Hope y’all had a great March!

South by Southwest (SXSW) took over Austin from March 10-19, so a sizable chunk of my month was occupied by SXSW-related events and festivities.

“What is SXSW?” you might ask.

And well, that’s a great question! This was my second year partaking and I’m still not entirely sure.

Last year at the festival I saw the comedian Dulcé Sloan (from The Daily Show) on a live podcast and she summed it up quite well:

But anyways, I got my hands on a reduced-priced badge, and so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and partake as best I could.

During the days I popped into a couple of sessions featuring speakers, panels, and live podcasts. My favorites included watching Bill Gurley (the venture capitalist that led the financing of Uber) interview Tim Ferriss (the podcaster and author of The 4-Hour Work Week), and one where the President of Shopify interviewed the YouTubers Colin and Samir about the creator economy.

At night I kicked it with a random assortment of friends that were in town for the festival. One night I went to back-to-back comedy shows (my favorite comedian from the evening was Pete Lee). And a friend from college was in town because his girlfriend’s band, Razor Braids, was playing a couple of shows at SXSW — so four of us from college watched them jam out at a bar on the east side of town.

An Ode to March Madness

Outside of SXSW, I spent the month watching a good amount of college basketball. I created a laughably bad March Madness bracket (even by this year’s standards), but I’ve been enjoying watching nonetheless.

I had a ton of fun cheering on Northwestern while they made a surprise run into the NCAA tournament, winning their first game and playing tough in their second-round loss to UCLA. Happiness truly is reality minus expectations. After being picked to finish second-to-last in the Big Ten, watching the team pull off the second-best record in the conference and take down top teams brought unexpected joy into my life.

Since Northwestern got knocked out of the tourney, I’ve dusted off the FAU tee that I got while attending an FAU football game in 2019 (my friend ran recruiting operations there at the time) and have been cheering on the Owls during their magical run into the Final Four 🦉

Monthly Favorites

🎵 Songs: Instead of flipping a coin to narrow this down, I’m hitting y’all with two songs that I’ve been grooving to this month:

• ​Weekend Friend by Goth Babe
• ​messy in heaven by venbee & Goddard

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📝 Article: The Levers That Money Can’t Pull by Lawrence Yeo — A fantastic read on the four things that lead to a life well-lived — health, freedom, purpose, and love. But while money can “buy” health and freedom, purpose and love are “money-negligent.” As Lawrence writes, “[Purpose and love] define the core of what makes life a beautiful experience, and nothing external and uniformly defined like money can shift them.”

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🎥 Video: NPR Tiny Desk Concert Submission by Family Junket — My friends at Family Junket jammed out on their Tiny Desk Concert submission video with their new tune Buzzin 🤘

Thanks for reading! As always, if anything I shared resonated with you, I’d love for you to shoot me a reply 😊

Til Next Month,

Ben

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