A quarter acre lot in San Francisco should cost a lot more than it does.

A three bedroom home in the Bay Area should cost a lot less than it does.

We’re staying in a place this summer that fits both. It’s too cheap and too expensive.

Anyone with half a brain can see the stupidity of NIMBY planners in SF who restrict new construction, renovations, and rentals such that housing prices are nuts. A seven mile square area with huge demand and hardly any structures taller than three stories is crazy. The overpriced properties are easy to spot, and so are the reasons why.

But regulations have even more bizarre consequences. They create both surpluses and shortages. Under and overpricing, mixing all the signals that emerge in a free market and help people adjust resources and behavior to create the most winners and biggest wins.

The house we’re staying in is a great example. The owners weren’t allowed to rent any of it out for five years, even though it has three separate floors with separate units. (They can’t even replace the windows to allow more airflow when it gets hot.) Forget tearing it down for something that can house more people. This quarter acre slice of property is stuck with the shell of a home left here decades ago when demand was much lower.

This drives up the price of the unit as a single family home, making it overpriced in that category. But as a quarter acre city lot, it’s underpriced. The value of this lot for a multi-unit apartment or condo complex has to be many times greater. But it can’t be put to those uses, so it remains a stupidly overpriced house and tantalizingly underpriced piece of property.

What Hayek called the pretense of knowledge on the part of city thugs is visible everywhere here, creating what Mises called planned chaos.

Too cheap for its place

Too expensive for its size

Slow death museum

Yesterday, my colleague Dave said something like, ‘I want to make sure this isn’t just a shower thought’. We were discussing changes to our product, and he wanted clarity on what motivated the proposed changes, what we want to accomplish with them, and how we’d verify whether it worked. He was offering a gut-check on whether we were falling prey to shiny object syndrome.

His concern was valid and useful. But I found his choice of words kinda funny. It made me think about the status of shower thoughts.

When Dave thinks ‘Shower thoughts’, he thinks half formed epiphany that’s not very serious. An idea that ranks pretty low among other kinds of ideas. Silly until proven brilliant. At least I think he does, it’s possible I’m wrong. Sorry Dave, but you’re stuck as an illustration in this post either way.

When I think ‘Shower thoughts’, I think of the climactic eureka of a long, unseen, subconscious process that’s probably the best idea you’ve ever had. An idea that ranks at the very top among other kinds of ideas. Brilliant unless proven silly. The shower thought is a sacred thing.

Not all shower thoughts are good. But all shower thoughts are serious. I give them greater weight than ideas that come from planning exercises, whiteboarding, researching, testing, or other forms of idea generation. In my experience, the highest quality ideas – those that move me the farthest from current paradigms to fertile new ground – are shower thoughts. Arthur Koestler’s phenomenal book The Act of Creation offers a theory for why this is. It’s a favorite of mine, and helped me understand my own mental processes better and more fully embrace shower thoughts.

I’m not opposed to testing and research and other conscious, rational methods of idea generation, and shower thoughts need critical examination before they’re operationalized. But if you shook me awake in the middle of the night and asked whether I’d prefer to take a big risk on a shower thought or a well-tested, focus-grouped idea, I’d yell, “Shower thought”, then ask why the hell you’re in my house in the middle of the night shaking me awake when you could just wait until the morning and read the blog post I write about it.

Walking to the office today I was listening to music I used to listen to in my teens. It was good, but it didn’t move me like it did then. I miss those days when it was so easy to lose myself completely in a song. Music would take me to the depths of my soul, and make me feel contact with the most foundational questions.

These days, music is a good way to change my mood at the margins and an enjoyable experience. It’s rare that it comes close to the penetrating depth of experience it once did. Part of the reason is that now my mind is mostly full most of the time. And not just full of sports scores and funny stories (though thankfully there is some of that), but full of hard problems with business and family and, occasionally, philosophy. Music is great, but I’ve got stuff to figure out and fast.

When I was younger, my jobs didn’t involve much deep problem solving. I manned a cash register at a golf course, delivered papers, bagged groceries, and worked construction. The tasks and hours were known and the problems repeats. My personal life was about friends and fun. None of that was particularly hard or deep. So music enabled me to go deep on what was left. Stuff like the meaning of life and my own potential and purpose.

The questions and ideas I pondered as a kid were more important in the grand scheme of things than those I spend most of my time on today. This isn’t self-condemnation, because I think part of the answer to my place in the cosmos is to solve the problems I’m working on now, which require more grounded, near-term focus. Still, that youthful ability to disconnect from the day and ask the eternal questions is a great thing.

A little more music, a little less podcast and audiobook listening. A little more mind-wandering, a little less problem-solving. Sounds kinda nice.

When you have a lot of resources, it can blind you to solutions. You face a struggle, and you assess your myriad options. They all have big drawbacks and high resource consumption, so you’re stuck with no solution or one that might cost more than it’s worth.

Then you take away all those resources and make the problem a must-solve. Somehow, you find one. And it’s pretty efficient.

I don’t know why, but it’s just too much to ask of the human brain to find these solutions when we don’t really have to. Resource constraints force exploration of corners of the brain otherwise missed.

Six years ago I had an idea. I thought it was simple. I set out to build it.

In my head, it would go like this:

Simple idea –> traction –> add a bit more complexity –> traction –> add a bit more complexity –> etc.

Eventually, this simple idea would be a massive mothership.

In reality, it went like this:

Simple idea –> little traction –> make it simpler –> little traction –> make it simpler –> bit of traction –> make it simpler –> almost meaningful traction –> make it simpler –> traction –> etc.

Eventually, the idea might be simple enough to be massive.

At every step, I thought I’d stripped to the bone. Made every non-core compromise. At every step, the big discovery and the big challenge was figuring out I hadn’t simplified enough.

The simpler a big idea or product, the harder it is to build.

I’m still trying to simplify every day.

A lot of people who work in venture capital hate the show Shark Tank.

They feel it portrays an unrealistic image of investing; one that will spread and cause viewers to misunderstand the business and then go on to make terrible choices because of it.

There’s definitely a bit of the Theoretical Man argument going on here, but it’s more than that. The investors who hate the show aren’t the show’s audience. They misunderstand the show’s purpose (besides to entertain).

They compare the show against what they would put in a TV show about investing, which is all the stuff they think is important. But they’re so deep in the business, they don’t realize how many steps a total noob must take to even understand what they consider basics.

I love Shark Tank. I used to watch it with my kids. It exposed them to tons of new concepts. The idea of building a business with someone else’s money was novel. The realization that you’ve got to have a story that’s compelling enough to convince the holders of that money to join. The concept of a “pitch”. The understanding that a good pitch and a good company aren’t always the same thing. The realization that investors can be wrong and can be jerks. And founders can be nice or idiots. The knowledge that investors might collaborate or compete with each other on deals while remaining friends.

It doesn’t even matter if the stories are real or realistic. Uninitiated viewers take away the basic insights. These are so basic that VCs forgot everyone doesn’t know them. But if someone doesn’t know it yet, there’s no way they’ll understand a Medium article about power laws and term sheets.

When you hate something popular, it’s prudent to pause and consider there’s probably something in it that is doing something for those who love it. You don’t have to love it, but it’s probably not supposed to serve your ends anyway. If you can discover the reason it brings value to others, you might navigate the world more effectively and enjoy it more.

(Still trying to understand this when it comes to Old Town Road. I’m not ready to give up yet…there must be something valuable in this song to those who like it).

It’s 80 degrees in San Francisco today, so naturally they’ve issued a heat advisory.

This is comical, since I’ve lived in Charleston, South Carolina for the last decade where it hits 100 and humid. But it’s to be expected. 80 isn’t normal here. Abnormal is harder for humans to handle than any objective material suffering.

I remember when we first moved to Charleston and saw alligators dotting the banks of neighborhood ponds, right behind houses with small children and no fences. This is crazy. Unless it’s normal. My knowledge of gator risks hasn’t changed at all, but my fear of living on a Southern pond has disappeared. Just because no one else seems to think it crazy. I guess it isn’t.

Every time an inch of snow falls in the South, northerners have a good laugh at the overreaction. I grew up in Michigan, and the need to start your car 20 minutes before driving was totally normal. No one treated it like a big deal so it wasn’t.

The normalization effect is amusing, but it can be really powerful if you weaponize it for your own purposes. Whatever stuff interests you, or whatever you want to accomplish can be viewed as crazy fantasy or totally doable. It depends who you’re around.

I’ve written before that I don’t think it’s primarily genetics or connections that cause the children of so many actors and athletes to become actors and athletes. I think it’s the normalization. Those career paths are seen as obvious, almost given, and therefore they are.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, put yourself in environments where that’s not super special. If you want to make a living selling art, put yourself in environments where nobody thinks that’s odd. If you want to avoid a stale, stagnant life, find environments where people are shocked and aghast at stale, stagnant lives.

Humans can be perfectly content living on the side of cliffs, in floodplains, on marshes, in deserts, around deadly predators, horrible insects, frozen tundras, remote plains, and dense, dirty cities. As long as others seem to think nothing of it, neither will you.

Go where your idea of life, or your biggest challenge is considered normal and you’ll increase the odds of achieving it.

Real sacrifice is

Not self denial. It is

Self realization

Thaddeus Russell loves misfits and rebels. His Unregistered podcast is an interesting collection of typically “off-limits” people and ideas. The kind of stuff you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company.

I was honored to join him on the show. This was a pretty unusual interview for me. A little more personal and less structured. We covered some things I’ve never talked about publicly elsewhere, and it almost turned into a mutual counseling session!

Check it out if that’s your thing.

And check out Thaddeus’s Renegade University.

There’s nothing scarier than knowing bad news is around the corner, but not knowing the details. You want to avoid it, but the longer you avoid it the more it eats at you.

I’ve found if I can turn that news into a spreadsheet, I go from frightened to relieved.

If I know my personal or business finances are not in the shape they should be, I’ve been spending way too much, and I know I probably have a rough few months ahead, the best thing is to open a spreadsheet and get all the facts laid out. No matter how dire, get every one of those ugly facts accurately listed. Tally, calculate, and project what it means. Get a hard handle on the present situation.

Then it’s not so scary. Not because the situation isn’t bad – sometimes it’s terrible – but because it’s legible. And legible means beatable. Legible means options. Illegible, undefined problems are too big for any solution. Spreadsheets can be worked with.

After coming to grips with the present problem by putting it all in a grid, I can move on to potential solutions. Spreadsheets let me run scenarios and projections and see how various plans would turn out over different periods of time.

It’s a constraining exercise, but what it constrains isn’t me but the problem. It makes me feel more free.

It works for non-financial problems as well. There are myriad ways to lay out pros and cons of decisions, assign weight to various stressors or ranks to various failures or goals.

Sounds nerdy (maybe it is, but I’m definitely not a math nerd), but it’s cathartic, calming, and effective.

Someone Tweeted the other day that what scares them the most is the growth of anti-scientism among the public, as evidenced by things like the niche of people who believe the earth is flat.

My first reaction to any fearful claims about the state of the world today is skepticism about the superiority of the past. Flat earthers have always existed. I’m not sure if they have actually swelled in number, or just been given a temporary internet celebrity status as the meme of the moment.

But let’s just accept that it’s true. Let’s say anti-scientism is growing. Why is this scary?

I heard someone say if you pursue any field of study deep enough you arrive at mystery. Yet the popular scientistic outlook is the opposite of mysterious. It presents a cocksure, “Everything’s settled but the details, and someone in a lab in Sweden is working those out as we speak”. What kind of invitation to inquiry is that? Where’s the adventure?

There’s a sense in which popular scientism makes the world smaller, rather than more expansive. Specialization need not lead to reductionism, but the fashions in science feel that way.

The funny thing is, scientific thought has a checkered history if you judge it by it’s own standards of what’s scientific. How many of the big conceptual breakthroughs come from alchemists, drug-trippers, and people who prayed to gods or sought mediums? You might be surprised. How many looming figures admit in private discourse their fundamental bafflement with reality, and belief that something like mind, or spirit, or consciousness must be at work in ways that don’t fit the models?

There’s an arrogant front put forward by the PR arm of intelligentsia. If a public company presented it’s business condition in such a way it would be considered fraudulent. The nice, tight, all-but-the-details presentation is not only boring and wrong, it runs counter to the zeitgeist.

The current trend is for openness and transparency. So much so that satirical labels like “Struggle porn” have popped up. Today, people want an unfiltered, rambling, three-hour drinking session on the Joe Rogan podcast instead of a well-written statement at a press conference. People want Medium articles about what it’s really like to run a startup, instead of post-IPO retrospectives. Some entrepreneurs have gotten famous by publishing their monthly income statements for all to see.

What about scientists? We’re confidently assured that they know how the world works, and if we wait patiently a few more years for some lab somewhere to tally some numbers no one’s allowed to see, and submit it to some journals no one can access, and let some anonymous referees behind closed doors approve it, it will see the dark of day and get improperly summarized in a news story and used as a bludgeon against anyone openly exploring other ideas.

No wonder mushroom-taking conspiracy YouTubers are more interesting to people!

I see the openness to fringe theories as a good thing. I think the best way to understand the world is to question it. The more fundamental the question, the better. It’s excellent mental exercise precisely because it’s so hard. If an intelligent 10 year old asked you to prove to them the earth was round, could you do it without appeals to authority? It’s shockingly difficult! And that is the kind of difficulty that should be embraced. That kind of question is the gateway to scientific understanding, and possibly breakthrough.

I say bring on the scientistic skepticism. Hopefully it keeps curiosity in the driver’s seat, rather than an obsessive illusion that we have everything neatly labelled and understood.

I listened to James Beshara interview Eric Ries on his podcast Below the Line this morning.

Eric said being a startup founder isn’t fun. In the movie version, you’ve got three stages. Stage one is the epiphany. A mythical, spiritual moment where the idea pops into mind. Stage three is the cover of magazines, suing each other, high status high-drama stage. What’s stage two? How did the company go from idea to success? That’s usually a two minute montage.

This imbalanced story arc can lull us into thinking it’s how life works. You set out to pursue a dream and it begins with a big stage one moment. Then after a while you’re wondering where the hell stage three will come. After a longer while you really begin to despair. The thing is, in real life, stage two is the longest by far. And the most important. And the hardest. And the least exciting or fun.

You’re probably in that second stage right now. The crap you’re wading through today and tomorrow and the next several years is likely to get collapsed into a two-minute montage in the movie version of your life.

Competition is great. Inspiration is great. Anger can be great. A desire to win can be great. Frustration that others are getting what you’re not can be great. Envy is never great.

Envy is when some combo of the above moves to the next stage. The stage where the ill-fortune of others makes you happier in and of itself. It’s not about achieving something directly yourself, but about someone else failing. When the success of others, even if it doesn’t harm you directly, makes you less happy, you have an envy issue.

And it will eat you up. It will taint everything. You will become a monster. And you will have no fun.

You can tell yourself envy is motivation, but it’s not. It’s demotivating and destructive. It channels mental and emotional energy away from your own progress and towards the regress of others. It breeds the worst kind of day-dreaming. It shuts off the powerful perspective of possibility.

If you can find a way to reverse envy – to feel happier at the success of others – you’ll be unstoppable and have tons of fun.

*I reserve the right to wish sports-ill on my sports-enemies. That’s why I play the game of fandom. It’s a little world where all the irrational, tribalistic tendencies can be indulged without real-world harm. (Hopefully)

Traveling across the country recently, I saw lots of semi-trucks, trains, and cargo ships. The semis take one container at a time, a driver and rig for each, not to mention roads. The trains can take a whole lot of containers, stacked two high and stretching a mile long all pulled by a single engine with just a few humans. But it requires a car for each and, more importantly, a track laid down, often through mountain tunnels or over bridges. A lot of infrastructure and energy consumption to overcome friction and gravity.

But the ships are another matter. Their size is almost absurd. They stack and file containers by the dozens. They don’t need roads or rails. Only at loading/unloading points do they require any kind of infrastructure. The ocean is already there. It does almost all the work. Friction is minimal, gravity is friendly, and massive shipments can cross the globe. The ships need little in the way of advanced engineering. They don’t even need good maneuverability, as tiny tugs handle the detail work in harbor. The tugs can zip from ship to ship, bumping and nudging them.

It’s kinda crazy to think that with all this stuff getting moved about, the water is doing most of the work.

Probably a labored analogy, but it makes me think of the internet. It’s this giant sea of info, atop which all kinds of data can float. The quantity of stuff you can move around is insane, because the network does most of the work, not individual programmers or machines. I’m sure there are analogies for tugs and harbors if I went far enough, but it’d break apart pretty quickly no doubt.

Still, the idea of using water to relieve friction and gravity constraints and move around massive shipments seems congruent with the internet as a medium for deploying services and information.