All about how to get new users from the wild and morph them into product masters.

Read it and all issues here.

I’ve been searching every which way to understand health problems I began having last summer. In the last nine months I’ve learned more about the human body than in most of my life prior.

And it’s not very heartening.

It turns out, nobody really understand much of how our bodies function. In most cases, the experts are guessing. Everyone is guessing. Our bodies are maddeningly complex, and new discoveries are constantly being made that cast doubt on previous paradigms.

I happened to be diving into cell biology and virology as various footnotes and papers and books led to others. (This was before the Coronavirus scare, where it’s now hard to avoid discussions of disease and viral pathogenesis.) In addition to detailed discussions of the way various types of cells work, I’ve been exploring different frameworks for understanding the body as a whole.

It’s a structural machine, a chemical machine, and also an electrical machine. The last one was sort of new to me.

Besides the scene in The Matrix about how humans are kind of like batteries, I’d not spent much time thinking about electrical elements of the body. I came across The Body Electric and started to see just how integral electromagnetism is to our existence, even at the cellular level.

Then I stumbled into The Invisible Rainbow. I almost wish I hadn’t.

It is a compelling and deeply troubling book. It presents a history of electricity and health in parallel. While some of the claims seem far-reaching, such that electricity can start to seem like the sole cause of all health problems, the research of EMF effects on plant, animal, and human life is massive and can’t be ignored.

It’s pretty logical and commonsensical when you think about it. If we can suffer shocks and burns from electricity and invisible microwaves, wouldn’t it stand to reason that less intense applications also affect the body in less immediately visible ways?

If even a small part of the research presented is true, it leaves some troubling questions. With the new knowledge of the health downsides of the miracle of electricity, how and when to make trade-offs between it’s manifold benefits and the costs?

On the grander scale, perhaps humanity needs to discover an entirely new paradigm for powering our lives and transmitting information. Is there a new physics that can unleash forms of energy with fewer negative effects on health?

It is exceedingly difficult to find anyone examining these fundamental questions. The more credentials people have, the less curious and open minded they seem.

I have never been drawn to biology or health. They’ve been lowest on my list of interests. Yet I’ve been forced to move them to the top as I struggle to understand and overcome odd illnesses that have struck me out of the blue. In the process, I’ve discovered that health might have the greatest gap between understanding on the part of credentialed experts and the respect and faith placed in them by the average person.

It’s not a comforting discovery. Just like in The Matrix, the truth isn’t an easy pill to swallow. No one can give me the answers, or hand me a treatment that makes everything better. I have to be my own advocate and researcher.

Some days suck.

When they do, I often want to skip the daily blog. Especially when I feel physically unwell. Knowing I have to write and publish adds stress and hangs over me.

If it weren’t for my favorite three words, I’d probably skip.

Compared to what?

Asking those three words brings me back. Yes, blogging on a crappy day doesn’t feel good. But compared to not blogging it feels less bad.

If I don’t post because I don’t feel well I get two negatives. Bad day and failure on my personal commitment. If I do post, I don’t feel well and am inconvenienced by posting, but I get one positive. I feel good that I got something done.

Whatever else happens on a bad day, I did something good. I produced something. I stuck to my commitment. I added a tiny bit of value. The feeling of posting on a bad day is greater than on a good day because I know how hard it is.

What’s the point of daily blogging if I only do it when it’s easy? I’d get no benefit that way.

I’ve found that I can give people really direct, even harsh feedback without hurting their feelings if I do it quickly.

I sometimes do writing or speaking workshops. When there are a lot of people to get through you have to move fast, and you have to give very clear feedback. When something is bad, you’ve got to say. But in this setting, everyone seems to take it well, and even appreciate the bluntness.

The trick is speed.

Slowly elaborating negative feedback is excruciating. It draws out and gives your brain time to think of objections and be offended. Worse, it adds insult to injury by including lengthy explanation as if you’re too dumb to just get the basic idea stripped down without filler and caveat.

If you’ve got to tell someone something non-complimentary, rip off the band-aid.

I’m a relentless purger.

I don’t save stuff. I hate clutter. I like to travel through life as light as possible (I love the backpack speech in the movie Up in the Air).

I can think of two times in my entire life when one of my purging sprees went too far and I later regretted it. An entirely acceptable cost on net for not lugging around all kinds of baggage and having cluttered closets and the cluttered mind that comes with it.

I also purge mentally. I outsource as much work from my brain as possible. If I don’t absolutely need to store something in memory, I don’t. I trust systems – email inbox, calendar, task lists, delegation – to tell me what I need to know and when. This has allowed me to get a lot done while rarely feeling frazzled or overwhelmed. I can be a bit OCD about my systems and my delete, shred, destroy mantra towards unneeded stuff, but on the whole it works for me.

But there are problems. For one, I do occasionally regret some of my purges. (I have been playing guitar a bit more lately, and wishing I hadn’t thrown away a giant D-ring binder of song chords I’d accumulated over fifteen years. When I did, I thought, “It’s the digital age, I don’t need this.” But searching Ultimate Tabs and finding the right version and viewing it on a screen is not ideal. Plus, I had hand-written notes and changes to many songs.) I also think my memory is probably not as good as it could be because my systems demand so little of it. I can also lack some of the mental clutter that contributes to happy, unforeseen a-ha moments.

I am aware of the excesses of my disdain for excess. Still worth it.

I just saw an article by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen called “It’s Time to Build.”

I’m both encouraged and troubled by it.

I’m encouraged to see anything promoting and celebrating human achievement, instead of just shitting on wealth and promoting envy.

I’m troubled because it begins with the premise that “We” have failed to do really big giant things. It’s a small step from “We need to build bold things” to a technocracy where everyone is forced to put their resources to uses dictated by scientistic managers with grand plans.

I’m troubled because Silicon Valley sometimes seems to long for any kind of “Big” effort, no matter how much of a boondoggle, or whether it’s backed by force or funded against citizens will via taxation.

It mentions how “We” need to overcome regulatory capture. Well that only happens if the state shrinks, and big, unified, central visions imposed on the populace die with it. You can’t reduce capture and also increase state-run Hoover Dam type projects. Silicon Valley is naive about Public Choice Theory and the way real-world political incentives play out predictably.

I am ALL for big, massive, bold visions.

I want to terraform other planets. I want flying personal vehicles. I want limitless energy. But I know that such visions are only beneficial and not dystopian in a world where individual freedom trumps the desires of any small group of people. Those efforts and advances will only be wonderful if visionaries can persuade individuals to embrace and engage them voluntarily, and part with their resources to fund them without threat of force or artificial incentive.

Absent freedom, none of these big bold builder visions are inherently good and can quickly turn evil.

Some Silicon Valley types seem to want a world of endless tech innovation whether the market demands it or not and whether individuals choose it or not. A world controlled by the nerds. I am not accusing Andreessen of promoting this. But I do see an easy shift from his progress promotion to progress coercion, animated by the collectivist spirit of the age.

Anti-Silicon Valley types seem to want to steal all the money from the successful and prohibit people from progress. A self-defeating and soul-sick approach.

While I agree that anti-progress is awful, pro-“big ambitious projects” is not by itself a less scary ideology. Only individual freedom is. Progress nested in choice.

I once wrote about how Virginia Postrel’s Stasist vs Dynamist dichotomy (progress vs. tradition) is usefully paired with Thomas Sowell’s Constrained vs. Unconstrained vision (reality vs. utopia). I think it’s very applicable here.

Dynamism is only a force for good when nested in a constrained vision. Otherwise it becomes technocracy.

Article here. Chart below.

I’ve always enjoyed playing dumb.

Not to a great degree, or to the point of deceit, but I usually prefer to be underestimated. Not so much for a calculated, strategic reason. More because I get personal entertainment and delight out of it.

It’s not too hard for my personality. I’m pretty exuberant and cheerful. When I enter a new scene, I often initiate chipper conversation with people and tell dumb jokes. This tends to convince more the serious-minded that I am a happy-go-lucky guy without a ton of depth of knowledge. I don’t claim that I do have a ton of depth of knowledge, but I am often in the position of knowing more than people around me assume.

I’m not sure why this entertains me. I’m not trying to toy with people, but something about having knowledge or ability unknown to anyone but me gets me excited. I like stories of hidden sages dressed as fools. While I don’t think I am a sage nor do I come off as a fool, something about the disparity between reputation and reality is thrilling.

Unless that disparity goes the other way. I can “fake it till I make it” a little, and sometimes some projection or bluffing can be useful as a bridge from where you are now to where you think you can go if people give you a chance. But for the most part, having a reputation that’s better than I am isn’t attractive to me. Those rare occasions where I’ve been mistaken for an expert on something I’m not, I have quickly tried to turn things towards an area I know better and emphatically insist I’m not an expert to the point of downplaying what I do know.

I guess I don’t like the idea of surprising people with a reputation-reality deficit. I prefer sneakily knowing more than they’ll ever realize. Something about it makes me feel empowered.

(Of course now having claimed to enjoy playing dumb, you are prone to assume maybe I know some secret wisdom, or that I’m making it all up so that you will think I have secret wisdom. Now I’m confusing myself.)

The newest issue is here.

It’s a strange time to be bored.

The idea seems impossible when you consider the infinite access to ideas and information, entertainment and project, people and products we now enjoy. But boredom is still very real.

My kids get bored. I get bored. Everyone gets bored.

I suspect modern boredom isn’t about a lack of things to do, but not finding interest in the things you’re supposed to be doing, or wanting to do. Maybe guilt is the real cause of boredom.

You’re supposed to want to do a certain range of things at certain times. Sometimes, those don’t appeal. But when bored, it’s rarely the case that you can think of absolutely nothing within your reach that would be unboring. More likely, you feel guilty that you aren’t interested in what you think you should be. If you were a better person, you wouldn’t be bored by X productive thing, so you pretend you’re not bored by it and have internal tension.

I don’t think escaping boredom is the highest good, but I don’t think enduring boredom is noble either. You have an inner fire. Stuff that stokes it is worth pursuing. Sometimes you have to push through boredom to find something amazing, but often, boredom is a sign that you’re not quite on track. Instead of feeling bad about it, listen to it.

It is perhaps true, as Chesterton said, that we aren’t suffering for lack of wonders, but lack of wonder. But that doesn’t mean you need to feel guilty for not being captivated by whatever you’re doing. To enhance your sense of wonder, you can begin by listening to your lack of it and moving towards where you find it. Seek and cultivate wonder at the same time.

Conversation I had recently on Daniel Prince’s podcast.

Listen here.

You will not be told the most important truths. Because no one can tell you. You have to discover them yourself from experience.

People can tell you ideas and information that may be useful. They can articulate versions of their truths. But the truths most important to your life can only be won through piecing together everything you experience, learning patterns, and seeing how they hold up and improve your life and thinking.

There’s no shortcut or book of important truths you can quickly ingest. There’s only living with curiosity, openness, and clear thinking.

Hype is a like a reputational check. And it will always eventually demand to get cashed.

It’s not inherently bad. Just like borrowing money isn’t inherently bad. But it’s dangerous in exactly the same way. If you are on an upward trajectory and can use the capital now to get there faster and go higher, it makes sense, so long as where the debt gets you exceeds the principal and interest owed by the time it’s due.

Hype is reputational debt. You’re borrowing from your future success and using it in the present for a PR bump that you hope will help you generate and accelerate that success. Social capital is at risk. Every announcement of “big things coming” is a loan taken against your reputation and trajectory that must be paid back no later than the time you promised.

Even if good things come, if you hyped HUGE things, you’ll be in reputational debt and have little social capital to work with. You can fail even by succeeding if your past self borrowed more future success than you achieved.

People are pretty gracious and forgiving. They’ll let you go into hype bankruptcy once or twice and still give you chance, and even loan you some present rep on presumed future success again. But after two big hype bankruptcies, everyone will get really stingy with social capital and you’ll be in reputational debt for a very long time, if not forever. (Think how potential customers or investors would respond to, “From the guy who brought you the Fyre Festival!”)

Don’t fear hype, or assume anyone who uses it is conning you. It’s a tool. It’s debt. If someone really is going great places, the earlier they hype it, the better off you are because you can see and get on board early for higher returns. But borrowing against a reputation is easier (at first) than delivering. So watch those who have at least some track record of underpromising and overdelivering. Be wary of those who have a history, even in small ways (like Tweeting, “DMs are open” then not responding to your DM) of failing to return social capital investment as promised.

And whenever possible, build up a big store of social capital by waiting to announce until you’ve already delivered, or letting your delivery do the announcing for you. Then, should you need to draw down some hype, people will gladly loan you their trust and attention.

Innocence is lost

Now the veil has been lifted

Tyranny exposed

This time on some of the zanier conspiracies and speculations around bitcoin.

Read it and all other issues here.