The Swyx Mixtape

Listen to the Egghead Podcast: https://egghead.io/podcasts/alex-reardon-on-balancing-work-life-and-large-side-projects

Check out https://domevents.dev/ and Alex's course: https://egghead.io/courses/your-ultimate-guide-to-understanding-dom-events-6c0c0d23

Transcript

[00:00:00] You mentioned that you had learned a lot about Dom events while you're like on the clock working on the D and D project. So presumably you got to learn some of it on the clock, but then you also have to, since, you're not paid to create courses by your day job. Like, how did you draw the lines between work time learning and free time teaching, I guess was, is the way I'd phrase  

it. 

Yeah. I mean working in software engineering, I think we're always learning all the time, every day. I that's been my experience anyway and relearning. I feel like there's some things I learn. And then not that long later I have to re-look up again. There's just so much out there. Just always learning all the time and relearning. 

It's just too hard to hold. Hold it all in your head or. So in terms of creating this course I set up very clear boundaries around my work time, and making sure that I'm doing and focusing on my work during work time. And then I set aside designated times at home where I was working on side projects. 

So for me, that, what that looked like practically was one night a week. For me it was Wednesday night where I would work like on this. And that's not a large amount of time. But it was a balanced amount of time, cause I have a lot going on, full-time work at the time. I had two kids now, three kids, which is wild. 

I'm doing stuff with my church and I'm doing stuff with my family, doing stuff with friends, like it's just my last very full. And so one night, a week was something quite palatable. But it meant that creating this course took an extremely long time. It took about a year and a half to actually put this whole thing together. 

Doing that research. I was doing a lot of research, on that Wednesday night. And I created a visualized. Which took a long time cradle the scripts, recorder, all the lessons. Yeah. It took, it just takes a lot of hours. And so you only doing it one night a week. It, it takes a while now. 

Sometimes it would be maybe no nights a week back. There was a period of some periods of time where I was busy with other things on holidays. And sometimes it might've been a few nights a week because I was like really inspired and towards the end. Of the recordings or when I was actually doing the recordings, we actually had our third child Jew. 

And so that was a bit of an interesting time. And I was really keen. I'm like, I need to get this course done. Working on it for so long. And so I guess the month before. He was born I was in the room, in my office, most nights I recording those lessons to make sure that it was done before he came so that I could, when he did come, I could focus on him and the family exclusively and not have to try and be balancing the stuff. 

It's impressive that you were able to have that kind of discipline to Wednesday nights. I'm working on this and you have to know in your head that it's going to take a while when you're only, one night a week. But what I'm wondering about is having I don't have children, but I'm married. 

And I know that when my hobbies are also on the committee when it's like work on the computer, but then my fun times on the computer too, it doesn't always make for the best home situation not to project at all. But what I'm wondering is how did you come to having one night, a week dedicated when you already have the door shut nine to five every day and everyone's at home? 

Yeah. I'm really glad you raised this. Because I think this is the less glamorous side of side projects. I'm happy to talk about the benefits of doing side projects, but I'm glad we're going in this direction for now. So you need to understand what's important to you. What's important with your time. What is more important for you? 

Is it more important for you to be a rock star, a software engineer, or to meaningfully invest and engage with the people around you? I think the answer to that. Questions. I was really big questions will impact what you do with your time and how you spend your time. So we arrived in after negotiation, like my wife and I on that one night, a week thing because it balanced everything else that I wanted to do. 

I really want to make sure that I'm spending good quality time with my family, with my friends and with my wife. Ultimately those are the most important things, like rather than. Becoming, the next big thing in software, so to speak. So yeah, it was a kind of a process of negotiation to to arrive on that point. 

Yeah. Because yeah, it is hard to balance. It is tricky when you're in the office all the time to then say, Hey, I'm going to spend more time in the office. Yeah, it's a tricky one. And I guess I'll take this question even further and say that like my experience with doing this call. Wasn't exclusively positive by any means, I doing projects on the side has a cost in the same way that open source has a cost, right projects have a cost. 

And the, I guess the big cost is your time. And I think [00:05:00] in the situation of the course, there was a big cost and it was primarily born, not by myself, but by the people around. Especially towards the end as I was doing, I mentioned that concentrated math month of recording. I have mixed feelings about that. 

And to be honest, I feel quite guilty about that because my wife was eight months pregnant at the time. And that's probably when she needed me the most practically and. If I'm real, like I should've been there more practically emotionally in that time. I think we agreed that we both, we we both agreed on that course of action that we wanted to get the course done before, before our son was born. 

But honestly, I feel regret about that. I'm happy with the result. Like the course is great, really proud of that, but yeah, I just think in a scheme of things, did the world need another cool. Know. Yeah, it's great. Like, I don't want to tear it down by any means, but I mean, yeah. I, I think I would have, I think I would have felt it would've been better for me to be, have been a really good husband during that time for her. 

So, yeah. So  

when you say that you have regret, like one of the things that I like as I'm thinking about this now So like a lot of does the world need another course? That's an interesting way to put it. And I know that you're joking, not. I just realized that I was probably Dane. 

I was about to step into playing devil's advocate for the Dom, which is a very strange position to have gone into where the API doesn't change. Like the Dom API is not going to change, so that topic will still be there. So there wasn't like a pressing. Need for you to do this. But at the same time, you'd also  

I don't know where I'm at. 

I mean, as you said, you said the, like the dumb event topic is fairly in some ways timeless, who knows where we'll be in town 20 years, but I think we were both it just been this particular project had been kicking on for quite ...

• Kiraly Payne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlxeWURe7q4
• Wayne Brady: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpMkrtXr4b8

Youtube autotranscription for Kiraly:

[Music]
hey hey hey i remember this i'm gonna
look about them but i was back in the day
now my whole crew filled with stars
[ __ ] make sure they people switch shades
it was enough for me to get a picture
had to go and readjust frames i've been
really feeling like it's new edition
where these hoes love a [ __ ] in the game but
hey i been focused on some other [ __ ] my
back been feeling like the mother [ __ ]
the pressure only made me better
reaching high levels really all because
of it
i really do it for the fun of it ain't
tripping really cause i love this [ __ ]
my soul be lighter than a feather like
puffin that is not feeling wonderful
hey
[Music]
my spiritual sin i just woke up to power
within ain't nothing unchanged for the
hoes in the [ __ ] bankroll
could it be indications need to pay
[Music]
treating you like you changed you ain't
even know the name
now you wanna be faithful girl i've been
making plays you was just later turning
on the game
all my peers so cold depression got a
[ __ ] feel like exploding but don't fall
for this platform chosen i'm on goal had
to lie my goals and my big bro he
reminded me ain't another [ __ ] quite
like you [ __ ] do you and [ __ ] stop
fighting competition leo ass how you
play too much attention on what they
doing
hey might hurt your movement it hurts
your confidence just keep moving as
possible
you can move obstacles go to impossible
places you thought was impossible just
focus on who you've been talking to
and watch how quickly they ride for you
stay on the road like a [ __ ]
monster
cause i had some down days depression
come where you were always change habits
taught a [ __ ] blessed to come with all
the lessons that be coming your way got
a message it was like you text me now i
take advantage every day i'm on game now
flex the creatine
[Music]

Listen to 20 minute VC: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-twenty-minute/20vc-eugene-wei-on-status-as-K-_1nakoYwE/

• The essay read to you on NFX: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-nfx-podcast/the-founders-list-status-as-_h9HsoiGQYc/

Reads:

• Status as a Service: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
• Graph Design: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/9/29/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-company-we-keep
• American Idle: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/2/15/american-idle

Listen to Masters of Community: https://pod.cmxhub.com/episodes/matthew-kobach-greatest-hits

3 key takeaways:
- Three ways to build your social media brand: Be Unbelievably Niche, Be Consistent, Compound Tweets.

- Be the lighthouse for topics you’re interested in. 90% of people don’t post, they just read. Get this 90% to look at your content.

- Need to be passionate about and enjoy what you’re doing. Being good at something makes you passionate about it. No matter what you do, there will be aspects you don’t love - but make sure it’s something you’re curious about.

“90% of people don't really post on social media, 9% post, a medium amount, and 1% of post most of it. So those 90% of people, they have interests, they want to participate. Maybe they'll reply once in a while, but for the most part, they just want to read interesting thoughts. So that's the lighthouse - you’re trying to get those 90% of the people, and they're looking for topics that interest them. The only way for them to find you is if you turn your light on and you start talking about the things that interest you, and you've just got to hope that they're actually attracted to what you have to say.”

Watch his video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP3dA2GcAh8
My Blogpost: https://www.swyx.io/tiago-forte-second-brain/

These 10 principles are basically different aspects of a system/approach to knowledge work that helps us reduce stress, produce more, and live a life of creative joy:

1. Borrowed Creativity: Stand on the shoulders of giants.
2. The Capture Habit: Outsource memory to devices.
3. Idea Recycling: Reuse ideas repeatedly.
4. Projects over Categories: Don't silo insights - organize them into projects you are working toward, right now.
5. Slow Burns: Not everything has to be a Heavy Lift. You can accumulate in the background.
6. Start With Abundance: Don't start from a blank canvas.
7. Intermediate Packets: Break down work into manageable projects.
8. You Only Know What You Make: Taking action is the best way to discover what you don't know.
9. Make Things Easier for your Future Self: Package up things for your future self to use.
10. Keep Your Ideas Moving: You never need to be stuck.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkCxE2Lh458
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3eRHmFV8aM

Listen to the Daily: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/podcasts/the-daily/mrna-vaccines-katalin-kariko.html

Long read: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/how-mrna-technology-could-change-world/618431/

Listen to Business Breakdowns: https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/56584905/kelly-moderna-the-software-of-life

Transcript

Jesse: [00:06:03] And if you back up on the DNA, like this notion that it's four letters of code, can you walk us through the history of that? How did that come to be? Who's the father or mother of that? Where did that come to be? And then how did it evolve to today where it sounds like you're able to essentially program your own things in a lab and create them?

Jason: [00:06:19] The first thing to realize is this is just a miracle of biology that it works this way in the first place. Get back four billion years of evolution, here's the magic. When we invented computers, we had to come up with a way to copy things. Do you want to send a file or make... And we realize that instead of like a record player, which is an analog thing, little bumps on the record define the data, but those can move around and change. If you really want to transfer information with high fidelity, make a CD and make it zeros and ones, digital, because every time you copy it perfectly.

Biology figured out the exact same thing. When you have a kid, you want to transmit heritable information, you want your genes to move on to the kid. And the way that biology figured out how to pass information across generations, digital. A, T, Cs, and Gs. It just happens to do it, not with magnetic bits on a computer, but with actual chemicals.

Jesse: [00:07:11] Through our cells.

Jason: [00:07:12] A,T, C, and G, adenine, thymine, they are actual chemicals in a long string, just like a piece of cassette tape back in the day, a long string of molecules. That's just how biology works. There was the discovery of DNA, Rosalind Franklin and Crick and all those folks, Watson, figured out what it looks like, but they just we're discovering it. They didn't invent it, it just was that way. And then we take advantage of it as cell programmers, as synthentic biologists, we take advantage of that fact that it's digital and read and write it to make it do new things across really tons of markets. But Moderna is really the leader.

Jesse: [00:07:46] So when did they discover it? What took it from them discovering it to then maybe The Human Genome Project profiling it to now the point? What are the big milestones and timing between those two things?

Jason: [00:07:56] So one of the technologies that got invented in the late '70s was PCR. And I won't get into much technical detail, but what PCR lets you do is basically pick a certain region of DNA and make a billion copies of it. And you're basically hijacking the fact that cells have ways to copy their DNA because every time XL has a kid, it makes a whole copy of its genome. So there's really great little things called polymerases that read the DNA and pop off a copy. And so PCR, you just do that in the lab. You basically say, "Hey, this little region, make copy, copy, copy." And the advantage of that as you start to get tons of it, it's enough you can work with it in the lab. So that's one technology, PCR. So that's what they did with the insulin. They took a human cell, they found where the insulin gene was, they put these things called primers in which your little markers on either side of the gene, and they use PCR to make billions of copies of it. Now, you get it into the bacteria to make that insulin drug, that built Genentech, now worth hundreds of billions of dollars company. What did they do to do that? A technology called restriction enzymes, which are basically scissors. It's like little molecular scissors that bacteria use to cut DNA out. Why did they do that? Oh, because they're afraid of viruses.

So if a virus infects a bacteria, the bacteria blows up. And so to defend itself, it has the technology that it invented through evolution, which is, "If I see some DNA that isn't mine, chop it into pieces." And in fact, the more modern form of these restriction enzymes is what's called CRISPR. So you might've heard of CRISPR, same shit. Basically, a technology bacteria used to defend themselves from a virus inserting its code into the bacteria, and the bacteria wants to cut that into pieces before it executes. It's wild. And so what Genentech did was it said, okay, I've got this scissor, I know it cuts in a certain place in the bacteria. I got this PCR to make copies of insulin. I'm going to use the scissor to cut the bacterial genome and the PCR products so that they match each other, and then I just paste them together.

Jesse: [00:09:53] And that happened in the late '70s?

Jason: [00:09:56] 1978 was the very first. That was the beginning of humans directly influencing the evolution of biology, life on this planet.

Jesse: [00:10:04] One quick sidebar just occurred to me. Can you even closer? What's actually happening? Is the microscope doing these things? What are the tools that human being is using to do these things? Is it like our biology class where we had a little dropper thing and we dropped from one Petri dish to do that?

Jason: [00:10:17] You're on the right track. Yeah. So I did a PhD at MIT of bioengineering and this is basically 5 years of standing in front of a lab bench with a pipette, which is like a little straw, essentially, sucking up one colorless liquid and squirting it into another colorless liquid and doing these elaborate little lab experiments. Horrible. It was a painful process. You can easily mess it up and you can't see what's going on because everything is microscopic. In modern labs, like at Moderna if you visit them, and here I can go by our works, it's mostly robotics and automation actually doing the work now. That has been part of the reasons, you asked earlier what's different between 1978 and today, one of the other big, big innovations is dramatically more laboratory automation and dramatically more software and data analytics to parse a huge amount of data coming out of that automation. So the way we do lab ...

Listen to the Tim Ferriss Show: https://tim.blog/2021/06/14/peter-attia-transcript-2/

Transcript

I think that one thing that I absolutely learned through fasting is the enormous importance of strength training throughout a fast. You’re going to lose muscle mass when you fast, you have to accept that. So the question is how do you minimize that damage? How do you lose as little muscle mass as possible? And strength training daily during a fast has become an important part of that. But when you look at time-restricted feeding, or people call it intermittent fasting, although I don’t like that term very much. I think time-restricted makes more sense when you’re just talking about 16 or 18 hours. I’m really starting to see a lot of people who do that excessively and who aren’t necessarily training correctly. They lose weight, but they’re losing muscle more than they would want to see.

And we just had a patient who we did a DEXA scan on last week and it was probably the first one we’ve done in 18 months on him. And in that 18 month period, his body weight had not changed. Maybe he was a bit lighter, actually, he might’ve lost four pounds. But his body fat was so high I almost fell off my chair and he doesn’t look chubby, but it speaks how much muscle he’s lost. So his body fat went from about 18 percent to 30 percent.

Tim Ferriss: Yikes.

Peter Attia: It’s just a totally unacceptable amount of fat for someone his age. And his visceral fat went up, which I actually care more about than body fat. We can talk about that later, but his visceral fat also went up. So, this is a guy who has religiously been doing his time-restricted feeding every day, but he doesn’t really lift weights.

He walks and does some yoga and stuff like that, but he’s not doing strength training. So I think in a person like that, there’s a real downside to too much time-restricted feeding. And even for myself, in the last four or five months, I did a DEXA back in January and I hadn’t done one in years. And from January to the last period that I had done a DEXA, my body weight was almost identical. Maybe I was two pounds lighter this year versus the last time. But my body fat was up.

I think I went from 10 to 16 percent body fat. And again, you could say, “Well, 16 is not the end of the world,” but that was a significant loss of muscle and gain of fat. And I did wonder if that was just too much, because I always exercise in the morning, but then don’t eat. So to exercise, and especially when you’re strength training, to provide yourself with any amino acids every single day to undergo muscle protein synthesis, I think is a little bit risky. So I’ve been looking at other strategies around that. So for example, front-loading the meals.

Tim Ferriss: Quick question, and then we’ll come back to front-loading meals. During that period of time, were you doing, and I may be misremembering, one three-day fast a month or one week-long fast every quarter? What was the frequency of — 

Peter Attia: All of the above. Yeah, I probably spent maybe two years doing seven days a quarter, maybe a year doing three days a month. But in between it’s also doing lots of time-restricted. And honestly, I think the daily time-restricted was a bit more the issue because I think the three-day fast a month with a lot of lifting, I didn’t sense I lost a lot of muscle during that period of time, but I think every day, exercising in the morning, not putting calories in until later in the day, it has to be taken in the context of an individual. So if you’re someone who’s 100 pounds overweight or you have diabetes, it’s a totally worthwhile trade-off to lose muscle mass because you’re losing more fat mass along the way. So you are going to technically get leaner with that approach, but when you take a relatively healthy and lean individual, one has to be a little bit careful and look for alternative ways to get the benefits of that fast.

Tim Ferriss: So you were saying something about front-loading meals.

Peter Attia: Yeah. So I just find nowadays, although probably not tonight.

Tim Ferriss: Almost certainly not tonight.

Peter Attia: I’m going to eat a little bit more early in the day and a little less late in the day. So — 

Tim Ferriss: There may or may not be some mezcal involved.

Peter Attia: There will be.

Tim Ferriss: So we won’t take either of our Oura Ring data as the standard for this evening. I totally got caught up in my own fantasy narrative — 

Peter Attia: Fantasies about mezcal?

Tim Ferriss: So front-loading meals, could you just walk back and explain — 

Peter Attia: In an ideal world I think that the best way to do time-restricted eating would be to eat a big breakfast. So it would be to wake up, exercise, eat a huge breakfast. By huge I don’t mean gluttonous, but that’s your biggest meal of the day at say — I don’t know, let’s just put some numbers to it. You wake up at six, you work out from seven to 08:30, at nine o’clock you’re eating your largest meal. You eat another meal at one o’clock that is modest and you don’t eat again. That would be a great way to do 16 hours of not eating a day. That’s problematic for two reasons. The first is it’s socially problematic. It’s really easy to not have breakfast because very few people eat breakfast with other people, but dinner is our social meal. And for obvious reasons, it just poses a difficulty to be the guy who never eats dinner.

Tim Ferriss: Just as a side note, I’ve been at multiple dinners now, quite a few actually, where you’ve been fasting and we’ve all been sitting, drinking wine, and you just pass the cheesecake at the end and you take a big whiff and then continue moving it along. It’s entertaining, but it is pretty antisocial to be that guy.

Peter Attia: To be that guy drinking the soda water. And then the other thing is I think for many people it is hard to go to bed hungry and truthfully in a longer fast it gets easier because if you’re fasting for seven days, by the time you hit that fifth day, a lot of your hunger has dissipated, but 16 hours of not eating can generally pose some hunger and for some reason, I just think psychologically in the evening we’re a little less busy, so it’s even more noticeable. Whereas if you’re doing the traditional way that people think about not eating for 16 hours, it’s pretty easy to wrap yourself up and work in the morning, skip breakfast, and delay your lunch a little bit.

So I don’t know that I have a great answer for that other than I think people should be a little cautious and not just apply the same hammer to every nail and think about their own physiology a little bit and rely on these technologies like DEXA to make sure. Which again is so readily available, relatively inexpensive, and provides both good information about body composition and also this thing of visceral fat.

Tim Ferriss: We’ll come to the visceral fat in just a second. On the DEXA note, about — I don’t know, a year and a half or two years ago, I recall a conversation with a DEXA technician who said to me, “Over the last 12 months, I’ve seen many cases of people coming in who are newly avowed intermittent fasters who have had their body composition flip, basical...

Watch his TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MuIMqhT8DM
Bill Gates on the book: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-We-Sleep
Criticisms of the book: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

• Lack of Sleep ages you 10 years by testosterone
• "Sleep Spindles" from Deep Sleep act like file transfer from short term memory to long term
• Sleep gets worse as you age
• Sleeping pills are blunt instruments - electrical stimulation helps better
• Daylight savings time causes 20% increase/decrease in heart attacks as we jump forward/backward due to lost sleep
• 70% loss in immunity with 4 hrs of sleep
• Nighttime shift work is carcinogen
• 711 genes distorted on 6 hrs of sleep
• Tips for better sleep:
  • no alcohol/caffeine
  • avoid naps during the day
  • regularity - bed and wake at same time regularly 
  • keep it cool: 18 deg celsius