Brian O'Neill

@ADubInDerry @JonTonge Why do you think that Ciara? I thought Derry would have more connection to Glasgow?

@JonTonge I'd wager of the 1770 students at John Moore's about 1754 are from Derry and the surrounding area.

Most popular British university destinations for N. Ireland students (source: hesa.ac.uk/news/20-03-202…

@SergioGiorgio12 @JonTonge Pretty certain it’s majority catholic as there’s more Catholic young people overall.

@JonTonge Interesting to know their religious identities or communities with which they identify. Probably too non PC a question but Dundee used to be the uni of choice for NI Protestants back in the 80’s/90’s.

@AkaPaulHoward This one is good for the perspective of an Irish guy in the music business amazon.co.uk/Adventures-Won…

@brianoneill I loved this book too, Brian. So many new insights into John and Yoko's life.

“There’s Nazis in the bathroom, just below the stairs.” brilliant song.

@tomfgoodwin @ZubyMusic Stacking blocks and cups are great. But discover the wonder of @playmobil eg playmobil.com/en-gb/junior%3… is a great toy as everything packs into the ark to make it easy to store and carry.

@ZubyMusic My 10 month olds loves cables, tape, paper, boxes, anything dangerous, balls, cans, bottles, food. Water. Hates every single toy ever, especially the most expensive.

I am yet to find any children's toy that is more versatile and engaging than a random cardboard box or empty plastic bottle. I am increasingly convinced that baby and toddler toys are to make the parents feel good. Kind of like designer baby clothes.

@helloitsolly @robwalling The thing about success is that it saps your hunger and drive. It makes you too comfortable and removes your motivation. Also, if you are ADHD, then we are just not great at doing the same thing long-term. We get bored and want a new challenge.

My SaaS revenue and sign ups are flat I'm plateau-d at $1,000,000 a year A great achievement but a challenging spot to be in According to @robwalling only 5% of bootstrapped startups escape these types of revenue plateau The more complicated issue is that I am struggling to stay motivated The business is funding my lifestyle and that lifestyle is really good I travel constantly, see friends, train 5x week, give back, connect with other makers, spend time in nature, and fly business class The things that motivated me no longer do, and the idea of pushing through feels almost ridiculous At times, when things are flowing I feel capable and ready to keep going But my desire to move through tougher challenges (hiring, addressing technical debt) is decreasing I'm unable to cultivate urgency in the way I was before Maybe the lifestyle business I've built is enough

@nevmed @rorysutherland

In the 1950's when cool car culture was at it's peak, the DANGER of cars was at it's peak also. Zero regulations meant small fender benders could cause massive injury or death. This was making lots of headlines at the time. Yikes. So around the 1960's Volvo went hard on safety. This was their way to stand out from other cooler cars. They did a multi-year campaign around how safe Volvo's are....and till this day that's one of the main reasons people buy Volvo's!

@jonhainstock Embrace barefoot shoes eg saguaro.com/collections/dr… or xeroshoes.com/collections/me…

@FinanceDirCFO wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-…

There is pretty much zero likelihood that this business is worth $852bn... (I mean, it never was, but still...)

@stoobe @buttonslives @SwipeWright Check out the Quaker movement. They have been doing that for 300 years: no hierarchy, no clergy, heavy into non-judgement, fairtrade, the environment, etc.

I kind of want to design a new "religion" for modern day secular people that's science/reality based but focuses on the beauty and wonder in the world and also pulls in good traditions emphasizing important moral lessons and thankfulness. I think some ceremony and sacrifice are good too.

In recent years, I’ve found myself wondering how things might have turned out differently if I’d grown up religious and in a tight-knit family. I’m sort of envious of people who had that kind of upbringing. @SwipeWright and I are nonbelievers, and we’re also not very connected to a community right now, even though we moved from California to Nashville four years ago. We’re both workaholics. My childhood was very solitary, and I want my own child to have stronger social connections. So when we have a family, we’re going to have to make some real changes.

@buttonslives @AlobhaPatrick @DrCamiloOrtiz Not to go off track, but the hair is very impressive! Can you explain how it was done? Is it just a matter of lots of time and different dyes?

You might be making a general observation, but speaking personally, I’ve seen many psychiatrists since adolescence and have never come close to being diagnosed with a personality disorder. I didn’t have the kind of emotional reactivity or neediness associated with the personality disorders more commonly diagnosed in women; if anything, I was more avoidant of closeness. The most consistent diagnosis throughout my life has been depression, but I’m very healthy now. And I’m not looking for any more diagnoses. My hair was another form of artistic expression, and I was good at it.

I thought I was autistic. I was wrong. I was 30 in 2019 when stories of women discovering they were autistic all along began appearing everywhere. They popularized a newer understanding of autism, with its own “female presentation.” It was framed as a scientific correction to a historical wrong against women, the kind of narrative the press finds irresistible. Like so many women, I felt immense relief when I was formally diagnosed. It offered an explanation for the mental health crises of my youth and the daily realities of my adult life. Then I spent a year in the online autism community. What I saw there, especially the way activists treated parents of severely impaired children, turned me into a critic of neurodiversity. But it was becoming a journalist in 2022, after discovering detransitioners’ stories, that forced me to question narratives about identity and diagnosis, including my own. Journalism also required the social skills autism says I should have lacked. From there, the rest unraveled: many traits I had come to associate with autism are not uncommon in the general population, but through the “female autism” framework, they looked like a meaningful pattern. I don’t think my story is unique. The same incentives that kept my diagnosis intact may also help explain why so many women are entering the autism category in adulthood. Read my first article for @thefp: thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-…

@davidmcw @SineadOS1 I joke, of course, but being a Michelin-trained chef is pretty cool.

@davidmcw @SineadOS1 It was a good interview, David, but I was disappointed about your lack of pastry-based questions. The switch away from butter to vegetable-based pastry is one of the great scandals of our time. 'Trained in pastry at a two-Michelin-star restaurant' sinead.co

If you haven't listened to @SineadOS1 on my podcast this week, give it a whirl. She is truly interesting.

@AlanStout19 Alan, was there not meant to be something like GPs in casualty units to help them handle all the minor stuff, or did nothing ever come of that? A lot of people go to casualty as they can't see their GP, but I can see you could end up with a vicious circle of workload going to a&e

Well worth reading. We have been having these conversations as long as I have been involved in medicine but so little has changed. Patients, families and those involved in the actual care have all the answers

@WisprFlow guys, would you consider adding a feature whereby I could say something like "Add this to my tasks" or "Add this to my shopping list", and you automatically add it to the correct place? This would be especially useful linked to the action button.

@JP_Biz Can we not just change the code? There's a lot more single people around these days, and I think accommodation options like this can be good. These shared communal areas can be a benefit for people's mental health and give them a bit of a community.

@brianoneill Planning & building regs for starters. You would have to basically demolish & rebuild the interiors to get them up to code.

It’s been clear for a while that the Belfast student building boom is over. What will happened to permissioned, not started schemes? BTR? Into deep freeze? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@AkaPaulHoward Stick with the deep fried kangaroo or battered koala.

I’m in the chipper in Melbourne and I don’t know any of these words.

@awilkinson Not sure why he did not just give the link. It's interestingpeople.com

I hate conferences so I started my own. Here's the story... In 2010 I was sitting at a big circular table feeling nervous. You know the type — hotel banquet hall, cheesy gold chairs with greyhound bus pattern cushions. I was twenty-four but could've passed for seventeen, completely out of my element at my first tech conference in Vancouver. The guy sitting next to me, a prominent venture capitalist wearing a white button down shirt and a Patagonia vest turned to me. "What's your startup?" he asked. I explained that I didn't have a startup. That I had bootstrapped my business and that it was profitable. "Ah," he said with a withering look. "A lifestyle business…" Without another word, he turned his back on me to speak to the more interesting founder to his right, leaving me all alone, my cheeks flushed red, awkwardly sandwiched between two other conversations. I've never forgotten this feeling. How it felt to be dismissed and discarded based on an arbitrary status game. (Also: F that guy.) Unfortunately, my experience is likely familiar. When you go to most conferences, it's about status. What your badge says. Who you know. Whether you're a speaker. They're about sitting. Small talk. Glancing at badges. Bragging at the bar. Jerks like that VC. So, three years ago, I got fed up and decided to build the event I wish I could have attended all those years ago. I invited 150 of the most interesting people I know to my hometown, Victoria, BC, and put on a different sort of event. I called it ​Interesting People​. Most of the room was my awesome friends from all over the world, and about 30% was randoms to keep things interesting. I scrutinized every applicant, immediately crossing people off the list when I saw red flags. "Chief Innovation Officer" "Futurist" "Change Maker" "Catalyst" And the most dreaded of all: "Forbes 30 Under 30" My objective was simple: To fill the room with people who make me feel warm and gooey inside. That sounds weird, but you know what I mean right? Down to earn and low ego people who ask questions of others instead of hogging the mic. Once we had the right people, we went about flipping the usual conference format on its head: Crappy Conferences: ❌ Status to get in ❌ 80% listening ❌ Rubber chicken buffets ❌ Speakers fly in for two hours, give a talk, then jet ❌ Too many people to know anyone ❌ 50 LinkedIn contacts you'll never talk to again Interesting People: ✅ Aggressive douchebag filtering ✅ 80% of the time spent meeting people ✅ Unreal food ✅ No speakers — attendees ARE the content, and everyone stays the whole time ✅ Capped at 150 (​Dunbar's number​) ✅ You leave with 5 genuine friendships My friend ​@nickgraynews​ MCs the event with me, and he conducts like a maestro. He's the freaking master of running events. Instead of sticking to a tight schedule, he wings it. If an activity planned for an hour is only interesting for thirty minutes, he jumps ahead. He hand-picks specific groups for dinner and table conversations, putting people who have similar problems together and giving them prompts so nobody defaults to small talk. If someone is being a douche or hogging the mic, Nick's people radar instantly homes in on it and he works to neutralize the threat. His attention to detail is unbelievable. We also try to keep the content and attendees broad. Nobody wants to go to a circle jerk of tech bros talking about Openclaw (ok, maybe I do, but we don't learn much). Over the last few years, we've had scientists, comedians, writers, musicians, and even a magician. Folks like @MatthewDicks (champion storyteller), @hannibalburess (comedian), @foundmyfitness (scientist), @samreich (dropout), @jasonverners (INSANE magician), @thatbilloakley (head writer of the simpsons), @ScottDikkers (founder of the onion) and @danmanganmusic (musician), among many others. Plus some tech/business dorks like me thrown in to talk about Openclaw for good measure: @gregisenberg, @Patticus, @ShaanVP, @adamlisagor, @stephsmithio, @cyantist. So, important question: Are you interesting? Do you make people feel warm and gooey? Because we're doing it again this summer July 27-29 in Victoria. Maybe you should come. Ask some of the folks I mentioned about the event :-) I linked it in my last newsletter, you can find out how to get in there, or I'll link in a bit.

@usemonologue Yes exactly. A place for random thoughts but I want them all in one place not individual files.

@brianoneill Would love to know what your use case is. Do you want to have a running note where you can keep on appending new voice notes?

2 days to go