Munger: “Don’t expect too much of human nature. I have a rule for politicians — it’s a stoic rule. I always reflect that they are never so bad you don’t live to want them back.”

He describes the scene in California when he first arrived LA: lawyers, insurance brokers, and car dealers running around Sacramento greasing pockets, trying to get every advantage through legislation they could. “Crooks, all of them.”

“Oh how I wish we could have all of those crooks back. You laugh, you young people, but you’re going to live to wish Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump were immortal.”

I wonder if it’s different this time, or if we’ll look at whatever crackpots are running the country in 20 years, and fondly wish again for this “simple” era.

Of course, perhaps it’ll be even worse. As Kurt Vonnegut is quoted, “Fear is waking up and realizing your high school class is running the country.”

I used to associate a “click” sound with clicking links on the web.

I remember sitting in the MBHS library, in one of those dorm-room-like wooden lean-back chairs, in front of a Dell machine running Windows. We’d be playing Wikipedia races, clicking blue link to blue link to blue link, trying to navigate a path to some random article. Each click came with a little dopamine hit, a little sound. “Click.”

Has that gone away? Was it the sound of the mechanical mouse clicking? Or was the computer also emitting a click noise?

I miss it.

This morning I was walking down Divisadero. “I’ve battled crashing servers in that Starbucks,” I thought to myself.

There are lots of places where I’ve frantically tapped my keyboard, cursing myself, wondering why I’m such a bad developer:

• The upstairs bedroom of a shared Airbnb in Boise (after driving through the night from Nevada) (I broke my arm while skiing less than 24 hours later)
• My desk overlooking the Paulina Brown Line L station
• A Starbucks in north beach
• A quiet room overlooking the Chesapeake bay
• A call tiny room in the Manhattan Industrious
• (and exhilaratingly, more…)

Our servers at Bottle have bricked at some very inconvenient times.

When I boarded my Southern China flight to Guangzhou last September, it was going to be the longest time (13 hours) that I’d ever been unable to check on the servers. It was terrifying. I upgraded the hardware we were using. I noted how lucky we were that it was late on a Friday.

Right when we landed in China - data charges be damned - I checked my email.

Nothing catastrophic.

8 years ago I wrote a blog post on Jirnil, (a little Medium-esque app I’d built while interning for the FCC) titled: “Google Search Is Dead”.

RageChill had been getting popular. To track usage and commentary, I’d type in “ragechill” into Chrome and hit enter. I got the same 3 articles each time: Mashable, regarding our IE debacle; one YouTube review; and a Reddit thread.

Then I’d go to search.twitter.com. The results were evocative. People tweeting at their friends, commenting on songs they were hearing, complaining about the app breaking. It felt alive, with new mentions and tweets and thoughts every few minutes.

Twitter was at least 100x more valuable than Google in keeping track of what people were saying about RageChill.

I think I was quick to judge Google search as dead, but the trend has continued. In the past week, I’ve seen more vocal complaints about the degraded results people are getting on Google. It’s nearly impossible to find the weird, quirky, interesting, intellectual web of 15 years ago. Google is now the YellowPages.

DHH/Jason complain about Monday.com advertising above their results. It takes multiple pages of scrolling just to get to genuine results. When I was trying to research Hemingway’s travels in 1939, all I could seem to get were Amtrak ads - despite how much I twisted the search keywords. Ben Thompson wrote about this very issue yesterday in the Stratechery.

Google feels very static. Static in a way Google Maps, Twitter, and YouTube don’t feel. And because of that, my searches have slowly drifted elsewhere without any sort of conscious decision on my part.

• Searching for a product review or recipe? YouTube
• Searching to buy something? Amazon
• Searching for a business’ phone number or reviews? Google Maps
• Searching for transit directions? Google Maps
• Searching for a hotel? Airbnb / Google Maps
• Searching for commentary? Twitter

Google the company is just fine. I heavily use YouTube and Google Maps to search and discover. But their core product is as useless as ever.

The streak of my water+pushups+walking morning routine is addicting.

When the streak is alive, it’s like walking downhill. But the moment I miss a day, it’s easy to think that I have to run uphill in order to make up for the lost time.

Sometimes I think I need to do 2x or 3x the usual morning push-ups in order to compensate.

Instead, I need to remember the consistency of the process is more important than the outcome. Doing 0.5x on the day to re-start is better than failing to do 2x.

A key element of making process goals sustainable is forgiveness. I have to forgive myself for not doing a daily goal and move on, as tough as it is to let go.

This morning, walking up Sansome, I was in the middle of a pack of people. Some popping out of BART, some waiting for their robot-poured lattes, others walking briskly - with jackets, backpacks, earpods.

Despite the omnidirectional traffic, crowded sidewalks, filled streets and morning vendors, despite the sense of rush and hurry, there wasn’t any noise.

Nobody was talking into their phone. Nobody was screaming to get my attention. Nobody has selling fruit or breakfast donuts.

I stopped and stood for a few minutes. It took about 30 seconds for me to hear something other than the worn-out brakes of Lyfts moving down the street.

“When a supernova explodes, the blast wave creates high-energy particles that scatter in every direction; scientists believe there is a minute chance that one of the errant particles known, as a cosmic ray, can hit a computer chip on Earth, flipping a 0 to a 1.”

James Somers in The New Yorker, 2018

My Uber driver Jacky picked me up at 4:06 AM this morning. I landed in Denver at 8:30 AM mountain time.

I didn’t get my full 8 hours of beauty rest last night. With each passing year, it seems sleep deficits affect me more and more.

But I’ve discovered a trick: if I merely sit on the plane - no music, no podcasts, no books, no movies, no nothing, just sit there - when I land I feel refreshed. I don’t yawn, nor do I get the urge to collapse in the nearest corner. Stimulating my brain with music or podcasts or books must wear me out.

Sitting 35,000 feet up in a metal tube is one of the last refuges of solitude. I’ve enjoyed recently leaning into that quietness.

I try to sit and do nothing except stare out the window. I might doze in and out. But mostly I just stare out the window. I did it this morning and I’m feeling pretty alert, despite a short night’s sleep.

Globalization has caused the “giant sucking sound” of jobs Perot predicted. The cause may be equal parts cheap labor and automation. But the effects are obvious: 1. the decline of the industrial Midwest, 2. the amount of carbon emissions resulting from globalization, and 3. the failure of the CCP to reform itself.

I’m a diehard free-trader, but I’m also flabbergasted that we can’t pass a carbon tax.

Chinese merchant vessels are the main source of plastic in the ocean. FedEx’s airline fuel and China’s coal-fired plants emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases. (Not to mention the fast fashion consumerism driven by race-to-the-bottom economics.)

Shouldn’t Pelosi’s America love the idea of tariffs set out to capture the insane negative externalities of flying toothpaste halfway around the world? Shouldn’t Pelosi’s America love the idea of punishing one of the most consistent and vocal abusers of human rights?

Meanwhile, American businesses have been scorned by the Chinese government. Facebook isn’t allowed to offer Instagram the way TikTok is allowed to offer video-sharing here in the states. Thousands of entrepreneurs have seen their businesses decline in the face of cheap global competition. Millions of workers have lost their jobs. And the Chinese people seem no more free from the CCP today than they did 30 years ago.

Shouldn’t Reagan’s America love the idea of tariffs set out to equalize the economic playing field? Shouldn’t Reagan’s America love the idea of punishing a communist, authoritarian government?

Why is China not the most bipartisan issue in America today? I look around and sense we are all much closer in ideology than we’re being led to believe.

Perhaps it is, and China will become the new Soviet-style enemy that we’ve been missing for the past decade. Perhaps the best-case scenario is China paints us as evil, we paint China as evil, and our countries enter a Green Innovation race, to see who can stop ruining our planet first.

“Remember, remember, the 5th of November.” I know they used to hang traitors in England. But high school history didn’t cover the official punishment for treason: “Hanged, Drawn and Quartered.”

Wikipedia has an article on how attitudes in England shifted away from such barbaric punishments. TLDR: chopping people up in public started gaining negative press.

Then there was a story of the burning of Catherine Murphy in 1789 (for Coining). No newspapers covered her execution. The story didn’t fit inside the 4-page-limit of the newspapers at the time.

It reminds me of Christopher Hitchens, one of my heroes. He never came to terms with the grey lady:

“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.” Christopher Hitchens in Letters to a Young Contrarian

Tyler and I were sitting in a diner in Nashville. He took a sip of his coffee and said, “language is consciousness. If we don’t have the words to describe something, we can’t experience it.” Being good semi-erudites, we commented how French people use big and impressive words and how they’re more romantic than us Americans.

But the mental model persists. There is something important about defining concepts.

Naming and categorizing different variants of cancer has been our biggest breakthrough in cancer research. Siddhartha Mukherjee, in Emperor Of All Maladies, discusses how once we could map and define the various cancers and pathways leading to unconstrained growth, then we could battle them in a more subtle way than intravenously pumping yellow mustard gas into cancer victims.

Similarly, in Progress And Poverty, Henry George spends the first 1/3 of the book simply defining the words Capital, Labor, Wages, Land, Rent, Interest, Wealth, and Profit. These seem like basic terms. But the definitions themselves are astoundingly important. They have cascading effects down to what theories of wealth and wages people have. George is able to disprove the Malthusian theory - widely accepted without much criticism at the time - simply by making the definitions of Labor and Capital more clear.

Without defined words, discussions can’t happen. We rely on the framework of language to open up new ways of viewing the world.

Vocabulary is table stakes. You can’t experience something unless you can describe it.

Last month, outside of JFK, Elizabeth commented, “No smoking sign… but it smells like smoke.”

You know how you know a lawn might have poop on it? When there’s a “No dogs allowed” sign.

There were a lot of peaks over the past year.¹ But the highest peak, metaphorically and physically, was Bald Mountain in Ketchum.

Last year, as Elizabeth was traveling through Asia and New Zealand, I decided this was my chance to spend a winter in a ski town.

I found an apartment listed in the local classified ads, Elizabeth found a job at a beautiful little new restaurant called Cookbook owned and operated by the kindest couple, Burke and Vita. And we had a parade of guest coming out to visit us.

I loved the record snow Ketchum received. I loved going to pick up Elizabeth late at night from Cookbook and eating pizza and drinking beer with Burke. I loved when we hiked up Baldy early in the morning. I loved waking up to snow on the ground, drinking hot coffee, and reading and programming and sitting in quiet.

The Sawtooth National Park has the cleanest air in the lower 48 states. There’s no rush hour, factories, or cities for hours in any direction, away from all the horns and trash and emails of the city life.

Ernest Hemingway shot himself in Ketchum. He finished For Whom The Bell Tolls in the Sun Valley Lodge, and later finished A Moveable Feast there as well. I read A Moveable Feast this spring. He tells of traveling to the Austrian backcountry to ski, before the rich people invaded the resorts there.

I couldn’t help but be drawn to, and relate to, the end-of-season ski run Hemingway describes.

“Finally towards spring there was the great glacier run, smooth and straight, forever straight if our legs could hold it, our ankles locked, we running so low, leaning into the speed, dropping forever and forever in the silent hiss of the crisp powder. It was better than any flying or anything else, and we built the ability to do it and to have it with the long climbs carrying the heavy rucksacks. We could not buy the trip up nor take a ticket to the top. It was the end we worked for all winter, and all the winter built to make it passible.”

This passage has forever converted me into a Hemingway fan.

Sam, covered in snow.

The snow report preceding the best day of my life.

1. Internally means I am halfway bracing for a disproportionate amount of troughs.↩

@naval put together a list of 10 simple truths tweeted by others, which I found interesting.

1. if the news are fake imagine history @AmuseChimp
2. Human life is gradually turning from a struggle against suffering into a struggle against pleasure. @G_S_Bhogal
3. If you don’t want to have a boss, you better be capable in the wild. @angjiang
4. Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. @TheHappyBody
5. Not wanting something is as good as having it. @L1AD
6. To remove the sting of insult, stop valuing compliments. @thalamu_
7. Meditation is good for nothing. That’s why you do it. @amirmotlagh
8. The unexamined parts of yourself are running around in the world masquerading as the things you think you hate @john_hobo
9. Only the individual transcends. @SteveMaxwellSC
10. In the end you have to accept that either everything is magical or nothing is. @CharlieKnoles
11. The things that we understand, create Silence // The things we do not, create Emotion. @KapilGuptaMD

2016, from Industrious

2018, from Industrious