David ex Machina

Crowd waiting in line outside of White House for New Year reception. Most people hear the word, patience, and think of a boring personality trait, a social virtue that demonstrates calm, rational thinking. A desirable self-control mechanism: the ability to forego short-term pain (or gain) for larger, longer-term gains. But it comes with the cliche, “patience is a virtue”, so much so, that the value of patience has been obscured. Many folks assume patience only benefits others and not themselves (i.e. politely waiting in line), when in fact you stand the most to benefit from being patient. Patience is correlated with success. “Good things come to those who wait”, a related cliche proven by the now-infamous marshmallow experiment, paints patience in a passive tone. Sit around, hold still, and you’ll get more marshmallows. But patience is an active trait. It underpins almost all of today’s success stories. Look back 10 years and pick any asset class whether it’s investing in the stock ...

Election 2020 Finale Having freshly watched the 2020 election unfold, with the build up, the stress and drama, a lengthy vote count, a sore loser, and ultimately the result, I couldn’t help but reflect how strange of an event it is to experience. It’s like you’re at a movie premiere, but someone is interrupting you every five minutes to tell you their opinion and how the movie is going to end. Can we please just watch the movie and see what happens?! That “someone” is the media covering the U.S. election. But no analysis, extended media coverage, or punditry will change the outcome. The script has been written, the scenes already filmed; all written and directed by the citizens of the United States, as their ballots have already been cast. The producers ( Biden and Trump ) are also in the theater with you, having spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help produce the movie they want. Biden watches patiently for the end result, whereas Trump is making a scene, threatening to stop t...

Proper Food Pouring After living with the pandemic for 8 months, I’ve compiled a list of learnings and activities that have helped me cope*. Maybe they can help you too. Have a token to remind you that things are not normal, like growing out your hair. This is especially good for remembering to wash your hands.  Chores are the new commute. I would always listen to a podcast to and from work, but lost that luxury when the pandemic started. It took me months to realize I could listen to one while doing dishes. So much more enjoyable. Rest your eyes. With so much telework, it’s easy to overload them. I have come to re-appreciate and trust my other senses. From touching the carpet to find crumbs, to using my hands to clean dishes, and to using my sense of smell to determine outdoor air quality. Use a physical divider, or a virtual background, during work video calls. It gives privacy and reduces anxiety.  Don’t wear headphones all day, it’s probably bad for your hearing and become...

TV (by which I mean the Film and Television medium) is the great modern meditation. Before you roll your eyes, hear me out. It’s one of the easiest ways to shut your brain off, escape, and transport yourself to another world. It’s powerful because it hooks into human imagination. How else can we so easily relate to characters with drastically different lives than ourselves, be it a lawyer, cop, billionaire, or superhero? TV is the visual representation of reading a book. Sports and other live TV gives us a chance to connect with other humans and experience a moment together; think Olympics, the World Cup, or an election night. TV is the original livestream. Reality TV gives us insight into how others live and learn about businesses, places to travel, and food to eat. Did I mention the news? TV expands your horizons. With so much content, TV is the original “netflix and chill,” the binging euphemism for a couch potato, whose actions are not too dissimilar from someone in a 3hr meditatio...

Most government programs, non-profits, and for-profit corporations are tackling income inequality through a bottom-up approach: creating social services to help those most in need, whether it’s UBI or Medicaid and donating to reputable charities and organizations like food banks or the ACLU. While important, these programs work to ensure a bare-minimum quality of life in a developed country, while ever so slightly improving a person’s chance of achieving the American Dream. The programs address the symptoms of poverty, but do little to overcome the barriers for an individual to excel in America, and rise from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. The data shows it’s clearly not enough, as the income inequality gap is only getting worse . Therefore, I propose a top-down approach, to address income inequality, Trickle Down Salaries . Trickle Down Salaries is simple in concept. Companies can improve the income earning potential of socio-economically disadvantaged minorities by paying them more, ...

Image by Sang Hyun Cho Here’s an idea to improve the legal system, introduce a litigious, consumption tax. More specifically, a punitive tax for litigious behavior that results in unsuccessful lawsuits.  How it would work. Every person, or legal entity, would have win/loss records as a plaintiff and a defendant in the justice system. A decision in your favor (be it a settlement or verdict) counts as a win, otherwise it counts as a loss. The tax is proportional to the number of unfavorable decisions, so the more losses you accrue, the higher tax you pay for the next lawsuit. The tax is non-refundable. A plaintiff must pay the tax before their case can proceed in court. The tax is meant to deter frivolous and abusive legal behavior. Having separate plaintiff and defendant records disincentivizes the person that sues to intimidate (plaintiff) and makes it costly for mega corporations to be negligent (defendant).  To prevent legal disenfranchisement, the tax rate would target heav...

Credit:  Ninaras You can’t force something to be something it is not. During this pandemic, people are learning this the hard way ( wear a mask! ). Counterintuitive as it may seem, the sooner we embrace the reality we are in, the sooner we can get back to “normal” and perhaps enjoy the journey a bit more.  Take sports for instance. There are all these plans to “restart” professional sports, none more extreme than the NBA Bubble Plan . As hard as it will be to pull off , why should the NBA spend all this energy to make a worse, literal version of itself? There’s always going to be an asterisk on the winning team anyway, so why not reinvent yourself? This is the perfect time to try something new and break out of the boring, old, repetitive basketball season. If you were given four months and the complete attention of superstar athletes with nowhere else to go, would your best idea be a summer basketball league? If I were a content strategist for the NBA, I would be jumping out o...

Proud to co-distribute Michael Moore's documentary Planet of the Humans . You can watch it at  https://vimeo.com/408435877  or click play below. PLANET OF THE HUMANS -- FULL VERSION from Jeff Gibbs on Vimeo .

SpaceX Demo-2 Launch by NASA/Joel Kowsky   The Curious Case of Elon Musk . Both brilliant and audacious, but equally stubborn and irritable. The idol . Elon has greatly impacted our way of life, from PayPal to Tesla and SpaceX. I’m writing this literally the weekend of the first NASA SpaceX human space flight in 9 years ! An incredible feat that few people thought possible a few years ago. The same holds true for all of his companies’ products: all solve hard problems that aim to make the world a better place, and always seem to be ahead of their time. Read the Elon Musk biography for more inspiration. The worshiper . Let’s be clear, I’m a big fan. Elon has the amazing combination of vision, technical ability, and execution skills to deliver on big audacious goals and the reputation of backing it up time and time again. And his goals are noble; save the planet and the human race from destruction, whether it is evil AI, climate change, or an asteroid. The tribe . He represents Sil...

via  Flickr For: Individuals and Society Prescription for COVID-19 (3 Refill s): Science is important, math is important, and nature is real. Continue to learn, think for yourself, and innovate. Critical thinking will help you take better precautions, prepare adequately, reduce panic, and help gauge risk more effectively. Build better safety nets. COVID-19 is the textbook definition of an exogenous shock to the system that even travel insurance does not cover . No one caused it, yet billions will suffer.  The value of a well-run healthcare system has never been more clear. Accessible facilities, plentiful testing, and a coordinated response would have greatly reduced the spread in the U.S.  The merits of Universal Basic Income are becoming more evident. As Twitter aptly put, “ maybe we should rethink a global system that collapses if people stop eating out for a week ” and put more resiliency into the system. Understand your needs and build your own safety net. Vote. E...

How did COVID-19 get this bad? People underestimate exponential growth . Taleb and Graham have touted this for a long time for risk taking and startup growth respectively. The data is there, but it is not in our nature to extrapolate nonlinear growth, so it’s hard to believe and we don’t want it to be true. But the truth is that COVID-19 is an incredibly infectious and lethal virus . A related factor at play is the psychology of proximity; people discount the effects of non-localized events . Even once the exponential growth factor was established in December of 2019, the COVID-19 threat was downplayed since it occurred in China, very far from the U.S., then the epicenter moved to Italy where it was still far enough away, and so on. This continues to play out, country-by-country, state-by-state, no government acts, let alone acts effectively , until it hits home (at the time of writing it is irrational and irresponsible to not enact shelter-in-place for any U.S. municipality ). Unfo...