Ben Springwater
@benspringwater
cofounder @matter, friend to all
End of an era. Bit of personal history... Before starting Matter, Pocket was my favorite app. It wasn’t just the app I spent the most time in, Pocket was part of my identity. I was proud of my Top 1% status, as I'm sure many Pocket OGs can relate to. In 2015, I actually…
My biggest takeaway from Michael Pollan's book Caffeine is that Pollan quit coffee, habituated, experienced the deepest sleep of his life, and then, without craving or dependence, enthusiastically returned to drinking coffee once again.
Okay I couldn't take it anymore, climbed back up to 400mg caffeine per day. I'm fucking back baby let's gooo
The hydrostatic pressure of being immersed in water calms your nervous system (like a weighted blanket). Swimming in cold water, specifically, works wonders for anxiety and depression. As my friend Larry says, "it helps with the pain between the ears."
We know that swimming lowers anxiety levels. You don't even need to do laps or anything fancy like that... just get in the pool and tread water. It's insane how doctors will prescribe pills before simple remedies like going for a casual swim with friends a few times per week.
I’m here for all the “use AI to optimize my health data” stuff, but what’s even cooler is you can 80/20 optimal health with a few heuristics that fit in a tweet: - Sweat every day - Eat food, not too much, mostly plants - Drink more water, less everything else
Charging a small toll for non-verified phone numbers and non-approved emails seems like a great mechanism for solving spam and improving signal. I hope some protocol emerges and gains momentum. Maybe stable coins will help enable.
$0.01 (or orders of magnitude more) per non-verified phone number call, please.
“What is honored in a country is cultivated there.” —Plato It’s good to see the culture shifting away from parenthood-as-burden and toward parenthood-as-peak.
Culture is shifting. @Nike just released a pro-family ad, highlighting Scottie Scheffler’s baby son as a “win” Children aren’t burdens—they’re blessings.
It's just crazy what Substack has done. What started as "Mailchimp + Stripe", at a time when social media had already killed off so much journalism, has today completely redrawn the map of elite discourse, spawned major media companies (eg Free Press), minted dozens of journalist…
We’ve raised $100 million that we will put to work for creators and their audiences. Ownership for creators. Agency for audiences. Substack is a network built in service of people who care about culture. I’m pumped for this. Now we go big.
This whole interview is fantastic, but the closing line especially reverberates: “There’s a concern that AI leads to more slop, to more crappy things and not more of the best things. I don’t what Cursor would do to ensure the world is creating more of the *best* software, and…
More people should create things to proliferate an aesthetic into our future, not just to solve problems. This is the quality that every artist and engineer I respect shares most universally. Without this, you are doomed to churning out slop.
Seinfeld on the good life: "Transcendental meditation, lift weights, and drink espresso."
PSA for anyone who hasn’t listened to the @AcquiredFM Google episode - it’s a masterpiece. I envy what you have in store.
Not enough people are talking about how one of the most canonical pieces of audio programming ever just quietly slid into podcatchers, buried among the disposable news of the day.
“Just do your work, kid”
Matt Damon spitting wisdom. I love this take.
Nothing better
Men don’t talk about how incredible fatherhood is. It’s just not normalized, I guess. Normalize the dad posting. it’s the greatest thing you can aspire to as a man
Not enough people are talking about how one of the most canonical pieces of audio programming ever just quietly slid into podcatchers, buried among the disposable news of the day.
