On a recent podcast, Seth Godin compared talking about AI to talking about the weather.

You can complain all you want, but the flakes keep falling. Same with AI — it doesn’t care if you’re excited, terrified, or somewhere in between — it’s still AI-ing outside.

That’s not to say we should just throw our feeble human hands in the air and bow down at the altar of AI robots. Godin offers another analogy I love: AI is like a talking dog.

a.k.a. just because ChatGPT wrote a paragraph, doesn’t make it Shakespeare.

Three feet of snow can ruin your week — or provide fertile ground for skiing, snowball fights, and a day off work. AI is the same. You can let it bury you, or you can figure out how to ride it. Just like calculators changed how we learn math, AI will change how we learn to reason. Don’t let your mental muscles atrophy.

Whether you like it or not, it’s snowing artificial intelligence outside. You can stand there shivering, or you can grab a shovel, build a sled, and figure out how to have some fun with it.

My friends warned me that this book would be a grind — and god damn, they were right. At a whopping 1,079 pages (including 200 pages of tiny-print footnotes), it’s by far the most indulgent novel I’ve read (and that includes two Dostoevsky novels).

The first 300–400 pages were pure confusion. You don’t know when it’s happening, who anyone is, or why there are Quebecois assassins in wheelchairs. The opening scene doesn’t make sense until 1,000 pages later, which feels like Wallace trolling his readers. But around page 500, something clicks. The book stops being punishment and starts being… well, still punishment, but with flashes of literary brilliance.

Reading Infinite Jest is less like escaping into a story and more like signing up for a semester-long philosophy seminar you didn’t realize you enrolled in. Every night felt like homework. After three months, I wasn’t excited to open it anymore. I realized I wasn’t reading for joy — I was reading for bragging rights. The literary equivalent of chasing the magic dragon.

The plot is pretty indescribable but here we go: It’s about America, addiction, tennis, art, entertainment, institutions, fathers and sons, drugs, film, and consciousness. At its core, though, it’s about addiction and how desire runs our lives, shaped by culture and media. What’s wild is that it’s actually funny. Wallace is absurd, satirical, and occasionally gut-punch moving. The characters are guarded and hard to access at first, but after hundreds of pages, they sneak up on you emotionally. You realize you do care — deeply, uncomfortably — about these broken, stoic people.

My takeaway: Infinite Jest is a marvel and a mess, often at the same time. You’ll get out of it exactly what you’re willing to suffer through. Which, honestly, might be the most honest definition of “art” I’ve ever stumbled across.

Often, the narrative around having kids is negative. “Say goodbye to sleep!” “Wait til they start walking,” “Terrible twos!” “Just you wait!”

So it’s refreshing to read this article from Nat Eliason (author of Crypto Confidential). Nat describes how, in his experience, becoming a parent has been about as predictable as he could have imagined. Sure, it isn’t easy at times, but it’s not like he didn’t know what he was signing up for.

I particularly like his phrasing of “Known Challenges, Unknowable Joys.” I think that nails it about as good as anything I’ve heard.

Chase Hughes is a leading expert in behavior, influence, and human behavior profiling. His book, The Behavior Ops Manual, is in such high demand that it’s currently selling for $179 on Amazon.

I’ve posted hundreds of clips on social media, and by far the ones that have received the most views/comments are the ones where I mistakenly mess up some historical fact, date, or name. People love to correct people. In a recent interview, Hughes explains how exploiting this principle is the key to getting valuable information out of someone.

As our culture has gotten more casual, etiquette has taken a back seat. People used to wear suits on planes, take their hats off, and stand when someone entered the room, and write thoughtful letters to each other. Some may call it old-fashioned, but I don’t think those things will ever go out of style.

Here are 21 great etiquette rules you can apply to your interactions today:

h/t @motivate.wise

I saw Caamp perform last weekend at Radio City Music Hall in NYC. It wasn’t until they played this song that I realized it’s also the theme song from the AppleTV+ show, Stick, with Owen Wilson.

The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is a prequel to the 2018 novel The Terminal List by Jack Carr, which follows Ben Edwards (played by Taylor Kitsch) throughout his journey as a Navy SEAL to the CIA.

The original Prime series starring Chris Pratt (and the main character James Reece) was excellent. This season, they go back in time to explain how Reece and Edwards became best friends while in combat. It exposes the darker side of human warfare and the intelligence community.

Keith and Kyle sit down to discuss the benefits of running and the pros and cons of the current biggest brand names in the sport, the Epstein controversy, the origins of Lacrosse as told in the fascinating book The American Game and why it's in everyone’s best interest to do as they do in Copenhagen and smoke some weed, drink some alcohol and go for a bike ride.

📚 Books discussed in this episode:

Follow us: https://observeandrapport.com/ | IG: @observeandrapport @keithsullivan_91 | X: @observeandrapport | TikTok: @observeandrapport @keithsullivan2 | Produced by Keith Sullivan

Thanks for reading!