumstances of the 1930s with those that we currently find ourselves in today.

• Capitalism is an evolving beast and whatever is coming down the pike from an economic perspective, it is vastly different to the economic system we have been accustomed to over the last 30-40 years.

• India is possibly the only country (alongside the US) that has labour, capital, and growing multi-factor productivity all simultaneously. There are also far more similarities between India and the US than we think. Like the US, India also has a single large domestic market, low trade dependency, desirable geopolitical positioning, and their problems mostly arise from societal causes.

Some pretty unique and thought-provoking insights and definitely opened my mind up to a new epoque of economic research.

Hack I tried:

6 Steps to Avoid Jet Lag Forever

On the flight back to Sydney from Germany, I decided to take the opportunity as a little experiment to see if I could completely avoid the effects of jet lag once I got home.

After sifting through a few different articles and YouTube videos, I was able to deduce the following 6-step protocol:

1. The morning of your flight from the departure time zone, manually set your phone & laptop times to that of your arrival time zone. This tip is psychological more than anything but makes a HUGE difference, believe me.

2. Eat, sleep, and caffeinate in accordance with your arrival time zone. Use your eye mask and ear plugs on the plane as necessary.

3. Within ~3 hours of landing in your arrival time zone, strenuously exercise. Combination of cardio + resistance. Think rowing machines, incline treadmill running, stair master, etc.

4. Sleep on time using optimal sleep hygiene (block-out curtains, non-exposure to blue light, etc).

5. Set an alarm for the following morning just after sunrise. Don’t hit snooze.

6. Sun exposure immediately after waking for at least 15 minutes.

It worked an absolute treat. Better than expected and can’t recommend it highly enough.

What I like about this is that it is fairly easy to implement and doesn’t impact your holiday in any substantial way.

Give it a go next time you travel.

Tweet I liked:

How To Guarantee an Extremely Unproductive Day

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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