Category: Posts

Blog posts of Marius Schober on random topics including opinions, thoughts, ideas, or personal day-to-day experiences.

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We are Stagnating

Our society is stagnating. And that’s the real problem, we, as a human species, have. In the economy, there’s no real innovation and no real productivity anymore.

Let me give you some examples, why this might be the case.

Getting Rich, Without Working

25-year-old guys are collecting JPEGs of pixelated monkeys and invest in crypto Ponzi schemes in a hope to become rich without having to work for it, instead of creating value in the real world by working or starting a business.

Politics over Science

23-year-old activists are studying liberal arts and go out in masses to the streets to demonstrate against climate change, instead of getting a science degree and spending 10,000 hours of their life trying to invent an actual solution for the problem they see.

Research for Status Points

30-year-old brilliant people become economists to formulate overly complicated but aimless macroeconomic theories, get published in a prestigious scientific journal and collect citations, instead of actually helping their communities on a microeconomic level with entrepreneurship.

Talk is Cheap

36-year-old venture capital investors who never started a company themselves talk cheaply on Twitter and on conferences about innovation and how to create the future, instead of actually doing it themselves.

Marketing Economy

47-year-old CEOs choose the easy path by doing what has already been done before. Either by copying and slightly adapting what others have already built. Or by building a product based on an OEM, ODM, or White Label supplier, without adding meaningful value. The economy is sustained by marketing, instead of innovation. The same product or solution gets built and marketed over and over again. Instead of innovating and creating an entire new product category.

The Easy Path

I could go on and on, but the pattern is the same. We collectively pick the easy path. We feed our ego whether it is with followers on social media, fancy law and finance degrees, citations in scientific journals, or getting rich quick with JPEGs of monkeys or questionable M&A deals which add no value to the society.

In your deathbed, you’ll never say:

  • “I wish I had bought more NFTs”
  • “I wish I postulated more economic theories”
  • “I wish I did one more LBO”
  • “I wish I had created more TikTok videos”
  • “I wish I had more scientific citations”
  • “I wish I brought one more OEM product to the market”

Curiosity

What is missing is curiosity:
Curiosity for what we – as a human species – could be.
Curiosity for what the world could be.
Curiosity for what we as a person could be.

Now: Stop playing status games. Stop listening to your ego. Become curious about who your absolute authentic self is. What are YOU curious about?

We as a society need to become less ego focused and more curiosity focused. Let’s actually be creative and start inventing. As Peter Thiel puts it, let’s go “From Zero to One”.

By going from Zero to One, we will not only solve climate change or the current inflation crisis, but we will become a growing and prosperous society again.

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Acting, Not Ignoring

A slightly cloudy day again today in a while. Very pleasant 22 °C. The North Frisian tea tastes especially good with a shot of hazelnut drink. Hazelnut milk would not be politically correct.

Other than my tea, trouble is brewing in the world. Cryptos and stocks are crashing, a brewing war in Taiwan, inflation, a deliberately induced food crisis, an energy crisis in the EU. Things don’t look rosy.

Act instead of ignore. The solution lies within us; be it collectively (that would be better) or individually (help yourself, otherwise no one will help you).

Let’s escape our habits that hold us captive and stand up against the absurdity of politicians. Only in this way will we take at least a small step towards a future to look forward to.

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Balance Is Key

What do we want to do?

Sometimes it is more,

Sometimes it is less.

Whether ambition drives us, or the calm rests us:
both are good – In moderation.

The key is not to only rest.

But also not to work without rest.

Balance is key.

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Health Hacks

A new app, a new subscription, a new book, a new diet. Nothing of this is going to make you healthy. There are no health hacks. Ultimately, it is only about you. You have to take full responsibility for yourself. And you have to act!

The good thing is, you don’t need a degree to become healthy. The basic rules are simple:

  • Eat fruits & vegetables, avoid processed food at all cost.
  • Move your body every day: push-ups, pull-ups, squats, burpees, hill sprinting, stretching.
  • To calm down, meditate, breathe, take a cold shower, and sleep enough.

If you follow those ridiculously simple rules, you will be healthier than most of your peers.

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Open Letter to Ángel Víctor Torres Pérez

Dear Mr. Torres, I arrived in Tenerife three weeks ago. I love The Canaries and I think with a few improvements to the ZEC, you will attract countless technology businesses and investment companies, which in turn bring jobs and prosperity to these beautiful islands.

Without digging deep to find problems, I want to share my thoughts I had while looking at the requirements of the ZEC:

It must be a newly-created entity or branch with its registered address and effective place of management within the geographical area of the ZEC.
👍 Fine.

At least one member of the administration must reside in the Canary Islands.👍 Fine.

It must make a minimum investment of 100,000 euros (in Gran Canaria or Tenerife) or 50,000 euros (in the case of La Gomera, El Hierro, La Palma, Fuerteventura or Lanzarote) in fixed assets related to the activity within the first two years following its registration.

😕 Suboptimal. I understand that by requiring a minimum investment amount, you try to attract larger businesses or investors, who in turn instantly create jobs. The problem is the following: by requiring a minimum investment, you cut out countless startup founders which are bootstrapping their business. Which means they are funding it with their money or friends and family money. They start with one person, then slowly grow to >10 employees over 3 or 5 years.

It is necessary to create, at least, five jobs (in Gran Canaria or Tenerife) or three (in the other islands) during the first six months following its registration and this average must be maintained during the time that the benefits are enjoyed.

🙁 Bad. An entrepreneur cannot predict how many employees he will have in six months. By applying this rule, you attract only larger companies who re-locate, open branches, or do investments in tourism (which you want to become less dependent upon?).

It is necessary to conduct activities that are permitted in the ZEC
👍 Fine.

To really create the “California of Europe”, The Canaries must attract entrepreneurs who build businesses. One first step will be to make the ZEC less complex and bureaucratic. An ambitious entrepreneur doesn’t want to deal with whether he suits all the requirements in the first place, and then has the possibility to fail one requirement after 6 months (i.e., only 4 employees instead of 5). Instead, they will start their business elsewhere. For example, in Portugal.

Don’t get me wrong, the ZEC is great in concept. If you refine it, market it more prominently, I am sure The Canaries will attract numerous entrepreneurs and investment.

In addition, I’d offer all arriving entrepreneurs and investors an English-speaking bureaucracy advisor (Gestoria).

Towards a great future.

Best regards,
Marius Schober

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AI Writing Tools

Creativity is what makes us human human. Writing is a large part of it. Through writing, we think. Through writing, we dream. Through writing, we invent.

I’m afraid we might lose this creativity. Instead of reading books and essays, we consume short-form videos on social media. Instead of writing books and essays, we record voice messages, videos, or write 240 character tweets.

AI writing tools accelerate the dehumanization of this beautiful creative work.

Instead of thinking, outlining, writing a first draft, refining, and finalizing a text, we write a few bullet points into the AI copywriting software. A written text or even blog appears magically and without any creativity or brainpower.

This text is then published – as a blog, a social media post, or an ad. The reader then – unaware of it – is reading a content piece which was written not by a human but created by an AI, with the purpose to catch his attention.

AI uses big data – which means it analyzes in detail how well which sentence, word, or even emoji is perceived by the reader. Unquestionably, it will become better at writing texts than us humans.

What does this mean for us humans? Will this destroy one of the most creative skills we have developed as a human species, for the pure sake of optimizing for attention metrics and profits?

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Turkish Humbleness

Turkish people are one of the most humble and kind people I’ve ever met. Especially when I eat at a Turkish restaurant, it’s not only their kindness, but especially their humbleness that strikes me.

Let’s say it as it is: No matter where you are in the world, if you look for great food at fair prices, simply look for Turkish restaurants. You can nearly blindly go to a Turkish restaurant or diner, and get a decent, nutritious, satiating, delicious meal for a very fair price.

For example: Today, all restaurants offer a small soup for – let’s say – €8.00. Not the hospitable Turkish restaurant, it offers you a large delicious soup for €3.50 with free bread and free çay (tea). It’s not that they couldn’t charge €8.00 as well, it is maybe their humbleness that doesn’t allow it.

I’m certain this is not limited to Turkish people. I believe it’s more a result of the Mediterranean Islamic culture: Turkish, Lebanese, Syrian, etc. The world is such a beautiful place if you are open-minded.

(As always, the exception proves the rule.)

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Nuclear War & Moving to Tenerife

It is official. We moved out of our apartment in Germany and moved to Tenerife – one of the Canary Islands. Tenerife – and all other Canary Islands – is a part of Spain, located just a few hundred kilometers off the coast of the Sahara desert. And that is the point: Tenerife is quite far away from everything.

Continue reading “Nuclear War & Moving to Tenerife”
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Holiday Resorts and Peace

Traveling is a great way to explore other countries, cultures and their people. While this is especially true for travelers, it is ironically just as true for the typical holidaymaker. The typical European holiday resort is basically a large conglomerate of hotels, restaurants, cafés, shops, casinos, and nightclubs. At the airport, the beach, in the café and in the hotel lobby you meet German holidaymakers just as you meet British, French, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Polish, Russian, Swiss, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Norwegian, and sometimes even American or Asian tourists.

Despite some small complaints that the Russian and English drink too much and party too hard, all these people enjoy their holidays with each other. Russians don’t attack the British with bar stools, just because their prime minister accused their president of something (The exception proves the rule). People want to live peacefully together. They wish to live with each other. And all want to enjoy the time they have in their holidays at its most.

This is true on a microscale (the holiday destination) as it is on a global scale (our world). People want to live and enjoy their life. The aim is to minimize conflict to increase positives. The holiday destination shows that the regular Joe, Wadym, Ilker, Marius, and Fernando don’t want to fight senseless wars with other nations or accuse each other of stupid shit.

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Three Words to Save Lives

As I am writing this, an ambulance is standing in front of the door of our home. They are searching for house #129, but are unable to locate it. Google Maps does not help, and it needed the assistance of several locals and three phone calls until they were now able to find the direction.

This just showed how important it is that we introduce new ways to communicate locations with each other. One of this is what3words. With what3words, every location on earth can be located with three unique words. Instead of street names, house numbers and zip codes, we can use three words, such as /explorer.chart.cheaply, to locate each other faster and easier than ever before.

While for the ambulance, an app which transmits the geolocation might be the first thought, for many older people simply remembering “their” three words can save their lives in those scenarios. What is holding us back from using what3words?