Wisereads Vol. 76 — Sahil Bloom's 5 Types of Wealth, Stratechery's DeepSeek FAQ, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Aaron Stupple's book that challenges rule-based parenting, The Sovereign Child. This week, we're sharing an exclusive preview of the highly anticipated debut from Sahil Bloom, The 5 Types of Wealth.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
The Art of Calling Out Room Dynamics
Former software engineering leader at Prezi and current EGYM leader Csaba Okrona champions people-first leadership. In his latest post, he demonstrates how to handle tense meetings. "In the moment, speaking up to name a difficult dynamic feels scary. There’s always the fear that you’ll make things worse or look foolish. But here’s the thing: 9 times out of 10, everyone else in that room is feeling the same discomfort you are. By finding the courage to name it, you’re not being a troublemaker — you’re being a leader."
The Attention Crisis Is Just a Distraction
In his review of Chris Hayes' The Sirens’ Call, Daniel Immerwahr contends that society’s panic over modern distractions is misplaced. "Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis. Which is unfortunate, because our relationships to our smartphones are far from healthy. The mediascape is becoming a stormy sea of anxiety, envy, delusion, and rage... The overheating of discourse, the rise of conspiratorial thinking, the hollowing out of shared truths: all these trends are real and deserve careful thought. The panic over lost attention is, however, a distraction."
DeepSeek FAQ
Chinese company DeepSeek grabbed the tech community’s attention last week with a reasoning model rivaling OpenAI’s o1. Ben Thompson looks back at their earlier model, V3, to underscore efficiency gains that unsettled investors. "The key implications of these breakthroughs — and the part you need to understand — only became apparent with V3, which added a new approach to load balancing (further reducing communications overhead) and multi-token prediction in training (further densifying each training step, again reducing overhead): V3 was shockingly cheap to train. DeepSeek claimed the model training took 2,788 thousand H800 GPU hours, which, at a cost of $2/GPU hour, comes out to a mere $5.576 million."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
The Best Book I’ve Ever Read About Financial Freedom
To achieve financial freedom, Ali Abdaal draws on Naval Ravikant’s four pillars: accountability, leverage, equity, and specific knowledge. "What do you do on weekends that feels like play to you but looks like work to other people? Secondly, what topics make you lose track of time when you're learning about them? Thirdly, what unique combinations of interests do you have that seem unrelated? What do your friends constantly ask your advice about? All of these are different ways of getting at what your specific knowledge could be."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
I've recently found a productivity hack
Anonymous creator Oreghall shares how writing down every decision fosters greater conscientiousness. He notes two effects: "It gives you a tool to cut through indecisiveness," and "It eliminates impulsivity by forcing you to reflect and consider every decision. About to check your phone? Oh yeah, I have to write a decision down. On second thought, I'm supposed to be finishing this other task, so it can wait."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
DeepSeek reveals how its V3 model and reinforcement learning led to the creation of their latest model, R1-Zero. "In this paper, we take the first step toward improving language model reasoning capabilities using pure reinforcement learning (RL). Our goal is to explore the potential of LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities without any supervised data, focusing on their self-evolution through a pure RL process... After thousands of RL steps, DeepSeek-R1-Zero exhibits super performance on reasoning benchmarks. For instance, the pass@1 score on AIME 2024 increases from 15.6% to 71.0%, and with majority voting, the score further improves to 86.7%, matching the performance of OpenAI-o1-0912."
Hand-picked book of the week
The 5 Types of Wealth
What does it mean to be truly rich? In his debut, The 5 Types of Wealth, beloved content creator and inspirational writer Sahil Bloom explores the wealth that matters to help build a dream life. Packed with science-backed practices, actionable insights, and masterful storytelling, Sahil's debut helps readers invest in Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth.
"A 2018 study found that the brain systems that are engaged by curiosity contribute to maintaining cognitive function, mental health, and physical health with age. Furthermore, curiosity has been con- nected to higher levels of life satisfaction and positive emotions and lower levels of anxiety. Curiosity keeps us happier, healthier, and more fulfilled. If curiosity were a pill, all the world’s pharmaceutical companies would call it a super-drug and clamor to sell it... One fact is clear: Fortune favors the curious."
We're ecstatic that Sahil is sharing an exclusive preview geared towards Wisereads readers, which dives into the foundations of Mental Wealth. If you enjoy the excerpt, you can preorder a copy of The 5 Types of Wealth here before it comes out Tuesday. Don't forget to register your puchase to access special bonuses like a ticket to the virtual launch party and a companion video series!
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
A reading life
In her newsletter for book people who've lost their way, Petya K. Grady discusses her recent reads and reading trends. From Issue 105: Why is everybody reading Middlemarch right now?: "There's something almost rebellious about choosing to read Middlemarch in an era of endless scrolling. George Eliot's careful examination of provincial life, with its intricate web of human relationships and moral choices, couldn't be further from the quick-hit content that dominates most of our media diet. When you commit to reading War and Peace, you're not just reading a book – you're making a statement about what kind of relationship you want to have with culture and with your own attention."