Four. / Contributor One: Adrian Grant-Alfieri, The Proof
On wellness as a status symbol, Vitamix blenders, and Lincoln in the Bardo.
Hello, everyone. I’m excited to introduce our first Le Cinq contributor!
I met Adrian earlier this year (he’s a newly minted New York resident thanks to his new gig at Assembled Brands) and have been a huge fan of his media platform The Proof (more on it below), from his wide-ranging interviews to some of the most powerful takeaways and advice. I’m excited for you all to read some of his stories below.
Adrian Grant-Alfieri is the Founder of The Proof, a media platform that offers distilled wellness advice from world-class founders. Past guests include Mark Cuban, Tim Draper, Peter Rahal, Jeff Raider, and Emmett Shine. Adrian also heads up partnerships at Assembled Brands, a modern holding company re-inventing venture financing for the 21st century. Prior to launching The Proof, Adrian was a Venture Partner at Babel Ventures, an early-stage consumer fund in San Francisco, and holds a Bachelor’s from Brown University.
A fun fact: Back in college I also studied Furniture Design at RISD, which more or less shares a campus with Brown. I still try to escape to a woodshop as often as possible. It’s incredibly fun to just blast music and build things with my hands for hours on end.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve been in the midst of restructuring my creative writing schedule to accommodate long-form, co-written pieces with friends of mine. Collaborative articles seem to be the hardest to execute, especially while maintaining consistent narrative flow, cadence, and tone. Put simply, it’s easy to lose the reader. At the same time, it’s pretty damn cool to co-write pieces.
There’s something special about two minds trying to align along common threads and put words onto paper (or a shared Google Doc - I see what you did there, Adrian. [Ed.]). There’s also a purity to long-form reading and writing that a deluge of soundbites and tweets can’t replace, so I’m pretty psyched to get this up and running.
What are you currently excited about?
I’m not sure I’d frame this as a distinct investment thesis, but wellness as a status symbol is fascinating to me. I was chatting with an friend in LA a few months back and we started getting deep into layered biometrics and actionable mental health platforms. After that conversation, I kept returning to a line from Sapiens (stereotypical, I know), specifically around one of Harari’s iron laws of history:
Luxuries become necessities and in turn breed new obligations.
For folks involved in the bi-coastal travel circuit, wellness has clearly evolved from a luxury purchase into a basic necessity. It’ll be interesting to watch how new obligations spring up around meditation apps, upgraded biometric mattresses, and subscription-based shakes, among other ‘wellness as a status symbol’ product manifestations.
What’s a story or article that you're currently thinking about?
In a feature in the Paris Review, Don DeLillo illuminates an interesting connection between his writing and running habits. He notes how running breaks up his writing blocks and helps his mind “shake off one world and enter another.” I’ve been thinking through the power of incentives, in this case with regards to my writing habits, and how I can reframe running from a break to a mental space in which ideas are waiting to be found.
Though DeLillo draws a useful analogy here around the linkage between repetitive movements and activating room for creative thought, it lacks direct incentives (running = good ideas). The way I currently frame the activity (running = break from work) just doesn’t spark my interest. Definitely a work in progress for me.
What’s a product you’re currently obsessed with?
Off schedule answer: my Vitamix blender. A few months back I upgraded from a Magic Bullet to a heavy-duty Vitamix. Once you’re on the blender train, smoothies become a daily regimen and a gateway drug to Daily Harvest (still have a mixed opinion on these).
Even when life gets busy and my schedule is a blur, a solid blender makes it easy to keep up a pretty healthy diet and save on prep time. Highly recommend.
Wild Card: What’s an item you can’t shake your mind off of?
I’ve been on a George Saunders tear for the past few weeks, starting with Pastoralia and Civilwarland in Bad Decline and currently halfway through Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders’ style is hard to describe, likely falling somewhere between deeply moving and batshit crazy. I can’t shake my mind from a quote in Lincoln in the Bardo, where Saunders writes,
We seem to be born to love, but everything we love comes to an end. What do we do with that?
Sounds a bit depressing, I know, but he digs into a simple truth that humans have seemingly been grappling with for eternity. One of the reasons I can’t seem to shake this line is that I don’t have a single logical thread or starting point from which to think through potential answers.
~ C O L O P H O N ~
Please send all feedback, both positive and negative, to sumeetshahwork@gmail.com as this project continues to evolve.
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