— Simone Weil

When asked about the key to building trust with an audience by an aspiring startup founder earlier today, without hesitation I replied; “Consistency is the key”.

I then immediately followed up by saying “So please, do as I say, not as I do”, my usual disclaimer to deal with the inevitable imposter syndrome that comes along with doling out advice.

Yet here I am, writing up a third edition of something I had planned for years, yet never prioritised highly enough to produce.

Why?
What has changed?
And is it permanent enough for me to call myself ‘prolific’ yet?

Hell no. Nothing big has changed at all.

And I think that’s the point.

Below is a series of tweets I put out earlier this year about my time presenting at Southstart in South Australia. I still felt the same nerves, the same tension and the same sense of imposter syndrome after drafting every single tweet. But I kept going, until I had finished my train of thought.

If you’re interested, you can check out the rest here

There’s no doubt I could have made it better and I’m certain lots of people disagreed with me. But as I outlined in my presentation, creativity is a practise.

Curiosity is important, but it’s only half the story.

Without constraints (ie time, budgets, deadlines, 140 character limits etc), we never give others the opportunity to engage with our ideas. Often, the tighter the constraints, the more innovative the outcomes.

But one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about this year is the tension between constraints and conduits… Specifically, whether factors like our environment or the tools we use make it easier or more difficult for us to create.

Every day, I help my kids get ready for school and wait (im)patiently for my wife to head out the door so that I can return to this little office and ‘begin creating’.

Sometimes I get a lot done, but often, I wander aimlessly between rooms or swipe between iPad games for the first hour or so, knowing full well that I’m wasting the most precious time of my day yet somehow unable to commit to the creative ‘practise’ I described earlier. Something I’ve taken deep pride in developing and honing over 15+ years seems to have completely disappeared.

Call it Covid, call it loneliness or a mid life crisis, I’m not sure, but it’s certainly not an enjoyable experience. I still have all the same ideas and high levels of curiosity that I always had, but no longer seem able to just make stuff the way I have for so often.

And yet, just when it seemed like nothing would help drag me forward, I discovered one line from a book by one of my favourite writers called Soundtracks. In the book, Jon Acuff describes his disdain for ideas like self-help, productivity and ‘positive thinking’, despite being considered by many as a self help writer. Yet while researching the problem of overthinking, Acuff discovered that even Seth Godin - someone he greatly admires and respects - spent years doing daily affirmations developed by Zig Ziglar, one of the forefathers of motivational speaking.

Inspired by this, Acuff wrote and refined a set of short sharp ‘soundtracks’ for himself, eventually sharing with his audience via this new book. Some are still a bit american cheesy for my taste, but the one I’m really enjoying right now is ‘Momentum is Messy’.

So with this in mind, I’m making some minor adjustments to this Museletter.

If you’re reading this after September 2021, you probably won’t notice any changes at all, but for context, I began writing this Museletter on a platform called Substack which is quite minimal (which I love) but which is super focused on the written word, which I really don’t consider my strong suit… I’m a visual thinker, so I want anything I put into the world to represent that.

Plus, some people might love the idea of monetising their audience (which Substack is 100% optimised for), however this doesn’t interest me in the least. Kinda defeats the point of creating for me, tbh.

So, after a month or two of research, I’m happy to say I’ve finally found a much more visual friendly platform and a new creative process I’m excited to try out, starting today. If you’d like to opt out, just reply to this or shoot me an email to museletter [at] murraygalbraith.com anytime. Otherwise, I’ll just migrate everything over to V2 and see you all again next week 😊

So yes, creativity is a practise.

But no, it doesn’t (always) have to be a painful one.

And never forget: Momentum is messy.

— Viktor Frankl

If you read Volume 1, you’ll already know I have long believed that some form of Universal Basic Income was inevitable, for three main reasons:

1. The costs of dealing with anxiety, depression and loneliness are skyrocketing, and the most efficient form of mental health support is not being broke.

2. The incomprehensible waste of time and money dedicated to paper addicted ‘welfare’ departments — an army of people responsible for chasing down low income earners for not filling out a form correctly.

3. Artificial Intelligence.

While tech luminaries remain deeply divided on where A.I will lead our species, there can be no disputing the effects of this disruptive technology will only increase in the coming decade, leading people like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil to co-sign this extraordinary set of A.I principles in 2017.

Which is why I was particularly interested to read Sam Altman’s recent essay entitled Moore’s Law For Everything. As the famously hard-working and ‘wicked smart’ former CEO of Silicon Valley’s most lauded accelerator program Y-Combinator, Altman had access to a view of the future very few could wrap their heads around.

Being responsible for birthing new baby unicorns on a weekly basis makes you a pretty hot commodity these days, so it may have seemed like a giant leap of faith when Altman announced he was leaving to become the CEO of OpenAI, a company he co-founded with Elon Musk in 2015.

If you can’t be bothered reading Altman’s entire thesis (which I strongly encourage you do), let me sum it up for you in two paragraphs and a video.

“The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear”

therefore…

“We could do something called the American Equity Fund … All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution, in dollars and company shares, into their accounts. People would be entrusted to use the money however they needed or wanted—for better education, healthcare, housing, starting a company, whatever … Poverty would be greatly reduced and many more people would have a shot at the life they want”

I, for one, don’t necessarily welcome our new robot overlords. But they’re coming anyway.

So what’s my point?

Almost none of the ‘entry level’ jobs we used to encourage kids to do as a first step on the employment ladder - candy bar attendant, checkout chick/dude etc - exist anymore, due to the incessant march of AI and robots like the all-smiling, all-dancing assassins you see above.

Sure, we will keep working on stuff, and yes of course we are already inventing new jobs to create or ‘oversee’ our new robots overlords until they inevitably crush us like the annoying mosquitos we will no doubt seem to them, but in my opinion the single best thing policy makers could do in the meantime is unlock the vast rivers of human experience by actively investigating ways to divert the traditional social welfare budget (and ideally, a small tax for the uber-rich people and/or companies) into a UBI program, much like the one Altman has outlined.

Maybe it needs a cool name like ‘Scomo’s All Australian Footy Fund’.

Or maybe we just need to watch that video again… And genuinely ask ourselves:
So, exactly which jobs will our kids do better / safer / faster than these guys?

Some things I found interesting this week

Monocle’s Digital Decency Manifesto

10 simple suggestions for not being a dick online, presented in a delightful way by the smart people at Monocle Magazine.

Is this what the Apple car will look like?

Probably not. But instead of wondering, the curious folk at Wall Street Journal engaged a very cool nerd called Thomas Forsyth to crack open an iPhone and test it out.

A boss and an employee break down the challenges at Basecamp

In case you missed it, one of the indie tech world’s most beloved families caused a very public argument to break out this week over its handling of some changes at work. The original memo released a flood of angry responses from employees, but the take I found most interesting was this article written from the perspective of an employer and an employee at QZ. Despite everything, it was just really nice to have two sides of the same argument, presented together.

PS. While waiting to board a plane this morning, I sent out a few tweets about my experience presenting at Southstart festival in Adelaide. I’d love to know if I missed anything etc, so feel free to hit reply.

— Murray

I’ve never been a big reader (much less a writer) but one of my most vivid memories of the past 18 months is heading to the library with my wife and two young kids in the final hours before total lockdown.

Of course, despite borders closing and thousands getting sick each day, none of us knew what was coming at that stage, however after conversations with many senior connections in health & technology, I genuinely believed this may be the beginning of the end.

If the health system collapsed as they had each cautiously predicted it may, it was clear to me that many other government functions would soon follow and that society would never be the same.

I still smile at the books I chose in the final hour before Gold Coast City Council shut down the entire library network due to fears of COVID-19.

The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age
— Gordon Marino

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World
— Tyson Yunkaporta

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
— Jacqueline Novogratz

The Beginning of Infinity
— David Deutch

Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
— Eugene G. d'Aquili and Vince Rause

Man’s Search For Meaning
— Viktor Frankl

Along with a big pile of books from the 1970’s about DIY fishing lures, how to tie better knots, 101 Make Believe Games for Kids and probably something about the zombie apocalypse…

Looking back on those early days of toilet paper craziness, I remember thinking ‘If we’re unable to work together due to the virus, the power lines could fall into disrepair or the internet bandwidth will probably get overwhelmed and these books might be all we have’.

Until that point, I had dismissed ideas of penning a book or even writing a blog for nearly a decade.

Why the hell would anyone care what I think about the world when there are so many other brilliant writers and thinkers who spend their lives crafting prose and phrase to help us reflect on the human condition?

Yet here we were, loading two huge boxes full of books into the car, each thinking these may be the last pieces of literature we ever read.

From that moment until now, I told myself it was time to get past the imposter syndrome and realise that every single book in that pile - from The 13 Storey Treehouse to Growing Succulents in the Sub-Tropics - was just someone’s perspective on the world and that without each author having the courage, patience and determination to document their thoughts on a page, we would all be far poorer.

Some things I found interesting this week

1:6.25 scale fully-articulated Lego Minifigure, carved from 3 types of wood

Nice one, Jimbo.

Stockton’s Basic-Income Experiment Pays Off

I’ve been a Universal Basic Income nerd for several years now (I went all the way to the biggest tech event in Finland just to see one session about UBI!) but this social experiment by a small Californian city has delivered some of the most exciting outcomes in decades. As one of the recipients says “The big change was how it helped me see myself. It was dead positive: I am an entrepreneur, I think of business ideas, I make business choices, I want to be financially stable.”

The End of Indie.VC

Speaking of grand experiments, one of my favourites from the past few years has been the rise and fall of Indie.VC, a new way to fund startups somewhere ‘between back loans and blitzscaling’. Sadly, that experiment has now ended due to less and less investors having the appetite for smaller, more sustainable returns.

That’s all for Volume 1.
Thanks for reading 😊

— Murray