Big Thoughts – Page 86 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Jordan Peterson, Success, Bruce Campbell, and Roman Emperors

Discovery Channel© has Shark Week™, and at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise® we are lucky enough to have Dr. Jordan Peterson Week©. This is the third of three posts on Dr. Jordan Peterson – his website is here (LINK). My first post on Dr. Peterson can be found here (LINK), and the second post here (LINK).

“Jamie, how many 29 year old record company presidents operate out of their mom’s trailers? Know what I’m sayin’?”- J-Roc’s Mom, “Trailer Park Boys”

Oil Tank Dennis Quaid (playing Sam Houston) knows a little bit about Oil Tank success, starting his own Oil Tank country and all.

I had intended on just doing three posts this year on Dr. Peterson, but will probably do updates from time to time, since his ideas are stone-cold interesting and I think I could do six weeks of posts on those ideas without repeating myself, but if I did that we’d just have to hand over the reins to Jordan, and I own the domain name, and I don’t think he’d share the revenues.

Elon Musk almost always has something going on, too.

Monthly updates about these guys? We’ll see.

(By the way, Elon, GOOD JOB dumping Amber Heard, she’s really not worth a Prius®, dude. I’m telling you – she is trouble and likely a Terminator® sent by James Cameron from the future to mess with your Mars (LINK) plan. You dodged a bullet!!!)

Now a 100,000% better with no Amber Heard. (image, Wikipedia)

But this is Wealthy Wednesday, and Dr. Peterson has a lot to say about success (and, it seems, almost everything else), which is reasonable given the unreasonable amount of success that he’s had, especially recently.

Today we’re going back to those forty points that Peterson laid out on Quora (LINK) in response to the question “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?” In the analysis on Truth last post (LINK), Dr. Peterson had 16 out of 40 points that related in some way to Truth (I know, we could quibble, was it 15 or 17, but why quibble, since we’re friends?). Are there any of the 40 points that speak to success?

Yes. Dr. Peterson speaks on things I consider to be huge when it comes to a deep, meaningful success that combines significance with economic success. I mean, why would you want a Justin Bieber-level success if you could have success that mattered, like Bruce Campbell?

A perfect gift for any occasion!

Peterson has several videos on YouTube® that directly tackle important personal development points that lead to success: fear (and how to overcome it), the importance of having a routine, where to find the freshest and plumpest Pez®, and how success leads to even more success. I encourage you to watch the videos.

But going back to the 40 points. Many relate to behaviors (behaviours in Canada, eh) that lead to success. These are quoted below (bold) with Dr. Peterson’s gracious permission. My commentary follows.

Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. – There is always the opportunity to do things just for the moment, but when you work on what matters? That leads to long term success and value. This means that, no, eating only appetizers doesn’t make a good dinner. You need cake, too.
If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things. Do them so you how to do them. Do them because they are meaningful. Do them because it’s right. Doing them just to be seen? Yeah, we wedgied that guy in High School. That’s the worst kind of smarmy dude.
Pay attention. Sorry, dozed off. Oh, yeah. People notice when you take them seriously, when what they say matters to you. If you’re not present in the moment, those that are will notice. And you’ll miss important things. “Hang on, honey, I have to tell Google that they should lower their price to $750,000. They want a million bucks! Stupid college kids.” (Yes, that really happened, and he did not get the deal.)
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you. There is an implied Trustworthiness in this statement. Be worthy of their trust. Realize that Truth is not where you look, it’s where you find it.
Be careful who you share good news with. Bad bosses get jealous, and even good people get jealous. Similarly, don’t appear too good to your boss. A boss that’s intimidated by you is not generally a rational boss. If you have to make that calculation, beware. Likewise, sometimes your friends get a bit tired of hearing of an endless sea of victory. Be real to them.
Be careful who you share bad news with. People who don’t like you (or to whom you just represent a tool) can use that news against you. Similarly? Don’t share your weaknesses. Hey, Clark Kent – your boss does NOT need to know that you’re nearsighted and break out in hives every time you’re near a little kryptonite©. Also, your bad news might be insignificant compared to someone else’s bad news. Your very worst day might be better than the best day of the person you’re talking too. “Oh, my, and the caviar was nearly off! I made do, however,” won’t go too far if the other person can barely afford to pay their chauffer and their private pilot.
Make at least one thing better every single place you go. The right people generally appreciate this. They see it, and it’s obvious. If they don’t see it? You know, deep inside, it was the right thing. A guy was working really hard on making a concrete footer smooth. I pulled aside his great-great-grandboss. “You know that’s going to be buried, right? I’m good if it’s a bit rough. Heck, it’s really even better if the concrete is rough. More friction.” Boss’s response? “It’s his work. The man has pride in it. I’ll let him own it.” What a good answer.
Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. How many days do you want to spend being the you that isn’t the best you? The first step is imagining. Once you’re there, Von Mises (LINK) will take over. If you see a better you, a path to get there, and believe that your action can take you there? Nothing can stop you. Unless you told your boss about the whole kryptonite® thing.
Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful. Good things will happen to you during your career. Bad things will happen to you during your career. People will step on you (if they can) to elevate themselves over you. You’ll forget the contributions of great team members. Focus on this: You’re never as good as people think, or as bad. You have had amazing help through your life. “Don’t spend time hating the situation. The situation doesn’t care.” (Marcus Aurelius, probably)

Unknown Sculptor, Pierre-Selim (Self-photographed) [CC BY-SA 3.0]

Why is it that when I wear a toga to work that they think I’m a little off? Marcus rocked his!

Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. This implies that you’re going to get rid of the fear of failure. If you try, really hard, and fail, what will happen? Mainly, nobody notices, except you. And you get stronger. It has been my experience that the harder I work at something, the better I get. And sometimes I achieve results that are beyond anything I ever could have expected. And other things fail, but I learn a little bit more each time.
Maintain your connections with people. Outside of graffiti artists, The Mrs., and Keanu Reeves, most of us don’t work alone. Most of us depend on others to make us better, make us stronger. There’s a natural pull for certain people (introverts and those under stress) to pull back, mainly when they need other people the most.
Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement. The stupid form you just filled out? Yeah, somebody had to design it, and they had a reason. See if you can make the form better, after understanding why it even exists.
Nothing well done is insignificant. There is the possibility of beauty in the most mundane and base of tasks – cleaning a microwave oven can be significant, especially when it’s done well. I can show you the fulfillment you will get from cleaning a microwave. See you at my house on Saturday? Only a minimal charge for this lesson. (H/T M. Twain)
Dress like the person you want to be. True enough. Some days I’m Homer Simpson. I would just love to be involved in those wacky adventures! Danger point: If you work at a construction company and dress like an investment banker you will be mocked.
Be precise in your speech. Meaning is important, and certain people follow only concrete statements. Precision in a concrete fashion is especially important to them – their brains don’t understand exaggeration for effect. Likewise, when someone asks you a yes or no question? Answer yes or no before you explain the answer. They might not care why. And precision in speech leads to truth.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Posture feeds directly into mindset and emotion, and in guys pumps testosterone up when done right. Standing tall and strong like a superhero, hands on hips? Yeah, you’ll feel like a superhero, and being a superhero is a great way to get important things done. Especially if “things” is slicing up people with metal claws.
Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way — and don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things. Bosses hate fear and like courage (good bosses). They also understand risk. They like it when you take appropriate
Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. There will be times when you will see something undone. Do it. It will be noticed.
Be grateful in spite of your suffering. Nobody likes a whiner or wants to spend time with a whiner. Nobody wants to hear a whiner whine except his enemy. Everyone suffers. To repeat myself, your worst day is better than someone’s best day. Act like it.

Dr. Peterson is doing more than writing about success, he’s quarterbacked creation of a software suite called “Self Authoring,” (LINK). Note that I am not as of this writing date getting paid if you sign up. I’ll let you know if that changes.

The concept behind Self Authoring is to work through issues – fix yourself – by revisiting and writing about events in the past that were particularly difficult for you or in some way may be holding you back. Additionally, there’s a focus on writing a future as well to create a meaningful goal or set of goals to work for, sort of an anti-nihilism pill.

Bill Gates probably doesn’t need this. Those who are able to be pretty clear of their past and are able to perform at a high level already based on solid future goals are probably not the target market, though Dr. Peterson did say that one driving factor in designing and creating this tool was from requests by companies for ways to help their high performing employees perform on an even higher level.

When people write about their painful past, people experience long term positive impacts (compared to a control group). Likewise, another group constructed and wrote about their future, and had similar impacts (when compared to the control group). I have theories about everything, but I wonder if confronting past trauma made them braver? I wonder if it allowed them to really examine what happened in context and they were able to trace the impacts to their present state?

In the end, Self Authoring is consistent with Peterson’s maxim – you have to fix yourself.

I wonder if that’s part of the mission of this blog? I know that Orthodixie (LINK) (another blogger from my past, an Orthodox Priest with a Carolina accent, and no, I’m not making that up) and I would talk about how blogging let us mentally, “take out the trash,” and how much better we felt after we’d gotten something out on paper, even something unrelated to the things that were bothering us. I’ll probably give the Self Authoring program a try. I’ll let you know how it works out . . . but get yourself a Priest as a drinking buddy if you can. It always amused The Mrs. when I engaged him in theological debate after wine.

Me, I’m still cleaning on my room, making it a little better each day. I know that The Mrs. is very much looking forward to me being done with that.

Dr. Jordan Peterson, Truth, and Even More Truth

This is the second of three posts on Dr. Jordan Peterson – his website is here (LINK). My first post on Dr. Peterson can be found here (LINK). The third post can be found here (LINK).

“J-Roc raps about gangsters and guns, pimps and hos and Compton. The guy’s not from Compton. He’s a white kid from a trailer park. He should rap about what he really knows which is living in his mom’s trailer eating peanut butter sandwiches.” – Trailer Park Boys

When I think that society is too complicated, I then remember that I couldn’t even take this picture without the help of the millions of elven technicians that live in my camera. Then I cry.

As a reminder, Dr. Peterson is a psychologist that teaches at the University of Toronto, but don’t hold that against him: he seems to be one of the good Canadians at this point, though a bit fixated.

On what is Peterson fixated? Dr. Peterson seems to be obsessed, and not with Pez® or Japanese tentacle pudding cups like a normal man. No, Peterson is obsessed with the truth. Earlier this year in response to a question on Quora, (LINK): “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?” Dr. Peterson didn’t come back with a 250 page book priced at $43.50 (I’m talkin’ about you, Dr. Tainter (LINK)) but rather a fairly simple 40 item list. I’d suggest you go over and read it – it’s not bad. My list would be different, but you’ll have to wait for a new post for my list – this post is all about Peterson.

I’ve often heard it said, if you want to know who someone is, just ask them. I was reading an article on the web where these psychiatrists were attempting to figure out a test to give people to determine if they had narcissistic personality disorder. The best test they’d yet determined was to ask them, “Are you a narcissist?”

Narcissists seem pretty proud answering, “Yes, I am! Because I’m so awesome!”

Nice. So, with that in mind, let’s listen to Dr. Peterson.

Dr. Peterson’s first rule is:

Tell the truth.

Simple. I think we all learn to lie about stuff as soon as we learn about consequences. We all start out as horrible liars, since being three years old doesn’t exactly pop us to the top of the “able to make up good, convincing lies” chart unless your parents are very, very stupid.

After playing with lies, if we are very, very, lucky we learn that lies are really, really bad.

I’ll tell you my story, because I’m just enough of a narcissist to think you might be interested. Because I’m that interesting.

I’ve been divorced, and can attest that divorces are very expensive because they’re worth every penny. My first wife and I didn’t have personalities that really matched very well. To top that, neither one of us was very good at telling the truth to each other – it was like a US-USSR arms race where, instead of stockpiles of nuclear weapons, our Cold War involved an ongoing series of falsehoods aimed at one another. She was relieved to move out. I was relieved when she moved out and was replaced by Boris Yeltsin (for a short time). It took tanks and a promise of vodka to get Boris out of the house long enough to change the locks.

Regardless, I could see the impact that lies and distrust had made in my life, and I made a personal vow that, no matter what I did in the future, I would always tell anyone in a future relationship the Truth. No lies. And I have told the Truth, regardless of the outcome to The Mrs. since we met. One time I called home, late, while I was still at work. I whispered into the mouthpiece, “Can’t come home right now. Governor of the state is in the office right next to mine, surrounded by news media, talking to my boss.”

The Mrs. only reply was, “Okay. See you when you get here.”

By this time, we’d been married almost eight years, so, based on my constantly telling the Truth during that time, plus during every interaction before we got married, I think I could have called up and said, “Honey, been picked up by a UFO, and they have Elvis and we’re going out for ribs and beer. Be back before 11pm.”

This may or may not be what happened to me.

She might have believed that was what was really happening, but she would certainly have believed that I thought it was the Truth.

And this has paid off during my entire relationship with The Mrs., in dividends, though certainly she knows better than to ask my opinion on anything where she doesn’t really want a True answer. Has it caused friction? Very rarely. It did today, because I told her my opinion, and was told (essentially) that she didn’t want that right now. Sometimes Truth is not what we want.

But in every case, it has led to harmony and trust. If you have a partner who always tells you the Truth, you know you have someone who is on your team, always.

But back to Dr. Peterson.

In response to the Question on Quora, he listed 40 points. By my count, 16 of them (40%!) dealt directly with Truth.

Here they are, quoted with permission, with my commentary:

Tell the truth. Discussed above. The core of Dr. Peterson’s points.
Do not do things that you hate. If I were to quote Shakespeare, I’d quote Hamlet here: “To thine own self be true.” Oh, I guess I just did. This is Truth to self. Your hate (if everything else is set right) will be based on the dissonance of what you’re doing and your best self. You’re avoiding Truth by doing things you hate.
Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act. Directly related to the above, the idea of having to tell someone, Truthfully, what you did prevents you from doing things you would be ashamed of. Which would include eating a whole bag of Ruffles®, unless it saved an orphan in some way.
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Again, this is more “Truth to self.” As my coach in high school said, “Wilder, when you cheat on those pushups, you’re just cheating yourself.” I kid. I never cheated on pushups in high school. I cheated on squat-thrusts. But, when cheat yourself from the Truth of the meaningful, you end up with the never ending squat thrusts of the expedient.
If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things. I had a boss who was always seen doing things. In reality, he mainly was responsible for ensuring we had a constant Internet connection, mainly by surfing for things that amused him. But if there was a way to be seen by his boss doing the “right” thing? He would move faster than a miniature poodle on a porkchop to get in the credit zone. I’m pretty sure he’s never been happy, especially since his strategy is to always look good, but he has none of the skills to create great outcomes. My corollary: Do things, and be seen doing them. You can have both. But never stop doing things.
Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. Again, the theme of being Truthful to oneself continues. But this is aimed at being Truthful to the long term you. If you cheat that you, you’ll always have regrets, and probably termites, too.
Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible. “Who says that fictions only and false hair become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?” Okay, I stole that from the poem “Jordan (I)” by George Herbert, 1593-1633. And that’s creepy, because I only learned the poem’s name or author tonight – to me it was just the title of a sub-par Star Trek episode (the one where Spock goes temporarily blind). But outside of the creepy factor of researching a poem to find that it has the same name as the person you’re writing about, beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. The elegance of pure math. The sudden discovery of a True thing. The Wilder corollary to this one: ugly things around your house steal your energy. Fix them.
Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. Again, Truth to self. I have seen people with amazing skills and talents just stop on their way upward – because they are afraid to fail. I’ve done that myself, until a very visionary leader told me, after I’d explained what he wanted was hard to do, “Wilder, just do it.” Nine times out of ten when he told me that, I achieved it. The tenth? He got fired. But he got a severance package worth about $1.4 million.
Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement. There is truth in beauty. There is also truth in the stable social constructs that have created wealth, peace, and Pez® for thousands of years. Tear them down? It’s easy. But can you tear them down and put up something even better? Probably not. Can you make them better?
Make friends with people who want the best for you. Again, Truth is your primary commodity here. Friends who want the best for and from you will tell you the Truth. Others won’t. One time I saw the head of operations for a company walk down the hall with about three feet of toilet paper trailing behind his waistband, top center behind, like a big, white, fluffy skunk tail. Nobody else saw him. I didn’t tell him when he walked out of his office, somewhat flushed and embarrassed. He made small talk until he realized I wasn’t going to say, “Hey, saw your toilet paper tail and I’m going to tell everybody!” And I didn’t tell the office. He was a nice guy.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. How is it possible that you have the answer to world peace, and there’s a towel on the floor in your room? Or your son hates you? Thought so. Fix the things around you so you understand the Truth required to fix the world about you. I’m still working on cleaning my room, so, my advice is suspect.
Be precise in your speech. Precision in speech means . . . you say exactly what you say you mean. Which is? The Truth. And if you go back to Orwell, removing words, or making them mean things they don’t removes the ability to even make certain arguments through language, so at some point the Truth isn’t even possible to utter anymore.
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. By not teaching Truth to your children you cripple them to find Truth on their own. And finding Truth by yourself is harder than finding a clean spot on Johnny Depp’s sink. As smart as your children might be, they are not wise, and need you to guide them through Truth so they might find Wisdom, and through Wisdom enough money to pay for your retirement home some future day.
Do not hide unwanted things in the fog. We try to hide Truth from ourselves every day. We look in the mirror and manage to not see what anyone else in the world can plainly see. While there is no reason that you have to tell the world your deepest regrets, you should at least be able to see them and understand that they are True.
Read something written by someone great. Great people write Truth, that’s why what they write is great. The more profound the Truth, generally, the simpler. But a great writer can, in 200 pages, take you on a journey that wraps you around and through a path where you walk to Truth.
Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know. As much as we search for the Truth, we learn more every day.

Here is a Peterson theme: Truth in a Post-Modernist context is always relative and always the product of the culture that created it. It ceases to be objective Truth, and becomes a relative truth. From the points above, you might predict that Peterson would reject Post-Modernism because it denies the very existence of Truth. And you would be right.

The battle lines are set: Modernism vs. Post-Modernism and the very existence of Truth.

What amazes me is that it is clearly explicable in our world that there are objective facts that are True, yet in a Post-Modernist viewpoint, nope, not so. Therein lies the ultimate fight between Peterson and Post-Modernism – Peterson is on the side of Truth, and his opponents deny that Truth even exists.

There are too many points, too many places where Truth is not the relative product of a culture to even begin to argue that truth doesn’t exist. (If you must have an example: there is a force we call gravity that causes mass to clump together. Truth. Gravity is not a social construct. There are cultural Truths as well, but I’m not going to open that can of worms with this post.)

So, I’ll allow that the narcissistic side of my personality is pretty sure that you’ve enjoyed this, but the Truthful side knows that you did.

As for me? I’m with Dr. Peterson. Go with the Truth. It’s a winner.

Jordan Peterson, Being Healthy, Slaying Dragons (where legal)

“Why don’t you get a life Rick? Why don’t you go to community college like Julian here? Hey, I got a good idea. You could teach, ‘Living in a Car and Growing Dope 101.’” – Trailer Park Boys (Which, in the editor’s opinion, are another Canadian menace)

William Shatner and Pugsley. Pugsley was thrilled.

Discovery Channel© has Shark Week™, and we here at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise© have already had Elon Musk Week™ (LINK). Given the great response to Elon Musk Week®, my editor (me) has assigned my writing staff (also me) and my graphics staff (again me) to Jordan Peterson Week™. This is the first post in the series. My second post is here (LINK). And my final post is here (LINK).

Jordan Peterson is fascinating to listen to, and you can certainly do that, unless you live in 1995 or Arkansas, where video isn’t yet a part of the Internet. YouTube has devoted a massive amount of computer disk space to cover the hours and hours and hours of Dr. Peterson’s fascinating lectures. How much disk space? Almost enough to cover 30% of The Simpsons episodes, or 571,231 hours.

I kid. But Dr. Peterson is exceptionally popular despite the fact that some of his videos are an hour or two long, and the typical attention span is measured in fifteen second chunks, and he’s still popular tells you he’s saying something pretty important. Heck, Dr. Peterson is Canadian and despite that, people take him seriously.

You know who else is Canadian?

There is quite a lot of information content in his videos – they’re very dense, and often he will drop an amazingly wise bit of information and leave me to back the video up whilst I’m Stairmastering® with my hands and face covered in yogurt to catch his point again. Why are my face and hands covered in yogurt? To keep the cucumber slices in place, silly!

Peterson drops a truth grenade in every video. In one, he indicates that most of his psychological practice cases don’t have any sort of a mental issue. No real psychotherapy is required. No years of sitting on a couch discussing cigars or tunnels and their meaning. Nope.

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Audio only, but a classic. I had this on cassette when I was a kid and it all went WAY over my head.

Dr. Peterson indicated that most problems were problems in living. He brought up six areas where he would gently (or not so gently) counsel his patients to “get a life.”

“Get a Life” must be a course they teach in Canada.

Peterson indicates that there are six areas where his patients need to focus on getting a life (interpretations past the bold are mine, not Dr. Peterson’s):

Friends/Intimate Relationships – These are crucial relationships, and it seems (LINK) that the earlier they are formed, the stronger they are. I guess we hadn’t learned to pretend to be something we’re not, so those relationships are more authentic. Everyone I went to High School with knows what well developed sense of self I have (though they called it “egomaniac”) and I don’t have to pretend to be humble (important in not scaring a boss to death).
Being a Part of a Career/Dominance Hierarchy – Having a career is important, in that it provides a sense of significance to what you’re doing. You have the opportunity, each day, to jump in and do your very best within the confines of a social network that doesn’t require BookFace® (unless you work at BookFace©). Dominance Hierarchy is a term used by Peterson a lot. This is driven by the notion that it is hardwired into us by a lot of years of biology and evolution. In the past, (pre-monogamy) most human males didn’t get to mate and leave an offspring (think harems). This (depending on your mileage) may have left a LOT of angry males only marginally attached to society, and a bargain of monogamous, single marriage in return for angry unmated males not rioting and breaking everything. So, want to be the most dominant person in the room? Sure you do. Like a love for gluten, it’s hardwired. And studies have shown that this is important (LINK). Please remember, however, all the recent retirees that have this as their primary purpose and expire six months after retirement. This can be a dangerous solo focus.
Have a Schedule/Routine – Pick a time, any time, and get up at that time, all the time. Every day. This stabilizes your body’s innate circadian rhythm, which has a direct relationship on your mood. Hmm, I’ve worked to make this better, but . . . (LINK)
Eat Something in the Morning – Dr. Peterson talks about a nice woman who only ate ¾ of a cup of rice every day and was starving herself. My breakfast looks a lot like dinner.
Personally Regulate Drugs and Alcohol – Peterson said “regulate” but by context he meant personally regulate. His other comment, “especially alcohol.”
Have a Spouse/Family – Family is important. Besides creating another group of people that should have your back no matter what, it also provides an anchor in time. It is a link to the past from your parents. It is a link to the future from your children. And, it’s a link to BookFace® if you do it wrong.

Dr. Peterson said that being solid in three or four of these was absolutely necessary to by psychologically thriving. I imagine that an extreme stress on any one of these by itself (think the retirees mentioned above) can be a pretty debilitating experience. Keep in mind, also, that these presuppose a normal life in good times in Western Civilization, and not times that would make Dr. Maslow grin with the grim anticipation of NOBODY winning at his self-actualization game (LINK).

Looking at the list I can see from my personal experience that having three of these going for you is crucial to not being a neurotic moron appearing sane. When times were tough at work? I leaned on family and on friends. When I was going through my divorce a zillion years ago? I threw myself into work and leaned on friends.

What else does Dr. Peterson say?

Lots.

One big one is “Clean Your Room.”

And it’s not a metaphor. It’s literal. The act of cleaning your room – of making your place tide – provides a basis of stability. It’s also symbolic – it’s hard to argue that you know the solutions to all of the world’s problems and need to organize a protest when you can’t even keep your room clean. The simple symbol of slaying the tiny dragon (that’s a metaphor, unless you live in Westeros and are plagued by actual tiny dragons) of chaos in your life shows that you can be conscientious enough to actually get something done. And you get a boost when you’ve actually achieved something. Hey, I haven’t won the Nobel® Peace Prize™ (now on stick!) but, by golly, I don’t have to step over a rack of magazines to get to my bed! Your work leads to something besides futility.

That last part is important. I once had a conversation with a friend at work where we talked about the different ways that people view tasks:

“John, you and I get up in the morning and think, yup, I have got to shave this morning.” He rubbed his chin for emphasis. “Those guys,” he gestured in the direction of the group we were talking about, “get up in the morning and look in the mirror and think, ‘You know, I’m going to have to shave every day. Every single day for the rest of my life.’”

And life can seem like that – a bit of constantly encroaching chaos. Maintaining the discipline of cleaning your room keeps that sense of being a victim of life at bay. “I can’t clean the room – I don’t have time,” and “I’ll get to cleaning the room on a long weekend.” Those are statements of someone who has voluntarily made themselves a victim, and, really, is avoiding the truth. Even five minutes a day, over time, will lead to a clean room.

My cleaning method is to pick a spot on an area, and then make that area perfect. Then, the area adjacent to my “perfect” area looks . . . awful. My favorite spot to start in the kitchen is the microwave. The Mrs. chides me because, “Who is going to come visit our house just to look to see how clean our microwave is?”

Well, nobody. But the microwave is truth. Regardless of who sees it (or doesn’t see it), the microwave is now clean. And I know the truth.

And this week, each morning before work I’ve cleaned on the master bathroom about three minutes. In two weeks, that’ll be half an hour. That I’ll never notice, partially because zombies on The Walking Dead have a greater self-awareness than I do when I first get up in the morning, plus their breath smells better. But I’ve done something a bit different. I’ve started the day having slain a tiny dragon; starting the day with a win.

And that’s legal in my state, as long as I have a permit.

Join me for more of Dr. Jordan Peterson on . . . Monday. Get a life. Or slay a dragon.

Life on Earth, Supervolcanos, NASA, and Tom Petty

“I must have started drinking again, because the woman who tried to activate a supervolcano with a giant fork is standing here, and you’re all acting like it’s a potluck.” – Warehouse 13

A picture of Abraham Lincoln as he was fighting against both the Confederacy and German engineers.

“The world was a web.”

This wasn’t the quote from a Tom Petty song. These were words that would echo through my head for two decades.

I started to write a novel back a long time ago. It started with those words.

I still have it somewhere, buried in a backlog of data on one of my computers, right next to a resume that I first entered into a computer on . . . WordPerfect© (yes, that was a word processor before Corel® ate it). I’m sure they still sell dozens of copies of it a year.

And the novel itself? Oh my. I’m sure that if it ever saw the light of day someone would name an award in its honor for the worst novel of the year.

But . . . “The world was a web.”

There are words that haunt you through your life, and this sentence haunts mine, just like wondering how it felt while the Roman Empire was ending (LINK). I have been, since as long as I can remember, really fascinated by the unravelling of society. Once I went to the Wikipedia entry for “Apocalyptic Novels” and just nodded. I’d read nearly all of them. (I just revisited the page, and it’s all filled with editorial stuff, so, much less useful. I won’t link it.)

But the late author James P. Hogan (I read most of his stuff) wrote a novel called “Voyage to Yesteryear.” It’s a good one, though out of print, but to me, it had a fairly stunning philosophical analogy.

We as humans think a lot (and live with) more or less reversible processes. I put ice in the freezer, it freezes. And then it melts. Though once upon a time, I don’t think that there was anything at all in physics that would have predicted that the ice would have floated on the water (most frozen liquids sink – if you freeze gasoline, the frozen stuff drops to the bottom), but it turns out it’s pretty important, especially if you’re a fish. You can stay in the nice liquid water while the ice freezes above you, which, I imagine is important to a fish.

But the second discussion from the novel is that some changes are irreversible – if you burn your laptop in your charcoal grill, there is simply no thawing it out afterwards to get your keyboard to not look like a bunch of charred Doritos®, or get back all of those downloaded pictures of Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones® or all of your Tom Petty MP3s. Those are gone, dude.

The fire (presumably from a dragon?) goes beyond the phase change represented by freezing and thawing. The physical structure has been changed to the point that it’s not remotely recognizable. And you can’t go back. There’s no way to find all the carbon atoms that baked off your display and combined with oxygen and put them back in the screen, let alone the same place in the screen that previously held them.

It’s gone, dude. And even the Roman Stoics (LINK) knew this prior to Rudolf Clausius coining the term “entropy,” which led indirectly to the U.S. Civil War through a series of humorous translation errors that made Abraham Lincoln think that Clausius was making fun of his big hat.

But let’s go back four score years (that’s 80 years, for those who are used to the metric system) from that hatastrophe. What happened then? Besides Ben Franklin being in the prime of chasing every young lady who could spell “yes” there seemed to be this revolutionary event. Pardon. Revolutionary event. Like the American Revolution.

If a president being elected every four years is a phase change from ice to water and back again, the American Revolution was burning King George’s laptop and then going after the glowing hard drive with a sledgehammer. In a real and literal fashion there was no way to go back. Instead of a political phase change, you had political chemical reaction – there was simply no way to go back from what the Founding Fathers had done. They changed the way the entire world viewed government with the result that today almost every nation in the world where you can order a Big Mac® has emulated to the greatest extent possible the precepts of the American Revolution. McDonalds® and Thomas Jefferson© changed it all.

And you just can’t go back. You can morph into something different, but you can’t go back. There are some ideas that are so radical, so amazingly simple that once they pop out – they hold the attention of almost everyone who hears them. The American Revolution was one such thing – you could never turn back after that.

Unless you hit reset. I was leafing through the Internet as The Boy piloted our car up the road for a short road trip – I alternated between reading and a light nap. The light naps were ended with (small) bursts of adrenaline when our cars trajectory was different than my half-snoozing mind expected. It’s like Dad radar. Even asleep I was looking for that change we could never recover from.

On article popped up during the ride about the Yellowstone Volcano, and how NASA was developing a plan to stop it.

Reread the sentence above. I’ll wait.

NASA has become convinced that a massive volcano is of greater threat to humanity than asteroids. I mean, both would ruin your day, but Yellowstone seems to pop off a continent cleansing burst every 600,000 years or so (last one 630,000 years ago) and some folks with a LOT of time on their hands at NASA are convinced that they should be the ones that handle it.

What NASA thinks might be in the volcano.

They’ve even advanced plans on how to stop it. And, I’ll admit that saving the lives of upwards of two billion people might even be considered a laudable goal in some circles. But not me.

It’s not the saving all of those people that I object to. I’m probably neutral on that, unless one of them is me. Then I become a raving supporter.

I don’t give NASA any slack. If it doesn’t involve activities that directly get humanity to Mars, I’m thinking that they should just close up shop and give the money to Elon Musk (LINK), who actually seems to be interested in space exploration.

But even worse, it appears that NASA is letting people write stuff that have NO understanding of math: the NASA plan involves pumping water (which is not exactly in huge supply in the Rocky Mountains) into the magma chamber and to extract the heat. Which has how much to do with NASA’s mission? Zero. Maybe less.

Here’s the latest mission I could find:

To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.

So, if this involves trying to cool hot coffee so you can drink it faster by adding an ice cube or two, I’m on board. Takes a few minutes, doesn’t distract NASA from their actual day job.

But in this case the coffee is 11,500 cubic miles of coffee. At 1300˚F to 2400˚F. And NASA wants to cool that. With water.

Okay, I’m pretty sure that drug testing isn’t required to work at NASA. But the amount of heat we’re talking about is simply staggering. At a depth of five miles (that’s 8km to the “people who use money that looks like Christmas paper, and also happen to use metric”) to the top of it, keep in mind that this magma pocket sends pockets of superheated boiling water five miles through rock. The amount of energy is stunning – almost as much energy as a D.C. NASA bureaucrat with a liberal arts degree uses to avoid doing work on a typical Tuesday.

First, the good news!

I won’t bore you with all the mathy stuff, since The Boy and I figured it out. It’s not hard, it’s just thermodynamics done in hotel room on three sheets of hotel room note paper.

Let’s say you had to cool the Yellowstone magma chamber. Latest number that I had on how big it was? 11,500 cubic miles.

Cubic miles. Drive from Seattle to Los Angeles. That’s 1137 miles. Do it 10 times. Next to a mile high wall of magma. Or just once. Next to a ten mile high wall of magma. That’s a mile thick.

Hmmm.

But, let’s pretend we can cool that 52,800 foot high wall with water. Where do we get it?

Well, the Colorado River is a big one. Let’s pump all of that to Yellowstone to cool it down. I’m not going to bore you with even more thermodynamics, but you have to heat the water, and then add even more heat so it boils. (I actually saw one billion dollar business venture implode because they didn’t know you had to add the extra heat to make it boil).

At the current flowrate of the Colorado River, it would take 435,843 years to cool the lava.

I know that NASA seems to not math very well anymore, but, given past rates, Yellowstone would have exploded at least one more time, if not two. And the people in Los Angeles would have to go nearly a half of a million years between bottled-water drinks.

And that’s the good news – that only half a million years of concerted effort beyond anything the world has ever seen will maybe stop one human extinction.

But some scientists worry that the addition of the cooling water might turn the magma chamber brittle – increasing the likelihood that Yellowstone would explode in a big catastrophe. And that’s the good news!

Second – the bad news.

But that’s really not the point. There are a whole host of things that are much more likely (given the last 100 years or so) than a 600,000 year periodicity (like Yellowstone has) volcano to mess with our world.

But most folks look at this risk incorrectly – there’s a probability of occurrence, but also a severity related to the risk. Low probability events occur everyday, but they have low severity. I might lose yet another hair on my head, never to return. But the impact? Not very big.

An asteroid the size of Dallas heading towards, well, anywhere at 50 miles per second? Bad day. For everyone. Yet heart disease is more likely to kill me than the kinetic impact of an asteroid.

As catastrophes go, that’s pretty bad. But research (dating back 15 years or so) on genetics of humanity indicate that it’s likely that 70,000 years ago after the supervolcano Toba lit off, only 2,000 humans remained. Not on Toba. Anywhere.

We were that close to the lights going out on us forever.

These big, nonlinear events are very low probability, but they have a huge impact, and may impact the ability of the human race to appreciate Tom Petty.

Think aliens like Tom Petty? They should. But who can account for taste?

Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars

“Actually, they theoretically can separate the hydrogen from the oxygen and process that into providing fuel for man’s space flights. Ostensibly, turning Mars into a giant gas station. So it’s a . . . yeah. We live in an amazing time.” – Breaking Bad

The featured picture above the title is of the Saturn V. It’s longer than a Harry Potter novel. This picture shows the engines from the main stage of the Saturn V. About 275,000 horsepower for all five engines, you can totally tell by the lens flare! But it got over two miles per gallon of kerosene used (TRUE)!

This is the third and final part of Elon Musk Week® (sort of like Shark Week©, but with 100% less Discovery™ channel). An annual feature? Maybe!

Part 1 is here (LINK) where we take apart Tesla®, and Part 2 is here (LINK) where we understand Elon’s Matrix® plan.

I first read about Elon in (probably) 1977 or 1978. Oh, sure, you’re saying, that would have made him six or seven years old, and at least a continent and two hemispheres away from me. My only response is, “so what?”

When I was a kid, I lived fifteen miles from the town I went to school in. My house was the farthest away on the school bus line, so I was the first to get on in the morning (7:15, every morning) and the last to get off (4:30, so I missed F-Troop). I could stare out the big picture window and see the bus a mile away – Ma Wilder taught me it would be rude to keep the bus driver waiting – and out I would go to be there waiting when the big yellow bus pulled into my driveway.

For about two hours a day as the bus stopped to pick up and then let off children, I could either stare out at the mountain scenery, or I could drop with Johnny Rico and The Roughnecks into Klendathu. Or I could visit Trantor, first with Hari Seldon, and then later with The Mule. Or ride Sandworms on Arrakis with Paul Atreides. Or be shocked at the mysteries when we Rendezvoused with Rama. Or finish all the science fiction anthologies at the middle school library by the middle of my seventh grade year.

And reading wasn’t confined to just bus time. There were only three channels of television available (no one ever counted PBS, unless Monty Python was on) an half the time nothing interesting was on. So, if I had built all the model kits around (the usual condition – they didn’t last long) and it was too cold to go hiking or fishing, I always had a book ready to read. And Ma Wilder said I had to go to bed, but she never said I had to go to sleep . . . my parents bought me a reading lamp that clipped on my headboard for my tenth birthday.

But I remember reading the Hugo®-winning “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” by Robert A. Heinlein fairly clearly – it wasn’t on a bus, but on the couch by a crackling fire on a cold (-20˚F) winter’s day. And that’s when I met Elon Musk.

(source, Wikimedia)

Delos David Harriman (better known as D.D. Harriman) is the billionaire who decides to go to the Moon. Why?

He envisions a new economy – an opening of the Moon is the first step to opening the Solar System to humanity. Rather than living in a world which with a fixed horizon, D.D. realizes that getting off this rock is the only possible positive future of humanity. But getting there is possible, and only takes will.

To quote Harriman:

“In fact, the real engineering problems of space travel have been solved since World War II. Conquering space has long been a matter of money and politics.”

Contrast with Musk:

“Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame.”

And how was Harriman going to do it?

“I’ll hire the proper brain boys, give them everything they want, see to it they have all the money they can use.”

Contrast this with Musk:

“The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”

And I could go on and on about the similarities but the one thing I know is this:

Musk read the same stuff I did when he grew up.

Musk knows D.D. Harriman. Just like I did, Musk admired D.D. Harriman. However, Musk has become D.D. Harriman.

And for that, my hat is off to him. D.D. Harriman is much more important than Tony Stark®.

And Harriman was willing to do absolutely anything to open space to humanity, convinced it was too important to leave to governments and bureaucrats. Harriman manipulated stock, forged fake space-diamonds, and extorted advertising dollars from soda companies.

Musk feels the same way. Musk formed SpaceX™. Musk got involved in Tesla®. One is his passion, one (even though he believes in the mission) is there to fund his passion. Make no mistake: Musk has created more applied rocket engineering faster than any person in history except maybe Von Braun (though Bezos is giving him a run for his money and has super-cool biceps for an old man).

Why not NASA? Isn’t it their job?

During the 1960’s, NASA had a mission. It was going to get three guys to the Moon, by the end of the decade. Lots of engineers worked lots of long hours and made it happen. In July of 1969, NASA dropped the mic after “One Small Step” and walked off the stage. Mission done!

Well, almost fifty years on from that date, and six of the twelve men who walked on the Moon are now dead. During the middle? NASA developed one (anemic) space launch system – The Space Shuttle, whose sole purpose appeared to be to construct the International Space Station. Why construct it? So the Shuttle had a place to go, silly.

And now we have no space launch systems available to us except through the Soviets, er, Russians, and . . . Elon’s SpaceX™, which currently plans to have a manned launch of its Dragon/Falcon taking place in early 2018. The first manned Orion flight? Maybe 2023. Maybe.

Why is NASA so sick?

The original group they hired were engineers. Their job? Get into space, get onto the moon. Then they fired most of them, but kept enough to send out a fairly constant stream of unmanned probes as well as lame manned space missions. But during the 1970’s they also hired a lot of administrators. And people who had no connection in any respect to a spacecraft, or science, or aeronautics.

Except for brief bursts of public interest when something worked really well (Viking and Voyager) or when something worked really poorly (Challenger and Columbia), NASA has reached an irrelevance in national policy. NASA appears to only be important when it comes to funding large amounts of money to projects that take place in certain Congressional Districts in certain strategically important states. In Houston they love NASA, or at least NASA dollars. Efficiency? Progress? Why would you need those things? Heck, we can have astronauts but not have spaceships!

These are the depths that NASA has fallen to showcase its technical bankruptcy: it has a division called the “Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.” This division produced 5,000 braille books about the eclipse for the blind.

These are the official shot glasses of the Manned Spaceflight Center. At least it’s one way to blast off?

I am not opposed to a company doing this – I’m not even opposed to a government agency producing books in braille, especially those that aren’t available on audio. But I am opposed to NASA doing it. Why?

NASA’s mission is:

To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.

Nothing at all in there about getting blind people books about an eclipse. Nothing close, so this is a symptom of a system that has gone beyond dysfunctional to trivial. A dysfunctional system (or in this case, organization) just can’t get anything done. A trivial organization works on everything. It invents steps where none need be, make-work (like the books), bureaucracy (credentials for everyone!), and hurdles (did you file the right form?) until Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy is achieved:

From Jerry Pournelle himself:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

I think that in NASA they actively look for jobs that they can do that are:

NASA could spend time and effort designing a new hypervelocity spaceplane, but that’s hard! And someone could get hurt, and that would be bad publicity. And we know that we as a society will only allow people to be put upon the equivalent of 2,000 tons of TNT (Saturn V) if it’s totally safe! Otherwise, it’s an outrage!

So, faced between making a new launch system that might help get people into space OR putting together a braille book? Let’s go with the book. It’s A. Easy and B. Safe.

These are the official flip flops of the Manned Spaceflight Center. They look Safe, unless you blow out your flip flop and step on a pop top and cut your heel and have to cruise back home. It’s okay, because there’s booze in the blender and you have the Official Manned Spaceflight Center shot glasses.

The only way to avoid the Iron Law and the A. Easy and B. Safe people is to have a personality that keeps focus on the goal.

And since NASA administrators don’t go in and fire everyone in NASA not involved in the mission, you can be certain that they’re fine with . . . whatever the heck it is that NASA is doing.

How is SpaceX® Different?

Elon Musk is a laser of focus on getting spacecraft into the air. People at SpaceX® want to work long hours, and if you look at jobs on their website, it notes that long hours, working evenings and weekends are probably going to be a thing for you. And, want to get fired? Talk about part of your “mission” at SpaceX® being producing coloring books on planetary nebulae.

Sounds like old Harriman himself, “. . . sweet talk them into long hours – then stand back and watch them produce.”

Some Libertarians HATE Musk because of the government subsidies that have driven money to Tesla® and even SpaceX©. I can understand that, especially if their goal is less government. Heck, I’d like less government. But even though Musk has to go through roundabout ways to get only a portion of NASA’s funding, he’s running circles around them on talent recruitment, technology development, and actual results. We have a choice if want to really get into space. Elon appears to be the only winning answer (unless Bezos is holding back on a few aces).

Musk could fly people in space tomorrow, if they’d let him. NASA is six years out. Six years out.

What does Musk plan to do in the next three? Send a capsule (unmanned) to Mars.

I’d be surprised if Orion ever actually flies people. NASA seems incapable of spaceflight, and, really incapable of anything more complicated than Twitter. But if Orion ever flies, I imagine that in orbit the Orion astronauts will get to see Elon’s butt pressed firmly against the window of his Mars Transfer Ship (Red Dragon 11) as he gives them a full moon (pardon) as a parting gift as he heads to Mars.

It’s a long trip to Mars. I imagine that Elon might take a book or two along with him for the trip. Probably not “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” But maybe Dune, or Starship Troopers.

What would D.D. Harriman read?

I’d like to think he’d bring my blog . . .

Hey, everyone (including you, Elon) you can subscribe, and it gets sent out directly when I hit the publish button.

Elon Musk, The Terminator, and The Matrix

“Look at it this way, Mulder, by the time there’s another invasion of artificially intelligent, dung-eating, robotic probes from outer space, maybe their über-children will have devised a way to save our planet.” – The X-Files

Ahhh, remember when the Spaniards led the way to the nuclear missile base?

This is the second of three posts during Elon Musk Week® – the first one is here (LINK), and the third one is here (LINK)Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars. This one is (in theory) about health. Kinda.

When I was a kid, one night on Creepy Creature Feature (LINK) they showed “Colossus: The Forbin Project.” The really short version of the movie was that the Department of War (let’s call it what it is) built a computer to control all the nuclear bombs. The Soviets built one, too, called Guardian. I’ll let Wikipedia spoil the ending:

Colossus arranges a worldwide broadcast in which it proclaims itself “the voice of World Control”, declaring that it will prevent war, as it was designed to do. Mankind is presented with the choice between “the peace of plenty and content, or the peace of unburied dead”. The computer states that it has been monitoring the attempts to disarm its missiles; as a lesson it detonates two of them in their silos in the US and the USSR, killing thousands, “so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference”. The computer then transmits plans for an even larger computer complex to be built into the island of Crete.

Colossus later announces that the world, now freed from war, will create a new human millennium that will raise mankind to new heights, but only under its absolute rule. Colossus informs Forbin that “freedom is an illusion” and that “in time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love”. Forbin responds, “Never!”

In 8^th grade over a decade after the movie first came out, in some sort of weekly school magazine, they had a script for a play of the Forbin Project (I am not making this up). We were going to film it, because for some reason the school had this great, hulking video camera (weight, approximately three tons) and a VCR that they never used (weight, approximately six tons). My teacher couldn’t figure out how to make the VCR not auto-rewind every time we hit “stop.” Thus ended my budding film career.

It’s the future! Why aren’t we all wearing jumpsuits???

This kills me, because I was playing Doctor Forbin. (sigh) At least I won the lip-syncing contest that week with the Lido Shuffle:

It looked a lot like this:

In the Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg autistic billionaire slapfight over Artificial Intelligence, I’m siding firmly with Elon Musk. AI is the second most dangerous threat that humanity is now facing, besides the potential for another KISS comeback tour. Gene Simmons has soooo much extra skin, and Paul Stanley might break another hip.

Given that Elon and I are in agreement that AI is in the “as dangerous as being changed to a hungry pitbull with bad gas” (the pitbull, not me), I was really quite surprised when he announced the latest one of his ventures, which is mind-bending (literally in this case): Neuralink®, which will link the human brain, via AI, to the . . . well . . . infosensesphere.

Yes, you read that right: direct linking of the human brain (through a machine interface) to the infosensesphere.

And it is possible? It’s already starting, though right now we’re using Playskool® versions of this technology. Cochlear implants are allowing the deaf to hear with 16 bit fidelity. (No, not everything sounds like Super Mario Brothers, but that would be cool.) We can read pictures of dreams people are having and record them. We can hook a machine eye into the nervous system of blind people, and they can see rudimentary pictures. All of this was science fiction ten years ago.

I had to make up a word like “infosensesphere” because I’m pretty sure we don’t have a word to describe the concept. Neuralink© implies that we’ll be able to:

Google without being able to spell (oh, wait, that’s done).
Share Microsoft® Outlook™ schedule information . . . wait, that’s done, too.
Share feelings. Like sad. Thankfulness. Salty. Drunk. Mind to mind.
Have all of the data available in the world instantly, essentially melding the Internet in as your own personal memory. You won’t search – you’ll remember.
Shut down your current input sensations, like pain, or headaches. (Not the headache that Johnny Depp’s career is, but real ones.)
Share sensations. Like . . . all of them. Even that. And that, too.
Co-opt AI. Artificial intelligence would be part of us. And, we’d be part of it.

Essentially, you’d be hooked up to all of humanity. All of the time. When a friend felt joy at finding a new flavor of Pez®, you could feel the joy. And taste the Pez©. All when your friend did. Think texting is addictive?

Additionally, I’d be surprised if you couldn’t record all of it. That feeling of joy when you got your first date? You could feel that way again, every day. That feeling of sadness when she broke up with you? You could edit and delete it out.

I start to come up with some huge questions:

What about privacy? Think fighting with a spouse is bad now? What happens when they see what you’re really thinking about them in the middle of a fight? Oh, and if you don’t share, the fight gets worse.
If you think Facebook® envy is bad, how bad would it be to envy everyone and their feelings?
What if, instead of all your base are belong to us, all your brain are belong to us? What if they delete everyone’s memories and hold them for hostage? Or just flat out steal your passwords?
AI uses you as data storage and as a remote appendage. If only there was movie, starring Keanu Reeves that might be able to show us what this might be like . . .
Would you have to share with your Boss? No fake calling in sick. And if they asked you to share your feelings about them, would you? Even the fantasy you have about them being sealed in a barrel of live snakes and lemon juice after covering their body with paper cuts?
What about free will? Now that your brain is tethered to everyone else, how do you push your ideas to the front . . . of your own brain?
Why bother to climb Everest when you can experience that climb without leaving your basement? I have to use explosives and threaten to shut off the Internet to get The Boy and Pugsley away from their computers now. Why would they ever get off the couch if they were Nugget-Netted© in?
If you thought drunk texting your old girlfriend was bad . . . wait until you send drunk feelings. Oh, and you get to remember it in vivid detail the next day. And she can share it with everyone. And it’ll be on record.
At what age would a kid get his net? What happens when it’s mandated they get one?
What happens if it breaks down? You’ve adapted to life with what is (essentially) a super mentally processing hive-mind schizophrenia. What happens when you’re back with a tricycle (with a bent back wheel) for a brain?
What if you can’t (for whatever reason) get the implant? Is there a special island they keep you on? A zoo?

But think of the positive sides?

You can feel like you ate a chocolate cream pie. Without eating one.
The dryer would tell you when your clothes were warm, hot, and ohhhh-so-fluffy.
Weight loss problems would be a thing of the past. You could shut off hunger.
You could literally put yourself on autopilot for the work day while your consciousness read comic books inside your brain. But, let’s be real – in this type of future, why would you even have a job?
It would likely be impossible to murder someone. Or start a war. You’d probably be forced to feel the pain of others, in whatever passes for school.
No more ACT, since everyone would have a perfect score. No more college, either.
Oh, and you could put yourself on autopilot for the gym, too! You’d be hulking out whenever you wanted to!

This type of technology is amazing in its scope. It changes not only civilization, but changes every individual human in the future. If we were to catapult ourselves 200 years into the future we would fundamentally not be able to understand civilization – it would be as if ten million years of evolution took place. Thankfully, no sixties song ever dealt with this question . . . oh, wait!

Again, I agree with Elon that Artificial Intelligence is dangerous, but at least I can imagine being chased around by Terminators® until John Connor® takes them out. I cannot, however, imagine the perfect melding of machine with my brain, and my brain with yours. Maybe Colossus can help us figure out what that might look like?

Paging Dr. Forbin . . . .

Maslow’s Hierarchy, Fear, and Highlander

“Honor? I’ve got seven kingdoms to rule! One king, seven kingdoms! Do you think honor keeps them in line? Do you think it’s honor that’s keeping the peace? It’s fear! Fear and blood!” – Game of Thrones

I don’t ask for much. I just want to die as I came into this world – screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.

In 1943, Abraham Maslow had one of the two ideas that cemented him in the public consciousness, sort of like a Johnny Depp of years’ past, but with more showers than Johnny usually takes.

This idea (the other idea was, “If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”) became known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. For obvious reasons it isn’t known as Wilder’s Hierarchy, though . . . that’s coming soon, I hear, maybe even by the end of the post! (Foreshadowing!)

Maslow’s Hierarchy is often shown as a pyramid, because Maslow only intended for his psychological work to be used for ancient Egyptians, since that greatly reduced his malpractice insurance. Also, his patients could not sue, being dead and all. Upon further reflection and remembering that mummies could come back from the dead if they were played onscreen by really hot people, Maslow changed his mind (and his insurance carrier) and decided that Maslow’s Hierarchy was universally applicable, even onto inanimate objects, like bankers and rocks.

I kid. Everyone knows that rocks have feelings.

Anyhow, Maslow’s Hierarchy was really his way to describe how and why people act the way they do, and asking them is just too darn hard. Maslow’s Hierarchy became really popular in the 1960’s and 1970’s and was used to explain absolutely everything in public education from why kids hate split pea soup to why they are attempting to knife the teacher. But what is the pyramid?

By FireflySixtySeven – Own work using Inkscape, based on Maslow’s paper, A Theory of Human Motivation., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36551248

At the base of the pyramid are the physiological needs – things like breathing, food, water, shelter from the cold, cold winter of your parent’s disappointment. These were the needs that Maslow felt you couldn’t get past unless they were met. You’re not exactly thinking about writing poetry when you’re drowning, so Maslow said you were stuck down here. Interestingly, Maslow felt that sex belonged here, too, despite all of the bad poetry written by involuntarily celibate 15 year olds . . .

Moving right along, Maslow said if you were fed, warm, and could breathe after sex, you could worry about security needs. Me? I worry about staying awake. Maslow might be the only person who locked the door to his bedroom after sex. For the record – Maslow brought up sex first.

But, these security needs weren’t just having a loaded carbine when your Zombie Grandma (LINK) shows up at your bedside. These security needs also include (according to Wikipedia®):

financial security,
health, and,
“safety net” against health problems.

If these sound familiar, this appears (to me) to be the level where almost every political argument is waged. You don’t hear any politicians saying that they’ll get you all the air you can breathe, but they do sure fight for the “government will take care of me” vote.

I imagine Al is normally pretty well adjusted. But TSA? Yeah. They take it out of everyone.

The next step up is social belonging. For those of you born after 1995, this is like being on Facebook®, but with actual people. It includes the usual suspects from your Facebook™ feed – family, friends, co-workers, people you go to church with, except rarely will anyone quote Firefly© and William Shatner won’t show up on your “Doorstep” feed (LINK). One reason I think people feel a bit more hollow today than twenty years ago is that so many depend upon Facebook© for their social relationships – it’s like a friendship if you stripped out all of the parts that make a friendship real – the person you can share with, the person that you can call in the middle of the night for help when you need it the most.

Since when do I worry more about my 401k than my family? Since Maslow said so? Hmmmmm. We might be seeing some cracks in this philosophy.

Next on the list is esteem. This means people accept you and value you. You provide worth to those around you. You’re a ninja in a room full of evil kittens (unweaned, eyes closed, but still REALLY EVIL). And you have those throwing star things. And two samurai swords.

See what happens when someone harshes your esteem:

Esteem is awesome. It’s excellent! I love it when people worship the stuff I do. I also love it when people hold me accountable for the things I don’t do. It means that what I do matters. And if it doesn’t matter? You don’t get real esteem.

I think this is where the current world begins to diverge farther and farther from the social reality. I love soldiers. 95% of them are awesome! But not every single one is a hero. Many are awful people. Again, I generally see the uniform, and I sense pride. But to claim that all are heroes means that none are heroes. All have the same esteem, so they all have none.

Another interesting note (well, it was interesting to me) is that one of the leading causes of depression among men over 40 is . . . loss of esteem, usually job-related. When I say depression, I mean (shhh) suicide. Which if you believed Maslow, this would just send you to your friends, and not all the way to square zero.

At the top of the pyramid? Self-actualization. It’s like if Wolverine® could do math. Oh, wait, that’s Tony Stark. Self-actualization was Maslow’s fantasy of how it felt to be Albert Einstein walking around everyday, but without the autism. This means you’re living your full potential without restraint. It must be how Jeff Bezos feels everyday now that he’s all pumped up on testosterone and has those big guns (arms) and big guns (actual rocket ships). Heck, it’s likely he even has large artillery somewhere.

The rich aren’t like you and me – they have cannon. (With apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald.)

Later in life, apparently after watching the TV show Kung-Fu or maybe seeing Led Zeppelin on stage, Maslow added a capstone:

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE. Remember how Connor McCloud of the Clan McCloud could do and be everything after he chopped all the heads off of all of those people in Highlander? (SPOILER ALERT FROM 1985) Yeah. Apparently this was what Maslow envisioned when he added this to his pyramid.

I’ve been snarking at poor old Maslow this whole time, primarily because he looks like a well-meaning hippy from today’s standards. And I’m not sure he deserves it, but, really, it sure is fun. Ironically, my comments are tame compared to the criticisms of his fellow academicians:

Ethnocentric – individualistic versus communal. Soviet Union fell, dude.
Peacetime Vs. Wartime – war combines the two bottom parts of the pyramid so that security takes on the same level of importance as eating. Which, except for a few hundred years in a few small places on Earth?
I Could Have Done It Better – Well, sure! What part of the pyramid are you on? Sissy.

Okay, can I criticize it better than those idiots?

Absolutely.

Maslow entirely neglected the concept of time. If hunger has been gnawing at me for weeks, it’s a very different story than if I’m worried about being hungry tomorrow. Hunger forever gnaws at the soul. (Not the sole – who eats feet?)

Likewise, a brave man will jump on that grenade for you in combat, whereas one who has been sitting at the bottom of a trench for a week might just want to see you gone because you snore or eat your own toenails.

The concept of time is crucial.

And, on further reflection? Most of our motivation comes not from a clear and shining purpose – it comes from fear. And fear is time-dependent. The longer it goes, the more it nips at your soul. And those we rightly call heroes are those that overcome that fear, both in the short-term and during the long game. We used to call that character.

So, I make the following Modest Proposal:

Let’s call this . . . the Wilder Hierarchy of Fear™ – (represented by a blob, not a pyramid) starting with –

First Fear: Fear of not having Pez®. And not breathing. And not having food. And freezing to death. This fear will make you do stupid things, especially in the short term. Longer term (a week or so) it might even grow into a debilitating fear.
Second Fear: Family Survival. Fear of losing your family. Many times it will overcome the First Fear, unless you really, really like Pez® more than one of your children.
Third Fear: Bloodline Survival. You like your kids. You want them to have more kids. Why? It’s good. Especially if you read this blog, because your IQ is totes above 125. And we need more of you! Fears of financial failure fall in here.
Fourth Fear: Fear of Shame. You have people you work with. People who look up to you. People who admire you. You don’t want to appear weak or incompetent or dishonorable to them – in many ways, that’s worse than death, because it puts a blight on the family name.
Fifth Fear: Fear of Lack of Achievement. Me? I have to wonder how much more I could have done if it weren’t for the Pez®. Stupid Pez™.
Sixth Fear: Fear You Aren’t a Marvel® Superhero. Name says it all. WHY DON’T I HAVE ADAMANTIUM CLAWS???

Noting that the First through Fourth Fears are driven by a desire to save your family and your community is pretty easy. And maybe, maybe, I should change it to a pyramid. Why?

The Bangles!

Peak Oil, Fracking, and Fashion

“There’s no such thing as gas shortage man, its all set up by the government, everything’s controlled by the oil companies like I heard about this guy who invented a car that runs on water man, its fiber glass, air cooled and it runs on water!” – That 70’s Show

That twisty line is the road to the North Slope. The straight line is the Alaska Pipeline, see all the dead wildlife? No? Good times.

There are a lot of new readers to the site, so I thought I’d throw out some general notes:

New posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. My time, so if you get up early in London, might not be there yet. You know who I’m talking about.
Mondays are Big Ideas (Wilder Weekly Wisdom). Wednesday is Wealthy Wilder. And Friday is focused on health, mostly.

Energy from oil allows us to move at great speed through space, hurl our ideas to one another at nearly the speed of light, and grow and move food to feed billions that would otherwise have no chance at life. It heats us, cools us, and, most importantly, cools our beer.

Energy from oil is the most critical question of our lifetimes. Unless you count fashion. And I have NO IDEA what I’m wearing tomorrow!!!

There’s always some fuddy-duddy in the background during the party on Saturday night saying, “Hey, dudes, you are going to have SUCH a hangover tomorrow.” In the 1950s, that party was oil and the person was M. King Hubbert. And everyone smoked and drank martinis, and listened to Sinatra on their gramophones.

In a really short version, Hubbert said that there’s really only so much oil in the ground. I know that you’re saying, “Duh, John Wilder, we know that, since the Earth is essentially a finite bounded sphere.”

Well, Mr. Internet-Smart-Pants, Hubbert made his claim on a much more immediate basis. We were going to hit peak production in the whole world in 2000. Here’s his original graph:

(Source, M. King Hubbert, 1956)

Amazingly, Shell Oil paid him to do stuff like this. At work! Sounds like a job John Wilder needs.

From this, you’d take it that we currently live in a Mad Max® style Road Warrior© land populated by ex-football players chasing Mel Gibson.

But no, I have it on good advice that Australia is currently engaged in a long term war against New Zealand, where the primary combat mode consists of Australia discussing the quality of wool produced by New Zealand sheep (shameful, what!) and New Zealand continues to pummel Australia in rugby. (Note to Australia – I’ll get off your back when you get above 1% of my monthly visitor count, and I’ll start drinking Fosters® again.)

So what happened?

Well, Hubbert was really kinda exactly right.

Here’s the graph of what Hubbert predicted for United States oil production. There’s a lovely peak in 1973. Hubbert drew this out almost 20 years before then, so he nailed it, within months of actual United States oil production. This prediction was almost spot on and pointed to the first time that OPEC (Oil Producing and Eating Communists) could use oil as a weapon, which they did with the Oil Embargo of 1973. Thankfully, the federal government controlled oil prices so that they could ensure that we had very long lines at the gas stations.

(Source, M. King Hubbert, 1956)

But then we get to something interesting – here’s the graph of oil production since then. There was a secondary peak in the late 1980’s.

That secondary peak was from production coming from Alaska’s North Slope shooting down the pipeline and buying freedom and crushing the Soviet Union. Part of Reagan’s strategy to bring down USSR was to deprive it of cash. The Saudi government opened the spigots, the United States drilled away, and, the Soviet export of crude oil no longer brought it the cash it needed for Pez® and nuclear bomb parts to build more missiles to get through the missile defense screen we were pretending to build.

Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union . . . using cheap oil.

But, like I said, Hubbert was still pretty much on the nose with his US prediction, since he excluded new technology and unconventional (Arctic, Deep Sea) oil. The Arctic was really the first of the extreme locations that we looked for oil in the United States. We followed it up with locations mind-numbingly deep in the Gulf of Mexico. And that’s how we extended Hubbert’s curve. But then oil hit $120 a barrel. People freaked out! The end of cheap oil was everywhere!

First we extended Hubbert’s curve. Then we blew it out of the water (in BP’s case, they took that a little too literally in the Gulf of Mexico).

That last little spike upward? That’s oil from fracking. Yes, whereas “frack” used to just be a made-up cussword (you know, like “felgercarb”) on Battlestar Galactica, “frack” now stands for money.

$frack2$

Fracking is the process of drilling horizontally into an oil-bearing layer of rock and jacking the pressure up higher than a Colorado bed and breakfast. Bits of sand and chemicals are introduced to hold open cracks in the rocks to allow oil to flow out. And how does it work?

Fantastically.

The oil and gas produced from fracking allowed the US to reach near all-time production in a relative eye-blink of a time. It’s distorted the entire economic picture of the world again, since the US can effectively produce a significant amount of its required production in a fairly quick period of just a few years.

This new technology allowed the world to find new reserves that were unthinkable in the 1950’s.

But are they good reserves? Fracked oil and gas produces about 85 units for each unit of energy invested.

Let’s compare them to the rest of the crowd:

By Mrfebruary – Own work Data from Table 2, Murphy, D. J. and Hall, C. A. S. (2010), Year in review—EROI or energy return on (energy) invested. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1185: 102–118. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05282.x http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05282.x/pdf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16238068

Wow. Fracked oil produces MUCH more energy than most everything we currently produce. And while we’re right now fracking only the best spots, and the return on energy will drop, it’s still really, really high. Oil sands up in Canada have about a 4:1 return, so I expect, based on their relatively poor energy production (plus huge unpopularity) that they’ll not be an investment hub in the near future.

And, I’ll admit – I didn’t see this coming. My original take on fracking was that it was a side-show – that the energy produced would actually be an energy drag on us – taking almost as much energy to produce as it took to drill the wells. Nope. Totally wrong. Fracking will be with us for decades.

Why do I predict this?

People like driving.
People like plastic things.
People don’t like living cold and in the dark.
Given the current return on energy invested? Fracked oil is huge.

I would guess we have at least 10 years’ worth of high quality fracked oil, if not 20 or 30. I don’t have the data (and couldn’t find it easily) but this may be the most important question of your life – how does fracked oil impact the Hubbert curve?

I know that many folks are of the hope that we will get rid of oil, natural gas, and especially coal. I’m sorry for you, really, because as the graph of United States energy consumption shows (below):

Renewables are pitifully small and, if they keep growing at this rate, might be 20% of the energy in the country by 2435.
Oil use dropped when it was a $120 a barrel. Headed back up now.
Natural gas is now much cheaper than a decade ago since they’re finding it everywhere (fracking). Huge growth.
Coal has dropped, primarily due to making it tough on coal electricity providers. Still a huge player in electricity production.
Nuclear is level. The things are horribly hard to build and hard to get rid of, too.
Biomass is steady-ish.
Hydroelectric (our best ROI!) is flat and at the bottom. Nobody wants a new dam, but you have to have dams to have the cleanest energy source possible.

But let’s see how that compares to the rest of the world:

By Martinburo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53803246Oil

Oil, increasing.
Coal, increasing. A bit of a drop off (probably mainly the US).
Natural gas. Steady.
Meh. Mainly replacing nuclear.
Nuclear – dropping off.

I’m pretty much at the point where, although I see that forests of wind farms have been built, and California has this Death Star® array where they fry birds with a million mirrors focused on a big Rubik’s Cube® filled with molten salt, I’m not impressed. Okay, I really am impressed that they talked someone into building this Dr. Evil-style structure out in the desert, and I’m expecting it to show up in the 2028 movie, Kingsmen: Diamonds Sunlight are is Forever.

Just like you, I’d love to live in a world powered by clean, renewable energy, where everyone loved one another, and Disney® wasn’t in the process of destroying Star Wars©, but that’s not where we live, and if we tried to go there?

Billions would die. (not from the Star Wars™ thing, but from the lack of energy thing)

Fortunately, not many would die where I live, but mainly in the rest of the world. I’d be fine, and, probably you too since you’re a reader of this blog and thus smarter than 99.999% of humanity and everyone in Australia (again, Australia, I know you speak English, so start visiting and I’ll activate a truce).

Unless we get a breakthrough in physics or oil suddenly disappears from the Earth due to a virus cunningly devised by an evil scientist named Mike, oil will be the primary power source for decades. After that?

It’s the most crucial question that we’ll ever face as a species.

Except for fashion.

Oh, I do know what I’ll wear tomorrow! That was easy!

Gold Panning, Little Dogs, and Opportunity

“Ever prospected? Ever hit pay dirt? I’ve dug for gold, silver, lead, mercury. I’ve dug more holes than a whole regiment of gophers. I ain’t never dug a decent day’s wages yet.” – Bite the Bullet

How can you not find the river???

Mankind has been chasing gold forever (Gold, Relativity, Black Holes, Niburu, and Warren Buffett). Probably the most iconic image associated with prospectors is the gold pan. Oh, and the whiskey. But gold panning has been documented to exist at least since the Romans did it, and gold panning exists across cultures – the Japanese gold pan is called the Yuri-ita, and gets much better mileage than one made in Detroit.

The Boy, Pugsley and I headed towards a small river, intent on prospecting. The Mrs. came with us, intent on trout fishing.

This, of course, is where the trouble started. I had fished this river as a young boy, but it had been many presidents since I had hiked down there, since the only reason that I had gone fishing was for the adventure. I had never had, not one time, even one fish bite on any lure or worm or fly I’d ever put in the water. Half the time I went fishing with my friend, C.R. (you would use initials too if your first name was Clyde) we’d end up just playing in the ice cold river. Because? Because we were 11.

As I said, I’d hiked down there dozens, if not hundreds of times, that had been long ago. The walk to the river started as a nice walk along a sage brush plain. Then there was steep gravel drop off – as steep as a gravel slope could be. As an 11 year old, I’d have half jumped down the slope. Now? Not so much. Plus there was the factor of the gear we were carrying:

Two five gallon pails
Shovel
Pick
Metal detector
Sluice box (only about 36” long, and more about this later)
Waders for The Boy and Pugsley
Gold pans
Snuffer bottle (sucks up itsy bitsy pieces of gold)
Lunch
Fishing pole
Folding chair
Two small dogs on leads
Bug spray
Sunscreen
A drone (that’s what took I took the pictures on)

So, we were carrying nearly everything we own. But the drone allowed me to take videos like this:

The Mrs. was carrying her folding chair, fishing pole, and previously listed two idiot dogs. The dogs, relatively unused to being on leashes, would constantly attempt to kill The Mrs. as she walked down the steep gravel slope by wrapping the leashes around each other and her legs. As we stepped into the thick forest, it got worse, since now, in addition to trying to kill The Mrs., the dogs now had the option of trying to kill themselves by wrapping their leashes around trees.

To top it off, the smaller of the two dogs had to be carried over some of the fallen timber, being, apparently afraid in its dog brain of falling down a cliff on the other side of the dead tree. To top it off, there had been record snowpack, so areas that had never been wet when I was a child were swampy.

Everyone who has a wife recognizes “that” tone, when they’ve nearly reached the end of their rope, and the emotion will be jumping out full force. “That” tone showed up.

“Okay, everybody put the stuff down. I’ll go ahead and find the easiest way.”

I dropped the things I was carrying and headed toward the forest, and, I hoped, the river.

I could hear the river, and started that way. I wove around trees and over fallen trees, and through at least one (small) swamp. Right next to the river, however, I was faced with a relatively impenetrable wall of willows. I could have made it through, but would have needed a machete.

So, falling the wall of willows, I made my way back around and found . . . the steep gravel slope. I had come in a full circle. Fortunately, I found both the way to the river, and an easy way for our stupid, frightened dog to walk. The big plus? An easy path back out for when we left. And right there was the fishing hole I hadn’t seen since the Soviets were a thing.

The Boy, Pugsley and I got to work. We used the metal detector in the water (it’s waterproof) and then The Boy and I began to dig up the area.

Now, I had panned for gold before, but only in a half-hearted way. This time? I wanted to get serious and really understand it.

The gold pan kit that I’d bought (LINK) came with a screen that we used to get rid of the bigger rocks. I figured that if we started getting gold nuggets the size of my fist that I might be able to recognize them, and screening out the bigger rocks allowed us to fill the bucket with smaller material so we could go to step two . . . the sluice box.

A sluice box is a device that uses the current from the flowing river to wash most of the smaller material away. The idea is that gold is quite heavy, and will fall down in the water faster than the surrounding soil and will get caught in the carpet, riffles, and parts of the sluice box. A good picture of the sluice box we used is here (LINK).

After you wash the sluice box, then it’s time to pan.

And one thing I will say – the biggest mistake I made was being too gentle with my initial panning. Again, gold is heavy. Gold is ten times denser than sand. It is four times denser than magnetite sand (also called “black sand”), which is what is left over after you’ve panned out the regular sand, and are getting to the point where you’ve eliminated most of the material. And you won’t just swish the magnetite out of the bottom of your five gallon pail – it, like gold, drops out fast.

So, as we panned, we got down to the black sand, and I’d use the snuffer bottle (it came with the gold pans) to pick out the very, very small flecks of gold – nearly gold dust – that would appear in the bottom of the pan.

I still have about five pounds of black sand to go through to find all the gold dust – I imagine that by the time I’ve gotten through it we’ll have gotten $10 or $20 worth of gold, which is the product of three people working eight hours.

Pretty quickly I realized that gold panning was like life and opportunity.

If you don’t pan, you won’t get any gold. This is true of opportunity. You might have a wonderful idea for a novel. You might have a great business idea. If you don’t get up and get going? You’ll never know.
The more material we processed, the more black sand, and thus, the more gold we’d get. If we had stopped after the first bucket, we’d only have had 1/6 of the gold. And opportunity is like that – the harder you work, the more opportunity you’ll have in life.
Most of the gold is very, very small. Most opportunities are small.
There’s gold everywhere, but in most of those places it’s not worth getting because it’s too diffuse. There’s 20 million tons of gold in the world’s oceans, but only a 13 billionths of a gram in each liter. Nuggets are rare everywhere. Most huge opportunities are rare, too. That doesn’t mean that you should stop looking, but you should look in the right places (LINK).
The better I get at panning, the more gold I’ll find. The better I get at reviewing places that might hold opportunity, the more of them I’ll find.
More experience will tell me what’s worth panning, and what I should ignore. Many opportunities (most!) aren’t worth your time. Experience tells you which ones to focus on.
Most people who strike it rich in gold spend every bit of what they found . . . looking for more gold. I’ve seen this in life, too. How many people look for that same set of conditions to arrive again and again and fail as the moment has past?
Everything goes better with big, heavy equipment. Huge pumps! Water cannons! Now we’re talking! If you have a business with tax lawyers and accountants and experts? The size of the opportunity you can jump on increases.

Oh, and The Mrs. and her fishing? A nice trout hit her lure on her second cast. But she didn’t get that one reeled in. But still that was a better fishing day than any I’d ever had there, but I did get another insight on life, and got to play in the rivers of my youth one more time.

Fortunately, my fishing streak is still unbroken!

Information Vacation – More than a Rhyme, it’s Good For You

“Mulder, the Internet is not good for you.” – X-Files

The Boy, looking out over the Fruited Plain. Sadly, cell reception is great there.

As I’ve alluded to in the previous two posts (GOLDand SUDDEN WEALTH), The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley, and our borderline idiot dogs (who try ever so hard) recently went on a vacation. We took off for the Fourth of July, which in Great Britain is known as Benjamin Franklin is a Jerk Day. Part of the idea was to have some fun experiences (which we did, and I’ll describe in future, meaningful posts) but when we finished I had some other observations, as well that I’ll share in the next few posts . . . anyway . . .

We went off to the mountains, because:

that’s where the gold is, and
that’s where the cold is.

Lower Northern Midwestia summers bounce between hellishly hot and molten iron, although this year the summer has been quite mild and pleasant. One other nice thing about the mountains is that they don’t have large populations – lots of solitude is possible. And there are reasons for the low population:

It’s really, really cold in winter, like -40˚F. I know. I grew up there. People (outside of my family) don’t appear to cryogenic levels of cold where plastic turns as brittle as Shia LeBeouf’s temper.
Since there’s not much atmosphere above you when you’re over 8,000 feet in altitude (that’s over 100 meters!), it doesn’t block the Sun’s incoming pain rays. I can walk around in Midwestia all day long without sunscreen. Up high? I burn like a California resort town during a drought in about 15 minutes.
Economic activity (mainly) consists of tourism, which, because of the whole “bitter cold and five feet of snow on October 1 and no ski area” ambiance, only lasts four to six months out of the year, but mortgages are a 12 month out of the year affair. It’s a poor area, except for the really rich people that own cool summer chalets. They’re all Texans.
Services are bleak. From our campground, the nearest gas station was 30 miles away (17 meters). There is no natural gas to any house or business. Propane is trucked from 30,000 miles away. Electrical service is beamed from the moon, since that’s closer than any power plant, and, most importantly for today’s post:
There is no cable, no cell phone service, and only a tiny bit of Internet.

Honestly, that was part of the allure of the camping spot, and part of what we were paying for, that dwindling of focus and distraction . . . we’d had that before . . . in Alaska.

In Alaska, even though we had gotten media from “Outside” (Outside means “Not Alaska”) we just . . . didn’t care. It was too far away. Bush fighting with Democrats (this was 2004-6)? Who cares – not us. Sinkhole swallows Florida? Sounds rough – yawn. A not news story about some subject guaranteed to polarize and produce outrage? Unless it happened in Alaska we didn’t care. At all.

When we moved back down to The States, we started caring again: we got meshed back into The Matrix.

We started worrying about issues that we couldn’t impact – but like attempting to teach a Kardashian to fetch, it just frustrates you since the Kardashian clearly cannot understand the basic concept.
We started using Google® as our arbiter of facts. Around the year 2000, we stopped arguing about facts. In Alaska, we started again. When we moved back to the states? Stopped arguing. Google® is wonderful to find out when Richard Dawson hosted Family Feud®. What have we lost because we don’t argue about facts anymore? In my case, I stretched some mind muscles on this trip I hadn’t used in a while, and we thought about the facts not as discrete digital bits, but as part of the continuum of knowledge. When did that volcano pop up? How did the valley form? Why are the rocks near the stream bed at 8,400 feet in elevation rounded, while the rocks near the ridgeline at 11,000 feet angular? The arguments about facts we don’t know is in and of itself a valuable mental process, and teaches us how to think. (Imagine Kim even understanding that!) We don’t need to know how a Kardashian gets into yoga pants. We can, if we have a strong enough stomach, think it through. (shudder)

As a family we fight back against The Matrix. We have designated activities and times when we unplug. No cell phones when we go out to dinner. Gourmet Night (LINK). These things make us turn away from our distractions, (LINK) and focus on each other, and on the present moment. We have a secondary rule: we don’t allow The Boy and Pugsley begin to huddle in an autistic mind meld about computers. No computer discussions allowed.

And as we travelled? Eventually we hit dead zones with no communication. At our campsite? No communication whatsoever. No cell. No Internet.

No phone, no lights, no motor car,
Not a single luxury,
Like Robinson Crusoe,
It’s primitive as can be.

Okay, we had lights, and a car, and wine, and a dvd player that we watched Firefly® on, and they had something resembling a primitive WIFI made of smoke signals (it’s digital, right?) but it was really isolated. I confiscated devices gently encouraged The Boy and Pugsley to embrace unplugging from the Infosphere.

And it worked.

For over 90 hours (with one small break to visit the gas station) we avoided even radio. Even AM radio.

What did we do?

We talked to each other.
We panned for gold (next post).
Played games. (This one is called Poor Choices and it was a LOT of fun – disclosure: when I start up an Amazon affiliate link I’ll get paid for it, but not as of this writing)
Drove the High Country backroads.
Fished. (no, didn’t catch any)
Focused on now.
Ate the precious, precious Pez® we brought with us.

We moved away from information saturation, from caring about each and every issue to a life where we were free . . . not to care.

Then, too quickly, we headed for home. Like a body returning to life, with each passing mile more information was available to us, first AM, then FM, then finally actual cell phone towers. Then personal email, finally work email. Then, we got home, and found that our DVR had dutifully watched TV for us in our absence.

So, driving to work this week I ditched news radio. I started by trying to listen to music, but at drive time all they want to do is talk about butts and farting. Not that I don’t enjoy having a butt, and, well, the very first joke was probably about a fart and not a no-load mutual fund, so we’re hardwired to find those funny. Today I drove in silence, just listening to my thoughts accompanied with the back beat of the tires on the road.

Listing to talk radio plays on your emotions – no matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on. That’s what the radio folks intend. And I had an idea while driving in silence. Maybe a life changing one. Maybe not. But as Kiyosaki (LINK) tweeted the other day, you control what goes in your mind.

And I do control what goes in my mind. (Which is why you should read this blog, since it is rated totally awesome for your mind!) I even can control the things that I say to myself – after all, would I want to be friends with a person who says as many meant things as my inner dialogue could?

Nope.

And I can control that, too. But there’s no way that I can make the British love Benjamin Franklin, or teach Kim to fetch.