“He needs to get off Twitter.”
“Why doesn’t he hire someone to watch what he says?”
“He shouldn’t have taken a puff on Joe Rogan’s podcast.”
I’ve long believed Elon Musk has taken the Donald Trump approach to Twitter. Tesla is constantly in the news. Sometimes it’s because of the carbon emission dragon they’re slaying. But other times it’s merely because of controversy.
This is how you become a cultural icon with a $0 ad budget:
Moving slowly is a feature, not a bug.
Things often go sideways when humans take things that should take a long time, and package them into condensed dosages.
Last week, Sarah Silverman and Howard Stern were discussing Steve Martin’s brilliant wit.1
Sarah proceeded to share a story about Steve. One year, she helped to host an AFI honors ceremony. After the awards show, she went to an afterparty at Steve’s house.
The idea was to have cocktails and dinner. Sarah was toasting with legends. Diane Keaton, Martin Short, Candace Bergen, Nancy Meyers.
Martin Short, acting as a sort of host, was asking questions to get conversation going.
“So Candace,” he said, “when did you first meet Steve?”
“Well, I remember I was hanging out with Lorne and Paul, and Steve didn’t know what prosciutto was!”
And then Steve, immediately, goes, “Can you believe it? And now I drive one!”
I landed in San Francisco this morning.
It was chilly outside.
After spending 5 weeks in 100-degree weather, I needed a sweater.
As I walked to Uniqlo, I passed this sign.
It’s 7,830 miles back to where I came from, back to where Elizabeth started her SE Asia trip.
The current US-based opinion of Facebook is that it’s on the decline. The narrative seems to be that 1) less people are using it; and 2) the people who do use it are using it less.
Traveling, though, has convinced me that Facebook is stronger than ever.
When I was walking around a clothing market in Chiang Mai, I’d see the stall owners scrolling Facebook on their phones while waiting for customers to pop in.
When I crammed onto the train in Bangkok, everyone had their phones out, scrolling away. About 80% of the time it was Facebook. 10% of the time it was YouTube. 10% of the time it was “Other.”
And it’s not just Asia. The same was true for all of the food stall vendors I saw in Mexico City. Everybody is looking down, scrolling the News Feed.
I think Facebook’s power is (unfortunately) underestimated internationally.
Near the end of this yellow brick road and tucked to the left is the Hangover Hostel. When you walk up, there are a few chairs on the patio. Mr. Singh was sitting in one of them.
“Elizabeth?” He asked before we could say Hello.
“Yes!”
“Welcome.”
He made copies of our passports, and then slid open a large glass door. We were immediately inside our dorm room.
There were 12 beds inside. There was a sink and two bathrooms. That’s it, except for the life lessons posted on the walls.
When we showed up, two girls who we’d met in Pai were there. Elizabeth went out to dinner and drinks with them while I stayed behind.
Around 10 PM, Mr. Singh started placing bottled water next to everyone’s beds.
The internet was blazing fast.
When I needed dinner, Mr. Singh walked me down to a local restaurant and asked them to stay open a little bit longer to make me fried noodles.
He warned me about eating the pizza after midnight.
When I came back into our dorm room at 1 AM after a call, he asked, “Hey Will - do you have everything you need?”
Mr. Singh’s one-room hostel was the best place we’ve stayed.
10/10. 5 Stars. Two Thumbs Up.
📍 Koh Phi Phi, Thailand
Not Pictured:
This is an Airtel 4G hotspot1. It takes cell service and turns it into WiFi.
This particular device is only compatible with the Airtel network in India. But everyone in Laos uses it to connect their phones to the internet.
We bought one from a street electronics vendor in Luang Prabang. They buy them in bulk from the manufacturer in China, and then open them up and change a firmware setting in the software to unlock them. That way, any GSM SIM card will work.
Elizabeth got two vendors into a bidding war. She got them shouting back and forth lower and lower prices. Our first quote was 440,000kip. We ended up paying 280,000kip (~$30).
After buying it, we opened the case, dug behind the battery, and put in a Unitel SIM card. 10,000kip bought us 5 GB of data for 2 days.
In Thailand, we opened it up again and put in a True Move SIM card. 600 baht for 30 days of unlimited internet at 6 gbps.
Traveling and working has been really tough, but would have been impossible without this device.
Every traveler that comes to Pai ends up extending their visit. People come here and decide they never want to leave.
An Australian we met back in Laos decided she was going to move to Pai for 6 months starting in 2019.
It’s easy to see why.
It’s surrounded by jungle-covered mountains. There are waterfalls and swimming holes. The locals are relaxed and friendly. Nobody honks or shouts.
The food is fresh. There are vegan restaurants on every corner. The Pad Thai and the Kao Soi are incredible.
We intended to come for 3 nights. We stayed for 5.
Goodbye, Phai-Mae Hong Son.
Goodbye, Pai.
Renting a motorbike has been an amazing way to see the country and travel with different groups of people.
For $17, we’ve had a motorbike for three days (including gas!).
We’ve overcome our fear following the stitches.
We biked over to the White Buddha temple overlooking Pai with three Dutch travelers we met at our hostel. The two guys are on a 3 week holiday. The girl met up with them in Bangkok and is traveling for 6 months.
We’ve gone to the bamboo walking bridge, the Pam Bok Waterfall, the Mo Paeng Waterfall, and Pai Canyon. As you pull up, there’s always a collection of bikes. Odds are you’ve seen the other tourists in town or at a different site. It’s fun seeing people you met at a bar the night before.
This morning, we woke up at 5:30am to bike up to the Chinese Viewpoint to try to catch the sunrise. We met a handful of other Americans and Brits we’ve been hanging out with. It was foggy.
The other American said, “I’m not leaving Pai until I get up here one morning and it’s a clear sunrise.”
One of the most fun aspects of our trip has been meeting people from other countries around the world.
Last night, Elizabeth went out with a group of friends she’d made. Some Dutch, some Brits, some Canadians. Some people from Brazil and Italy.
This morning, we went to breakfast with two of the friends she made last night. It was fun hearing their perspective on the night of the Trump election, the Kavanaugh proceedings, and their travels.
Last night at dinner, we sat across the table from three earthy musicians. Two from Scotland and one from Israel. One of the Scots and the Israeli had just hitchhiked through China, playing music along the way. The woman from Scotland said she was a precocious 5-year-old piano player. Then she fell in love with metal and never looked back.
As we motorbike around to Pai Canyon, and the Chinese Lookout, and the various waterfalls, it’s fun running into people we know, and chatting with them as we all slide down the falls.
I have never done an extended trip at hostels like this before. I’ve found it very rewarding.
“It’s all in the angle,” they say.
Yesterday, we met Lo at the Wat Chedi Luang monk chat table.
Every day after school, from ~2pm-6pm, Lo talks to tourists. He does it to practice his English. The tourists do it to learn more about Buddhism and life as a monk.
He was able to hold a conversation and ask us some questions and answer our questions. He told us about the 10 rules of Buddhism. He told us his daily schedule, how he wakes up at 6am to collect food from the town during alms.
Lo was born in Myanmar, but he came to Thailand with his parents and two sisters and brother when he was 5. He became a monk when he was 13. He’s been a monk for 2 years and expects to be one for 6 years before leaving.
He has only been learning English for 3 months. Further proof that the best way to learn a language is to get out there and talk to people.
Before we left, a student from Shanghai walked up to chat with Lo. They started a new conversation in Mandarin.
We were sharing a beer with other backpackers last night at the hostel next door. I noticed us saying, “We did Luang Namtha and Luang Prabang and blah blah,” and then they would say, “Oh I’ve done Laos, and we did Siem Reap in Cambodia.”
As if staying in a hostel, looking up TripAdvisor reviews, and going on a temple tour means you’ve “done” Siem Reap.
“I did Chiang Mai” implies that the city is a checklist that can be marked as complete.
If the goal of travel is to collect stamps1 in a passport, then perhaps it makes sense.
But there is a finality and imprecision to the phrase that misrepresents what flying and eating and meeting and drinking does for you.
Chokepoints cause a concentration of qualities.
For example, in both Britain and Denmark, birds have been under attack by asphalt. Meanwhile, birdfeeders have become popular in Britain but they have not caught on in Denmark. As a result, the beaks of British birds have become 1-2mm longer than Dutch birds of the same species in only 40 years.1
The chokepoint plus the birdfeeders (which favor birds who can strain for more seeds) has led to the quality of longer beaks to spread rapidly among British birds.
When a population faces a chokepoint, there is a concentration of “successful” genes.
This is why I, along with 3-5% of people from European descent, carry a recessive cystic fibrosis gene around. While the Black Plague killed 60% of the population across Europe, those who carried one copy of the recessive cystic fibrosis gene had cells which prevented the bubonic plague, typhoid, and tuberculosis from infiltrating.2
Evolutionary leaps do not occur via gentle, slow progression. Instead, fossils reveal “punctuated equilibriums”,3 as Stephan Jay Gould describes it, in which a species will undergo a rapid branching and change.
Business is the same way.
Despite the financial crisis, in 2009 Panera was opening a new store every three days.
As CEO Ron Shaich explained, most of their competitors had loads of debt that they were struggling to pay down as customers came less often and spent less money.
Panera, meanwhile, still had customers buying food and had no debt on its balance sheet. Land and construction costs were down 20% because of the crash. So while everyone else was downsizing and ripping out costs as the market contracted, Panera was able to triple their market share and triple their stock price.4
An entire mental model narrowed down to Warren Buffet’s advice that you can grab market share when everybody else is pulling back.
From Luang Namtha in Northern Laos, it takes a full day to reach Nalan. It’s an ethnic minority village in the middle of the Nam Ha National Park. 180 people live in the village. They are rice farmers.
There is no internet, no cell service, and no electricity except for what a generator placed in the Nam Ha river can produce.
There are lots of stars at night.
In order to get there, we left Luang Namtha, took a bus into the middle of the Nam Ha National Park, and hiked through 6 hours of thick jungle.
When we got there, we took a shower in the river. We strolled around town and chatted with our guide and met some of the villagers.
Our host family was a father and his two daughters. The daughters cooked us amazing food, which we ate inside their kitchen crowded around a common table.
They gave me and Elizabeth our own bowls and spoons because we are from America. But they simply shared everything. For them, there is no “yours and mine” when it comes to food.
The father had met his wife at a local wedding party. She was from the next town over. They fell in love. When they got married, she moved to his village and in with his parents as is customary among the villages.
This year, the wet season was too wet. Some of the villages have not yielded as much rice as they need.
Walking through the rice fields was hot with the sun beating down on you.
Each field can grow rice for 5-7 years and then new plots need to be cleared.
One family’s field gets planted in a single day. The whole village helps plant one family’s crops on one day, and then the next day the whole village helps a different family plant.
But from there, a family’s yield is a family’s yield. It’s not communal.
A few years ago, the government paid the Chinese to build a road to the village. It is already nearly unusable, especially in the rainy season. It takes at least an hour via a motorbike to wind all the way down the road to a larger highway.
The day we left, dozens of the villagers were working on repairing a bridge so that motorbikes could keep crossing.
If the road is not operational, then it’s a 3 hour hike up and over the ridge to the nearest town.
