When I came across the image I sent out to Second Breakfast the other day, I thought it was a cool depiction of how cars and people are incompatible.

After taking it in, I also thought to myself that it wasn’t very novel. “Everybody’s probably already seen this.”

I have a tendency to do this about so many things I discover.

• “Everybody has a Substack newsletter now.”
• “Everybody knows the main complaints about Prop 13.”
• “Everybody knows who Henry George is and what his ideas were.”
• “Everybody has heard of Mailchimp.”
• “Everybody has seen Empathy Wines by Vaynerchuk.”

Why do I forget that 10 seconds ago, I had never seen that image?

It feels like a version of Crichton’s Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Just like how we forget journalists aren’t experts, once we learn a fact, we forget what it’s like to not know that fact.

This problem is exacerbated by Twitter bubbles. Oftentimes I roll my eyes because it seems everyone I follow on Twitter is reading Sapiens and Atomic Habits and Poor Charlie’s Almanack and is engaged in a collective party of confirmation bias.

But even if it’s true that everyone I follow online is reading all the same stuff as me (they aren’t), I need to remember this is a tiny fraction of my actual life. It’s a self-selected group based on my interests.

None of my IRL friends are on Twitter.

We got into an argument the other night about whether you should say “Go Up Market” or “Go Down Market” when telling someone to go down Market in the direction of this arrow:

I think (despite the fact the street numbers are ascending from 1st to 10th) the proper verbiage is “Go Down Market” because you’re moving South(west).

I always anchor myself to maps. I like knowing what direction I’m walking in. I like reading maps and seeing how the streets come together.

When I pop up out of a Subway station and don’t know which direction I’m facing, I feel nauseous. I get the same sick feeling when I wake up in a new bed and can’t remember how I’m positioned in the room relative to the outside world.

Maps are cool. No idea how we used to make them so accurately without overhead views.

Napoleon has expelled Snowball from Animal Farm with his pack of fierce dogs, leaving himself as the Leader.

The windmill that the mules and horses and sheep have built stone by stone over the course of a year has been blown over by a tremendous storm.

Fall is fast approaching.

To make up for the dwindling rations and the slipping windmill construction schedule, Napoleon announces that Sunday will become a work day.

It will be voluntary, of course. But “any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”

I frequently defend Uber and Lyft and Postmates and the like, citing schedule flexibility as one of the most incredible opportunities offered by app marketplaces.

But in order to make money, drivers for Uber have to drive during peak hours: the morning and evening commutes and the bars-are-closed rush.

Not much schedule flexibility when the demand dictates your schedule.

“Driving is strictly voluntary, but any driver who absents themselves from the morning and the evening will have his rations reduced by half.”

Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, referred to cultural norms that get imitated and spread as “memes.”¹

Cultural memes - such as how we gather for Thanksgiving, the Happy Birthday song, how we drink and greet each other and mourn together - are similar to our biological genes: the successful ones survive generation after generation, even if they slowly change.

Last night when I was driving up snow-covered Highway 50 in a row of other cars with our engines humming, I thought about how not a minute goes by that a combustion engine isn’t running somewhere in the world. They’re always going. And this has been true every single minute of every single day for about 140 years.²

Successful inventions are memes. Their concepts succeed and spread.

The behavior of memes isn’t limited to only cultural and biological realms, but also to academic and mechanical realms. And how many other realms?

“We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.” -Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene

↩

1. The internal combustion engine was invented in 1876.↩

I seem to get done exactly what I need or want to finish whether or not I have a deadline. But when there’s a deadline, I get things done sooner.

At 3pm yesterday, sitting in Industrious, I thought to myself, “It’s okay the day is running out, I can finish that up later tonight.”

But then I realized I’ve learned two things. First, “I’ll do it later today” is an excuse to not get it done right now. And second, “Later Today” is really about an hour of unfocused anxious time after the dishes are put away but before my eyes start to droop.

So I’m going to stop allowing myself to work at night.

It’s a 2.7 mile walk back home from the office to our apartment. That should be the time I decompress, walk out what’s rattling in my brain, and walk into our apartment finished for the day.

If I can’t get it done before I leave the office, then it has to wait until the next morning.

My AIM username was scribbler. My Xbox username was scribbler. So was my email. And my Facebook ID. And my Kazaa. I liked having a unifying name across all services.

Nowadays, kids not only have different usernames for Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok, but most kids have multiple usernames for each platform.

Boomers have very strong identities. They enjoy certain kinds of wine, they are loyal to certain carmakers, they put the same hotel brands and airlines on repeat.

But young people are promiscuous. Trying new beers, new airlines, new travel experiences.

I wonder if the iPhone generation is more comfortable with changing identities. Boomers have carved their identities in stone. But when you’ve got 20 different usernames on a dozen different services, who are you? And does it matter if it changes?

I think fluid identity is a net positive for society. But we’ll see.

Car dealers try to sell you a car for “just $225/month.” The company Lemonade sells you renter’s insurance for “only $0.25 a day.” But when you’re offered a job, they tell you your annual salary.

Instead, expenses should be annualized and income should be accounted for per diem.

Your morning latte is $1,642.50 a year.

Your post-workout-smoothie is $1,404 a year.

Taking that 15-minute YouTube break is 91 hours a year, or two full working weeks.

You earn $400 a day.

The day Christopher Hitchens died, his longtime editor and friend at the Vanity Fair posted an In Memoriam.

“He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation.”

That sentence nails it. I don’t care for cigarettes or scotch. But Hitchens’ appetite for opposition, for combat, for conversation was contagious.

I don’t have the appetite Hitchens had. But debate was my favorite activity in high school. The tournaments were fun. It was even more fun staying up late in Hampton Inn’s, arguing about philosophers we couldn’t pronounce and foreign policy we didn’t understand.

My best college memories are similar. We’d leave Rippy’s and get cabs back to Convent. A pizza would be waiting for us on the porch. We’d put music videos on the TV. And then we’d start arguing. About space, about economics, about Bush and Obama and about how many beers we could drink.

I craved those nights.

One night in particular still cracks me up. We were watching a video featuring Carl Sagan’s voice booming out of the subwoofer, opining about the humility of man amidst the vastness of space.

At the end, my friend from Texas (cowboy boots and all) said he didn’t understand why we invested so much in space travel. I spoke at length about Ernst Stuhlinger’s letter to a nun who’d asked “Why go to the moon?” in 1970.

After what I thought was a passionate defense of the hope and promise of space exploration, the innovation it provides, the beautiful expression of physics and math, the unifying force it has as an “Earth vs. the Universe” framework, my friend shakes his head and goes, “I just don’t get it. There isn’t whiskey on the Moon.”

My craving for conversation has reached a new high, and so I’m going to start using Twitter and the Internet more deliberately to reach and chat and argue and talk to more and more people. If it’s fun I’ll keep doing it.

So, talk to me!

He Knew He Was Right, The New Yorker, 2006:

At a dinner a few months ago in San Francisco with his wife, Carol Blue, and some others, Hitchens wore a pale jacket and a shirt unbuttoned far enough to hint at what one ex-girlfriend has called “the pelt of the Hitch.” Hitchens, who only recently gave up the habit of smoking in the shower, was working through a pack of cigarettes while talking to two women at his end of the table: a Stanford doctor in her early thirties whom he’d met once before, and a friend of hers, a librarian. He spoke with wit and eloquence about Iranian politics and what he saw as the unnecessary handsomeness of Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco.

[…]

In the noisy front room of the North Beach restaurant where the friends had met, Hitchens made a toast: “To the Constitution of the United States, and confusion to its enemies!” The conversation was amiable and boozy; Hitchens might be said to care more for history than for individual humans, but he was in an easy mood, after a drive, in beautiful early-evening light, from Menlo Park. (He and Blue, a writer working on a novel, live with their thirteen-year-old daughter in Washington, D.C., but spend the summer in California, where her parents live.) During the ride, he had discussed with the Pakistani-born taxi-driver the virtues and vices of Benazir Bhutto, while surreptitiously using a bottle of Evian to put out a small but smoky fire that he had set in the ashtray.

And then the young doctor to his left made a passing but sympathetic remark about Howard Dean, the 2004 Presidential candidate; she said that he had been unfairly treated in the American media. Hitchens, in the clear, helpful voice one might use to give street directions, replied that Dean was “a raving nut bag,” and then corrected himself: “A raving, sinister, demagogic nut bag.” He said, “I and a few other people saw he should be destroyed.” He noted that, in 2003, Dean had given a speech at an abortion-rights gathering in which he recalled being visited, as a doctor, by a twelve-year-old who was pregnant by her father. (“You explain that to the American people who think that parental notification is a good idea,” Dean said, to applause.) Dean appeared not to have referred the alleged rape to the police; he also, when pressed, admitted that the story was not, in all details, true. For Hitchens, this established that Dean was a “pathological liar.”

“All politicians lie!” the women said.

“He’s a doctor,” Hitchens said.

“But he’s a politician.”

“No, excuse me,” Hitchens said. His tone tightened, and his mouth shrunk like a sea anemone poked with a stick; the Hitchens face can, at moments of dialectical urgency, or when seen in an unkindly lit Fox News studio, transform from roguish to sour. (Hitchens’s friend Martin Amis, the novelist, has chided Hitchens for “doing that horrible thing with your lips.”) “Fine,” Hitchens said. “Now that I know that, to you, medical ethics are nothing, you’ve told me all I need to know. I’m not trying to persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I’m telling you why I disagree with you. That I do care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There’s nothing you wouldn’t make an excuse for.”

“That’s wrong!” they said.

“You know what? I wouldn’t want you on my side.” His tone was businesslike; the laughing protests died away. “I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud, and you say, ‘That’s O.K.’ Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I’m telling you what I think are standards, and you say, ‘What standards? It’s fine, he’s against the Iraq war.’ Fuck. Off. You’re MoveOn.org. ‘Any liar will do. He’s anti-Bush, he can say what he likes.’ Fuck off. You think a doctor can lie in front of an audience of women on a major question, and claim to have suppressed evidence on rape and incest and then to have said he made it up?”

“But Christopher . . .”

“Save it, sweetie, for someone who cares. It will not be me. You love it, you suck on it. I now know what your standards are, and now you know what mine are, and that’s all the difference—I hope—in the world.”

E-commerce is like Michael Jordan when he played for the wizards. Sport-defining. Dominant. But increasingly average in a world of quicker, stronger Kobe’s.

E-commerce was our first attempt at digitizing the store. We took pictures of all the products in Wal-mart and stocked the internet’s infinite shelf space.

I don’t mean to diminish the excitement of discovering obscure books with the help of obscure reviews and having that book show up on the doorstep. Online shopping is dope.

But tapping around Safari with two thumbs on a 4″ screen is tedious.

So while we all loved bidding on Ebay for fun in 2004, nobody is surfing the web anymore. Don’t believe me?

This is the #1 app on laptops:

This is the #1 app on phones:

We spend less than 1 out of every 10 minutes in Safari on our phones (our desktop usage is a mirror image). The rest of the time, we’re scrolling through apps, taking pictures, and texting our friends and our coworkers.

We’re fully in the iMessage era. Yet every business is building stores the same way we did when ‌You’ve Got Mail wasn’t just a movie.

iCommerce is the process of optimizing stores for the noisy world of tap-tap-tap and Instagram attention spans.

Three articles from the past three weeks:

• Bridgewater Makes $1.5 Billion Options Bet on Falling Market (WSJ, November 2019)
• Investors Bail on Stock Market Rally, Fleeing Funds at Record Pace (WSJ, November 2019)
• Warren Buffett’s company is sitting on $122 billion in cash, which could be a bad sign (Business Insider, November 2019)

People are bracing for the pending recession. The trade war’s unpredictable. The election year is volatile. The 12-year bull run has to eventually end. Several people I know in hedge funds are betting the market declines next year.

But where is the irrational exuberance? WeWork gets rejected from public markets completely. Tesla, the most exciting technology stock in at least a decade, is the most-shorted stock on any exchange. BTC is trading 75% down from its peak two years ago. The market is flooded with money, yet returns are getting harder to find. The most popular investments among young people - unlike in 2001 - are ETF’s.

My “efficient market hypothesis” mental model is telling me that because of the negativity - the bracing-for-impact everyone seems to be doing - the downside risk of equities are already priced in.

The market is most inefficient when everyone thinks it’s efficient.

The big tub on the left is two loaves worth of sourdough. It’s been fermenting overnight.

The little tub above it is a branch of my brother’s sourdough culture.

The big jar on the right is brown sugar-water with water kefir grains in it. They’ve been rehydrating since Thursday. Today, I’ll add fresh sugar water. Tomorrow, I’ll swap the water again and add fresh fruit. After that, I’ll bottle it, refrigerate it, and drink it a day later.

Elizabeth gave me The Noma Guide to Fermentation. I’d been reading a copy from the Ketchum Library this winter.

My fermentation station is growing.

When searching for our apartment, I met three different property managers. One was driving an Audi, the other two were driving BMW’s.

We need Fred Schwed to write a sequel to Where Are The Customer’s Yachts?

All economic gains seem to be flowing to landlords. Ridiculously favorable tax treatment, regulation-locked supply, and an inflow of SaaS money from around the world are all making the royal landowners wealthier by the monthly rent check.

By the time we search for our next apartment those property managers will be driving new Porsche Taycans.

Lyndon Johnson nearly killed himself running for his first Congressional seat when he was 28 years old. He found out he won the seat from his hospital bed where he was being treated for liver failure stemming from his sleepless nights and frantic rallies where he tried to meet everybody in his district.

He grew up on barely-fertile soil in West Texas. What he lacked in brainspeed he made up in physical speed. He made sure he and the other aides below him wrote personal responses to every letter written to Congressman Kleberg. His fellow legislative assistants laughed when they saw Johnson running up the steps of the Capitol to work each morning.

But for all his psychotic behavior, his insane work ethic, his Shakespearean love letters, his unmoored ambition, the thing I most often think about from Caro’s Path To Power is how Johnson - as a sitting Congressman - would get into his beat up Ford and drive through the night from D.C. to Austin. Before Eisenhower built our interstates. On backroads and state highways. Without a radio, without podcasts, without a fellow passenger. For 28 hours, he’d drive over rolling hills, all the way home.

I wonder what he thought about.

One of Bezos’ lines is “it’s day 1.” How is the third most valuable company in the world, with over 50% of all e-commerce traffic servicing over half of all product searches, still “in the early days”?

Early adopters think “it’s too late” (imagine Bill Gates reading the Popular Electronics magazine and thinking “software is happening without us”), when really things are just getting started. I remember learning about Tesla over a decade ago in high school and thinking, “Exxon is toast, how can people hold their stock?” Lol.

Ridesharing’s a great example. It feels ubiquitous. When I was taking a Pool to ATL a few months ago, I shared my ride with a woman headed into work at Dunkin’ Donuts. But only 36% of Americans have ever used ridesharing - only a quarter ride once a month. And worldwide, only 110 million people (1.4% of humans) ride Uber monthly.

When DHH/Jason released Rework, they thought it was too late; remote work was already obvious. Over a decade later, the book is having a resurgence because remote work is really beginning to take root.

@patio11 (who works in Stripe’s newest location, “Remote Hub”) placed a $500 bet that 3 of the top 5 largest YC companies founded this year or later will be remote companies within 5 years. None of the top 5 largest YC companies currently are.

Oh, and as for Bezos and Amazon? Only 0.92% of commerce happens online. Still day 1.