Richard Li

Ideas

1 min read

A collection of interesting ideas, articles, and resources from my weekly updates.

Week 11: BAU

Interesting Ideas

  • Trust at Scale Lessons from Wikipedia: The RBC Disruptors podcast is one of my favourites because John Stackhouse always brings in a wide variety of guests from various industries (episodes are also ~30 minutes!). Perspectives around how trust is implicit, why access to information has led to a decline in trust, and how we can maintain optimistic for humanity is very refreshing to hear.
  • Every major economy is trying to ditch Visa & MasterCard: BRICS + EU countries are building their own centrally managed payment rails, but it’s interesting how Visa and Mastercard are both growing with record revenue and profits over the last 10 years despite a shift internationally.
  • Toyota Prius | It Survived Haters and Smugness: Make fun of me all you want, but my dream car is a Toyota Prius (will be another week’s blog post haha) but I really do admire Toyota as a company and they value: long term planning (not obsessing over quarterly results), don’t jump on trends (hybrids > EV’s), and the focus on reliability and quality which are all values that I align myself with.
Link to original

Week 10: For All Mankind

Interesting Ideas

  • 3 rules for life | James Hoffmann: Loved seeing James Hoffmann (goat of coffee youtube btw) talk more personally here. I actually love the question he leaves viewers with: Would you still do something if you couldn't tell anyone about it?.
  • The real message of One Battle After Another: I guess I’m in my long form video essay arc now haha, but this was a movie that had a lot of depth with it’s message and themes. What continues to stand out to me is how two things can be true. It explores how someone can hate and be infatuated and how darkness can directly lead to light.
Link to original

Week 9: Coffee With My Younger Self

Interesting Ideas

  • Project Hail Mary: Sci-fi is one of my favourite genres: Interstellar, The Martian, and For All Mankind (season 5 is out next Friday I’m so excited!!) are some of my all time favourite movies/shows to watch. Project Hail Mary definitely makes that list. It was surprisingly very funny, wholesome and also an example of how someone overcomes self-doubt and does his best given the cards he’s dealt with.
  • I don’t like what the internet is doing to me.: The attention economy game is a fascinating concept: content on the internet is readily available (no scarcity) → addiction to information → creators pushing things out to capture our attention. This loop leads to creators starting off with good intentions and then slowly trying to optimize for the metrics (likes, comments, subscribers). A question I’ll end off with: is directing our attention all we need?
  • Mylene’s TikTok: This was the original video I saw that inspired my reflection!
Link to original

Week 8: Why

Interesting Ideas

  • Inside MUJI How the “No-Brand” Brand Built an Empire on $3 Pens: I’ve really enjoyed Taylor Bell’s deep dives into how a business is able to scale. Very cool to gain some more lore about Muji’s brand philosophy: Restraint, humility, the idea that this will do is not a compromise but clarity
  • Why You Only Hear About AI Doom: The economic machine of online media is an idea that we all know: negative content is what gets more clicks and shares. However, our opinions are heavily influenced from doomed headlines and we don’t dive deep. A mental model of knowing how two things can be true is critical to staying optimistic — something I’m trying to do better at.
  • How China blew up its own future: I didn’t know that as countries become richer, birth rates decline. I wish the video delved into this pattern, but it did explain the second order consequences of China’s one child policy and how this will lead to disastrous population dynamics within the country by 2100 (unbalanced amount of elderly to youth). Who knows if humanoid robotics will help to offset this problem. Another interesting problem that no country has solved: creating the right incentives to have children.
Link to original

Week 7: Light vs Heavy

Interesting Ideas

Link to original

Week 6: Timeless Advice

Interesting Ideas

  • Stripe’s 2025 Annual Letter: I’m personally excited (and nervous) to see how the world of agentic commerce will unfold. Stripe defining these levels is a cool thing to read and internalize. Also, the inclusion of Joel Mokyr’s work (I need to read!) about how technological advancements require alignment from non-market aggregators brings up an important point behind integration of new technologies. We need to balance the regulatory side with the advancements to make it a success (e.g. drug discovery).
  • Dan Wang on China’s Breakneck Economic Growth | Odd Lots: I read Dan’s book Breakneck earlier this year and enjoyed the nuance of comparing the US and China by how they are run: lawyers vs engineers. He has a very balanced/nuanced view that critiques both sides. Always love hearing and reading his perspectives!
Link to original

Week 5: Roles & Responsibilities

Interesting Ideas

  • Why This Olympic Sport Bothers Physicists: This video focuses on curling is a direct case study into why we should be curious. Cleo articulates this so well in this video diving below the surface of the sport (how there is the “curling problem” with how curling stones defy physics as it has to do with how the stones interact with a surface). This could lead to discovering life on other planets as this is the same physics problem as curling. There is always more than meets the eye.
  • Meal prep shouldn’t be this easy…: As someone getting into cooking and food, I’ll share something a bit different this week. I’ve also been playing around with making these lego cube based meals and have found it helps to maintain the taste and allows the food to last longer (since we freeze it).
  • It’s Official: The World Order Has Broken Down: This article blew up my Twitter/X feed last week mainly because it’s so timely. At the Munich Security Conference, all the world leaders were declaring that the post WW2 world order doesn’t exist anymore. One part that was interesting was about Dalio’s principle of: have power, respect power, and use power wisely. International relations lack the clear governance structures (laws, enforcement, adjudication) that exist within countries, so when roles aren’t defined and respected, power dynamics take over.
Link to original

Week 4: Real Value

Interesting Ideas

  • Doctor Mike Eats His Last Meal: Great interview with many meaningful topics covered: action before motivation, how should we raise children, outlook on the US medical system, healthy skepticism in science, impacts of social media on misinformation, importance of humility. My biggest takeaway from Doctor Mike is always trying to find balance for our health, and how we think about the world.
  • AI Doesn’t Reduce Work — It Intensifies It: Interesting study from the HBR where the productivity increase from generation trickles into fatigue, burnout, and decline in quality due to context switching. The authors called for more intentional use of AI at work emphasizing the need for human collaboration, intentional pauses to prevent context switching.
  • How My App Is Doing (2 Month Update): Chris Raroque is an indie developer who makes productivity apps (I use his budgeting app Luna). In this video he was summarizing his takeaways from releasing his new app Amy. Despite building multiple apps and leveraging the latest AI tooling, Chris finds himself having to iterate on many things: AI costs, user retention, new features, etc. It’s refreshing to hear from a real world developer who is encountering nuanced problems that are impossible to encounter before development. Any product always requires constant iteration and refinement and I love videos like these.
Link to original

Week 3: How I View Fulfillment

Interesting Ideas

  • I didn’t set goals last year, here’s how it went - Mylene Mae: Mylene makes very high production short form video essays that offer tons of valuable advice. Mylene explained her approach to this year: while it was good to go with the flow, she discovered that she thrives when attaching herself to obtain purpose and meaning. She also addressed setting input based rather than output based goals.
  • What you must know before AGI arrives - Po-Shen Loh: I love content that addresses actionable principles. Interesting topics such as the impacts of AI on human creativity, how we should re-approach education, focusing on value creation, and thinking critically are all essential skills I think we should all embody moving forward into a world where AI will be integrated into daily life.
  • Are Low Expectations The Key to Life?: I’ve read both Poor Charlie’s Almanack and Same as Ever this year and this blog post highlights the key insight from those books on how happiness is based on the gap between our expectations and circumstances.
Link to original

Week 2: Reflect

Interesting Ideas

  • How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills: This was an interesting article from Anthropic on how utilizing AI reduces mastery for developers. However, we can all be more intentional with how we use the tools to gain deeper understanding into what exactly we are building. Code review and going back and forth with your agents is going to be so critical moving forwards.
  • Inside OpenAI’s in-house data agent: Love how the team at OpenAI publicly shared their approach to using AI Agents to better retrieve information across a wide array of data sources. Internally at RBC Borealis, I’m working on a project that tackles these same problems and it’s cool to see how this is still an ever evolving problem.
  • Mark Carney’s Davos Address: This talk generated a lot of buzz on my feeds and rightfully so. “We take the world as it is, and not as we want it to be” relates a lot to defining and working within constraints simply because we can only do what we can control. I highly recommend watching this to better understand how the world operates.
Link to original

Week 1: Read, Write, Speak

Interesting Ideas

  • Just Talk To It: This article follows one of my principles: Don’t Optimize, Just Start. Over engineering your workflows with MCP, Claude Skills, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, Ralph, can get overwhelming. Stick to the basics and just talk to it.
  • Werner Vogels AWS Re:Invent Keynote: I had the opportunity to attend Re:Invent this year. One of my highlights was listening to this keynote live. Werner’s insights about the renaissance developer and the qualities one must exhibit is what I think every developer should try to adopt.
  • Code is Cheap, Software Isn’t: I love this take on the age of agentic coding. Generating code is the easy part, but it hasn’t eliminated endless bugs, outages, and following best practices. There is still a huge challenge and need to developing maintainable, and extendable software
Link to original