Hello, welcome to another Sunday Sesh, where I give a little life update and share tidbits I’ve found interesting over the past week.
This week I went to watch a movie with our friends. At the cinema! It was such an immersive experience and I’d forgotten just what I was missing out on. Nothing like watching Netflix at home. We watched Shang Chi and I could feel every hit, block and pulse in the movie through the massive sound system. I thought the movie was great! Seeing an all-Asian cast led by an Asian Marvel superhero is bound to inspire lots of kids out there, and the Eastern mythology and old-school kung-fu movie tropes were beautifully brought to life.
EnergyLab also hosted an exciting panel discussion on the future of electric vehicles in Cambodia. I got to film one of the epic entrances to the event, with the Australian Ambassador driving the Managing Director of Electrice Du Cambodge to the entry in an electric Jaguar I-PACE. The two remaining panelists, the British Ambassador and the Managing Director of the Ministry of Public Works and Transport, also drove to the event in the same epic fashion.
Check out a recording of of the panel discussion here
🎧 Podcasts
“What Does a ‘Just Transition’ Look Like?
At this point, it’s accepted by (almost) everyone that our energy is going to be all-renewable at some point in the future. That means that the massive fossil fuel industries that power our world today are going to to the way of, well, fossils.
But what about the thousands of people who’s livelihoods depend on these sectors? Most of them entered the industry just trying to make a living and feed their family, like the rest of us. This podcast discusses how we can ensure that the renewable transition can be fair for everyone. It covers those directly impacted, but also indirectly, through the local shops, restaurants and communities that existing mines and plants might support.
📚 Books
I’ve been reading Originals by Adam Grant, which is a good dive into the factors that make teams and companies innovative, from tech startups to the CIA. It’s super interesting so far. It challenges a lot of common conceptions that we take for granted and I’m excited to read the rest of it.
📺 Videos
THIS Is The Future Of Urban Planning!
A very interesting video talking about an idea to reclaim city streets to be places where people can walk around and socialise with each other. The solutions is “superblocks”: a bunch of regular city blocks squeezed together with the inner roads changed to prioritise foot and bicycle traffic rather than cars. It sound like an excellent idea to reclaim our cities for people, reduce pollution, improve our communities and increase happiness.
How to Create like Christopher Nolan
This video from David Perrell extols the value of “getting wonky” – going deep into a single niche that other people might consider “weird”. By honing in and applying an obsessive amount of thought and consideration to tiny details, you can end up creating great work. Such is the domain of Christopher Nolan, who’s directed many of my favourite films including The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar and the Dark Knight. Each of these films plays with concepts of time, space and society in extremely interesting ways that really require you to think differently to any other films.
📃Articles
22 rules of story telling from Pixar
Storytelling continues to be more important in my life every day: from this blog to the personal and client videos that I write scripts for. This is a fantastic Twitter thread that explores tips from one of the most innovate storytelling companies ever founded: Pixar.
How David Perell writes an essay
So this is actually the third piece of content this week that I’m sharing in relation to David Perrell – I have been trying to learn more about writing lately so naturally I’ve been consuming a lot of his content.
“If the internet is a Great Online Game, David Perell is one of its grand warlocks”. A fitting description, as he runs one the premier (and rather expensive) online writing course Write of Passage.
The article is a fascinating look into how he comes up with ideas to create essays, and tests the waters along the way and gets feedback using Twitter. By the time he’s ready to publish, there’s good reason to think that people will like it.