A group of teens in Maryland is sharing one Instagram account in order to confuse Facebook’s ad targeting. By browsing and posting from different phones in different places, Instagram can’t figure out what ads or interests to show in the Discover tab.

Prolificacy is the reaction to the modern world.

Instead of trying to hide behind “Private Browsing” Chrome tabs, there should be a service that continuously crawls the web in the background to obfuscate your browsing history.

Instead of sweating every picture and comment posted to Instagram for fear of ruining your image, have a “casual” Insta and a “serious” Insta and a “friends” Insta and a “work” Insta.

Instead of worrying about how the news is going to report your press conference as President, overwhelm them with an avalanche of ridiculous gaffes and insane comments.

When Al Gore was asked in Nashville how he sees the balance between privacy and security playing out in the next decade, he noted how the CIA and FBI had all Al Quaeda-related communications prior to 9/11 on record. They missed the attack because the noise:signal ratio was way too high.

We live in a world where everything is on record, things move terrifyingly fast, and people are being “cancelled” every day.

The most effective reaction to this new world is being prolific.

Multiple identities are better than one. An avalanche of thoughts guards your most controversial ones.

Every October in college, I had to go to the “Idea Fest” in Louisville. I always dreaded getting on the bus and missing out on a weekend on campus. But Philippe Petit was there one year to talk about life on a tightrope. Joseph Gordon-Levitt ended up playing him in a movie.

This guy Dom, who billed himself as “one of the original creators of Twitters”, met with us after his talk. I remember two things he said. 1. “I never forget a face,” as he stared at each of us intently for 3 seconds. 2. “Twitter is awesome because of the 140 character limit. Constraints breed creativity.”

I knew it was true. It’s one of those fortune-cookie statements that you roll your eyes when you hear.

Despite its triteness, I keep observing how constraints breed more than creativity. Constraints breed friendships, adventures, productivity, and more.

This past weekend, Elizabeth and I wanted to get out of the city for a hike. We sold the Subaru before moving here, so we could either 1. rent a car, 2. take an Uber, or 3. find friends to go on a hike with.

We’re cheap. So we texted a bunch of people asking if anybody was down for a hike.

One of Elizabeth’s friends said he was going across the golden gate bridge for a hike with two other guys. There was room for two more.

If the Subaru was parked downstairs, we would’ve just gone to Point Reyes on our own. But instead, not only did we get a hike in, I also met new people.

Andy casually mentioned this morning, “Us only having one car means I either have to Uber to work, find a ride, walk, or scooter. I decided to walk halfway, then scooter. And I’ll probably end up walking the whole way.”

In the past two days, here are two examples of constraints breeding friendships and exercise. It’s far more powerful than just creativity. Dom was right.

I’ve been sick the last few days, hence the dry riverbed of blog posts.

I’m still not 100%, but feeling better. Thankfully I don’t have coronavirus. Just being within one BART ride of SFO gives this amateur hypochondriac all the fuel I need.

I’ve been thinking about how long it’s taken me to learn a simple fact: not everybody is going to like what I build.

In high school, my friends weren’t particularly interested in things I was building. None of my close friends bought the shirts I sold online. None of my close friends were eager to use the (bad) software I built.

I’ve since read stories about Sean Parker meeting all these crazy people online in IRC chatrooms. I didn’t know what IRC was, I’m not sure I knew anyone who knew what it was. But good for him. It’s likely that none of his geographically-close friends thought the hacking he was doing was cool. So he found his community of friends online.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve repeatedly made is trying to convince everyone that what I’m building is cool. It’s an unrealistic and dangerous path.

I call the chronic sufferers of this illness “Cocktail Party Entrepreneurs.”

Most people at cocktail parties run in the same general social circle, have somewhat interesting jobs, and live happy lives commuting to and from work and collecting paychecks and skiing on the weekends. These people are not interested in buying your SaaS. Your SaaS is boring.

When you describe what you do, the best you’ll get is, “Oh that’s interesting.” So it goes.

I used to suffer from this illness. And I’ve observed so many others try to impress the cocktail party crowd with their new shiny idea.

Instead of saying “we help local businesses resell over text,” suddenly the product serves everyone and solves some deep social problem. It involves Maths and machine learning. Cocktail Party Entrepreneurs lean into the need for validation that this problem is worth solving and that they’re wise to work on it.

This is a terrible path.

Only 1/100 people are going to “get it.” You’re better off getting 2/200 people to “get” your product than you are spending incredible energy and wasted hot air trying to get 2/100 people to “get” it.

The goal isn’t to impress the cocktail party. The sample size is too small.

Years ago, Sarah Silverman went on the Howard Stern Show. After chatting about comedy for a while, they started taking listener calls.

One of the callers who made it live onto the air started cussing Sarah out. “Whoa whoa whoa, I’m hanging up” Howard said. Just before the line went dead, the caller blurted out in a crazed stuttering voice, “I exist!”

Sarah’s takeaway was that people have a need to be heard.

But I think it’s more than that. Why are we so obsessed with validating our own existence?

When men catcall women on the street, do they really think it’s going to lead to a date? Or are they looking for an acknowledgement of any kind?

We snap an ungodly amount of selfies each day. We post them online and are thrilled when people double-tap them.

We put pictures of ourselves all around our own houses. Toddlers love mirrors, and adults never rid themselves of those sideways glances into dark windows and mirrors.

We try to make others laugh at our jokes. We like when people look us in the eyes. We hurt others in order to feel pain - to feel something, anything.

I think our obsession with validating our existence means that deep down we know we don’t exist.

Maybe it’s because we’re living in a simulation or maybe because there is no self - as much as we wish there was.

When I sit down in front of my laptop, I’ll start upgrading our Stripe integration for Bottle to comply with new EU/CA regulations.

And then I’ll get pulled into fixing something with the checkout flow. Then I’ll start thinking about our scheduled action architecture. Then I’ll chip away at our upgrades to “Message Templates.” Then I’ll start thinking about the automation UI, how we need to improve the concept of “Audiences,” how we need to finish and ship new signup pages for our merchants, how the checkout flow needs to be customizable, how we need to expose more analytics, how PDF’s and Excel downloads and reports need to be improved, how we need to give insight into automations that have run, how customer info needs to be highlighted, how shortcodes need to be added, how link tracking is needed, how scheduled message reporting needs to be added, how we need onboarding handholding and signup and plan management and credit card intake and account management and new checkout options and embeddable signup forms and a horizontal nav on the product selection screen and bug fixes for phone calls.

When I circle back to the upgrading of our Stripe integration, I’m out of breath.

Writing here every day has been very cathartic. It’s helped me organize at least one thought every day. And that’s an accomplishment, and it sets me up to be happy about my day.

One of the major things Andy and I have talked about is where to go from here. Should we raise money? Should we stay bootstrapped? Am I good enough to push the product forward? Can we build revenue to hire the next designer and developer?

Writing also helps me work through those questions. Not that I arrive at answers, but it at least organizes my thoughts.

In Nashville, when I was in college, there was a bar across the street from a bunch of dorms. I can’t remember its name. It constantly changed names. It kept failing.

After a new owner hung a new neon sign out front, the bar’s manager tried hard to attract everyone on campus. One night, we went. He offered penny beers. We got to bring in our own DJ. There were lasers, it was dark, you could feel the bass and couldn’t hear well enough to hold a conversation. We had a great time.

Then we never went back.

A few months later, the bar shut down. Another neon sign replaced the old one.

Somebody, I wish I could remember who, mentioned his theory for why this bar kept failing: it was all alone on the block.

Nowadays there’s a 20-story luxe hotel at the corner of campus and 21st. But back then, there was a fenced-off parking lot. A few hundred yards away there was a Wendy’s. That was about it.

He theorized that we went to Tin Roof and Rippy’s in part because we liked those bars, but also because there were tons of other bars around them. If there was a long line, or there wasn’t enough EDM, or they were charging $5 to get in, then we could go next door.

I’m sure if I opened a bar, and a new bar opened next door, I’d worry they were stealing my Bud Heavy sales. At the micro-level, it’s a valid thought. But two bars is better than one. Three is better than two. At some point everybody ends up splitting the same pie, but at what point? Empirically, lone bars struggle.

Bars need competition in order to get crowds.

I thought back to this theory when I saw a poll Barstool ran the other day. They asked people in each state what their least favorite states were. Pretty much everybody said their least favorite state was a state touching their own. Ohio hated Michigan and Minnesota hated Wisconsin. The funniest was North Dakota saying South Dakota was their least favorite, and vice versa. Really?

We view those closest to us as competition. At the same time, we need each other.

It’s only fun when the Crimson Tide crushes Auburn because Auburn fans hate Alabama.

If we need each other, are we actually enemies?

Americans bought 909,330 F-150’s last year, which is more than the number of Silverado’s (585k), Camry’s (343k), or RAV4’s (427k). They outsold everything.

When a gallon of gas is burned, approximately 20.1 pounds of CO2 are emitted into the air. That’s 9,117 grams of CO2 equivalents [CO2e] per gallon of gas.

Since F-150’s average about 18mpg (optimistically), ~536.29 grams CO2e are emitted for each mile driven. (This excludes the cost of building and selling and transporting the car, it excludes upstream costs of gas, it excludes parking and asphalt and everything else that goes along with it.)

I propose using this marginal cost of driving a mile in a F-150 as a metric to express the carbon emissions of everyday life.

We could express the carbon impact of riding in an Uber, taking a flight, drinking a cup of coffee, riding the elevator, or ordering clothes in terms of F-150 Mile Equivalents, or “FME’s.”

For example, what’s the FME of charging my laptop?

In California, the grid efficiency is 841g of CO2e per kWh of electricity. Or, 0.841g of CO2 per Wh.

So it takes 48.9g of CO2e to fully charge the 58.2 Wh battery in my MacBook Pro.

My laptop’s FME is 10.97 charges per 1 F-150 mile.

I’m visualizing the exhaust of an F-150 trucking up a hill as I type this out.

An obvious incentive design flaw.

I was having tea with the founder of a preventative healthcare app. It helps people get flu shots on time, sync genetic info to improve diets, monitor Apple Watch data for irregular heartbeats, etc. It keeps upcoming should-do’s organized in one place

He thought they’d be able to go out and sell it to all the insurance companies to help drive down premiums for end consumers by lowering risk profiles.

Then he discovered the consumer is only on an insurance plan for an average of 2.7 years before rolling off.

One insurance executive told him bluntly, “Investing money today to improve somebody’s health years down the road isn’t in our best interest. If we improve your health 5 years from now, by then you’re no longer paying us.”

I cross 31 crosswalks on my way to work every morning.

There’s a four-stop at Steiner and Ellis. This morning, a white Ford Explorer came in hot to the stop sign before slamming its brakes.

We made eye contact. He paused. Then I took my eyes off of him, off of the car, looked straight ahead, and started crossing the street.

I wouldn’t have ever thought about this tiny interaction. But Daniel Kahneman was recently on Lex Fridman’s podcast. They were talking about how self-driving cars can possibly infer whether or not humans are about to step into the street.

Kahneman noted how, immediately after making eye contact with drivers, walkers invariably always look away before beginning to cross.

Our parents don’t teach us this behavior. “Now Johnny, remember to look away from the car as you’re beginning to cross the 8-line highway.”

But over time we’ve all learned to play a variant of this game of chicken.

2,402 people live in St. Maries, ID. The Lumberjack is the mascot of the lone public high school.

Tom Mueller grew up there, about a hundred miles from the Canadian border, surrounded by wilderness and chainsaws. But Tom also spent a lot of time looking up at space. His friend across the street had a telescope. The two of them would look for roaming planets and black holes in the night sky.

One day, Tom’s dad came home from a day of logging to discover Tom had strewn all the parts of the lawnmower across the yard. He was pissed, at least until Tom proceeded to put all the pistons and valves and blades back together. It still worked just fine.

Tom was really good at math. He was also really good at quickly understanding how different engines worked, and how to fix them. He loved launching homemade rockets from his backyard.

In high school, his math teacher asked if he wanted to be an engineer.

Tom said “no.”

“Do you want to be the guy who fixes the plane or the guy who designs it?” his teacher asked.

Nowadays, Tom is the CTO of SpaceX. He first met Elon Musk in 2001 after developing liquid-fueled rockets in his LA garage. The two decided to build rockets that would one day make it to Mars.

Tom credits his high school math teacher with nudging him to major in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Idaho, which pushed him onward to LMU in LA for a master’s degree.

“If it hadn’t been for that math teacher, I probably would have been a mechanic or a logger.”¹

The math teacher’s suggestion reminds me of Tyler Cowen’s observation that small nudges can be the difference in massive success and failure.

But there’s another interesting part of this story. Tom Mueller was born in rural northern Idaho. He now designs the world’s most groundbreaking rockets in LA. The move from St. Maries, ID, to Moscow, ID, to California was relatively easy.

There’s an economic efficiency in matching talent to geography. There’s a reason the auto industry clustered in Detroit, silicon clustered in the Bay Area, and healthcare clustered in Boston.

Geographic redistribution is one of the built-in advantages of the United States. Whereas even in Europe people can move around, there are still significant cultural differences between cities. It’s less likely somebody born and raised in Paris will choose to live in Berlin when compared to somebody born and raised in Chicago choosing to live in Boston.

The dynamism of people moving around is a hallmark of a free society. We get to vote with our feet. The inverse - the inability to move around - is a hallmark of centralized economies.

The startling problem, as I’ve discussed on this blog before, is that the number of people moving across state lines has dropped by 51% in a half-century.

Why?

What have we done to make it harder for somebody like Tom to move from Idaho to LA? How can we make it easier for people to move and choose where they want to learn and grow and contribute?

1. https://magazine.lmu.edu/articles/rocket-man/↩

Vulnerability is my favorite quality.¹

I struggle to be vulnerable. I’ll catch myself journaling as if my great-great-grandson is deriving the meaning of life from my words, writing in a way so as to appear “strong” and “clear-minded.”

How laughable.

Why is it that I struggle to write about my own flaws and shortcomings and frustrations in my own journal? Who am I being strong for? When I read my old posts, the most compelling entries are the ones where I’m most blunt.

It’s not just my journal entries. I find characters with massive character flaws more compelling. If Sherlock Holmes didn’t ignore Dr. Watson, the stories would be boring. If David Brent better understood the manager/employee dynamic, he wouldn’t be winking at the camera.²

Christopher Hitchens is my favorite essayist. Tiger Woods is my favorite golfer. Elon Musk is my favorite entrepreneur. These people are not saints.

When I think about why I like my best friends, it’s because they tell me stories about peeing the bed after late-night Tinder dates. And the most successful politicians - Trump, Boris, Bush over Gore, Clinton, Nixon, JFK - seem even more depraved than my friends.³

Boris goes so far as to ruffle his own hair, fall off his bike, get stuck in the sky, and forget his lines when he’s speaking at events.⁴ Even Obama, the great orator, got famous in 2004 when he emphasized how he was just “a lanky kid with a funny name.”

Paul Graham says these politicians have charisma. And they do. They have exceeding amounts of charisma. I haven’t heard a compelling reason as to why Graham is wrong about the more charismatic candidate always winning the election.⁵

But, what is charisma? Graham tries to answer that question in an entire essay. His conclusion is that in order to be charismatic, you have to genuinely like people.⁶ And I agree. But lots of people who like other people also lack charisma. I’m reminded of this every time I get seated on a plane next to Danny From Orlando Ready To Make A New Friend.

I think charisma requires being deeply flawed.

We aren’t drawn to the Buttigieg or Romney robots. We’re drawn to the people who make us smile despite everything burning around them.

I’m left thinking about three potential relationships between vulnerability and charisma:

1. Maybe being flawed is a prerequisite for being liked.
2. Maybe flaws force people to develop charisma in order to overcome their flaws, and sometimes this spills over. Like how people who have lost their eyesight can hear things the rest of us can’t.
3. Or, maybe charisma gives cover to flaws and lets them fester.

1. I define vulnerability in this context as being comfortable enough with your own character flaws to broadcast them publicly.↩
2. Ricky Gervais explains the difference in American and British humor: Brits root for the underdog.↩
3. I love you, this is not a criticism.↩
4. The best story I’ve read on Boris.↩
5. I particularly enjoy discussing this essay with Political Science majors. They always disagree.↩
6. Trump is an exception to Graham’s observation of charismatic people “genuinely liking people.” Trump does not seem to like anyone as much as he likes himself. All Presidents have had egos, but Clinton and Bush and Obama and others seem to have needed connection with other people, whereas Trump seems to merely need attention.↩

Suman and I were in the back room¹ of a wine shop on Friday. Alex, the owner of the shop and the founder of Subject To Change natural wines, was pouring glasses and explaining the story behind each label.

He explained how for a wine to be “Double Zero Wine”, it must either:

1. Have nothing added and nothing taken out during the fermentation process;
2. Or, be made from organic grapes with nothing added during fermentation.

Alex thinks natural wine should be all of it: organic grapes + nothing added + nothing removed during fermentation.

“People add stuff to the fermentation process?”

“Oh, yes,” he explains. “As much as Americans claim they like dry wines… Most vineyards at a minimum add sugar before fermenting. Gives you sweeter wines with higher alcohol content.”

Then he said: “Unfortunately we [as humans] learned a lot about food science.”

Unfortunately. I’ve noticed this pattern.

We as a species learned how to preserve stuff. It was great! We learned how to prevent botulism and food-borne illnesses. We learned how to prevent the arduous process of canning. Preserving things was now as easy as adding chemicals.

Sourdough bread became Wonder Bread. Fermented strawberries became Smucker’s Jelly. Fermented root beer became Coca-Cola.

A few generations went by and we lost our collective fermentation knowledge. It’s wild that the chefs behind Noma “rediscovered” fermentation. Just a handful of generations ago, food in the Nordics had to be fermented in bulk to last through the snow-drenched winters.

(Fun fact: Rene credits David Chang’s kimchi at Momofuku in NYC as part of their fermentation-reawakening journey.²)

What we didn’t understand when we started artificially preserving food is the importance of our gut biomes. We didn’t understand the impact of sugar or the impact of processed food on our bodies.

We knew enough to get into trouble, but not enough to avoid disaster.

We’ve done this repeatedly throughout history.

We knew just enough about fossil fuels to light them on fire.

We knew just enough about genetics for academics to advocate for eugenics.³

And we knew just enough about food science to add preservatives to all our food.

1. “They used to deal drugs out of this room. It was a mess when we moved in.”↩

I’ll be honest with you: David Chang immediately came to mind because of kimchi. He may not remember serving it, but I remember having an oyster topped with kimchi water at Momofuku Ssam Bar and finding it absolutely incredible. He and his team were working a parallel track to our own, learning their way around fermentation and developing new products using age-old techniques. I asked him to come speak at MAD about fermentation. While onstage, he introduced the culinary community to the concept of microbial terroir.

Chang was referring to the largely unseen world of mold, yeast, and bacteria responsible for fermentation. They are omnipresent, transcending countless cultures and culinary traditions. What Change was saying was that the microbes indigenous to any given region will always have their say in the flavor of the final product, in the smae way that soil, weather, and geography affect wine. Rene Redzepi, The Noma Guide To Fermentation

↩

1. https://harvardmagazine.com/2016/03/harvards-eugenics-era↩

I was having coffee yesterday with a freelance marketer at Joe & The Juice on Montgomery St. She’s lived in SF for 25 years. Her side hustle is giving chocolate tours on the weekend through a touring agency.¹

It reminded me of when I moved to Chicago. I was driving a big yellow Penske truck up I-65. I was going to need help unloading once I got there.

So I searched on Taskrabbit and booked the only guy available on a short 3 hour notice. He was going to meet me at my new apartment and help me unload my table and chairs and bed and boxes.

I almost missed him at first. He was a 60-year-old man wearing glasses and a Northwestern quarter zip. “Hey, are you Will?”

This was my mover. Not what I expected.

But we got to work. He was high energy. He’d jog from the door of my apartment back to the truck. He was directing me to unload boxes in a certain order and showing me how to properly lift boxes.

“Most people pay money to go to a gym,” he said, “but people pay me to work out.”

He then told me that he’s a math professor at Northwestern. He moves people via Taskrabbit on the weekends for the hell of it. He was telling me how he also teaches chess lessons to middle and high schoolers, and how he also will do handyman services for people around his neighborhood.

I loved that.

My mind started spinning with Airbnb Experiences and Taskrabbit at what all was possible. “Maybe I should start putting together Ikea furniture for fun.” “Maybe Elizabeth should give a running architecture tour in the mornings before work along the riverwalk.” “Maybe I can get paid to workout too.”

1. I asked her if she listed herself on Airbnb Experiences. She said she’s really interested in checking it out. But her hesitation is the rigidity. If one person books a tour it doesn’t matter if nobody else signs up, she has to give the tour.↩