rorysaur.blog

Best of 2023

2023-12-31T00:00:00Z

Here's my rundown of some of my favorite TV, movies, books, and apps/tools/things around the internet from the past year.

TV shows: (in no particular order)

The Last of Us
Not an original choice in any way, but absolutely one of the most joyous, moving gifts of 2023. And for me, carried heavily by the magnificence of Bella Ramsey, and by the bond between the two main characters. Something like, "Even if the entire world goes to shit, at least we have each other." Where "each other" is neither a romantic partner nor blood family, but just people who have run into each other & have come to a mutual trust. In the world of this show (and maybe IRL, too): if you realize someone isn't out to use you OR kill you, hang onto that person!

The Bear
Season 2 this year, but the first season was on my "best of 2022" list too. This one is also not an original choice, but I will be pushing The Bear until everyone on the planet has seen it. In particular, this season has a couple of my favorite episodes, of any show, ever. Those who have watched the season will be able to guess which ones they are.

Normal People
Late to the party as this show started and ended in 2020. But the only way I can describe it is exquisite. After every episode I was left stunned and happily and/or sadly devastated. I read the Sally Rooney book (after watching the show), and I'm of the (perhaps controversial) opinion that the show breathed life into the story, in a way the book did not. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it on TV.

Honorable mention: Arcane
Also late to the party on this, and I wouldn't say it was life-changing like the others were, but Arcane is just really great fun with eye-poppingly gorgeous art. I was wrong to avoid it because of assuming it was "just the League of Legends show." It works quite independently of League of Legends (which I know very little about) and is just a high quality show, most importantly featuring a protagonist who has almost the same hair as me.

Movies:

I'm sorry I couldn't narrow down this list to fewer than 7 movies, but I apparently watched 84 movies this year (slightly fewer distinct ones—I do like to rewatch the same movies over and over), so I'm just giving you the top ~10%! They are (mostly) in order of when I watched them, starting from the beginning of the year.

The Menu
The Menu might be one of the least ""good"" (read: serious, important) movies on this list, but as I somehow watched it 4 times in 6 months, it didn't feel right to leave it out. I watched it twice for myself, and twice more because I was forcing various other people to watch it for their first time. Somehow, it only got funnier and funnier to me on each watch. (Those I forced to watch it found it very funny as well!) I feel like I enjoy this movie even more than its own creators really intended or planned for it to be enjoyed. I can hear them going, "Okayy, Rory, I love how much you love The Menu, but it's also okay to maybe watch a different movie sometime, y'know."

Return to Seoul
It's just good.

Past Lives
I cried watching this, then told all my Asian woman friends who are partnered with or married to white men to watch this movie, which I realized.. is all of my Asian woman friends.

Bottoms
One of those movies where it feels like whenever someone asked, "Okay, this might be too crazy, but what if we...?" the answer was "YES." Every line in every scene is totally stupid and totally brilliant. I wish so much that this movie had existed when I was in high school. Immediately jumped into my top 4 all-time.

Perfect Days
An older Japanese man who lives alone and cleans public toilets around Tokyo for a living, just quietly enjoying his life, day after day. This movie was so healing to me. It put this seed in my brain that's slowly changing my relationship to reading and books.

All of Us Strangers
Latest addition to my "Paul Mescal being tender & caring" cinematic universe.

Grave of the Fireflies
The only movie on this list that didn't come out this year (it's from 1988!), but I got to watch it at the movies anyhow, thanks to a special screening. Grave of the Fireflies is regularly cited as one of the best movies of all time—not just out of animated movies, but all movies (#28 on Letterboxd, #118 on Metacritic), and now that I've seen it, I consider it a non-negotiable must-watch for all humans. Especially in this year of many wars. It's animated but it is NOT light viewing. Watch it well, because you may find it too devastating to watch it ever again. You might never think of geopolitics the same way ever again either, and that would be for the better, I feel.

Books:

An exciting thing is that my favorite books list below can now also be found in the app I've been building.

Like, I built this lists feature so that I could make lists of books, and now I get to use it. Sometimes being a coder is kind of rad.

In contrast to all the other lists in this post, none of these books came out this year. I rarely read new books, or books from this century if I can help it. (I won't go so far as my dad, reader of ancient Chinese poetry, who stands by his claim that "Nothing worthwhile has been written in the past 800 years.")

In order of when I read them, earliest first:

An Editor's Burial, ed. David Brendel, Wes Anderson
Anthology of old New Yorker pieces that inspired The French Dispatch (movie)! Many characters in the movie are amalgamations of the writers featured in the book. As it's an anthology I would typically point out my favorite pieces, but I actually can't. They're all good.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didon
No one does LA, SF, and NY in the 60s quite like Joan Didion. In particular, her way of seeing people, esp. young people, in all their silliness and also beauty, reminds me of Mavis Gallant who has a piece in the aforementioned An Editor's Burial. But not just people: Didion has a paragraph describing wind, that will make you want to quit writing on the spot (if you write).

Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes
Where has this book been all my life? When I needed role models for my toxic girl crushes? (By which I don't mean role models for snapping me out of my toxic girl crushes, only for writing about them beautifully.)

Life in Code, by Ellen Ullman
A random bookstore pickup that turned out to be life-changing: rare chicken soup for the programmer/poet soul. And as someone who literally grew up inside the internet, I felt right at home.

Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain == the best comfort reading/TV. His intense passion for anything degenerate and unclassy is something we needed in this world.

Apps, tools, things around the internet:

Kagi search
Paid search engine. No trackers. SEO junk downranked/hidden by default. No shopping links (unless you want them). Super customizable. Has already saved me years of my life of scrolling through garbage SEO-farm results on Google.

Arc browser
Lets me keep all my gazillions of tabs organized in separate spaces and folders. Lots of other little quality-of-life things that make it better than other browsers. Chromium browser, so I can still use dev tools as I would in Chrome. Pairs well with Kagi search because you can make it your default search engine and never look back.

Raycast
Raycast is a macOS "Spotlight replacement." If you've never used Spotlight to begin with (press Cmd+Enter, search stuff to open files or apps; it's built into macOS), maybe going from no-Spotlight to using Spotlight will make a big enough difference in itself that you may or may not need Raycast, which has lots of extra stuff. But I've been finding the extra stuff super handy, for quick conversions and similar things that shouldn't require opening a browser tab, like "london time", "43 days from now" (returns the date), measuring unit or currency conversions, also for moving/resizing app windows, getting "the thing before the last thing I copied to my clipboard," some dev stuff I've added via extensions (get current unix timestamp, convert colors between hex and HSL), and! the ChatGPT window (covered in "ChatGPT", below). It's like a Swiss Army knife for my computer.

ChatGPT + GitHub Copilot
Another unoriginal choice, but I should say that I only really use ChatGPT for coding. Occasionally I use it for something else for fun, but I wouldn't necessarily pay for that. On the other hand, these two services combined have probably made me at least 2-3x more productive as a dev. I use GH Copilot for the autocomplete suggestions while typing code in my editor. What it suggests is sometimes exactly what I want and sometimes exactly NOT what I want.. but it's about 90% what I want, at least 60% of the time. That just saves me a ton of typing and looking stuff up. It's about the same quality as when I copy-paste code from my other files or from the internet (all of which I regularly do), but without having to spend the time even to find it and copy-paste it, only to edit it after. It's like, "Is this what you were wanting to copy-paste?" and I'm like, "Actually, yeah."

I use ChatGPT for all other coding help, including prompting it to write code (you can do this with Copilot but I don't find it as good), or to write SQL queries (huge!), "what's wrong with this code / can you fix it?", "here's some sample code I copied from the internet, can you convert it to [system/language I use]?" and more. I especially appreciate that I can keep talking to it, e.g. "no, I meant using [blah]," or "but won't that not work because [reason]?" About 5-10% of the time it responds with complete BS, but it's still worth it for me on net. (The connection to Raycast is that Raycast gives me a ChatGPT shortcut and window, so that I don't have to keep the OpenAI website open; it also means I can use GPT-4 (for more money) through my Raycast subscription, which I recently learned might not be available to everyone yet if you go direct through OpenAI.) I was a holdout on AI tools too and was not excited to try them, but I'm finding them too useful to ignore.

Lofi Girl
This isn't an app or tool, more of a "thing around the internet": Lofi Girl is a YouTube channel / set of 24/7 streams of chill music, each with a chill animated backdrop of a person working or, well, chilling, always with an equally chill little pet nearby. The streams come in a few main flavors with a couple of different characters (there's Lofi Girl and Synthwave Boy), and are watched (not really "watched", more like "put on") by tens of thousands of people, around the clock, every day of the year. And the streams run continuously, for YEARS (interrupted once every few years by the rare technical issue). Lofi Girl is the patron saint of all those working at a desk in solitude late into the night, as she is always, ALWAYS studying. (Or writing, if you want to see it that way.) I love the community (there is a YouTube chat, but I hide it, so I mean more like the implicit community) of knowing many thousands of people (probably mostly students) are working whenever I'm working. Lofi Girl was such good company for me in the past few months and helped me concentrate to such an extent that I learned that if I have the stream on every waking hour, it is actually not sustainable after a week or two, as the music starts to cycle a bit too much, so I had to cut back.

Alrighty, that's it for now. If you get into any of the above things because of my rec, I'd love to hear about it. Happy New Year and see you in 2024!

The total amount of money in the world is a figment of our collective imagination

2023-01-17T00:00:00Z

This post is part of Tailwit Capital, my Substack newsletter which you can subscribe to here.

Just after the FTX unraveling began in November, Bankless' David Hoffman asked the following question on Twitter (don't worry if the names of the companies are unfamiliar to you):

Okay, answer me this:

3AC liquidated...
Alameda liquidated...
FTX insolvent...

then who made all the money???

In other words: there were many companies this year that were worth millions or even billions of dollars each, which each within a short interval of time became worth essentially zero dollars. But you don't hear about other companies or individuals that made the equivalent in millions or billions of dollars. So where did all the money go?

The asker of this question is David Hoffman, one of the co-hosts of the Bankless podcast, which is the single resource that has taught me the most about money. David knows a lot about money, yet he seems to be asking honestly, because it's very non-obvious what happened to the money. At the time that he asked, I didn't know the answer either, but it's a question that has given my mind much to chew on in the months since I saw it. It's a question that I think is fundamental to the endeavor of understanding anything about money that goes beyond... well, maybe gold. There will be an answer later in this post, but don't peek ahead! I'm watching you.

Net worth is imaginary

You may be aware by now, from following your favorite household-name billionaires, that it's quite often the case that a billionaire's "net worth" is almost entirely based on the amount of stock they own in various public companies. The bulk of it is not the amount of money they have sitting in any bank account(s), and certainly not the amount of money they have sitting in a massive vault of physical Benjamins. For our purposes, just think of a public company as a company whose total market cap (the amount of money that the market thinks it's worth at any given moment, let's say) is a publicly known number. So you can calculate the corresponding piece of the billionaire's net worth by multiplying the company's market cap by the % of the company that that billionaire owns. If a company is worth $20 billion, and someone owns 50% of it, then that counts as $10 billion toward that person's net worth.

A company's market cap is its number of shares x the stock price (price per share). The number of shares is decided by the company and doesn't change too often, but the stock price can vary wildly from day to day, in extreme cases even minute to minute, and it can be, to an alarmingly high degree, affected by, basically, Feelings. Like whether people who own shares or could buy shares are feeling more hopeful or more despairing, in any given moment, about the future of the company. In less eventful times, the effects from different people's feelings often cancel each other out, or cause very gradual movements in the price over years. But every once in a while, a lot of people feel the same way at once, often due to some news event or some sort of new perception that becomes viral, which can cause a large, sudden spike or drop in the price. A change in stock price is a change in the market cap, and thus a change in the personal net worth of all owners/shareholders. That's how a rich person can suddenly "be worth" $500 million less from one day to the next.

What's most interesting to me about this is how we talk about and judge these things, culturally. Net worth is talked about as if it's a fairly legit and stable metric—essentially the equivalent to how much money someone has, even though equity (owning stocks) is not, strictly speaking, the same as money. But in a hand-wavy sense, net worth is generally treated as if it's money. We have these lists in magazines of the top N highest net worth individuals. These lists are not usually printed with caveats that it's all based on Feelings and the amounts and rankings can change drastically at any time, or that it's not the same as money, etc.

Isn't it funny that someone who keeps their modest life savings in a bank account in USD—which isn't, relatively speaking, super vulnerable to extreme swings in value based on Other People's Feelings—such a person would be considered in our culture kind of quaint, and certainly not a "player" or a "winner," while someone who has a billion dollars in an asset that's completely subject to Other People's Feelings, is considered rational and successful, and their holdings are considered more legitimate? Not to mention the person who keeps in their home a big stash of physical gold or physical USD cash—both even less vulnerable to other people's control than bank deposits are—who we assume must be kind of unhinged at best and possibly some sort of criminal at worst! In fact, it's almost like the more fragile an asset is, the more prestige it carries. A subject for another time, maybe.

So if a famously rich CEO has a big portion of their net worth in a public company and people start to lose faith in the future of the company, this CEO can lose a huge chunk of their net worth in a matter of days. And yet, again, no one else got that money, not even a bunch of individuals added up. In fact, I think it's even theoretically possible in such a scenario that everyone involved with a given stock either loses money or at least doesn't make money. So it seems like, in a big selloff, a big chunk of something that was considered to be money just disappears somewhere. So does that mean that in a buying frenzy, a bunch of money likewise appears out of nowhere? HMMM!

Valuations are imaginary

We just talked about public companies, but let's dive into the even weirder, wonkier world of private companies. There are all kinds of private companies, but I'll focus on startups that haven't "gone public" yet, since that's the kind of private company that I and a lot of my friends are most familiar with.

Private companies also have this concept of "the amount of money that the market thinks the company is worth," but instead of market cap, it's called valuation. They're basically the same idea. But what's really weird about private companies is that the valuation at any given time isn't any known number (except at very specific moments that come maybe once every year or two). I don't mean that the number is secret but known to a special group of people; I mean it's literally unknowable, to anyone.

See, how much money a public OR private company is (reportedly) worth is determined by the aggregate of all the latest individual offers to buy or sell pieces of the company at certain prices. When you don't have any active deals or offers going on, you can't calculate the company's valuation at all. The CEO can claim whatever they want, but as with all things in the market, the ultimate judge is what someone is willing to pay for it. Since shares of public companies can be bought and sold by the general public whenever the markets are open (meaning, during the business day), a public company usually has at least some offers being posted throughout every day, thus it always has a current known price and market cap. But that's why a public company's listed stock price doesn't change over the weekend or at night when the markets are closed. Maybe on Saturday or Sunday everyone in the world changes their mind about it, but you won't see it affect the stock price until the first trades happen on Monday morning.

By contrast, pieces of a private company can't be bought or sold by just anyone at any time. Such offers and deals only happen at very specific points, like when a company is raising more money, which as I said happens closer to once a year or two. At that time, investors will offer to put in a certain amount of money (in cold, hard bank transfers) in exchange for a certain % of the company, which implies a certain valuation. For example, if they put in $1 million for 10% of the company, it means they think the entire company is worth $10 million. Usually you have a group of different investors in each funding round, so the group has to kind of agree on a total valuation and what each investor's share of the company will be.

These things are put in writing of course, which is what forces a private company to have a known, documented valuation at this precise moment. But only at this moment. So in between fundraising rounds (or other events that force a company to have a known valuation), if you ask, "How much is this company worth right now?", literally no one can tell you the answer. The only possible answer is in the form of, "Well, it was last valued at $N dollars a year ago." You may believe it is now more valuable or less valuable than the last official valuation, but it won't be confirmed until the next time someone commits to buy or sell part of it. You know how quantum particles literally don’t have exact measurements until the moment they’re actually measured? It’s like that. Now you can go around telling investors that your startup’s valuation is, in fact, quantum.

...and the more imaginary the valuation, the better??

If you've made it this far, past the idea that it's possible for entities to be worth an inherently unknowable amount of money—this next idea is the real mindfuck. It's best expressed in this 1-minute clip from Silicon Valley, a sitcom that parodies the startup world. In this scene, an idiot (or is he??) billionaire investor explains the idea to the hapless naive founder kid:

If you show revenue, people will ask how much, and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100x-er, the 1000x-er, becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue. You're a potential pure play.

Like the best parodies, it's funny because it's not wrong. You may have heard that this or that huge unicorn startup actually hemorrhages money, yet investors are clambering over each other to buy into it. Why would so many people want to pay money to buy into something that has only ever lost money? Because the way venture capital (VC) investing works is that it's premised on the idea that almost all startups completely fail, but an extremely select few win BIG, and it's not easy to predict which is which. So if you're investing in a bunch of startups that are likely to mostly fail (even in spite of all the research you might do before investing), you can only survive if all of them at least each have a chance of becoming the winner that pays for all the rest. And startups that win BIG can only do so if they prioritize growth at all costs—which often involves losing money in the interim, as they spend a lot of money to gain more users and become the dominant player in their space. They can't win BIG if they have to make sure they're always spending less than they earn. Therefore, companies that lose money but show growth can be more attractive and highly valued than companies that make a moderate, but not earth-shattering, amount of money.

Another way of putting it is that having tons of users but not making money is considered an easier problem to solve than making money but having few users. (Is it true? I have no idea.) That's what investors probably tell themselves and each other, but I'm guessing part of the truth is that high-growth companies are just darn exciting, and we are talking about Feelings, after all. A company that demonstrates a steady, sustainable amount of money coming in is more predictable, and the valuation that it "should" have can be calculated according to traditional formulas that take the revenue into account and do math with it. Boooring. It's easy to write it off as not having much chance of becoming the big winner. But a company that has no revenue but high growth, since its valuation can't be calculated the traditional way, is completely unpredictable, which means if someone were to just figure out how to monetize all those users, it COULD be THE ONE!

It's just like how you've been procrastinating on writing (or whatever your life's work is) all your life so far, because you're afraid that once you actually get started, you might not be amazing at it and everyone will be able to see that.. whereas if you never write anything, then no one can say you're not a genius. The genius of our generation, as a matter of fact. Your potential is infinite.

So where did this idea come from anyway, as far as startups showing no revenue? Did it start with Pinterest, Snapchat, Uber? Or earlier than that, with OGs like Google or Amazon? Think earlier, my friend. It started not in this century but the previous one: it started with Netscape.

In his book The New New Thing, Michael Lewis spends a few pages telling the story of Netscape's (mind-blowingly successful) IPO in 1995. He writes:

In the frenzy that followed [the IPO], a lot of the old rules of capitalism were suspended. For instance, it had long been a rule of thumb with the Silicon Valley venture capitalists that they didn't peddle a new technology company to the investing public until it had had at least four consecutive profitable quarters. Netscape had nothing to show investors but massive losses. But its fabulous stock market success created a precedent. No longer did you need to show profit; you needed to show rapid growth. Having a past actually counted against a company, for a past was a record and a record was a sign of a company's limitations. Never mind that you weren't actually making money—there'd be time for that later, assuming someone eventually figured out how to make money from the Internet. For the moment you needed to plow all of your revenues back into growth. You had to show that you were the company not of the present but of the future. The most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility.

So there you have it. This idea that the more imaginary a company's future profits, the more value it can command in the present, has been around at least since the 90s. People invest real dollars into vehicles of "pure possibility," and that's how imaginary things become worth real money.

Perhaps all this begs the question: will such pie-in-the-sky valuations come crashing down on some future day of reckoning? For how many years can a company lose money before investors or shareholders are like, "Okay.. maybe this company is never gonna make money"? I don't think anyone really knows. Some companies flame out in dramatic, streaming-miniseries-worthy fashion, often from having been either fraudulent or highly misleading (Theranos, WeWork, FTX). Some rise and fall quickly from being part of a wave of general mania (the dot-com bubble in the 90s). A few really do start to rake it in after a few (or many) years of losing money (Google, Amazon). But most of them just kind of chug along, to this day, continuing to lose money but have a lot of users, and appearing to not have much of a plan. So the jury's still out, as far as I know.

Here's the kicker, though. The people who invested in a company early (or got equity as compensation for being early employees), while it was private, don't actually need to see the company ever turn a profit, to get a great return on their investment. Because if the company ever IPOs (goes public), then at that point the early investors are free to sell their shares to the general public and cash out. (I'm sure there are caveats here but I'm hand-waving them away.) As long as the IPO is a successful one (commands a high enough stock price), the investors can make their money and walk away. Which means they don't need the company to turn a profit, they just need other people to believe that it someday will. The pure possibility, the imagined potential of the company, which may or may not ever be realized, is just handed over from private investors to the believing public.

Some other stuff is imaginary, too

There are a few more examples I can think of right now of money-like things that are also imaginary, but that I won't get deep into here because this post is already too long.

One broad class of assets with imaginary valuations is around things affected by demand and liquidity. Say you hold 1000 of some identical Pokémon cards, pogs, Chuck E. Cheese tokens, or shares of your friend's latest misadventure. And you've seen somebody sell one of those recently for $20. You could then say that your whole stash is worth $20,000. But there are a number of scenarios that could prevent you from ever being able to actually get $20,000 for it. Maybe, as in the private company fundraising example, you're legally or contractually not allowed to sell anytime you want to, and by the time you can sell, the going price has changed. Maybe nobody wants to buy any more of them, ever, so your stash is effectively worth $0. Maybe you could find buyers for 1000 units at $20 gradually over the next 5 years, but you're in desperate need of cash and need to dump all of them now, so you have to keep lowering the price as you sell more and more of them. The less time you have to sell them, the more you'll have to lower the price. And so on. So being able to sell one unit at a certain price doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to sell the whole batch at that price. A fact that is sometimes conveniently "forgotten" by the likes of SBF or the Enron folks when they're getting creative with their accounting.

The other class I can think of has to do with leverage, which I really won't get into even a little bit because it's a rabbit hole, but I do hope to explore it in depth with you someday. For now, just trust me that there's a lot of imaginary money to be found in that rabbit hole.

And now that you've made it this far, dear tailwit, I think you're finally more than ready for..

The answer to the question: who made all the money?

Here is the best answer in the replies to David Hoffman's question on Twitter, from one Ben McMillan:

...a neighborhood with 100 houses has one sale for $1M. Everyone thinks there's $100M of "equity". Turns out the other 99 houses only sell for $100k...so only $9.9M of "equity". Noone got the $91.1M. It was always imaginary.*

When you have a batch of things, and you've seen some unit or portion of the batch sell at a certain price, there are still no hard guarantees about the monetary value of the rest of the units in the batch, until they are actually sold. The total value of the batch as a whole is a matter of collective belief.

When those individual units are traded, money is really changing hands; but extrapolating that information to estimate changes in value of the entire batch involves no money changing hands. So rather than say, "This company lost $100 million in market cap the past month," as if something was lost or went missing, it would be more intuitively understandable to say something like, "A month ago the public believed this company was worth $5 billion but now it believes it is worth $100 million less than that."

The reason it's so hard to wrap one's mind around this idea is not only thanks to these misleading nuances of language, but that as I said in the "Net worth" section above, these numerical markers of collective belief are treated with a certain legitimacy and go into official counts of what people colloquially think of as "how much money we have." How big is the US economy? I don't know anything about how that's determined, but one obvious metric that I'm sure gets looked at in some way is the total market cap of all US companies. Which we now know to be largely imaginary! The economy as a whole is a complex organism that "breathes," that expands and contracts, based, to a surprising extent, on Feelings.

Why is this important for us, the little people? What on earth would induce me to write 4000 words on imaginary money, other than to serve as a vehicle for that excellent Silicon Valley clip? I don't think it's possible to understand the money system, and our place in it—collectively or as individuals—without understanding its imaginary elements, and how those can still cause very real suffering OR very real well-being. (Just wait till we get into the Federal Reserve and just how much of its M.O. boils down to, essentially, "mind games.") And understanding how the measures of really big things in the world depend in large part on the aggregate of our tiny individual decisions about the value of things, our individual purchases and debts and trades or lack thereof, and on our opinions and memes and vibes. It's about starting to pull the curtain back on the Wizard and learning how to see more clearly the weird world we find ourselves in.

Refs:

The Question tweet.

The Answer tweet. * Btw, if you noticed that the math is slightly wrong in this tweet, GOOD JOB! Write me back explaining how it's wrong, and I'll send you a STAR. (The value of which is, of course, up to your imagination.)

Reality doesn’t exist until you measure it, quantum parlor trick confirms

Silicon Valley, season 2 episode 3. (Clip)

Michael Lewis, The New New Thing.

Economics of Money and Banking, Perry Mehrling (Coursera). Not actually mentioned in this post, but the idea for this post came to me while watching one of the lecture videos, from which I also got the metaphor of "the economy that breathes." Specifically this video.

Current takes on crypto and web3

2023-01-04T00:00:00Z

This post is part of Tailwit Capital, my Substack newsletter which you can subscribe to here.

I thought I'd kick off the year with a snapshot of my current thinking on some things I do know a bit (but not that much) about. I like the framing of a "take," which feels less heavy or committed than an "opinion" or a "stance" or, doge forbid, an "argument." A "take" also makes me think of filming a movie, which is not only fun to think about, but also each individual take in a movie is usually pretty quick, and if you mess up, you can just do another one. (Except for a "long take," which these aren't.) I like "current" because it means I can change my mind, which I probably will.

A bit about what this post isn't:

Unfortunately if you're totally new to these topics, this isn't a primer on crypto or web3; this is one of the (hopefully rare) Tailwit Capital posts that is higher than 101-level, as I've been active in the crypto community for about a year now (first cycle achieved ✅). You can read all about my experience of that year, which might be easier for new folks to absorb. If that's you, I'm not sure how much this post will help, but at least you'll probably be able to guess how I feel about each topic based on how snarky my take sounds. Plus, maybe it can still provide some entertainment value.

This isn't a persuasive essay. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind; this is just a snapshot of my current thinking in case I want to refer back to it later.

Finally, these aren't predictions or forecasts. As I explained in my last post, actual well-defined predictions are falsifiable, meaning that at some known point in the future, people can more or less agree on whether the prediction came true or not, because 1) it has a time limit or end point, and 2) the criteria are specific and measurable.

Anyway, here are my current takes on a few things around the cryptoverse.

Bitcoin is the OG crypto and warrants the respect due to the OG. But the situation it's in where it's becoming harder and harder for miners to be profitable and competitive (at this point, "miners" referring to huge mining conglomerates) feels precarious to me. Bitcoin may continue to work as a store of value, where its strength is in its "boringness" (Ryan Selkis) but it's not going to be an interesting chain to do stuff on, because the culture of the development of the chain is to NOT develop it, and to not enable people to do more stuff. The religious fundamentalism of Bitcoin maximalists is off-putting to most people and isn't helping its ecosystem thrive.

Ethereum is best thought of as what Justin Drake calls it: the settlement layer for the internet of value. (Disclosure: in terms of crypto, I hold almost exclusively ETH.) I think of Ethereum like TCP/IP for SWIFT. If you haven't heard of one or both of those, that's exactly my point. One is the backbone of the internet, and the other is the backbone of international banking. People don't need to know how it works to benefit from using it in their day-to-day lives. Hopefully they increasingly won't have to know how it works. But Ethereum is not constrained to money as SWIFT is, rather it's a settlement layer for value, which includes so many more things besides money. All concerns that aren't inherent to its design—e.g. concerns about scalability, security, high fees, UX—will be a non-factor in time, as they get addressed one by one by the insane gravity well of talent that is the Ethereum ecosystem.

I wrote this whole take on Solana last week (it was not positive), but then Solana had such an existentially rough week that I thought, you know what, regarding Solana and all other L1s that have yet to survive multiple cycles, I will defer to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's maxim (in Antifragile and Skin in the Game) which says that (I paraphrase) what survives is ultimately what's rational; it doesn't matter what we say about it. If something looks nonsensical, but works (over the long term, through many stressors), then it's not nonsensical. If something looks genius, but blows up or collapses, then it's not genius. So any chains that are left standing as major players by the end of this entire bear market, I can comment on, maybe in next year's takes!

Crypto as a form of currency may maintain a relatively small role in the US economy, but it may have much more significant impact on everyday life in some developing countries.

NFTs aren't always going to be synonymous with expensive JPGs or other art assets. That's conflating a technology with its first and most famous use case. The true nature of the NFT is that it's a technical primitive (a building block) representing the very abstract concept of digital property. It's actually even more abstract than digital property, in the sense that sometimes you have something not to have it but to say something—for example, when you have a diploma on your wall, which you don't put up to prove that you own it, exactly, but rather because it proves something about you. So NFTs can and will represent not only "property" but also something more like "attestations." They already do: most of the NFTs in my possession were created and given to me by friends, to commemorate something I did or am doing with them.

DAOs aren't a magic panacea for human coordination. The typical early-stage DAO hasn't yet surpassed what I call the "high school badminton club" level of coordination problems: Your club treasurer doesn't know anything about handling money, but they're an important friend who obviously wouldn't do as president or vice president. Two different people each believe themselves to be in charge of swag. You throw a pizza party, but can't get any of the club members to stay and clean up. Oh, and members can't seem to agree on the actual purpose of the club.

Some of the more mature DAOs seem to be working well for managing specific parameters in a system. A few seem to be actual collectives that produce stuff together. In general, I think DAOs have the potential to be an alternative to existing org structures, but I don't think they will make all things easier than any other form of coordination. Also, having a big pool of money doesn't make coordination easier. It makes it harder. And I think it's overly simplistic to assume you can straightforwardly get people to do good and prosocial things by mapping token rewards to desired behaviors.

Humans figuring out how to work together well is THE hardest problem in all of humanity, ever. There are no shortcuts.

Wallets deserve more credit than they get, for one because they've managed to popularize public key cryptography for individuals, when all previous attempts failed to catch on (PGP, etc). (I was reminded of this thanks to a Bankless episode I was listening to the other day—maybe the one with Molly White?). Wallets are also the foremost face/interface of crypto for most people. Did you know that people who are new to crypto often try to call up wallet makers (like the MetaMask team) when something has happened to their money—as if they're the support hotline for all of crypto? Wallets get a lot of hate for everything that they aren't yet, but I feel like the big ones are maintained mostly by a lot of diligent people who want to make crypto easier and safer for everyone.

Smart contracts are a technology that has strengths and weaknesses, and they work better for some use cases than a centralized server/API. But they are subject to some of the same principles inherent to all software. Software has bugs. Software can usually use some improvements. If a piece of software is immutable, it won't get bug fixes or improvements. To push bug fixes or improvements to immutable software, you have to either release a whole separate piece of software and get everybody to switch to that, or you have to use proxies, which complicates the whole premise of immutability. Also, as in all software, developers having admin rights is a double-edged sword: it gives them power and it means you have to trust them, but it also allows them to save you in case something goes horribly wrong. At least it's hard to lie about what's in a smart contract. So at least you theoretically know what you're getting.

I like IPFS. I use Filecoin. There are various non-major considerations that make me nervous about storing important stuff on it, like availability of nodes and the need to go through HTTPS gateways that can be slow/unreliable, but I think these will get better with time. Arweave is something I don't know about and want to explore. In general I'm supportive and excited to see how decentralized storage evolves.

Play-to-earn, isn't. Isn't "play," I mean. When there exist on-chain games that people widely agree are fun and would play for fun, that will be something maybe worthwhile. Until then, it's just "earn"... which is otherwise known as a job. Worse, it's a job consisting of grinding through an unfun game, which David Graeber would call a bullshit job. Worse, the pay for the unfun job comes not from some distant entity eventually getting some value out of the work or even believing they're getting some value out of the work (as in a click farm situation), but from newer participants putting up money to join in—meaning, it's a Ponzi.

Web3 isn't truly revolutionary so long as VCs are still funding most of it—which they are—because of the incentives inherent to the VC dynamic (in short: VC is anti-cozy). I work in web3, not because it's revolutionary, but because it's more fun than doing something else.

There are lots of centralized entities in web3. I think centralized services (exchanges, blockchain providers, liquid staking pools, etc) will always have the inherent advantage of convenience over decentralized solutions. I believe that most humans will choose convenience over self-custody, most of the time. But that doesn't make working on decentralized solutions a waste of time. Because it gives people a choice.

We understand now more than ever the importance of exit as an option when it comes to social media platforms. Well, where you store your money (in whose custody, in which currency) and where you store your data are both a kind of platform. Building another option for people in case their centralized solutions become untenable one day, is a thing very much worth working on.

Best of 2022

2022-12-31T00:00:00Z

2022. Weird. Short. Dark. Another year that was a little disappointing for being an even-numbered year. Don't have too much more to say about the year that's interesting, so I'll get right to my best-ofs.

Best TV show I watched in 2022: Station Eleven
It's really hard to pick a favorite TV show from this year, but I think Station Eleven has to win just on pure weirdness. About 20 years after a pandemic wiped out most of civilization, Mackenzie Davis is part of a theater troupe that travels around the known world on foot, performing Shakespeare. But then spooky things start happening to the troupe. Also, there is a mysterious graphic novel that ties everyone together. How can I explain that? I can't. It's the only show this year that prompted me to write a 9-page letter to a friend that was mostly about a single episode of it (it was episode 7, in case you're wondering), as well as filling many pages of my journal. It's weird and puzzling and beautiful and haunting.

Honorable mentions:

The Bear. Pound for pound (of BEEF), the most densely packed show in terms of brilliance to runtime. Nothing is wasted. Every line is perfect, every shot is perfect.

The Peripheral. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy x William Gibson x Chloë Grace Moretz. Highly entertaining on the visceral level of a video game. Also, the clothes.

For All Mankind. Alternate history space race—what if things had gone down completely differently between NASA and the Russian space program, all the way from the time of the moon landing? I mostly watch this for my single favorite character (see if you can guess who 'tis).

Best movie I watched in 2022: Aftersun
I hope I'm not being biased due to the fact that I watched this just yesterday and so it's going to be the last movie I watched this year. I don't think I am. I haven't been this destroyed by a movie in years. It feels so good to have a new beloved director in Charlotte Wells. Go see this movie. Feel something.

I had so many favorite movies I watched in 2022 that I had to limit this whole list to movies that were also released in 2022.

Honorable mentions:

Petite Maman. Perfection, as I expected. Céline Sciamma gets more across in 72 minutes than most people do their whole lives.

Bones and All. Young cannibals in love, portrayed by Luca Guadagnino.. what more do you need?

Everything Everywhere All at Once. Just watch it.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (the movie). Just watch it.

Best book I read in 2022: Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop

This book is about a group of people who in the 80s got together to study a field that wasn't a known field but rather one they defined by discovering surprising parallels between observations in their respective fields in physics, biology, chemistry, computing, and economics: namely, complexity.

How exactly do you create a system of inputs that results in the kind of interesting behavior you see in something like Conway's Game of Life? If your inputs are too few or too orderly, the system quickly dies down and settles into a static state. If your inputs are too many or too chaotic, the system becomes endlessly dynamic but without any apparent patterns. But if your inputs are juuust right, you can end up with a system that's constantly changing, yet shows patterns, shows a balance of chaos and order, and kind of seems to have a life of its own.

When you put together a few extremely simple inputs or building blocks that have just the right traits, you can end up with something that's almost, well, alive. That's what this book is about.

Best practice/habit I developed in 2022: Using a separate bedside phone

I only get a new phone once every few years, and sometimes only when my current phone becomes literally unusable, so it's rare for me to get a new phone and have an old one that still works. But I got a new phone last month, while my old phone was annoying but usable. So I realized that I can use my old phone to solve my problem of looking at my phone too much right when I wake up, and also before sleep (a problem because it puts my head in the wrong space at these very anchoring moments of the day).

So my old phone now lives exclusively on my nightstand, connected to wifi with no cellular data and no SIM card or phone number, purely for the things I need when going to sleep and waking up: alarm clock and Spotify (with Bluetooth). It stays logged out of all messaging, social media, email. So I don't look at any of that stuff, sometimes not until I have my coffee in hand.

So far, it's been amazing and made such a difference in how I start each day. I spend my waking-up time remembering about my dreams; I think my random thoughts about faraway people. It's quiet in my head. At this point, if I didn't have a working second phone, I'd probably buy a cheap one just for this purpose.

Best purchase under $100: an RGB light strip

This is a staple of gamers' "battlestations" that it had never before occurred to me to acquire for myself. It's a cheap strip of lights that you can stick to the back of something (I have mine along the back edge of my desk) and for which you can change the color via an app, which creates an instant ambient light of your color of choice. It completely changes the experience of night coding. I now have mine on all the time when it's dark, often on a soft orange like a perpetual sunset, sometimes other colors depending on my mood or depending on what I'm watching on TV in the room. It makes me ridiculously happy every single day when it's time to turn the lights on.

Honorable mention for best purchase under $100: a humidifier

Growing up, in my family we never used a humidifier or dehumidifier for personal comfort. (Eventually the latter was purchased, but only to keep the house from getting moldy and losing property value.) I only discovered this concept because of how unbearably dry it is in the winter where I live now. It's the kind of thing that I feel would only really occur to someone who's comfortably in their 30s: when you're no longer busy having one crisis or another regarding rent, job, love, the meaning of life, etc, and have the bandwidth to realize that you can change the water content of the air around you. And that it would be worthwhile to do so. Through a little device that you have to water and clean regularly and keep it happily humming along, like a household pet.

Best purchase over $100: AirPods Pro

I have to include this because I love my AirPods even despite wanting to not love them. I've just been an AirPods (and wireless earbuds) holdout for.. my entire life.. but finally decided to give them a try early this year. And I just haven't looked back. They are uncannily good at knowing which device I want them to pair with, even when I have several devices in front of me, and they pair instantly without needing to be asked to, so it's easy to switch seamlessly between devices, and between earbuds and not-earbuds.

The biggest difference between the Pro and non-Pro—the noise cancellation—is my other favorite thing about them. Occasionally I like to make a friend try it out for the first time, just to see their reaction. All external noise pretty much disappears. Especially the constant SCREEECH and rattling of New York subways, and the dull roar of airplane engines, and a fair amount of other-people-talking as well. It goes HUSHHH on the outside world, which is indispensable for anyone who is easily overstimulated.

Is this kind of dangerous? Yes it is. Please look both/all ways when walking around with noise cancellation on. What's that you said?—Sorry I have the noise cancellation on and I can't hear you over my Taylor Swift.

See you in 2023!

Piano tuners and superforecasting

2022-12-28T00:00:00Z

This post is part of Tailwit Capital, my Substack newsletter which you can subscribe to here.

At one point in my reading of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, I came across a concept where, as soon as the concept sank in, I felt like I could've just closed the book right there and I would've come away with the one most valuable takeaway (for myself personally) from the whole book. I finished the book anyway, but it only confirmed that I would've been right. So I'm going to explain that one concept here, and hopefully you'll leave this post either knowing you want to read more of the book, or knowing you don't need to because you got the best part.

I won't summarize the whole book here, as there are plenty of summaries you can find. The only backstory that's really interesting to know is that in the 2010s, IARPA (a research-oriented agency associated with the US intelligence community (which includes the CIA and many similar agencies)), presumably wanting to figure out how to get better at making predictions about what will happen in the world, created a forecasting tournament to get different research teams to experiment and try to find the best forecasting techniques. What's surprising (as Tetlock mentions) is that the US intelligence community willingly initiated a competition that they knew they themselves could lose, which does seem oddly sportsmanlike for the CIA. :)

The questions were all about the likelihood of specific events around the world within specific timeframes—examples from the book include:

"Will North Korea detonate a nuclear device before the end of this year?"
"In the next year, will any country withdraw from the eurozone?"
"Will the Kurdistan Regional Government hold a referendum on national independence this year?"

They're the kind of questions where you might expect the average layperson to know something about some of them, but you definitely wouldn't expect any layperson to have enough context in advance to make an informed forecast (with specific probabilities) about all of them. And the questions are such that it's perfectly expected that on many questions, any given person might start out with no context at all (like the Kurdistan question, for most people, I imagine).

I should also point out that the questions are all concrete and enforce predictions that are falsifiable, meaning that when the timeframe is up, everyone can more or less agree on whether the answer was yes or no, save for some potential hair-splitting e.g. on what constitutes a "nuclear device," what constitutes a "referendum" or "independence," etc, in cases where what happened in real life was ambiguous. But you can't "move the goalposts," e.g. by saying that your prediction just hasn't happened yet.

Tetlock and his partner Barbara Mellers started a team called the Good Judgment Project (GJP) that aggregated the forecasts of thousands of volunteers—untrained normies, basically—retirees and all!—who had a little bit of free time and a lot of curiosity—and, in short, they CRUSHED. (And by the way, performance on a given question was not correlated with whether one was an "expert" on that topic or knew nothing about it to begin with. In fact, if I recall correctly, "experts" tended to do a little worse, due to being overconfident and attached to their preconceptions.)

Here's an excerpt about how the tournament went down:

Each team would effectively be its own research project, free to improvise whatever methods it thought would work, but required to submit forecasts at 9 a.m. eastern standard time every day from September 2011 to June 2015. By requiring teams to forecast the same questions at the same time, the tournament created a level playing field—and a rich trove of data about what works, how well, and when. Over four years, IARPA posed nearly five hundred questions about world affairs [...] with the vast majority of forecasts extending out more than one month and less than one year. In all, we gathered over one million individual judgments about the future.

In year 1, GJP beat the official control group by 60%. In year 2, we beat the control group by 78%. GJP also beat its university-affiliated competitors, including the University of Michigan and MIT, by hefty margins, from 30% to 70%, and even outperformed professional intelligence analysts with access to classified data. (emphasis mine)

Most of the rest of the book is about the particular forecasters they discovered within their volunteer pool who were unbelievably good (the superforecasters), and what made them good. There are a lot of takeaways, but as I said, I'm only going to go into the one that was by far the most valuable for me.

Okay, but to explain it, I have to start by asking an annoying question: How many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago?

This style of question is called a Fermi problem. My first awareness of these came from the fact that it used to be fetch for companies to ask questions like this in engineering interviews. I wish I were joking. Thankfully I have never been asked this in an interview. I won't go into my opinions on the correlation between the ability to answer this question and the ability to build great digital products, but suffice it to say that Google themselves, one of the industry leaders in asking piano tuner questions, eventually decided not to do that anymore.

You can google for in-depth walkthroughs of how to answer such questions (ironic, eh?), but the gist is that it's a matter of breaking down an unguessable number into several component numbers that might be more guessable, like: the number of people who live in Chicago, the percentage of people/households that own a piano, how often a piano needs to be tuned, how long it takes to tune a piano, and so on. You don't necessarily know these, either, but at least you can make a guess, and identify the assumptions your guesses are based on. Then you multiply across, and all the units cancel out, kind of like in those high school chem or physics problems where it's super satisfying to cross out all the units. (No? Just me?)

The key takeaway of the book for me is that superforecasters treat every question as if it's a Fermi problem. No matter the question, they Fermi-ize it. Fermi all the things. Once I read that, it seemed so obvious, but it hadn't occurred to me before, and it immediately took me from "totally stumped" in the face of one of those geopolitics questions, to "hey, maybe I could get halfway decent at that, too!"

When it comes to forecasting real life things and not silly interview questions, what you want to break the question into specifically is base rates vs. differentiating factors. ("Base rates" is a real term, "differentiating factors" I just made up because I don't know what that's called. Do correct me if you know it.) In other words: "which parts of this situation are like other situations that I can get data on... and which parts are unique?" The idea is to first come to an estimate of what the likelihood of an event would be if the situation were not special at all compared to comparable known situations, and then adjust for any factors that do make it special.

Let me digress here and say that one of the best things you can do for yourself, in terms of accurately predicting events in your own life, is to start from the assumption that you are not special, and your situation is not special, until proven otherwise. I only say to start there! Of course everyone is ultimately a little bit special. But by briefly suspending your specialness and allowing yourself to be comparable to other people of certain demographics and certain circumstances, you get to be grounded in a massive foundation of human stories and data that can help you know what you can expect to happen. That is why we always start with base rates.

Back to our Fermi problem. Geopolitics is hard and abstract, so let's use something closer to home as an example. What is the probability that you'll lose your job (involuntarily) within the next year? (Sorry to choose a downer question, but I think #studiesshow something scary is more likely to keep your attention, so I'm doing this for you.)

Most likely there is no single statistic out there that can just give you the answer, or you don't know of one, so we can start by asking, "How is my situation like other situations that I could get data on?" Possible answers include: the rate of layoffs across similar companies in your country (especially in whatever economic conditions you would predict for the next year, which is kind of a sub-forecast in this forecast); the rate of layoffs of people with your job/role, or your seniority or length of tenure, across all companies in your industry; and I bet you can think of a few more. If you can look up data for any of these, you'll end up with some numbers, and can think about how to take all of them into account to come up with some informed estimate of a base rate.

And next: "How is my situation different from those other situations?" Is your company doing particularly well or poorly compared to others in the sector? Are you new to the company, and that makes you feel more likely to get cut first if layoffs happen? Or do you happen to have evidence that your team or project is so high priority that it would be the least likely to be affected? Are you 10x and everyone knows it? (Hell yeah.)

But how do you know exactly how to weight all the different pieces of data that went into your base rate? And if you have individual factors that make the thing more likely or less likely than the base rate, how do you know how much you should adjust for those factors? My guess is that getting a sense for all those specifics is a big part of what forecasters get better at over time if they keep at it and if they review the results of their predictions and make an effort to get more accurate. (Which pundits don't do, almost by definition.) And I suspect that's part of what distinguishes an OK forecaster from a super forecaster.

That's okay that I don't know how to handle all those specifics right now. As a tailwit, I don't need to be the best at anything. I mostly just want to be not the worst. And to be not the worst at forecasting, my hunch is that all you have to do is to make a guess based on any actual data and reasoning. Just like with the piano tuner question, any guess involving the tiniest iota of logic is definitely going to be closer to the answer than no guess at all, and will probably also be closer than a super random guess based purely on feelings (e.g., "I'll definitely get laid off in the next year because my boss hates me," or, "I definitely won't get laid off in the next year because I don't want to think about that so it's definitely not going to happen.")

With this Fermi trick in hand, you can go forth and start forecasting all the things. Most of all—and I'm sure I will be harping on this again and again along our journey—most of all, a true tailwit must keep in mind: NEVER FORGET BASE RATES! If somebody tries to tell you that such-and-such a metric is a whopping 7.2% right now, your response had better be (in your best Marcel the Shell voice): "Compared to WHAT?!"

A tailwit who knows their base rates is ready to take on the world.

Appendix

I asked ChatGPT: "How many piano tuners would you guess there are in Chicago?"

ChatGPT's response:

It would be difficult for me to accurately estimate the number of piano tuners in Chicago, as I don't have access to current information about the local piano tuning market. The number of piano tuners in a given location can vary based on a number of factors, such as the size of the population, the number of pianos in the area, and the demand for piano tuning services. Without more specific information, it would be difficult for me to provide a reliable estimate of the number of piano tuners in Chicago.

Tailwit Capital: Prologue

2022-12-23T00:00:00Z

So I'm starting a new blog series and newsletter project called Tailwit Capital: Notes on money, by smooth brains, for smooth brains. Posts will go here on my blog and will also get sent out to email subscribers (for free) via Substack, for your reading convenience.

The first post, below, will tell you what it's all about.

These are the notebooks of a normal (in the bell-curve sense) person on a quest to learn how money works in our world.

First, you should know that I am not qualified to write informatively about money, finance, or business, in any way, much less to hand out advice on same. I have never taken a class in any of the above topics, nor worked in any field related to them. I don't make or have enough money to be able to not work. I might have more aptly named this venture "Midwit Capital," but that moniker was taken on Twitter, so I had to go down a tier in intelligence.

I'm a normal American. Like nearly all Americans, I'm above average at everything that I do. But, like some-but-not-all Americans, I love to nerd out about money. I like reading such respectable publications as The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, even though I don't understand any of the words or numbers in them. I like the idea that I'm reading them. My favorite vacation reading is any Michael Lewis book. The Big Short is one of my favorite movies, in large part because I love anything that Ryan Gosling is in.

Up until late 2021, I didn't know almost anything about "macro," as it's called. I didn't even know that's what that was called. I knew just enough about personal finance to have some idea of what to do with my own savings. But I knew zero about the Fed, about inflation and interest rates, about global reserve currencies, about fiat money. A year later, by late 2022, current events, as well as newfound related interests, were my gateway into starting to learn about all of the above.

Now I'm hooked. Not only do I find it addictive to gradually understand more and more of the words that have always been swimming around in our media, I'm continually mind-blown by how much they didn't teach us in school about how the world actually works, specifically the kinds of things that affect every aspect of our lives. I'm also continually mind-blown by how much the experts don't seem to know what's going on, yet how confident they are in saying words about it.

So I've resolved to become more money-literate (and finance-, economics-, business-literate) in 2023 and beyond. One sample concrete goal is that by the end of 2023, I'd like to be able to stumble my way around an SEC filing, like an S-1 or something that's equivalently mystifying to me now. That's just an example; I'm sure I will add more concrete goals as I come up with them, and swap some out for new ones. One less-concrete goal is that I'd like to be informed enough to be able to call bullshit when I see it. But then, that's a lifelong goal, not just a 2023 one.

This is the journey we're about to embark on, dear tailwit, should you choose to keep me company. This newsletter will be my notebook and journal as I learn about the things I want to learn about. For 2023, I could see that list including: the Federal Reserve; money theory; bond markets; crypto; venture capital; IPOs; the SEC and regulation; management consulting; and whatever chaos the new year brings.

We will watch movies and TV together, like Americans. We will read books and blog posts and try to wrap our smooth brains around what the wrinkly-brained ones are saying. We will read "ELI5"-style posts and still not understand them. (But if we do eventually understand them, we'll write better posts, posts that "explain like I'm actually 5.")

You should expect no structure whatsoever (though structure could emerge), nor should you expect topics to be selected to be timely or to benefit or interest YOU. I might write about up-to-the-minute dramas, or I might write about 80s-era coke-fueled hostile takeovers. Come along for the ride, stay for the dank memes.

I certainly promise no helpful insights, in any practical or intellectual sense. All I can promise you is word salad of the most profound order, along with some deeply noob questions that even you could probably answer for me (and I hope you do). I aim to entertain. There may also be swear words.

This newsletter is free (maybe not forever, but I have no plans either way for the moment) and will get sent out irregularly. I'll cross-post it on my own blog (which has an RSS feed) and on Substack so you can follow by email.

Welcome to Tailwit Capital. I hope to be your source for the most basic (in the pumpkin-spice-latte sense), amateur, low-IQ, premium-mediocre insights into the world of money.

Notes on bookshelf

2022-11-27T00:00:00Z

For the past few years, I have been somewhat mobile, residentially speaking, and so have, at a number of points, purged my books, bought books, re-bought books I used to own, refrained from buying more books in case I would move soon, moved books via carry-on baggage, and kept what few books I own in little stacks on the floor of my room.

A few months ago I bought a bookshelf. It was a chance for a fresh start in terms of deciding how to arrange my books on a shelf. And for the first time ever, I decided to do that which is unthinkable for "serious" readers, and almost certainly heresy for someone in possession of an MFA: I decided to organize my books by color. Most importantly it's pretty, but it also confers certain benefits, which a younger me would not have recognized as benefits. A younger me would have insisted (and did insist) on using a system that's deterministic, meaning based on rules which, if followed correctly, would always result in the same arrangement of books. This also means a book would be easy to instantly find, because its correct position would be predictable.

The me of today likes that the color system is subjective. It's not always obvious whether a given book should go to the left of another one, or vice versa. The order of the colors isn't fixed either, and is based on how the books flow as I organize them. Sometimes a spine is equally two different colors, and I just pick one to go with. I might take out a book for a few weeks or months, and by the time I put it back, I might forget the exact position it held previously, and put it in a different spot that seems to make sense. If i forget what color a book is, I might have to look over all my books to find it. I no longer have a problem with any of the above. The me of today prefers to let the chaos in.

What would have irked the younger me the most, more than non-determinism, is that this system privileges the book's physicality, the body of the book, over its substance. I still agree that this is true; it's just that (I'm surprised to find) this no longer upsets me. I'm not sure why it no longer upsets me, or I'm not sure how to articulate why, but it's something I continue to think about.

A friend of mine, whose household also organizes books by color, describes it as being "more democratic," because even his 4-year-old daughter can participate in organizing the books—which is a take on democracy that I find refreshing.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of organizing my books by the race of the author, not only to troll everyone who might look through my shelf trying to figure out the logic, but because it reflects a certain truth that I feel in my reading life. But that idea was put abruptly to rest by one tiny fact of physical reality.

My bookshelf is divided into two rows: the top shelf contains a space that is 8.125 inches tall, and the bottom shelf is several inches taller than that. It turns out that American books are most often 8, or 8.25, or 8.5 inches tall, which means that, of a set of books that are all nearly the same height as each other, some of them will fit on my top shelf, and some won't. So few of the books I own will fit in the top shelf that the ones that do fit need to live there. So, thanks to the brutal and arbitrary realities of these physical objects, the root node of my library's taxonomy tree must necessarily be book height, specifically whether a book happens to be taller or shorter than 8.125 inches.

I could be annoyed with my shelf for not conforming to American book size standards, but I feel I would be equally justified in being annoyed with American book size standards for not conforming to my shelf. I bought this particular bookshelf because it's beautiful. The people who designed it, I have to assume, felt that its exact size and shape, and the size of its shelves, was some winning combination of beautiful and efficient to produce, publishing standards be damned. I mean, most likely they neither thought about it nor cared. If they had cared to make the top shelf accommodate the standard American book, I would have appreciated that; but the fact that they apparently didn't care, I appreciate in a different way.

That my library is first and foremost split by book height, and at such an arbitrary cutoff value, for me breaks any ambition I might have had to organize my books by something more "meaningful" than the book's physical attributes, makes it almost easy to let go of such worries, and simply do the rest of the organizing by color.

It kills me to think that I won't have the chance to hear the stories of every single person in the world about how their books ended up in the arrangement they are in, down to the individual book, especially the exceptions to the rules. That this one lives in this spot because it's easier to reach for; that another is lying on its side because of the shelf height, and these others ended up sitting on top of it because that's where a friend last put them.

Near the end of a long and leisurely dinner at M's house one night last spring, I was starting to wonder if it was time to start taking our leave, when D said he had something to show us, and got up from the table and went into the next room. He came back with an old box set of books by one of his favorite authors (I'm sorry to say I don't remember which author it was)—a box set that he had presumably owned for a long time, decades maybe—and started pulling out the books and telling us about each one.

At some point, it suddenly occurred to him that he couldn't remember what order the books in the set had been in just before he had pulled them out—which was maybe also the original order of the set. We laughed about it together then, but at his end of the table he went on privately trying to recall the order the books had been in: arranging them in a certain order, trying to see if that felt especially familiar, then trying another. A small sadness had come to him, I felt it too: it was the sadness of losing a previous state of your world that you hadn't realized was meaningful enough to need a snapshot, until it was too late. It was the sadness of forgetting. For me, there was also the gravity of knowing that the thing he had lost, he had lost in the process of sharing with me his love for it. The loss was now wrapped up inside the gift.

I suppose the current state of one's shelves or stacks, with all its exceptions and the stories of how the exceptions came to be, is the sum of all the little displacements and forgettings that life and love and friendship have wrought on the canonical order, such as it was. To be able to wake up in the morning and greet your books as they are, without shame or discomfort... you strive for that all your life.

A year with Ethereum

2022-10-20T00:00:00Z

As I'm quickly approaching the one-year anniversary of the day I became obsessed with Ethereum in the fall of 2021, I thought I'd write up a look back on the year, quarter by quarter, with the things I was learning and thinking about and the developments that happened in each quarter.

Prologue (before the madness begins):

It's 2021.

I've known about Bitcoin since 2014. The original idea (and ideals) seemed cool to me at the time, and I worked very briefly in the space (without acquiring any BTC, alas), and I always intended to learn about it more deeply, but still haven't gotten around to it. Since then, it's seemed like just a highly volatile asset for people to speculate on, which is not my cup of tea.

Heard of Ethereum, but isn't it just another coin, same as all the other non-bitcoin coins?

NFTs are just more new things for rich people to trade amongst themselves, and for everyone else to get screwed on. Also, they kill the planet.

Q1: Rabbit hole
November and December 2021, January 2022

I become obsessed with Ethereum at a single moment, on a single day, like the flip of a switch. It's upon listening to one specific podcast episode: The Tim Ferriss Show with Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant.

It's reinforced by a second episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, which is his interview with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum.

The switch that flips is that for the first time, I learn what Ethereum actually is. It's not just a coin, and not even just another blockchain (a ledger of monetary transactions). It's a blockchain that runs code, runs programs and apps (smart contracts). Meaning it's a ginormous, shared, decentralized computer. (Ethereans hate this computer analogy now, but that was the lightbulb analogy for me personally.) A global database that, if pulled off correctly, can never be taken over by anyone.

Once that switch flips, every switch is flipped, all the lights flipping on in my mind at once. The existence of smart contracts means, not just one currency, but many currencies, all with different features and tradeoffs, but all native to the internet and moveable, across borders, without going through banks. Not tied to geography, not intermediated by corporations.

NFTs mean digital property of all kinds, not only collectible JPEGs for the rich to trade, but, given enough time for the space to evolve, mundane things of more sentimental value, like digital shoes, digital plants, your kid's art, badges for having done certain things—the digital equivalents of all the random things we have in our homes today that mean something to us. Digital property makes more sense when paired with an interoperable metaverse. A metaverse makes more sense in the context of VR/AR, but doesn't rely on VR/AR becoming ubiquitous. For example, many of us already live and work online. We already exist in the metaverse, it's just 2D.

Ironically and coincidentally, this switch-flip happens around the same time as the Zuckerberg Meta announcement, but that's more of a distraction than anything else. Or if anything, it motivates me to get involved ASAP. Because the metaverse will happen. But we have ONE chance, now, to make sure it's not one that's owned by Zuck.

Early on, there were visions of the internet where the tubes themselves (the routers, the routes between them connecting all the computers all over the world, and the protocol by which they talk to each other) were proprietary and owned by a single entity or a small handful of entities. But thanks to the work of many, many people who cared, TCP/IP won: a neutral, open protocol that anyone can implement.

It feels instantly, unequivocally clear to me that, now that the idea has been said aloud in the world and the tech exists, a form of internet that runs on a blockchain and is paid for by flows of a native internet currency WILL get built, one way or another. And that an internet-native currency is the thing that was missing in web1 ("the original sin," as I think Marc Andreessen puts it), the lack of which got us so deep into ad-based business models that are now killing us.

It feels so clear, I think, simply because of flows of talent, energy, and excitement. A space that gives individuals, small teams, and young people with new ideas (and without old assumptions) a chance to build things that have never been built before, especially people who would never have had the same kind of opportunity in web2—a space that gives them a chance to play, in every sense of the word—there's no betting against that. All the talent and energy in tech will pour into a space like that, and it's not coming back out. It will be a one-way flow.

And I need to be part of that.

Not only does it make sense for the world, it's a perfect amalgamation of almost all the interests I've ever had.

Will it bring about utopia? Probably not. But I think it will bring a changing of the guard, for better or worse. And I think a change is needed.

Within days I discover the Bankless podcast. There are so many episodes of it, I actually have to switch to a new podcast app just to load the older ones. I decide I will learn my way around by listening to every episode of Bankless ever. How it actually goes is that I listen to a few of the early foundational ones, then catch up on the last few months of episodes, while keeping up with each new episode that comes out (about 4-5 per week at the time), no matter what it's about, so I can learn what everything is: every company, every investor, every DAO, every chain. I listen to Bankless when I wake up, while I make coffee, while I eat, take public transit, go for walks. I fall asleep listening to it and pick up where I left off the next day.

I buy my first crypto (BTC and ETH) on a centralized exchange. I use a non-custodial wallet (Metamask) for the first time. I follow a Solidity tutorial and deploy a simple "hello world" app to Rinkeby. I buy an ENS name.

I am totally, blissfully (and, in retrospect, hilariously) unaware that it's a bull market at all—and of course, along with everyone else who can't predict the future, unaware that it's reaching its peak—riiight at the time that I'm getting into all this. Which means coin prices and gas prices are all sky-high, all projects' Discord servers are filled with thousands of people hoping for an airdrop, and it's the peak of ponzis and scams. Being a somewhat conservative and "boring" investor to begin with, I ignore the hype anyway and buy mostly ETH.

I don't know anything about Ethereum at the protocol level. I want to learn a bit more Solidity, but end up stopping basically at the aforementioned tutorial, because I have no motivating idea or project to build.

I desperately want to get a job in web3, even though I barely know anything about it. Still, a lot of jobs in web3 are actually for web2 skills, like frontend development, so there could be a way in. In web2, I wouldn't even need to apply for a job by submitting an application—I'd just go through a friend whose company I was interested in. But in web3, I don't have any friends yet. So I apply the traditional way to a whole bunch of jobs. Nobody responds.

I start telling all my friends about my lightbulb moment, the next time I catch up with them. They mostly have one of two reactions: they're either surprisingly open and curious, asking lots of questions and seeming to "get" certain ideas right away; or they're surprisingly negative, in which case it's as if I become, for them, a person to whom they send all their links that are negative about crypto. (If this was you, it's okay. I just wanted, and want, you to get a chance to learn about the thing that I'm into.) Though some friends do get it to some extent, no one gets seriously into it. So I remain alone on my journey.

The reading I'm sharing with everyone at this moment is Packy McCormick's The Value Chain of the Open Metaverse.

Wanting web3 friends, I apply to a few different communities that are web3-related in some way. My interview for KERNEL, one of those communities, is the first time I've ever talked to people about web3 who also already know what it is and don't need me to explain it to them. To my surprise, I'm accepted.

Q2: Community
February, March, April 2022

KERNEL begins. All of a sudden I'm amongst hundreds of people, all over the world, who are passionate about the same things I am. Not only that, but some of them are bored by the same things within web3 that I'm bored by—namely, DeFi and NFTs (in the collectible-art sense), the two big use cases that have traction at the moment. Lots of people are, like me, more interested in totally different potential use cases that have yet to be built out or gain adoption, like identity, privacy, reputation, social media, games, regenerative systems, science, governance, public goods funding. It's regen culture.

When KERNEL ends, it doesn't really end. I like to say it's what an alumni network is actually supposed to be: a curated community with an incredibly high signal for really great people. Friends to hang out with when you travel anywhere in the world or go to conferences. Neighbors to lend you a couch to crash on, or water your plants. Readers for your musings and cheerleaders for your work, in perpetuity.

Macro becomes a thing, both in the world, and in my understanding of the world. It starts in January because the entire market starts to go down, including stocks, bonds, crypto. By February, there's war in Ukraine. Then talk of the Fed raising interest rates to fight inflation. This is when I start to learn, for the first time, how global economics and geopolitics work, thanks to specific guests on Bankless, as well as another podcaster, Kyla Scanlon. Why the Fed raises rates, what that means for everyone else, why the Fed has to thread a fine line between inflation and recession. Energy considerations due to sanctions on Russia. Potential ramifications of the US freezing Russia's USD, for the USD's status as the global reserve currency. The kinds of things that, as a kid, I knew that grownups understood and cared about and that I wanted to understand, but didn't know how to learn about. (When I was a kid, the marker of true grownup-hood, in my estimation, was whether or not one paid rapt attention to speeches by Alan Greenspan. Only in the mysterious world of grownups could such dullness capture so much interest. No pun intended.)

My learning of Ethereum starts to evolve as well, as I start to get a sense of recent and current protocol developments. EIP-1559 and the burn mechanism, base fee vs. priority fee. Issuance in proof of work vs. proof of stake. Modular Ethereum and how it addresses the trilemma of security, scalability, and decentralization. Ultrasound money; what makes ETH valuable into the future.

I feel more confident in my doubts about specific aspects of web3 that feel overhyped. "Play-to-earn" is gross and exploitative, at least in the forms we see today, and there's no way to swing it that gets around that. It's true that many things are more centralized today than we'd like them to be, including over-reliance on Alchemy and Infura to access the chain. DAOs are often speed-running the same coordination and collaboration problems that every high school or college/university club has faced, in terms of governance, budget, how to distribute work. Naive tokenomics and incentive engineering is hubris—it's overestimating one's ability to understand why people do things, and one's ability to make people do certain things. I think systems that work will be arrived at empirically, through trial and error, rather than by being planned out in advance. And in general, there are a lot of really young people in web3 who don't realize they are reinventing something that was already invented, and making the same mistakes again instead of learning about them and iterating on the old mistakes.

Q3: Leveling up
May, June, July 2022

May brings, of course, the UST/LUNA collapse. Starting from the day UST loses its peg for good and falls below 90 cents or so, I sit there refreshing both Twitter and CoinMarketCap in morbid, horrifying fascination for the next two or three days, as everything goes to zero. This is when I learn what an algorithmic stablecoin even is, how UST and LUNA actually work, and, well, what the potential risks are (in particular, the "death spiral risk")... as I'm watching it literally happen. By contrast, I learn how all the other major stablecoins work in general, including USDC, DAI, and Tether.

Macro continues to be a thing—my own grocery bill gets noticeably higher, as my understanding of macro concepts deepens. Why the US's raising of rates leads to every other currency weakening relative to the dollar. More fully realizing the importance and dominance of the dollar as global reserve currency. It starts to dawn on me the implications of growing up in the US, with my own country's currency also being the global reserve currency: while I thought about the prices of things in dollars from time to time, aka my own buying power, I never thought about the price of the dollar itself. A dollar costs a dollar. What else would you even price it in? Of course, for billions of people in the world, that is not how money works.

I consult new sources to learn more about how money works, including Perry Mehrling's book and lecture videos. I know what's going on with the Fed—but what IS the Fed? What is a central bank for? Liquidity is king, not net worth on paper—as can be clearly seen in a liquidity crisis, i.e., when you need it and don't have it. It's like oxygen for banks.

I finally get a job in web3—naturally, when I'm no longer actively looking for one. It turns out that the way to get a job in web3 is by making internet friends in web3 first. Then it just happens, because everyone is hiring, but they want to hire people they know and like. Working in web3 enables me to finally learn tons of things in detail that I hadn't gotten around to learning just in my spare time. I learn how smart contracts actually work, how to code them, how to interact with them from the frontend. Smart contract architectures and patterns: the proxy pattern, upgradeable contracts, the diamond pattern. I learn Solidity syntax a bit more deeply. The ERC-721 spec in detail, including all its smart contract methods, and every field of metadata. How and where to store the metadata. IPFS, Filecoin. Sign-in with Ethereum.

Having slowly amassed enough ETH that I'm now uncomfortable keeping it all in an exchange, I buy a hardware wallet and learn to use it. This is when I finally take the time to sit down and understand what a wallet actually is, and what I need to do to retain control of my accounts. I've always thought of my first wallet/account as being "inside Metamask" (which is inside of my browser), but in fact a wallet isn't contained inside the app that you access it in. It just exists anywhere and everywhere. It's the private key OR the 12 or 24 word mnemonic that gives someone access to a particular account, but through any app that connects to the blockchain. One time I run into a bug in Metamask while sending some money, and simply use a different app to send it. Kind of like cash, my money belongs to the person who has the key to my money. At the moment, and hopefully in the future, that person is me.

I stake my first ETH (via Rocketpool). I learn what this means, financially, logistically, philosophically.

I continue to buy ETH. Finally, after several rounds of being wrong, I capitulate to the fact that it really is best (for me) to just dollar-cost-average in, because I keep trying to time my buying based on being convinced about something or other, and realizing I would have done better not making any guesses at all. (In almost all cases, it is for the simple reason that I underestimated the sway of macro. ETH may be fundamentally strong, but the fear of high interest rates or a recession is much, much stronger.)

My ambitions to learn about the Ethereum protocol keep growing. When I see Vitalik's Ethereum roadmap, I want to learn what EVERYTHING on the chart means. I don't understand any of the terms on it. Each one might as well be a magical incantation. "Single-slot confirmation." "Verkle trees." "History expiry." "In-protocol PBS." "ZK-SNARK." But I'm determined to understand all of them. Even if it takes me five years, and it all gets built within that time, so that by the time I learn what all the work is, it's done. Even then.

I start following the progress toward the Merge, and understanding what the Merge actually entails. I attend the community call (livestream) for the first testnet merge, which is Röpsten. I start to understand proof of work vs. proof of stake at a deeper level: not just what the difference is, but the tradeoffs between the two, in terms of economic security and decentralization.

I start to learn about danksharding, and intend to spend my summer learning about it, but due to starting aforementioned job in web3, I turn my attention toward that instead.

By this point most of my new friends are Ethereum people, but that's okay. Ethereum people tend to share the quality of being willing to invest time into meeting people and making new friends, which makes for good new friends.

Q4: Cruising altitude
August, September, October 2022 (the present)

After 9 or 10 months, things reach a more stable state for me and I no longer vacuum in information indiscriminately at such a high rate. Instead of listening to EVERY Bankless episode that comes out, I pick and choose them. Mostly I love anything about macro and geopolitics, cultural paradigms, and Ethereum economics and development. I skip most of the ones on specific projects or companies. I no longer listen to podcasts while falling asleep or waking up. I finally make time to return to other interests dropped along the way, like watching TV, reading books, and learning languages.

Macro is bad, but in much the same way it has been all year, so fewer new developments to process. Winter is coming, and it's gonna be cold in Europe. The US is not out of the weeds in any way. Also, what we're doing may or may not break the entire global economy, but we'll see.

Tornado Cash is sanctioned, which is deeply upsetting and brings back Aaron Swartz vibes.

At work, I step back from going deep into contracts and NFTs, and instead focus on some more traditional things that need doing, like database work, testing, devops stuff.

I continue to attend every testnet merge call (Sepolia, Goerli), where I learn what the words mean that they are saying: clients, execution, consensus, attestations, epochs, justification, finalization, 66%. I bridge tokens between mainnet and L2 for the first time, to pay for the POAPs for these calls. I learn how Ethereum development happens, without any official company, hierarchy, or chain of command.

I realize: Ethereum exists purely in the clients. Like TCP/IP, Ethereum itself is just a set of specs. It exists in the real world because people code pieces of software that fulfill the specs, and lots more people run the software on little computers around the world, and the computers talk to each other through the software and help each other remember who has what, and that's how we have internet money and assets. The fact that the different clients can be, and are, written in different programming languages and implemented in slightly different ways, yet all adhere to a common spec and can talk to each other, is part of Ethereum's strength. There is no canonical implementation. Ethereum is the sum of all its participants.

I organize a virtual Mainnet Merge watch party with my friends who care the most about the Merge. For me, watching the Merge brings all the same excitement as watching a space shuttle launch, and thus merits a watch party. As part of the official Merge celebration, there is a site where you can participate in pixel painting if you hold at least one of a large list of eligible POAPs, mostly to various recent community calls and conferences. I hold three eligible POAPs: one for each testnet merge community call. No one else at the party has even one. This is when I realize that I follow the Merge and Ethereum protocol developments way more closely than anyone else I know.

The Merge goes more smoothly than anyone anticipated. NFTs no longer kill the planet.

I start to understand MEV, proposer-builder separation (PBS) (which was one of the "magical" terms, if you recall from above!), and MEV-Boost as a preliminary stand-in for eventual in-protocol PBS. How creating an efficient market for MEV by making it available to everyone can help Ethereum stay decentralized in the validation of blocks, even while allowing parties with the computing resources to build the most valuable blocks, to do so and to profit from that.

I'm also finally feeling ready to learn the nitty-gritty of Ethereum, on a different level than Solidity, like: what data goes into a block, what a transaction literally looks like (its schema), how clients talk to each other to validate a block, how data propagates through the network.

Finally, in October... I attend Devcon VI in Bogotá, the Ethereum Foundation's official conference, and my first crypto conference of any kind. I go in intending to learn more about rollups and ZK. At Devcon, I meet and spend time with more new Ethereum friends. I go to talks for most of each day and learn new stuff. EVM assembly, its syntax, the opcodes, storage, memory, the stack. Account abstraction and the need for smart contract wallets. The importance of, and excitement around, zero-knowledge (ZK) and its potential to enable both scalability and privacy on Ethereum. Potential applications of ZK for private transactions, rollups, machine learning, social media.

At Devcon I also encounter an explosion of advanced, mathy, cryptographicky concepts in the overlap of ZK proofs and danksharding, more concepts and terms I had never heard of before this year. (I have taken not much more math than the average American, so I don't know things.) Polynomials as a way to store data. Finite fields. KZG commitments. Reed-Solomon codes. Elliptic curve pairings. Data availability sampling. Merkle proofs. Counting my halting starts into learning about danksharding over the summer, this is by now my fourth or fifth time hearing or reading explanations of some of these concepts. I still don't fully get it—but I notice that each time I try to understand it, a little bit more starts to sink in. Maybe it will happen like the way I came to understand Bitcoin: I never had any one moment where it all clicked in a satisfying way, and I never felt like I understood how it worked. But seven years went by, and at some point I realized that I did, in fact, understand it.

My year with Ethereum

I learned what Ethereum actually is, and what makes it so exciting for so many people.

Macro understanding: the biggest surprise of the year was the fact that getting interested in crypto helped me understand all the geopolitical news of 2022, including the dynamics of inflation, interest rates, bonds, global currencies, war, energy markets, even the tension around Taiwan. These are really the things I most wanted to understand about the world.

As a dev: I've come to understand the landscape of frameworks, tools, and services for building smart contracts and dapps, and I know that whatever I need to build, I can figure out where to learn it.

I got a job in web3. And what I would say about that is that, while it certainly won't solve all your problems, and while most web3 jobs provide no moral high ground over web2 jobs (in spite of the marketing), there is no substitute for a web3 job in terms of learning a lot, and fast, because you have something you need to build, and you get paid to spend all day figuring out how to build it.

Ethereum protocol and ecosystem: I now understand the major milestones of the past year or two of protocol development, and the upcoming milestones for the next year or so. More than that, I've discovered that I love learning about this stuff, and that that makes me part of the surprisingly not-that-large set of people in the world who will spend their nights and weekends reading about things like danksharding.

Community: I started on this journey alone, with no friends or connections. Now I feel cozily embedded within an ever-expanding community of friends and future friends.

Learning modes: I spent Year One listening to smart conversations about Ethereum and economics. Now I'm ready to sit down and do a lot of reading.

My own role here: I think my own role is more to enable others to build whatever they want to on Ethereum, rather than to build a very specific thing myself. Be it via education, contributions to infrastructure, or something else.

Year One was a wild ride. I have absolutely no idea what Year Two will bring. And that's exactly as it should be.

21 pieces of unsolicited advice nobody else is willing to tell you

2021-01-10T00:00:00Z

On New Year's Day I happened to read this lovely blog post 100 Tips For A Better Life (which is not at all as generic as the title makes it sound) while having my first coffee of the year; and I thought—short pieces of advice without too much exposition, I could do that.. and I should do that, as an exercise in deviating from my default of extreme long-windedness.

By no means do I feel at all qualified to be handing out advice; but I don't think that matters too much in the end. Good advice resonates with you in the moment when you most need it.

Hence: 21 pieces of advice to kick off 2021! Regarding the "nobody else is willing to tell you" part, I realized that's the kind of advice I felt most compelled to include. So I've excluded things that everyone else would also tell you to do (exercise, get enough sleep, etc etc.); and I've focused on things I would love to tell the people I care about, but which may sound too harsh for me to feel comfortable telling them directly. So instead, I can just post them on my blog and feel like I've done my duty. It means I care about you, reader.

On living with yourself:

You are not special. Until you've proven otherwise, assume you are not an exception to the rule or to the statistics. Your predictions about yourself will be more accurate this way.
Nobody is paying any attention to you. When you realize that this is great news, the rest of your life can truly begin.
When deciding what to do or not do, take into account the risk and the opportunity cost of doing nothing—of staying passive, of putting off the decision. It's easy to unconsciously write off "doing nothing" as the safest option, when in some scenarios it is by far the riskiest and/or the costliest.
If you're agonizing over whether to get into a given activity or skill or field, just commit to actually trying it out for 20 hours first. If you don't have 20 hours, commit to 2 hours. It's going to answer a lot of questions for you that just imagining doing it, or reading about doing it, could never answer.
If you feel stuck or like you've hit a plateau in getting better at something, consider the possibility that you haven't tried enough times, you haven't memorized enough things, or you haven't practiced enough: in other words, that you're avoiding "the grind" that is necessary for the basic motions of the skill (including mental motions) to become automatic for you. Are you a savant at this skill? If not, then: yes, it's going to be a grind, and yes, it's necessary if you want to get good at it. In light of this, it's totally okay if you decide that it's not worth it and that this isn't the thing you want to spend your time getting good at.
There is much to be said for what you can accomplish in the margins and the scraps of time in between the biggest priorities in your life—the little pebbles and grains of sand that fill the space around the big rocks in your jar, to use someone else's analogy. But if you really want to get serious with something, there comes a point when that thing needs to become one of the big rocks: it needs to be one of the things that you place first, and shift other stuff around.
Know your energy patterns, and take full advantage of them. Going straight into a headwind all day in the name of "willpower" isn't commendable, it's inefficient.
Pay special attention to the specific things you fantasize about—in terms of work, environment, who you picture being around you, etc. It can reveal endless insights to you about what's actually important to you and what's making you unhappy. Don't blindly suppress your unrealistic fantasies, and don't blindly indulge them either—examine them for clues.
The way your life goes will be disproportionately determined by your making certain moves at certain timings that are specific to you. Sometimes the window of opportunity is only open for an instant. (But often, things come back around in slightly different forms.) So you should spend the vast majority of your time getting prepared to go all in at the right moment. How do you know it's the right moment to go all in? That's what the preparation is for.
Superior self-awareness wins every game there is. It's a skill that can be cultivated. Cultivating more self-awareness is always a good use of time.

On living (and working) with other people:

How to upgrade your friends: Every time you become friends with someone who's more awesome than most or all of your current friends, think of the caliber of this awesome friend as the new minimum for what you expect from all your friends. Repeat until all your closest friends are maximum awesome (which is when you can't even picture how they could be any more awesome). (This is my implementation related to an idea that Naval Ravikant calls the "five chimps theory": the idea that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.)
Every area of a project that's important should have a single decision owner. This makes it safe for anyone else to disagree on things as strongly as they want to, without it ever becoming unclear who makes the final call. Consensus is overrated. (If you want to get stuff done.)
Any given thing is probably going to happen the way it has consistently happened in the past. I'm not talking about Black Swan events or financial markets here, but for example, your next project is likely to play out in the way that your previous similar projects have, as well as in the way that previous similar projects by other people have played out. (See #1: You are not special. And neither is this project.)
An immediately handy use of #13: To estimate a project timeline, just take your best estimate and double it. Your best estimate probably doesn't include any surprises, so if there are any surprises, you'll be late. I know it feels like giving yourself too much time, but you might find that it's still barely enough. Just try it. (A sort of counter-suggestion: To simplify a project down to the essentials, think about what it would take to deliver it in half the time of your best estimate. Just maybe don't promise that to your boss or client.)
The counter to #3 about the risk/cost of doing nothing: It happens surprisingly often that you can do nothing and other people will solve their own problems (or their problems will solve themselves). There are even times when your stepping in to solve a problem can make it worse. (I know, it stings to admit it. But it's true.) Sometimes the most heroic thing you can do is to refrain from jumping in to save the day.
There comes a point in every career ladder where, if you have to ask someone to explain to you how to get to the next level up, that means you're not ready yet. What's required is for you to learn to see for yourself what needs to be done, and get it done. If you find yourself complaining that you don't understand what a [title above yours] even does, and no one seems willing to explain it to you, consider that the answer may be: "Yes. Exactly."
It's entirely possible that no one will ever thank you for the things you do that end up having the most positive impact (or preventing the most negative impact). People may even blame you for some side effect of what you've done. You'll be happier if you choose to do those things because they're consistent with your value system (in other words, because you consider them the right thing to do)—and because you want the results—not because you need the credit. (Not to say that you shouldn't communicate what you've done, when it counts.)
People love to be asked to help with things, if it makes them feel included in something good. Especially when it's low-risk and low-cost, ask someone to help do something with you—then trust them with the thing that you asked. They may go to great lengths for you and may even thank you for the opportunity. This is a very underrated way to bond with people.
Believe in someone's best self and you'll see a little more of it. Believe in them fully, genuinely, unfailingly—more than they believe in themselves, if needed. There is absolutely no need to be stingy about this. (But pair this with the next point, #20.)
Every minute of every day, you are constantly teaching people how you'd like to be treated. Stop taking shit from people and they'll stop giving it to you. Bullshit, like any gift, can't be transferred unless it is accepted by the recipient, not just offered. (But pair this with the previous point, #19.)
We are all mostly small, scared animals that don't want to be left to die alone. Don't attribute to intent or rationality what can be attributed to the limbic system or conditioned behavior—in yourself, or in other people.

Did any of those points make you think of someone you know? Now instead of confronting them directly, you can send them this post, hoping that they'll get the hint! Of course, what's most likely to happen is that instead of applying these to their own life, they'll immediately think of someone they know, and pass it on…

Here's to 2021!

Further reading: For my favorite collection of no-nonsense life advice that nobody else is willing to tell you—one that has influenced me greatly—read The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, which you can download for free at the link.

8 best things I discovered in 2019

2020-01-02T00:00:00Z

Happy 2020, everyone! Okay, I would have liked to have gotten this post out before 2019 ended, but that's just how my year went: I didn't necessarily get everything done exactly as planned, and it wasn't always pretty, but I got everything done one way or another.

Lots of stuff happened this year that I could recap, but in deciding what kind of end-of-year post to write, it came down to this: I always want to be discovering new things. No year should go by that I don't have something to include here. Even if I don't "accomplish" anything during the year. Moreover, I don't know that summarizing my accomplishments or life changes is valuable to anyone at all, including myself, so instead, I've collected things that you can immediately check out for yourself.

Here are a few things that really made my year, that I'd like to share with you. If any of these speak to you or if you get into any of them because of this post, let me know!

Here's a quick overview, with links to each section:

Practice/tool I adopted: Post-it notes & Sharpies
Podcast I got into: The Tim Ferriss Show
New sport I tried: Bouldering
Film director I got into: Jia Zhangke
Best book I read: Frantumaglia, by Elena Ferrante
Other best book I read: Adults in the Room, by Yanis Varoufakis
City I visited: Bratislava, Slovakia
Best purchase under $100: a glass tea pot

Practice/tool I adopted: Post-it notes & Sharpies

When I talk of writing "notes" in this context, I almost exclusively mean "lists of things I want to keep track of," and I'll give you some examples in a minute. I used to write such notes either in a mini notebook (which 95% of the time I was too lazy to go hunt down), or in my phone's Notes app, or not at all. In other words there was no system. This year I also migrated from the Notes app to Evernote, but it's telling that the thing that wins this category isn't digital, but good ol' paper & pen.

I think I first got the idea from reading Make Time (which deserves an honorable mention as best productivity / self-help book I read this year), and which you can already see from the cover has a sort of Sharpie-inspired vibe, though I don't remember if making handwritten lists is explicitly mentioned in the book. As soon as I started making some lists on Post-it notes, I got hooked, and started to realize there were more and more lists I'd been almost unconsciously storing in my head, that it felt better to write out. This had actually already happened once when I started using Evernote for the first time, but there is a way in which standing right in front of a blank pad of Post-its draws out even more lists that I might have thought too fleeting to be worth opening up Evernote for.

At first I was sticking them to the wall of my kitchen, which I faced when making coffee, planning my day, eating, etc. The blank pad and Sharpie were also right there on the counter, encouraging more list-making whenever I was waiting for my coffee/tea or otherwise standing in that spot spacing out, which I did a lot. Then I bought some new Post-its that were not sticky enough to stay on the wall (not actually Post-it brand, of course, that's why they were subpar), so I just let them all lie flat on the counter, where they started accumulating. I wish I could show you a picture, but the lists are private, plus I'd look like a crazy person. Once there got to be around 20 notes and they started cutting into my food prep space, I started transferring some to Evernote and throwing the paper notes away. But Post-it + Sharpie is still the best way for notes to originate--and both elements are important. Here's why:

There can only be one note on the top of the pad. Peeled-off notes are ephemeral. Post-its aren't really optimized for you to use all pages equally well, like a notebook. They're optimized for writing on the top note and then peeling it off. This means I can only really have one list or note active at a time. Sometimes I have peeled-off ones sitting around that I'm still adding to, but they are considered ephemeral because they get lost or damaged easily, so they only hang around for a few weeks at most, until I transfer them to Evernote and/or throw them away.

The benefit is that it encourages me to stay in the moment. What notes did I write last week? Who cares? If it was important, then I've put it into a different flow in my system where I can find it. If not important, it's gone, I won't see it again.

The other benefit is that this encourages me to make lists even if it's just going to help me in the next 30 minutes (e.g. what I need to do before I leave the house, e.g. what I'm going to put in my stew), which I normally wouldn't bother putting in a notebook or in digital notes. There are lots of times when this helps me de-stress in the moment because I have 7 little things I need to take care of now, plus I get the satisfaction of checking/crossing items off as I finish them--and throwing the whole note away, when I'm done!

No distraction from other apps while trying to take a note. 100% of the time I go to my phone/computer to write something in Evernote ("quick before I forget!"), I end up in some other app first, and forget what the note was, or even why I opened my phone. Even if I manage to not forget, the world of my phone/computer takes me out of whatever space my mind was in, which can be devastating if I was deep in thought on something I was writing or reading.

With a Sharpie, you can only fit a tiny amount of text on a Post-it. This is very important. On a standard square Post-it, using a Sharpie, I can only fit 8-10 lines of 2-4 words each. It forces me to distill every list down to what's essential. No whole thoughts, only triggers. No digressions. And that makes for clearer, more structured thinking. Certainly I love to be long-winded and digress e.g. here on my blog, but a post like this one originated from, and can be summarized back to, 8 items on a Post-it note. Of course, any marker of the same thickness works, but I like Sharpies because they're exactly the same anywhere you go.

Examples of what I use Post-it notes & Sharpies for:

Blog post ideas: This whole post was one item called "best of 2019," in a running list of post ideas.
Blog post bullet points: The 8 items in this post were also listed in their own note. So it served as the outline of a single blog post.
Subpoints of bullet points: This list of examples was also its own note! It's Post-its all the way down.
Punchlist: Quick ephemeral to-do list, meant to be used in the moment and thrown away: things to do before a friend comes over; packing list for a day trip; etc.
Misc ideas/thoughts: Topics to write about or research, distilled to 3-6 words each.
Things to remember tomorrow: To be written if I'm anxious before going to bed. I love this use case.
Highlight of the day: This is from the book Make Time. I write the ONE thing I need to get done today, leave it sitting out all day, and change it out every morning.
Quote to remember: Similar to "highlight of the day," I write one thing and leave it sitting out.
Things from the outside world: I'm experimenting with carrying a pad and Sharpie in my pocket, so that when I hear about something while I'm out somewhere, I can write it down instead of automatically going to my phone.

Podcast I got into: The Tim Ferriss Show

I used to dislike Tim Ferriss. I knew of him from around 10 years ago, around the time his first book The 4-Hour Workweek came out--indeed, if you go read some reviews of it, plenty of the top reviews are some variation of "Tim Ferriss is a douche," so I wasn't the only one. I hadn't read that book until just recently, but I read his blog for a while. Back then, my concern was that he was purely out to take shortcuts, blow through everything in the fastest way possible, and rack up accomplishments just so he could crow about being a master at this and that. It's true that a lot of things in life aren't as complicated or hard as we assume them to be, but for myself I didn't want to risk crossing that border from constructive irreverence into arrogance.

This past year, on a whim I gave Tim Ferriss another chance, and I'm very glad I did. Either I was wrong about him, or he mellowed out over time, or I mellowed out over time, or all of the above. My way in was flipping through Tools of Titans at a bookstore in Bratislava (the former deserves an honorable mention, the latter is actually on this list, farther down), which proved to be immensely valuable to me throughout the rest of my year. Tools of Titans is basically a collection of excerpts from the podcast, so I went to the source and listened to the podcast itself.

Lest you think it's only of interest for young white tech dudes trying to get buff, check out the episode where he nerds out with Maria Popova of Brain Pickings about their respective systems for taking notes in books, or the one where designer Debbie Millman walks you through an exercise in visualizing what you want your life to look like, or the one with Neil Gaiman which just warmed my heart.

The reason I'm sticking with Tim Ferriss now is that he's the only author/personality/etc obsessive enough about doing things well, for me to relate to. I actually have a hard time finding anyone else who is willing to go into enough detail for my taste. He is also by far the best podcast interviewer out of anyone I've heard (which is only maybe 5-6 others, but still). No one else comes close. He doesn't go into an interview like, the guest is just here to push their new book/venture so let's just summarize that over and over and be done with it. He goes into it looking to wander into a conversation the guest hasn't had before even if they've gone on a hundred other podcasts--maybe going into their childhood, the darkest moments they've ever had, or their exact morning routine, or other life stories they haven't told anyone else about.

He doesn't let the guest dodge the question by being vague: "Haha. No, but seriously. What's one thing you do every morning? Maybe you can tell me one specific thing?" He asks the followup questions that are begged: almost every time I think to myself, "Oh, now you have to ask him X," the next thing he says is, "Okay, since you said that, my listeners are definitely going to want to know X, can you elaborate on that?" He makes it applicable to his listenership: "Let's say someone has been wanting to get started [making electronic music / experimenting with ice baths / earning money from photography / whatever the guest does]. What's the first thing they should do? How does it work?"

Thanks to all those little things and more, it almost always turns out to be a really engaging, detailed conversation and not a bullshit interview just to claim you had so-and-so on your show, like so many podcasts. Even if you don't care about the content, it can teach you how to talk to anyone, which is to say how to be curious about anyone.

If you want to check it out, all 3 of the episodes I mentioned above are representative of what I describe, especially because the guests really go with the flow of what he's trying to do. If you are a young white tech dude trying to get buff, there's plenty for you there too! Just browse the episode list and you will see all the big names.

New sport I tried: Bouldering

"What made you decide to try bouldering?" my instructor asked me.

"I watched Free Solo too many times."

This is true, but it's only part of the reason. I watched Free Solo first, in late 2018, but my first climbing experience was actually ice climbing, in January 2019. While in Norway, two tiny Finnish ladies taught me how to top-rope up a frozen waterfall using ice axes and crampons. Hanging out alone at least five stories up a wall of ice, the people I came with reduced to tiny pinpoints way down below: that was the seed of the addiction. After that, I was ready to try indoor climbing.

In the town where I lived, I could choose between bouldering and rope climbing; there was one gym for each. Bouldering involves climbing short heights without a rope. It's a bit simpler because you don't need any gear at all, you don't need a partner, and you don't need any training (though obviously it's nice to have a little bit). You can walk in, change your shoes like with bowling, and with some gyms (this was true of the one I went to), you can already do one or two of the easiest routes, which might require no more skill than climbing a ladder. Just like with bowling, you can pick up some tips from friends along the way. I liked the simplicity, but what clinched it was that the bouldering gym was closer to the office and to my house, and was slightly cheaper. There you go.

Once I was up on the wall, I discovered another reason I was drawn to bouldering: without any rope or equipment, your mind is left with a real, primal fear, even when the fall would be relatively tiny and harmless. Self-consciousness and fear of embarrassment is a whole 'nother thing that's real (if you don't fall on your ass in front of strangers and friends, often, you're probably not doing it right), but I'm talking about a deeper, non-social feeling, the vertigo from looking straight down the wall, the animal nervousness that if I slip, I might literally die. And I don't even have a particular fear of heights.

But what I discovered that was much more unexpected was the countering belief: the sense of the state and position of my own body and how it's currently balanced, that allows me to know: "Yeah--but I won't fall. Not from this position." And that conflict between primal panic and informed calm is an allegory for all sorts of things in life (see my previous post The downside of staying put, for one). Not only that, there's the self-preservation that kicks in: "Falling is not an option. I can't fall." Which functions like a +20-50% strength powerup on some hard/scary moves that I wouldn't have thought I was strong enough to make, because my body has kicked into survival mode. Just for the experience of one or both of these feelings, I think it's worth trying out.

Speaking of strength, I am an exceedingly petite and physically not-strong person, but it turns out it doesn't matter too much for climbing. Not having a lot of muscle just forces you into good technique, which will pay off in more advanced routes where dudes who have been muscling their way up will falter. See Ashima Shiraishi, petite Japanese-American girl who became a world-class climber around the age of 13.

I'm still very much a beginner and I don't climb much these days; it's just kind of time-expensive and sometimes money-expensive, and not a priority for me at the moment. But I still have my own chalk bag, which means I'm legit. And if you invite me, I will probably go.

Film director I got into: Jia Zhangke

Ahh. I discovered Jia Zhangke in the most unlikely of places: sitting at a cafe in the Netherlands, idly picking up a film festival brochure on the table and flipping through it. It was an international film festival which happened to be in town that week. (This happened more than once while I lived in NL. Are the Dutch just good at leaving timely film festival brochures in cafes, or do we also do this in the US and I never noticed?) So I looked for movies subtitled in English and not Dutch, so I could watch them, and the one that caught my eye was Ash Is Purest White, so I went to the movie.

What the work meant to me is easier to convey if I tell you that in my family, as in many Chinese families, there is no concept of an inner life or an emotional life. None. Just last year I told my parents that I found out the father of a friend of mine had committed suicide. Their response was, "But how could that be? He had plenty of money to support himself through retirement." Reader, THIS WAS MY CHILDHOOD. Think I ever tell my parents, or anyone in my family, when I'm feeling sad about something? I don't, and most of my other Chinese friends don't either.

Chinese movies and stories historically have had plenty of emotion, but it's mostly kind of hackneyed and over the top; if you were to actually act like any of the characters in such stories, your family would talk shit about you behind your back forever, until you die. Not an exaggeration.

In Jia Zhangke's films (I've watched just a couple now and I plan to watch more), there is China, today, with all the transformation that is actually happening, and with the distinct sense of place and class and being from a specific region (like you can be Chinese and in an unfamiliar part of China you can still feel like an alien from another planet… kind of like in the US), and there's a deep undercurrent of anguish and emotion, which is both real and expressed realistically, which is to say, pretty much not at all, but you can feel it. That's the real shit. All the reasons in the world to feel loss and suffering, and no language to say it in.

In short, Chinese film in general is becoming a real, nuanced thing and not just the cheesy soap operas and martial arts movies I grew up with, and Jia Zhangke is a major influence. For a more general overview, I especially liked the documentary Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang.

Best book I read: Frantumaglia, by Elena Ferrante

As I wrote on Goodreads: "The best company the lonely soul of a writer could ask for." (But if you haven't read anything by Ferrante yet, I wouldn't start with this one, I'd start with My Brilliant Friend, which I force on any and all friends who will accept a book from me. Amazon says I've ordered it 4 times; I know I've bought it in a store more than once; and I recently gave away my own copy so I don't even have one anymore. My only copy is in Italian.)

But back to Frantumaglia. Why write? What makes it worth it? How do you know whether you have to or should? How do you know when it's good enough, what does that feel like? Why publish, and what makes that worth it? Why not publish? What does it mean to publish? What's the cost?

Who is the author? Does it matter? What does your childhood give you, or the place you come from, and how can you use that? What do life experiences give us, what does cruelty and suffering give us, what do our mothers give us?

What can writing do that film can't? What does it mean to read a book? What happens when you read someone else's book? When someone else reads your book? How do you let go of what you've written?

Sometimes I don't feel like I'm really a writer. When I read My Brilliant Friend, I don't feel like I'm a writer, I feel like that's a writer. But reading Frantumaglia, I felt like a real writer. Like I'm part of a secret sisterhood of people who care about the same things and wonder about the same questions and quietly, wherever we are in the world, find a little corner and do our work.

City I visited: Bratislava, Slovakia

This was a true discovery, as I'd never heard of Bratislava, and only went there to attend a polyglot conference that was happening there. The conference was just okay, but the city was a gem. Small, cheap, English-friendly, warm (as in charming, though the weather was nice when I went in spring/summer), walkable, bussable, with a surprising density of lovely food, comfy cafes (Turkish coffee and the selfie-ccino, where you can drink latte foam in the shape of your face or your dog's face), the occasional terrifyingly stark Communist architecture / interior design, which you may or may not find funny (terrifying when you're inside it, maybe funny later)… and, maybe most surprisingly, the best collection of bookstores with English books that I've found anywhere in Europe that I've been. Yes, perhaps better than Amsterdam. And that's a major factor for me.

I felt it on the rainy day I spent bookstore-hopping and visited pretty much every one with English books in the city. In the morning I was in a tiny cafe-bookstore with about five tables, and bookshelves along the walls--at one point, just two of us in there, the barista-owner lady sitting behind the counter, and me at a table, each of us reading our own book, both listening to the perfect rainy-day-indie playlist over the speakers. (From which I discovered a couple of bands that I continued listening to for the rest of the year.) The afternoon I spent at a huge bookstore with an equally huge cafe (actually, two stories of cafe) where you can read the books without buying them, and I think you either press a button to order or they have servers walking around and you can wave them over. All I remember is I camped in a big comfy armchair with a pile of books for about three hours while servers came by dropping off multiple rounds of pie and tea. It could be worse.

Visiting cities for the first time, I often feel like a tourist, which means either shunned, or treated with fake niceness and servility that I can't break past, or taken advantage of, or any combination of those. In Bratislava, I felt like a guest. Not fawned over, not judged or even really noticed, but welcomed with a run-of-the-mill, almost boring kindness, like a regular person. That's the best way I can think of to describe it.

Best purchase under $100: a glass tea pot

(My glass tea pot was way less than $100, but I got this category/question from none other than Tim Ferriss, mentioned above.)

I'm all about small, inexpensive ways to make yourself feel rich and pampered. Want to know my #1 tip for this? Garnish your own food and drink. Fresh herbs on your food, a sprig of mint or a lemon slice in your drink, a piece of chocolate or a little cookie with your coffee/tea. If you've been my guest before, then you know. This is really important because if you get used to it, you'll start to feel slightly disappointed when you go out to a restaurant or cafe and they don't bother to do this. Which teaches you that no one else can give you the kind of attention and care that you can give yourself… which is one of the most important things there is to learn, really.

Anyway, for me, a glass tea pot falls into the same category. If you don't drink tea, just think of it as a way to prepare and/or serve your beverage of choice (or even a food) that's just slightly nicer and more restaurant-like or cafe-like than is strictly necessary. I don't think I ever owned a tea pot previously, I just had tea bags to make individual cups, or at best, paper sleeves for loose leaf, still for individual cups.

With a tea pot, I could brew a pot and share it with a guest--there's no better way to make someone feel comfy in your home. Plus, it's pretty, and makes having tea feel like a real event. But I also sometimes used it for myself, even when just a mug and an individual tea filter would suffice. Because it's fancy. On days like those, sitting down at my own table was like sitting down to work in the best cafe in the world.

Happily, I gave my glass tea pot to a friend when I was moving out, I don't have it anymore. And I won't own another while I'm nomadic, but the concept still applies. And it takes on a different twist when you're not buying things for your own home, but working with what's there in the place where you are staying.

The downside of staying put

2019-10-21T00:00:00Z

Deconstructing the risk in my previous life decisions. How I view risk and opportunity cost differently than many people.

Ever since I started telling people I was going to quit my job to write full-time for a while, there's been one response I've gotten far, far more often than any other: "You're so brave."

At which point I ask, "Why?"
"Well… because you might fail."
"But what's wrong with that?" I ask. "If I failed, I could just come back to tech, and it would be the same as what I'm doing now."
"I don't know."

And that line of conversation pretty much ends there because I'm not sure how to respond. I've stopped asking "why?" when people say that, because it's never really gone anywhere. But I'm still genuinely curious about why that's such a common reaction for people to have. To think of such a move as brave. Especially because, when I think about it, it's also been by far the most common reaction to all the major life decisions I've told people about in the past 6 years.

The truth is, when it comes to risk, I'm one of the most conservative people I know. I only decide to make a change when I see that there is virtually no downside. But as soon as I do see a very favorable opportunity--a decent possibility of large upside, with very little downside even in the worst case--I'm ready to make the change immediately. This is what's known (in investing, and other fields) as an _asymmetric bet_, or _asymmetric risk/reward_. Maybe that tendency to go for such opportunities appears particularly decisive, fearless, or brave only because it's relatively rare; people in similar situations, with similar opportunities, often seem to hesitate for a long time, or to never make the change.

I don't gamble with my life. I count the cards. --Sekou Andrews

I would argue that there are situations, very common situations we all face at many points in our lives, in which it would be much more risky to stay put, to hesitate too long, keep doing what you're doing, maintain the status quo. Cases where not making a change means losing out on a potentially life-changing opportunity, means ignoring doors open to you now that won't be open again later, as well as leaving yourself exposed to hidden risks.

We always think of this false dichotomy where living true to yourself automatically means taking on more risk than not. I'm saying that in many cases, living true to yourself means taking on less risk than not. These are the easy ones and we should all be taking full advantage of these cases when they come along. They're win-win, all upside, and they should be no-brainers. But it's so common to assume that major changes or unconventional changes always mean more risk, without actually doing the analysis.

When we feel like the world is a dangerous place, then it seems like nothing could be safer than staying put. But for myself and many of my readers, there's more to it than meets the eye. Diversifying your skill set and network (which means learning new things and working with new people) makes you antifragile (that is, able to adapt to and benefit from random events); failing to diversify leaves you in a very fragile position, exposed to any random event--anything from your company shutting down or you being laid off, to your home country becoming unstable. In the same vein, large companies that are slow to react to changes in an industry appear safe, but are also fragile.

As an exercise, I thought I'd go through my major life decisions of the past few years, the ones people most frequently labelled as "brave," and deconstruct how I evaluated the risk of each one, and the potential upsides and downsides.

Becoming a software engineer

The first of these decisions happened in a time when I was living at my parents' house, tutoring SAT part-time. I really wanted to get a job that would allow me to move out of my parents' house, so I decided to try to attend a web development bootcamp, as I had no programming experience, and to become a software engineer.

Let's talk about the downside first.

A good question to always ask: if it doesn't work out, can I come back to the current situation? In this case the answer was a resounding yes. Alas, SAT tutoring will always exist, and my parents are very hospitable people and enjoy having me around.

Another downside was time. Though with a bootcamp, it's as short of a time investment as you can get: 3-6 months to get trained from scratch for a whole new career. Assuming I graduated, got a job as an engineer, and after a year or so decided I didn't like it at all--that would still give me a lot of information and experience in a short amount of time. Plus, I didn't have any other ideas.

Another downside was money. For a lot of bootcamps, just the tuition is a big risk (dropping $12-18k up front, at the time; something like $15-30k now, egad!). However, I was fortunate to find out about App Academy, which at the time only had a deferred-tuition model, where (other than a small deposit just to save your spot, which would be returned to you) you didn't pay a cent until/unless you got a job as an engineer afterwards, and then you'd pay a percentage of your first year's salary. Of course, I assumed I would never get accepted to App Academy, but as there was also basically no downside to applying, I applied, and to my shock and wonder, I got in!

So, there was almost no downside in terms of money. I say "almost" because there was some other money I would need to plan on losing: 3-6 months without my tutoring salary. As I made very little to begin with, I was fine with this. Another potential cost would be paying rent to live in SF during the bootcamp: but actually, I didn't. At the time, App Academy let students crash on the floor of the office for free (not anymore, sorry!). Between that and the generosity of some friends who let me housesit when they went out of town, I didn't have to pay rent during those months. So in that sense I de-risked the cost by sleeping on the linoleum floor of a giant office space for weeks at a time along with 20-30 dudes.

So, downsides were I'd have to give up a small amount of time, and a small amount of money, but I could definitely reverse the change and come back to the current situation. Now, the potential upside. It was all upside. I could get my first full-time job, doing something I knew I enjoyed and was good at, in a market where my skills would be in extremely high demand for a long time to come. I could go from making $20-25k a year (my best year tutoring), to over $100k (entry-level market rates in SF in 2013-2014). In less than one year. It was a no-brainer. I went for it, actually did collect all of that upside, and never looked back.

In retrospect, I lucked out: my timing couldn't have been more perfect. It was the best time possible to go through a bootcamp and enter the job market. In 2013, developer bootcamps had been around for maybe a year or two. So I wasn't so early that bootcamps didn't exist, or so early that I was in the initial, most experimental cohorts; but I wasn't so late that the bootcamp world became saturated as it is now, which means higher tuition, government regulation (no more crashing at the office), and the job market also being saturated with candidates fresh out of bootcamp, which makes it harder to stand out. I wasn't aware of any of that at the time. A combination of luck, and the fact that I made a decision and acted without delay, got me to where I am now.

Let's look at the next big decision.

Quitting without another job lined up

When I was at my second job as an engineer, everything was chugging along as usual, and then one day everything changed without warning: we were told the company was going to be acquired, by a major corporation, at the end of the month. We'd each be given our offer to join the corporation, and we had one week to decide what to do. If you declined, then you'd simply be out of a job at the end of the month, with very little severance pay.

My offer included a small raise, as well as a massive retention bonus if I were to stay a full 2 years. The monetary benefits (401k/pension, health insurance, etc) would also be more generous in every way. It was like money on money.

I had a few options:

Accept and stay 2 years for the bonus. I wasn't at all interested in working for the corporation. But that 2-year bonus was more money than I'd ever pictured getting as a lump sum. That gave me pause. It would be really agonizing to turn that down. But it might be at least as agonizing to stay for 2 years, when I was already getting all kinds of signals that I wouldn't enjoy it and that I wouldn't learn as much.

Accept, but start looking for a new job, and then quit after finding one. The company explicitly said that it would be ok if we wanted to do this. Rationally speaking, this is probably what I would recommend to someone else. It would mean turning down the big retention bonus, but it wouldn't result in a break in income, and I could take as much time as needed to find a job I liked better, AND I would be able to actually experience working for the corporation and decide what I did or didn't like about it, rather than relying on hypotheticals. This is what a bunch of my colleagues did.

Unfortunately, I'm not so rational. I was mad about how the whole thing came about, and I felt like my arm was being twisted into accepting, and I hate that feeling. I knew that if I got into a situation where I resented going to work every day, then it was going to mentally poison me a little more every single day and start turning me into a negative person. And messing up my mental well-being wasn't a risk I was willing to take.

Plus, if I stayed, then there was also the risk that it might be easy and comfy, and I might stay longer than I meant to, and lose that urgency to find a new job. So I started to consider a third option:

Decline the offer and leave at the end of the month. This would mean losing my income suddenly, without knowing when I would have a new job. But there were some benefits: being able to interview full-time was a big one. And the lack of income giving me a sense of urgency and focus.

Oh, and if leaving didn't work out, could I come back? Technically yes, I think the corporation would have been glad to have me back, and I don't believe in burning bridges; though for reasons of simple pride, as well as the aforementioned mental well-being, I thought it best to consider it a closed door. 😄

In the end, I decided on the third option, to decline the offer and lose my job. These were the factors that influenced my decision:

At that stage, just over a year into my engineering career, growth and learning were by far the most important factor for me. Any growth I experienced now would be a huge multiplier in the opportunities I would get later on, including opportunities to make more money. Putting that growth at risk at a crucial time, for 2 years, for a known sum of money, would be short-sighted: the money wasn't going to compound at anywhere near the same rate as my value as an engineer.
I had enough savings to go maybe 3-4 months without a job. Given the job market at the time, and my background, I felt reasonably confident that I could get a better job within that time.
Rather than try to interview while also starting at what was basically a new company, on new projects, and still stewing in my emotions around the acquisiton, I could get a clean break and focus on what to do next.
Finally, I had this thought: The true meaning of "rich" is being able to walk away from the money. And knowing that I could earn it all back in a better way. Being trapped for the money is a position of fear, and I didn't want to be the kind of person who is controlled by fear. And that's what ultimately decided it.

On the whole, I felt that the downside of staying put was much worse than the downside of moving on. I walked away, I got a new job within about 2 months, I even got contract work during that time so that I actually had no break in income, and after 2 years, I didn't regret not getting that bonus.

That was one of the best decisions I've ever made. All else being equal, the knowledge that, when it came down to it, I walked away from the money because I valued something else more highly, and I could do it again--that's going to stay with me for the rest of my life. Not everyone gets the opportunity to know that about themselves.

3. Moving to Europe

In 2018, I came to the Netherlands for the first time on a work trip, just to visit the other office of my company and get to know the people there.

Within days, I knew I liked everyday life here better than back in the SF Bay Area, in every possible way. The city (a small city in the north) is gorgeous; you pretty much can't go anywhere without encountering canals, cathedrals, brick houses hundreds of years old, and lots and lots of green. The city is made for walking and biking. Commutes are mindblowingly short compared to any major city in the US: the vast majority of my colleagues walked or biked to work, and the absolute longest commute was probably around 20-30 minutes each way. Plus, I've just always felt at home in Europe.

All of these things contributed to an intense calm that came over me as soon as I arrived, which I had never felt before anywhere in the US, and which stayed with me for my whole visit. More than anything, it was that feeling that did it for me: I thought that if I could be somewhere where I had that feeling all the time, it would slowly turn me into the person I actually wanted to be. And that new person would be able to see new possibilities that I was completely blind to now.

It was remarkable that the idea to move here even occurred to me at all, as I had never lived abroad before or even considered living abroad, and in fact I hadn't been planning to move out of the Bay Area… ever. I was born there, I've spent the vast majority of my life there, my parents live there, and I figured I'd just live there until I died. I guess I just needed the right thing to click, and then all my perceived walls around my old life fell away. I have some of my friends to thank for planting seeds in my mind that led to that click happening at just the right moment.

I floated to my employer the idea of me moving here. They actually had a greater need for my role in the Netherlands office than in SF, so it would be win-win, but the decision was totally up to me.

In retrospect, I think I'd already made up my mind within that first week, but I took another couple of weeks to try to come up with any objections.

Here were some of the thoughts going through my mind:

If things didn't work out, could I come back to my current situation? Yep. I could move back, get my old job back, everything other than my exact apartment, basically, but it was okay, I'd already stayed there longer than I'd wanted to.

Almost every variable was known already. That's what made it a lot less scary or risky than just deciding to move abroad without knowing what I would do. I'd stay with the same company, in the exact same role, I knew how it would go financially, I'd already met the whole team I would be working with, and they were used to helping expats move there, and the team would be my community. There weren't any big unknowns.

I realized there was nothing more I could learn by spending more time thinking about it or doing research. Whatever remained that I didn't know, I could only find out by packing up and going. So I went to my employer and said, "Let's do it."

Again, people said I was brave. Again, I didn't understand why, because there was absolutely zero risk. And all the upside I mentioned above, including getting to live in Europe, a place Americans fantasize about getting to visit for two weeks every summer; and including literally becoming a different person. It was another no-brainer: I had run into the most amazing luck and all I had to do was say yes. Three months later, I was here.

Now I've lived in the Netherlands for just over a year (and loved every day of it) and I'm getting ready to leave again for my next adventure. But that first move paved the way for what I'm doing now, in ways I couldn't have anticipated before I made that decision, except that I sort of did, when I had the vague feeling that making a change would open up more possibilities than staying put.

Looking back, the amount of joy I would have missed out on in this one year alone, had I decided to stay put, is staggering. And it kills me to think that so many other people have a thing like that--maybe it's moving, maybe something totally different--but something amazing that they miss out on because of never actually evaluating the risk of making a change, and comparing that with the downside of staying put.

By the way, I really have to give a shoutout to my parents, for the way they reacted to each of these decisions, especially as I tend to decide without mentioning anything to them until after the fact.

When I came to them and said, "I want to do this program and become a software engineer in 3 months," they were like, "Sounds like a good idea," (which by the way was the first time I remember them ever saying that about any suggestion from me). And I was like, "Huh?? You're not going to lecture me about it being obviously a scam?" But for some reason, they didn't.

When I said, "My company got acquired and I didn't want to go, so I went ahead and quit, and I'll figure it out from here," my dad said, "Oh… that's not what I would have done, but OK. Good luck."

When I said, "I liked it in the Netherlands so I'm going to move there, I don't know for how long," they said, "Good! You're young, you should go out and experience more of the world."

When I said, "I'm quitting my job and I'm going to take at least a year off, maybe more, and just roam around aimlessly," they said, "Okay, do you need to ship some of your stuff back to our house?"

I'm really fortunate to have parents who would never in a million years try to talk me out of something because of their own desires or fears. And, it's funny--neither would they ever say, "You're so brave!" Rather, their stance is always, "By default I assume you're making a reasonable decision based on what you know. Good luck!" If they don't understand it then they ask questions. They treat even my more drastic decisions as perfectly normal and unremarkable, which now that I think about it, is the best reaction I could ask for.

I won't go into detail about that latest decision here--leaving my job to travel and write--because it's what I'm doing now, so you'll hear a lot more about it in later posts. But a beloved mentor of mine had a similar reaction to my parents, upon hearing the news: "Oh, that's wonderful. It makes perfect sense for you." No comments on bravery, no questions that start with, "But aren't you worried about…?"

And that's exactly how it should be: in a perfect world, it would be not at all out of the ordinary for anyone to identify a new path in their lives that's all upside and no downside, and when that opportunity comes along, to take that new path and never look back.

How to set up rory's exact desktop environment (and why it matters)

2019-10-05T00:00:00Z

[UPDATED! September 28, 2023. Deprecated things will be inlined throughout the post.]

Setting up your computer is a form of mise en place, a way of being intentional about the work you're going to do. This is all the apps, tools, and settings I use, and some of the reasoning behind my choices. I wrote this mostly as a reference for myself, but you might find an idea or two that could make a difference in the quality of your digital life.

I recently had my laptop wiped as part of exiting my job, and so yesterday I set it up again from scratch. I've set up a new or newly-wiped Macbook for myself probably on average once a year for the past 6 years (maybe I quit jobs a lot—to be discussed in some later post probably). As my preferences evolve, and technologies shift, each time the setup is slightly different. Still, I like to make it a smooth process for myself by documenting everything clearly.

Setting up your computer is a form of mise en place, a way of being intentional about the work you're going to do. After going through the process and thinking about it for this post, for the first time I've extracted some core principles that seem to underlie most of my digital practices. I'll list them here, and then in all the setup details that follow, you'll probably be able to see how the specifics tie back to the principles.

Contents:

Core principles: the zen of rory's desktop environment

i. No noise, no clutter. Everything I see a lot should have only what is needed. All docks, menu bars, sidebars, etc should be pared down to only necessary items, and hidden by default. Desktop should always be empty.

ii. The most frequent actions should be lightning fast. Life is short, and I want to spend as close to zero of it as possible typing, switching or opening or closing windows/panes/tabs, moving my mouse cursor, searching, navigating, fixing text formatting, etc. Thinking, reading, and writing should take time. Everything else should happen close to the speed of thought. This is at least half the reason that I was usually one of the faster developers on a team. Often when I paired with another developer, I could see they were actually spending the majority of their time on the above actions, which adds up when you're doing them hundreds or thousands of times per day. Below I'll show you how I set these up to be faster. (Except for typing, I guess. That takes lots of practice.)

iii. Everything in the cloud; individual machines are replaceable. All code and configs in GitHub; everything else in either specific cloud-based apps (streaming music, to-dos, notes, passwords, etc) or Dropbox. Everything stored locally on the machine is meant to be temporary and expendable. This way, my computer can be wiped or replaced at any time, and I don't have to worry about losing any work or getting it back to the state I'm used to.

iv. Create your own environment. I'm going to repeat this every time I give any advice. Never blindly follow someone else's system, including mine! Consider each item individually, and only incorporate it if it sparks joy for you. This is also why my dotfiles are annotated with the purpose of every setting and plugin.

And now, the setup. ~~This was on a Macbook Pro 2017, running macOS Mojave.~~ 2023: Now on a Macbook M2 Air, running macOS Ventura 13.5.

If you want to know how to do a certain thing, try ~~googling~~ searching it. If you want more detail on exact settings I use, just find me and ask.

Step 0: First things first.

Rename the computer to something cool. This is under ~~Sharing~~ General -> About. It's so much easier to properly care for your machine when you've named it.

Step 1: Apps I use on a daily basis:

~~Chrome: browser. Use Safari to download Chrome, then never open Safari again.~~
Arc: browser. Use Safari to download Arc, then never open Safari again.
Kagi: search engine; install as browser extension to make it the default search
1Password: password manager
Karabiner-Elements: remaps keyboard keys. This is incredibly important and explained below.
Raycast: Spotlight replacement, utilities/tools/converters, ChatGPT window
Dropbox: cloud storage
~~Evernote: notes~~
Bear: notes
Spotify: tunes
Byword: simple text editor for writing (I draft everything in Markdown)
Discord, Slack, WhatsApp: chat

Step 2: Remove noise and clutter.

Dock: Remove all apps from the Dock. Make the Dock small and auto-hidden. Never use the mouse to open, close, or switch to an app: I use cmd+tab to switch between open apps, and cmd+space to open ~~Spotlight~~ Raycast, type the app I want, and open it.

Menu bar: Remove unnecessary stuff from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Touch bar no longer exists!
Touch bar: This is under Keyboard. "Touch Bar shows: Expanded Control Strip" -- this makes it always show the same stuff which I've configured, rather than app-specific stuff. "Customize Touch Bar…" -- you can drag and drop to put only the stuff you want in the touch bar. I have: esc key (not configurable), brightness, music controls, volume controls, screen lock.

Finder: Change the sidebar to have the stuff that I want: most importantly my home directory (this is the directory named after you). Set to show file extensions. Press cmd+shift+. to show hidden files.

Displays: Scaled: More space. MAXIMUM SPACE! Just squint a little, and zoom in when needed. :D

Chrome: install Momentum extension, which makes new tabs clean and pretty.
Arc: Settings: “Ask where to save each file before downloading". Why? Apps these days always want to turn a single folder (e.g. Downloads) into a crap pile. I want to be more intentional about where each item goes.

Set computer's screenshots location to a dedicated screenshots directory in Dropbox. Why? See above "Desktop should always be empty." Secondly, see above "Everything in the cloud."

Byword: wide width, 15pt Menlo.

Step 3: Make all actions easier and/or faster.

Trackpad: Tracking speed higher. Change all the gestures to the ones I prefer.

Mouse: Set up a mouse with similar settings if I have one.

Keyboard: Keyboard: Key Repeat: fast. Delay Until Repeat: short.
Keyboard: Text: Uncheck all auto-correcting.
Keyboard: Input Sources: Enable extra keyboards. (Currently I use: US; Pinyin - Simplified; Turkish Q - Legacy.)
Keyboard: Shortcuts: Input Sources: set option+space to toggle between the above keyboards.

Karabiner-Elements: Complex modifications: Import rules from the internet: Modifier keys: Change caps_lock key.
This is the most important life hack I use that you probably haven't heard of:
Enable rule: "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone."
(I also enable a second rule, "Post escape if left_control is pressed alone." This just ensures the same as the above, but for my Whitefox keyboard.)

Short digression:

Why is remapping caps-lock the most important life hack I use that you probably haven't heard of?

I initially learned about this key remapping because it's common amongst vim users, and it will probably immediately make sense to a vim user, but it is a game-changer even when I'm not coding at all.

The caps lock key is a useless key--yes, a USELESS key--taking up incredibly valuable real estate due to its central, easily-reachable location. There are at least two other keys that are 100x more deserving of that location: Control, and Escape. Fortunately, it's possible to remap that key to a more useful one, and even possible to overload it with BOTH Control and Escape, due to the fact that Control is always pressed in combination with some other key, and Escape is always pressed alone. So depending on whether you're pressing that key alone or in combination, you can have it trigger one or the other.

Of the two, you may think that you would use Control more often than Escape. After all, in the Macbooks with touch bar, Apple opted to not even give Escape a real key! But Apple has its priorities all wrong, and if you're not using the Escape key a hundred times a day, you're missing out on all the things in life that you could be Escaping. Escape fullscreen, like in YouTube. Escape Spotlight search. Escape a settings menu. Escape an annoying modal popup on a website. Escape from cmd+f (the "find on page" function in most apps). Escape to "mark as read" in Slack. Escape tends to have some useful function in almost every app, and once you get into that mindset, Escaping is a way of life.

I have listed this step last here, but actually I set it up immediately after installing Chrome, because I can't stand to do the rest of the setup without it. And if you ARE using the Escape key a hundred times a day, you'll know that you've gotta remap it to where caps lock is, right next to your hand for easy access.

If you want to remap the key but get stuck, just reach out, I'm happy to help.

Anyway. If you're not a developer, then congrats! We're done.

Step 4: Development environment.

Are you a developer, or learning to code? Then you can find the rest of the setup steps, config, and tools for my dev environment over at my dotfiles, which are now up to date as of today.

Shoutout to my friend Nathan, who has been a big influence in this area, especially in the early days.

This time around, I had everything including my dev environment up and running in under 3 hours, which I'm pretty happy with. (Update: in 2023 it took around 5 hours total, mostly
due to all the cloud syncing everything requires nowadays. Ah well.)

Bottom line: are you going to live forever? Probably not. How much of your life are you going to spend on the computer? If you're a reader of my blog, then probably a fair amount. Therefore it's a good idea to do the preparation necessary to make this chunk of our finite life as joyful, chill, and intuitive as possible.

Language learning advice I freely ignore

2019-08-17T00:00:00Z

As part of my language learning project, nicknamed a cup of tea, that I started in earnest at the beginning of this year (but which I'd been toying with on and off for maybe a year longer), I've read and heard plenty of advice and opinions on language learning from lots of different sources, from books (Fluent in 3 Months, Fluent Forever, Kató Lomb's book Polyglot) to blogs (All Japanese All The Time) to podcasts (I Will Teach You a Language) to Reddit. I've even attended a Polyglot Gathering.

There's a lot out there. I pick and choose tactics based on what seems intriguing, what works for me, what doesn't, what's fun, what's boring. My system is always evolving, and it's still pretty unsolidified, but already I can identify a few things that work for me and a few things that don't.

We're only a few months in and I don't actually spend that much time on languages, so it's too early to say like, "You can do what I do and still be wildly successful," but I am happy with my progress given the time I put in, so all I can say is, "You can do what I do and it's a valid way to go about things." (Though as I'll explain later in this post, you shouldn't just blindly do what I do. I don't think that will work either.)

Here's some common pieces of advice that I freely ignore:

Focus on one language at a time. Work on that language until you reach a certain threshold of fluency, so that you don't forget it as easily.

I experimented with this advice by attempting to follow it, but seeing what I gravitated towards (and letting myself stray from the rule if I wanted to). What I found was that I can focus on one language for a few months, and then all of a sudden it starts to feel icky and boring, while another language starts to feel exciting and urgent, and I would have to force myself to keep working on the original one. And I don't learn quickly when I force it.

Instead, I just switch my focus to the new one, and I find that the original one becomes exciting again in time. It's like rotating your crops. Or something. Or to switch analogies, riding the surges of motivation is like drafting, in cycling and car races and bird flight.

After a while, I get a little rusty in my inactive languages, but it comes back very fast. When I return to one, it's not like relearning so much as reactivating.

I usually have one main language that I'm most actively working on at any given time. But it's also not uncommon for me to have days where I might do my flashcards in Mandarin, complete a lesson from my Italian grammar book, put on a podcast in Turkish while I'm making dinner, and then watch a movie in Spanish. Those are great days.

While I find the "one language at a time" advice perfectly reasonable, and it's quite possible that it would be more effective for me to follow it, I'm not in this to be effective, I'm in this to have fun. I try not to draw too much on willpower, which can run out and need to be replenished. Doing whatever I'm already motivated to do is my long game.

Speak from day one.

I get the sentiment behind this. Too many people try to learn a language without ever using it in real life. And you just can't. (Well, most people can't.) The best way to learn to use a language is to use it.

The only problem is, I don't like awkward conversations. I don't even like having them in English. So I'm not gonna speak from day one.

Conveniently, it turns out there's an entire opposing school of language learning that happens to align well with my preferences, which we might term the school of "keep your mouth shut from day one." In this approach, you listen to hundreds or potentially thousands of hours of audio by native speakers, without ever uttering a word, until you feel like it (which you probably will eventually, after having listened to thousands of hours of other people speaking). The argument is that by starting to speak too early on, you'll develop more of an accent, or other bad habits, because you haven't gotten enough correct input yet.

That's what I do. Keep my mouth shut. Like a little baby just watching all the grownups talk around me. Or at least, I listen about 100x as much as I speak. Jury's still out on how well it will work for me, as I have yet to reach my first 100 hours of listening in any of my languages, a far cry from AJATT's recommended 10,000 hours, but it already works wonders for my listening comprehension, which is also really important to develop.

Use keyword mnemonics.

Keyword mnemonics are the kind where you try to learn some word in the target language by pairing it to some word that it sounds like in your native language (this is the keyword), then coming up with a memorable visual scene that links the two. Like Benny Lewis's example of learning the French word gare (train station), which reminded him of the cartoon character Garfield (gare, Gar), by imagining Garfield in a train station. This seems to be a common suggestion in language-learning literature.

Personally I don't do this because I'm fundamentally against any strategy that relies on sounds in the native language. (Another example is the sound charts in textbooks that are like, "this vowel is like the a in car.") You risk messing up your pronunciation if you map sounds in one language to sounds in another that are not quite the same. Plus, I don't want to make up a memorable image for every word I want to learn. That's just not what I want to do with my time.

I do use some visual mnemonics that don't involve English, whenever it would help. For example, in learning the Chinese character 影 (ying3, "shadow," but I know it from 电影, which means "movie," literally "electric shadow"--pretty cool right?), I imagine the written character as a drawing of a movie projector casting shadows on the wall. No English involved.

Watch TV/movies with subtitles in the target language, not in English (L1).

The argument behind this one is that if you watch a movie with audio in the target language and subtitles in English, then all you've done is read the movie in English, and gained no experience in the target language at all.

Of course, it's only true for you if it's true for you. When I watch with English subtitles, I really do listen to the audio and read the subtitles at the same time, and the English subtitles inform the way my brain parses the audio, allowing me to identify words in the audio that I wouldn't have been able to make out otherwise. Which all makes for an immensely satisfying, active, multilayered watching experience.

In fact, it's my killer tactic. Don't let someone else steer you away from something that could be a killer tactic for you.

Make your own flashcards.

Hell no. Making flashcards is so boring. (UPDATE May 2020: I do now make my own flashcards, but not in the very involved and "fun" way described in the book Fluent Forever.. I make mine as quick and minimal as possible, just a word/phrase sentence and the translation. And I don't enjoy it.)

Those are a few of the things I DON'T do. What DO I do? Briefly, here are a few components of my system thus far:

SRS (spaced repetition software). I use Anki app on my phone. I find a deck that someone else has made online, of the most frequent sentences/words/characters in a language, depending on what I want to focus on, and then use it every day until I feel that it's not valuable anymore. (As a side note, active recall might just be the most underrated learning tactic, in any subject, ever. Google it.)
Mass input. Not 18 hours/day like AJATT (more like.. a couple of hours a week), but as I said above, I listen about 100x more than I speak. When I get better at reading, I'll also read much more than I write.
Grammar practice. Acquire any decent grammar book that has lots of exercises (my Turkish grammar book, I randomly found at a used bookstore, I have no idea whether it's considered good or not). As long as it's a grammar and not a textbook with annoying dialogues, vocabulary lists, or pictures. I do the exercises longhand in a notebook, for about an hour at a time.
Watch TV/movies with English subtitles. See above.
Occasionally text with a native speaker. If I have a friend or family member who's a native speaker, we can text each other. Not only is it a more realistic time investment for them than speaking with me, I learn better this way, because if they use words I don't know, they're already written down, plus I can look them up before I respond. The most annoying side effect of this is that I have a ton of keyboards I have to toggle through on my computer and phone.

But the real point I want to get across in this post, is not that you should adopt my system. It's that NOTHING beats a system that you create for yourself, picking and choosing tactics from a wide range of sources, based on what does and doesn't work for you and what is and isn't fun for you, which you find out by experimenting and paying attention.

I have no judgment re: laziness, as sometimes it's beneficial to be deliberately lazy in something and limit the attention you invest in it. But if you value results and/or fun over laziness in the area of learning languages, NEVER blindly follow someone else's system.

All of the work that really multiplies the payoff, is essentially the work of developing self-knowledge: the knowledge of how the system of your body interacts with the systems of the world. This is a metaphor for life.

10 years from now

2019-08-05T00:00:00Z

The other week I was listening to The Tim Ferriss Show episode with Debbie Millman on my walk to the grocery store and back, and there was a part near the end that stopped me in my tracks. (By then I was at home and standing in my kitchen with the groceries half put away.)

It was the part where Debbie Millman describes an exercise she did as a student of Milton Glaser, where you picture your life 10 years from today, and write out what it looks like, and write out a whole day in that life, in as much detail as you can. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would immediately shrug off and never bother to do.

But something about the way she spoke it into my ear, grabbed me; it was just as if we were 10 years in the future, and I was on the phone with a friend from way back, who was breathlessly asking me all kinds of questions about what my life looks like now ("Where are you living? Who are you living with? Do you have pets?"), while I'm laughing and going, "Hang on, hang on, one question at a time." And unlike those exercises that just ask what your 10-year goals are, the way she put it made me feel like I could answer the questions, like it would be fun to.

So I sat down yesterday and wrote it all out. You're supposed to read it again, once every year for 10 years, and supposedly it all comes true with spooky accuracy. I could see how that would be possible. But whether it all comes true or not, writing out that day in my future life is probably one of my favorite things I've done all week, maybe even all year. It put into perfect clarity what I actually want. Because it's easy to say, "I want more money." But really, if you had that, what would you do all day? Would it be any different from your life now? If you don't know, then it's hard to know what you actually want your life to be.

Being able to clearly see what I actually want means I can also see what I can already do right now, and do it. Example: in my vision, as a small detail I noted that I only look at my personal email (assuming email still exists) one time the entire day, for less than 15 minutes. That's something I can do now! So I closed my tabs and have only looked at email once a day since then. Living the dream.

Lucky for us, some nice, practical person posted the audio clip I'm referring to, and the transcript, on the internet here. You can also put on the original podcast episode and the part I'm referring to starts at 01:32:22. If you want to check it out, I recommend listening to it before you read the transcript, for the same effect I described above.

The same day I did the exercise, I was reading Robert Caro's Working (highly recommended), in particular the Paris Review interview, where Caro says that before he can start writing a book, he has to boil its essence down to 1-3 paragraphs, and that it takes him weeks to get those paragraphs right.

If you consider that each of Caro's books is about 1000+ pages long and takes him about 10 years… in writing that first, tiny outline, he's basically writing himself a 10-year vision! He does it because, over the course of covering that much material, he could easily digress into anything, and that clear vision helps him distinguish between the necessary digressions and the ones that need to be cut.

Sounds a lot like life.

(Re)learning to read in the 21st century

2019-07-08T00:00:00Z

Learning how to read, forgetting how to read, and eventually learning how to read again, in an age where technology is systematically destroying our ability to focus.

1988 - 2000: Learning

I don't remember too much about how I learned to read for the first time, but I remember a little.

I guess it's a unique experience growing up as a native English speaker, learning to read from parents who are not native English speakers. My parents are from China; Cantonese is my other native language. (I can't read Chinese. Yet.)

I remember struggling with the same quirks of English spelling that everyone encounters: sounding out mountain like "moun-tane" with the long a, then being annoyed to find out that it's pronounced "moun-tin." (Try this one: coxswain. Ridiculous!)

Not hearing English spoken at home, I had this persistent issue of not knowing which syllable should be stressed, an effect of my written vocabulary far outrunning the spoken: in kindergarten, reading the cover sheet on my homework packet which was meant for the parents: this week, we're working on how to re-cog-nize shapes and patterns. That's how it sounded in my head.

If you look closely, you can see that my kindergartener self was using a valid stress pattern found in other instances where re- means "to do something again": re-fu-el, re-cov-er, re-learn. Re-cognize. But what does it mean to cognize?

Much later, the funny way I broke down words helped me understand them more deeply: when I learned the word cognition, the other piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

Once I got rolling, past picture books (Frog and Toad, Amelia Bedelia) and chapter books (Roald Dahl), my dad started assigning me one classic novel after another, from the Sherlock Holmes books to The Count of Monte Cristo. I welcomed these assignments (especially any that were seconded by Wishbone which I watched religiously), as they came from a place of genuine interest; my dad wouldn't assign me any book that he wouldn't read for fun himself, and he would never force me to read something, only recommend. I suspect he was grooming me to be ready for what I later found out was his favorite book of all time, Les Mis. (Still haven't read it. It's on my shelf.)

Most evenings, I had dinner with my parents at home. But every Friday night, my dad and I would go to McDonald's, without my mom. We'd grab a booth, and I would pull out my book and he'd pull out his Chinese newspaper (Sing Tao, anyone?), and we'd just read for at least an hour over dinner. That was our quality time: reading together and not needing to talk. Like my dad, I preferred French novels to British ones, and didn't read American novels at all. These books saw me through third and fourth grade.

By fifth grade, I was into sci-fi: Ender's Game, the Animorphs. In sixth grade, something interesting happened. We moved to a different part of town, so I started sixth grade at a new school. I fell under the spell of a new friend, Nora, and for the next two years, I just read whatever she read. Thus she brought me into the realm of fantasy fiction written for adults: Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, for one. Which at the time was 8 books long, each book a 600-to-800-page brick of paper. All year, we'd carry around these massive tomes at school (I loved the hardcover versions I got from the library; each was about the size of my torso at the time), and snootily read them during class, obviously too cool to participate in whatever the rest of the class was working on.

We ate, slept, and breathed the Wheel of Time world. That world was superimposed on the real world, more real than real life. I remember, one of those books towards the middle of the series, I read the entire thing in about a day and a half, and that day, I read for ten or twelve hours straight, barely looking away to eat or move from the chair to the couch and back. That intensity of focus was always typical for me when reading a book; that day marked the peak of my ability to sustain it. And there was nothing else I'd rather have been doing.

I was twelve. After that came the precipitous decline.

2000 - 2018: Forgetting

The year 2000 ushered in a new century, a new millennium--and of most pressing concern for me: middle school.

Middle school was very, very different. It quickly became apparent that one major difference was that attending middle school was going to seriously hamper my reading life.

For one, you no longer had the same teacher for every subject, all day long, for the whole year. You had 6 different teachers, and you might have 6 different ones the next semester. Instead of having just 30 students, each teacher had up to 150 or so, and they were no longer ready to make an exception for just one of those kids who preferred to read their own book rather than do the classwork.

In addition, the classwork, and especially the homework, though not much more difficult than that of elementary school, was a lot more time-consuming. I found I could no longer breeze through it, even if I already knew the topic. There was a lot of mindlessly copying out long texts, rewriting the whole question, and a lot of questions per assignment. That was the first time I recall thinking of homework as being a grind.

Finally, the way they taught you to read books in English class was the polar opposite of my natural reading style: you were supposed to read maybe 10-20 pages each day, and stop to answer a bunch of questions about the chapter and maybe take a quiz. Every day there was a mandatory reading period, where everyone in the school, in every classroom, would stop and read for 30 minutes. Reading was an incremental activity: a little bit each day would somehow turn you into an educated, well-rounded person. Like medicine.

It's only looking back, nearly twenty years later, that I can see that, perhaps more than anything, it was that mindset that began to slowly dismantle my ability to read. Taking something I could happily do for twelve hours straight, and cutting it off at 30 minutes sharp. It was the beginning of interruption. Up until then, I read knowing I'd be transported: a few minutes to get into the zone, then--by the time I re-emerged, a few hours or half a day later, I might have experienced months or years in the story's world. Now a novel became a collection of separate little pieces, to slog through over a month or more. And not something the teacher wanted you to experience, for love; but something to be shoved down your throat, for your own good. You performed best if you paid attention to the things the teacher wanted you to pay attention to.

I see parallels between this very structured, heavily mediated approach to reading, and modernity itself. Or industrialized society. You read in moderation, a consistent amount each day. Not too little, not too much. Imbalance would be bad. A book split up into 15 parts, assembly-line style, and read one part per day is assumed to yield the same value as the book read as one whole. Note the words yield and value: it's not the experience of reading that matters, but what you can extract from it. And in terms of what you can extract from it, there's no space for flighty things like emotion; you read purely for the almighty Theme. (Cheat sheet: for any given work, if the Theme isn't "hubris," it's "the human condition.") In this worldview, a novel is no more than a fancy vehicle for an intellectual idea.

I kept reading books outside of school for maybe about a year, then eventually slowed to a complete stop. I only read books for English class. If I tried to read anything else, I found I couldn't get through it.

All of the above continued into high school. Actually, my grades in English class got worse every year. Don't get me wrong, I made forays back to reading: closer to the middle and end of high school, I could be found at Barnes & Noble or Borders (RIP) every day after school, until dinner. I read a lot more than your average high school student. But I still read incrementally and distractedly, rarely able to really get into a book and finish it, the way I could as a kid.

One big influence at the time was Gilmore Girls, which I was introduced to when I was 17. Though it's too bad Jess was never able to manage even the most meager of boyfriend skills, I maintain that Rory and Jess belonged together at least in soul, because Jess was the only one of her boyfriends who could read. Jess made reading cool again. He always had a book either in his hand or in his back pocket. And Jess didn't read in 10-page or 30-minute increments. He read all day, as though real life were the interruption and he was impatient to get back to the life inside his book.

Jess even communicated through books. His first real interaction with Rory is when he steals her copy of Howl to write notes in the margins for her. Swoon! (Note: if you know me in person, don't actually do this to my books, unless your notes are brilliant and the same edition is still in print (in case they aren't brilliant).)

I read everything Jess read in the show. That's how I got into the Beats: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs (somehow managing to skip Bukowski). The heroes of the other movies I watched obsessively--Pride and Prejudice, Good Will Hunting--also read all the time. Though I'd mostly lost my own ability to read--I read those Beat authors very, very slowly over many months--I too liked to carry a book around with me all day, hoping that if I played the part, I could get the feeling back.

I went to college. From the age of 10 or so, I had longed to go to college, and I assumed college would fix everything. But in fact, it got better in some ways and worse in others. We were asked to read whole books in a matter of days, by ourselves, without breaking them up, the way I used to do. By then that had become a pretty tall order for me, but I tried my best. There were highlights. Kierkegaard. Brian Greene. Authors who are incredibly rewarding once you get yourself all the way into their universe.

But at the same time, in some courses we were asked to read long academic papers every day. Or long books that were much less rewarding. All told, a quantity of reading that, in retrospect, was physically impossible to get through, at least with the kind of attention I applied to everything I read. Teachers would assign a dense 40-page paper to be read today, when it turned out they just wanted you to get the main idea of it. For some reason I failed to get it into my head that that was all I had to do. I wish someone had said to me: "and by read I mean skim," and then taught me how to skim.

These assignments demanded different mechanics of reading than those in middle and high school--no longer "read a little bit each day for a lot of days," more like "get the main ideas of this book/paper today"--but it was still about trying to extract the maximum value out of the text, for the minimum amount of effort invested. With the college approach, it's optimal if you stay disengaged; no time to waste on following the author's flow of language.

This way of reading was also completely alien to me. But instead of realizing it as such, I decided I was dumb and incapable of self-discipline: I just can't read, like everybody else can. I'm not cut out for this. I felt like I was barely keeping my head above water. But I muddled my way through, thanks to my writing ability, and did well in college.

That was around the time the iPhone first came out.

A decade went by. In adult life, with a full-time job, it turned out to be even harder to make time to read. When I did, it was almost always in the "medicine" way: trying to get myself to read a few pages each day, but unable to focus even then. And, on top of that, being unable to stick with the same book beyond the introduction or first chapter, before I got bored and wanted to start a new one.

In the meantime, our collective attention spans withered away to something like the attention spans of mice (or so I picture it). We became twitchy. I got my first smartphone and checked it 60 times a day. Communications became segmented into 140-character increments--either that or the size of a comfortably-proportioned text bubble in a messaging app. I've noticed a proliferation of contemporary books that read like one blog post, stretched out to fill 200 pages. Maybe because publishing cycles are shorter; maybe because very sparse, repetitive books are easier on the attention span.

My one saving grace was the New Yorker, which I've been a subscriber to since I was 21, and have read for a couple hours almost every week since then. It's not the same as reading a book, but the articles are long, and they haven't watered them down over time. I credit it with keeping my brain alive until now.

They say you really shouldn't waste your life finishing books you don't even like that much, because there are more good books than you can ever read in your short lifetime. And I totally agree with that. But I tried to finish each book I started anyway (and I still do today)--because I wanted to remember what it felt like to finish a book.

So rare now was that feeling of being transported that had been so commonplace for me when I was a kid. I only experienced it a handful of times in the intervening years; maybe just once or twice a year. What's worse, I was pretty sure that the lack of those experiences was making me stupid, and had been for nearly two decades. Starting around 2016, my favorite way to spend a long weekend was to take the extra day, and try to finish a whole book in that day. The day I read The Argonauts in one sitting (in bed) was the best day of that whole year.

2019 - Present day: Learning again

My best guess as to what saved me is that those book-in-one-sitting days are self-perpetuating: after the first one, I wanted to do it again. And for longer. The more I carved out whole days to read, the more I started to remember: this is what reading feels like. This is how I used to read, this is why I used to read.

Carving out the odd vacation day, turned into carving out most of each weekend, is now turning into carving out a fair chunk of every day.

And it has to be a chunk of several hours. The incremental approach doesn't work for me, because for me, reading is essentially a romantic endeavor, it's all or nothing. And it's nonlinear: reading for 4 hours isn't 8 times as hard as reading for a half hour; it's actually easier. Because reading for just a half hour a day means almost 100% of all my reading time is the crappy distracted part where I have yet to settle in, and that makes it hard to look forward to the next time. But reading for 4 hours is less than 20% the distracted part, and over 80% the fun part. And that's the difference between having to read and getting to read.

If I want to fall in love with reading again, I'll have to learn how to go about it the way I used to when I was last in love with it: make it a part of life, not something to sneak into the margins of life. My books are what send me off in the morning and what I come home to at night.

What I do these days: during the workweek, I don't worry too much about it. If I can't focus then I can't focus. But weekends, as far as possible, I make no other plans, batch everything I need to do and get it out of the way, and then sit down with my cats and just read, planning to stay there for 1 to 8 hours. Almost always a print book. If it's nice out, I'll take a chair outside and read in my garden.

I usually have my phone with me. I don't let it buzz anymore for anything other than a phone call. I let it light up with a notification pretty much only if a friend is texting me directly, not for emails, not for Slack.

I still get a little thrill when I hit page 100 of a book, because I know that if I've gotten that far, I can finish it if I want to. And page 100 only really takes about 3 uninterrupted hours, even at my relatively slow pace. In this way, I've managed to finish a book in a weekend, for a few weekends running now. Which is more than I could say for the past 18 years.

"You inquire my Books." Mostly I just follow my curiosity, which can branch out in a hundred different directions. When I was trying to stumble my way back to reading last year, I read a lot of the fluffy self-help stuff, as it was the only type of book I could reliably finish. Accordingly my curiosity felt stunted. Now I'm starting to work my way back to stuff that's more substantial, slower-paced, often older. I find pacing isn't so important unless I'm in it to extract information, or unless I have attention problems. Slow is good, because it's about the company.

Giving it the kind of attention that befits a passion, I can finally hope to return to the kinds of books I knew how to read as a kid, that I considered out of my reach until now: Proust. The Russians. And, one day: George Eliot, Robert Caro. Les Mis. Not that everything has to be long. But that long doesn't have to be impossible.

Usually people talk about learning how to read all over again like after a stroke or some sort of brain trauma. Of course, I'm not talking about the same thing. But no joke: it's worth considering what kind of damage has been done to our brains by the way we live now. What abilities we've lost, or, for some people, what abilities we've never gotten to experience at all.

When I settle in to read now, it's like getting on an airplane. Take-off takes some time, it can be bumpy, sometimes it's delayed for an hour on the runway because you're puttering around distracted by this and that.

But, eventually, when I stick with it and settle in: flight.

Exactly as I remember it.

rorysaur.blog

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