A packed news day and a quick introduction.  Today we highlight new writers, experienced writers, innovations, and drone photography of the tops of skyscrapers.  This whole letter is full of innovative people and ideas.  Oh, and then there is a Chaos Monkey; read on!

Due to scheduling issues inside the Stoic program – today’s challenge was delayed.  We will use the time to reflect and hit it again tomorrow.

Changing the Night Journal post, ask yourself the same three questions, throw your answers into the comments, and we will highlight some of the responses.

We always look for a familiar story from a unique perspective or angle.  Or a unique story told from any perspective.  Today we are going to highlight Rashi Goel and her newsletter Performonks.  We have highlighted stories from Goel previously, but she outdid herself today.  Goel writes about marketing in her own words:

Her unique perspective is the be better people part.  In her newsletter today, she talks about being resilient, which she explains as the ability to survive stress and continue forward, and antifragile, which Goel says is when staying the stress makes you stronger than you were before.  The entire read is worth it for anyone looking at strategies for growth.

Goel talks about marketing and highlights several companies and situations where they had to utilize these strategies.  One example she points out is Netflix, and Netflix engineers invented something called Chaos Monkey.  This is a tool the engineers designed to randomly attacks its systems to determine how redundancies and other systems can pick up the slack if another system goes down.  A smart strategy, and it gets our vote for the best-named tool in IT.

There is a new discussion about creating a Digital Reserve Corps.  Like the military reserves, private sector individuals could sign up for three years, working at least 30 days per calendar year.  This has been knocked around in DC a few times before and is being discussed in 2023.  The Digital Reserves would focus on cybersecurity, innovation, and tech expertise for the Federal government.

A quick search online shows that the percentages of cyber attacks over the last several years are staggering.  We asked ChatGPT what the greatest threat to the U.S. is, and terrorism, cyber-terrorism, and cyber attacks were the first three responses.  A website called Selfkey has a long list of data breaches from 2019 – 2022; if you printed out the list of breaches on the website, it would take 16 pages of paper. 

Today on Seth Godin’s blog, he talks about the difference between an event and a journey.  In typical Godin short form, he pins down the difference, the event is a quick one-time event, and a journey could take a lifetime.  If you have ever played or coached a sport, you know more time is spent in practice than in the game.  If you have ever been a student or a teacher, there are usually several days or weeks to learn a specific topic and one test.  The good news is for most of your life, learning, practice, and work don't have too many difficulties.

A new website came across our wires this weekend and brought terrific pictures captured by drones of historic buildings in the U.S.  The footage and the way the website lays out the work are unique.  Photographer and recent architectural school grad Chris Hytha took the pictures with a drone.  The website My Modern Met did the story; follow the link to see the work.

A recent trend on Spotify and YouTube has sped-up versions of songs.  The rise of TikTok-style shorts and other videos that started to use altered versions of popular songs may have led to a further alteration and sped-up version of new music.  In some ways, this is another version of sampling music and changing it into something new.  The difference, when you sample a song, the artist who wrote and performed the original is compensated (or the label is).  With the new remixes, it is unclear if anyone is getting paid.  Kids can create these sped-up versions and post them on Spotify or YouTube.  In the early stages, this is similar to people sharing mixed tapes; remember that? 

From mixed tapes shared with friends under the Fair Use provisions to the Napster origin story.  Spotify was born from a Napster seed and planned to pay artists, labels, and those involved in creating the music.  This next phase could get interesting.  The Guardian wrote about this earlier in the week.  If you are curious, here’s a link to A-Ha’s Take on Me – Sped Up.

Words | Music | Art | Unknown

Something special.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

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With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

X/O