✂️ What to Cut, What to Keep

The Bob Seger and Marcus Aurelius School of Focus — Plus, OpenAI and AMD Team Up for Monster Collab, Sending Lisa Hsu's Stock Soaring

Author

Katie Perry
October 07, 2025

Welcome to Tuesday Thursday Saturday! Here, I share a snapshot of trending stories across business, tech, and culture, plus some updates from the daily financial news show I host. - KP

The Big Idea: Subtraction Is a Superpower

I’m in the final stretch of writing a manuscript for a book that’s due in a few weeks. The character count seemed preposterous at the start of this project, and now I’m wondering how I am going to fit everything I want to say into 70,000 words.

My thought process is seldom linear. While I aggressively maintain organization by creating infinite lists on paper, Post-Its, and in Asana, the way thoughts and ideas are organized in my brain is all over the place. It’s more like a giant bulletin board with collages of related, unrelated, and tangential ideas, intelligible only to me.

Me, for better or for worse.

This bulletin board way of thinking doesn’t work when writing a book that’s supposed to demystify a complex and nuanced topic. And it certainly doesn’t work when the goal is to inspire or educate people, or “sell” ideas to others.

Anyway, this entire process has me wanting to understand and learn more about how to streamline my ideas and separate the signals from the noise. If you’re like me and have a bias toward thoroughness and detail, you might also find some of these insights helpful.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “addition by subtraction.” What you can avoid or eliminate from a situation is sometimes as important as what you put in. A few months back, I wrote about the importance of nothingness: “Space is what gives everything else its shape.”

There’s a Bob Seger song about the uniquely human experience that is consciously navigating the passage of time. In “Against the Wind,” he laments, “Deadlines and commitments – what to leave in? What to leave out?” Sing it, Bob!

“What to leave in and what to leave out” is such a simple and universally understood concept. And it isn’t remotely new. 

The Stoics asked it two thousand years ago. Marcus Aurelius wrote about focusing only on what’s within your control. Modern management thinkers just gave it spreadsheets and acronyms. This problem has literally been haunting humans since we started keeping lists.

Economists describe attention as a scarce resource. It’s the currency we trade for productivity, meaning, and sometimes sanity. In the “economics of attention,” every ping, post, and pixel competes for the same finite resource: our time and our ability to notice – both of which comprise a zero-sum game. Once we understand that, we start to see focus as a bit of a superpower.

There’s a fairly clear consensus among experts across psychology and leadership when it comes to what good prioritizers do well. 

  1. They tie their actions to clear values;

  2. They eliminate relentlessly; and

  3. They measure success by outcomes, not activity.

Greg McKeown’s Essentialism calls it “the disciplined pursuit of less.” John Doerr’s Measure What Matters teaches teams to define success through a handful of measurable results. Both boil down to the same idea: if everything is important, nothing is. Sound familiar?

For individuals, frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix or the 80/20 rule offer a kind of mental scaffolding. The Eisenhower test helps you separate urgency from importance. The 80/20 rule reminds you that a small fraction of your efforts drive the majority of results. It’s less about choosing perfectly and more about cutting intelligently.

What I found most interesting, though, was the cognitive science of it all: the human brain treats “important” as emotional … not logical. We “feel” our way to priorities, then rationalize them after the fact. Which means that any system, whether that’s OKRs, value maps, or color-coded to-do lists, only works if it reflects what we already care about. When it doesn’t, we rebel. That’s why people abandon productivity systems that look good on paper but ignore the messy, irrational reality of being human.

We’re all guilty of it: chasing the work that flatters our strengths, which may not be what’s most important. I’d rather perfect a byline than stare at an analytics dashboard, just like a design-oriented founder would rather tweak a billboard than a business plan. It’s human to equate “what we like” or “what we’re good at” with “what matters.” 

But real focus asks us to get over ourselves. You don’t really need a new system for that so much as a new perspective. Important to whom? The challenge is learning to measure importance in terms of impact, not instinct.

Daily Rip Live: OpenAI and AMD Squad Up, Shutdown Day Six, and Costco Double-Dips

Every weekday, Shay Boloor and I co-host a morning markets show for Stocktwits called The Daily Rip Live. Monday’s episode covered a ton of ground, and our pal Olivia “Voz” Voznenko hopped in to share some of her favorite setups for the week. We’re now a week into the government shutdown, with no end in sight. And the market doesn’t seem to care? OpenAI and AMD also just cut a massive deal, sending AMD stock up more than 20% in the trading session. Costco also announced a $499 Ozempic and Wegovy offering via a new partnership with Novo Nordisk.

⇢ 2:00 | AI Arms Race: OpenAI signs a multi-year deal with AMD to supply hundreds of thousands of AI chips starting in 2026, plus a warrant to buy up to 10% of AMD. The move diversifies GPU supply beyond Nvidia and supports OpenAI’s massive Stargate supercomputer project with Microsoft. $AMD ( ▲ 23.71% )  $NVDA ( ▼ 1.11% )  $MSFT ( ▲ 2.17% )  

⇢ 7:00 | Equity Stakes & National Strategy: The AMD-OpenAI partnership reflects a new era of equity cross-holdings between AI hardware and software leaders, driven by both commercial necessity and national security concerns.

⇢ 11:00 | Galaxy Digital, led by Mike Novogratz, launches Galaxy One, a retail hybrid wealth app offering crypto, stocks, and high-yield products (8% APY for accredited investors). It signals a move toward super app convergence between traditional finance and crypto. $GLXY ( ▲ 7.41% )  

⇢ 26:30 | Despite the ongoing U.S. government shutdown, markets remain focused on AI growth. “It’s not a bubble!” I explain the plot of ‘Kindergarten Cop’ to Shay and Voz.

⇢ 36:00 | Firefly Aerospace rises 12% after acquiring defense firm Siatech for $855M; Rocket Lab and AST SpaceMobile are highlighted as space plays to watch. $FLY ( ▲ 6.28% )  $RKLB ( ▲ 4.17% )  $ASTS ( ▲ 7.59% )  

⇢ 46:00 | Costco begins selling Ozempic and Wegovy at $499/month for uninsured consumers through a Novo Nordisk partnership. One in eight U.S. adults have used GLP-1 drugs, signaling massive market potential. $NVO ( ▲ 0.03% )  $COST ( ▼ 0.49% )  

Now, Here’s a Chart

Crypto-fatigued? Or just saturated? Bitcoin is up 10x in the past five years, but Google Search volume for “bitcoin” is at a five-year low. A couple of ways to interpret the data here: Back in 2020, there were probably a lot more “what is Bitcoin?” searches, but if BTC is more mainstream, you would think more people would be searching the term generally. What do you think?

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Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.