I had a very social week (Ricky Weekly #51)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
Haven’t sent a newsletter in three weeks so here’s three weeks ago when I went to stay at my friend’s house in Alameda to hide from my housemate who tested positive for Covid-19 (he’s fine now! Barely any symptoms). I’m on the beach, wearing my favorite free T-shirt that I got freshman year when the Geico rep launched it at me with a T-shirt cannon. I’m also wearing a chin diaper (for reference watch the South Park Pandemic Special).
Thing on my mind:
Loneliness got to me recently so I decided to address it more proactively. My social life has been reduced to Slack chats and two Zooms a week with David, a few text threads with friends, and a morning group Zoom workout M, W, F. Occasionally I’d do a walk-and-talk, phone / Zoom, or lunch at a park, but not much beyond that. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until I went down to LA to spend a few days with family and friends doing relatively normal things together IRL (although it was a risk). So this week, I caught up with two friends over Zoom and sent them drinks via Doordash (because no one actually drinks for Zoom Happy Hour), joined a book club with some startup founders (we read Apollo’s Arrow), organized an Among Us game night, co-worked with strangers using Focusmate, networked with two strangers on LunchClub.ai, initiated a Zoom with a startup mastermind group I’m in, organized a lunch at the park, joined a Stanford Alumni Association virtual dinner, and went to co-work with David in-person for two afternoons. All of that felt great. I was so happy to interact with people and in some of the Zooms we got so carried away that we went way over time. The problem is I had to be very proactive in seeking out people and organizing, and that’s hard to sustain.
I’m usually the more outgoing one in my friend group, even though I’ve shied away from really social people over the years because aggressively social people make me uncomfortable. I usually tell people I’m a learned extrovert or an extroverted introvert, but most of my friends think I’m full of shit and I’m either just a straight up extrovert or an introverted extrovert. I don’t know, that’s not how I feel. I was very shy growing up, and I was really afraid of public speaking to the point of taking two public speaking classes in community college during high school and working with speech coaches in college and after college to overcome it.
In one of my Zooms, a friend mentioned that Covid-19 was a black swan event, and that it will likely precipitate more black swans in the future. When he asked the group what the next black swan will be, three people including me answered “civil war” and that was really disturbing. It’s something I’ve been thinking about, especially after looking at the data from Opportunity Insights about the economic fallout of this pandemic and how it made the rich richer and poor poorer. Obviously, the inequality has always been an issue, but the pandemic is definitely going to be an accelerant. Could it also be an accelerant to restoring a sense of fairness to our society? Is there cause for optimism?
Piece of content I recommend:
The Economic Impact of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data by Opportunity Insights
Opportunity Insights is a project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that partners with private companies to obtain key economic data like consumer spending, payroll, job postings, small business revenue, etc to build a better and more granular understanding of our economy than the GDP. They studied the impact of Covid-19 and here are some of the key findings:
The “V-Shape” recovery in employment happened, but only for higher income workers. Low-income unemployment remains high and those jobs may not be coming back.
High-income people stopped spending, leading to loss of jobs for low-income individuals, especially those working in affluent areas like SF. Play with the Economic Tracker and you can see very stark differences by county depending on average income, demographic, shut down orders, etc: https://tracktherecovery.org/
Stimulus checks worked, especially for low-income households, in increasing consumer spending. Most of the spend though went to goods. The service sector is suffering.
PPP did not work due to fraud and it being taken advantage of by firms that were relatively unaffected by the pandemic.
I was spending too much time trying to parse the slides so here’s a helpful video of Prof. Raj Chetty presenting the findings.
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My latest essay is called “All social media is now parasocial.”