Twitterings and Odds & Ends

Posted inWeb/Tech4 Comments on Twitterings and Odds & Ends

I’ve posted nearly 900 messages on micro-blogging service Twitter. Each update is limited to 140 characters. I use it to post quotes, single sentence thoughts, and more personal updates. It also serves as my Facebook status update.

Here are some recent Tweets:

  • Reading the Bible. No, not The Economist, the religious one.
  • Not everyone should include a middle initial when signing their name. Generic names must. For others it depends – sometimes it’s pretentious
  • I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve inspired to close social transactions with "take care." It’s a great all-purpose line.
  • Small airports don’t sell water after security, which tortures waterholics like myself. TSA should require a water vendor after sec
  • I find listening to music rarely changes my mood but can intensify whatever mood / emotion I am already feeling at the time.
  • "I can be bought. If they paid me enough, I’d work for the Klan." – Charles Barkley
  • "We are in the business of kicking butt and business is very, very good." – Charles Barkley
  • Minneapolis airport en route to Wisconsin to give a couple talks. Do twin cities have big Japanese pop? Signs in eng and jap
  • idea for what to name a bar: "Pacific Standard Time" – patrons could abbrev to PST.
  • Great ad placement by Zappos: the bottom of TSA bins that go thru x-ray.
  • Co-founder of RealClearPolitics today at Claremont: Obama and McCain have 14,000 lawyers btwn them ready to litigate on election day.
  • Just got back from dinner where Karl Rove spoke. He’s been on campus all evening. Not surprisingly, a smart guy.
  • I think I called a wrong number, but got this hilarious voicemail greeting. Call: (906) 875-6770. Spoof mental hospital.
  • Especially in teenagehood, girls heavily discriminate in favor of similar physical attractiveness when picking friends.
  • People who wear glasses and fancy themselves smart like adjusting / touching the frames.
  • Testimonials with just the first name or just initials look worse than no testimonials at all.
  • Christopher Hitchens in a debate on the existence of God: "There are no statements worth arguing here; all you can do is underline them.”
  • Every time I read the FT I think of and pine for int’l traveling — it was my main source of news while overseas.
  • Philip Roth, Tom Friedman, Bob Woodward, Stephen King, and Malcolm Gladwell all have bks coming out in the fall.                        
  • When you expose yourself to an expert’s work, you feel both inspired by what can be and depressed by your own lack of natural ability.             
  • "Once you have a mission you cant go back to having a job." – Shai Agassi, frmr SAP exec
  • "The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." – Pascal, Pensées, 136.
  • Zinger from Palin: "I guess being a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have real responsibilities."                            
  • "In part, conservatism believes you can’t perfect humans or society. Suspic of do-gooders who think they can, who underrate complexity."                            
  • Facebook has rendered the "happy birthday!" note un-special. People get inundated on their b-day. Unexpected greetings are best.
  • September in non-coastal Southern California: waaay tooo hot. Am I really doomed to only being able to thrive in SF-like, foggy climates?
  • Southern accent in children is endearing.                              
  • I’ve seen more fat people in last hr in Pigeon Fordge, TN than in last month in all SF.
  • Just ate hickory smoked pig shoulders (smoked for 11 hours) with BBQ sauce. Feeling very Southern.
  • Participated in Laughter Yoga session today — totally bizarre and very amusing. You laugh with others for 30 minutes: http://tiny.cc/etxVt

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I’m speaking in Waterloo on October 4th and have some time for dinner in Toronto that evening before my flight. Email me if you want to meet up.

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I’ve been blogging for more than four years. Check out the "Best Of" page of selected posts from the archives. Some good stuff.

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You can access a mobile version of this blog by visiting mobile.casnocha.com on your phone to get a stripped-down site with just the posts.

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The Social Lubricant of Self-Awareness

Posted inRandom14 Comments on The Social Lubricant of Self-Awareness

When I meet someone new who seems interesting, I tend to ask him or her a lot of questions. My attitude is, I already know about myself and I know nothing about this person, so why not try to learn more about the unknown?

If someone tells me she flew somewhere, I ask what airport she flew out of, about her flight route, her experience on the plane, how she bought her tickets.

If someone pulls out a credit card to pay for a meal, I ask about the card, the point system associated with it, why he chose it, how he tracks expenses, where he banks, etc.

If someone asks me what books I’m reading, I’ll answer quickly, and then ask him what books he’s reading, whether he buys or rents books, whether he takes notes or scribbles in margins, whether he reads fiction, how he decides what to read, etc.

Here’s the problem: it can make people uncomfortable. Once a friend took me aside and said, "Ben, you’re, like, interrogating the guy."

Here’s how I’m dealing with it: if I feel like the conversation is too one-way, I say something like, "I’m not trying to play 20 questions, I’m just really interested." This tells the other person that I’m aware of what’s going on and am, in fact, genuinely interested, not interviewing her for a police report. Even a simple one-liner of this sort lubricates the social interaction in a helpful way.

Aren’t you more accepting of someone who says, "Sorry I’m a backseat driver!" before or during her criticism of your driving skills? Or more accepting of a long-winded person who at least acknowledges his tendency to be verbose? This principle applies in various situations.

Bottom Line: Showing an ounce of self-awareness around potentially annoying / intimidating behavior goes a long way to making people comfortable with it.

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The Best Three Paragraphs I Read Today

Posted inCurrent Affairs3 Comments on The Best Three Paragraphs I Read Today

They’re from Freeman Dyson’s article titled The Question of Global Warming in the New York Review of Books. Andrew Sullivan called this the best piece on global warming he’s read in months. I skimmed it but slowly read the last three paragraphs, which I think are spot-on.

In a sentence: Some members of the environmental movement think the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet is fundamental to environmentalism in general, and this is not necessarily so. Many global warming skeptics are passionate environmentalists.

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

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Networking: It’s Too Late to Get to Know a Fortune 500 CEO

Posted inEntrepreneurship15 Comments on Networking: It’s Too Late to Get to Know a Fortune 500 CEO

It’s too late to buy Google stock. You’re not going to make much money buying it at its current high price.

I think the same attitude should apply when trying to meet new people. If you’re a relative no-name trying to build a network it’s too late to reach out to Mark Zuckerberg to talk about entrepreneurship. He’s too busy, too high profile. If you’re an aspiring writer and want to meet other writers, you can’t reach out to an author after he’s become a New York Times bestseller. Either you won’t reach him, or if you do, he’ll assume you have an agenda or want something from him.

Better, in my view, if your goal is to develop long-term relationships with interesting people, to focus on those whose “stock prices” are low but long-term potential high.

Compared to the already rich and famous, no-names can be less egotistic and often more insightful. Plus the value flows bi-directionally (you can help each other).

How to find a hidden gem? Hints from my post on de-emphasizing popular filters: seek out introverts. Seek out people under age 30. Seek out people who are bad at marketing.

Recognize and discount the celebrity effect. Spend time with people who also have time to spend with you. My bet is you’ll have a more rewarding relationship.

Bottom Line: The only reason to try to meet with Mr. Busy and Rich for 10 minutes is if you have a very specific request or need. If you’re just trying to “network” or build a relationship, don’t waste your time.

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The Peter Thiel Worldview

Posted inPhilosophy6 Comments on The Peter Thiel Worldview

In his 2007 speech at the Singularity Summit (this year’s event is coming up in October in San Francisco), Peter Thiel offered insight into how he makes sense of the world. Worth reading. I’ve bolded certain sections of my excerpts below.

(Here’s my post about Thiel’s Hoover article on "The Optimistic Thought Experiment." Also, at the TechCrunch 50 conference Thiel was widely quoted as saying the best predictor of a start-up’s success is low CEO pay.)

His fundamental premise, vis-a-vis the Singularity:

I suppose the basic intuition that I have about it is very simply, this is a world in which there is a possibility of things going extraordinarily well or extraordinarily badly, where both the good things and the bad things are bigger than people think. If you have a bell curve distribution of possible futures for the world, the tails on that bell curve are much fatter than people think. There is far more that can happen at the far edges. This would lead to a very different behavior in markets from a normal bell curve of distributions where nothing that interesting or extraordinary is going to happen. In particular, the Singularity will either be very successful, in which case we are going to have the biggest boom ever, or it is going to blow up the whole world and there will be nothing left to invest in whatsoever.

Something that resonates more than ever after these past few crazy days on Wall Street, about the bottom falling out of economic textbooks:

The alternative to a good Singularity is the apocalypse, and we don’t really know where it is going to happen. You would expect the world to be full of massive manias, booms, and busts on a scale unprecedented in all of history. Interestingly, if you actually look at the world’s financial markets over the last 25-30 years, that is exactly what they have manifested. It is one of things that I think is very striking. All of the conventional theories say that markets should be getting more smooth and efficient as there is more and more information out there. Somehow everything smoothes out, the volatility gets suppressed, and stocks should move up like 6% a year in a smooth, monotonic function. Instead, we’ve seen bigger booms, busts, bubbles than ever before.

On the internet boom, Thiel wonders whether the late 90’s mania actually represented enlightened thinking:

What if March 2000 in some sense represented not a peak of insanity but a peak of clarity, and that at the peak of the boom people could actually see the furthest, and what they could see was that in the long-run, in the next 20 years, 30 years, the entire old economy was going to be doomed and that all sorts of businesses and ways of doing business were no longer going to work? Therefore, and this is the tricky part, you had to bet on this one way that was going to be the way out. And that was the internet.

Want to make money? Thiel says predict the next boom:

It is very difficult to know where one necessarily goes from there, but the point that I would stress is, probably the best thing to try to focus on are these sort of incipient booms that people have not yet realized. My guess is that we will see a whole series of booms, bubbles, and busts for the next ten, twenty years as we are getting closer to this. It’s not at all clear that it will be any of the ones we’ve seen. If you look at the historical info, we had Japan, the internet, we now have financial engineering on Wall Street, we have emerging markets, even the boom in the late 1960’s, it was outer space. It was basically thought that the Singularity was going to be driven by whoever controlled outer space. Maybe we’ll have a combination of all of those. If I had to bet, I think it will probably be something completely different that people are not expecting at all. That makes it quite difficult to figure out. I would say that as a baseline, it’s going to happen and it will be none of the above.

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