Welcome to your Saturday. Here are your weekly five things from the mind of Miles.
Creativity. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about creativity. I’m a believer that quantity leads to quality. I believe that constraints can improve creativity. And that process can improve quality, too. What do you believe about creativity?
Food Waste. You may recall I mentioned Project Drawdown in last week’s newsletter. If you looked into it, you may have seen that reducing food waste is one of their top ranked ways to fight climate change. You can learn more about two ways of reducing food waste on this week’s Startups for Good podcast episode on Imperfect Foods and the Food Recovery Network. (BTW, I’ve also been reading up on Direct Air Capture aka mining the air for carbon. Would love to discuss it with you.)
Ironically: Overeating. While we want to reduce food waste systematically, that doesn’t mean that we should individually try to eat all the leftovers at once. Not that I do exactly that, but I definitely eat more food than I need. Particularly at dinner, on the theory that day is done, I did my work and I deserve a reward. Plus I view eating as fun and relaxing. Examining and seeing if I can change my beliefs about food. I’m about halfway through an Insight Timer course on overeating by Andrea Wachter. (I do have an indirect small financial interest in Insight Timer.)
Burkean Memetics. Burke is often called out as part of the conservative intellectual tradition. The Conservative Minds podcast covered his work early on. It inspired me to try to read Burke’s famous book but alas I got bored. (Does that say something about my political views or that writing styles have changed?) An interesting reframing of Burkean thought from Emerson Spartz is if the meme (in this case a tradition, practice or norm) has survived then perhaps it has value. Utopists can solve the problems they know about but not the ones they don’t realize as the solutions were embedded in existing practice.
Too Many Behind Bars. Over 1% of working age adults are incarcerated in the US. And while the US is ~4% of the world population we have ~20% of the prison population. While it is hard to disentangle cause and effect, my take is that it has not resulted in the US being less violence or more safe compared to other countries. If you want to learn about the racial side of mass incarceration, I recommend The New Jim Crowe. I’ve been fascinated to see the political coalition building to change this. As an aside, I wonder what Burke would say about reducing food waste or dismantling mass incarceration? Both may sound progressive to modern ears although in some way they are about going back to a previous way of doing things.
As a reminder, my work projects are:
Startup investing with Purpose Built Ventures
A podcast called Startups for Good with associated virtual community and giving circle
My blog Venture Patterns