Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Dressing Like a King

Noah Hawley produced two of my favorite TV shows—Legion and Fargo. Alan Sepinwall profiles him this week, ahead of the August 12 debut of his latest, "Alien: Earth". His article opens with this snappy vignette:
When a director arrives at a filming location, they have a lot of important tasks before the real work can begin. Department heads to consult. Actors to be prep. Schedules to lock. When Noah Hawley got to Bangkok to direct the first episode of Alien: Earth, he immediately had to have some suits made.

“One of the first things I did upon landing was go to a tailor and work up, not a full wardrobe, but a way, through linen and cotton, to try to manage the heat, in a way that was the most stylish and comfortable,” explains Hawley, 58, the Emmy-winning creator of Fargo and Legion.

Most TV showrunners would throw on a T-shirt and cargo shorts to accomplish that goal in temperatures that were upwards of 118 degrees. But Noah Hawley is not most showrunners. Hart Hanson, who gave Hawley his first regular TV job, writing for the Fox crime drama Bones, remembers thinking on the day they met, “He’s too well-dressed to be a writer.” He doesn’t recall ever seeing Hawley in jeans or a polo shirt.

The bespoke wardrobe serves two purposes. One is, Hawley believes in dressing for the part when that part involves leadership. “We can get in trouble as artists who are also managers when we don’t understand the power of symbols,” he says. “The boss looks like the boss. No good comes from ‘I’m just like you.’”
I've been posting diatribes against emulation and affectation, plus confessions re: my piss poor poseur skills (I wrote here that "I'm quite good at doing things, but horrendously bad at posing as a thing-doer. There are specialists for that! Thousands of them! And they're good! They can do something I can't, and I truly admire them! Me, I could never fool anyone into imagining I could do something notable. Even if I actually have.")

But this story struck me. If the great Noah Hawley at age 58—superbly accomplished, and firmly atop his game—feels obliged to dress up in a steaming jungle for a job where he's essentially God to all his underlings, anyway, then maybe there's something to it.

Perhaps I should have diverted effort to the Seeming, even at the expense of the Doing. It would be against my religion to sacrifice an iota of quality, but in collaborative endeavors this might have earned more cohesive collaboration—and with it, better quality. And it surely would have elevated a project's public profile.

My mind's eye flashes on Tom Wolfe in that goofy white suit, and Hendrix plucking guitar strings with his teeth. Those guys—and Hawley—might have had surplus bandwidth to devote to self-signaling. Me, I've always felt like I was skating just ahead of failure, so it would have been a grave misuse of assets—like a morbidly fat king reigning over an impoverished tribe.

But maybe that's what it takes to be King.

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

The Waif and the Limo

Following up on "Perverse Corroboration":
I cobbled it all together into a short film that's a meditation on quality. How it gets in, how it's recognized, and whether there's any objectivity. All the interesting questions! It's very poorly shot, recorded, and edited. It's tediously repetitive, lacks any discernible structure, and never quite states its theme. And yet, it has magic to it.
I was describing some strange phenomena, but neglected to deal, head-on, with some strangeness of my own. Mainly: Why did I let it be so crappy? And why would I so blithely concede it's crappiness?

That's not how you're supposed to do it! You're supposed to cover over the worst flaws, maintaining a cocky assurance that you're a great filmmaker who deliberately evoked crude, homespun flavor. "I meant it that way!"

So why freely confess my limited skills? Why even make such a film? Who deliberately sets out to make a sloppy film?

To me, it's obvious: I had no desire to impress anyone with my filmmaking skills. I wasn't trying to be a filmmaker. I just wanted to make a film.

Isn't everyone just trying to make a film (or whatever it is that they make)?

No. At least not as a straight shot. Most filmmakers make films not to make films, but to be filmmakers. The drive is much more about identity and status than authentic creative drive. As I recently noted:
Few can resist a snapshot with their face appearing within a hole in a board painted to assume the persona of a super hero, medieval knight, etc. "Hey, look! I'm a farmer! It's me doing that thing!"

"It's me doing that thing!" is what the world is about. That's the core presumption, distilled to its essence.
I wasn't grabbing a snapshot of myself as a thing-doer as I did the thing. I just did the thing. And this undermined the process, from the perspective of those who go the other way. My guileless sincerity - I was 100% invested in the cookie guy, capturing his truth, and shedding light on one of the most slippery mysteries—gave the result an elemental magic. A child's magic.

I hoped to capture lightning, but not so I could be The Lightning Capturer. Just for its own sake! Who cares about me and my terrible skills? That's irrelevant. I have something I sincerely want to show, which might coax a useful reframing (though I don't need to be The Reframing Coaxer, either)! I was taking a straight shot. Doing a thing with no regard for being a Thing-Doer (see previous postings tagged 'Karma Yoga')

Les Blank was a brilliant maverick filmmaker, one of my all-time favorites and remarkably unpretentious. Yet, even for him, everything about this felt infuriating.

When a singer-who-sings-because-she-wanted-to-be-a-singer encounters pure-hearted singing—perhaps through the window of her limo as a street waif warbles a tremulous "Old MacDonald Had a Farm"—she is not touched. She does not slip money in the waif's pocket. She will most likely be oddly miffed. And if you were to ask for an explanation, she'd criticize the tremulousness...with incongruous agitation.


How does this apply to the story of David Liebman, the sax player?

It doesn't. As a musician, I was no tremulous waif. I had copious training and solid technique. So that one represented some other ju-ju.🤷


Monday, July 28, 2025

My June 1999 Mailing List Email from Larry Page

This is interesting. I remember being an early adopter of Google, but I hadn't realized how early! Here's issue 2 of "Google-Friends News". Not "friends" just as a marketing term. Apparently it really was a friends/family list. I have no recollection of how I got on it, though I was using their site heavily by then.

Too bad I didn't hit them up for a job and grab some of those stock options. But, hey, I was busy at the time.



From: Larry Page, INTERNET:google-friends@google.com
To: Jim Leff, 75570,441
Date: Tue, Jun 8, 1999, 7:50 PM
RE: [google-friends] Google-Friends News: Google Gets Funding

Sender: google-friends-return-1-big-dog=chowhound.com@returns.egroups.com

Dear Google Friends!

Welcome to Vol. I Issue 2 of the Google Friends newsletter--news about the Google search engine. This is a monthly newsletter. You shouldn't be on this list unless you subscribed. Thank you for using Google!
IN THIS ISSUE

1) Introduction
2) Google gets $$!
3) Changes with our results pages
4) Google government search
5) Google expansion
6) Want a job?
7) We love feedback
1) Introduction

This was an exciting month for us as we secured funding so that we can continue to improve Google in new and exciting ways. This month we issued our first press release which announced our financing of $25 million and introduced the new the members joining our board, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. We also came out with a specialized government search that searches just the .gov and .mil domains. We have also been busy growing the company in employees and computers. Our plans are to keep improving Google in every way possible!

2) Google gets $$

This month Google secured $25 million in venture funding and will add two prominent venture capitalists to its board: Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Google plans to use the funding to continue to further its search technology research and grow the company's human and computer resources.

You can read our press release and articles published about our funding on our website at: http://www.google.com/funding.html

The Red Herring reported the following on our funding and new board members: On Thursday morning, Google, a search-technology startup founded by two Stanford graduate students, announced it had secured $25 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as a range of high-profile angel investors. While that number may seem staggering for a company's first round, what caused more jaws to drop was the company's newly named board members: yes, Mr. Doerr, but also Sequoia's Michael Moritz. The Red Herring article can be read found at: http://www.redherring.com/insider/1999/0603/vc-google.html

The Wall Street Journal also commented on the investment saying, "Even by Internet standards, Google has attracted an unusually large amount of money for a company still in its infancy."

In the Google press release, Michael Moritz, a new board member states "Google should become the gold standard for search on the Internet. Larry and Sergey's company has the power to turn Internet users everywhere into devoted and life-long Googlers."

We are thankful to all the current Googlers out there. We will use the funding to continue to improve Google and provide the best search results possible.

3) Changes with our results page

You may have noticed some changes in our results pages. We made some key changes that we think will make your search experience with Google even better. We no longer use the "phase match" or "partial phrase match" indicator since our users found this information to be redundant of the contextual, bolded search query results. We also eliminated the Page Rank percentage given since the red bar next to it shows the Page Rank graphically. (TIP: if you click on the red bar, you can see all the pages that link to the returned page).

4) Google government search

This month you probably noticed that we had our "Uncle Sam" search off of our home page (It's the next best thing to the CIA) that is now housed on the "more Google" page under the title of "special searches." This search covers all the .mil and .gov domains. So if you are looking for something published by the government, this is the best place to start.

5) Google expansion

Our capacity is still going up (thanks to you!), and we've been expanding to meet the demand. This month we've put in even more servers to ensure a faster user experience (we've started ordering our computers in 80 packs, up from our previous increment of 21 packs). We have also been working to make sure there the duplicates are removed from search results and we are working on some new features (sshhh!) that we hope will improve our users search experience.

We have also hired our first business development and marketing employees. If you want to do any "deals" with Google, please contact us at bizdev@google.com. If you have any marketing plans for your company that you would like to include Google in, please contact us at marketing@google.com.

6) Want a job?

Looking for a start-up adventure? Google is the leading designer of the next generation search engine. We are rapidly hiring talented people to bring the latest and greatest technology to the web. We have lots of openings. Check out our jobs page at http://www.google.com/jobs.html! Or send us a resume to jobs@google.com

Reasons to work for Google:
1. Hot technology
2. Cool technology
3. Intelligent, fun, talented, hardworking, high-energy teammates
4. Location, location, location! University Ave in downtown Palo Alto.
5. Excellent benefits
6. Stock options
7. Casual dress atmosphere
8. Free snacks and drinks
9. An exciting place to work! Your ideas can make a difference
10. Millions of people will use and appreciate your software

7) Feedback

We always love hearing from our users! Please let us know if you have comments or features that you would like to see at Google. We read every email and always do our best to respond as quickly as possible. You can reach us at: comments@google.com.

Thanks for using Google!

Sincerely,
Larry Page, CEO and co-founder
Sergey Brin, President and co-founder

Sunday, July 27, 2025

Perverse Corroboration

Dave Liebman

As a 21 year old jazz trombonist, I enjoyed the support of a few jazz heavy-hitters. I was clearly no boy genius—nothing like that—but they assured me I was on the right track and expected good things, which is the most warmly effective sort of appraisal. Rather than inflate my ego, it made me redouble efforts to do my very best.

This was the age where one stops being a student and starts calling oneself a professional, but I attended one last polishing program for talented kids my age. Several went on to stardom. And a number of them really liked my playing.

I knew what I was doing, at least. I was coherent, assured, and could get from A to B in interesting ways. I'd done the work of acquiring fluency and control. Though, as with my writing, it wasn't quite like anything else. But I'd always figured that was the goal. A personal, original approach was exactly what my mentors had encouraged.

Saxophone star David Liebman started the first day's class by asking me to improvise. I played with swing, feeling, and lyricism. I told a story. And, when I was done, Liebman didn't look at me. He faced the class, like a surgeon standing beside an excised tumor, and asked, with unconcealed disgust, "Does anyone know what the fuck that was?!?" Even the students who liked my playing shrugged. Geez, Dave, no. We have no idea!

I was confident enough, thank heaven, not to be destroyed (I knew—though Liebman did not—that one of his own idols strongly supported my playing). But, man, was I angry. And I remain angry to this day, though it's not something I revisit often. How could a bona fide jazz veteran be so horrible to a kid?

Les Blank

Thirty years later, I had a chance to interview a guy in Connecticut who was renowned for his cookies. He wasn't a professional, just some guy, and said he'd show me his technique and I could film it with my iphone camera.

So I showed up, and he revealed that he's just using the plain old recipe from the Quaker Oats box, so it's really nothing special, yet he conceded that no one else ever comes close to matching his results. He showed me how carelessly he cooked, and how pedestrian his ingredients were. And when I tasted a cookie, I nearly lost consciousness.

I cobbled it all together into a short film that's a meditation on quality. How it gets in, how it's recognized, and whether there's any objectivity. All the interesting questions! It's very poorly shot, recorded, and edited. It's tediously repetitive, lacks any discernible structure, and never quite states its theme. And yet, it has magic to it.

One of my best friends at the time was the great film director Les Blank. I sent him a copy, and it made him so angry—just spitting mad—that he refused to discuss it.

I instantly realized that if it were legitimately bad, there'd be no anger. Professional filmmakers don't lose their tempers over crappy films. They just wince and move on. Les' rage showed that I'd accomplished something.

Why the rage? Who knows. Some byproduct of Les' tangled inner being (perhaps having spent his life refining skills to create magic, seeing even a bit of magic emanating from guileless incompetence felt infuriating). I didn't need to parse it. It was sufficient to recognize it for what it was: corroboration.

Linkage

But while by that point I'd acquired the insight to parse Les' reaction appropriately, I still carried anger over my Liebman encounter from years earlier, before I knew how to frame it correctly.

In fact it was only today that I put the two together. If my playing merely sucked, Liebman would have been more teacherly. He'd have dressed the wound, given me basics to work on, and sent me on my way with an exasperated eye roll. A jazz superstar only howls "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?" at an eager skinny 21 year old trombonist in summer camp shorts and tank top if that kid actually has something.

What's the thing? I can't venture a guess. So what set him off? Same. But, at this late date, I see I should have accepted it as corroboration. Not in the sense of twisted, trollish delight at getting under someone's skin and eliciting a reaction, any reaction. Just the level-headed realization that 1. I had something, and 2. It's neither necessary nor possible for everyone to dig every something.


Laboriously Updating Assumptions

But this posting is not about under-appreciation. Nor about celebrity insecurity, nor the chilling subterranean streams of human interaction. Rather, I'm underscoring my perturbing failure to tie this all together until an hour or so ago.

I try hard to sharpen my thinking and strip away kludge and bullshit. I work to apply lessons forward to future experiences and backward to recollected ones. I generate my share of insights, but must constantly relearn them...endlessly. As I noted while explaining Why My Cooking Isn't Great, it's devilishly hard to distribute insights evenly into all aspects of one's life.

It seems impossible to effectively update assumptions and memories in light of freshly-acquired insight en masse. So I remain endlessly mystified by puzzles previously well-solved, and doomed to ceaselessly re-solve it all.

On the other hand, if you're ever bored in old age—no one invites you to dance parties anymore, and your crustily truculent friends can't be pryed out of their easy chairs to come see a movie or whatever, this might be the answer. Spend your time processing mental fodder with ever more lithe framing. Be like an earthworm, improving the soil by passing it through your corpus.

I guess that's what old age was always supposed to be for. Perhaps this explains the elder "wisdom" people used to talk about way back when.


For extra credit, watch that movie, and consider how the discussion of quality - what it is and how it gets in - pervades this entire discussion. Creating quality is a sticky wicket, but appreciation is no less tortuous.


Followup: The Waif and the Limo

The Lord Protects the Simple

I've never been a fan of the view of God as some bearded dude on a cloud, getting all up into our everyday lives and doling out consequences according to some ridiculously lumpy formula.

As a young man, this skepticism led me to atheism. Then I meditated enough to recognize that this is a material world full of propositionally material “individuals,” and the whole thing is a caprice of—what else?—subjectivity. Subjectivity is so utterly what we are that we're hardly able to even consider it. In fact, we tend to drop to our knees and light incense whenever we get close. And from this framing, I found that an awful lot of God talk made sense—just so long as you don't need it to involve some bearded dude on a cloud.

But I still have a tick. Whenever I see someone bumbling along, oblivious to danger while doing life horrendously wrong—pushing a baby carriage behind my car as it backs up with reverse lights gleaming, or speeding through blind turns without watching—I peer at them closely and check to see if they're limping or missing teeth. And I estimate their age.

While any of us might slip and momentarily zone out, there are people who behave this way as an ingrained habit. And such people, I can report, walk the Earth uninjured for years. Decades, even. People with white beards, who long ago should have been culled from the gene pool, stride confidently into harm's way and emerge unscathed. And they're usually not limping.

I, the careful one, am the limper. Though I'm thoughtfully cautious and shrewdly strategic, my outcomes resemble those of hapless straight men in slapstick comedies.

I'm beginning to reconsider the notion of a God capriciously goosing the settings as part of His “mysterious” work. How else are we to understand these superhumans blazing from point A to point B without watching, thinking, or caring? Either some paternal sky figure insulates them (and definitely not you or me), or else they're not bumblers at all, but a higher form of life—as unknowable to the likes of us as a man is to an ant.

Either way, it's clearly some God shit.

Friday, July 25, 2025

Chuck Mangione

Chuck Mangione (RIP) was part of a long continuum of good or very good musicians who lost their chops and reinvented themselves as images of musicians...with enormous success.

The gambit works because the public is far more interested in image than in substance (e.g. musicianship). Dropping the "music" part, and focusing on the image part, can actually increase your value...tremendously.

The list includes some names most people—even most musicians—would find surprising. Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong were faint shadows of their younger selves by mid-career (and desperately seeking chop recuperation behind-the-scenes), but did far better as icons than they ever had as musicians. Consider the Rolling Stones and so many more, even aside from more widely-recognized image-pushers ala Kenny G, Herb Alpert, Chris Bodi, Liberace, etc.

Chuck was a serious bebop player when young. By the time any of you heard of him, he could barely play two notes in a row...and made a zillion dollars with the hat and the flower and the beard, playing kitsch ear worms.

Something to consider: I know a very good jazz guitar player who won top price in a Guitar Hero competition (that's a game where you pretend to be a guitar player), and it earned him more money than his entire previous career as a real guitarist.



Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

Relocating Sanely

I posted this a couple of years ago to a forum for American expats in Portugal, where it went viral. This pleased me, because it induces a helpful shift of perspective, and I haven't met many Americans here who are even marginally sane. They're mostly starring in movies in their heads about their Marvelous Portuguese Adventure Where They're Living Happily Ever After And Isn't It—And Aren't They—Marvelous??? Once the ditzy mania wears off, they tend to quietly sell everything and slink back to Tampa or Cleveland.

Early on, I was lucky enough to settle into a framing which has worked beautifully, and puts me in a completely different world than any of my fellow expats: I've swapped in a better/cooler backdrop. That's all. Life continues as before, only sunnier and with better food and much nicer people and lower expenses. Same life, new backdrop. A modest change, in the end, but a very welcome one.

Every day, I go outside and enjoy the backdrop, and it never gets old. I don't have to mentally place myself in the picture ("It's me doing that thing!"). This isn't some exciting chapter in my Life Trajectory. It's still the same me living the same life, only now it smells like garlic and grilled fish and it's sunny. Nice!

If you ever do a move like this, this is how to frame it for optimal mental health.





I'd like to help immunize newer arrivals against a potential peril.

Once the initial giddiness subsides, and you've explored environs and chilled in the plaza and strolled by the ocean and consumed 45 plates of bacalhau a bras, you'll experience a lull. You'll feel oddly reluctant to seize the day. You'll want to lazily surf YouTube pet videos or whatever. You suddenly lack motivation to Celebrate Portugal.

And you'll recognize that Portugal's not going to celebrate you, either. It all just keeps rolling out there, obliviously. Yikes.

If you've been harboring grand cinematic views of your sweeping expatriation narrative (i.e. your "Forever Home" or whatever), you will feel gut-punched by this return-to-earth. This is just another place! You frantically re-list the benefits, but pastel de nata and fado, alas, do not fill all gaps. You're bored. You're small. You're stalled. What am I doing here? Was this a mistake?

There is an antidote to such moments; a reframing I'd suggest you keep handy:

How scintillating were your previous environs? Were you perpetually stimulated and delighted? No! That's not what home is like! And you're experiencing Portugal as home.

Home isn't scintillating. Vacations are scintillating. And vacations are not eternal. If this were a few weeks of visiting sunny Portugal, you could expect unflagging excitement. But home isn't always exciting. So at some point you need to step down (like a voltage converter) from tourist eagerness to everyday life-living. It's not deflation. It's not a stall. This is just what home is like.

And if the lull persists, remember you're a 30€ roundtrip flight from Milan. The greatest tapas on the planet are a four hour drive. Such diversity at your fingertips! Living in Akron or Seattle, you'd need to go to vast trouble and expense to change your channel. So don't forget to take vacations - once being in Portugal stops feeling like a vacation of its own. Which it will!




I didn't include this in my posting, but if you have no life - if you've been nothing aside from your job and/or your relationships and you haven't cultivated a sense of self beneath the facade and beyond the roleplay—then don't move to a place like this. Unless, that is, you have the social wherewithal to re-contruct or transpose the facade, or create a new one. A new locale will not supply you with a story for yourself (at least not one that endures for more than a few months). A place is just a place.

Me, I don't need a story to tell myself about myself. I'm not doing roleplay or starring in a movie. But apparently that's rare. 🤷🏻


Wade Vestal

I was hovering between sleep and waking, when a name flashed into my mind: Wade Vestal.

"Like the virgins!" explained the voice of Wade, fully of oily glee.

I sensed it would be hard to get back to sleep with this damn name flashing in my mind's eye like a neon sign. It demanded attention and investigation.

I sensed that I wouldn't get anywhere googling 'Wade Vestal' (like the virgins!) but it enticed me just enough to force me awake. Also, I needed to pee (coffee is not the engine of human action; peeing is. Coffee comes from Colombia, while peeing comes from God).

So I attend to my business and then reluctantly google 'Wade Vestal', finding that there is one single person on earth by that name. And he has an Instagram account!

I click into Instagram and, atop his profile I see the slogan "Don’t give up on your dreams, keep sleeping."

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Cashing Out

Most experts I listen to say the stock market is overheated. Plus, there's enormous chaos in the US and in the world. That said, the worst mistake an investor can make is to try to time markets - e.g. sell twitchily out of suspicions and intuitions. Here's the main thinking:
1. Your intuition probably isn't better than the billionaires who set the prices with their own moves. And you don't just need to be "right", you also need to beat them. Good luck!

2. You'll never time it just right, so you'll lose upside (if the market keeps climbing after you sell) or suffer downside (if the market dips before you sell)

3. The long term economic trend has always been upward, but you need to be "in it to win it". If you keep nervously jumping off the train—hoping to reboard at just the right moment—you will almost surely wind up short.
But there are exceptions to every rule. My health is poor enough that I doubt I face many more market cycles. And I don't see myself taking fancy vacations or buying sports cars into my 70s and 80s (I'm not even doing that now!). As I wrote last month, Spending Is Non-Linear (with age)
Shiny things begin to lose their luster, and savings become propositional. Abstract. While your bank balance might once have conjured fantasies of blowing it all on speed boats or vacations in Aruba or weekend cabins, at the point where you notice your transformation into a bag of broken sticks, those fantasies become more remote. They never quite die, but it's like watching kids playing hopscotch. Regardless of any nostalgic impulses, it feels viscerally not-for-you.

So here's the counterintuitive observation: when you're doing financial planning, realize that spending won't be linear. You will absolutely want clean clothes and healthy food and a roof over your head when you're 85, but there will be vastly less interest in gadgets and vacations and fine copper cookware. Some stay "vibrant" longer, but they're edge cases, and it's largely genetic. Look to your parents and aunts and uncles to augur your likely time frame. Mine were decrepit and foggy by 70.

So: spending is non-linear. And I'm therefore letting myself spend more, to enjoy a last hurrah. But I'm a bit late. It already feels tinny. A bit "not-for-me". By the time I'm 70 (perhaps sooner), the door will be closed. And my point is that you should budget for this. Maybe have more fun in your 50s (adjusting all these numbers to fit your family's decrepitude pattern, plus your own health situation).
So, all in all, this is a good moment for me to cash in my chips. A high point to freeze-frame, sharply reducing potential risk.

Easier said than done! First, one must consider inflation, the primary concern in any fixed income situation. But living in a country with a modest economy means extremely low expenses, even though I'm heedless about signing up for streaming channels, enjoying tons of restaurant meals (they average €15 here!), and staying atop gadget upgrade cycles. My Apple and Siga investments did well, and a few others hit, too, so, given that 70 year-old me won't be splurging on champagne and fancy watches, I can ride out low to moderate inflation via belt tightening (e.g. save circa €100/month by cancelling streaming channels!). I will, however, hedge against severe inflation (see below).

As I write this, I realize I probably described a unicorn. "Investing success" + "very low spending" is surely a rare combination (though I'm no miser; I just had a bunch of matcha sent in from Japan!). So this regimen isn't for everyone—hell, it might not even turn out to be right for me!—but perhaps you'll find some chunk of it useful. Here's how I'm proceeding:

SWVXX—Schwab's Prime Money Market 25% of assets
Money market from Schwab. Strong yield, great liquidity.

Certificates of Deposits 30% of assets
FDIC protection, unlike the money market account. I will "ladder" them so they overlap, yielding cascading redemptions for purposes of liquidity and the chance to capture higher rates if they arise.

SCHP—Schwab's U.S. TIPS ETF 10% of assets
Treasury bonds. I'm paying a negligible fee for professional management and full liquidity rather than holding TIPS directly. Normally, this would occupy a much higher percentage in my mix, but political instability leaves me cautious about placing too much faith in US government credit. So I'm going easy on them. Also: I can tap into this pool for emergencies if needed.

FLOT—iShares' Floating Rate Bond ETF 5% of assets
This hedges rising rates, balancing my TIPS.

PIRMX—PIMCO's Inflation Response Multi-Asset Fund 15% of assets
My one (possibly) clever move. This is an expensive (steep 1.95% net expense ratio) but deeply tactical mutual fund. They do terribly smart and complicated things to hedge against inflation. This is not my airtight defense against any/all inflation, it's my catastrophic insurance policy in case of severe inflation, hopefully staving off the worst-case prospect of grubbing around for bugs and berries. Do not touch, ever!

Speculative Moonshot Stocks (biotechs and such)
Currently 15% of my assets. I'll gradually reduce it to 10%. These hedge against both inflation and market decline, because, if any hit, they'll hit hard regardless. They will also help keep things lively. If I'm going to have the portfolio of a decrepit old man, at least I'll also hold some lottery tickets.

Friday, July 18, 2025

What Do Humans Do All Day: A Taxonomy of Posing

A loose collection of notes gathered in the hope of achieving a broader view.

Personality Cloning

From my posting "Highly Imitative Aliens":
There are a few dozen clone lines in any society, no more. People are types, which is adaptive behavior because it lubricates social interaction. When you meet a brassy lady with a gravelly voice and energetic good humor, you feel that you know that person. Love her or hate her, you can deal with her comfortably due to long experience with her clone line. Same for the aloofly ponderous academic. Or the BAD BOY. No one's born as these things. The personas are adopted via modeling, these days mostly via movie and TV actors. In the old days, one modeled the persona of a family member or another local "role models" (turn that phrase around in your mind for a moment!).

We really commit to the role. People never feel more expressively uniquely themselves than when they're being most flagrantly clone-ish. That's how the millions driving VW bugs or listening to "indie rock" manage to feel fiercely nonconformist. "I'm a free-thinking type! One of those!"
Skinner Boxes

From my posting "A Tale of Two Chickens":
A Skinner Box is any setup rewarding "good" behavior and punishing "bad" behavior. If you imagine that humans have transcended the animal kingdom, start looking for Skinner Boxes in the animal world (e.g. reproduction = good = reward; not sleeping/eating/drinking = bad = punishment), and you'll find that every damned one of them not only engages humans but absolutely captivates us. The shitty reward pellets are THE GREATEST THING EVER ("Go Cubs!!!").

Whenever we find ourselves in Skinner Boxes - as we do a zillion times per day - we instinctively strive for the cookie, and avoid the electric shock. We're no fools. We know how the game's played.
From "Exiting the Skinner Box"
If you pay close attention, you'll notice the reward is always chintzy (which explains why humans are "never satisfied") and the punishment is always oversold (which is why the worrying is always worse than the actuality).

The chicken, trained to endlessly hit the button which rewards with a corn pellet (and not the one which punishes via mild shock), thinks it's just killin' it.
Pattern Matching

Humans treat other humans like ornithologists treat birds. We glance at coloring, and at wings and beaks, and feel like we know. This, of course, is category error. Humans are not birds. Though our plumage might indeed communicate something, it's certainly never the last word. But we curate internal spreadsheets full of snap judgements—"this means that"— based on superficial parameters. Also: based on abstractions—if you're wealthy or smiley or Moslem, it means that.

Pattern matching isn't just a sloppy first pass. It most often "sticks". Shockingly scant attention is paid to the individuality of individuals, or even acknowledgement that such consideration is warranted. Few notice the gap.

Pattern matching doesn't just inform our reality; it establishes it. So when someone fails to epitomize their apparent characteristics, they’re blamed. "Why are you not matching your pattern?"

From my posting Seemers Always Win: Posing as Someone Like You:
Whenever I meet someone new who recognizes "Chowhound" if it comes up in discussion, I always get the same disbelieving reaction:

Huh? Hold on. That was you? YOU?!?

At this point, I stop the conversation and beg the bewildered, skeptical person to explain what, exactly, they expected. It's not that I'm being defensive or confrontational. It's that I genuinely don't know how a Jim Leff is supposed to look or act! No one ever taught me how to act like someone like me!
...
I never receive a satisfactory answer. It's not that they expected me to travel with a security team, or to address them with smug condescension. They don't have any particular image in mind. Just certainly not that.
Tripwires

This is pattern matching with alarms set. Certain words and ideas trigger tripwires. Anyone using any such language becomes, first and foremost, A Speaker Of Those Words, with utter disregard for their intention, context, or track record. The pattern is matched, the bell rings, and they suddenly disappear into a category.

From my posting "Sticks & Stones":
As a professional writer, I have a shrinking palette of expressible thoughts and a growing pile of taboo words and phrases (which can't even be used to express "nice" things, because everyone's blindly pattern-matching so they can point-and-shriek at deviants).
...
Thirty years of socially electrocuting anyone saying "nigger" in any context and with any intent has not tamped down actual racism one iota. It's a failed experiment.
Face-In-Hole Board

Few can resist a snapshot with their face appearing within a hole in a board painted to assume the persona of a super hero, medieval knight, etc. "Hey, look! I'm a farmer! It's me doing that thing!"

"It's me doing that thing!" is what the world is about. That's the core presumption, distilled to its essence.

And it baffles me, because I've never felt the impulse to grab such a snapshot, even while actually doing the thing. I'm not a seemer. My satisfaction comes from doing things, not from seeming like a thing-doer.

Most legit body builders, despite their physiques, are still skinny kids at heart, still sticking their heads into face holes and urging "Hey, look!" And most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

N.B.: Astoundingly, we view Impostor Syndrome as a malady. To me, it seems like the gateway to sanity. A glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel vision. A softly buzzing bedside alarm clock.

Rich People's Problems

I don't have to explain this one. We all know what it is.

And that amazes me. Why is it so easily grokked? You'd expect people, lost in self-dramatization, to ask "What do you mean?" and to deny they'd ever do any such thing. But our clear recognition of this—and our willingness to sheepishly confess our tendencies—suggests that, at some level, we always knew how performative this all was.

The only thing we miss is that virtually all our problems are "Rich People's Problems". If you ask a modern First Worlder what their great-grandfather might make of any given dilemma or disappointment, it's hard to imagine any response but an amused chortle.




So what do humans do all day? The above. Mostly that stuff. And, sure, they all bleed into each other. These are just some of the most prominent buckets.

One commonality: all involve poses. But the term "pose" is far too thin to stretch across such vast terrain. For fish, "swimming" is not some distinct activity.

Posing—in all these ways and more—isn't something we do. It's all we do, virtually all the time. We have some distant notion of what it might mean to Be Real, but it quickly turns glorious. The prospect of not-being-completely-full-of-shit compels us into a reverent hush—a brush with God-fearing mystery. I once noted that the term “soul” was invented by poseurs to identify the mysterious and unobservable part that’s not posing.

If we direct attention to the relentless posing, we might eke out a sliver of distance. And once we realize how we pose, and how much we pose, posing becomes something we watch ourselves do. The observer coolly steps back, and perspective arises. The birth of wisdom? Nah, just dropping character. A subtraction, not a power-up.

In time, you identify more with the watcher than with the (hilariously flimsy) contrivance. This reframing is the gateway to a higher perspective that is delightfully bulletproof. But the final key is to behold a world of posing poseurs without superiority, or adolescent sneering. Both, after all, are just more posing. Best of all is a blithe shrug and some bemused participation. Hopefully less frantic.

In "Why God Lets Bad Things Happen", I wrote that "The solution is to wear it all much more lightly, and to remember that the rollercoasters are merely rides (we waited on line!), not oppressors."


Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Well-Meaning Guys Under Siege

Chowhound was racking up $300/month in data transference surcharges, and I didn't have it. Our massive popularity was straining the rented server, and we were forced to pay for it.

I needed to devise some profit streams, and fast, so I supervised design and execution of a line of t-shirts and tchotchkes such as the Chowhound Passport—sliding cards reading "Give me the real stuff, not the tourist stuff" in eight languages to show one's waiter. Plus a bundle of newsletters which I'd edit and distribute in my spare time.

A thousand passports arrived, to my surprise, unassembled. They needed to be laboriously folded and glued. I threw a party for some friends to help assemble them. In an ideal world, I'd have plied them with great food and drink, but all I could swing was beer and chips. Anyway, we assembled just 100. Not nearly enough.

One attendee sighed and volunteered to tackle the rest as a Zen exercise in gracious patience. A week later, she handed me back 900 passports, ready to go. And of course I thanked her, but not, like, a LOT. And I didn't subsequently include her in my life—because even my best friends weren't included in my life, which was crammed full of seven full time unpaid jobs (while desperately trying to make rent on the side). It was clearly non-viable, but I didn't want to disappoint a million nice people by shutting down that monstrous albatross of a website.

I sold the operation a few years later, and, a year after that, the corporate machinery spat me out like a lead slug, and then there was recuperation and then various ingenious and heartfelt ventures which all drew vacant stares. Decades were passing. I'd tried reconnecting with old friends, but they'd all moved on. A few were jealous, most just indifferent. And I never reapproached this person. So much time had gone by.

Relatable, right? If so, it's only because I've convincingly shared the framing of a well-meaning guy under siege. But imagine the perspective of that other person.

I've written all this to share one single nugget of insight you might want to bear in mind: Well-meaning guys under siege can look like assholes.


"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Proof of Concept

If you've been reading this Slog for some time, and want to check whether it's benefited you in any tangible way, watch this 2 minute Instagram video of Ezra Klein explaining something that lots of people find surprising and mysterious. A new way of parsing people's inner workings.

Maybe it won't feel quite so shocking and mysterious for you. See if you have a slightly shrewder understanding of the basis for this than your average Joe.

Sunday, July 13, 2025

Analogies are Lost Technology

We can’t make analogies anymore. They are essentially "Lost Technology"—familiar to our ancestors but now mysterious to us.

The problem is, everyone expects them to work sideways.

Example:
Person A: “Telling me (considering my weirdly loud voice) that I need to “speak up” is like telling Michael Jordan he needs to practice his layups!”

Person B: “So you’re comparing yourself to Michael Jordan, huh?”
Try using an analogy, and some shithead will tilt it sideways and smugly declare rhetorical victory. An onlooker might vaguely frown, sensing something's off but unable to say what. That lingering doubt is all that's left.

In the 17th century, uneducated peasants eagerly digested Shakespeare’s fancy, subtle wordplay. In 2025, analogy seems like a shiny semantic monolith that mostly just spooks the apes.




I once noted that we also can't make reasonable generalizations if they might rub a single reader the wrong way. For example, you can't get away with this now:
Tall people tend to dislike small cars.
There is 100% certainty someone will angrily lash back:
I'm tall, and I'm perfectly fine with small cars!
Hedging terms don't help at all, e.g. "Deaf people often wear hearing aids," or "Many children enjoy spaghetti."

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Restaurant Chairs and the Secret of Human Existence

Sheer speculation based on knowledge of human nature: What percentage of restaurateurs would you suppose actually try sitting in the chairs they buy for their restaurant? Let's leave out the 15% top-end fanciest ones who are well-trained to consider comfort.

I'd guess 25%. (ChatGPT, which makes a great sounding board if you don't lead it with your own guess, guessed 35%)

And how much more future success would you imagine that fraction will have with their restaurants? I guessed "considerable". (Without leading the chatbot, it guessed the same.)

The observation sheds light on foundational truths behind some unexplained phenomena.

"Grandma's chicken soup is soulful because she cooked it with love" is a nice plummy saying for a wall hanging. But let's say it straight: Grandma doesn’t utilize accepted procedures with approved ingredients to meet soup adequacy thresholds. No, grandma gives an actual fuck.

And not just as some abstract principle, but she maintains that framing. The soup eater matters, so every onion is cut, and every stir is executed, with an unshakeable connection to the eater. "People I care about will sit in this chair. I (viscerally!) want them (need them!) to feel a certain way. So I keep asking: how will it seem for them?"

It’s not florid love. It’s simple empathy.

Why are some things so viscerally good? Why do wholes occasionally exceed the sum of their parts? And when they do, why can't the result be replicated by following a formula or recipe? Rote formula-followers get dull results because it's never, ever, about how it all seems for the other person.

This explains one of the most mysterious chunks of the human experience. And, practically speaking, it's a framing that works beautifully as an all-purpose tool for doing life: GIVE A CRAP. DON'T TREAT EVERYTHING/ANYTHING AS A DRY ABSTRACTION. DRINK YOUR OWN LEMONADE. CONSIDER THE OTHER GUY'S EXPERIENCE AND FRAMING.

And don't make it theater, where you stoke an image as Mr. Thoughtful who cares so very deeply. Don't be a silly peacock. Just actually do it.

Simply flip your framing, and hold there: "How will it all seem for THEM?" That's the ballgame. You won't just be ensuring good results; you'll make yourself a stoker of magic—a vastly better proposition than working blindly to spec like an insentient robot.


If your situational awareness sucks—if you can't even register the existence of The Other, much less inhabit their perspective—don't open a restaurant. In fact, don't do anything. Just go away.

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