Continued to listen to Tim's interview with Andrew Chen today and learned about his new book. In the interview he talks about how he uses Twitter as a way to source writing ideas. Tim called it "his MVP for writing" which makes a ton of sense. I also learned that Andrew is writing a new book called the Cold Start Problem (which of course is why he's on Tim's podcast). It also explains why he started the podcast with a great story about how coupons solved the cold start problem from over 100 years ago!

I love how he's building viral promotional campaign for his book.

Step 1: canvas your audience to engage them on the content:

Step 2: publish excerpts on different types of social media to non-overlapping audiences. Update: I just realized that these are stories about companies and not where those excerpts are going to get published (to be fair, I only remembered LinkedIn and YouTube - publishing a chapter on Tinder would be ... interesting 😄). Regardless, I stand by the observation that publishing excerpts on different mediums would be an interesting experiment - YouTube would be interesting.

Step 3: profit! #

Trevor Bedford is one of the best academic sources for information on the SARS-CoV-2 virus on Twitter. Yesterday he published a thread that explains the difference between transmissibility (early results say that Omicron has 3-5X the transmissibility of Delta) and immune escape.

The interesting thing is, that in a heavily vaccinated population, a virus with high immune escape but low intrinsic (R0) transmissibility can out-compete a virus with higher intrinsic transmissibility. This seems to be the case with Omicron based on early data.

But all is not necessarily good here, as high immune escape viruses can target existing vaccinated populations more effectively. #