If someone cold emails me and says "Hey David, I have a project you're really interested in, I'd love to chat", I'll likely ignore it. But if the same person tells me that same thing, face-to-face, at a conference, I'll happily take a meeting.

Something about an in-person interaction triggers my innate trust sensors. Maybe this is an evolved sense, inherited from my email-less ancestors. Maybe it's a consequence of growing up pre-Facebook. Either way, it is an informed conclusion. Emails can be effortlessly generated by computers. Past experience with Nigerian Princes has trained me to discount most online interactions.

I'm not alone, of course. As a society we lack trust in digital interactions. This may be logical, but it's also inhibiting.

Just as biases against marginalized groups in the US make it harder for those groups to prosper, our bias against digital interactions keep individuals outside of our physical communities from participating economically and socially.

As jobs become increasingly remote there's huge opportunity to include people from other localities who can bring advanced skills, new ideas and, in some cases, cost savings.

But biases will probably keep that from happening.

I used to work at Andela, a startup that outsourced talented developers from Africa for US based companies. The main challenge of Andela, like its competitors in Eastern Europe or India, was to get our clients to trust people they had never met in person. The developers needed us. They couldn't just reach out to a US employer and inquire about a role. They needed a trusted intermediary, paying in-person visits every few months.

I'd be so frustrated if this was the case for me. If every startup job I wanted was inaccessible without applying to and accepting a lower salary from a staffing company. If the only way around this was to travel 10,000 miles to bump into someone at a meet-up.

However, it's frustrating on the other side too. As mentioned earlier, there's a logical reason it's harder to trust a stranger you meet over email. In person meetings require significantly more effort than digital introductions. A bot, or a human assisted by a bot, can send a thousand intro emails in a second. Someone at a conference has sacrificed at least a few hours to meet the other people there. Effort demonstrates commitment, commitment builds trust. Since Andela I've worked with quite a few of my old colleagues on projects, remotely. However, when someone, possibly someone just as talented, sends me a cold LinkedIn message, I ignore it.

The people I work with is largely limited to the people I or a trusted friend have met in person or over zoom. A stranger isn't gonna stumble into my zoom call (at least not anymore), so the only way I'll meet strangers is if they are geographically near me. Lunchclub, helped me experience conference-like chance encounters online, but the people I met were largely the same kind of people I'd meet in person.

So what's the solution? I've been thinking about this a lot recently. How can we create online interactions that can be trusted in the way an in person interaction is?

Maybe a system where you can only send a few messages per day and you have to verify your identity?

Maybe a proof-of-work system that forces you to expend some time or money to communicate with someone?

Or maybe this isn't a problem at all? Or perhaps it can't be solved? Thoughts?

Many of us have worked on startups, so building a good product came up.

However, as we discussed further, it became clear that a product, as a source of passion, only went so far.

One friend commented that he used to dream about hockey stick shaped usage graphs. But now, he says, none of that is exciting anymore. He has lots of users, at least compared to before. The dream feels accomplished.

The dream that is never accomplished, for him, is building a great team. For him, his team became his product.

The phrase "dream team" seems more apt now.

That idea really resonated with me. Certainly, I have dreams of building a super impactful product, used by millions of people. But, at this point, my more compelling goals are almost all around working with great people. Whether I build that team from scratch, help one develop, or join one that's already vibeing, being part of a great team feels more important than building a great product.

It's fortunate that a great team is also likely to produce great products. In fact, in today's world, where so much of a product's success comes down to rapid, learning focused, execution, team is actually more important than any specific iteration of a product.

VCs know this. When investing in early stage companies, team matters most. The product is just evidence that your team is great.

Yet, usually we focus on products or founders when we celebrate success. Our shared stories focus on heroes and the results of their actions. As a result, when aspiring entrepreneurs dream, they usually dream of fame and product usage.

I wish there were more stories about amazing teams coming together and working together. Or, specifically, I wish I had watched more movies and read more books about this.

In college my friends and I used to alternate between watching Star Trek and The Social Network. Late at night (or early morning) after finishing a project we would put one of these programs on the TV we salvaged from the dump. That was what we dreamed about when we finally entered a pizza induced sleep— an amazing team coming together to explore space or a brilliant founder giving up everything for success.

Visions from The Social Network won out over Star Treks dreams for a while, but I just watched them both for the first time in years, and Star Trek really resonates.

Usually.

A "good" community can help us to transcend our naturally selfish instincts to work together as a team.

They incentivize us to do things for others in return for status.

Status, the positive regard of others, is something we all want and it's fortunate that earning this usually means helping people.

But not always.

Sometimes communities are structured in a way that gives status for doing things that aren't helpful, or in fact harmful.

I'm sure you've observed or been part of this kind of community in the past.

You've had peers that were respected for how much they put down others. Or peers that were respected for being a certain race, or gender.

These kinds of communities are not so great.

Not only are these kinds of communities uncomfortable to be a part of but they can harm the world outside them.

At best they produce leaders who have no history of providing benefit, but have status nonetheless. Think about Gaston, the narcissistic anti-hero from Beauty and the Beast. That guy did very little for his community, but thanks to his looks, got a bunch of status. Then he used that status to lead the other villagers in an attack on the Beast's castle! A bad idea from someone who had earned their status without providing much benefit.

At worst, communities can be actively destructive, rewarding members for destroying other communities.

I'm not a great historian, but I hunch that historically successful societies probably had lots of good communities and not so many "bad" ones. Conversely, I imagine that societies begin to fail when their constituent communities start to reward less productive or downright destructive behavior.

Recently I've wondered about where the US is in this regard. There's been a lot of talk about communities, particular those enabled by social media. From what I can see, a lot of communities, across the US political spectrum, fall into the "unproductive or destructive" category. I'm guilty of this myself. I seek status across the different communities I'm part of. Most of those communities use some form of social media as their primary communication tool. As a result I find myself spending a lot of time posting and commenting in order to win status. Is this ideal? Probably not. If I spent as much time actually building products as I do writing about building products, I'd probably have built 25% more products. How nice.

Of course, I hope my posts aren't entirely useless— they should have some educational and entertainment value. But, in the ideal world I'd be able to earn status by just doing my job well.

Politicians have it worse than me. Trump's tweets are a huge way he earns status as president, but they provide very little of the value that a president is supposed to provide. Trump has shown that social media expertise is necessary and largely sufficient to be elected president.

Not sure how to change this trend. It seems like the inevitable result of having a platform which enables anyone to mass broadcast information. If you can mass broadcast you doing your job (as Twitch streamers do) then that is a super productive way to build status. Great community. But if your job is not amenable to that (sorry politicians) then twitter posts are all you got. Not so great community.

Sometimes I read for action. I want some new piece of knowledge that will change my behavior in some way. I might read about a programming problem I'm struggling with and try a new strategy as a result.

Other times I read for entertainment. I want to consume something exciting, that defies my expectations. I might read a science fiction novel and not act any different as a result, but be thoroughly entertained.

Sometimes I read just to be right. I want to take in information that validates my understanding of the world. I might read an article about the failings of the trump presidency, learning nothing new, but feel entirely validated for voting against him.

I observe that other people read for similar reasons.

In the last 40 years, it seems that the amount of time we spend consuming media for each of the above reasons, has shifted.

We spend more time consuming to feel right, and less time consuming for action.

Neil Postman has a book "Amusing Ourselves To Death" about this. He proposes that we can score media using a number called "information to action ratio". This measures the amount of information we take in vs. the amount of action that results. When we read an instruction manual, this ratio is very low. There is not a lot of information and a lot of action we will take. When you watch international news on CNN, the ratio is probably pretty high— you're probably not gonna hop over to another country and do something about the thing you just saw.

When the ratio is high we're not reading for action, which means we're either reading for entertainment or righteousness.

40 years ago we started shifting from action focused consumption to entertainment focused consumption. Neil Postman’s book (published in the 80’s) was about this.

In the last 10 years I think we've gone from entertainment to righteousness.

If Postman was to write his book today I think he'd title it "Being Right to Death"

I'm not completely sure how or why this happened. I'm guessing social media had something to do with it. I'm also guessing that the slow, continuing demise of organized religion had something to do with it.

The most popular books in the world continue to be religious texts, but in the developing world that lead is narrowing.

Media, whether mass or fringe is filling the void left when there is no religion to tell you you're right.

The printing press was key in the rapid spread of modern religions. Social media is like the printing press gone mad, enabling the dissemination of thousands of different bibles.

I suppose there's nothing really wrong with this— I like to feel right as much as the next guy. However, it is dangerous when we mix up righteousness focused consumption and action focused consumption. If we're consuming to be right, but then attempt to take action based on what we read, we end up as zealots, acting in blind faith while ignoring real world feedback.

I suspect that some of our political challenges in the US are due to this. What do you think?

Long time readers may remember a post discussing sleep as a convenient emotional reset.

I talked about changing who we spend time with as a way to reset parts of our personality.

I wrote about how meditating in a spa is an effective mental reset for me, personally.

Research is starting to show that a large swath of mental disorders result from cognitive hyper-activity.

Depression is when we think too much about the past.

Anxiety is when we think too much about the future.

Excess REM sleep (aka thinking too much while we sleep) can exacerbate both these conditions.

Mental health treatments, from talk therapy to antidepressants, act as a reset button for our thought processes. They let us break out of negative cognitive loops. LSD, which has been shown to be incredibly effective as a treatment for depression and anxiety, is famous (or notorious) for its ability to "open your mind".

All of us have times when we get stuck in outdated thought processes. We experience frustration when old beliefs keep us from accomplishing our goals. We feel anxiety when our lives proceed in a way that violates expectations for the future.

As I've become more convinced of the need for mental resets, I've started thinking about tools that can help enable them.

The biggest factor reinforcing negative, cognitive feedback loops is the environment.

Most existing tools, like meditation, drugs, or therapy, shift our perception of our environment. These products allow us to subtly reset without disrupting our lives. However, for many people they're not enough. They will experience a new perspective for a few hours or days, then their environment will guide them back into old thought patterns.

This is why people move close to their gym when they want to get fit.

This is why halfway houses are an effective treatment for addiction.

This is why travel is recommended as a way to prevent burnout.

Environmental change is the most powerful tool we have for resetting our thoughts. However, environmental changes are often disruptive and expensive

I want to make it as easy to change your environment as it is to order a prescription. I want coaches, therapists and friends to recommend targeted, environmental changes in the same way they prescribe other treatments.

My first attempt at this is a house where you live and work in an environment that reinforces behaviors that you want in your life.

If you want to get fit you can spend a month with other aspiring athletes who join you for regular morning workouts and healthy dinners.

If you want to be more mindful you can live with a group of people who meditate twice a day and do evening yoga.

The houses will be located just outside major cities and will be fully equipped for remote work. Participants will work remotely and remain within driving distance of their old lives. You can try on a new lifestyle for a month, determine whether it's something you want long term, and establish habits that will create sustainable change.

I would love your thoughts on this— even more than I normally love everyone's thoughts on my blog posts.

Here is a 5 minute survey with some questions related to this idea.If you have time and interest please fill it out! I hope to run the first pilot house early next year, so check in then for more updates (and also every other day for all my normal blog posts)

I'm amazed that they are able to maintain a cheerful demeanor through almost any problem.

No matter how many plans go awry, these people are always able to find the silver lining. Or even when none is found, they are somehow, very chill.

Recently I was talking with a friend who falls into this category and she mentioned that during quarantine she had actually been quite depressed.

This is a person whom I had never seen in any mood less than sanguine.

It was then that I realized, for many of my friends, there is no weird trick. I always see them happy because, well, they're more extroverted.

When they're around other people they get energy, they feel joy. Thus, I'm pretty much always gonna see them in a happy state.

It's like quantum physics in a way— my friend might not have been happy before I observed them, but as soon as I was able to observe their mood, they became happy.

When these friends are alone they are just like anyone else, subject to the same unhappy moods we all get.

This was an important reminder for me because usually I put these friends into the category of "people who probably don't need my help". They appear to totally have their life together. I always think of our time together as mainly serving me. I may need their companionship, but a person this chill probably doesn't often need me.

As a result these friends were last on my list to check in on during Covid.

However, weirdly, the opposite was true. These friends are the ones that would especially appreciate my call. One week in quarantine will hit them harder than it hit me.

This makes me wonder what other assumptions I make about my friends and their lives outside our time together are worth updating.

Recently I've been interviewing a lot of friends about a product idea I'm working on. It's been awesome, not only because the feedback is insightful and totally clutch, but also because I'm learning things about my friends which I never knew. I’ve heard about challenges my friends faced in the last few years which never came up before, even in weekly 1:1s.

Anyway, it is a good reminder for me to be curious about my friends, in addition to being generally in awe of them. 

And to more often build new products which I can interview people for.

But it wasn't really a humanitarian disaster. It was a status disaster.

During the 6 years after the great depression US life expectancy actually went up.

The reality was that, by 1929, America had a powerful transportation network, advanced food growing techniques, plenty of space, housing and natural resources. During the great depression a lot of people lost a lot of money, a lot of people had a lower quality of life, but very few, in America, were starving.

In 1989 the Japanese market lost almost half its value. It took almost 26 years for it to return to the same level. What changed in Japan after this historic crash?

Fewer extravagant parties. Less consumption. But otherwise, nothing. People still lived ridiculously long. Society stayed clean and safe. Transportation networks continued to grow.

How about the 2008 Global Recession? Same deal. Population health actually increased, even as our GDP dropped.

However there is one source of death that went up during all of the downturns highlighted above:

Suicide. Because the issue wasn't really losing money, it was losing status.

In the US, and most of the capitalistic world, the ability to earn an income plays prominently into status. Our view of ourselves and others is modulated largely by what we're getting paid. This is actually not a bad thing. If a lot of people pay me over an extended period of time, it's a pretty good sign I'm trustworthy and/or valuable. I probably deserve some status if people think I’m valuable enough to pay money to.

In this way money is really just status points that are exchanged and hoarded.

When you suddenly lose a lot of money and buying power due to an economic collapse, you lose a lot of status as well. If you can't live in the same house and own the same nice things, the societal measure of you, is lowered. This is obviously dumb, since your actual worth hasn’t changed, but seems like a natural and probably unavoidable result of capitalism. 

One of the key features, from what I can tell, of a "developed" country is that the population can focus on efficient distribution of status instead of resources.

Before the 20th century in the US, when we were still “developing” there was a challenge in making sure that our resources were being used efficiently. There was a lot of capital and natural resources, but much of it was not being used or was used inefficiently. There was corruption, gangs, and other sources of waste.

This all was a big problem because the cost, in an absolute sense, to sustain a life, was pretty high. It took a lot more literal energy to grow food, power machines, move messages around etc. So when resources weren't used efficiently, people might die.

Technology and improved governance structures changed this. By the time the Great Depression hit it was cheap enough to sustain a life that, even when the output of the US dropped by 90%, we could still support everyone. The Great Depression, like all bubbles, was caused by inefficient allocation of resources, but even at our most inefficient, nobody starved.

Today, a depression should have even less of an effect. Thanks to technology, not only is food abundant for 90% of America regardless of income, but high quality entertainment and communication is as well. Americans across all income brackets spend 12 hours per day, on average, consuming some form of entertainment, for little to no cost.

So efficient allocation of resources is no longer really an existential issue in a developed country, or even a quality of life issue. And, as technology continues to improve, hopefully it will become less and less of an issue across the Global South, as well.

This means that, in "developed" countries, the market can go crazy, as is happening now in the US, with capital pouring into companies that are surely overvalued, and that's OK. We have more capital than we need, so inefficient allocation is fine.

Yet status distribution is still an issue. Inequity manifests even in abundance. We, as humans always want to experience growth in status relative to ourselves and others. It is an innate desire that is amplified by capitalism.

When automation replaces most of the jobs in the US, which seems likely in the next 50 years, everyone will likely still be able to do most of the things they did before. But we'll be super unhappy because we won't be accumulating status. Ditto if we experience a serious economic depression.

So how do we efficiently allocate status? How do we ensure that everyone, regardless of employment, knows they're valuable? There's no single fix— there will need to be cultural shifts, technological changes and improvements in governance.

One proposal, which seems promising to me, is a UBI funded entirely through deflation. Print a bunch of money, decreasing the value of the US dollar, and issue it to individual citizens simply for living. Those who have a lot of US dollars (wealthy folks and foreign countries) will be pissed, but that's probably OK. Again, focusing on the happiness of rich people and corporations makes sense when you are aspiring for efficient use of resources— when you want the market to be operating at full capacity. However, it's less important when you're so far past scarcity. Remember, even 100 years ago, when our unemployment rate was 25% the US was still able to avoid an increase in mortality.

Anyway, what do you think? How do we ensure equal distribution of status? Is that even an important issue? If not, how do we keep people happy when there are no jobs but plenty of livin to be lived? 

This might seem like a surprising statement.

I like solving hard problems. I'll find creative solutions, work long hours, and do what is needed to get things done.

I work on challenges that other people have given up on.

That might not sound defeatist, but defeatism is, indeed, key to my ability to solve problems. In fact, I think it's key for every good problem solver I know.

If a problem exists for long enough for me to encounter it, it usually means others have tried to solve it. Many of those others were surely smarter, more experienced or better funded than I. Why will I be able to solve it?

Because, even though I really, really, want to solve 100% of a problem, I'm willing to give up on part of it and accept an imperfect solution.

It seems like there 3 general approaches to solving problems:

1) Perfectionist. You want uniformly good results and expect that uniformly good execution is required to achieve those results.

2) Optimist. You want uniformly good results but expect that those can be achieved with imperfect execution.

3) Realist. You do not expect to receive uniformly good results and do not attempt to execute perfectly.

Let's look at an example problem and see how each of these problem solving types approach it:

You're having a dinner party. You ask your guests for dietary restrictions and, unsurprisingly, most people have one. Some are vegan, some are gluten free, some can't eat nuts, etc.

The perfectionist will make a separate meal for everyone. They want everyone to be happy and expect that, in order to do that, care must be put into every meal.

The optimist also wants everyone to be happy, but feels that they can do this by making sure everyone has at least one dish they can eat.

The realist accepts that they can't make everyone happy. They plan out a meal that 80% of people can eat, and tell the other 20% that they need to eat before coming— but there will be plenty of wine and great conversation.

Every strategy has its pros and cons.

The perfectionist makes every guest happy but spends a ton of their own time and energy doing so. Are they gonna have another dinner party anytime soon? Probably not.

The optimist enjoys the prep and enjoys the dinner, but some of their guests are probably a bit perturbed. They weren't told that the only dish they'd be able to eat was the salad.

The realist has to tell some people that they can't accommodate them, but otherwise the dinner is happy all around. Those who don't get a meal at the party get advance warning so they can eat before coming.Although all 3 strategies involve some tradeoffs, the realist, by accepting that a tradeoff will occur, is able to choose what they tradeoff and how that happens.

A lot of the startups I work with suffer from an optimistic or perfectionist mindset. They forge blindly ahead hoping everything will work out differently for them then all the other, failed companies. Or they spend many months working hard on the perfect product before releasing one version and failing.

Much of the work I do as an advisor is just getting them to identify and accept a tradeoff. I get them to understand that it's a success to accept defeat in a part of their business or product that doesn't really matter. I help them see that their competitive edge is derived from ignoring 20% of the problems that other companies are trying to solve, so that they can be 20% better on the problems they are solving.

I wonder sometimes if that same mentality can be applied to our national projects.

For instance, I think this may be the cause of our student loan crisis. We tried to provide a college education to everyone through guaranteed loans. We weren't willing to accept that not everyone was going to be able to go to any college they wanted. We went for 100% success. We didn’t think we needed to make a tradeoff. However, in the process of avoiding one known tradeoff we unknowingly made a much bigger one— skyrocketing college tuition. We wanted everyone to win and instead everyone became losers.

This might not sound very progressive— to give up on such an important problem as universal education. Especially coming from someone who's worked in progressive education for a while. But if we had given up on 100% success here we could have created a much better solution that enabled real educational outcomes without burdening students in $150K+ of debt. Other countries have achieved similar or higher employment levels to the US at 1/150th the cost, through a combination of technical schools, on the job training and Universities. They accepted defeat, and in doing so solved the real problem.

What do you think? Should we compromise when it comes to big national initiatives? Or is that an arena where we can't be defeatist?

Recently I was with a friend traveling through Scotland.

When we're together we end up spending a lot of time talking about how weird the world is. We've both lived in lots of different countries, including various parts of Asia, Europe and Africa. So at this point, basically everything seems, relatively, weird.

During this trip to Scotland we started talking about Chinese names for foreign cities.

To understand why this topic is interesting it's important to note that Chinese is written using semantic characters.

Each character is a word, not a letter.

However each character is also a monosyllabic sound.

So the character 好 means good and is pronounced hao.

There are a bunch of other characters that are also pronounced hao, and they are differentiated from this one using special tones and context.

Anyway, there is no phonetic writing system in common use in China. There is a system called pinyin which people use when learning. But you won't find it written anywhere outside of that.

This means that things like maps just have characters on them. When you open Google maps, in Chinese, you're gonna see a bunch of characters.

Although each character is a word, in this case, on the map they're being used to make sounds which are kind of similar to the name of the town.

Take the town I grew up in, Gaithersburg.

The Chinese name for it, on Google Maps, is:

盖瑟斯堡

The pronunciation for that is gai se si bao. Get it? Kind of sounds like Gaithersburg, right?

Anyway, like I said before, these are all words, not letters. They might have monosyllabic pronunciations but they have complex meanings.

All taken this translation of Gaithersburg approximately means "Castle for a Zithern".

A Zithern is an ancient Chinese stringed instrument. Presumably many of them were secretly housed in Gaithersburg castle.

Anyway, obviously these characters were assigned for their sounds, not their meanings. But that's the interesting thing— there are thousands of other character combinations which would have had the same sound. How was this one chosen?

Or, better question: WHO was in charge or choosing? Like, how did Google decide that this was the Chinese translation for Gaithersburg? Someone, presumably the first Chinese speaker to visit Gaithersburg wrote home about it, or blogged about it, and the characters they chose to use for its name spread around? Were there, at one point, competing spellings? The sounds "gai se si bao" could also be translated into something along the lines of "Everchanging Colorful Death Bag". Was that a competing name for Gaithersburg at one point?

And Gaithersburg is a relatively large city. There are Chinese names for cities in the middle of nowhere!

Maybe there are competing, Chinese travel bloggers who journey far and wide in search of unnamed western cities which they can choose the name for. I've never heard of them, but seems like it would be a fun gig.

Anyway, to my Chinese readers, can you solve this mystery? How does Google or Baidu choose the characters used for western cities? Can I propose a new name for Gaithersburg? 

Controls is an important and interesting field, whose lessons are pretty hard to distill into one sentence, but I'll give it a shot: Never use positive feedback.

Ok not never, but there are very few systems in the world that rely on positive feedback.

In a positive feedback control system the closer you are to your goal the harder you try.

Take your car's cruise control system— a classic example of control theory in action. Cruise control operates through NEGATIVE feedback, meaning the closer your car is to it's set speed, the less gas it will inject into the engine. If you want to go 60mph but you're currently going 30, your car will inject a lot of gas. If you want to go 60 but are going 55, it will inject very little. This allows it to smoothly reach your desired speed and not go over. Good job, car.

Now imagine if instead your cruise control used positive feedback. This would mean that the closer your car got to it's set speed the MORE gas it would inject into the engine.

I once accidentally built a system like this in college. It didn't end well. The arm I was trying to control spun in circles very quickly until it broke.

The reason you don't have many positive feedback systems is that most systems are designed for stability. The majority of systems, including the natural ones powering our body, work to maintain a stable state. Positive feedback systems are inherently unstable. Negative feedback systems are, when designed well, stable.

One of the few, natural, positive feedback systems I can think of is childbirth. When you go into labor each contraction stimulates more oxytocin to be released which stimulates more contractions. Contractions get more and more frequent until, presumably, a baby is born. To be clear, I've never done this, but this is how I heard it works.

Childbirth is a great place to use positive feedback because you don't want stability. You want disruption. You want the child that is inside you get out. When you want change, particularly rapid change, positive feedback is good.

Another place where you can see positive feedback, and thus instability, is in most societal systems. This is a feature of US society in particular that has gotten a lot of press lately.

In the US (and, to be clear, most countries, but I'll speak for my own here) the more power you have, the easier it is to get more power. In capitalism money turns into more money. In a technocracy knowledge turns into more knowledge. In a hierarchy status turns into more status.

The rich get richer, the smart get smarter and those with status, well, you get the point. This is positive feedback.

We have negative feedback systems in place which try to correct for some of these, naturally, unstable systems.

For instance, our progressive tax policy takes more money from you the more you make. Though It's not super effective at achieving stability (a wealth tax would be more effective), it does somewhat counter the positive feedback inherent in capitalism.

Positive feedback for knowledge is naturally checked by technological progress— especially today. Most of the useful technical knowledge I'm accumulating today won't be useful in 10 years. Even if I can accumulate knowledge faster than the average person, thanks to the education I've been fortunate to receive, there's a reset every 10 years when my knowledge becomes outdated. Thus knowledge and skill inequity is, largely, averted.

However, positive feedback for status, has no effective check in American society.

Cultures have attempted to put status accumulation in check for a long time, but most fall prey to the very system they're trying to regulate. Most religions, for instance, include instructions to help those weaker and less fortunate. Many religions even prescribe self harm for situations where you realize you have more status than others. However, these religions usually become hierarchies themselves. Those climbing the hierarchy are unlikely to emphasize the religious doctrines that would prevent them from benefiting from their hard work. Thus, religion has mostly been unable to check status accumulation. In fact, sometimes it makes things worse.

The lack of negative feedback on status accumulation leads to power inequities in the US that transcend wealth or ability. Whatever group has historically held the most status within a domain continues to accumulate status faster than other groups. Within the domain of work and politics, in the US, the group that has historically held the most status is white men. As a result it's pretty freakin hard for marginalized groups to obtain that same status, regardless of their wealth or ability.

Of course, it's also important to note that status feeds positively into wealth and knowledge as well. The more status you have the better educational resources you can access and the more capital available to you. So, until we can solve for status inequities, it will be hard for any system to control the inequities elsewhere.

So my question is, what is the status equivalent of taxation? What is a negative feedback loop that makes it harder to accumulate status the more status you have?

I have some thoughts on this, mostly based on observing cultures that have managed to survive for a long time. I'll probably publish these in my next essay. However, what do you think?

Note: This entire essay assumes that societal stability is a good thing. I personally would like a relatively stable, long lived, American society. However, if you like the boom-bust cycle that is typical of most civilizations, then probably positive feedback is the way to go. 

A subscription service that makes it safer and easier than ever for you and your family to travel and reside around the world.

Includes clubhouses in most major cities. Check in any time for a safe, convenient place to meet other members.

Includes educational services— both online and in person. Your child can receive a high quality k-12 education from anywhere in the world.

Includes expedited visa services for 20+ countries.

Includes repatriation in the case of emergency.

OK you caught me, this isn't a product, it's the services provided by the US Government to citizens abroad.

However, it DOES look a lot like a tech product right?

In fact, I consulted for a company in Nairobi that is developing a product very much like this.

If you were to become a member, it would be similar to having dual citizenship.

The key missing feature, of course, is a military. However, if this company were based within an existing country with a sizable military, it would be able to access many of the same benefits as having its own.

Estonia has an e-residency available for purchase today. You never need to have lived in Estonia, but you can purchase the e-residency and launch a virtual business within EU borders. It DOES not, however, give any benefits beyond that. That being said, you could imagine that if that if Estonia, which has about 1/8th the population of NYC, created a true e-citizenship, it would be quite a hit. They could probably make a lot of money. They could still use the same checks they currently use when awarding citizenship. Perhaps they require an annual tax regardless of residency and, in fact, might not even grant automatic residency in Estonia. But people would still line up to pay them big bucks to get the consular services it would include.

Then at that point, why not just have a private company do all that? No need to build roads if nobody is ever gonna live in your country. No need to enforce laws— you can rely on existing countries for that. I guess it would be international travel as a service. You could have competing companies in the "consular services" space. Would we have the same nationalistic pride regarding these quasi-countries as we do towards our existing nations?

Anyway, I'm sure there are plenty of good reasons for why there aren't countries that do the job of the state department. But also, we do have private companies that do the job of NASA now, so who knows, maybe one day. 

I, as a normal human being (more or less) cannot be easily described in a few words or sentences.

However, that is what we, as normal human beings, try to do when we're around others. We want to understand the world, we want it to be predictable and consistent. We apply these same demands to the people in our life despite the fact that people are much less understandable or predictable than the rest of the world. We want our friends (and enemies) to abide by a simple consistent story. Like "Janice is fit" or "Drew is lazy" or at it's most nuanced, "Jeff really likes taking trips to the beach"

Yesterday, when I wrote the aforementioned article I was focused on how being around others forces me to simplify my story and how that was bad. However, a few hours after writing and publishing it I realized that actually, what I don't like about spending too much time around others is not the simplification of my story but rather the premature communication of it. I think simplifying my story can actually be good. Of course, a simple 3 sentence story can't communicate everything about me, but it doesn't need to. A simple story, if it feels authentic, can provide direction and meaning without tricking me into doing things I don't like.

The "authentic" part there is pretty key. When I'm forced to tell a story about myself prematurely, no matter how nuanced, it often won't feel authentic.

I am constantly encountering new situations and responding in new and unexpected ways. I try to study my feelings and behaviors with curiosity and from them glean an understanding of myself that is constantly evolving.

Last year I went through an exercise where I tried to distill my personality down to 3 statements. I ended up at 4, viewable on www.freedavid.co. This process took me 3.5 months of nearly daily work. I went through hundreds of versions, with feedback from people close to me and finally arrived at 25 words that feel both authentic and descriptive.

Now, what would have really sucked is if I had ended that process early. If I had been forced to commit to 4 statements before I was ready, I think it would have been worse than not doing that exercise at all. Whatever story I would have told would have become reality, whether I liked it or not. If I tell a story that feels inauthentic it means I'll live in a way that feels inauthentic.

I think this is what happens when I'm around friends too much. When I spend a lot of time around other people, both them and I will observe my actions together. We'll both be curious about why I'm doing certain things. My own curiosity will manifest through reflection— patient consideration of what my actions mean. My friend’s curiosity will, naturally, manifest through questions. They'll want to understand right then and there. Ideally I'd feel comfortable saying "I don't yet know why I do this". But nobody wants to be inconsistent. Nobody wants to admit they don't know themselves. So instead I just say whatever answer pops into my head. Hopefully, that premature response won't stick. Hopefully, after I reflect more I can come up with a more authentic answer, and communicate that to my friend. But too often this premature answer becomes my reality before I'm able to really process and produce an authentic one.

This article itself is a good example of this phenomenon. Last night, I gave myself a deadline: I had to publish before 9PM. I had already worked on the essay for two days. So I put it out before it felt totally authentic. Fortunately, I took a second look a few hours later and realized that the explanation I gave with so much certainty didn't actually make sense to me. I reflected and realized there was a better explanation, now expressed in this article.

It can be harder to catch these premature stories in real life, when I don’t get enough time alone. A story I tell once, prematurely, will get reflected back at me over and over again. It might be told by myself and my friends for weeks or months before I get around to updating it. At that point it's embarrassing and confusing to correct the story. Imagine if my article from yesterday went viral and 1m people read it. It would be pretty hard for me to be confident in the correction I'm writing now.

With this in mind I'm realizing that this problem is more under my control than I previously thought. I don't have to necessarily avoid living with others (though there are other good reasons for that, mentioned in yesterday's essay). But I do need space to reflect, to tell my own story. I also need to be comfortable with saying "I don't know why I do this. I don't know who I am at this moment" I need to avoid telling premature stories about myself and I need to be working to continuously update the stories I do tell. And, of course, I need to empower others to do the same, because I'm definitely, although unintentionally, creating this same situation for others.

What do you think? Which article resonates more with you, yesterday’s or today’s?

While I definitely get joy out of living with those I care about, I also really, really like living alone.

I have many reasons for this. For one I like owning basically nothing. My apartment in Oakland had no furniture other than my mattress, on the floor. And if I had known about Japanese futons I would have had one of those instead.

Another downside to living with others, which I've just recently become aware of, is the need to simplify my personal story in order to be consistent. Let me explain this one more.

When I'm by myself there are times I'm really focused. I'll work for hours, do structured workouts at regularly scheduled times, and be exactly on time to all my calls.

There are times I'm lazy. I'll lie on my floor for hours (remember, no furniture in David house). I'll let my calls run way too long, bleeding into what was supposed to be work time. Or I'll skip a scheduled call altogether because I'm socialed out.

Finally there are times when I act just...crazy. I'll rapidly alternate between standing and sitting on the floor. I'll sing random songs at random times. I'll dance as I think about a hard problem.

These, and many other behaviors make up the entirety of David. The person I am when nobody is watching cannot easily be described using words like "disciplined", "high energy" or "peppy". I, like everyone, am pretty complex and can’t be easily described in a book, let alone a few sentences.

Yet, when I'm around other people, this is what I try to do to them, and them to me. When humans are around other humans we want to tell stories about them— short stories. We want to say "this is my friend Hogarth, he's really into fitness" or "Meet, Janie, she loves coding". Moreover, we want our friends and family to live up to these punchy descriptions. When we see Hogarth the fitness guru being lazy we ask "hey Hogey, what's up?", thinking somethings wrong when, in reality Hogarth is just like anyone else, sometimes lazy, sometimes fit.

When we're just seeing a friend for an hour, their unconscious efforts to get us to comply with their simple stories are no big deal, because shortly afterwards we'll get our alone time to be ourselves, in all our inconsistent glory. However, if we live with other people there is sometimes no escape. Especially if you're locked down together due to a pandemic.

Apart from being uncomfortable, what I've noticed in myself is that in these scenarios I start to become, truly, one dimensional. I don't want to be inconsistent. I want to tell a story of David that explains everything I do. In fact, there's a good amount of research showing that being able to tell this story can make a person pretty happy. The story I tell when I’m on my own, in my own head, is pretty complex, encompassing all the weird things I do. It’s also constantly evolving, constantly in an imperfect state, and that’s fine— when not being judged by others.

However, when I'm around others, I feel the need to have a perfect story. Usually this means simplifying it so I can appear consistent in front of someone who doesn't have time to hear the rambling musings that constitute my true narrative. I'll start telling myself and others that I just LOVE being productive and that's all I want to do, despite also loving dancing, singing and lying on my darn floor.

The really scary thing is that, in the last year of living with others, there were times that this kind of simplified story telling became my reality. My actions followed the uncomplicated story I was telling and my life became less joyful as a result. I started doing one or two things, instead of indulging in all the cool multifaceted interests I usually enjoy.

Fortunately for me, the one or two things I fall back on when forced to simplify my story are basically work and fitness. Between those two activities I can stay healthy and support my life, so this version of me is pretty sustainable, even if it doesn't unlock a ton of happiness.

However, I have other other friends whose simplified forms create more conflict with their authentic desires

I have a single mom friend who struggles to date because the simplified "mom" story her family tells her doesn't include swiping through Tinder.

I have a friend who's incredibly hard working but likes to pair his effort with focused relaxation. Since lockdown started his friends (myself included) have seen a lot more of his relaxing time. Before lockdown, we would have said he was ambitious, now we say he's "lazy". He, unfortunately, started to believe the same thing.

I'm sure there are many ways to avoid this. In the long term I do eventually want to live with someone(s) for an extended period of time. Thus, getting good at creating a space where I and my housemates can be totally authentic and inconsistent at the same time seems like a good plan. However, in the meantime, while working towards that lofty goal, making sure I get extended periods alone also seems important. In fact, the only reason I’m realizing this now is because I lived mostly by myself for two weeks while moving to England and my behavior changed pretty significantly. 

What do you think? What is the story you tell yourself and how do you simplify it when telling it to others? How do you maintain a rich personal story?

For those who, like me, don't know the difference between a structural engineer and an architect, they described themselves as the people who make architects dreams come true. Or at least their building related ones.

Anyway, one of them is now working on the Sagrada Familia, a giant church in Barcelona that has been under continuous construction since 1882. And when I say "continuous construction" I don't mean maintenance. They've actually been inching (or yearing?) their way towards completing the vision of architect Antoni Gaudi for 130 years. Each year they add on a few more elements from his original plan and they hope to finish it within the next 10 years.

Made me think about the, recently cancelled, California high speed rail line. It was approved by voters in 2008, broke ground in 2015, and then was (mostly) cancelled in 2015. The small portion that they already started on will be finished, hopefully.

So basically that project, which everyone agreed was pretty cool at first, lasted about 11 years. Compared to 130 years of unbroken progress on Sagrada Familia.

What's the difference? I'm sure there are many differences that allow the Church's journey towards completion to continue. One that probably is relevant is faith.

Unsurprisingly, given that Sagrada Familia is a church, it's ongoing construction is probably largely driven by faith. Although it may not be the religious kind of faith. It's faith that Gaudi, and the folks who originally sponsored the project, were right, that it's really worth 1bn euros and 130 years to bring that original vision to fruition.

It's also faith that drove the US to complete the "moonshot" Apollo program. It was faith that it was gonna be really great if we could get an American astronaut to walk on the cold, dead surface of the moon, and come back. There wasn't really a ton of empirical evidence it was gonna be helpful, but people believed anyway. And, arguably, it was helpful, although not because of the moondust we brought back. Rather it was made valuable by all the innovations developed along the way by all a bunch of hard working people following blind faith. Faith seems like a better motivator than money or guns for big projects like that.

I feel like there's not a lot of faith in government projects today. Even within a given party leaders struggle to get uninterrupted support for an initiative— California High Speed rail being a great example. The project was approved by an mostly Democratic electorate, and then cancelled by a Democratic governor.

Not really sure why this is— I always want to blame increasing media consumption, and it probably plays a part here. Bad news sells better than good, so, statistically speaking there is much more bad news published than good. If something stays in the public eye for long enough it will rack up more unfavorable press than favorable and average reader opinion will eventually shift. Or at least this seems likely. Don't know if there is evidence to support this hunch though.

But there is probably also more to this than the increase in media consumption over the last 40 years. What do you think? Why has it been so hard to get long term support for large projects, over the last 20 years?

It's a game where each player is a captain of industry building out a capitalistic empire during the industrial revolution.

Aside from being a fun game that I lost pretty badly, it also reminded me about how bad the industrial revolution must have been for everyone except the rich people building stuff.

The game had some really great artwork, which very powerfully conveyed the smoggy, crowded nature of the cities and landscape at the time.

Contrast this with how it must have been 100 years before with green pastures, roamed by livestock and happy little families. I mean yea, it wasn't truly idyllic. There was disease and all that, but at least it seems nicer than working in a dark, dangerous, noisy factory.

However, in the long term the industrial revolution was great. It enabled innovations that allow more people to live happy, healthy, long lives.

It seems like, both in the industrial revolution, and other technological transitions, the first few generations to deal with the transition get kinda screwed.

The agricultural revolution was the same.

The first generations that transitioned into agriculture were probably forced to do so. They were likely happy roaming the woods, hunting and gathering. They got a diverse diet, lived in relative isolation and apparently only worked 20% of the time.

Then, likely they were captured and forced to work on fields by some larger, agriculturally savvy group. They worked all day, doing the same boring thing, eating the same nutritionally deficient cereal grain. Of course, a few generations later, this revolution had enabled cities, specialization of labor and other improvements that, again, these later generations were probably thankful for.

In both of these revolutions most people were basically forced into a lame transition, while a fortunate few, who were ahead of the curve, were able to reap the benefits. In the case of the agricultural revolution the lucky group were the leaders of the hunter gatherer tribes that transitioned into farming. They were able to sustain and command a larger population. The captains of industry featured in the board game I played were the winners in the industrial revolution. They made a lot of money off their factory workers. However, there wasn't really any going back. Once there is one person using modern manufacturing to make goods, nobody else can compete without doing the same. Once there is one tribe that picks up farming, it will beat up any tribe that doesn't follow suit.

Anyway, thinking about all this made me wonder: What revolution is ongoing now? Are we in the beginning of it, getting screwed, or in the middle, reaping the benefits?

One answer is that we're in the beginning of the automation revolution. Over the next 30 years a lot of jobs are going to get automated. One or two generations from now folks will be celebrating how amazing it is that they don't have to go to work every day, to punch commands into a computer and develop lower back pain. However, us early generations are gonna have to deal with the transition into a world where one of our greatest sources of meaning, employment, doesn't exist. This has already been happening for a portion of the population for the last 40 years, but it's going to accelerate greatly. The loss of meaning from no longer having employment might be devastating in the same way moving from a farm to a factory was for our ancestors.

Another revolution that I think is just starting: The data revolution. More and more of our life is being uploaded into the cloud and we're going to be able to reap great benefits from all that data— but us early gens are also gonna have some troubling consequences. We've seen just a taste of this in the last 20 years. Photos, videos or confidential documents that leak online and go viral. Companies like Cambridge Analytica using preferences expressed on social media profiles to sway elections. More and more data breaches where personal identifying information is leaked. It seems like these are just going to be part of life going forward and we, as a society, will have to get used to our data not being truly private. Over the last 20 years we’ve have gotten much less sensitive about our private data. I remember the first time a friend uploaded a photo of me to facebook— I totally freaked out. A photo of me, online, without my permission? Today, I laugh about what photos of me show up in Google search when you search my name— even though those can be seen by the whole world! Seems like this trend will continue and in a few generations perhaps the space of things considered "private" will be much smaller, limited to our thoughts (or maybe not if Neuralink works as promised). However, getting to that point will be a slog for us early generations that are used to controlling what others know and think about us.

What do you think? What revolution are we going through now? Are we the generations that are getting screwed? Or the generations that are reaping the benefits?

From Global Warming, to nationalism, racism and overpopulation. Some places have rising crime rates, many previously flourishing nations are in decline.

When you look at the solutions that are being proposed to these problems by governments and individuals, most involve technology. When I talk about tech here I don't just mean digital tech, or even cutting edge tech. My definition for tech here is anything which operates independently of the human psyche. If you can confirm a solution's efficacy with a simulation, then it's tech. A mosquito net is technology which prevents malaria, and we can confirm this by simulating it with little AI bugs. Carbon credits are tech which help curb industrial emissions, and we use them because economic simulations show they can be helpful.

These kinds of tech solutions are a really good fit when we're dealing with natural adversaries— mosquitoes, locusts, hurricanes, dirty water, etc. These kinds of opponents are predictable. They can be simulated.

However, most of the problems I originally cited, including Global Warming, aren't really natural problems. They may cause environmental issues, but the root, in all cases, lies with people doing bad stuff.

When we have problems caused by human behavior tech is an inefficient solution.

Take, for example, a problem that Japan had in 2005.

The country was spending a lot of money on electricity during the summer months, due to AC usage. Electricity in Japan is super expensive, because they don't have cheap sources like coal or oil.

Now, the government could have solved this problem by investing $100bn into new, super efficient AC units.

However, they knew this was a people problem. People felt too hot, so they turned on the AC. If they could convince people to feel less hot, they would need less AC.

They did this by launching the "Cool Biz" campaign. The government convinced the biggest companies in the country to allow their workers to wear casual, light clothing to the office during the hottest weeks in the summer, while turning up their thermostats by 2 deg C.

They also worked with the clothing industry to launch "Cool Biz" ad campaigns, advertising professional looking but lightweight fashions.

Within 3 years the campaign had saved over $4bn and prevented over 3 million tons of CO2 emissions. That's more than Tesla has prevented in the last 10 years, with all it's cars, solar roofs etc. I can't find any citations for the cost of the program, but I'm guessing it was less than $10M

These kinds of solutions probably aren't talked about so much because they involve changing people's minds, something the western world doesn't like. The US knows that it could solve it's Covid woes if it could get everyone to wear masks. Why hasn't there been a massive ad campaign, with celebrity cameos and a catchy theme song? Because not only do a lot of people want to keep their face uncovered, they want to WANT to keep their face uncovered. They don't want anyone messing with their desires. When we see campaigns that are trying to change our minds we call them "propaganda" and "brainwashing".

However, we get brainwashed everyday. Every ad we think we gloss over while we binge watch Youtube is, in fact, leaving a mark on us, changing our desires over time. They make us want to pay money to watch a movie, own a bag or a piece of clothing.

If we could be OK with using these same strategies to solve pressing global problems, in addition to controlling consumer demand, we'd make a lot of progress very quickly. Take these examples:

1) If we could convince people in the US it's cool to take cold showers we'd cut each person's daily energy usage by 20%. That would get us pretty close to solving Global Warming.

2) If we could convince everyone in the US to not eat meat, we cut out another 35% of daily carbon emissions.

3) What if we started advertising alternatives to college? Or maybe just funded ads for community college? We'd cut back our crippling student debt quite a bit.

4) How about ad campaigns that help people understand unconscious bias? Or campaigns that demonstrate the contributions that marginalized groups have made?

Marketing companies in America are so good at people to want things that are useless or downright harmful. What could we achieve if we used that power to solve our real problems? 

Japanese, Chinese and Swahili, all use a phonetic writing system where words are pronounced exactly as they appear.

Every character indicates a sound and that sound does not change from word to word.

Compare that to english where "pear" is pronounced quite differently from "appear", despite containing the same character.

So, today I was wondering about that and realized it might just be because the latin phonetic alphabet has been used for english for a long time, in a lot of different places. Each new group that achieved english literacy over the last 400 years created competing pronunciations, but, for the sake of consistency, we didn't want to change the spelling of the words themselves. So, over the years we developed a lot of ways of pronouncing the same words.

Japan, China and Kenya, on the other hand, developed their modern phonetic writing systems less than 100 years ago. So there's been less time to develop weird readings.

Of course, this kind of phenomenon can be observed for technology in general, not just writing technology. Most technology is great when it's first introduced, but over time it becomes outdated. This tends to give early adopters of tech a kind of disadvantage, in the long term.

For instance, the US built it's rail network long before China, and probably has spent more money in total creating and maintaining it. But I'd much rather ride a Chinese train than an American one. The Caltrain, which connects SF to Silicon Valley didn't even have outlets 4 years ago, let alone WiFi. China's high speed trains, as you'd expect, have both these things, and are about twice as fast. .

Now, you might argue, that's because trains are infrastructure. Surely the US has an advantage by being the first country to get computers and the internet. Unlike with trains, we can easily keep our digital technology up to date, so we shouldn't suffer from the same early adopter problems.

However, I think that, although our digital technology itself has been easy to update, our perspective towards it and the way we interact with it has not.

Because the US was one of the first countries to get online we maintain a kind of naive perspective on the internet. There were about 20 years when the internet was an intellectual paradise. The things you read online were relatively trustworthy. There were not many incentives for people to publish false information, aside from occasional chain emails. Many thought that the internet was going to be a great store of all human knowledge.

Then social media changed the game. It became possible for anyone to publish anything to millions of people while being rewarded for the attention they received. Incentives changed, technology changed, but our mindset did not. We continued to believe that we could trust what we read online, and we're now slowly realizing that this understanding is outdated.

However, my friends in Africa, who didn't start using the internet until after social media had already become popular, have a very different perspective.

My friends in Kenya and Egypt don't even read the news, let alone believe what is shared on social media. They seem to have the opposite mentality of most Americans. They believe that they can't trust anything they read online.

This doesn't mean they don't consume digital media, just that they read it for entertainment, not for learning, and they're dubious about anything claiming to be news.

There are surely many reasons for how this culture arose, and I have some guesses as to other factors, but it seems like at least one contributor was delayed adoption of digital tech.

Also, China is an interesting datapoint. Most people in China got the internet and social media at the same time. The way my Chinese friends consume digital media is definitely different than how we consume it in the US, but they're not totally untrusting of it the way my African friends are. So, more thought needed on China...

Anyway, what do you think? Is a disadvantage to being an early adopter? Do you think the US has an outdated perspective on digital media?

I've come to realize that most changes I observe in my life come from one of two sources:

Source 1 is knowledge: Knowledge changes my life when I have experience in a domain and a specific problem that arose through that experience.

For instance I went to a physical therapist a few weeks ago. My knees were hurting and I wanted to know what I could do to make them feel better. My PT communicated the secret knowledge of stretching, and my life since then has been filled with hamstring stretches and non-sore knees. This was knowledge that stimulated change.

Now, I've been to a PT many times before, and many PTs have told me that, as a runner I should regularly stretch my hamstrings. However, that knowledge did NOT change my life. In fact, I didn't even remember being told this until my most recent PT visit jogged my memory. In order for knowledge to create a change it needs to be relevant. It needs to be immediately applicable to a problem I have and can measure.

Change source 2 is thoughtful experience. Experience paired with observation and reflection can change my life, even when I have no problem to solve.

Two years ago I met someone really cool at a networking event, messaged them to meet again, but didn't get a response. A friend of mine suggested I ping them again, however to me, my new connection clearly wasn’t interested in talking. Anyway, I decided that I had to send a follow-up message— if only to prove my friend wrong.

Of course, my friend was right, my new connection replied right away, apologetic that my message slipped their mind. We met up for coffee and have been fast friends ever since.

This experience changed my life. Today, I always send follow-up messages. In fact that one successful followup changed my perspective on communication from "I don't want to bother this person" to "this person will be happy to know I'm thinking about them". This experience changed me in a way that I didn't know I wanted to change.

I think these two sources can be framed as attention resolving vs. attention generating.

In the case of my knees I had been thinking about my knees for months, giving them lots of attention. The knowledge I got from my PT changed me by resolving my attention. It gave me an answer— likely one of many right answers, and freed up my attention for other things. Today, my life is different because I think about my knees less.

In the case of not wanting to follow-up with my new friend, I had never thought that maybe I was being too conservative with my communication. Communication with friends was part of my life that had always received very little attention. This experience changed my life by focusing my attention on how I message people.

In fact, these two types of changes seem to occur cyclically.

After I realized I wanted to be more liberal with my communication I found that, even though I wanted to followup with friends, I would often forget. So I went hunting for a tool that would remind me to message people at the right time. A friend of mine suggested a tool called Dynalist and I've been using it religiously ever since.

The attention generated by my initial, thoughtful experience gave me awareness of problems that I then solved with knowledge. This knowledge resolved my attention so that it could be redirected into other areas in my life, through impactful experiences.

Attention is generated for a problem through experience and then is resolved when we seek out and receive new knowledge

However, there are often parts of my life where I feel like this cycle has stalled.

Sometimes I feel like I've been spinning my wheels on a problem, getting frustrated by the lack of a resolution. Usually this means I need to focus on finding some secret knowledge, by asking friends for help, reading or Googling.

Other times I'll feel like part of my life has gone stale, like I'm doing the same things I've always done. In these cases I need new experiences. I need to focus on trying new things in that domain. I need to challenge myself, usually alongside friends who can provide accountability and motivation.

How about you? Do you find the same patterns of change in your life? How is your experience different?

Upon mentioning this I had a sudden flashback to visiting my dad's workplace in 2000.

It was “take your child to work day” and this was the first year my dad deemed me old enough to visit his office. My brother and I went together. It was his first year too even though he was two years older than me— sorry Adam.

Anyway, there were a couple notable things about that visit.

1) We got to try on a virtual reality headset (in 2000!). It was about 25 pounds and let you explore a very pixelated driving simulator.

2) I got my first programming lesson, in BASIC. The engineer who taught me copied the program I made onto a floppy disk and let me take it home, at which point I promptly lost it.

3) We got to visit Dad's office.

#3 is my strongest memory mostly because of all the stuff my Dad had in there. There was stuff he picked up at conferences, framed pictures and this weird mirror box that made a hologram of anything you put in it. Basically a whole bunch of items that held meaning to my dad that we, his children, had never seen before. We had, of course, dug through boxes of my dad's stuff at home— old patches from his time in the Navy, musty clothes and all manner of screws, nuts and bolts. But here was a new side to Dad! At that point my 4th grade brain mostly defined people based on what they owned, wore etc. So seeing all these items that my Dad kept in his work office, was like seeing a whole new Dad!

Of course, that understanding wasn't too far off. My dad almost certainly WAS a different man at work. Not because of his hologram box that I had never seen, but because he was around different people who only saw him at that office

Now, with remote work being all the rage, what will happen to that? There's a lot of research showing that it's important to have space to try on new personalities and identities. That we need to be different people at different times. When we work from home all day will we still get that?

At first it seems like this would be hard. If you see the same people all the time, how can you change? Your friends and family would probably be confused if you tried on different personalities on different days. "Yay, it's Wednesday, which means Mom is gonna be excited about sports! Almost as good as Tuesdays when she’s really into 80's Hip Hop."

However, upon further thought, I realize that I'm living in a culture that contradicts the notion that this is hard! In fact, Japanese social life is built on the assumption that you can be a different person, at different times, within the same community.

Karaoke is a great example of this. Karaoke, in Japan, is not just about singing. It's about letting go and trying on any identity you want. My friends who work here tell me stories about karaoke outings with co-workers or friends, that included confessions of love or sexuality, apologies, screaming matches and more (I'll let you decide what more means here). But the craziest thing to me, as a Westerner, is that people carry on the next day as if nothing happened. It's not like they don't remember— they'll acknowledge that they got naked and sang "Living on a Prayer" (or the Japanese equivalent), but they don't feel the need to justify it or say "yea but I was reallllly drunk". It's totally normal to be incongruent. Most of my friends just think of their Karaoke self as another identity, ready to be tried on when it's appropriate. There is no judgement for being two or three different people at different times. At least not of the kind that this behavior would normally receive in the US.This is actually a studied phenomenon. I was reading a paper a few months about about the connection between authenticity and happiness which pointed out that one moderator of this relationship is culture. In particular, folks who grow up in Asia’s more collectivist cultures don’t see consistency as necessary for authenticity. They report feeling authentic despite being different people at different times.

I think I could learn something from this. As mentioned in yesterday's essay, I have a real apprehension around being incongruent. But in a world where I see only a limited number of people, all within the same community, it's hard to to change or grow without triggering this unease. So I have a new resolution from my time in Japan, which is to try on different identities with people who know me well, and see what happens. And I guess I should also put my money where my mouth is and welcome the same from my friends. Hopefully I can even do this without a trip to the Karaoke studio.P.S. To my Japanese friends, please disagree with any of these musings, in the comments below!

I'm trying to find a pair of noise cancelling headphones before flying to the UK, so I can jam out mid-flight

These Sennheiser phones are pretty expensive, so I wanted to make sure they actually fit comfortably in my weirdly shaped ears before I dumped cash on them.

The only place you can try on in-hear headphones like these is at the Sennheiser showroom, which I hunted down by reaching out to a friend. It's only open weekdays from 12-2, so went today when I wasn't working.

I showed up at the closest station, Aoyama something-or-other, shortly after the showroom was supposed to open.

The station exits into the basement of a rather old looking building. Not the kind of old that looks cool. Rather, the kind of old that was new recently enough that blemishes still count as dilapidation.

The dark, brick and concrete walls reflected the dim light more than they should have, looking unnaturally glossy.

The corners, where neither light nor, presumably, mops, can reach are filled with dust and bits of things that have settled there over the years.

However, even in this setting, daily life thrived.

Bento box sellers hawked their wares loudly, but politely, to passerbys.

Company men and women made their way to and from their offices.

Outside, in a large courtyard, children played.

All of them are oblivious to the aging demeanor of the building in which they spend a large part of their, clearly happy, lives.

It's just me who feels the not-quite-nostalgic unease of being in a place that is past its prime.

Perhaps my discomfort stems from the fact that, at one time, someone cut a ribbon, welcoming the public into this building. At some point eager passengers disembarked from the first train to arrive at the station. And now that excitement is gone. To lose that novelty feels like a politician flip-flopping. Someone, in the 80’s said "This new Aoyama building is amazing— state of the art." and now they say...nothing.

Obviously, this is normal and expected, but for some reason it feels like hypocrisy. I often feel an instinct to not to let myself be excited about things now because I know my excitement will fade. To be excited about a new phone, book or friend now is to be incongruent with my future self.

However, I'm pretty sure this kind incongruence is also an important part of experiencing happiness. A continuous stream of change is one of the few things researchers have found which consistently improves people's reported joy. Change creates memorable moments, which, upon reflection create a feeling of fulfillment.

In an essay from a few days ago I wondered about the emotional equivalent of a Sento (Japanese public bath). I love Sentos because they give me an opportunity to practice patience, as I alternate between way too cold and way too hot. Perhaps allowing myself to feel unbridled excitement is like allowing myself to soak in a hot tub, knowing I'm about to jump into a cold-bath. In fact, I'd imagine this is something that a lot of us could use more often, given the popularity of the phrase "unbridled excitement". I imagine a lot of us are bridling our excitement on a regular basis.

Back to Aoyama and the headphone journey that started this whole musing: When I finally arrived at the showroom there was a sign saying that they were closed for covid, with no plans to reopen. So I made my way back to the train, empty handed, congratulating myself that I didn't get my hopes up.

But now, thinking back on those happy people enjoying their lives in that old building, I realize they really know what's up. Many of them surely experienced the Japanese economic bubble bursting in '92— perhaps from within a cleaner, newer version of that same building. To this day Japan has not surpassed its economic high of that year. However, does anyone regret partying like it was 1992? Probably not. 

A Sento is just a Japanese public bath.

Well, the way I say that it sounds like a public bath is no big deal, but that's wrong, it's a really big deal.

Public baths, in addition to being, at one time, a massive innovation in public health are also super nice.

We don't have them in the US, but they're big in countries like Japan or Italy, where there are a lot of hot springs and people wanting to be clean.

Why are these public baths so great? Because they're chock full of things that can alternately challenge and relax you. Mainly hot tubs and cold tubs.

When you go to sentos in Japan it's recommended you do 5 minutes in a hot tub, two minutes in a cold tub, and repeat this 5-10 times.

As you perform this strange, masochistic task an amazing calm comes over you. It arises from a unique chemical and mental combination.

The same pleasure chemicals that are released after you go for a hard run (those that create the "runners high") get pumped into your brain anytime you go quickly from pain to pleasure. Jumping from cold into hot and vice versa, is just this.

But the Sento creates more than just a normal runner's high. Sitting in a really hot or cold bath for 5 minutes takes concentration. Your mind has no space to wander so basically you're forced to empty your mind and meditate.

Meditation + happiness chemicals = bliss.

Best of all, while you're sitting in a hot or cold bath, meditating on the pain, you're practicing a really, really important skill: Patience.

One of the hardest things I ever have to do is sit still. I mean this in a mental, physical and emotional way. It's really hard to not try and distract myself when I'm bored. It's challenging not to stretch when I'm feeling tight. It's pretty tough to not fix things when I'm unhappy.

In the Sento, I'm forced to practice patience. If I don't want to overheat I have to sit perfectly still and let go of all the problems I've been trying to solve. I have to patiently leave them alone, trusting they'll be ok when I come back.

As I left the Sento tonight I wondered what other things in life create this same kind of situation? Sentos are physical challenges that force us to practice patience, however is there an emotional or intellectual equivalent? Is there a way I can alternately challenge and relax myself intellectually or emotionally? What does that look like?

If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments! 

The restaurant was situated in a quiet neighborhood, beautiful and nearly empty. It was either very new or meticulously maintained, with thick square tables made of light pine. Its specialty seemed to be beef Shabu Shabu, which came in a variety of formats. Prices were reasonable, considering everything was Wagyu beef and we got a totally free bowl of beef tongue stew just for walking in.

At least this is my reflection today. Yesterday's perspective was not so charitable.

We complained that the prices were too high, that the minimum order for everything was two, that it was too sterile, too clean and too far from the train station.

Then we bickered with each other on the way back to the train, arguing about whether it was impolite to pay with loose change.

We went out to distract ourselves but just ended up accumulating more grievances, despite getting everything we wanted.

What a strange thing that the human brain evolved this way. The more unhappy we are the more likely we are to notice and remember unpleasant things. Our dark moods feed themselves with sad thoughts and unflattering interpretations of the world. What caveman did this quirk of cognition ever help?

It seems that the only reason we're able to escape perpetual unhappiness is sleep. Today, 8 hours of sleep later my mood has totally flipped. I messaged my friend apologizing for the argument, I wrote a short, happy vignette based on the restaurant and made a note to try more Shabu Shabu.

Sleep forces our thoughts to reset. It wrenches the perceived faults of the world from our attention's iron grip and allows our mind to wander aimlessly for a few hours. When we wake up our mind's ready to latch on to something new and hopefully better.

Maybe this is why sadness sucks our energy, why depression can make you bedridden. Perhaps it's an evolutionary evolved mechanism to force us to do the thing that is so hard while awake: let go.

This is, of course, what meditation is designed to do as well. Meditation is guaranteed to make me feel better when I'm anxious or stressed. I go into meditation fixated on some problem and when I finish I can barely remember it. I've learned to note down the thing that's bothering me before I meditate so I don't totally forget.

However, meditation takes energy and practice. Sleep is something most of us can do from day 1. I just hope it stays that way for me. This reflection makes me realize how hard it must be to struggle with insomnia, to have no barrier stopping runaway thoughts. I only hope that, when the day comes for me to suffer from sleeplessness, I'll have some other strategy to halt cyclical, negative thoughts

What do you do to recover from a dark mood? Does sleep have the same effect on you?

One of these people was a woman with her daughter. The daughter was probably 6 years old, and was crying the entire time as she ran after her mom.

Surely her mom was subjecting her to this with the best intentions. She wanted her daughter to be fit, and like most 6 year olds, the little girl didn't love running an extended distance. Thus the mom had to force her to run the same way she forced her to eat broccoli.

The mom probably considered it a success when the daughter, despite crying, made it all the way around the 800m loop without stopping.

I think success might be the wrong word.

I remember when I first started running. I was about to start high school and was pretty sure I didn't want to join the cross country team, despite my dad and my brother being avid runners. Instead I was just going to focus on school and swimming, which I already did twice a week. However, as the start of school neared, and my brother started going out to practice I got kind of jealous. I wanted to make friends, I wanted to see the high school where I was about to spend 4 years. So, without any persuasion from my family, I decided to try out running. In fact, my family tried to talk me out of it, wanting to be sure I wasn't just trying to be like my brother (though that was certainly part of it).

Honestly, it was terrible. Running a 5K race in the DC summer heat is still the most grueling thing I've ever had to do. And I did hundreds of those races over the next 4 years. I put myself through this for 4 years for no reason other than because, on that August day in 2014, I chose to start running. As a human being I like being consistent. When I make a decision, independently, I want to stick to it, even if it brings me pain.

And I'm glad I stuck with running. I became much fitter, made great friends, distracted myself from the unnecessary stresses of school and formed a habit that still brings me great joy 15 years later.

Now, let's say I could warp into an alternate reality where 13 year old David came down with a cold, missed the first week of cross country practice, and now has decided not to run. Knowing how important this hobby has been for me, knowing how it changed my life, would I try to convince young David to go out anyway? Probably no. There were a lot of kids who joined the cross country team that year because their parents made them, or their friends pressured them. None of those kids stuck with it. For them it was a waste of time. In fact, for many of them, being coerced into running probably turned them off running forever. If I hadn’t chosen running I’m sure I would have chosen something else, committed myself to that, and experience a similar pay-off.

I think the right decision is usually whatever decision that I really want. It's easy for me to look back at decisions I made which caused me to miss out on money, experience or fame, and feel regret. However, if I had made those decisions, while wanting something else, I probably wouldn't have gotten those results anway. After all, there aren't really any "big" decisions in life. Every "big" decision is followed by a continuous stream of "little" decisions, the sum of which have just as much power over your future as the big one. If you're going to make positive, healthy choices at each of these small crossroads you're gonna need to be happy and energized. That's a lot easier when you identify with the thing you do.

Back to the crying, jogging, 6 year old: her mom might feel like she succeeded, but this kid might hate running for the rest of her life. Every small decision from now on that involves running will be a big "No" from her. Maybe next time mom can ask her kid "what sport do you want to do?". Even if the kid doesn't want to do a sport at all, the chance at agency might be enough to entice her to try— especially if she's used to mom bossing her around. I mean, to the experienced parents who are reading this, this might be pretty obvious stuff, but to me, it’s revelatory. I just hope I can put my money where my mouth is if I ever have a 6 year old...

The twist is, her brother is 12, and he has Down Syndrome.

Well, it wasn't a twist for me, I know her brother already and have been to his other exhibits. 

However, it's certainly a twist on most art exhibits and also a twist for a lot of people who show up. The advertising for the exhibition doesn't include that he has a disability or that he's 12 years old.

People don't come because of the backstory people come because his paintings are totally rad.

It was honestly, the most fun I've ever had at an art exhibit. All the paintings were aesthetically really pleasing. There was no deep meaning, no secret history to be discovered on Wikipedia. They were the result of a totally fearless painter who had no idea that there were "rules" about how to paint.

This made me realize why I generally really dislike art exhibits, and, honestly, the fine arts in general.

I don't like secret rules.

Overt rules are fine and, in fact, often desirable. It's fun to play a board game where you have to optimize your score based on the rules. Rules and other constraints foster creativity, as long as they're clear.

Unclear rules are sources of stress. Imagine a board game where your score seemed to randomly go up and down through the game. Don't think that would sell too many copies.

That's how I feel when I'm at most art exhibits. There are signs explaining why a certain piece is significant or valuable, but the reasons are neither logical nor consistent. A realistic still life drawn 30 years ago is likely trash, but one from 300 years ago might be worth millions. A single dot on a large white canvas or a urinal can be placed in the MOMA and called art. I feel totally incapable of predicting what is "good" or "bad" art.

This is also why I stopped swing dancing 7 years ago and picked up ballet instead. In swing you can be a "good" or "bad" dancer. However this is judged by your partner who isn't gonna hand you a rule book before each dance. In ballet there is a defined set of movements and rules about what makes a "good" version of each one. This is the kind of environment I enjoy.

But I don't think it's only me.

Secret rules are also the reason why many people are scared to live in China, but happy to live in Singapore.

Singapore has much more strict laws than China and much harsher punishments. However, these laws and punishments are clearly defined. For instance, while possession of drugs in Singapore is punishable by death they tell you this as you board any plane going there.

In China on the other hand, you can easily find drugs and the stated punishments for these kinds of offenses are much lighter. However, there are a lot of laws that are very open to interpretation. For instance, in Hong Kong, under the new security law passed a half year ago, you can be arrested and sent to prison for any activity related to secession, terrorism, subversion or collusion. What does this mean? Nobody really knows. Right now when a protest is happening and the authorities feel like it's crossed the line for any of those items, they simply hold up a red flag, indicating that, by their judgement, you could now get a life sentence in Chinese prison if you continue your activities.

Secret rules create stress. I don’t think art thrives in stress, so I figure that the best artists, like my friend’s brother, either didn’t care about the rules or weren’t aware of them at all.

I went with a friend out to the countryside, saw a really cool art exhibit, stayed in a wonderful hostel and was awake the whole night because of a mosquito.

These are things that don’t normally transpire in my Tokyo apartment. They weren’t all fun, but by the time I came back today I had ideas for 5 new podcast episodes.

Looking forward to publishing those over the next few days, but today’s episode is really quite simple and short: I need to shake up my life every once in a while. Even if the shakeup itself isn’t fun, the resulting ideas and insights that bubble up in the days afterwards are more than worth it.

I need to shift my mindset around leaving the house from “do I want to do this right now” to “do I want cool stuff to think about later?”

By judgement I mean labelling someone or something as a worse than yourself.

I'm allergic to this kind of thinking. The more I do it the sadder I get.

Judging is useful for making sure we don't waste time with people that we won't get along with. It allows us to separate into tribes and, in that way, has an evolutionary advantage.

However, knowing this doesn't help me feel any less bad to do it. Yes, even if that person is a) flouting their privilege b) being racist or c) literally pumping CO2 directly into the atmosphere.

I figured it was time I do a little essay to explain why I get so uncomfortable when judgement starts to happen

The primary reason is because I know that I'm just as bad as the person being judged

Yes, although I try not to flout my privilege, I'm really just as bad as the SF tech bro who tweeted about the homeless guy sleeping in front of his Porsche

Yes, although I haven't verbally or physically assaulted someone because of their race, I'm really just as bad as the people who post racist comments on Reddit.

Yes, although I haven't driven a car in years I'm really just as bad as the person who takes their Hummer to work each day.

It's easiest to explain why I think this using examples:

When I watch a movie I use about 3 hours of time doing nothing but staring at a screen. Now, if that screen had code on it instead of a movie I could have made money during those three hours. The amount of money I make in 3 hours of coding is enough to save a life in many parts of the developing world. Yet I choose to watch Tron: Legacy for the 37th time. I choose my own comfort over saving a life.

When I was 25 I spent a year teaching in low income schools, mostly working with students of color. Then I stopped, because, as much as I cared about making an impact, it was exhausting, demoralizing and draining my savings fast. I could have contributed to education equity. Yet I chose to leave and found a company. I chose my own comfort over making an impact.

Every evening I take a hot shower. If I took a cold shower instead I'd reduce my daily energy usage by about 25%. If everyone did this the US would immediately meet it's climate goals immediately. However, we don't. Not one of my American friends takes a cold shower, including the ones who work full time trying to solve climate change. We choose the simple comfort of a hot shower over solving global warming.

From an utilitarian standpoint, the cost to society of me deciding to watch a movie or take a hot shower is at least as much as the person who posts racist rants or drives a hummer to work. Furthermore, the reason why I do these destructive things is the same— habit.

People post racist stuff because that's how they're used to thinking, that's the environment they exist in. People drive gas guzzling cars because that's the car they own, that's the routine they're used to.

If I can't muster the willpower to take a cold shower, then I can't really expect someone to sell their car and change their schedule for a similar goal.

The reality is, we're all the same. We're all weak-willed products of our environment and it's a miracle if we manage to make a change every once in a while. So, when I think about other people being bad, I can't help but think I'm bad, and that makes me sad.

This doesn't mean that I agree with the actions everyone takes, or don't care who has power. I'll work to remove a leader who's racist. I'll avoid spending time with someone who goes on about how hard it is to maintain five Lambos. I won't take lifestyle advice from someone who doesn't believe in Global Warming.

I try to remember that someone can be harmful to me and others without being a bad person. I try to dislike their behavior while not having contempt for them as a person. 

And then, when I fail, I judge myself for judging others. I suppose, after all, judgement is another way we're all similar.

P.S. I know that most religious texts basically include this whole "do not judge" thing in paragraph one, but hey, never said I was an innovator. 

Normally we think about centralization of power as something a government does, however the most powerful force in this regard is actually technology.

Nearly every piece of technology ever created served to centralize power.

The first caveman who crafted a spear was centralizing power. It used to take a team of cavemen (or women) hours to hunt down and kill even a small animal. Now thanks to spear technology a single hunter can do it! A person with a spear has a lot more power than a person without.

The invention of paper also centralized power. It used to take an army of zealous disciples years to spread some idea through word of mouth. With paper, a single thinker could change the minds of many.

This centralization occurs independently of a government and, in fact, governance is often used as a way to disseminate power that has been centralized by technology. Back to the hunter with the spear: their peers likely recognized that this one, spear wielding, caveman was now much more powerful than them. In response they probably agreed on some rules like "we all own the spear" and "you're not allowed to use the spear to hunt people". Voila, the first government!

Centralization of power is scary to most people. Facebook Haters, Liberterians, and socialists all fear centralization of power, even if the methods through which they foresee it occurring are different. Facebook haters don't like the power that a person with a viral post has to influence the thoughts and actions of others. Libertarians fear the power a government official has to enact discriminatory laws. Communists want to avoid wealthy capitalists that have the power to allocate resources unfairly.

These folks all fear power centralization because they know this: humans are fickle, emotional creatures, but on average we're reasonably sane. If you give one person a lot of power their emotions will lead to their and others’ demise. But if you spread out power amongst a lot of people things tend to stay stable.

To be clear, when I talk about disseminating power it isn't enough to disseminate opportunity for power. This isn't about fairness. Guns are dangerous even if everyone has the opportunity to own one.

Anyway, at various points in history there have been moments of sudden, massive, power centralization. Usually this sudden shift is the result of technology, which tends to develop faster than governments. When this sudden power centralization happens, disaster often follows.

WWI is a great example of this. Prior to WWII most of Europe was ruled by monarchs. Some countries had a parliamentary system, but even then monarchs still wielded a lot of power.

However, their power was balanced by the fact that it was hard to communicate, move around and do stuff. When these monarchs waged war (which was often) it was still largely the "line up and take turns shooting" kind of war. When they issued a command it had to be carried, slowly, by messengers on horses. They had a lot of centralized power, in theory, but the limitations of the world kept them in check.

Enter cars, machine guns and telegraph.

Suddenly the decision to go to war carried huge weight. Telegraphs carried orders faster, troops moved from battle to battle faster, machine guns killed faster. WWI was like 10 wars crammed into one— all triggered by a few, bored, monarchs.

After WWI, and unfortunately a second big war like that, countries got wise, got rid of monarchs and made the UN. We had nukes at that point so one representative government per country was not enough!

You can look at other catastrophes and see similar trends. China's Cultural Revolution, Global Warming, European colonization (and all its subsequent wars), were all largely the result of sudden, power centralizing technologies.

Today we might stand at a similar precipice to Europe’s monarchs in 1914. Historically, reading and communicating has been a force for healthy progress. It was essential to the founding of the US and has been key in its continued development. However, until recently most people could only talk to a few people at once. Messages spread slowly and people had time to think critically, or let their emotions cool, before responding. Oh, and the things you read were relatively boring and short.

Today, with the internet, a single person has the ability to spread their message to everyone, all at once. If you have money to pay for ads (or a bunch of bots) you can do this repeatedly, regardless of the relevance of your message.

The messages being sent are in 4K HD and are viewable with a VR headset. We consume, on average 11 hours of these highly stimulating messages per day. 

The science we have so far is pretty clear: with this kind and quantity of content we'll believe whatever we watch, see or read.

Media technology has rapidly and powerfully centralized power and our habits have not caught up. At the start of WWI all the monarchs were still exchanging letters looking forward to a wonderful little war. However, their old habits and beliefs which used to be sustainable, turned out to be disastrous when combined with modern technology. We are in the same place today. In as much as it can be argued that the election interference in 2016 was the result of Russian meddling, it also the result of our outdated views towards the publishing and consumption of media.

I don't know what the solution is. Other countries (like China) are trying to solve this problem by censoring public speech. That seems pretty bad.

If I had to commit to an answer I'd say: educate people. Today's media technology is only powerful if you use it. It cannot (currently) be forced upon you. Therefore, the problem can be solved by changing ourselves. Instead of trying to censor fake news, or prevent foreigners from posting public messages (which, to be clear, is China's stated censorship policy as well), can we focus on engaging with media in a healthy way? Can we teach about bias and be honest that it exists everywhere (not just Fox News)? Can we have conversations about what a healthy amount of media consumption is— even if you're watching documentaries and other “educational” content? Can we ban marketing?

Ok maybe that last one won't happen, but a guy’s gotta dream.

Anyway, what do you think?

They were inspired by a realization that we had around the start of Covid: We know more about basically everything than we do ourselves

We could talk for hours about latest tech trends. We could analyze and compare public policy. We could harp on about chemistry, math, and physics.

We had so much knowledge. 30 years of formal and informal schooling had given us a crap ton of knowledge on a huge range of topics

But it had excluded one, little topic: Me. I know that that covid is spreading, but how does that make me feel about traveling? I know that Donald Trump is building a wall but how does that make me feel about the diverse community I grew up in?

If asked I would tell you an answer but that answer would surely be an answer I had read. It would be the opinion of a journalist who wrote an article, who in turn probably got that opinion from someone else.

But this would be wrong. I am a unique person, I have have desires and aspirations born from my unique experience and cultivated through every interaction I have, every mistake and success I experience.

It might feel OK to my conscious brain to just mimic the assumptions and desires of others, but my subconscious, it knows what's up

This cognitive dissonance, whether we're conscious of it or not, will cause anger, frustration, and general unhappiness. Living authentically is one of the strongest predictors of happiness, and it's hard to live authentically if you don't know what you want.

It's not surprising we end up here. We are never taught to learn about ourselves. At first we are taught to learn from books, memorizing content. Then we learn how to do research, searching out ideas others have written. Then, finally we learn how to combine multiple ideas and information to synthesize new conclusions. If you make it through all of that you are a well educated human being!

But not once in school was I taught how to determine what I liked or what makes me happy. Frankly I wasn't taught how to learn anything that could not be found or synthesized from existing information .

Any kind of learning essentially involves two ingredients: Information and synthesis to integrate that information into your current understanding.

Recently I've been trying to learn how to draw.

* Information I need: Instructions and activities which build drawing skills

* Synthesis I’ll perform: Read instructions, do activities.

Learning how to draw has been relatively straightforward. It's been time consuming, frustrating and difficult, but I know the steps.

Now, knowing why I'm learning this in the first place? That's a much harder question to answer.

* Information I need: My thoughts and feelings during and after drawing and other similar activities.

* Synthesize: compare and contrast how I feel while drawing to other activities I enjoy.

This stuff is hard. I can't google "how does David Gaynor feel after drawing". I didn't learn how to analyze my feelings in school and even when I've managed to have a personal epiphany in the past, it usually fades fast

This also applies to learning about others, or really learning anything through personal observation and exploration. Essentially, we are good at learning from books, but bad at learning from the world.

In fact the biggest breakthrough for my own pursuit of happiness was starting a company. There is no book or Google search that can tell you what product will succeed. If there was then we'd all be rich!

I had to become more observant, build a regular reflection practice, question my assumptions and run experiments. Eventually those habits made their way into my personal life. As a result even as my work hours went up I actually became happier. In addition to understanding the education market in China, I now understood myself better as well.

Today, I refer to this process as "guerrilla learning". Guerrilla learning is when you get an answer from a person who doesn't even know they have it. It's when you observe and note things about the world before you've even formulated a question. It’s when you get points not for having the right answer, but for proving yourself wrong. This kind of learning is fun, challenging and extremely helpful for personal growth, entrepreneurship and other scary subjects we don't teach in school.

Where can we pick up Guerrilla Learning skills? How do we refine them? Can they be taught at all? All good questions and I'd love to have your thoughts!

By 10th grade the average student of color has received $26,000 less in education investment than the average white student. When you account for ROI (you get more return from educational investment at a younger age), the investment needed to simply create parity is probably over $100K dollars, per student.

Let's imagine how this funding gap develops. 10 years ago, there was a meeting in some average school district. At that meeting an administrator probably pointed out that there were underfunded schools serving predominantly students of color. They likely said something along the lines of "If we don't fix this, these students will fall behind their peers and won't be able to catch up. We need to do something."

But nothing happened, probably due to budget issues combined with bias.

To be clear this imagined, conscientious, administrator surely did not say. "Hey these schools are underfunded, let's make sure to fix this 10 years from now"

Yet often we act as if they did say this. We try to bring better teachers, do more testing, or improve facilities to help students that we've underinvested in for 10 years, expecting that they'll catch up

We do this because it's hard to accept the reality: We've already lost. It is too late for these students.

Or at least too late for them in the current system.

When I say there's a $100K funding gap between students of color and their white peers I mean that we'll need $100K to realize the vision that the aforementioned administrator imagined 10 years ago. It's probably a vision that includes all students scoring highly on standardized tests of history, english and math skills. It probably includes all students going to college.

We've lost that vision. There is no way we have enough money to invest even 50K per student who's been left behind, to bring them back in line with that plan.

But that doesn't mean that we can't help this student, it doesn't mean that we can't give this student an even better life than we imagined for them 10 years ago. We just have to change a few details of our vision.

This is likely similar to how you operate in your own life. If you're running late for a flight and you miss it, you don't continue jogging to your destination. Your real goal is not the flight, it’s having an enjoyable weekend. You imagined that weekend was going to be in LA or whatever your destination was, but that’s no longer possible. So you change your strategy. You start to imagine a weekend relaxing at the coffee shop nearby, or camping with friends. 

As individuals we're flexible. We can be happy with a wide range of outcomes. As long as our basic needs are met, it's not a big deal if we can take a trip to a certain city or not. However as a society we're not so flexible.

Back to the wonderful world of the American School System: Most of my experience working with low income students came while I was running a program in Oakland which taught entrepreneurship during and after the school day. Most of our students were labelled as "at risk", as in, at risk of not accomplishing the vision that the school system had for them,

These students mostly came from low income neighborhoods with underfunded schools. However, thanks to Oakland's progressive school integration policies, the students, in eighth grade at the time, were able to switch to my school, which had more funding.

These students were pretty frustrated as they failed classes despite the school investing in remedial help. Again, spending $1000 per student on remedial learning can't be expected to make up for a $80K learning debt.

Fortunately, the school let myself and a few others experiment with a class that had a different vision. We wanted our students to get good at something that no student had any experience in: making money. We gave our students an opportunity to create and sell small products to strangers on the streets of Oakland.

It was a pretty great experiment. Of course, it wasn't a total panacea. There was still misbehavior. There was still skipping class. There were still hard conversations about failing our or other classes. But lots of student reported that they saw the point of school for the first time— and their grades across the board reflected this improvement in engagement

This kind of "changing the goal post" strategy has its critics and those critics have some good points. For one, if you show that you're willing to compromise on a goal then people have less accountability to reach it.

I agree we don't want to compromise on results, but I think we have to be open to tweaking how we get there. The desired result of school is not a test score, or any particular piece of knowledge. We want happy, healthy graduates who can contribute to our society and I'd argue that being able to start a business is a more useful result for that than passing the state history exam.

Anyway, our schools aren't the only place we're too late to fulfill our original vision. I don't think Al Gore said "Let's fix global warming in 20 years". I don't think Martin Luther King proposed we address racial injustice in 2020. This doesn't mean that we're too late to achieve a world where people aren't in danger from climate change or racism, but I think we are going to need different strategies than they and their contemporaries envisioned.

Both have the potential to destroy our society if left unchecked.

And I think we can learn a bit by comparing how we deal with each.

You may have read at some point about the different drastic changes we could make to stop global warming.

Perhaps you've read that eliminating meat consumption reduces your carbon footprint by 35%.

Perhaps you've read claims that owning a pet is like owning half a car.

Perhaps you've read, or heard me rant, about how paper towels are the devil.

Probably when you learned about these cool facts (pun intended) you thought, ok sure, but those are impractical. There's not enough protein rich veggies being grown to feed everyone. If we got rid of pets, think of how many people would be depressed! What am I supposed to use to clean up if not Bounty, the Quicker Picker Upper™?

But here's one easy trick that would reduce your carbon footprint by 12.5%, and you could make the change tomorrow: Cold showers.

Yes, that's right, the energy used for a 5 minute hot shower accounts for about 12.5% of your daily energy usage. If you're taking 10 minute showers (shame, shame), then cutting that out is the same as not eating any meat.

And, cold showers are healthy for you— even in the winter! So you're saving money on healthcare too. It's a win, win.

So why is nobody talking about this?

Because cold showers suck. They're totally uncomfortable. I've been doing cold showers every morning for about 2 years now and I can say it still sucks, especially when it's cold out.

Even though we know that we'd basically solve global warming by switching to cold showers, we also know that people aren't gonna add in 5 minutes of discomfort, every day, in pursuit of a such a long term goal. This is how humans work. Hot showers are just too darn comfortable.

You know what else is comfortable? Racism.

In White Fragility Robin DiAngelo talks about how white people avoid even talking about racism, because it makes us uncomfortable— let alone actually checking our biases.

She's right of course. Racism perpetuates because it feels nice to do what we're used to. It's hard to change any habit, but especially one that is often unconscious.

In fact, I'd venture to say that getting someone to be less racist is even harder than getting them to take a cold shower.

So why do we totally discount the idea of solving global warming by asking people to stop taking hot showers, when asking (or perhaps, vehemently imploring) people to be less racist is a popular strategy for resolving racial injustice?

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. If you have ideas or feelings please share.

My hunch right now is that racism is (obviously) a much more personal and immediate problem than global warming. The American brand of racism been going on for hundreds of years and its accumulated damage has reached the point where it cannot be ignored.

Climate change will, unfortunately, get there in 50 years or so. When we see people dying from coastal flooding every week, then perhaps we'll start talking about cold showers.

However, pushing cold showers at that point will probably be just as ineffective as talking about racism seems to be now.

Over the last 6 years we've seen only a 1% increase in the number of people of color being employed in Silicon Valley. That's despite that region being one of the most progressive in the country, despite tons of money being spent on diversity training, and despite lots of, unfortunately, mostly white, tech workers tweeting about bias and racism.

I think, as long as we have confidence that we can somehow will ourselves or others into being less racist, we're gonna spend energy unproductively. But then what? I know there are a lot of amazing people working on systemic change. However what can or individuals like me do to better advance the cause of racial justice? This question, again, is not rhetorical. I would love to hear your thoughts!

Identity is basically a magical thing which allows us to derive joy and energy in arbitrary things.

When you do something that falls within your identity, you'll find meaning in it, independent of its difficulty or outcome.

I started running when I was 15 not because I liked it— nobody likes running when they start. I started because someone told me I was good at it, and, as a 15 year old who wasn't very good at many things, I eagerly incorporated that into my identity. I became a "runner". Suddenly it was a lot easier to do grueling training runs and races.

This was literally an overnight change. No habit building, no self help book, no life coach.

Of course eventually I actually got good at running and then was able to derive authentic joy from it independent of my identity, and eventually eventually I stopped identifying as a runner and just run for fun.

I imagine something similar happens for most people at some point. Maybe someone told you that you were a reader, and that helped you read hard books that you might not have enjoyed. Or they told you that you were nice and suddenly you cared more about being kind.

There's book on IQ called Intelligence and How to Get It, by Richard Nisbett, which is great for many reasons, but one part I really liked is how it criticized twin studies. The premise of the authors argument is basically this: There are studies that have shown that two twins raised in totally different homes will end up with similar levels of achievement. It's like magic.

Except, it's not the magic of genes, it's the magic of identity.

Their identities end up being very similar, not really because of their genes, but because of little, genetic influenced characteristics that cause others to pidgeonhole them into an identity.

If two twins have bad eyesight, due to genetics, then both will wear glasses. If they wear glasses both are more likely to have a teacher tell them they are smart, and thus will be more likely to identify as smart, work hard in school, and end up with notable scholastic achievement. This will happen no matter where they are raised, as long as they’re within a culture that associates glasses with intelligence. All it takes is a single, respected, teacher saying "wow you really like math" and those twins will push through all the barriers that differentiate their lives to end up at the same destination (probably a degree in math). We have science to prove that!

This is really exciting if you're trying to make a big change. Though you can't easily change your genes or even your environment, you can always change your identity. It's hard to know how, but most of us have experienced a sudden identity shift, or breakthrough at at some point— so we know it's possible! If we can make that shift, we could end up on a seriously different life path as a result.

Of course there are nuances here. Identities have a dark side as well. When the world shows us evidence that contradicts our identities that can make us feel pretty bad. There's a reason why lots of philosophies recommend keeping your identity small. But no matter how small your identity is, it has a ton of power. I'd say my identity today is pretty small, with the largest part being: "A person who is likes growth and change". However, this small identity allows me to get a lot of joy out of a lot of boring, difficult or painful stuff— because I think will help me grow.

I want to think more about how to create identity shifts, for myself and others. It seems like a really important tool that I've never really learned about. If you have any ideas, let me know!

In particular, Japan, Singapore, China and, more recently, Malaysia, come to mind.

60 years ago China had nothing. Its infrastructure was ravaged by wars, it's agriculture was pretty messed up from the various great leaps forward, and because it was communist it wasn't getting a ton of aid.

Yet today china has laid the most high speed rail line on the planet. They have hundreds of subway systems. Now they're building infrastructure for other countries.

Japan has a similar story, though it started a bit earlier and had more help from the US in the form of trade and loans.

How did this happen?

It seems like in both cases, marketing played a huge role.

Marketing is the fuel that drives a population to work, even when that work makes their life harder, not easier.

Let's say you're a government and you want to build a road, but you have no money. Some governments have tried to solve this by putting out propoganda appealing to patriotism, or family duty. You talk about how awesome things will be with that new road.

But historically that hasn't worked so well.

The stuff that seems to work better is economic propaganda: Ads.

You convince people that their life would be way more awesome if they had a handbag, or a vacuum. However, they need to build a couple roads before they'll have enough money to buy it. You convince people to trade work on a permanent thing for the chance to purchase a totally impermanent one.

China's always been a hostile economic environment for foreign companies, with the exception of luxury goods. However, if you're a European maker of handbags, you've been welcome for a long time.

Us basically did this same thing. "Keeping up with the joneses" and all that. We needed people to want that middle class life, so they would do crappy jobs that were needed for the country's development.

However, were're now starting to see the dark side of this strategy.

Marketing makes us want more, and when there's work to be done, we work more, which is good. However, when there isn't enough work marketing just makes us feel bad. It makes us feel like we're lacking because we can't buy the things being marketed while others can.

Marketing is a force for action, and when that action can't be used productively, to create, it instead becomes a force for destruction. When you pump marketing into country that has a lot of stuff to get done, you get roads, etc. When you pump marketing into a country with high unemployment, you get a lot of crime instead.

So, as technology accelerates job loss, will marketing respond? Will we paint a picture of a life that is unrealistic for most people? What will happen when 90% of people can't have the life they see on TV? Will the strategy we used to bootstrap our countries lead their demise? 

Today I'm going to talk about identity and Ikigai. Two words that sound kind of similar and I pretty sure are related in some way

Ikigai is this Japanese concept of a life purpose. If you've ever seen the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Jiro, the person who's followed around in the documentary, is a great example of somebody who has Ikigai. Jiro has been making sushi in the same way for the last 60 years and he's gotten really good at it and people pay him a lot of money to do it. And. As you can see from the movie he enjoys doing it a lot. He gets a lot of meaning out of it. And I think, well this i not just my idea but many people have posited that icky guy is one of the reasons for why Japan has such a crazy average lifespan. I think Okinawa has the highest concentration of centenarians on the planet. And it's supposed that that, in large part, thi is due to this Ikigai. This meaning that people get from their lives in Japan.

And Ikigai is associated with work. People's meaning is kind of tied to their work. Now one possibility is that everybody in Japan at some point naturally, Organically develops some desire and then magically is able to find a job that expresses that desire and that personality that they develop. And then they do that for the rest of their life. But I think likely what's happening is different. People basically shift their identity to match their job.

This is actually kind of interesting. I have some friends here who've just recently started working in Japan and they had to go through a year long orientation, with no work. And a large part that orientation was just about making them feel attached to their company and their work. They had to send out postcards to everybody they knew advertising that they just started work at this company and loved it so much. The idea here I think is to shift the employee's identity so that it includes their work and in doing so produce an Ikigai that aligns with the job that they have to do. Now this kind of sounds evil overlordy especially as somebody from the US, where individualism is highly valued. But if at the end of the day it lets you live to be over 100 maybe there's something to it. The funny thing is I don't think we can really achieve this in the US. Our individualistic culture makes us feel bad when we associate our identity with something that is not unique or special. And, by default, work is going to be neither unique or special. Most work will inherently be about , essentially, copying somebody else. We learn our trade on the job or in school from other people who have done it before and we'll do it in basically the same way.

As a result we can't really make our identity about our work. It feels too much like you're just conforming and in an individualistic society that feels wrong. So instead we shape our identity around the things that we do after work the things that are unique like bowling or running or knitting. Of course other people would do those things as well but it feels a little bit more unique than shaping your identity around accounting or engineering. And as a result we spend most of our life not really expressing our identity, not really doing the thing that brings us a ton of meaning. I don't really know which life I'd prefer. I look at the life here and the sending postcards everybody say how much you love the company you just start, and I think, well I feel a little bit, ick, I guess from that. But at the same time I love the idea of finding a ton of meaning in my work. So what do you think. Do you feel like you'd want to have your identity be based around your work. Or, do you value having an identity that is separate from your work even if that means you spend less time truly expressing and pursuing it?

We experience positive change when we do something to increase joy or energy, or decrease fear or friction.

But how can we affect this kind of change? The answer, I think, is in the magic of identity change.

No thank you!

Productivity = Energy + FearCreativity = Energy + Fearlessness