Studio Notes #1

Hey!

Welcome to the first edition of Studio Notes. This is my new weekly newsletter, where I share my thoughts, recommendations, and challenges that have come up during the week.

Story

Imagine Ex-Apple employees start working on an AI replacement for the iPhone. A new type of device that will be just as revolutionary. Humane, you say? That’s old news. No, this time, it’s Jony Ive himself! And even crazier, he is collaborating with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to bring it to life. This is exactly what happened this week. OpenAI announced they would be acquiring io, a company founded by Jony Ive to work on AI hardware, for a reported $6.5b. Now I have no idea what they are working on, what they have already built, or if they will actually succeed, but with an acquisition price this high, and the talent they have working for them, including former Apple design lead and Ive replacement Evans Hankey, I am certainly excited to see it come to life. Unfortunately though, it will reportedly take until 2027 until it comes out. Well, after Humane and Rabbit, seems like it makes sense to wait to launch until the product is actually ready.

Book

This past week, I have thought a lot about where I want to go with my life, what to spend my time working on, and what area to focus most of my efforts on. One book I always like to come back to is: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Erik Jorgenson. It’s timeless ideas paired with simple, straightforward writing always calm me down and help me see life more rationally. Made from the source material of Navals podcast quotes and tweets, it has a very concise language and the type of paragraphs that make you re-read them multiple times to think about them deeply. It doesn’t offer a lot of specific solutions, but has been very helpful in showing me different ways of looking at problems I am dealing with and is packed with useful frameworks. Highly recommend checking it out!

Project

The video I posted on my channel last week was very successful, in fact, the most successful video I have made this year. While I am happy, I also noticed that it set the bar for the next video, which made it hard for me this week to sit down and write. To avoid that, I want to develop at least one recurring format for each week, to be able to post something valuable without having to decide between so many different ideas every time. This newsletter is a start in that direction, but I would ideally want to also have something like it in video form. Let’s see, I will work on it until the end of next week and then test whatever I can come up with until then. All I know is, it shouldn’t just be news, as that is not really something unique to me.

Recommendation

I really enjoyed this podcast episode of the Colin and Samir show with Ryan Holiday. Even though it is a couple of years old, it was exactly what I needed to hear right now, and gave me a lot of inspiration.

So that was my first newsletter episode. Since the list is quite small still, as I haven’t shared this in a lot of places, let me know if it was helpful to you, and any suggestions you might have. I am treating this one as more of a test run, trying to figure out what this should be in the end.

Have a great weekend, until next week!

Chris