No More Elon Musk! | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

So, my latest video is out which means I don’t have to think about Elon Musk again for a little while!

In truth, I’d been keen to make a video about the emergence of the public sphere for a long, long time and had been waiting to find some way of making it appealing to a general audience. That Elon Musk attempted to buy Twitter thereby giving me the opportunity to do so was therefore a real godsend! While there were many ups and downs along the way, it was a really fun project to work on!

In the week since that video went out, I’ve been beginning to put some work in on the next project! Where the Elon Musk video was a very book-led, historical affair, the next video is going to see us return to doing some more analysis of the news media. It was a bit of a surprise to me how popular my video about think tanks ended up being and so my next video is going to go down a similar route of putting the way the media talks about certain issues under the microscope.

I don’t want to reveal exactly what that topic is going to be until next week’s post. However, this week has involved watching and analysing *a lot* of clips of politicians being interviewed on the news. My goal is to stay suuuuper focussed with this one and to try and curb my tendency to turn every video into a massive history lesson(!) so I’m hoping to start turning some of that analysis into a script as early as next week. Whether I can resist the urge to make something super in-depth or not is another question though.

As I always say, I’m still chasing that tight 20-minute video!

And outside of work?

As those of you who tuned into the premiere of Why Elon Musk Couldn’t Save Free Speech will know, I released that video whilst in the car on the way to a weekend trip to London with some friends (I obviously wasn’t driving, haha!). I had a really nice couple of days hanging out in the capital. It was one friend’s birthday and so we did an escape room and went out for dinner at a place called Din Tai Fung which I really enjoyed—the dumplings were incredible!

On the Sunday, I then split-off from that group of friends and went to hang-out with a different friend with whom I spent the day playing some Warhammer: Kill Team which was less sophisticated than going out for dinner but was a lot of fun!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

Whilst I was in London, I picked up a copy of Ha-Joon Chang’s Economics: The User’s Guide which I began reading on the train home. I’ve wanted to do a bit more reading on some basic concepts in economics for some time and, so far, this seems like a really good way in to the topic. To date, my knowledge of economics has been a bit scatter-gun; my reading around the topic has always been to jump in and read about a certain area. While the book isn’t just a textbook, it has been really great to read something that does take the time to flesh-out some of the really basic concepts at the foundations of the field. I’m certainly looking forward to reading more!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!