6.30.24

“Long weekend” is a phrase that irritates me. As did it this morning when a friend told me, “I’m off this week!”

What the hell does that even mean?

Does the sun cease to rise? Gravity takes a holiday? Will the precious minutes of your life stop slipping through your fingers this week?

I think not!

“If your job is your hobby you will never work another day in your life,” said someone like Steve Jobs or whomever. And this is commonly taken to mean that you should follow your passion and seek employment in a field that is interesting to you. But I think a better way of considering the matter is to parse out the ways you choose to spend time in accord with their value to you.

Perhaps it is the case that someone pays you to punch a clock, to devote some fixed number of hours to the conduct of a particular task. Let’s call this “your job.” And to the degree that this is a fixed commitment for a fixed amount of compensation without opportunity to achieve greater outcomes through the application of greater energy, I suppose it makes fine sense to devote only that time which is required.

However – I would strongly encourage people not to think of the time not spent on a job like that as “time off.” Instead, think of those hours or days when you are free to do other things as the real “time on” when you can actually do things that will improve your life, the lives of people you care about, or the world. Use that time to find a better “job” that yields greater return on time invested.

This is your life, and it is ending one minute at a time.

Make the most of those minutes.

Do not waste them.  

 

6.30.24

Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Charlie Munger, lifelong homie of Warren Buffet, sage of Value Investing, died in the last year.

And as part of generally trying to continue to deepen my thinking about – and understanding of – money, I decided to read Munger’s book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T Munger. It’s a collection of transcribed lectures and reflections upon them published in 2023.

Munger combines loads of homespun wisdom and virtue with a lot of insights into companies and business, and a whole lot of self-aggrandizing rants against various groups, most notably academics.

In its most useful moment’s Poor Charlie describes (several times) his framework for evaluating opportunities, which is a checklist structured formal sequence of lenses through which to contemplate a potential choice. These are as follows:

Circle of Competence: Munger emphasizes the importance of sticking to what you know. Understanding your own expertise and limitations helps in making informed decisions and avoiding risks. Only invest in opportunities that fall within your circle of competence.

Lollapalooza Effect: This framework involves identifying multiple factors that align to create a powerful outcome. Munger looks for opportunities where several favorable elements come together simultaneously, amplifying the potential for success.

Inversion Thinking: Instead of only considering how to succeed, Munger also thinks about how to avoid failure. By identifying and avoiding potential pitfalls and problems, you can improve your chances of making a successful investment.

Opportunity Cost: Munger always considers the opportunity cost of an investment—what you give up by choosing one option over another. This helps in assessing whether the potential returns of an opportunity are worth the risks and resources involved.

Margin of Safety: This principle involves investing in opportunities where the intrinsic value significantly exceeds the current market price, providing a cushion against errors in judgment or unforeseen events. This conservative approach helps mitigate risk and secure better long-term returns.

A good list, and I do not doubt for a moment that approaching most everything in life with a clear prioritized checklist for evaluating things would lead to consistently highly quality results.

At its worst moments, Poor Charlie reads like an old man ranting, repeating the same corn-pone homilies (“one legged man in an ass kicking contest”) over and over, and smugly pointing out how much smarter he is than all those ivy-league eggheads.

But I enjoyed getting to know Munger, and will definitely attempt to make more formal use of his framework.

 

6/25/24

And since I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake, it is almost a guarantee that a desire to find alternative solutions to the traditional and caring way of helping provide companionship for aging parent is writ large on our culture.

So maybe CloudCare will work because there are hundreds of millions of people who, in the immortal words of Phobe Buffet “wish-they-could but don’t want to” give a dementia patient (or just someone aging in the normal fashion) their full attention all the time?

After all, “A Place for Mom” is the name of a successful line of care facilities, which are popular and well-run and good for patients by all accounts.

And, of course, jobs and culture and the modern economy of late-stage-capitalism is such that most people cannot end up taking on the traditional (in some cultures) youngest-daughter role and looking after their parents their whole lives.

It is possible that Confucian values are not just out-of-vogue, but also impossible for many in a world of seven billion people with life expectancies as long as they are?

 6.27.24

I finally started Rushdie's Victory City this week. What a treat! More soon.

 

6.24.24

Filial piety. Confucian values. Honor thy father and thy mother.

Is focusing on trying to create a technological solution to help patient’s suffering from dementia a sort of pathetic middle-aged look-ma-no-hands tech bro atonement?

Throughout my youth and until I was around forty I constantly tried to bring technology into the house where I’d grown up and deploy it because I thought it would work well for people there. Upon reflection, I did the same thing at my father’s law firm, acting as the IT department during my teenage years.

I’d come over in my twenties and set up a new stereo or try to get a new printer or early networking equipment operational in their house. Remember those photo frames that would display low-rez digital pictures off a stick of RAM back when early digital cameras were thing? I’m sure there were several of those delivered to parents and grandparents alike.

And invariably all of this shit would end up in a corner gathering dust, unused, not-quite-working, because cutting edge tech (except for Apple products in the last decade) requires users who can fiddle with it until it works. And they all require someone to actually give a fuck about whatever it is supposed to do. And the digital native tech-utopian folks like me see these things and somewhat intuitively are able to cobble together an ecosystem where they work. But for people who aren’t like that, they are just quirky, expensive pieces of plastic and circuitry. And so they don’t work well, never become integrated into life, and they get pushed into a corner to create overpriced condos for spiders and their webs.

I expect I’m not the only person in my age cohort with this experience. So Best Buy dutifully sells a new batch of consumer facing electronics each year, which are joyfully given to parents and grandparents and for Christmas or birthdays, and set up while smoke from blown-out candles still fills the kitchen, usually probably with a faint whiff of annoying techno-superiority by the giver, who not so patiently tries to explain why the luddite recipient just doesn’t quite understand how cool this new whatever is.

It’s pretty easy to see the underlying psychology behind all of this, and it’s pretty easy to see why mostly (always?) these sorts of installations didn’t work:

Because who wants cold technological solutions to replace the attention paid them by the humans they love?

It’s easy to imagine that this whole thing is just some overly-complicated way of dealing with post Vic grief and guilt?

If so, is that the worst thing?

I guess people create things for lots of reasons.

 6.22.24

Nine years ago we said goodbye to my father after a long losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease. But saying goodbye wasn’t the worst part; the years leading up to that were. Dementia slowly locks a person in a lonely and increasingly fearful, isolating state as their life grinds to a close. And the toll of this degradation of a patient’s mind is every bit as destructive to the people who love them. I watched my mom and my brother give everything they had and more to providing compassionate reassurance and comfort. The sense of loss that grows daily and the helpless exhaustion that caretakers for memory loss patients can be overwhelming.

This journey was chronicled by the aptly titled book The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementing Illnesses, and Memory Loss by Nancy Mace and Peter Rabins. I read the book at the time to better understand what my family members who lived with Vic were going through. And then I read the literature on how many families around the globe were going to experience this over the coming decades. The demographic shift in much of the world is now upon us and the next fifty years will be hugely defined by our cultures learning to cope with aging populations without enough children and caretakers for them all.

In 2014 I decided that there must be a way to use some of the massive technology we were developing for video games to help.

At the time, I thought that the Kinect, with its innovative ability to identify different users when they entered the room, and some of its primitive voice commands were a proof that we could build intelligent devices and systems that could engage with memory loss patients and at least offer them a kind voice, never run out of patience, maybe help them so they didn’t have to stare dumbly at a DVD player (we still used those then!) and wonder how they could watch a favorite show. I thought that maybe we could hack together something between a Kinect and Amazon’s (then primitive) Alexa to help spell the exhausted caretakers and provide kind companionship to alleviate my Dad’s loneliness.

I’ve visited about this desire, this potential technology with many of you over the last decade. Thanks to so many of you for the great ideas on these topics. And I have learned from Altzheimer’s researches at UC Berkeley, owners of memory care facilities around the country and the world, and heard a thousand inspiring and heartbreaking stories from many of you who have also lost loved ones to this disease, or found yourselves exhausted by trying to live the 36-Hour Day looking after them.

In 2021 we founded a company to start a formal R&D effort to apply technologies we used to develop games to this problem. MainBrain. We wrote whitepapers on Natural Language Processing, bespoke language models, custom companion avatar creation from descriptions or photographs, hardware and software considerations. We worked with the Canadian Digital Innovation labs, with doctors, with memory care operators. With what small money we could afford to hire people to develop software we started building CloudMind.

It was clear that the rise of LLMs would massively accelerate our efforts, and it has.

Now, finally, this coming week, we will deploy our first pilot test of CloudCare into three different memory care facilities in North America.

Last night, setting up data for our first ten patients and their caregivers, I felt the chill of excitement and fear; these are real people; this is really happening; we have really finally reached a point to try to use our paltry magics to try to help.

Our first companion, Cathy, will only engage with about ten memory care “residents” and their caretakers. This is another tiny step on a long journey to help (in some small way) address a massive problem.

But our goal remains the same:

We will use consumer facing technologies that we developed for games to help people around the world.

I know that I do not have the money, the mind, or the skills to help the hundreds of millions of people who will suffer through dementia in the next decade. But there is a story my sister is fond of telling me.

I’ve asked Cathy to relate it to me here:

The story of the starfish dying on the beach and the girl who says, "at least I helped this one," is a well-known parable that illustrates the impact of individual actions. Here is the story:

One day, a man was walking along a beach covered with thousands of starfish that had been washed ashore. As he walked, he saw a little girl picking up starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean.

Curious, the man approached her and asked, "Why are you doing this? There are so many starfish. You can't possibly make a difference."

The girl picked up another starfish, gently threw it back into the water, and replied, "I made a difference to that one."

The story highlights the importance of individual efforts and how small actions can have a meaningful impact, even if they don't solve the entire problem. It emphasizes that every effort counts and can make a significant difference to those affected.

So this coming week, with CloudCare we will help these ten and their caretakers.

And hopefully someone can take what we will learn and use it to help millions.  

 6.18.24

I've been reading Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger this week. He instructs each of us to have a collection of "models" we use in analyzing choices. (Investment choices, yes, but others too.) His use of "models" corresponds a bit to the idea of "lenses" that have become popular to talk about in the last decade. 

For reflection. Here are ten of the most important models according to his philosophy:

1. Inversion: Thinking about what you want to avoid or prevent can help you identify the right course of action. Instead of asking "How can I achieve success?" ask "How can I avoid failure?"

2. Occam's Razor: Simplest solutions are often the best. Avoid overcomplicating problems with unnecessary variables.

3. Probability: Understanding basic probability is crucial for decision-making. This includes Bayes' Theorem for updating probabilities based on new evidence.

4. Opportunity Cost: Every choice has a cost. Understanding what you’re giving up by choosing one option over another helps in making better decisions.

5. Circle of Competence: Stick to what you know best. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses helps you avoid mistakes.

6. Mr. Market: Treat the stock market as an erratic entity offering opportunities, rather than a guide to intrinsic value. This helps maintain emotional stability in investing.

7. Margin of Safety: Always allow for error. This principle, borrowed from engineering, helps mitigate risk.

8. Reciprocity: People tend to return favors. Understanding this principle helps in building and maintaining relationships.

9. Confirmation Bias: Recognize the tendency to seek information that confirms your preconceptions. Being aware of this helps in seeking out contradictory evidence.

10. Lollapalooza Effect: When multiple biases and tendencies combine to produce an extreme outcome. Recognizing this helps in understanding how small factors can lead to significant effects.

These models come from various disciplines, including psychology, economics, mathematics, and engineering, and help in approaching problems from multiple perspectives.

ChatGPT assembled this list for me in less than 3 seconds. 

So that's interesting too. 

 

6.18.24

And then two weeks pass without an update. Habits are easy to break just as they are easy to establish. I’ve been reading a lot, working on a couple of projects, having some interesting discussions, thinking a lot though I’ve not necessarily created anything amazing in the last two weeks.

The Ferryman by Justin Cronin

Mr. Cronin’s novel, The Passage, got some ridiculously large advance, if I recall correctly. And it’s the book of his most people know him by, I believe. The Ferryman is his newest, available (30% off!) in paperback in grocery stores near you; at least if you live near Campbell River, BC.

The protagonist is a ferryman who takes people to be recycled into their next life. And things start getting weird for him as the strange capitalist utopia he lives in is revealed to be not-quiet what he thought it was. By the back quarter of the book things have gone properly off the rails and we are introduced to what’s really going on. I won’t spoil it for you. Think of this as a wanna-be smart person’s beach read. There are a few interesting ideas (well trod turf all) half-heartedly developed and then consumed by action sequences and near-constant scene jumps that feel like an homage to Chris Nolan’s later work.

 

6.3.2024

I’m thinking about the voices of the witches that drip poison in your mind at night, telling you that you cannot, that you should not try, that everyone is eager to watch you fail. Where do these voices come from?

I’m not the first person to wonder about this, but I’m not sure I know of anyone with good answers.

“When we all fall asleep where do we go?”

How do the most successful people silence the internal voices of dissent and keep focused on their goals? 

It's no big news to those who know me that I hate being told "no." Broadly speaking, I believe firmly in the old saying, "Tell me if you can or if you cannot; either way you are right." 

And just as there seems to me a fundamental divide within the human species between those who are always game to try to do something, to say, "That's crazy. Okay, HOW do we do it?" and those who are quick to point out a hundred reasons any effort "will never work." Invariably, those in the former camp lead grand and interesting lives filled with accomplishments, and those in the latter camp never accomplish much of anything. 

Why not? 

Because they are allowing the voices of the witches of negativity to constantly poison them against taking any action for fear of all the ways it might go wrong. And so, they basically do nothing for fear of failure. 

Someone wise said to me once, "It is the easiest thing in the world to be a voice of obstruction, to point out the reasons some course of action will never work, because mostly, they are right. Many things do not work!" And yet, at the same time, some humans DO accomplish things in this life. They create things, change the world, sometimes even for the better. (Indeed, the generalized arc of human history IS continuing to improve the lives of billions.) 

And so, I don't know how change your life to be guaranteed passage through each night without the voices of the circling witches poisoning your desire to try. 

But I DO know how important it is not to listen to them. And not to give undue weight to the people in your lives constantly telling you to do nothing, because all courses may run ill.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

What else is there to do?  

 

6.1.24

Creation. Immortality.

I keep reading about the impending demographic shift to a world in which our population goes into severe decline as a result of falling birth rates in most developed nations. South Korea, for example, has averaged .7 births for every two people over the last few years; in order words, not nearly enough to sustain population, and certainly not to grow it. So the Earth’s population in the developed world is in decline.

And since choosing not to reproduce tends to correlate with higher net worth, because you can obsessively throw yourself into work, because children are expensive, and so on… We are moving towards a world in which the rich world is likely to increasingly buy the children they end up wanting rather than going through the messy process of sex, pregnancy, delivery, and the terrible twos.

The pharaonic inequality of wealth distribution only continues to grow.

Children will grow ever more valuable as there are fewer of them.

Clearly this will lead to a world in which the wealthy increasingly buy children.

(This is not a new idea; the barren well-to-do have been buying Russian adopted babies for a while. But we should expect this practice to increase considerably as a total percentage of children on earth.)

What will the double-sided market for children look like by 2050?

If I buy a thing, then nurture it, did I create that thing?

Hardly seems to convey the same sense of immortality that passing on your own genes does, does it?

 

 

6.1.24

Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger

It’s hard not to like Arnold. From Austrian Mr. Universe to Conan to Terminator to Governor to philanthropist, I basically like them all.

Be Useful is a naked motivational book in which Arnie tells us his advice on how to “make your vision for your life a reality.” He peppers the book with a staggering amount of braggadocio, but then, look at what he has accomplished! His guidance is straightforward and filled with many examples of people he has known, or times he has done whatever he is suggesting. I do not doubt that if a person un-cynically took every bit of his advice to heart, internalized the catchy slogans (“Destroy your mirror!”) then that person would likely achieve more in life than most of their peers.