012: Small Steps | 16–22 March
On incremental progress, the self-improvement trap, AI that doesn't deliver, and the week Australian indie music got a Netflix pitch
“Small steps are still progress”, reads the quote on my office wall — and this week, I’ve been taking that very literally. Progress on the thesis (incremental), fitness (consistent), and relationships (showing up, staying present) all fall into that category. Rationally, I know these small steps are necessary and are leading me in the right direction. Emotionally? I am READY for a reward any time now, universe.
Socialising at The Rise of Agentic AI and Vibe Coding event at The Precinct on Wednesday was a bright spot. The week's viewing delivered both ends of the spectrum: the warmth and chaos of Jury Duty: Company Retreat, a reminder that joyful, kind media still exists, and the unexpected news that someone I used to know from the Australian indie music scene is now facing life in prison. More on both below.
This week’s reading and listening circled back, again and again, to a tension I keep bumping into: the gap between optimising yourself and actually living. Between the process and the reward. Between small steps and the pressure to sprint.
Image from the hike I went on with my soul sister, Santhi, and her daughter, Gwyn, at Air Tergun Coban Rais (Coban Rais waterfall) near Batu, Java, Indonesia (December 2025). More photos and videos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Here’s what I’ve been reading and listening to:
📚 BOOKS
Try small steps and set the bar low: how to find the meaning of life
About a new book from Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, How to Live a Meaningful Life, with the following strategies to lower the bar of aiming too high and reframe the question. Focus on small steps and embrace the process.
Wonder: go beyond yourself (seek out awe, wonder and connection to something bigger daily)
Flow: lose yourself in the moment (increase your tolerance for boredom with being present in mundane activities - stop time just for transactions or to-do lists)
Coherence: find your compass (actions reflect values and beliefs when you live a coherent life, and when in alignment, meaning comes more easily)
Community: find your ‘formative community’ (those people who share commonality in getting more out of life and answering the big questions - not just focusing on a goal or having a good time)
🧘🏻♀️ HEALTH, FITNESS, & LONGEVITY
The optimized self and the life that got away by Joan Westenberg
The weirdness that used to attach itself to the full texture of a life has been violently redirected into a single obsessive beam aimed at the surface of the self, and what you’re left with is a culture that has never been more earnest about self-improvement and less interested in what that the ~self might actually do once it’s been improved.
She talks about how in 2015, Stoicism became more mainstream as “Ryan Holiday moved Marcus Aurelius from the philosophy section to the business section” (oof. I felt this, girl!). And, yes, as someone in the startup space, you can blame a lot on the startup industry
The gym absorbed this logic [of metrics], and the body became a startup, and the optimization influencer became its growth hacker, and the language of biohacking was borrowed directly from Silicon Valley engineering culture: stacks, protocols, outputs, iterations. The journey was irrelevant and the destination was simply a more productive you.
What does all of this actually produce?
Is the optimization cult producing more interesting people? The empirical record isn’t encouraging.
The looksmaxxed face and the engineered body and the supplement stack tend to converge toward the same aesthetic ideal, which is to say that all the optimization is producing less variation. The pursuit of objective attractiveness, to the extent that such a thing exists, is an undignified rout toward the mean...
The curse of the optimization boom is that it presents itself as self-expansion but its adherents are, to a man, practising self-contraction. Every hour spent on the body protocol is an hour not spent wandering, reading, getting obsessed with an obscure subject for no reason, falling in love, handling it bloody badly, making something ugly that teaches you how to make something less ugly.
So, let’s now look at some videos of guys working out.
The first one is Love Island and The Traitors star, Robert Rausch
He focuses on an upper-body workout.
I’ve been a Rob fan for years (never heard another man on TV - let alone Love Island! - mention loving beabadoobee music before), but he needs to lean in to his “heartthrob” status way more - like the Heated Rivalry guys are (for both the female and male gaze).
Here, Hudson Williams has a full-body workout:
♫ MUSIC
Death Cab for Cutie - Riptides
Pre-order their album on Bandcamp:
Triple J have finally added Lucy Dacus, but it’s not from Laneway, but for Like a Version.
Lucy Dacus covers Daniel Caesar ‘Who Knows’ for Like A Version
Here’s a live version of his song on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon
Lately, I’ve been thinking that perhaps I am a coward
Hiding in a disguise of an ever-giving flower
Incompetent steward of all of that sweet, sweet power
Lucy Dacus - ’Losing’ (live for Like A Version)
Fortunately, the algorithm is now giving me more Daniel Caesar content, including
KNEECAP - Smugglers & Scholars
Pre-order their upcoming release, FENIAN:
MUNA - So What
The Art of the Fall of Azaria
If you were involved in the Australian indie music scene in the 2000s, you might know of Azaria, who was on Popstars, from the band formerly known as The Follow, now The Art. Previously, Azaria dated Jess from The Veronicas, allegedly faked a disappearance that was reported worldwide, and allegedly may have let a random woman in Bali take the fall for drug possession in a country (Indonesia) with tough drug penalties.
The Indonesian incident in 2014 had alerted INTERPOL, and after a drug manufacturing raid on Wednesday in Sydney, Azaria Byrne was found to be part of a large-scale international drug manufacturing and supply syndicate on Thursday, and faces life behind bars if convicted.
Azaria and his fiancée, Brooke Mitchell, were taken into custody with charges of supplying drugs, participating in criminal activities, and dealing with the proceeds of crime. Additionally, Azaria has firearms parts charges. Brooke’s mother was also charged with participating in a criminal group and was granted bail, while Brooke and Azaria were not. Producer, LA-based Oliver Dibley, with “zero monthly listeners” on Spotify 👀, was also arrested as the offshore ringleader in the US. At least four others have been arrested in relation to the syndicate.
The drugs seized on Wednesday - behind a hidden wall in a music rehearsal space - had a $5.5 million street value, and included “25 kilograms of ketamine, 17 kilograms of cannabis, 2.5 kilograms of cocaine, 3.5 kilograms of MDMA, 5.6 kilograms of diazepam, half a kilogram of magic mushrooms, 70 grams of methamphetamine, almost 20,000 pills believed to contain LSD, and $200,000 in cash”.
Drugs in the music industry aren’t anything new, but the international scale of the amount of drugs and money involved is! I can’t get over that someone I used to know is involved in something that may send him to jail for life…
It’s a great time for someone to write about this for a limited Netflix docuseries!!
The Superjesus’ Jet Age 25th anniversary tour will take place throughout Australia in June, even if The Art is no longer the support.
🪶 POETRY
In his classy acceptance speech on Saturday night, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas recited a Henry Lawson poem, The Duty of Australians, written after Australia’s federation over 100 years ago
‘Tis the duty of Australians, in the bush and in the town,
To forever praise their country, but to run no other down…
When a man, or nation, visits in the heyday of his pride,
‘Tis the duty of Australians to be kind but dignified…
‘Tis our duty to the stranger—landed, maybe, but an hour—
To give all the information and assistance in our power,
To give audience to the new chum and to let the old chums wait,
Lest his memory be embittered by his first days in the State.
‘Tis our duty, when he’s foreign, and his English very young,
To find out and take him somewhere where he’ll hear his native tongue.
To give him our spare moment, and our pleasure to defer—
He’ll be a father of Australians, as our foreign fathers were!
More from Peter:
Lawson was on to something that has remained true to this day in our island continent that we call home. And it is why Australians should be patriotic and be proud of what our nation stands for.
Because it is distinct. Australia’s version of patriotism is a little different to our Northern hemisphere friends. We are famous for being just a little bit more laid back. That is to say less brash and boastful, and more dogged and determined. We can and we should wave our flag with pride knowing that Aussie patriotism sometimes means sitting with a stranger and having a cuppa or a frothy. And arguing about the footy not our faith… When we work together diversity has always been our greatest strength.
More men reciting poetry:
Edward Norton recited a “distilled version” of Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry poem: (from 17: 50)
Just as you feel when you look on the river and the sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.
Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refreshed.
So what is it then between us?
What is the count or the scores of hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not. Distance avails not. And place avails not.
I too lived…
It is not upon you alone. The dark patches fall.
The dark threw its patches down on me also.
The best that I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious.
My great thoughts, as I suppose them, were they not in reality meager.
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to see evil. I knew what it was to see evil…
So flow on river, flow on with the flood tide, ebb with the ebb-tide.
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset drench with your splendor, me or the men and women of generations after me.
Stand up, tall masts of manahhata. Stand up. Beautiful hills of Brooklyn.
Throb baffled curious brain. Throw out questions and answers.
Live live, old life. Play the part that looks back on the actor or the actress.
The role that’s as great or small as one makes it, but play your role.
🗳️ POLITICS
Labor Party retains power in South Australia, as One Nation vote surges
Some points:
Labor has comfortably won re-election in South Australia
Premier Peter Malinauskas had secured a second term with a significantly increased majority
One Nation appears to have achieved its best electoral result anywhere in the country
It’s the strongest result the right-wing party has secured at any federal or statewide election anywhere in Australia since the 1998 Queensland poll (11 seats)
One Nation lower house votes remain unclear and will depend on preference flows (1 seat so far in Ngadjuri to Adelaide Plains Council Deputy Mayor David Paton)
Nine seats are still in doubt
One Nation is in contention in several other electorates as well, including the regional seats of Hammond, MacKillop and Narungga
Liberal Leader Ashton Hurn retained her seat of Schubert
Here are the results: (as of Sunday night just before 6pm)
ALP: 32 (37.8%)
LIB: 4 (19.2%)
ONP: 1 (22.0%) David Paton in Ngadjuri
OTH: 1 (10.6%) Travis Fatchen in Mount Gambier (previously held by his ex-boss LIB, Troy Bell)
The Greens: 0 (10.4%)
🤝 RELATIONSHIPS
When men call on women to “make Australian babies” the gloves are off!
When political leaders call for a return to “the past” in all its patriarchal glory, where women bred more and men led more - the Trumpian echoes are deafening. Is it any wonder women aren’t breeding?
Is it any wonder young Australian women aren’t having babies? For many, finding a man unsullied by the manosphere’s misogynistic ideology is hard enough. Then there’s the existential crisis at their door.
It might take eternal optimism to bring a child into a world spinning on the whim of narcissistic authoritarians who preach joy in violence and war. Where a child’s safety is impossible to guarantee. A world that is badly overheating, burning, flooding and erupting; where a few tech-bro megalomaniacs, with eye-watering wealth, control much of the information you see and read.
A world in which you can’t ever imagine owning a home. A world in which the cost of petrol, bread and milk is about to spin out of control.
The past is an easy country to promise when the truth is heavily redacted.
👨🏼💻 TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
Your Attention Please
A new documentary asks “some of the most urgent questions of our time: Can we reclaim our autonomy? Can technology be redesigned to serve humanity? And what does a healthier relationship with the digital world look like for us and our kids?”
we’re being domesticated to be maximally harvestable for the attention-based business model - Tristan Harris
Featured at SXSW on 12-14 March
Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
The practical consequences of an unexamined inner life at scale are not theoretical. The social media platforms built by people who believed behavioral data was a reliable substitute for understanding human psychology produced a decade of engagement metrics while user wellbeing declined and our entire social order decayed. The engineers who built these systems weren’t malicious; they were optimizing for things they could measure, because they’d implicitly accepted the view that measurable outputs were a sufficient model of human flourishing. Goodhart’s Law exacted its toll: the measure became the target, and the target was not what anyone would have chosen if they’d been forced to actually specify what they were aiming for.
Other than the poem from above, Ed talks about anxieties and joys and how to balance them. Plus shares a cool environmental system that removes toxic emissions with a barge company (random!).
It’s worth acknowledging that the anxiety of the times is particularly intense for a lot of people right now… I think that we know the world is effed up in ways that are unprecedented in our lifetimes… but we also live in this unbelievable onslaught of information… it is such a conundrum because we know that there’s a value. We know that it’s good in some ways to know what is actually happening … But at the same time, it is very difficult to know what we as an individual person can do about all of that while moving through our day... I have really struggled in my anxiety about it all with the idea even of making art anymore. I have noticed in myself over the last few years that if I doom scroll and stay in it, I can really go down a hole as we all can. And I think that for me, the only antidote to the anxiety has been action, you know, some kind of action.
Stephen is a great interviewer and lets Edward speak and express his thoughts (slowly)
Everybody’s got something small that they’re good at that they can contribute... in my view, I think we have two lanes, we have a lane in which you have conviction that the rule of law and democracy and compassion are the fundamental tenets of American society. And in the other lane, you believe that those things are inconvenient to power. And that lane has gotten really loud and unapologetic. And we need to be loud in our lane.
🤖 TECHNOLOGY & AI
Tech companies are blaming massive layoffs on AI. What’s really going on?
It is also worth distinguishing between two kinds of workforce reduction. In the first, AI genuinely increases productivity to the point where fewer workers are needed to produce the same output. In the second, staff reductions are not a consequence of AI, but a way to fund it…
AI is a consequential technology and will have a significant impact in the long term. What is in doubt is whether the dramatic, AI-attributed workforce reductions announced by individual companies accurately reflect that trajectory, or whether they conflate genuine technological change with decisions that would have been made regardless.
As I’ve said, it’s not about whether AI can replace your work; it’s more about whether your boss BELIEVES that AI can replace you.
And, if we are being replaced by AI, John Quiggin says it’s time to revive the push for shorter working hours to ensure benefits are shared with workers
The spectre of AI-driven job losses has been the subject of much debate. But missing almost entirely from this debate is the idea that the increased productivity associated with AI should deliver a reduction in working hours, rather than an increase in wages or, more likely, corporate profits.
As we enter the age of the AI-rranged marriage, here’s why I hate Fate by Van Badham
What people wanted from AI in dating apps has been superseded by what some data-hungry, rich-dork megacorp thinks that they should need. Studies in Europe showed users just wanted AI tools to “weed out fake profiles and flag toxic users”.
You know, how writers just wanted contextual proofing tools from AI but got machines insisting on the superiority of rewritten, flattened text. Or how academics just wanted a tool to index their references and got hallucinations that invented a few sources that didn’t actually exist, but the machine thought maybe should.
AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense. (Archive.is)
Examining AI users’ digital activity 180 days before and after they began using such tools on the job, ActivTrak found AI intensified activity across nearly every category: The time they spent on email, messaging and chat apps more than doubled, while their use of business-management tools, such as human-resources or accounting software, rose 94%.
Meanwhile, the amount of time AI users devoted to focused, uninterrupted work—the kind of concentration often required for figuring out complex problems, writing formulas, creating and strategizing—fell 9%, compared with nearly no change for nonusers.
Reminder of the key points from last year’s The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 from MIT
The GenAI Divide: a gap between high adoption of generative AI and its low capacity to truly transform businesses.
Despite enterprise investment exceeding $30 billion, 95% of companies see no measurable financial return from their AI projects.
The main cause is not model quality or regulation, but the lack of memory, learning, and adaptation in deployed systems.
General tools such as ChatGPT or Copilot improve individual productivity but fail to integrate into critical business workflows.
Internal customized developments often fail due to rigidity, lack of context, and poor alignment with actual operations.
Successful projects are defined by deep process integration, continuous learning capabilities, and evaluation based on business outcomes.
A “shadow AI economy” has emerged, where employees use personal tools more effectively than official enterprise solutions.
Companies crossing the GenAI Divide gain benefits in support automation, external cost reduction, and customer retention.
Most sectors show little structural disruption, except for technology and media, which present clearer transformations.
The report anticipates the rise of agentic systems and the Agentic Web, where autonomous, learning agents will reshape enterprise processes [what the Agentic AI and Vibe Coding event at the Precinct was about]
📺 TV Series
Boarders S3 is out
6 episodes
BBC + 🏴☠
Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat (S2)
8 episodes - the first three are out now
Prime + 🏴☠
Do yourself a favour and watch the first season (as well)
We need more kind people in the world bringing joy
The Other Bennet Sister
5 episodes out now + the other 5 at the end of the month
BBC + 🏴☠
I’m grateful for social events, deep chats with friends, reconnections, joyful media, men who recite poetry, and a reminder that action is the antidote