Five Arguments from Four Years of Saturday Mornings

Beyond Tweets #200 — The best of four years, in five posts

Hello friends, I hope you had a great week!

This is issue #200, and I am about to do the single most self-indulgent thing available to a person who writes a newsletter: write a newsletter about his own newsletter. I apologise in advance. There is no way to dress this up as anything other than a small act of vanity, so I am not going to try. Normal service resumes at #201, when this will once again be about literally anything other than me.

Every one of these five began with something that was not mine. An essay somebody else wrote, a Greek word, a tweet, a meme, a video of Obama. Which is not a confession, because it is the name on the masthead. The whole method here has always been that something catches my attention, I go and find out whether it holds up, and then I add the part that is mine.

1. Why Warm Countries Are Poorer

This post started as an argument I kept losing at dinner. Look at a map of global prosperity and the pattern is hard to unsee: wealthy nations cluster in temperate zones, the poorest sit in the tropics. Nobody at the table ever wins, because every explanation has an obvious exception.

Then I read Tomas Pueyo’s piece that pulled the competing hypotheses into one frame. Heat lowers productivity: each degree Celsius costs roughly 8.5% of GDP per capita, and the research extends to exam scores, crime rates and even the coherence of political speeches. Humidity compounds it by stopping the body from cooling itself. Disease follows: the World Bank puts malaria alone at 1.3% of sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP annually, and cold has the brutal advantage of a winter that resets the pathogen pool each year.

The hypothesis I find most persuasive is about storage. Cold forces planning. When winter stops food production, survival depends on storing surplus, preserving it and coordinating who gets what. Over centuries that pressure produced granaries, property rights and legal frameworks. Where nature is forgiving and you can replant next month, the incentive to build those institutions is weaker.

Constraint hardwired systems that scaled. Abundance did not.

The exceptions prove it is not random: Singapore engineered constraint through trade, Dubai bought it with oil rents, the American South converged once air conditioning arrived. This matters now. The IMF estimates each degree costs hot countries 1.3% points of annual growth, and the planet is warming. Whether societies can adapt their institutions fast enough to offset the drag is an open question: Europe’s strange reluctance about air conditioning suggests wealth alone does not guarantee it.

2. Some Time Matters More

This came from two Greek words. The Greeks had Chronos, the clock (measurable, linear, indifferent) and Kairos, the moments where time seems to expand or stop. A conversation with your child that goes somewhere neither of you expected. A late-night talk that stays with you for weeks.

The statistic that pushed me to write it: by the time your child turns eighteen, 95% of your time with them is gone. By twelve, 75%.

We have built extraordinary infrastructure for Chronos: calendars, to-do lists, time-tracking, and nothing at all for Kairos.

No app has ever told you that this particular dinner is the one you will still be thinking about in ten years.

You can have a packed week that feels hollow and a light week containing one conversation that redirects everything. The difference is almost never duration, but rather whether you noticed.

Kairos cannot be scheduled, but it is not random. It shows up when you are present, unhurried and not already thinking about the next thing. The biggest shifts I have seen at work came from someone being fully present at the right moment, not from a strategy document. Culture lives in the gaps between the formal things. The average life is about four thousand weeks.

The question is not what can I fit in, it is what might I regret missing.

3. Nobody Cares

Nobody is thinking about you as much as you are. Not your boss, not your investors, not your closest friends. They love you, but they do not carry the weight. That sounds bleak for about ten seconds and then turns into the opposite: if nobody is coming, waiting is pointless, and the control is yours.

When you own the process you stop waiting to be chosen.

Nobody cares about your excuses either. They can be completely valid, but investors do not get their money back because the explanation was convincing. Horowitz put it as "nobody cares, just run your company." And nobody cares about your potential: not the hours nobody saw, the drafts never published. I once spent weeks on a document and a formatting error made parts of it unreadable. The only part anyone judges is what you actually send.

The common misreading is that this means "nobody loves you." People can love you deeply and still not carry your responsibilities. Recognising the line clears out a surprising amount of misplaced resentment. People can stand beside you. They cannot stand in for you.

4. The Last Useful Job

This started with a meme that made me laugh for five seconds and then would not leave.

It is about fixers: the people whose default setting is "this needs to work." They show up when goals are half-clear and ownership is vague, and they turn that mess into something with edges. Their output is reliability, and reliability has a peculiar property: it disappears into the baseline. Once a system becomes dependable, everyone stops noticing the work that keeps it dependable.

Without a fixer, you get debt. Coordination debt, when two teams each assume the other is handling the edge case. Decision debt, when trade-offs stay unmade until "later" becomes the deadline. Operational debt, when a process only works because one person knows the unofficial steps: which gets called speed and behaves like a single point of failure.

You find fixers at the seams, often in unglamorous titles. Outside work the pattern is even clearer: the person who keeps the family calendar coherent. The phrase I kept coming back to is Schwarzenegger's, from his father: be useful. It survives every context shift.

This gets more valuable as AI improves. AI makes output cheap. It does not make systems work. More automation, more edge cases, more surface area, more seams. Fixers translate abundance into reliability.

5. Unlocking Career Potential

The oldest post on this list, from 2023. It came from Obama giving career advice ( learn to get stuff done) and Ethan Evans' Magic Loop.

The Loop runs as a cycle:

1. Do your current job well.

2. Ask your manager how you can help, and mean it.

3. Do what you are handed, including when it is dull.

4. Only then do you start steering the work toward your own goals, framed as mutual benefit.

Most people put that step first, and it does not work.

Show you are useful, then bring your agenda. Repeat.

A career is a marathon: do not trade long-term position for a short-term win. Focus on inputs you can control rather than outputs you cannot. You cannot directly control promotions. You can control the quality of your work.

Altman's caveat has aged well: career paths are so personal and serendipitous that most advice is worthless.

Each of these five posts starts from someone else's material and then goes somewhere with it, and every time the distance was covered with something personal rather than something researched.

This is the value I get from writing these posts, people sometimes ask me “why do you do it?” (besides the “where do you find the time?”) and the answer is actually really simple: I enjoy this process a lot, I had no idea when I started but progressively realized how the benefit of writing is really in thinking clarity!

Have a fantastic weekend!
Giovanni