Spencer Burleigh

Constraints beat prompts for AI code

2026-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

Coding with AI has an entropy problem

A few hours into coding with AI, a pattern shows up. The code looks clean. Abstractions make sense. Tests pass. And yet under concurrency, your rate limiter collapses because the counter isn’t atomic.

Here’s the formula nobody talks about: failure= error rate × variance

Coding with AI massively increases variance. Even if error rate stays constant (big if), failures scale dramatically with output. After a few hours, you have 200 files of mostly okay spaghetti code and an AI who responds to your prompts with things like:

That asymmetry is the core problem.

AI systems are very good at generating plausible structure: clean abstractions, proper separation of concerns, thoughtful API boundaries. They’re weaker at adversarial edge cases, enforcing invariants, state transitions under load, and remembering decisions made hundreds of thousands of tokens ago.

I’ve spent much of the past month coding with agents and building a set of open source tools called CrossCheck to push development further. What follows is an overview of my philosophy and implementation.

This is a governance problem, not a prompting problem

Most advice about coding with AI focuses on prompts: be more explicit, ask for tests, review carefully.

That’s behavioral control. But behavioral control isn’t deterministic and decays as context grows.

So the question shouldn’t be “how do I prompt better?” but how do I design a repo where the compliant path is the path of least resistance?

This means converting norms into invariants.

Not “please run tests.” Instead, require a test script to pass or git refuses to proceed.

Not “NEVER commit secrets.” Instead, block secret patterns at commit time.

Not “don’t merge your own code.” Instead, set git branch protections to make it impossible.

Instructions are advisory. constraints are real.

Uncorrelated layers reduce failures

If Claude writes the code, writes the tests, reviews the diff, and evaluates the security scan output, you do not have four layers. You have one reasoning process with the same blind spots wearing four hats.

If a model misunderstands a concurrency primitive, that misunderstanding propagates through implementation, test design, and review commentary. Everything agrees. Everything is wrong.

Just like investing, a couple of uncorrelated checks is much more valuable than many correlated ones.

Aviation’s “swiss cheese model of accident causation”

In the early jet age, planes had the nasty tendency to get lost and fly into mountains. The fix wasn’t “train better pilots.” It was layered, uncorrelated safety systems:

Pilots crosscheck independent instruments. Critical phases of flight operate under “sterile cockpit” rules where nothing unrelated is discussed. Aircraft carry multiple navigation systems: GPS, inertial reference, radio beacons that all validate each other.

Most importantly, modern aircraft connect navigation to a terrain database. If the projected flight path intersects terrain, the cockpit doesn’t politely suggest a correction. It shouts:

“Terrain… pull up.”

After incidents, black boxes reconstruct what happened; even near-misses feed back into procedures.

The result: planes are ~150x safer than driving and crashes are much “weirder” results of many errors.

Governance layers for AI code

AI development needs the same architecture as aviation safety: multiple layers, each with different strengths and weaknesses. I’ve found a few things to dramatically decrease my error rate:

Execution-level deny list. Destructive commands and bypass flags are permission-blocked. The agent literally cannot execute rm, sudo, –no-verify, etc. We mitigate -rm with a garbage folder the agent moves files to and the user empties occasionally.
Git hooks. The enforcement boundary: secrets, format, tests, protected paths.
Tests. Behavioral verification, invariant assertion from planning docs. Code must do what it claims under defined conditions and adversarially test against itself. I’ve also tried enforcing a CI but have been blowing through my GitHub account’s quota :/
Multi-model review. A model from a different lab reviews the code. Different training data, different reward tuning, different strengths and weaknesses.
Server-side branch protection. Identity-enforced approval. The agent account that pushes code cannot approve its own PR. Squash-only merges.
Give humans a place to write documents the AI can’t edit. I’ve found AI has a bad tendency to change documents that I write. I now have a section of my repos dedicated to human produced text that the AI can use as a “golden reference” and should never change. This folder is protected by a git hook.

A bug that slips past tests may not slip past a second model trained on different distributions. A secret missed by one pattern matcher may not bypass a deny list. A sloppy review cannot bypass server-side merge rules.

Git hooks as zero-trust infrastructure

AI agents regress to the path of least resistance (commit directly to main with no tests). Git hooks convert norms into invariants. They run automatically at commit, push, and merge boundaries. If a change violates policy, the repository itself refuses to move forward. Hooks enforce procedure, secrets scanning, format checks, and merge policy at commit and push boundaries while reminding the AI what it should be doing.

For solo developers, the permissions aren’t really designed to support vetting the code “you” submit so I opened a second GitHub account just for my agents. This ensures the agent account that pushes code can’t approve its own PRs and codeowners adds another gate.

The result: agents are treated like software engineers at a well permissioned company. They have total freedom on feature branches and a very scoped blast radius from others’ contributions, git history, and production systems.

AI reviews AI code

If AI writes your code, the first reviewer should not be you. It should be another model. This matters because a second model reduces correlated error, and frees you to focus on higher-leverage decisions.

Every three PRs in my setup trigger a git hook enforced repo-wide assessment for bugs and security regressions.

Only scale dependably correct code

Once you have a system that writes good code, it’s time to create ways for the agents to run in a development loop without your involvement. Some best practices include:

Give agents tools like CLIs and MCPs. Configure once, let the agent interact programmatically. As with GitHub, I create a separate account for my agents with scoped permissions.
Protect the model’s context so it remains cohesive longer. Use CLAUDE.md but don’t make it too long.
Parallelize with git worktrees.

Protect the model’s context window

Context is a budget. Every rule, every file read, every test dump consumes tokens. As context grows, the model gets slower and starts forgetting what you told it. Heavy exploration should be delegated to subagents that return summaries.

Stale context is worse than no context. CLAUDE.md is loaded into every session so every line needs to earn its place. Mine is <100 lines and it’s supported by more detailed rules that load via hook-based triggers rather than sitting in context hoping to be remembered 200k tokens later.

Parallelize agents with git worktrees

Parallelizing development is another multiplier on your output while coding with AI. Git worktrees let you run isolated branches each with their own agents and context windows. Spin up 3-5 features in parallel, each in its own terminal tab, each with its own agent.

I combine this with a task queue: structured files the agent processes autonomously in priority order. Create branch, write code and tests, submit PR.

Numbers 001-099 are human-created tasks. 100+ are agent-created when the agent discovers follow-up work during execution. Define five tasks, review five branches of PRs an hour later.

The key: every parallel path still routes through the same structural gates. Throughput increases without sacrificing enforcement.

A warning: I tried doing this before I implemented quality gates / multi-modal checks and it took me a few days to resolve the mess :/

What’s next

Making adoption easy

This isn’t free. Setup is heavy. Token usage increases. Trivial scripts become slower. For prototypes, this is overkill. For long-lived systems, I think it’s pretty essential.

To make it easier to get started, I built my tools into an open source system called CrossCheck (link below). Let me know what you think :)

What I’m still trying to solve

Long-term memory. CLAUDE.md is static. it doesn’t know what the agent did yesterday or which tasks are blocked. the missing piece is dynamic state that persists across sessions: task graphs, dependency tracking, learned patterns.

UI loops. Backend code has clean, autonomous, easy to verify loops. UI doesn’t. You need to see the component, evaluate it aesthetically, and decide if the layout works. Screenshot-based feedback loops exist but AI’s visual judgment is unreliable. I’m urgently looking for a solution to this one. Until then all my apps will be CLIs and simple landing pages :/

Should I add a third model? Right now Claude writes and Codex reviews, but the merge-to-main step only has branch protection. Should I add Gemini? Gemini and Kimi? Where does this stop being useful?

Safer CLI access. CLIs enable loops, but many CLIs and MCPs don’t have a great way to permission access between agents and humans. We need more approval gates for destructive operations and a better way to distinguish between agents and humans in a way that doesn’t involve buying two seats for every piece of software.

Better agent permissions. We need more granularity on what parts of a git tree an agent should be able to access. I have strong main branch protections enforced on main but more nuance is needed between the branches different agents are individually working on (eg agent1 should be able to have ~unlimited permissions on branch-agent1 but agent2 running in parallel shouldn’t have any permissions there).

How I’m thinking about myself as a developer

I’ve always seen myself as a builder more than an engineer, and I haven’t had the identity crisis some of my friends are going through. The role of human judgment is still central. It’s just shifted: less typing, more governing. Less “write this function,” more “design this system.”

That’s empowering. People without specialized engineering backgrounds or the resources to hire specialists can now build things that used to be gated by both. You don’t need to be a great engineer. You need to be a great governor of systems that create software. I’ve never been more excited to build.

What are the World’s Best Airports?

2025-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Airline route networks really fascinate me. Walking into one of the great airports of the world you can feel the reach of the place and the people who move through it.

S Tier

The handful of irreplaceable hubs that every airline wants to fly to:

Hong Kong (HKG) London (LHR) Los Angeles (LAX) New York (JFK) Paris (CDG) Singapore (SIN) Tokyo (HND)

6 Continent Club

Very few airports can claim to serve 6 continents and it’s hard to not call the members of this club great airports.

From S Tier: CDG, LHR, JFK (New Zealand)

Hardest continents to serve? South America (eliminates HKG, HND, SIN) and Australia (eliminated LHR, CDG until the past few years, still kind of eliminates JFK).

Chicago (ORD) (also New Zealand) Doha (DOH) Dubai (DXB) Houston (IAH) (sometimes) Johannesburg (JNB)* Rome (FCO)

A Tier

Mega-hubs with massive passenger count usually powered by a single airline. Also some regional capitals / gateways.

Amsterdam (AMS) Atlanta (ATL) Beijing (PEK and probably PKX* too) Delhi (DEL) Frankfurt (FRA) Istanbul (IST) Miami (MIA) Seoul (ICN) Shanghai (PVG) Sydney (SYD) Tokyo (NRT)

B Tier

Regionally essential airports that still anchor intercontinental networks like Madrid or São Paulo (both South America <-> Europe), and domestic superhubs with international connectedness like Dallas / Houston.

Addis Ababa (ADD)* Bangkok (BKK) Dallas (DFW) Madrid (MAD) Mexico City (MEX) Moscow (SVO) (pre-war - it’s C tier today)* Munich (MUC) Mumbai (BOM)* New York (EWR) Panama City (PTY)* San Francisco (SFO) São Paulo (GRU) Taipei (TPE) Toronto (YYZ) Vancouver (YVR)

C Tier

Regionally important airports like Anchorage (arctic / cargo), Addis Ababa (west African gateway), and Jeddah (Hajj traffic).

Abu Dhabi (AUH) Anchorage (ANC) Bogota (BOG)* Buenos Aires (EZE) Casablanca (CMN)* Denver (DEN) Honolulu (HNL) Jakarta (CGK)* Jeddah (JED) Kuala Lumpur (KUL) Lima (LIM)* Lisbon (LIS) Manila (MNL) Montreal (YUL) Riyadh (RUH)* Rome (FCO) Santiago (SCL)* Zürich (ZRH)

I haven’t personally been to these airports. Looking at route maps is great but a list like this is really an exercise in the vibes of an airport.

Marginality: the Hidden Variable of Impact

2025-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Doing the work only you can do is the best way to change the world.

Impact isn’t only moral philosophy. It’s also pragmatic.

It’s more fun. Building something singular is infinitely more satisfying than being cog #12,428 in someone else’s machine.

It’s better for your head. People who optimize only for money or status often end up restless. Someone else will always have more and when you finally stop optimizing for that, you don’t have much else to show for it.

It compounds. Impact tends to snowball. Choosing to work on something meaningful attracts better people, creates deeper conviction, and sustains you through harder problems.

Impact is both self-serving and world-serving. It’s the alignment between what keeps you happy and what makes the world better.

At the same time, when people talk about “impact,” it usually comes wrapped in abstraction.

Did this career matter?

Did this donation move the needle?

Did this company change the world?

It gets much sharper if you treat it like an equation:

Impact = Marginality x Scale

Scale is straightforward: how big is the surface area of what you’re working on? Marginality is slipperier: how much does the world actually change because you showed up?

Why the Margin Matters

Marginality isn’t about being present, it’s about being decisive. If you weren’t there, would the outcome still happen?

By this lens, a lot of careers look less impactful than they first appear. High frequency trading might be the most extreme: HFT firms handle more than half of trades (often trading with each other) so the “marginal” impact isn’t building markets, it’s being the 42nd firm in an already crowded race. Even if you capture a sliver of improvement in liquidity, the world wouldn’t really notice if you didn’t exist.

The opposite is true in fields where no one else would have stepped in. Vacuums would still suck without James Dyson, theme parks wouldn’t exist without Disney, and nothing like Airbnb would exist without Brian and Joe or YC funding them when everyone else said no.

If you’re the marginal career or investment dollar[1] that leads to something truly new, the world after your decision is meaningfully different than before and the essence of impact.

Marginality without scale

Unfortunately, a brilliant breakthrough that never reaches people is little more than a curiosity. The world is full of elegant prototypes, academic papers, and clever hacks that live only on GitHub or in a dusty lab notebook. They might prove a point, but they don’t change the point of the world. Impact is defined not only by being the first to do something, but by finding the leverage to make it matter.

Adjusting for scale

Sometimes even a tiny marginal improvement, if multiplied by scale, can be enormous. Making ChatGPT inference 0.01 seconds faster for 1 billion people searching 1,000x / year would save ~320 years of human life.

That’s the magic of scale: a nearly invisible improvement per unit balloons into double-digit billions when stretched across a large footprint.

Scale without Marginality

But here’s the marginality test: if ten different engineers were working on inference optimization and you were the one who happened to land the win, was your presence essential? Or did you just happen to be the one standing in the right place when the bowling ball rolled down the alley? The difference between “I reduced global compute costs by billions” and “I was one of dozens who might have gotten there” is exactly why marginality matters.

This leads to the real challenge: the highest-impact work is not about joining the biggest game, it’s about finding the game that wouldn’t exist without you or where you skill set can truly be unique.

Building an “N-of-1” company

Building a unique, N-of-1 companies scores high on marginality by definition. If they scale, they dominate.

These kinds of companies do a few things at once. What matters isn’t just being first, but altering the trajectory of what follows:

Point to the possible: The best companies are magnets for optimism that shift the Overton window of what feels achievable.

Rally people: Dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands of people orient their careers around the world these companies build.

It compounds outside you: N-of-1 companies are filled with missionaries instead of mercenaries so their growth looks more like a spiritual movement than a corporation.

SpaceX is perhaps the best recent example: they insisted on reusable rockets, reduced the cost of orbit, and enabled the modern space industry.

Do something unique

Marginality teaches us that impact is not evenly distributed. It accrues disproportionately to the people who choose work that literally wouldn’t exist without them.

That’s the specificity needed to drive conviction, attract the best collaborators, and leave no ambiguity about success or failure — either at a startup, as a researcher, within a big company, or in government.

Find the place where your marginal presence multiplies by real scale. Go do the thing only you can do.

How to Own a Commodity

2025-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Vertical integration is a very under-explored modality of technological progress

Peter Thiel

Everyone says not to start a commodity business. But the truth is, the best businesses are commodity businesses that really own the commodity. The trick is to build a structural cost advantage in production, or differentiate the product enough for customers to no longer view it as a commodity.

Why build a vertically integrated business

The magic of vertical integration is that it takes something perfectly fungible — aluminum, oil, electrons — and makes it yours. That’s how you turn a commodity into an empire.

The prize is clear: a large, durable business with 5+ of Hamilton Helmer’s ‘7 Powers” of businesses with a long term competitive advantage.

✅ Scale Economies

✅ Cornered Resource

✅ Network Economies

✅ Process Power

✅ Branding

🤔 Counter-Positioning (maybe to get there)

🤔 Switching Costs (if your customers bought infrastructure that only works with you)

#Opportunities for integration

Opportunities to start an integrated business are a subset of the circumstance that enable any new business.

New technology

Netflix: Streaming was only viable once broadband became cheap.

Alcoa: Aluminum was more expense than gold until the Hall-Héroult smelting process industrialized production.

New demand curve

Amazon Retail: Bezos started Amazon because the internet was growing 2,300% / year

FedEx: Globalization made overnight shipping essential.

Standard Oil: Industrialization, later automobiles.

Certainty (safety, scarcity, reliability)

Standard Oil: Low quality kerosene killed people. Standard was just that.

Meter: WiFi always fails at the worst time. Meter guarantees reliability.

Moderna / mRNA vaccines: First COVID vaccine candidate created in two days.

Distribution / logistics

Coca Cola: Global bottling and distribution enabled the same drink to be served everywhere.

Walmart: global distribution enabled cheap imported goods everywhere

Amazon Retail (internet)

Structurally lower cost basis (control of inputs)

Saudi Aramco: Controls the world’s cheapest oil to produce.

SpaceX: Made their own engines (Elon tried to buy a Russian ICBM first).

Alcoa (owned electrical generation in Tennessee and Quebec Canada)

Regulatory or institutional openings

19th Century Railroads: Granted right-of ways, eminent domain by the government and owned all the land on their routes.

Electric utilities: Traditionally owned generation and delivery to customers.

Half baked integration

Most companies that fail to vertically integrate do so because they can’t reach the scale they need to realize the benefits of integration, don’t integrate the things that accrue the most value, or are in a market that commodifies faster than they can become dominant.

Integration without scale

Not enough scale

GoPro: Tried to launch a a video ecosystem but had too small of a user base.

Rent the Backyard (my previous company): We solved scarcity but priced it like a commodity before reaching scale.

Industry commodifies before you reach scale

SunRun / Solar City: Responsible for solar panels on roofs across America by creating the “solar lease” funded with government incentives. SolarCity tried to go into the solar panel market in 2016 but the product was undifferentiated and Chinese manufacturers were dominant.

Uber: Divested self driving team in 2020. Now, you can book a Waymo via the Uber app in Atlanta and Austin but Waymo has its own app with >25% market share in San Francisco…

Integration in the wrong place

WeWork: Financing innovation turned out to be raising money to burn on riskier than expected leases. Owning buildings wasn’t the bottleneck.

BlueApron: Unit economics were so broken vertical integration of food prep couldn’t help.

Integration with distraction

Juicero: Integrated hardware + proprietary juice packs + logistics. Not enough product differentiation.

Lyft Bike: Doesn’t lead to more Lyft rides. Now Waymo has more market share in San Francisco.

How to integrate

Vertical integration is easy to romanticize or dismiss, but its logic is surgical: it only works when you own a step of the value chain that captures an outsized share of value, or when you change the terms of competition.

Find the bottleneck

Scarce input, distribution channel, reliability guarantee, etc.

Control it

Integrate upstream or downstream to surround that choke point.

Decide how to compete

Option A: Develop a lower cost basis

When everyone gets the same price for a product, the only way to win is to offer your product on a lower cost basis. Economies of scale are most straightforward, but technology or process advantages can get you there too.

Option B: Break the commodity perception

If customers don’t view you as a commodity, you having pricing power. This can mean wrapping your product in a brand that signals trust, engineering reliability guarantees others can’t match, or building an ecosystem that locks in demand.

Follow where value accrues

Early on, this usually means chasing fat margins around scarcity, reliability, or a new technology. As the product commodifies, margins move downstream toward distribution, logistics, and trust, or upstream into scarce inputs and capital intensity.

Owning the commodity

Owning a commodity isn’t about fighting commodification, it’s about bending it to your advantage. The world’s great industrial empires didn’t escape commodity markets; they mastered them by grabbing the choke points where value accumulated, then relentlessly scaling or differentiating themselves.

Oil’s Financials are Falling Apart

2025-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Solar keeps getting better. Oil keeps getting worse.

Hydrocarbons borrow energy from the past

Set aside climate for a moment and ask a simpler question: is continued growth in energy use structurally viable?

The classic de-growth argument says “no” because most modern energy comes from hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal). These are finite geologic windfalls, so we’re effectively living off photosynthesis from millions of years ago. As those reserves deplete, the claim goes, society must ratchet back to something closer to nature’s replenishment rate.

In the long run, this is a pretty good argument against hydrocarbons! We’ve probably used around 50% of accessible oil reserves and depletion raises extraction effort [1]. The more oil we pump, the more expensive the next marginal oil becomes [2].

The declining EROI (energy return on investment) of hydrocarbons You see depletion most cleanly in oil’s decreasing EROI: how many units of energy you get back for each unit you invest to find, extract, process, and deliver energy [3].

An EROI of ~10 is needed for an energy source to “support complex modern societies.”

An EROI of 3 is the “minimum … value required for a fuel to be minimally useful to society.”

In the early 1900s, US oil wells had an EROI of 100-1000.

Today, US oil wells have an EROI of ~10.

US shale (fracking): ~7.

Canada’s tar sands: ~5 [4].

Corn ethanol: 1.0 - 1.7 (it’s not very efficient to burn oil in tractors and on fertilizer to grow a plant you turn into oil!)

As oil’s EROI decreases below viable levels, natural gas (EROI of ~30 but also falling) will first fill the void, but coal will backstop the system if we don’t build out alternatives [5].

Look at that big bump in coal generation in the mid 2000s :/

The Increasing EROI of Renewables Renewables aren’t extracted, they’re manufactured [6]. Costs and, in practice, EROI improve with time and scale because factories learn, supply chains densify, and everything is standardized.

Solar PV (photovoltaic) has shown a remarkably stable learning rate for decades. The more panels we build, the cheaper the next watt becomes (independent of commodity cycles). EROI estimates have increased from ~6 in 2005 to ~20 in 2015 and perhaps as high as ~75 in 2025.

Wind rides a similar curve, albeit slower, with steady gains in rotor diameters, hub heights, and capacity factors pushing it to an EROI of ~18 today.

Today, solar (plus batteries to modulate day / night swings) is quickly becoming the cheapest form of electrical generation in nearly every country in the world [7].

Solar’s cost per kWh has been log-linear decreasing for the past 50 years with no sign of stopping.

Now that it’s crossed the cost tipping point, deployment has gone exponential, compounding the increase in EROI even higher.

Notes

[1] “Accessible reserves” are a moving target. America was a declining oil producer (~5m barrels / day) reliant on foreign imports until fracking technology developed. That boosted technically recoverable oil estimates in the US by ~15%, US oil production up 160% (~13.4m b/d), and made the US the ~second largest exporter of oil in the world. If we find a cheap alternative to oil, we might push the price down to the point reserves are no longer economically viable to extract.

[2] The oil supply curve is upward-sloping because early barrels are extracted first. Successive increments come from deeper water, tighter rock, heavier crude, or harsher environments. Each step requires more energy per barrel.

[3] These numbers are annoyingly nuanced to calculate (is the final use electricity?, how far do you have to move the fuel?, how much do you lose in generation? etc) but the numbers make comparisons a lot easier. I’ve chosen the middle of the range from a couple different research papers including one cited above.

[4] The Saudis and Kuwatis still have an EROI of ~90 which pushes the oil world average to 20.

[5] Coal has consistently remained had an EROI of ~45 over the years and also remains extremely abundant (~20% of reserves extracted). Today, China, India, and so much of the rest of the developing world continue to build and rely on the cheap, consistent, large scale generation provided by coal.

[6] You can sort of make an “eventually we’ll run out of everything including the things to make solar panels” argument but that’s basically arguing for total depletion of all the elements on the earth. Solar panels are primarily made of Silicon which is 28% of the earth’s crust by mass! Hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal) are <0.0001% of the earth’s crust.

[7] LCOE = levelized cost of energy: the net present cost of electricity expected to be generated over the life of the generation facility. I am pretty sure these numbers are unsubsidized.

Founder’s Guide to Executive Skills

2025-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

Being a founder requires many skills. As your company grows these skills overlap with those of an executive. To this end I’ve really enjoyed and learned a lot from the following episodes of Tom Henschel’s executive coaching podcast The Look and Sound of Leadership among others.

Last updated January 2026

Relationship Building and Rapport

Must listen: Your Goodwill Bank Account — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Creating Devoted Followers — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Personal Connections — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Dynamic One-on-ones — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Intimacy in Business: Setting Boundaries — The Look & Sound of Leadership

How to Balance Positive and Constructive Feedback

Conflict Resolution and Difficult Conversations

Building Consensus – Savvy or Sin? — The Look & Sound of Leadership

How to Disarm a Trigger — The Look & Sound of Leadership

The Conflict Resolution Wheel — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Taming the Defensiveness Dragon — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Team Management & Development

How To Coach Your People — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Psychological Safety — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Your Team’s Best Interests - Part One — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Your Team’s Best Interests - Part Two — The Look & Sound of Leadership

How to Respond When You Don’t Have Resources — Coaching for Leaders

If you’re struggling with a new hire: Managing Disruptive Executives — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Meetings

Taming Meetings — The Look & Sound of Leadership

How to Tackle Overtalking — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Communication (tactical)

Very good structure: Sorting and Labeling — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Communicating with Clarity — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Inviting Dialogue — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Communication (general)

Being Concise — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Assertion Versus Aggression — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Showing Teeth — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Leading Teams — The Look & Sound of Leadership

How to Fight Well - The Art of Accomplishment

Passive Aggression - The Art of Accomplishment

Leadership Styles & Approaches

The Flexible Leader — The Look & Sound of Leadership

The Generous Executive — The Look & Sound of Leadership

The Honorable Executive — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Personal Development and Well-being

The Well-Balanced Executive — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Stop Giving Away Your Secrets — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Self-Awareness & Self-Management — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Unlocking Executive Presence through Emotional Intelligence — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Mastering Anxiety — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Failure - The Art of Accomplishment

(If you have imposter syndrome) Managing Former Peers — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Executive Presence and Influence

Usually useful for founders, useful for your team

Influence — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Status — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Gravitas — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Smiling—The Look of Leadership — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Have been told this one is very useful!

Women as Powerful Communicators — The Look & Sound of Leadership

Let me know if you other materials worth sharing!

The Factory's Quote is the Product

2025-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

How instant quoting is reshaping machine shops — and where the real money is going.

Machine shops’ value prop has come unbundled

Shops historically offered a bundle of services to their customer around usually a single type of production process (eg laser cutting, bending, powder coating, etc). Since finding, evaluating, quoting, and scaling with a shop was very involved, customers were extremely sticky.

This is still the case for most large scale production. But the system didn’t work for everyone and a revolution has started. Small startups who just wanted to buy a 25 parts, hobbyists building project cars, and even engineers at big companies who needed parts the next day for their prototype were delayed, ignored, and overcharged by shops who could only process a few, highest priority requests at a time.

Companies serving these markets with the help of new technology have now started the irreversible unbundling of the machine shop ecosystem:

Shops used to sell engineering assistance aka “design for manufacturing” or “DFM” help.

Today, software tools (not even really using AI) can instantly help you with anything flat and many more complicated CNC parts.

Shops used to distinguish themselves on quality and delivering on the timeline promised. Labor skill between shops drove big differences in quality. It was hard to tell if a shop made good parts and delivered on time until you worked with them for awhile.

Today, shops use mostly (the same brands!) computer driven machines. Review sites make it easy to screen for a shop experienced in the type of parts you need and tell if they deliver on time

Shops used to require you to bring them a drawing and it took someone hours to tell you what it would cost.

Today, quoting software tells you immediately or after the sales rep reviews the work in 10 minutes. This has led to the rise of Instant quote powered “horizontally specialists” that produce sheet metal or another specific process at massive scale.

The result: bad shops have really suffered and the average quality in the industry is higher, but good shops are losing the stickiness and DFM differentiation that made them healthy businesses. Most time sensitive work goes to an instant quote marketplace or horizontal specialist. Most extremely cost conscious work goes to China [1] or increasingly, a domestic metal service center [2].

Shops’ next move

Prototype demand in American metalworking is exploding: supports for solar panels, lunar-lander brackets, and AI datacenter server racks. But shops still operating with the old model are struggling. Unable to compete with the scale of newcomers, but also providing the same services, shops have to pick a lane:

Double-down on one narrow step (horizontal focus) and become the lowest-cost, fastest producer of that step.
Climb the value ladder (vertical scope) and re-bundle around a set of physical steps (rather than services) your customers need: cutting, bending, finishing, assembly, even installation. Shift from selling parts to selling solutions.

Margin lives where complexity hides

Horizontal scale wins headlines, but vertical depth wins deposits. When every buyer can click “get quote,” the only defensible profit is the premium people pay to make their problems disappear. That premium pools where a shop owns the whole outcome. From first‐cut DFM tweaks to final torque spec, one PO means one neck to choke.

Horizontal specialists vs vertical integrators

Axis	Horizontal specialist	Vertical integrator
Scope	One manufacturing step: laser cutting, CNC machining, etc	Several steps in the value chain (eg cut → bend → coat → assemble)
Customer promise	Fast + cheap for their narrowly defined scope	One PO. Full service and 100% accountability for an outcome.
Capex pattern	Dozens of ~identical machines supported by custom highly optimized software for the use case; bulk raw-material contracts	Multiple types of specialized machines highly optimized for a specific workflow (eg making data center racks)
Margins	Converge toward specialty’s cost leader	Higher through ancillary services like design and certification.
Cash flow	Boom and bust. Almost certainly low or negative until scale	Consistent and growing
Venture appetite	High (winner take all or oligopoly)	Medium (depends on vertical) — looks more like a job-shop plus services business
Cost driver	Live and die by material costs: they buy metal by the rail car and obsess over nesting and sheet usage.	Material is < half the story; hardware kits, coatings, electronics, testing all pile on. The margin conversation shifts from pennies-per-pound to value of a working sub-assembly.
Through-put	Every wasted second of spindle time hurts. Relentless investment in seamless setup, pallet changers, and “lights out” automation drives everything forward.	Certainty matters more than speed. Delivering the delivery date and quality standards promised to the client is the reason protect premium pricing.
Customer intimacy	Shallow and wide. Thousands of buyers with small orders. Margin comes from scale.	Deep relationships with a few multi-year customers. Margin comes from dependability and consistency.
2025 Closest Examples	SendCutSend, OshCut, metal service centers with machine shops like CoreMark Metals	RMFG, Precision Castparts Corp (Berkshire Hathaway), many contract manufacturers (at least in spirit)

On first look, it seems like these are two parts of a complimentary system:

Horizontal shops win when time and material efficiency are the customer’s top priorities.

Vertical shops win when uncertainty (complex parts that benefit from high DFM expertise, complex value-add processes, compliance) is the dominant pain and buyers will pay to transfer it off their plate.

While it’s clear that traditional shops are caught in the middle and will go out of business, if you dig a bit you’ll realize that those who who focus exclusively on horizontal scaling won’t build enduring businesses either.

Horizontal specialist: get big fast

While horizontal shops might look like the better path because of their scale, I expect their opportunity will look a lot more like an airline than a hyperscalers. Selling commodity parts is really hard!

The capex noose: constant investment with no pricing power

Just like airlines, horizontal specialists need intense ongoing capex to stay ahead. This hamster wheel of investment is coupled with low pricing power created by the instant quoting software they need to scale.

Expiring capacity: a prisoner’s dilemma

Shops are built on a queue of work. If there’s no work, machines and people sit losing money. Shops today commonly take unprofitable work from marketplaces like Xometry to recoup whatever costs they can when machines run idle. Horizontal shops will scale to saturate boom time markets before collapsing in downturns.

Data and process are not a moat

Large datasets of parts help get the companies off the ground but the advantage is logarithmic, not exponential. There are only so many way to make thing before your data is repetitive. Worse, a well funded challenger could effectively buy their way to this dataset (and market share) by subsidizing demand.

Geographic disadvantage

A facility can only grow so large before it saturates the area that it’s cost competitive to transport to. That area shrinks when a competitor opens (even a moderately inferior) facility closer to your customers.

Low barriers to entry

Competitors might be someone in their garage right next to your customer. You can start a machine shop with a few thousand dollars!

Instant quoting commodifies the market

Horizontal shops have initially scaled by offering instant quotations. It’s clearly a 10x customer experience that pulls demand to these first adopters. Industry veterans are skeptical, but they’ll be forced to adopt the technology as they hemorrhage customers.

As instant quoting increases, the friction to get quotes decreases, driving prices to converge around the lowest cost (probably VC subsidized) offering.

Vertical integration: get big smart

Vertically integrated companies might not initially be as interesting, but they’re probably the better business to own in the long run.

Relationships = pricing power

Shops historically differentiated themselves by providing DFM feedback. Vertical shops continue this with white glove service tailored for each customer. The success metric: how many shops replace their in house machine shop with your team.

When a competitor offers a cheaper quote, your customer isn’t choosing between parts, they’re choosing between people.

Deep data is a deep process moat

Verticals record fewer unique geometries, but accumulate process sequences: eg which powder spec plays nicely with which bus-bar plating or which torque spec cracks a particular composite insert.

This dataset is much deeper than a a horizontal shop’s so ages much better. The moment every sheet-laser giant knows what a 7075-T6 0.125-in pocket costs, price converges. Knowing that the pocket warps after hard-coat unless you tweak dwell time is harder to replicate.

Knowing the other 50 hard won lessons needed to make your customer’s satellite enclosure are a competitive advantage.

Transportation costs lessen and extend geographic range

Vertical shops save intermittent shipping costs but also ship items with a higher “product value density” than a horizontal shop, reducing the percent of total cost shipping eats and increasing the geographic range it makes sense to serve customers from.

How to win

The choice then, is stark:

Race to the bottom with ever-faster lasers and a balance sheet destined for consolidation or bankruptcy.
Climb the ladder and charge for certainty, stewardship, and the thousand hard earned tricks that turn steel coils into solutions

For builders, investors, and founders peering into American metalworking, the only enduring margin left is vertical. If you’re not getting paid to shoulder complexity, you’re volunteering to be the cheapest spindle in someone else’s supply chain.

Notes

[1] They have someone making $4 / hour standing by 24/7 to reply to your messages so it might arrive faster than a US shop anyway.

[2] These companies historically were the distribution layer between steel mills and machine shops. Their margins are slim and with instant quoting and increasingly computerized machines, they can view running a machine shop as a capex problem rather than a skill problem. With access to cheap metal and already operating at massive scale, I strongly suspect one of these companies will grow to be the largest horizontal specialist in the market.

Gold Mines & Self-Terminating Business Models

2025-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

But Rung, you're rich — you’ve got everything. Ladders! Ascots! Why did you need [to steal] a diamond?

I inherited a ladder company. We make the one product in the world that no one ever replaces! Ladders don’t wear out like TVs or personal trainers over 40. Oh no. They’re built to last which means no sales. Company’s broke!

- Fred Jones & Rung Ladderton, Season 1 Episode 3: Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated

The Scooby-Doo ladder magnate isn’t just a cartoon punch-line, he’s a warning label. For forty years, Silicon Valley has been trained to worship businesses that compound indefinitely: SaaS dashboards that bill monthly, network effects that snowball, and margins that expand with every extra user.

Deep-tech plays in larger markets than SaaS but by a very different rulebook. Many businesses look less like revenue compounders than process compounder [1] and the revenue you do have looks like a discovery of gold. Finding gold is rare and it’s not necessarily a given you can strike it twice.

My Gold Mine Business

I have first-hand experience with this, because I ran a gold mine: Rent the Backyard. which built ADUs (backyard homes) across the San Francisco Bay Area. The mine was deep (>100,000 suitable backyards in San Jose alone) but obviously a mine. We weren’t particularly worried about exhausting the market though — ADUs were our initial way to build affordable housing.

At just over 400 square feet (40 square meters), we thought of our ADUs as “minimum viable housing” we could quickly get cost effectively reps building. Built with a flat roof from cross laminated timber, we envisioned combining modules into larger single units or stacking them into multifamily units.

Spoiler: We were killed by small scale production and interest rates, not by running out of gold [2].

Anatomy of a Gold Mine

Once you start looking for them, gold mines are remarkably common. Physical installations, financial / technology arbitrage, and products well loved on “r/BIFL” (Buy it for Life) all share the same defining characteristic:

One-and-done customers: You sell to a customer once. There’s no LTV (Lifetime value) calculation, no upsell path, no recurring revenue from the core product. The entire economic value of the relationship is captured in a single transaction [3].

This leads to

Depleting TAM: every sale by you (or a competitor!) reduces the potential customers for your product.
Depleting customer quality: just like a real miner you go after the more accessible and profitable seams of gold first. Subsequent customers are further from your ICP (ideal customer profile), your sales process gets more difficult, and margins decrease as you grow [4].
Gold rush: running the business isn’t about growing the pie, it’s about gorging yourself until it’s gone. If you don’t already have competitors they’ll be here soon.

Struck Gold or Printing Money?

Most real-world businesses sit somewhere between a pick-once gold mine and an always-on SaaS subscription. Two variables matter more than anything else:

Axis	Question	Gold Mine Extreme	SaaS Extreme
Repurchase cadence	How often does the same customer need you again?	Once a ~decade. (Casper)	Every second you’re awake. (Slack)
Revenue elasticity	Can you keep charging for more value over time?	One fixed ticket. (LASIK vision correction surgery)	Expanding seat count, usage-based billing.

Trying to be SaaSy

The easiest way for most software companies to grow is by increasing revenue from existing customers. Gold mine companies don’t do this!

At Rent the Backyard, we were often encouraged to sell homeowners ancillary or reoccurring services like property management or insurance. Unfortunately, commissions from $50 / month insurance or even $200 / month property management couldn’t move the economics on a $200,000 ADU purchase. Solar panels or battery systems might have been a little better but there wasn’t a conceivable way to double or triple the margins on an installed project [5].

Casper spent millions trying to improve the economics of its $1,000 mattress business by selling $50 pillows. The business was bought by private equity for 1/3 its IPO price after two years on the NYSE.

At both companies, it was much better to invest in the core product than ancillary revenue but all companies exist somewhere on the spectrum between mining for gold and selling SaaS.

Mapping the Gold-Mine-to-SaaS Spectrum

Business	Why It Lives There	Attempt to be SaaSy
Gold Mine: LASIK vision correction surgery	You only need to correct your vision once (and it’s literally unhealthy to do twice)	“Lifetime guarantee” conditional on annual eye exam
Casper mattresses	10+ year replacement cycle, no built-in add-ons.	Release pillows, dog beds, CBD sleep drops — anything to manufacture frequency.
Tesla & Peloton	Durable hardware, but software subscriptions or purchases can add meaningful revenue	Convert one-off buyers into subscribers. Shorten upgrade cycles.
Airbnb Guests	Guests often book once for a wedding or vacation.	Cater listings toward remote workers. Offer loyalty perks and business-travel tools
Apple iPhone + App Store	iPhone itself is a 3- to 4-year good, but the services layer renews daily.	Subscriptions and ongoing spend (iCloud, TV+, Apple Pay Later)
SaaS: Slack	Metered or seat-based billing, near-zero marginal cost.	Increase usage and switching costs

Solar Leasing’s Jevon’s Paradox: Growing a Gold Mines to Death

As residential solar panels first became available in the early 2000s, companies like Sunrun and Solar City (now owned by Tesla) were textbook examples of a gold mine business. Massive sales teams went door-to-door signing up homeowners for “solar lease” loans to put solar panels on their roof to save on their utility bills. It was an easy sell: your monthly payment on the solar panel was less than what you’d save on electricity.

At first the market was a true gold mine. There were a finite number of correctly angled, suitably sunny roofs owned by people with good enough credit. Once a house got a solar installation, it was off the market [6].

But then solar kept getting cheaper.

The Y-axis (cost per watt) is a log scale 😳

The number of homes solar leasing companies could service rapidly expanded [7] giving the companies more TAM to mine but the costs kept dropping. When Sunrun was founded in 2007, a 7 kW system to power a 2,000 square foot house cost ~$60,000. In 2025, that same system would be only ~$14,000 [8].

Unfortunately for Sunrun, low prices also meant consumers didn’t really need to finance solar panel as much either. Sunrun’s stock is about the same price as when it IPO’d in 2015.

Gold Mine Mistakes

If you realize you’re running a gold mine, you have to fight the instincts you’ve learned from reading about or running typical venture-backed startups [9].

Mistake #1: Confusing Yourself with a “Growth” Startup

The single biggest error a gold mine company can make is subsidizing customer acquisition. As a gold mine company, you will make ~all of your money at the time of acquisition or on some short half life thereafter.

The easiest way to recognize a startup that doesn’t know they’re a gold mine business is to see them losing money on CAC. In a normal startup, you might justify that with high LTV or !network effects! But here, the transaction is the beginning and the end. There is no “later” to make it up on volume. You are just lighting money on fire.

Mistake #2: Staying in “Growth Mode” for Too Long

The lifecycle of many gold mine company can be brutally compressed: Growth -> Plateau -> Decline. You have to be ruthlessly honest about which phase you’re in. If you’re in decline, you can look for clever ways to reinvest in growth or new business lines, but you might never find anything as good as the original business!

It’s okay if you can’t find anything worth investing in but your job becomes gracefully managing decline and creating the best outcome for your stakeholders, employees, investors, and yourself [10].

Mistake #3: Returning Capital the Wrong Way

Without a growth story, declining companies have a share price that’s hard to predict but presumably decreasing. While conventional wisdom is now that buying back stock is mechanically ~identical and more tax efficient than issuing dividends, this only applies to companies with a flat or rising market capitalization!

The worst mismanagement of a declining company? IBM:

The company spent ~$200 billion buying back their stock between 1995 and 2019. As recent as November 2023, IBM’s market cap was only ~$100 billion.

The stock has risen with the AI wave to ~$275 billion as of July 2025 and the company has finally switched to paying a ~$6 billion dividend instead of buying back more stock.

Sunset or Pivot

IBM’s buy-back folly shows what happens when a finite-growth company pretends there’s more gold in the mine. The cash would have served shareholders far better as dividends (or even better if they would have built their Watson Jeopardy playing AI into ChatGPT).

If you think you’re running Rung Ladderton’s ladder company, here’s the playbook:

Phase	What You Do	What You Don’t
1. Exploit	Price for margin, not share; recover CAC in months, not years.	Subsidize acquisition “for growth.”
2. Harvest	Pour operating cash into dividends or a clearly superior adjacent bet.	Chase low-ROI “synergies” just to keep the music playing.
3. Sunset (or Pivot)	Shrink with dignity: cut fixed costs, keep service quality, communicate early.	Hide decline with creative accounting or heroic share buy-backs.

How to Win as a Gold Mine

When the gang finally unmasks Rung Ladderton, he snarls, “I could’ve made it work, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!” The truth is simpler: no amount of villainy, or venture accounting, turns a non-recurring product into a compounding engine.

Gold mine companies aren’t “bad” businesses. They can be incredibly lucrative and strategically valuable. But they are fundamentally different to run than a quintessential software business. The key is self-awareness. Know what kind of company you are. Mine your gold, be smart about how the business can grow, and know when to distribute the spoils.

Notes

[1] Companies that can internally compound their engineering culture, ambition or underlying processes (eg Musk’s belief “the factory is the product”) are probably the businesses most likely to win in the long run.

OpenAI’s uses the same staff to build successive new products that each monotonically decrease in cost.
SpaceX has the lowest cost launch today but is focused on going to Mars and doesn’t patent its core rocket technology.
Facebook benefits from an incredible network effect but it’s “move fast and break things” engineering culture has helped it copy or buy anything new in social media for the last 20 years.

[2] Reading this piece again a few years removed I also think we didn’t charge enough. We wanted to be the Toyota of the market (cheap homes for everyone, not custom homes for the upper middle class), but we pursued that a bit too dogmatically. Until the very end we missed opportunities to upsell customers who would have happily paid for fancier fixtures, landscaping, and small custom additions. Pricing low, slow production, and construction inflation cut our backlog of projects (and the CAC embedded in them) from profitable to break even and eventually unprofitable.

[3] All of the economics might be captured in a single transaction but it might take a while for all the revenue to arrive (maybe you are paid monthly for 20 years like a solar least) and there is some stochastic risk on the backend.

[4] There’s an idyllic conception of the California Gold Rush as a time when prospectors with only a pan easily pulled gold from pristine rivers next to Sutter’s Mill. This was the case for the first few months, but those surface deposits were quickly exhausted. Most of the gold harvested in California was from large operations that exploded rock underground, smashed to bits in giant machines and then run through a sludge of mercury to catch the gold flakes.

[5] The business did have an upsell opportunity at the customer level though: many of our customers were property investors with multiple properties that could have an ADU installed. This was meaningful for the ADU industry as it descended into a CAC war.

[6] There was actually a second gold mine here: Federal Investment Tax Credits (ITC) for solar installations that made up ~half of early economics. From Sunrun’s S1: ”Federal Investment Tax Credit (“ITC”). Tax incentives have accelerated growth in U.S. solar energy system installations. Currently, business owners of solar energy systems can claim a tax credit worth 30% of the system’s eligible tax basis (or the fair market value). While the tax credit for third-party-owned systems is set to step down to 10% on January 1, 2017, we expect the impact of any reduction to be mitigated by declining costs, rising electric rates and additional sources of low-cost financing.”

[7] A home in Maine (worst state for solar) needs a solar system ~22% larger than in CA to generate the same amount of power

[8] Prices before tax incentives. Post incentive prices would be ~$40,000 in 2007 and ~$11,000 in 2025.

2007 panel cost: $5 / watt x 7,000 kW = $35,000

2024 panel cost: $0.16 / watt x 7,000 kW = $1,120 — a 96.8% decrease over 17 years

Permits, installation, etc cost $5,000 - $8,000. Many customers also now add batteries which keeps the price a bit higher and make the leasing business model a bit better.

[9] Choose who advises your company very carefully! Silicon Valley is so SaaS pilled that >95% of randomly sampled investors, advisors, and employees won’t understand this dynamic and will encourage you to run the business sub-optimally.

[10] Maybe you will find something to use your gold mine as a launchpad to reach. But be intellectually honest: if the new business is so good why aren’t you just doing that right now? Be very skeptical if you can’t find a good reason. All companies have a lifespan and some are shorter than others. Gold mines produce incredible outcomes — just don’t spend all the proceeds continuing to mine when there’s nothing left!

Basic Capital's Big Idea: Bet Your Retirement on Interest Rates

2025-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

I just saw a Tweet for how Basic Capital can help you 5x the size of your retirement portfolio by borrowing money.

There’s definitely a way to lose all your money.

But more importantly, Basic butchers the entire philosophy of investing for retirement.

So what is Basic offering and should you take them up on it?

You give Basic Capital control of your 401k or IRA.
Basic Capital lends you $4 for every $1 in your account. They charge you ~6.25% for this privilege [1].
Borrowing that $4 costs $0.25 / year but there’s a solution to cover that cost!
Take $4.25 of the $5 available and invest it in bonds [2] that pay you more than the interest you pay Basic.
Invest the remaining $0.75 in the stock market.
The money is locked up for five years.

How should you think about this retirement portfolio?

Obligatory disclosure that I’m just some guy on the internet - not your financial advisor!

It’s generally recommended (especially for young people) that you should be almost entirely invested in stocks [3]. Investing in American stocks is betting that American companies and the country’s economy will be worth more in the future. This has been a really good bet if you have a multi-decade time horizon! I am personally very excited to bet on America - especially on the 40+ year time horizon before I retire.

But Basic is asking us to turn 25% of the money we’d otherwise put in stocks into 425% bonds. How should we think about those?

Let’s say interest rates go up 5% as they did between 2022q1 - 2023q3

Your cost to borrow $4 rises from $0.25 / year to $0.45 / year.

If the bonds you bought have a fixed interest rate, you don’t make any more money per month. You have a monthly deficit [4] and even worse, since new bonds would be issued at a rate that makes more money, your bonds are less desirable and go down 25% in value [5]. You borrowed $4 to make a $5 portfolio but the whole thing is now only worth ~$3.93 [6]!

This means you’ve technically lost $1.07 on a $1.00 investment and the interest you’re being paid doesn’t cover the interest you have to pay each month.

That means one of two things would happen:

SVB fire sale: [7] Your lender watches this start to happen and gets nervous. They force you to sell the bonds and some of your stock to pay them back. This could happen slowly or all at once.

Margin call: Your lender forces you to contribute more collateral to keep them from liquidating you [8].

If the bonds you bought have a variable interest rate it’s a little less bad but you’ll probably still lose a good bit of money [9].

And those are the two issues with Basic:

You’ve changed your retirement account to be a bet on interest rates being stable (or decreasing) over the next five years instead of on the American stock market / economy growing over the next 50 years [10].

And you have some large risk of losing all of the money you invest if interest rates climb a lot.

Unfortunately this is the problem with most all complicated consumer financial products — they shift considerable advantage to the company that has 10x more time to think about the transaction [11].

So how do I personally think about how to make an investment in something claiming to beat the market [12]? I ask myself why I’m special — and I better have a pretty good answer!

There’s a world of people who spend decades of their lives trying to find and make good investments and even they struggle to beat the market!

There’s only a few times when you should be able to make better than average returns:

The government is subsidizing it [13].
There’s some regulatory arbitrage you’re being paid to be a part of [14].
The investment is too small to be interesting to big investors [15].
You know something that’s both non-consensus and correct about the world [16].
You have some kind of special access (and be really really cautious about how valuable that actually is…) [17]
You’re being paid to assume some risk that you don’t understand very well and it’s too good to be true 💔 [18].

For all the clever packaging, the swap Basic Capital’s offering is pretty simple:

They wants you to swap a decades-long bet on American growth for a short-term leveraged gamble on interest rates. That’s not just risky — it’s missing the point of retirement investing entirely.

Notes

[1] Technically they charge you SOFR (overnight treasury backed lending rate) + 2%. This is an a pretty good rate. But then they also charge you lots of other fees!

0.50% management fee (maybe on the borrowed money too?)
5% fee on gains
$300 annual subscription fee

Sheel Mohnot modeled the post fee returns profile here and the performance looks even less impressive (4.5% CAGR). In this (optimistic) scenario where interest rates don’t change, Basic Capital and its lending partners would make 5x the money you made in fees.

As an aside there is some risk this structure is not permitted by the IRS and could invalidate your IRA’s tax exempt status. The IRS prohibits using these “as security for a loan.” Basic tries to get around that by putting the portfolio in an LLC but the LLC sure seems like a “sham entity” that only exists to circumvent the rules. Any profits from the money you borrow might also be subject to a 21% UBIT (unrelated business income tax) rate.

[2] Matt Levine’s article mentions “private credit opportunities” — lending money to other (riskier) uses to receive a 9% interest rate.

[3] There have been a lot of articles published about Basic (and featured on Basic’s website!) that aren’t really about Basic — they’re about whether you should borrow money on margin for what you’d normally buy in your retirement account — eg a portfolio of 125% or 150% stocks. This isn’t the portfolio Basic wants to sell you. They’re offering a portfolio with 75% equities and 425% long-dated bonds.

[4] Since the portfolio would probably now have “negative carry,” you need to make a contribution each month to cover the difference between what you’re paid and what your cost to borrow was. You’d do that by making additional contributions or liquidating some of the portfolio (which probably makes the whole situation worse since you’re realizing losses).

[5] Price change = -Duration * Interest Rate Change → 5 years * 5% = 25% decrease

[6] 4.25 x 0.75 (bonds) + 0.75 (stock) = $3.93 I’m assuming the stocks stayed the same value but their value might also go down when interest rates go up like this!

[7] This is the same situation SVB was in. They purchased bonds at low interest rates and a long duration and when the interest rate went up, the bond’s value went down and they were technically insolvent (even though they could have just held the bonds to maturity and everything probably would have been fine!)

[8] It’s unclear if this would even be possible since IRA and 401ks have contribution limits ($7,000 and $23,500 respectively if you’re in Basic’s young professional target market).

[9] It’s not much better if the bonds you bought have a variable interest rate. Variable interest rates mean that the person that owes you money now needs to make a payment ~twice as large. If the buyer can’t pay you or renegotiates how much they’ll pay, your bond is now also worth less than before. Either way, your portfolio is highly levered, worth a lot less, and your lender is very nervous.

[10] Stocks will certainly go up and down over this same time horizon but a stock has an indefinite life. Bonds have a fixed duration and you should probably care about what’s happening when they reach maturity and expire.

[11] You might be able to gain some “edge” by maximizing a system like credit cards that other people don’t think about (I literally wrote a guide for this lol). Chase probably lost money on the Sapphire program from 2016-2024. But even then, the bank probably comes out ahead by winning a large chunk of the financial business you’ll do over your life.

[12] “Beating the market” here means receiving a return in excess of what could be expected for the given level of risk you’re taking. See [18]

[13] The Basic Capital team talks about wanting to create an “FHA mortgage for investing.” This is an interesting goal (I am directionally in favor of Senator Booker’s “baby bonds” / American Opportunity Account proposal) but it misses the underlying aspects of both an FHA loan and the 30 year fixed rate mortgage — they’re not viable financial products without a subsidy / guarantee from the government!

[14] This is the most charitable possible way to view Basic Capital. The story goes something like:

banks want access to this cool new thing called “private credit”
regulators told them they should loan money to consumers instead
lending to Basic Capital’s customers is basically a backdoor to something that the banks think resembles private credit

[15] A popular private equity playbook is literally to buy and bundle up very small businesses and sell that bundle to a bigger private equity firm. The bundle is worth more than the sum of its parts because it’s (presumably) more resilient than any individual part and it’s more interesting to a larger group of investors.

There’s a sweet spot in real estate investing that also rewards small (but not too small) scale since a professional firm has a ton of overhead and would rather invest $100m at an 8% return than $2m at a 12% return.

[16] This is possible (especially at a small scale) but really really hard to do consistently. This is what makes Warren Buffett Warren Buffett. We should collectively be skeptical that we or anyone we know is the next Warren Buffett!

[17] Bernie Madoff and lots of other frauds started with “special access!”

[18] All investments happen on some risk vs return curve but it’s probably a bad idea to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller. The investment tranche that was first to lose money among a series of investors had a name in 2008: toxic asset

Your Credit Score is Worth More than the Plane

2025-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

If a capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk back in the early 1900s, he should have shot Orville Wright; he would have saved his progeny money.

- Warren Buffett

The airline business is brutal. Your seat availability today depends on aircraft orders placed a decade ago. Your inventory — empty seats — expire the moment the gate closes. Everyone from the mechanics to pilots are unionized. And competitors offer virtually the same product. In 2024, every major US airline lost money flying passengers [1]. Good thing that flying planes isn’t how airlines actually make money.

The real moneymaker? That shiny piece of plastic in your wallet that lets you check a bag for free [2]. That means airline hubs aren’t just about filling seats on direct flights all over the world; they’re about maximizing credit card sign-ups and, more importantly, ongoing credit card spend [3].

A hub in a large population, high-income catchment like the San Francisco Bay Area (~8 million people @ ~$130k per capita) has a potential credit card spend 12x higher than a smaller, less affluent metro like St. Louis (~2 million people @ ~$40k per capita) [4]!

United Airlines: The Coastal Overlord

United has played the geography game best. Their hubs are a list of America’s largest and wealthiest metropolitan areas: San Francisco, Chicago, New York (technically Newark), and Washington DC. These are an advertiser’s dream for premium credit card products. Add to this their significant operations in Los Angeles and secondary hubs in Houston (oil money and the fourth largest US metro) and Denver (perhaps the largest physical catchment of any US hub), and you’ve got a network of people who buy $8 lattes on their United Explorer card [5].

Delta Air Lines: Premium Brand, Mixed Geography

Delta has a strong reputation for reliability and is usually seen as the most “premium” of America’s major airlines. While they’re big in New York and have made strong pushes into premium markets like Los Angeles, Seattle, and Boston, the rest of Delta’s hubs lie inland.

Minneapolis, Detroit, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City are all captive “fortress hubs” (>70% of flights) with reasonable enough economies, but they can’t rival the high-income sizzle of a big coastal city. As the pre-merger saying at Northwest went for Minneapolis: “It’s cold, dark, and nobody wants to go there. But it’s all ours!

American Airlines: What’s Geography?

American Airlines is what happens when you merge a bunch of airlines together without a coherent strategy. The market agrees: American has a ~$7b market cap while Delta and United hover around $30b.

Miami is American’s only star. They split (and seem to be getting pushed out of) Chicago. They’re tied for #2 with United in challenging Los Angeles [6]. Dallas is a solid large fortress hub, (about as good as Houston) and everything else is weak.

American’s cardinal sin is Philadelphia. During their merger, US Airway’s fortress hub and primary transatlantic gateway was chosen over American’s (very strong) New York hub to cut costs.

Philadelphia and New York’s catchment has overlap, but losing what was a leading position in America’s largest city has been the strategic blunder American has never really overcome. Today, American limps along in New York, serving high-traffic business markets but with far less connectivity than United or Delta.

The rest of American has leaned into the retirement rich, low credit card spend Sun Belt. They fly an incredible volume of domestic travelers through Charlotte (North Carolina lol) and Phoenix but these cities are smaller than the other major airlines’ secondary hubs [7].

Miles > Miles Flown

As Southwest continues it’s fall as the only US airline to consistently make money transporting passengers [8], the credit card wars have intensified. During Covid, United and American each borrowed ~$5b against their mileage programs. Delta borrowed $9b [9].

So next time you’re 30,000 feet up remember: your cabin crew is primarily there for your safety, but also for your comfort, and your credit score.

Notes

[1] This means <$0 of net income from flying people around. In industry parlance: cost per available seat mile (CASM) higher than passenger revenue per available seat mile (PRASM). This was the case for Delta, United, American, Southwest, JetBlue, and Spirit in 2024 and 2023. Only exceptionally well run (and much smaller) Alaska had a higher PRASM than CASM in 2024 (as well as 2023).

[2] Geography is somewhat correlated to business travel which industry analysts love to obsess over. This is moderately important — my consultant friend’s team of 5+ spending $12k / person to fly roundtrip business class across the Atlantic for two days is really profitable!

There just aren’t that many clients like this though. In 2019, Apple was United’s #1 customer, spending $150m / year with the airline ($35m of that bought them 50(!!) business class seats every day between SFO and Shanghai), but the whole account was <0.4% of the airline’s ~$44b of revenue.

[3] Though this certainly helps! Direct flights are disproportionately chosen by business travelers and other price-insensitive flyers, and they cost less to operate. American Airlines has spent the last decade losing the New York market because their merger with US Airways forced them to focus on Philadelphia as their transatlantic gateway.

[4] Similarly to sports teams, the thing that matters isn’t as much metro area but what major hub is closest. Aside from being large and rich, San Francisco pulls fliers from all of northern California and parts of Nevada. St. Louis unevenly splits Illinois with Chicago, and loses in the south to Nashville. Pittsburgh was too close to DC to stay a hub, but has kept good service because it’s the airport for Appalachia and half of Ohio. PIT also has a really good CEO.

Some airports like New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Orlando move a lot of people but aren’t as valuable because they don’t have strong local traffic (fliers get your credit card because the airline can take you everywhere).

[5] It then also makes perfect sense for United to be the most international of the US airlines.

[6] Los Angeles and New York are essential but very tough markets. They’re big, rich, and everyone wants to go there. However, this competitive dynamic though, means that no one airline can ever really dominate the market (though American sure got close in the past!) — they’re too big of a prize.

In NYC

United	24%
Delta	22%
JetBlue	16%
American	13%

In LA

Delta	20%
American	15%
United	15%
Southwest	10%

Chicago has this problem a little bit too, but after some gate shenanigans, it seems like United might beat American.

Delta had American’s problems a few years ago, so got competitive in small but rich hub cities. They’ve dominated JetBlue in Boston, but have a mixed record against Alaska in Seattle, and are now even challenging American in Miami.

[7] American also has a Washington DC operation at (the much more premium and convenient) National / Reagan airport but the airport is packed, has tiny runways (no big planes) and a “perimeter rule” that limits flights >1,250 miles (about as far as Oklahoma City).

American also has a crazy idea to be the leading airline in the “125th-200th” largest metros in the US. This has a different problem: serving these markets well means increasing frequency by “downgauging” to smaller planes. These smaller planes cost more to operate so you need richer customers. That might exist in Hyannis, Martha’s Vineyard, but probably not in Topeka, Kansas.

[8] Southwest did so many things differently (point-to-point, and was profitable for 47 consecutive fiscal years. But the airline’s egalitarianism, point-to-point domestic network, and dispersed geography meant is could never develop as much of a halo around its credit card points. As the airline’s underinvestment in technology caused operational mayhem, there was no golden mileage goose to fall back to.

[9] United’s MileagePlus program was appraised at $22b (>70% of its market cap), American’s AAdvantage program at $20b-$32b (300% - 450% of its market cap). Delta’s Skymiles program was not publicly appraised.

Dancing with Missiles

2025-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

I wrote this essay back in school after spending months interviewing veterans and poring over declassified mission logs from the squadron my grandfather flew 100+ missions with during the Vietnam War.

The Wild Weasels were the “first in, last out” volunteers who intentionally drew fire from surface-to-air missiles to protect the strike packages behind them. I’m still struck by how much their story says about courage, politics, and the uneasy art of fighting a limited war under the shadow of super-power escalation.

When a Soviet-made, SA-2 surface-to-air-missile (SAM) was launched at an F-100F Wild Weasel fighter jet, the atmosphere in the cockpit was surprisingly calm for the danger posed by the thirty-five foot long missile closing in on to the plane at three and a half times the speed of sound. Detecting the launch with the “oh shi— light”, the Electronics Warfare Officer would call for his pilot to “take it down” in the general direction of the launch, searching for black smoke to indicate the exact location of the launch site. When found, the pilot would roll the aircraft over and dive directly towards the missile, pushing the throttle to full power. Locating the speeding telephone pole sized missile, the pilot would hurtle the plane towards it, pulling out of the steep dive a half second before the two hundred and eighty eight pound warhead would have otherwise slammed into the jet at supersonic speeds. If the evasive maneuver was successful, the aircraft would then proceed to strafe the heavily camouflaged missile site to destroy it.

This was a textbook mission. Not all missions bore such results for the US Air Force crews who flew them. Charged with protecting strike packages of F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers, the Weasels were be the “first in” and “last out” in a mission. As Wild Weasel and Medal of Honor recipient Leo Thorsness recalls, “The strike pilots had a fixed target dropped their bombs, and they’d be maybe two minutes. We’d be trolling around in there for maybe twenty minutes.” The first Weasel crews had less that a fifty percent survival rate. Indeed losses only worsened with the arrival of the second squadron of Weasels. As one pilot recalls, “We arrived [at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base] on the Fourth of July in Sixty-Six. We had eight aircrews and six airplanes. Forty-five days later we had no airplanes, and of our sixteen people, four had been killed, two were prisoners of war, three had been wounded two of them had wounds so serious they had to go back to the states and one fellow had quit.” From the perspective of airmen in theater, this tactical situation and their losses might have been avoided. Pilots had watched as the North Vietnamese gradually built their air defense umbrella, but air strikes were forbidden especially on surface to air missile sites because of restrictions issued from political authorities who oversaw the war from Washington DC. These political restrictions seemed folly to the pilots fighting every day, who recoiled at the waste of aircraft, men, and prestige, but they were a necessary and just part of a global containment strategy to stop communism while avoiding global conflict.

Beginning in 1962 with the deployment of 3,000 US Military advisors to assist the South Vietnamese Armed Forces in combating the Viet Cong insurgency, the war over the skies of Vietnam began modestly. Soon, without permission, American pilots began to fly reconnaissance and ground support missions, pretending to be South Vietnamese Air Force pilots. This low level of US engagement corresponded to the limited guerrilla warfare the Viet Cong waged against the South Vietnamese government to undermine its control. In 1963, with increases in the guerrilla war around Saigon and in the Mekong Delta, the United States began to escalate its involvement by deploying aircraft to support the South Vietnamese Army. But, support was small-scale and tactical in nature, and the United States refrained from attacking strategic targets in North Vietnam.

After the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, America began to bomb strategic targets in North Vietnam. With escalation into the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign, America’s policy makers attempted to slow the flow of material support to the Viet Cong and thus bring a Korean Conflict type conclusion. Initially planned for several weeks, the operation continued when the North Vietnamese would not yield not Rolling Thunder’s pressure. Fours years later, when Rolling Thunder concluded, it would be America that yielded unable to force the desired result militarily without the risk of broadening the war. Fourteen hundred American pilots and over 50,000 Vietnamese would be dead.

Defended by only 1,500 Anti-Aircraft-Artillery (Triple-A) guns at the start of Rolling Thunder, North Vietnam was poorly prepared for the onslaught of the United States Air Force and Navy. Initially, US Air Superiority over the skies of North Vietnam proceeded as planned and losses were acceptable in the context of similar, historical efforts.

Once the United States had committed itself to Rolling Thunder, the Soviet Union began to increase the quantity and sophistication of the armaments it gave to the North Vietnamese including the SA-2 to counter American efforts. While not considered accurate above 30,000 feet, the SA-2 changed the nature of the air war, forcing bombers higher and thus decreasing the accuracy of their strikes, or lower and into a newly built up mass of Triple-A. Even when flying at higher altitudes where SAMs were less effective, aircraft were often forced to drop their bombs prematurely to conduct evasive maneuvers. As one pilot notes, “a SAM is what got Gary Powers in the U2. The missile was effective, it could reach you at most altitudes you flew at.” While only eleven of the 180 SAMs fired in 1965 destroyed aircraft, the sophistication and lethality of the missiles intimidated pilots and influenced mission planning. This fear became so deeply ingrained that some predicted SAMs would be “the death of the flying Air Force”

First detected under construction on April 5, 1965, by a U2, the deployment of fifty-six SAM sites was closely documented and monitored by the US Military. Banned from attacking these sites out of political worry that Soviet advisors might be present to oversee construction, pilots helplessly watched the sites become operational over the next three months. Indeed, the unloading of numerous SAMs and other armaments in the port of Haiphong was also observed, and again strikes were banned out of fear of escalating the Cold War. As one enraged pilot recalls; “They photographed [the missiles] everyday being loaded onto trucks and hauled out to the countryside. They photographed them being set up in the jungle… we could have knocked them out right then, but that was never the case. We had to wait until they were operational to shoot us down and then our leader [Secretary of Defense] McNamara would allow us to hit one site.” The seeds of dissent among pilots were sown during this early phase of Rolling Thunder when political concerns predominated military ones.

While the US Air Force and Navy had been aware of the threat posed by the SA-2 since the mid-1950s, no strategy had been developed to counter the threat. When the US Air Force (USAF) suffered its first combat loss to a SAM over North Vietnam on July 24, 1965, the Air Force moved to establish a committee to counter the threat. Under the command of the Air Force’s Chief of Staff General John P. McConnell, the Dempster Committee recommended the development of a squadron of fighters with special electronics to seek and destroy SAM sites with missiles capable of homing onto SAM radar systems. These recommendations began to be executed in a new program known as Project Wild Weasel.

While this committee was underway, something had to be done about the immediate SAM problem facing aviators over North Vietnam. After the initial loss, McNamara took to the New York Times to announce that the United States would destroy the offending missile site by the end of the week. The next day, orders for Operation Iron Hand arrived. A strike force was to be assembled to attack the SAM site under very specific mission criteria including: altitude, airspeed, and ordnance. At Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base, pilots were upset when they saw the “idiotic” specificity of the orders. Reflecting on the mission, pilot Billy Sparks described the orders as “the absolute most incredible bunch of crap imaginable,” noting that his “grandmother knew more about targeting than” to fly only fifty feet above the ground at half the usual speed of a bombing run. With pilots upset by what they perceived to be “suicide orders”, their commanding officer phoned headquarters in Saigon to request changes to mission parameters but this request was denied.

On July 27, 1965, sixty-four aircraft were sent to eliminate the SAM site. Fifty-six returned. As one pilot remembers: “There was no missile equipment anywhere in the area. The North Vietnamese had taken telephone poles, painted them white, and propped them up with pine trees they had cut down to make it look like a missile site.” Instead, hundreds of guns of all caliber greeted the strike force as it rolled slowly into a bombing run of a nonexistent target.

Iron Hand undermined the trust pilots had in their chain of command. Angered by McNamara’s New York Times article detailing the location of the site to be struck and also by his other comments regarding a surplus of pilots in theater, aircrews responded with gallows humor: perhaps their numbers could be reduced by announcing the location of targets ahead of time more often. Pilots became even more enraged when they discovered the orders for the strike had been passed through command in Saigon where “[all information made its way to] Hanoi in hours”. In his 2013 memoir, Billy Sparks considered the Department of Defense’s judgment dereliction of duty at best and treason at worse given that they were aware of the leaks in Saigon. “I promised myself that I would never, ever allow anyone, regardless of rank, to waste so many folk” said Sparks. “I owed it to the people I flew with to take better care of them than that”. Beyond questioning the military qualities of orders given, front line pilots often felt that their efforts were subservient to the career advancement of officers above them. “No one ever paid any penalty for those names that went on the wall [because of Iron Hand]” Sparks lamented.

In the wake of Iron Hand and growing fears over the SAM threat, the head of Project Wild Weasel, Brigadier General Kenneth Dempster quickly organized meetings between the military and defense contractors to pursue creating a squadron with a radar homing and warning (RHAW) electronics system. When Applied Technology Inc. came forward with the AN/ APR-26 electronics system capable of detecting SAM radar frequencies, the Air Force negotiated a deal to use the technology in hours, and Applied Technology had the adopted for the an aircraft in just thirty days. During testing, it soon became apparent that the pilot would not be able to mange the complicated electronics system on his own and that the mission would require a second crewman. This prompted the addition of an Electronic Warfare Officer (EWO) whose primary duty was to manage the system.

Recruiting the “best and brightest” the Air Force had to offer, pilots were required to have at least two thousand flight hours and EWOs were selected based upon their skills and experience with sophisticated electronics in aircraft such as the B-52. As pilot Mike Gilroy described, Weasels additionally required an arrogance that the job would “not [be] too tough” and a feeling of being “bulletproof”

Because of the danger of the Weasel mission, pilots and EWOs were allowed to select one another over cocktails and often had mock weddings. As Billy Sparks notes; “the joke went that you were together for a hundred missions or death to you part.” Forming powerful bonds, pilot and EWOs (affectionately called “Bears”) often developed their own means of communication in the cockpit alerting one another of threats and other pertinent information. So close was the bond between pilot and EWO that one Weasel remembers that he’d “rather have someone mess with [his] toothbrush then to mess with [his] bear [because his] bear was the most important thing in the world to [him] at the time and for very good reason. “

Beginning their training in October of 1965 at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the initial Weasels’ training was accelerated and highly expedited given the hot war in Vietnam. Focused on destroying sites before strikes and suppressing SAMs while aircraft were in the vicinity of the target, the Weasels developed tactics to “make the SAM drivers nervous and shaky”. In an Iron Hand mission, Weasels would fly in front of a strike force to entice SAM operators to engage them so that they could attack the sites. With the sites neutralized, the strike force could continue on their mission with less risk. As a Wild Weasel training aid mentions, “the actual destruction of SA-2 sites [was] normally of secondary importance in the suppression role and [would] not normally be carried out unless a particular site [could] be destroyed without sacrificing the protective suppression the strike force [required] from other threatening sites.” Nicknamed “dancing with the SAMs” by pilots due to the sudden evasive maneuvers required to dodge the speeding missiles, the specifics of missions were at first laughable. In one briefing, when EWO Jack Donovan first understood the scope of his mission he exclaimed: “You want me to fly in the back of a little tiny fighter aircraft with a crazy fighter pilot who thinks he’s invincible, home in on a SAM site in North Vietnam, and shoot it before it shoots me, you gotta be shittin’ me!” Donovan’s statement resonated with many a Weasel as “you gotta be shittin’ me” soon became an unofficial motto, appearing on patches and planes as “YGBSM”.

Arriving in Korat just a month after starting their training, the eight initial pilot-EWO teams endured a week of briefings on rules of engagement. Having already been banned from attacking any SAM site that had not fired, the list also included MiG fighters at their airbases, dams, power grids and other strategic targets. One Weasel complained that “we could have cleared just about all of the radars in the North with very little trouble [and could have] blind(ed) the air defense system of the [North Vietnamese] with very little cost and no change to the number of [missions] flown” by having the planes already conducting strikes strafe radars on their return flights.

Flying their first mission on December 1, 1965, the Weasels destroyed nine SAM sites but found the F-100F (Wild Weasel I) inadequate for the mission due to its slow speed and low tech electronics fit. Equipped with the AN/APR-26 radar homing and warning receiver (RHAW) system, but with no dedicated anti-radar missile, it relied on strafing and bombing to destroy targets. While their aggressive tactics paid off, the initial Weasel crews experienced heavy losses during their first weeks in theater — losing three planes. In response to the inadequacy of the F-100F, the Air Force deployed the next generation of Wild Weasel aircraft (Wild Weasel III) based on the F-105 Thunderchief airframe. Used in seventy-five percent of the strikes against North Vietnamese targets, the F-105 had proven itself a versatile and capable platform. Nicknamed “Thud” for the sound pilots sardonically associated with its crashes, F-105 pilots held their mounts in high regard despite the cynicism they felt for their missions. Famous for its low level high speed, and its rugged construction, pilot Robert Dorrough raves, “The F-105 is the greatest plane I’ve ever flown, [because] it can take a lot of hits and still go on”. When the Wild Weasel III F-105s were deployed to Thai air bases, they represented a significant step forward: with a better electronics fit (Applied Technology’s APR-35/37) and, more importantly, a weapon dedicated to the destruction of SAM radars.

The Shrike was the world’s first dedicated anti-radiation missile. Based upon the AIM-7 Sparrow air-air missile, the Shrike incorporated a new guidance system which allowed it to home onto radar systems such as the Fan Song that was used with the SA-2. As Weasel Don Kilgus recalls, the Shrike changed the nature of the mission because it allowed the Weasels to attack SAM sites from afar and with a greater probability of disabling the target. The Shrike was not without limitations. Relatively short ranged and with a small warhead, it required pilots to expose themselves to the very SAM they wanted to destroy. Additionally, the Shrike lacked the ability to remember the location of an emitted radar signal. When first deployed, the Shrike was devastating. Soon, though, North Vietnamese radar operators developed tactics to minimize the missile’s effectiveness. In response, American tactics and technology evolved. So continued a tug-of-war between Wild Weasels and SAM operators for control of the skies over North Vietnam.

Even as the battle in the air raged on, pilots felt continual strain regarding targets and tactics for waging their part of the conflict. Disobedience of orders — even in cases of self defense — often resulted in a court martial for a pilot and EWO. For example, if an F-105 crew attacked a new SAM site that had fired at their aircraft while it was egressing a mission, it would be considered a violation of the strict rules of engagement and a court martial could be ordered. One Weasel recalled Lyndon Johnson pronouncing, “them boys over there can’t bomb an outhouse without my say-so.” Sentiments like these fostered the notion that America fought the war in Vietnam only half-heartedly — and ignored the broader global political context in which the war was fought.

The geopolitical context of the war dictated a measured response to perceived communist aggressions. Just three years prior, the world had been almost driven to nuclear holocaust because of the Cuban Missile crisis, and America’s strategic forces remained on high alert. For example, during Operation Chrome Dome, B-52 strategic bombers carrying nuclear weapons remained airborne continuously — flying routes over the arctic from 1961 through the entirety of Rolling Thunder. Because of the simmering Cold War, Johnson and McNamara favored restraint over a more aggressive approach prosecuting the war in Vietnam and specifically to combat the SAM threat.

A visceral hatred of Johnson and McNamara grew as Rolling Thunder progressed. When a New York Times article titled “How Johnson Makes Foreign Policy” was published, pilots mocked the breakfast meetings over which targets were selected and policy decisions were made. As Billy Sparks lamented, “The major problem with Rolling Thunder from day one was that the targets we were assigned made zero sense … I think my mother could have done better.” Indeed, the command at Korat and Takhli had given the Defense Department an ordered list of 207 targets within North Vietnam that were of strategic importance but the commanders were not given the freedom to ever update the list as conditions changed. Political leadership also favored bombing the lowest priority targets first — the exact opposite of what the military leadership had requested.

The waste pilots experienced was best seen in a typical raid to destroy a supply dump or truck convoy. To execute their mission, the Air Force would deploy twelve F-4s to bomb the target, four F-4s to provide protection from MiG fighters, eight Wild Weasels to suppress the SAMs, and an RF-4 reconnaissance aircraft to photograph the site for damage assessment. These strikes were often unsuccessful as the Viet Cong operated in small groups in the dense jungle. As one general suggested, air missions to “bomb [the North Vietnamese] into the stone age” were largely unsuccessful because “they were in the stone age, what were we going to bomb them back to?” On one mission, the Air Force bombed a choke point in the mountains known as the Mugai Pass. The strike force consisted of more than thirty planes dropping six hundred tons of bombs at a cost of twenty-one millions dollars. Though successful in closing the path temporarily, over the next two days 150,000 North Vietnamese labored and reopened the pass. As one Thud pilot remarked, “We take a 20 million dollar fighter and launch it against a four dollar bicycle and get shot down doing it. That’s pretty insane. And that shows you a lot of what the F-105 and others were up against — it’s hard — you can’t win that kind of war.” A lack of ordnance too, often compelled fighters capable of carrying eight bombs to fly with only one — further decreasing the “efficiency” of the war.

For many F-105 crews, reaching the magic hundred missions needed to complete their tour of duty seemed a nearly impossible task. For those pilots not immediately killed after being hit by a SAM, death still remained an imminent threat. As one pilot remembers hearing on Hanoi radio of one of his friends downed that day, “angry villagers had run out and killed the pilot. They were so mad that with their pitchforks and shovels, and sieves and all that they had punctured the man and killed him.” Death often seemed a better option to those captured and brought to the Hỏa Lò Prison in Hanoi. Acrimoniously nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton”, prisoners were malnourished, tortured and sometimes placed in solitary confinement for years.

All the danger posed by the mission failed to dissuade some pilots from signing up for an additional tour of 100 missions. As Tom Cushenberry explained, “I had [signed up for another hundred missions because] I still was a soldier and I felt that if they [were] gonna keep on doing [the missions] then they needed someone with my experience … somewhere in the mix over there [so that] I may make a difference to somebody.” Continuing, Cushenberry commented on the success of his mission and how he wasn’t going back to help the effort “because there was no effort.” Even Billy Sparks — constant cynic and critic — returned to Vietnam as a Weasel after serving as a strike force pilot. He calls his time in Southeast Asia, “the singe most important thing I have ever done” in his memoir.

While pilot’s motivations can never be know for certain, many returned for unexpected reasons. “I just got bored” shrugs Larry Waller, home after completing two hundred missions. Had Air Force regulations permitted a third tour, he would have volunteered to return. In the words of General Patton, “compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.” For some, war is, “a potent …. addiction” that often kills its victims. If considering the role of these pilots in the context of jus in bello (justice in war), it must also be considered that a number of pilots not only volunteered for their service and initial tour, but also to return to a war fully aware of its inconsistencies and ambiguities.

With the end of Rolling Thunder on November 1, 1968, Weasel involvement in Vietnam too began to wind down. While most Weasels returned to the United States, the remaining ones were consolidated into the 6010th Wild Weasel Squadron at Korat. Protecting reconnaissance planes that flew missions into 1972, the Weasels saw little action. With the commencement of Operations Linebacker and Linebacker II in 1972, the Weasels once again took to the skies to protect convoys of B-52 bombers as they proceeded north to bomb Hanoi. Armed with an improved anti-radiation missile (the Standard ARM) and now well trained in anti-SAM tactics, the Weasels performed skillfully, successfully able to suppress the more advanced Soviet SA-3 system without losing a single aircraft. Helping to ensure the success of the Linebacker operations, the Weasels helped bring North Vietnam back to negotiations at the Paris Peace talks just eleven days after the start of Linebacker II.

Throughout their mission, Weasels and strike pilots wondered what they were doing, and if their losses were in vain. As one Weasel pined on his role, “I felt that there was no reason for dying for a country that didn’t care and had no intention of ever winning the war.” Anger, fear, and a resentment of the commanders who had placed them into their role filled most Weasels’ hearts as they returned home. Though grappling with a perceived meaningless destruction of their friends, many Weasels remained silent in their views of their commanders and very few cried out against them openly in the press.

While the loss the Weasel endured were immense, and some of those losses were not required to punish the North Vietnamese for their support of the Viet Cong, the restraint the US political leadership used in the air war had implications across the globe. Through the latter sixties and into the seventies, Soviet-American relations had become more amicable and the superpowers began to sign treaties such as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT) which limited the number of nuclear weapons the powers could hold and governed how new nuclear systems could be developed in the future. This rapprochement between superpowers was known as détente and it peaked in the mid-1970s.

On July 17, 1975, 229 kilometers above the Earth, an Apollo and Soyuz capsule docked with one another. The astronauts shook hands, exchanged gifts, shared a meal, and flew home. Détente was at its height and Soviet-American relations had reached a new level of cooperation. As President Nixon emphasized “Détente [did] not mean the end of danger … [and it was] not the same as lasting peace” but the world had become a much safer place because of it. The sacrifices of those who fought in Vietnam not only checked Communist aggression for a long time, but the restraint that they showed enabled the first thaws in the Cold War. Hundreds of men served as Wild Weasels during the Vietnam War. Seventy-two were shot down. Nineteen endured the horrors of captivity. And thirty-three never came home alive. Many veterans live with agonizing, horrific memories of their time as Wild Weasels. While millions of lives across the world had been saved by the tremendous sacrifices Weasels and others had made, as the Weasels remained an entirely officer and volunteer force throughout the war, it can not be said that the United States political powers at be prosecuted a war that violated ethics of jus in bello by restraining their pilots’ ability to take preventative measures against future threats and to execute the mission they believed they were there to carry out.

Delta Wings & Supersonic Dreams

2025-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

I wrote the following essay as a school research project into the Cold-War race for civil supersonic flight. In those times, Concorde’s slender delta wing came to symbolize industrial ambition, national pride, and, ultimately, the crushing economics of the luxury high speed travel against the egalitarian jumbo jet.

The first supersonic age ended in defeat when Concorde retired in 2003, but a few months ago, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator began a new era. Built in a Colorado warehouse rather than a state-owned hangar, Boom built the first privately funded civil supersonic aircraft, and broke the sound barrier in the quietest way ever recorded.

The story that follows captures the drama of that first supersonic age; may it also offer context, and a bit of propulsion, as we watch the second one taxi toward the threshold.

Slowly backed from her hanger in the southern French city of Toulouse, fresh white paint across her slim body and slender delta wing glistening in the late afternoon sun, Concorde 001 was ready. The names of her creators BAC (British Aircraft Corporation) and Sud Aviation France above the slim red cheat line that ran the length of her fuselage, Concorde stood in front of the world’s media for the first time on the afternoon of March 2, 1969. After checks, double checks, and checks one last time, Concorde slowly pivoted onto runway 33L, 7 years after the signing of her development treaty, 10 times over her original budget, and with builders unsure of her prospects considering Boeing’s new 747 jumbo jet had flown less than a month earlier in Seattle.

Firing her four reheats two at a time and rolling down the runway to the delight of spinning newsreels, Concorde effortlessly lifted into the sky for her inaugural flight. Nose and landing gear extended through the duration of her “faultless” (as described by the exuberant French press) 27 minute maiden flight above the French countryside, Concorde effortlessly glided back onto the runway, the small white drag chute she carried for testing artfully following her down the runway.

Emerging from Concorde and hustling down a movable staircase to the applause of Sud and BAC executives, Pilot Andre Turcat entered the adjacent terminal to address the waiting media throng. “The big bird flies.. and it flies pretty well.” After 7 years of work, a prototype had flown. Closely following the first flight of the Soviet supersonic transport (SST), which had flown just three months prior, the Anglo-French effort now definitively led the SST program of the United States. Despite its ambition and disdain for its Anglo-French competition the United States was nowhere near its first flight, and, indeed, never would be.

The United States’ SST program began with an inspiring launch speech from President Kennedy at the US Air Force Academy’s 1963 commencement. Seeking to beat Concorde in every metric, Boeing had entered an overambitious sweep-wing design into the bidding process and the government chose it over more moderate alternatives. With a passenger capacity and maximum speed nearly twice that of Concorde and an all-titanium airframe, the United States entered the race to build a commercial SST, planning to dominate the anticipated global market as it had in subsonic commercial aviation. After eight years of development, and $1.8 billion, Congress stopped funding the program in December 1970 and its principal developer Boeing subsequently disowned the project - failing even to produce a prototype.

Since the introduction of commercial aircraft, each successive generation had flown higher and traveled faster. Built in the heat of the Cold War, the next, supersonic generation of commercial aircraft would be heavily influenced by the clash of communism and capitalism. With Chuck Yeager shattering the sound barrier in the bright, orange Bell X-1 “Glamorous Glennis,” in 1947, and the Soviets breaking the Mach (768mph at sea level) barrier a year later, the race for speed began, powered not only by rocket engines, but by the quest for ideological superiority.

After this initial catalysis, however, the West turned inward. Soviet civil aircraft rarely flew in Western airspace, and with a substantial wall preventing inter-bloc commerce, the Soviet Union’s SST endeavor was not a threat to Western aircraft manufacturers - just to the pride of the world’s capitalists. The Soviets had started the race, and they continued to run, far ahead, reveling in the propaganda and inferred superiority their achievement brought them, but the real fight was behind them, between the United States and the Anglo-French. Britain had initially led jet-powered civil aviation, but after the disastrous de Havilland Comet, its industry lacked in prestige and sophistication. Seeking redemption, Britain embraced the SST, partnering with the French to challenge the United States’ global dominance in civil aviation.

Worried about Anglo-French collaboration, the United States launched its own SST program. Had American and European projects matured quickly and inexpensively, the story of the SST might well have ended differently. With billions poured into the project on both sides of the Atlantic, and program delays mounting, public opinion began to shift against the planes. The United States, with plans shifting towards massive, cost effective aircraft such as the Boeing 747 jumbo-jet, dropped from the SST race. Britain and France, with aircraft industries in decline and no alternative plans, felt they had to push to lead commercial aviation with their auspiciously launched Concorde.

Led by prominent Welsh aeronautical engineer Morien Morgan, Britain began a study of the viability of supersonic commercial aircraft at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in 1954. After Sputnik’s launch in 1957, development began in earnest, through the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) which had been established a year prior through the Ministry of Supply. As Morgan summarized in successive STAC meetings, building a supersonic transport was not only a matter of national pride, but a matter of reviving Britain’s troubled aircraft industry. In 1952, Britain had been the first nation to launch a commercial jet with the de Havilland DH. 106 Comet. It was initially a wild success. During its first year, Comet flew 28,000 passengers 104.6 million miles across the world and de Havilland even took orders from the United States’ flagship carrier Pan Am. Beneath this success, however, lay myriad deadly design flaws. First, in October, a Comet ran off the runway in Rome because of a broken piece of landing gear. The 35 passengers and 8 crew members of that flight were spared, but just five months later, in April 1953, a Sydney-bound Comet crashed on takeoff- killing all 43 souls. Comet’s wings were poorly designed, but subtle modifications to the problematic leading edges, and more instruction for pilots restored Comet’s airworthiness and it hurried back into the sky, deprived of her perfect safety record and with a little bit less prestige.

Less than a month after the April crash, and exactly a year after Comet’s May 2, 1952 inaugural flight, disaster stuck again. Climbing above an afternoon thunderstorm on a flight out of Calcutta, India, a Comet disintegrated. Weather was thought to be the probable cause of that disaster. As the Times of London declared on May 4, 1953, 2 days after the crash the plane was “knocked down by the tempest.” Comet and her promising leap into the future for civil aviation and the British aircraft industry was in danger. The death blow that brought Comet and everything behind her back to Earth, was about to come.

Seven months after the May crash, in January of 1954, a flight from Rome to London fell out of the sky on a cloudless winter day over Italy’s Tyrrhenian Sea near Elba. Hurrying to the debris field, fishermen pulled suitcases, pieces of fuselage, bodies, from the water. Any chance of redemption for Comet was lost. Initial reactions to this crash were mixed. Headlines declaring the crash sabotage, jumbled the world’s thoughts, as the story ran as far from the British Isles as Australia. An investigation commenced, but in a time before flight data recorders and with the plane broken up and at the bottom of the ocean, all Comets returned to service two months thereafter.

Less than a month after Comet’s second return to service, tragedy struck again near Naples, Italy when another plane fell from the sky. This was the end. Though Comet was to return to service in October, 1955 before ultimately retiring in November, 1967, it had been grounded for over a year while an extensive operation by the Royal Navy retrieved one of the planes from the sea floor, and an intense investigation revealed metal fatigue from constant pressurization to be the deadly weakness. Though first to introduce a commercial jet, Britain with its Comet, had lost the all too important battles of prestige, and safety to the American commercial jets that followed.

With Boeing’s 707, Douglas’ DC-8, and other American commercial jets over 80 percent of the civil aircraft flown in the West, the British had lost the advantage, and ultimately the ability to compete in the jet market. As Permanent UK Aviation Secretary Sir Cyril Musgrave reflected, “All the major airlines were buying the 707 or the DC-8 and there was no point in developing another subsonic plane. We felt we had to go above the speed of sound, or leave [the market].” Minister of Aviation Duncan Sandys agreed with Musgrave noting that, “If we are not in the supersonic aircraft business, then it’s only a matter of time before the whole British aircraft industry packs it in.” Stressing that supersonic travel was, “obviously the thing of the future,” and that staying out of the race would be the most expensive thing the country could do because, “If we miss this generation of aircraft we shall never catch up.” Musgrave concluded that, “[though] it may not pay, we cannot afford to stay out.” This sentiment of necessity began to flow through the project, and citizens to politicians began to view the construction of a supersonic jet as more an issue of pride and desperation than of practicality.

For Britain, building a supersonic transport was seen not only as a path to national prestige, but also as a path to redemption, for its failing aircraft industry. Each successive generation of commercial aircraft had improved on the previous generation in speed, and the general consensus was that this trend would continue through the sound barrier. Postulating that “in two or three decades… the bulk of long distance passenger travel will be at supersonic speeds,” Morien Morgan, now Deputy Controller of Aircraft Research and Development, firmly concluded in an October 1960 meeting that “if Britain is to retain its position as a leading aeronautical power, we cannot let ourselves be edged right out of the supersonic transport field by America and Russia.” Building a supersonic aircraft had great stakes for Britain, and the political and technical bureaucracy were lining up to support it.

For Morgan, technological knowhow and developmental knowledge was the most important aspect of a supersonic transport project. Noting that, “Since this country’s future will depend on the quality of its technological products and since its scientific manpower and resources are less than those of the USA, and the USSR, it is important that a reasonable proportion of such resources are deployed on products which maintain our technical reputation at a high level. “While knowledge and display of technical prowess would certainly improve Britain’s national prestige, in order to convince commercial airlines to purchase the SST, its commercial viability would need to be shown. With an initial development budget between £165-265 million, and with operating costs projected to be five times that of a conventional aircraft, aircraft manufacturers doubted the pragmatism of committing so many resources to such a high risk project.

In addition to his conviction that Britain must build a supersonic aircraft in order to remain competitive, Morgan asserted the UK should act as soon as possible because it had a “two or three-year lead on the [competition] in hard thought and supporting research on supersonic transport problems. “Continuing, he suggested that to most practically use this advantage to produce a jet quickly, a mid-sized supersonic jet capable of about Mach 2 (1200mph) would be most reasonable. Simultaneously predicting the high cost of a supersonic endeavor but cognizant that “not to embark upon such a project would be tantamount to the exclusion of this country from the field of advanced civil aircraft design,” Britain began the search for a partner.

Across the English Channel, France faced similar issues with its aircraft industry. In a wave of early 1950s nationalism, President Charles de Gaulle had pushed his state’s leading aircraft manufacturer, Sud Aviation, to develop a jet of its own. Flying for the first time on May 27, 1955, the SE 210 Caravelle was a minor success, selling 282 jets to airlines across the world including in America, but ultimately failed to compete with the dominant Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8. With the example of the Caravelle in mind, France, like Britain, was determined to produce an SST to counter the “American Challenge” and to ignite a French and broader European aircraft industry that would reduce the United States’ utter dominance of the civil aviation market.

With Britain and France independently concluding that a mid-range, Mach 2 jet with a slender delta wing design would be the ideal configuration for the first SST, the countries seemed ideal partners for one another. For Britain, working closely with the French could gain them access to the newly formed European Economic Community and its Common Market of free trade and simultaneously reduce the amount of time needed to settle on an SST design, and the transit time large components would need to travel between countries. With these advantages of Anglo-French cooperation, however, came opportunity cost. America led the world in civil subsonic jet aircraft and, in preparation for the supersonic era, its engineers had amassed a collective 100 years working on supersonic problems, and had conducted thousands of crucial hours in wind tunnel testing. Indeed, on trips to the United States, numerous members from the RAE had been thoroughly impressed by US knowledge of supersonic transport and advocated for an Anglo-American coalition.

Initially pursuing an Anglo-French coalition, Minister of Aviation Sandys met with officials from the French Air Ministry in February of 1960. Continuing these meetings, Sandys began to believe his French counterpart General Jean Gerard lacked interest in the project, declaring at an April 1960 meeting that: “If we see no possibility of quick collaboration with France, we shall turn to the USA.” Because of this inferred disinterest, Britain banked away from France and headed back to the United States.

Frustrated by the French, the British Cabinet, led by the Chancellor of Exchequer, Derick Heathcoat-Amory, Minister of Defense Harold Watkinson, and Minister of Aviation Sandys convened in July 1960 to establish a plan. Concluding that they must “create a negotiating position” for the United Kingdom to “secure the United States collaboration” the attempt to collaborate with the United States began.

Meetings with FAA Administrator Elwood Quesada in September 1960, initially seemed promising. Quesada had agreed with Sandys that collaboration would be mutually beneficial, but his suggestion that the United States should build the plane’s airframe and the United Kingdom provide the engines was off-putting for the British. They wanted to be partners — not suppliers of components. Continuing discussion through the Civil Air Ataché Roy MacGregor at the British Embassy in Washington, a year passed with no progress. The United States didn’t seem interested in anything beyond banter. As the talks wore on, Quesada epitomized the skeptical view of the Eisenhower administration if supersonic aircraft had any chance of being commercially successful, they would take at least a decade for airlines’ to begin actively making new investments to replace their new fleets of subsonic jet aircraft. MacGregor and the other British diplomats slowly grew annoyed at this rhetoric. In November 1961, an unknown British diplomat issued the same ultimatum given to France the previous year: if she could not secure collaboration with the United States soon, the British would partner with the French. The stakes were high, and the British wouldn’t wait for a partner — even if that meant moving forward alone.

With the United States “hardening against collaboration,” and bent on producing a more ambitious Mach 3 (1800mph) jet with twice the capacity of the their design, the British flopped back towards the French. Eventually finding common ground, the two countries planted the seeds of cooperation with the signing of an agreement called “The Development and Production of a Civil Supersonic Transport Aircraft” on November 29, 1962. Committing themselves to build the mid-sized, slender delta plan that their designers had been advocating, the British insisted the treaty have the same scope of an international treaty, ensuring the French would continue collaboration. Committing £28 million a year each, for a total estimated budget of £224 million per country, the program began — its managers oblivious to the technical challenges and resulting budgetary explosion that would soon dominate the efforts of both nations.

Deciding to split work on the airframe between the British Aircraft Corporation and Sud Aviation and work on the engines to Bristol-Siddeley and SNECMA (National Company for the Design and Construction of Aviation Engines), Britain and France began as equal partners: sharing costs, technology, and encouragement. Political strife, however, soon threatened the very existence of the project.

In joining with France, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had hoped to demonstrate his country’s commitment to Europe to his counterpart, President Charles de Gaulle. With his close historical relationship with the United States, and with France positioning itself to be Europe’s new economic powerhouse, Macmillan felt that engaging with the French on such an ambitious project could help to ease relations and help Britain to gain access to the newly formed European Economic Community and its “Common Market” of free trade.

On January 14, 1963, de Gaulle crushed British aspirations to join the Common Market at a crowded press conference at Paris’ Elysse Palace. In a prolix answer, de Gaulle asserted that English entrance would eventually lead to American entrance and thus, “American dependency and direction” that would “absorb the European Community” and subjugate the national identities of Europeans. Having effectively vetoed any British attempt to join the Common Market, de Gaulle then brilliantly renewed both countries commitment to developing the Concorde, calling for the maintenance of continued close relations with Britain in “every domain.” British resolve to continue work had been weakened, but, searching for an entrance for its industry back into civil aviation, it decided to continue the collaboration.

Assuming the British prime ministership in the midst of an economic crisis in early 1964, “honest broker” Harold Wilson began a futile attempt to maneuver Britain out of its treaty obligations to continue supporting the ballooning costs of Concorde. With the strength of an international treaty, however, leaving the agreement was not an option. With the right to pursue an international civil suit at the Hague, Britain could be forced to continue paying for development. As Wilson noted:

Had we unilaterally denounced the treaty, we were told, we could have been taken to the International Court, where there would have been little doubt that it would have found against us. This would have meant that the French could then have gone ahead with the project no matter what the cost, giving us no benefit from the research or the ultimate product. But the court would almost certainly have ruled that we should be responsible for half the cost. At that time, half the cost was estimated — greatly underestimated as it turns out — at 190 million pounds. This we should have had to pay with nothing to show for it.

Maneuvering through Assistant Administrator for International Aviation Affairs Raymond B. Mallory, the British learned that the French were set on continuing, and that they would be content to do so alone provided with sufficient capital and a good engine — sourced from the United States or Britain. Britain was stuck in the cockpit and hurtling down the runway.

As the project continued, costs continued to soar. From an estimated $400 million total in 1965, through reprojections of, £770 million, £1.26 billion, £1.75 billion, £2.63 billion, Concorde’s cost ultimately steeled at a staggering £3.25 billion (a staggering £24.64 billion in 2016 adjusted pounds). After another £0.85 billion in production costs for the 16 Concordes produced, Britain and France each had a £2.05 billion (£15.54 billion in 2016) tab.

Across the Atlantic, the United States faced a similar budgetary progression. By 1971, the nation crossed the billion dollar mark in spending and the costs were beginning to be too much. Significant technical challenge in confronting the exponential growth of drag as a plane increased in speed, and working with the titanium necessary to help the Boeing design exceed 3 times the speed of sound had slowed the project to a standstill. Technical and budget issues, together with the new public and environmental opposition to the Boeing 2707 eventually would see the aircraft from even making it to the tarmac.

Similar to the Apollo Project, the US SST effort began as another glistening beacon from Camelot. Climbing a stage at the United States Air Force Academy’s Falcon Field eight years earlier in June, 1963 to give the commencement address, President Kennedy spoke about the future of air travel and launched the United States into the supersonic race, declaring that “this Government should immediately commence a new program …. to develop … a commercially successful supersonic transport, superior to that being built in any other country”. Behind closed doors, the United States was worried. The previous day, the nation’s largest international carrier Pan Am, had placed orders for six Concordes, shocking the White House and the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Najee Halaby. In a memo sent the previous year in response to the signing of Concorde’s development treaty, Halaby had warned that if the Anglo French initiative was successful and went unchallenged, that the United States would be forced to “relinquish world civil transport leadership,” lose 50,000 jobs across the nation, and “conceivably, persuade the President of the United States to fly in a foreign aircraft!” Supersonic aircraft were the future, and with Pan Am’s selection of the Concorde, it was clear that the world’s strongest economy and greatest innovator was behind.

The United States’ mission to create an SST had begun three years earlier in late June, 1960 during the Eisenhower Administration, when the House Committee on Science and Astronautics recommended that Congress help fund the development of a supersonic jet. Congress was interested, but President Eisenhower was against the proposal because of its fiscal burden.

Eisenhower’s term ended on January 20, 1961, but, amidst the enthusiasm of Kennedy’s inauguration came a warning from the outgoing president. Addressing the nation three days before his departure, Eisenhower delivered a poignant, 20 minute televised speech focused on the military and the rise of the professional and continual armament industry he called the “military industrial complex.” Asserting that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” With the Cold War beginning, Eisenhower believed frivolous projects like the uneconomical SST would serve primarily to the benefit of the aircraft industry.

Though cognizant of Eisenhower’s concern about the SST expanding the military industrial complex and imposing an undue fiscal burden on the nation, many in Congress saw (like their British and French peers) that developing an SST was a necessity to remain competitive in commercial aviation. As President Kennedy asserted in the Air Force Academy commencement speech, an SST program to “maintain the Nation’s lead in long-range aircraft” would be “essential to a strong and forward-looking Nation” that would not only continue to lead the Soviet Union, but also the industries of other Western nations. In his 1966 thesis titled “The Supersonic Transport as an Instrument of National Power,” Air Force Colonel Donald Hackney agreed with Kennedy, arguing that an SST would be not only an exceptional jet commercially, but would additionally “strengthen our national military airlift capability and provide a highly productive vehicle for other military missions.” Concluding that “the magnitude of the development cost [requires] Government assistance,” Hackney asserted that financing the SST in exchange for a royalty could “quite conceivab(ly) … lead to the finest transport in the history of aviation at no cost to the taxpayer.” Adopting similar reasoning, Congress began its deliberation.

With knowledge that the Soviet Union was already working on a supersonic transport, tension was high when the “Supersonic Transport Symposium” was called in June, 1960. With two of the four papers presented focused on issues of competition and the “national prestige” of the United States, political ends of the SST project were emphasized from the start of development.

Asserting that, “unless as a nation we want to risk lagging behind the USSR in the introduction of a supersonic transport … we must start an aggressive development program without further delay,” the first paper, presented by Pearson and Pfeiffer of North American Aviation set the tone of the symposium. Presenting the opportunity an SST offered the United States, the other paper, from Burt Monesmith and Robert Bailey at rival aeronautics firm Lockheed echoed the first, declaring that “in the supersonic transport, the US has an opportunity to demonstrate to the world its technological leadership over the Soviet Union” and that “the Government would be justified in supporting the development of a supersonic transport simply for national prestige.” The Soviets had driven America into the supersonic race. The goal: a Mach 3 capable jet by 1963.

In these initial days of SST development, the United States was eager to find a national partner such as the United Kingdom or West Germany to spread the burden and risk of developing an SST. As Arnold Kotz, a Policy Planning Officer in the FAA, suggested in mid-1962,

” If the obstacles can be overcome, the West will preserve its prestige vis-a-vis the Soviet bloc; uneconomic competition for a very small market among the Western allies will be reduced or precluded; the claim on US public funds will be substantially reduced; the strain on the US private aircraft industry will be lightened while they would still achieve the largest share of the market since US airlines would presumably order the largest number of aircraft… all Western participating countries would share in the advanced technology, and there would be a definite political gain in having key Western Nations work closely together on a program of this magnitude. “

As talks continued however, technical goals for the project, and ideas regarding how work should be split between the two nations began to erode this cooperative attitude.

After the signing of Concorde’s development treaty, there was no going back. Intense lobbying for an SST began in Congress immediately. Speaking about how the Anglo-French had called on Boeing as a supplier for the Concorde project, Boeing’s William Bell declared that “the foreign threat, particularly that of the French in our air transport image and our national prestige is so great that an effort much more vigorous that our present national supersonic transport program must be organized.” Cries that the United States would lose 500,000 aviation jobs and that the military would become dependent on foreign corporations began to scare Congress into action funding a bidding process for the FAA’s specifications.

At the White House, President Kennedy balked at the Anglo-French coalition. As FAA director Halaby recalled, “When de Gaulle embraced the joint [Anglo-French] Concorde project, it seems to trigger competitiveness.” asserting that, “JFK associated the Concorde most with de Gaulle” and that when they saw each other the President would “press me on how our studies were going and how the British and French were doing,” declaring more than once that “We’ll beat that bastard de Gaulle!” President Kennedy had become obsessed. On March 1, 1963, the President spent 20 minutes on the phone with Director Halaby. Only Prince Peter of Greece received more of the President’s attention that day. With Kennedy’s dedication, however, came a caveat that he highlighted in a letter to President of the Senate and Speaker of the House on June 14, 1963. Declaring that “If at any point in the development program, it appears that the aircraft will not be economically sound, or if there is not adequate financial participation by industry in this venture, we must be prepared to postpone, terminate, or substantially redirect this program,” Kennedy had set clear boundaries for the United States’ SST project—ones that would eventually end the program.

As Lockheed, Boeing, and other firms began preliminary SST design, sentiments of American superiority began to pervade the project. At Boeing, Vernon Crunge was confident and didn’t equivocate, declaring that, “the British and French will be left to do this thing on the philosophy that is stupidity of their own and will lead them nowhere, and we shall ultimately overtake them with something more versatile, more economical and better suited to solve the problem.” Even Pan Am, treacherous patron of the Concorde, let it be known that what it really wanted was a US SST.

On November 22, 1963, everything changed. Riding in a motorcade through the streets of Dallas, shots rang out from a nearby building and Kennedy slumped down into the seat of the convertible he was riding in. The SST’s champion was dead. With Johnson’s climb to the Oval Office, ecstatic obsession for an SST was replaced by passive support. Director Halaby met less with Johnson and the men were never as close as Kennedy and Halaby had been.

Announcing on April 1, 1964, that after a rigorous overview by 210 of the country’s most skilled engineers, and aviation professionals that Boeing’s sweep-wing airframe and General Electric’s turbo-jet engines had been selected as the primary contender to build the US SST, the SST project began in earnest. Issuing an executive order on the same day to form a Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) on the SST, President Johnson sought to lay a solid foundation for the SST program to continue. Appointing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to chair the committee, however, Johnson had unknowingly subverted the project.

Coming to the Defense Department during the Kennedy Administration after leading the Ford Motor Company, Robert McNamara brought his obsession with efficiencies to the Cold War Department of Defense. Preferring the “economy” of intercontinental ballistic missiles, McNamara had killed the B-70 supersonic bomber program, and now turned his attention to the United States’ SST. Reflecting on the program, McNamara dismissed assertions of preserving national pride and competition with the Soviet Union, noting that:

” Right at the beginning I thought the project was not justified because you couldn’t fly a large enough payload over a long enough distance at a low enough cost to make it pay. I’m not an aeronautical engineer or a technical expert or an airline specialist or an airline manufacturer, but I knew that I could make the calculations on the back of an envelope. So I approached the SST with that bias. President Johnson was in favor of it. The question, in a sense, was how to kill it [so] I conceived an approach that said: maybe you’re right, maybe there is a commercial market, maybe what we should do is to take it with government funds up to the point where the manufacturers and the airliners can determine the economic viability of the aircraft. “

Sufficiently undermining the United States’ program with a team of economists led by SST-skeptic Stephen Enke, McNamara then turned his attention across the Atlantic.

At a meeting of the PAC-SST on March 30, 1965, CIA Director John McCone presented a report detailing the technical difficulties the Anglo-French had had with drag, and their general lack of research into the effect of sonic booms and the economics of their plane. With the report’s conclusion that the Europeans were slowing down in development, McNamara encouraged that United States program to slow down as well so that the country could focus on building the best SST possible.

With Najee Halaby’s term as FAA Director ending in July, 1965, and his replacement William “Bozo” McKee dedicated to creating an SST “economically profitable to build and operate” the SST project had lost its biggest ideologue and advocate for a pragmatist. The final blow was near.

Encountering technical problems with the mechanics and weight of its hinge system, Boeing announced that it was abandoning its sweep-wing design on October 21, 1968 and submitted a new proposal for a smaller, slender delta design four months later in January 1969. When Boeing submitted its new design, the Soviet Tuploev Tu-144 supersonic jet had already flown, and Concorde’s first flight was just two months away. Boeing and the United States were limping sorely behind the competition. As interest moved from the SST to the new Boeing 747 and its incredibly low costs per passenger mile, public opinion began to rapidly shift against the SST. Securing funding for the SST had always been an easy pitch, but when a funding bill in May, 1970 passed with only 13 votes above a majority in the House, opponents across the country saw weakness and began the final assault.

Eyed by Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin - infamous for his “Golden Fleece Awards” that he gave monthly to highlight dubious government spending—the SST’s budget came under attack. Unconvinced by SST Project Lead William Magruder’s assertion that “by the time the 300th airplane is sold, all of the Government’s investment will be returned the the US Treasury, and when we sell 500 airplanes, there will be a billion dollar profit for the government,” Proxmire tore into what he saw as a blatant waste of public money. Lamenting that, “We are being asked to spend $290 million this year for transportation for one half of one percent of the people—the jet setters—to fly overseas, and we are spending $204 million this year for urban mass transportation for millions of people to get to work,” Proxmire ignited the fires of public opinion, holding a congressional hearing in May, 1970 with whitenesses carefully selected to degrade the SST as thoroughly as possible.

The final barrage came in September, 1970, when a wave of economists across the ideological spectrum—including Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur Okun who had chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisors—dismantled the commercial viability of the project. The Nixon Administration remained in support of the project, but in a time when only half of all Americans had flown in an airplane, and 85 percent of the country opposed the SST, the administration was effectively powerless. When the House narrowly voted against funding in December 1970, a bureaucratic battle ensued through congressional committees. Six months later, on May 20, 1971, the SST died an unglamorous death when the House once again voted against funding 215-204. A slow, pragmatic, assault had dispersed the SST’s champions, and ended the program. The United States had spent $1.8 billion ($10.99 billion in 2016 adjusted dollars).

Though the United States had failed to produce even a prototype aircraft, the Soviet Union had performed only marginally better. First to fly an SST, the Soviet Union initially seemed to have a large advantage over its Western competition. As time progressed, however, the world began to recognize that while the Soviet jet was first, it was clearly inferior to the Concorde. From the small canards it needed to deploy for stability while landing, to the air conditioning of the Tupolev jet, which required a separate tank of water as a heat sink where Concorde employed its fuel tank.

As time progressed, the rush to produce the Tu-144 would prove to be tragic. Seeing Concorde’s spectacular performance the previous day at the 1973 Paris Airshow, when it was the Soviet jet’s turn the pilots tried to mimic Concorde’s steep initial climb and hard banks. Diving from 4,000 feet, however, the plane broke apart and debris rained down into the Parisian suburb of Goussainville, killing all 6 onboard the aircraft and 8 residents of the town.

After the airshow crash, the Tu-144 flew cargo and occasionally passengers from Moscow to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, but, after an in-flight fire brought another Tu-144 crashing down in 1978, the plane was removed from regular service.

Thus, of the three initial programs, only the Concorde lived to see regular commercial service. The Anglo-French coalition had beat the Soviets in the field of quality, and the United States in the field of determination. At 23 miles a minute—faster than a rifle bullet—it offered those fortunate enough to fly her unprecedented speed and unsurpassed luxury. Contrasted with the general deglamorization of air travel and the continued demise of the empire, Concorde upheld the sophistication of both air travel and British industry and technology. Flown with the Red Arrows—the Royal Air Force’s Aerobatic Team—to commemorate the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, Queen Elizabeth’s Golden (50th) Jubilee in 2002, and other notable events, the Concorde became an emblem of post-empire Britain, and a symbol of pride. In a video produced by British Airways to mark Concorde’s 2003 retirement, pilot, after stewardess, after business executive, recalled their fondness for their countries “national symbol for celebration” and remarked on how she stood out as special because of “the quality of the work, the minds, the skill, the talent, the commitment that went into it.”

Stretching beyond the elite group of people who regularly flew her, Concorde’s appeal transcended class barriers. Even at the end of her 27 year career, Concorde’s “unique blend of power, grace, [and] beauty” continued to draw people to “look up whenever and wherever she [took] to the skies.” Commenting on Concorde’s mass appeal, Mike Bannister, Chief Concorde Pilot for British Airways, asserted in a 2002 explained that “[Concorde] turns the heads of people who have no need to fly on it,” not because they are jealous of those who can afford to fly on the plane, but because they are a “part of a country that is capable of putting such a beautiful aircraft into the air.” For the thousands of British and French citizens who worked on Concorde’s development and construction, Concorde’s “fusion of art and technology” conjures “up a sense of pride and fond affection.”

The first and only commercial supersonic aircraft, Concorde offered passengers travel at twice the speed of sound—cutting travel time on its flagship New York to London or Paris routes from seven hours, to just over three. The evening flight outsped earth’s rotation. Passengers could watch the sun set, sipping cocktails in Heathrow’s exclusive Concorde Lounge, board the plane at night, and cross the Atlantic, to once again watch the setting sun from one of Manhattan’s rooftop restaurants.

Concorde’s supersonic career came to an end in 2003, when rising fuel costs and a constant uptick in the cost of maintaining the fleet made Concorde economically unbearable. Before this point though, the 16 plane fleet had found a niche carrying the rich and famous across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. The plane never made much money—the oil shocks of the 1970s and 90s made sure of that—and the British and French government didn’t make much money either, selling the first 9 planes to their national carriers for £80 million apiece and the remaining 7 for just £1 apiece, but the Concorde inspired two nations for half a century. As a middle-aged woman from the southern English city of Exeter, who knew many of those who built the plane remarked “It’s our aeroplane really.”

Andrew Jackson’s Ghost at the Fed

2025-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

As politicians on both side thunder about ending, auditing or increasing the President’s authority over the Federal Reserve, it’s easy to forget we’ve fought this war before. Nearly two centuries ago, Andrew Jackson’s populist crusade against Nicholas Biddle’s Congressionally chartered “Second Bank of the United States” toppled our nation’s monetary backbone and set the stage for the Panic of 1837.

Back in high school, I wrote an essay about Jackson’s crusade and how a victory against imagined financial tyrants can become a long defeat for everyone else:

Andrew Jackson was a fighting man. It is said that as a young boy, Jackson was playing with a gun when it accidentally fired and knocked him to the ground. He immediately jumped to his feet and threatened to kill any of the other boys if they dared laugh at him. When Jackson first met Nicholas Biddle — the President of the Second National Bank — Jackson was already very well versed in tearing down those he disagreed with and getting what he wanted. When the dust of their colossal battle over the Second Bank of the United States eventually settled, Biddle’s life’s work and a great asset to the country — the Second Bank of the United States—was destroyed and Biddle’s reputation lay in ruin. Jackson the Populist thrived and the country didn’t feel the repercussions of his decision to end the bank until after the conclusion of his second term. Historian Thomas Govan was right when he said that Jackson’s destruction of the bank was an, “Act of spite by an ignorant frontiersman whose stubbornness gravely injured his country”. Driven by archaic perceptions of banking and a determination to end the national bank for its political opposition, Andrew Jackson destroyed a valuable institution and gravely injured the economy of the United States.

An orphan at the age of fourteen, Andrew Jackson made his own way in life. Rising from a poor background, he worked hard and married well, which allowed him to scale Tennessee’s social and economic ladder. Jackson’s success as a general in the War of 1812 made him a hero and gave him recognition on the national stage allowing him to run for President on the Democratic ticket. Jackson was an unorthodox presidential candidate, and his opponents sought to publicize his love of dueling and his gambling habits. Nothing, however, could stop Jackson. Running on his popularity and status as a war hero, he decisively won the 1828 Presidential Election. At his inauguration, thousands of citizens rushing to shake his hand nearly crushed him, and forced him to flee for his safety. During his two terms as President, Jackson paid off the national debt, nearly started a war with France, and ignored a Supreme Court decision forcing thousands of Native Americans to march hundreds of miles from their homes to be resettled. Throughout his time as President, Jackson’s stubbornness (he believed the world was flat for his entire life) was very visible and led his opponents in the 1828 election to nickname him “Jackass”.

Appointed President of the National Bank on January 6th of 1823, Nicholas Biddle restored credibility and financial prosperity to the bank after mismanagement and political scandal. Biddle’s financial success at the bank can certainly be seen in his generous dividend program that paid seven percent of the bank’s profits to shareholders the entirety of his first six years at the bank. Under Biddle, the National Bank made credit more available — encouraging economic development — especially in the South and in the West.

Under Biddle, the currency issued by the bank stabilized, never varying more than a quarter of a percent below the stated value of the notes at any of the bank’s twenty nine locations throughout United States. This stability was a sign of confidence in the bank’s deposits of specie (precious metal like gold and silver) and the ease which notes could be exchanged for it. Biddle also reduced volatility in the state banks by preventing them from issuing more notes then they had deposits to back. As the National Bank accepted every state bank’s currency, it built up reserves of currency that it used to procure specie, thus controlling the supply of money. The stable currency, fostered by the bank, allowed business to be conducted easily and safely. The bank also supported large transfers of money by issuing deposit certificates for a nominal fee that allowed depositors to withdraw an amount from any one of the bank’s locations. Another testament to the strength of the United States’ currency during Biddle’s first six years as bank president was that the currency was convertible to British pounds with almost no spread. Biddle and his bank enhanced the economy and fostered growth across the country.

Having nearly been put in debtor’s jail for losing money speculating on land, Jackson was skeptical and suspicious of banks and their role in the economy, believing debt and speculation were inherently evil and “instruments of the swindler and the cheat”. As President, Jackson believed it his duty to save the nation from these evils. Because banks enabled these practices, and irrationally skeptical of financial institutions, Jackson decried even paper money representing a claim for specie.

Publicly, the most contentious issue regarding the bank were the allegations that it — and Biddle by extension — was pro-Federalist. Ironically, Biddle had voted for Jackson in the 1828 election, though this was not known at the time. In an 1828 letter to Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland, Biddle denied accusations that the Portsmouth Branch of his bank had discriminated against Democrats by saying: “There is no one principle better understood by every officer of the bank than that he must abstain from politics, and I have not seen nor heard of any one of them in any part of the union who has been engaged in this controversy”. Determined to keep the bank above politics, Biddle ordered an investigation and personally traveled to the Portsmouth branch. The investigation revealed that the accusations had no grounds, and the issue seemed to be resolved. However, even after the conclusion of this investigation, President Jackson held onto his belief that the bank was corrupt and politicized, despite several meetings with Biddle and reassurance from his entire cabinet.

Given a commendation by shareholders after his first six years, Biddle reveled in his success. Richard Rush, Secretary of the Treasury under John Quincy Adams and convert from an opponent to a strong supporter of the bank, commented that the bank was “an indispensable and permanent adjunct in our political and fiscal system”. After six years, Biddle’s wife was eager for him to resign his position and join her and their two children at home. Biddle however, relished the prestige of his position and wanted Congress recognized his success by re-chartering the bank before retiring.

During the 1828 Election neither Jackson nor any other Presidential Candidate mentioned the National Bank. Over 80% of citizens and Congress supported the bank but did so passively. Since Biddle had previously converted so many detractors, he believed Jackson too would soon support him. Biddle discovered how mistaken this was when Jackson spoke of his view on the bank in a meeting with him, saying bluntly: “I do not dislike your bank any more than all the (other) banks”. Disappointed, Biddle remained vigilant in his efforts to convert Jackson. Unbeknownst to Biddle, Jackson had expressed an even more radical view of the bank in private letters, detailing how he believed the bank was compromising morals and destroying freedoms.

Biddle continued his push to convert Jackson to support the bank by appealing to one of Jackson’s goals for his Presidency — paying off the national debt. Biddle sent Jackson a letter detailing how the government could entirely eliminate the country’s debt by selling its twenty percent stake in the bank. Biddle had underestimated Jackson’s disdain of the bank and was surprised when he received a matter-of-fact reply condemning the institution as unconstitutional. This issue had arisen before, but McCulloch v. Maryland and other Supreme Court decisions had all reaffirmed the bank’s Constitutionality. It was after this that Biddle began to believe he could not convince Jackson to support the re-charter.

When Jackson ordered Congress to investigate the bank on the grounds that it had “failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency”, Congress praised it for “almost completely succeed[ing] in the performance of this arduous, delicate, and painful duty”. Recognizing that the Democratic Party was split in factions for and against the bank, Henry Clay — one of the bank’s original supporters — sought to use this to increase his chances of being elected president. Clay went to Biddle and convinced him to re-charter the bank four years early in order to require Jackson to take a formal stance on the issue. At first, Biddle was reluctant to make the bank an issue in the election, but ultimately concluded that the re-charter would likely be vetoed and agreed to Clay’s proposal. Biddle had been explicitly warned by Louis McLane, the Secretary of the Treasury, not to seek re-charter during the election because Jackson would veto it. McLane furthermore told Biddle that if he waited, he could persuade the President to pass a bill re-chartering the bank on the grounds that it was Congress’ responsibility. Biddle would have none of it. Seeking to force Jackson to support the bank and acknowledge how well he had done, Biddle submitted an application to re-charter the bank on January 6th, 1832, four years early. The bill easily passed Congress and made its way to the White House. When Jackson’s close friend Martin Van Buren visited him, Jackson reached for his hand and told him, “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me.” He squeezed his hand. “But I will kill it”. Biddle’s boldness in his efforts to renew the charter had doomed his bank. Jackson was fearful of the bank’s significant appeal to the people but believed with fervor that he was acting in their common good and voters would recognize this. Acting on this belief, Jackson vetoed the bank’s re-charter on July 10th, 1832. In his veto message, Jackson condemned the rulings of several Supreme Court cases and deemed the bank unconstitutional saying he was “deeply impressed with the belief that some of the powers and privileges possessed by the existing bank are unauthorized by Constitution, subversive of the rights of the state, and dangerous to the liberties of the people”. An editorial in the wake of Jackson’s veto called it “the most wholly radical… document that ever emanated from any Administration, in any country”. Daniel Webster similarly decried the veto by predicting it to cause price drops, workers to be paid less, and great embarrassment for the United States. Unfortunately for Biddle, Clay, and the bank, Jackson’s popularity had overpowered the passive widespread support the bank had, despite Clay’s attempt to make it an electoral issue. Jackson was overwhelmingly re-elected President.

Jackson’s veto left the bank on uncertain ground. When he ordered his Secretary of Treasury, William Duane to remove the bank’s federal deposits, Duane refused and Jackson forced him to resign. Jackson then appointed a new secretary who began the distribution of deposits to state banks. As the bank’s accounts steadily drew down, the bank lost its power to effectively check the state banks and to keep a balanced currency as it had before. This triggered a reckless expansion in lending, which eventually contributed to bank failures, deflation and widespread unemployment during the Panic of 1837. When the Second Bank of United States’ federal charter expired, Pennsylvania re-chartered it as its state bank, but three years later, the bank became insolvent and permanently closed.

Jackson’s veto message had been successful. In the aftermath of the collapse of the bank, Biddle was sued by shareholders who had once given him a magnificent plate of gold in appreciation for his service. Congressman Charles Ingersoll — a longtime friend of Biddle — noted that the “dogs” that had once “licked his hands and fawned on his footsteps” were now tearing him apart. Jackson’s destruction of Nicholas Biddle’s character was all encompassing. Biddle died in February of 1844, his reputation tarnished, clinically depressed, and financially dependent on his wife’s inheritance. Democrats jeered him as he was lowered into his grave. Jackson lived only another year before succumbing to the lead poisoning of two bullets he had received during duels in his twenties. Jackson was a fighting man and his ignorance in choosing to destroy the Second Bank of United States, prevented central banking efforts from resuming in American for over eighty years.

Bad Startup Names

2025-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

I generally believe that good startup (and product) names are short, fairly easy to remember / spell, somewhat distinctive, and you can buy the .com / .ai domain name. I’m also a sucker for things that rank first alphabetically. If you meet (most of) these criteria you get a 4/5.

5/5 names have something extra that ties to what you do. This is great if you have high confidence you won’t pivot but that isn’t the case for most startups. Some of my favorite names of the last few years:

Anthropic (might be a little big brain but the word means “relating to humans”)
Cameo
Databricks
Liquid Death
Rainmaker
Starlink

It’s pretty important to get this right. Changing your name once you’ve launched is really hard almost to the point you shouldn’t do it. Rebranding takes a ton of time, and pushes your startup back towards no one caring.

I also think it’s quite easy to have a bad startup name:

Startup names are bad because they are overused

almost all of these I have seen 3+ times!

Updated January 2026. Send me more bad names and I’ll add them here!

Agora
Alloy
Apollo
Arc
Atlas
Beam
Bloom
Bolt
Central
Cover
Delta
Feather
Gather
Haiku
Hatch
Ladder
Lambda
Landed
Levels
Lever
Magic
Marathon
Orbit
Patch
Puzzle
Radar
Slope
Sonder
Spark
Tandem
Trellis
Whisper
Zest

Startup names that are bad because they have other flaws

Random nouns unrelated to your business that are hard to rank on. Always check how many Google results the name you want has! Bonus points if you do a search on the Delaware Division of Corporations database!
Names that box you in. My last company, Rent the Backyard was a great name for customers but a bad name for investors who thought we only ever wanted to build backyard homes.
Names that someone can’t spell if they need to be able to spell it (matters directly proportional to the number of customers you have).

The cardinal rule? Know your audience

Corollary: b2b names probably matter a lot less than consumer!

Sometimes being last is best: “US Airways” was a great name

Excerpt from View from the Wing:

“US Airways took over American Airlines a decade ago and kept the American name, just as America West kept the larger airline’s name when it took over US Airways. The US Airways brand went away in 2015.

…

I simply assumed that the ‘US’ name was chosen to give the carrier a more national brand. But it may have had a much more practical explanation, according to a story that long-time airline CEO Ed Colodny would tell new hires when they onboarded.

His main interest in the airline’s name change was the phone book.
Allegheny was the first airline listed in the yellow pages. People would shop for ticket prices by going to the phone book and calling airlines, calling Allegheny first and calling United Airlines last.
When they would reach United, which would have a price similar to others they’d called, they’d be on the phone anyway and ask to make the purchase rather than starting over and dialing another carrier.”

Founder’s Guide to Working with Filipino VAs

2024-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

We wrote this guide to compliment Spencer’s popular “Founder’s Guide to Hiring an Operations Team in the Philippines.” It draws upon our personal experiences and insights gleaned from working with talented VAs (virtual assistants) over many years (shoutout to Angeli, Karyn, Rio, and Shang!) as well as observations from other founders who have successfully built remote teams in the Philippines.

Rio & Spencer

For a real-world example of the kinds of tasks you can delegate, see our list of 221 tasks you can give to a VA.

Communication and Collaboration

Working remotely with someone on the opposite side of the world is hard.

Think about what can be asynchronous

Your VAs are in a time zone very different from you. There is a culture in the Philippines where people will work the night shift to overlap with you but consider if that is really needed. Your VAs will be happier and stay with you longer if they can work during their daylight hours.

Lean into project management and accountability tools

Track tasks, deadlines, and progress with tools like Asana and Notion.
Track time with a tool like Clockify to better understand where hours are going.
Communicate with tools like Slack and WhatsApp

Provide Clear Instructions and Expectations

Set clear expectations for response times and help your team understand what tasks should be prioritized.
Clearly define tasks and project goals, leaving no room for ambiguity. Use tools like Loom to record yourself doing a task that will be repeated many times. Have your VAs create written SOPs from your videos.

Foster Open and Honest Communication

Your VAs may initially default to trying to hide what is challenging them. Review time sheets to gain a better understanding of the situation.
Encourage your team to over-communicate — especially about any delays or challenges they might face.

Building a Strong Working Relationship

Create a Culture of Appreciation and Recognition

Filipino culture seems very driven by appreciation and shame.

Public recognition for a job well done goes a really long way.
Consider having a feedback-based bonus system. I rate everyone on my team on a scale of one to four in a few categories every two weeks. The total score corresponds to a bonus.
Celebrate work anniversaries (ask another one of your VAs for help sending a gift) and other personal milestones.

Invest in Your VA’s Growth and Development

VAs are motivated like any other member of your team.

Help your VAs understand your company’s culture, mission, and values.
Give your VAs a budget to invest in work-from-home tools or software to be more efficient. Consider buying them computers in some cases.
Consider offering training programs or give your VAs an annual self-improvement budget.
Consider inviting your VAs to all-hands meetings.
Help your VAs understand how they can grow with your company.

Understand Your VAs’ Motivation to Work Remotely

Many of the best VAs work remotely because they need to be at home to help children or elderly family members.

Being flexible when it’s inexpensive is a great way to attract a larger pool of candidates and higher-quality talent.

Learn about Filipino Culture

Filipino culture has a lot of overlap with American culture, but your team will really appreciate it if you are curious about their experiences and try a few words of Tagalog, too.
Consider visiting the Philippines once you have a large team there. Your team will really enjoy getting to meet you and you’ll have a much better perspective on their lifestyles and culture.

Additional Tips

Establish clear payment terms and expectations from the start. Ensure both parties are aligned on payment methods, frequency, and any potential bonuses or incentives.
Be mindful of security. Use tools like 1Password to securely share logins and other information.
Foster a sense of community and belonging, even in a remote work setting. Consider organizing virtual team-building activities or online social events to connect and engage with your VA.
Regularly review and update your processes and workflows as your business grows and evolves. Ensure your VA is equipped with the necessary tools and resources to succeed.
Most importantly, treat your VA with respect and appreciation, recognizing their valuable contributions to your company’s success.

Conclusion

By following these guidelines and building a strong working relationship, you can harness the immense talent and potential of Filipino VAs, helping your company move faster and do more. Remember, a successful partnership is built on trust, communication, and mutual respect. Invest in your VA, and they will invest in your company and its future.

p.s. If you’re (potentially) working as a VA, here’s how to do a great job

While this guide is primarily aimed at founders, it’s equally important for VAs to understand their role in fostering a successful working relationship. Here are some tips on how to be a valuable and effective team member:

Be Proactive and Communicative: Take initiative, ask questions, and communicate any challenges or concerns promptly. Don’t wait for your employer to reach out to you – keep them updated on your progress and any potential roadblocks.
Be Organized and Detail-Oriented: Maintain a structured workflow, utilize project management tools, and pay close attention to details. This will help you stay on top of tasks and minimize errors.
Be Adaptable and Flexible: Embrace change and be willing to learn new skills and take on new responsibilities. The startup environment is dynamic, and your ability to adapt will be invaluable.
Be Reliable and Accountable: Meet deadlines, deliver high-quality work, and take ownership of your tasks. Your employer should be able to trust and rely on you to get the job done.
Be a Team Player: Collaborate effectively with your team members, offer support, and maintain a positive attitude. Even in a remote setting, fostering a sense of teamwork and camaraderie is crucial.
Be Passionate and Engaged: Show enthusiasm for your work and a genuine interest in your employer’s company and goals. Your passion and engagement will be contagious and contribute to a positive work environment.
Have the Right Tools: Make sure you have a reliable internet connection (along with a backup) and a computer capable of doing the work. If your computer is limiting how quickly you can do your tasks, consider asking your boss if they might be able to help you get a new computer once you work for them for a awhile.
Embrace Upskilling and AI Tools: New tools are being created every day. If you can keep on top of these changes, you have the opportunity to become much more valuable to your company, earn more money, and make a bigger impact at your company. Consider setting aside a few hours each week to research how new tools might be able to help you do your regular type of work faster and share things that work with your employer!

By embodying these qualities and actively contributing to a productive and positive working relationship, you can establish yourself as an indispensable asset to any startup team. Remember, your success as a VA is intertwined with your employer’s success. By working together, communicating effectively, and supporting each other’s growth, you can achieve remarkable things and build a lasting partnership.

Founder’s Guide to Personal Finance

2024-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

I wrote this guide to help founders navigate the uncertainties of their financial lives. I’m very confident that your startup and its shares will certainty be worth unimaginably large amounts of money at some point, but for now there are bills to pay and tricky situations to navigate.

See you at IPO!

Updated January 2026

✈️ p.s. if you’re also interested in credit cards I wrote a Founder’s Guide to Credit Cards

❓ Questions, feedback, or just want to chat? Email spencer at argomy dot com

Why this matters and a disclaimer

Stability and Focus

Stable personal finances can be a source of comfort and flexibility against the inherent risks of running your startup, allowing you to make decisions from a position of strength rather than necessity.

Disclaimer

This guide is based on personal experience and a process that’s worked for me and some of my friends. I’m just some guy on the internet, though — I’m not a financial advisor, lawyer, or tax accountant. You should do your own research!

Warning about financial content, advisors

Heads up: personal finance content is pretty fraught with people who have bad incentives: people who get paid a commission when you buy shares of something or give them money to manage, people who get paid when you sign up for a credit card / brokerage / bank account.

If you want to chat with someone about your specific financial situation…

You should probably find someone who is:

A fiduciary (has a legal responsibility to act in your best interest)
Isn’t trying to sell you anything. This means they’re paid by you directly for “advice only.” This type of advisor shouldn’t actually do anything with your money and don’t make a commission off your investments — they just make suggestions you implement.

The type of professional who usually best meets these criteria is a “fee-only, Certified Financial Planner” (CFP).

You want to find someone who: isn’t related to you or a friend, works with many clients in a similar situation to you (ask!), has a teacher mindset (you should understand everything going on in this process), and ideally covers investing, tax, and estate planning.

You might need to work with additional specialists like accountants and estate attorneys but the CFP should empower you to get started.

Last updated: August 2024

How much to pay yourself

This section is aimed at founders who have raised a bit of money but have not reached product market fit or profitability. If you’ve done either of those things (especially profitability), you can still use the benchmarks below, but they should probably be a lower bound of what you should be paid.

In general your goal should be to feel stable and not have to worry about your personal financial situation too much (you have much bigger things to worry about!)

Efficiency vs. Frugality

Your investors funded you to move fast and paying yourself very little is time expensive. Pay yourself enough to avoid wasteful time expenditures (car that constantly breaks down, unsafe neighborhood, taking the bus everywhere when you don’t enjoy doing that) that could be better spent on your business.

Market Rates

You shouldn’t be getting rich off your startup salary but you also shouldn’t be totally left behind by your peers or taking on personal debt to keep your company going (once you’ve raised a moderate amount of money from investors). Companies like Pilot conduct surveys and establish benchmarks.

If you’ve raised between $1m and $3m the median (Bay Area in 2024) salary is $110k.

You should probably just follow the benchmarks for your scale, raise amount, and city unless these don’t accurately reflect the company or you have a ton of life obligations (need to pay yourself more). You almost certainly shouldn’t pay yourself way less than the Pilot data unless your salary negatively affects your company.

What if you don’t have enough money?

Start by defining “enough” — are you struggling to pay for your kids’ daycare or keep up with your friends who work in finance or big tech?

Generally, figure out if you have a spending or an earning problem.

Spending problem

If you’re already paying yourself a market rate, start with tracking where you spend money. Use a budgeting app like YNAB, Empower (Personal Capital), or Copilot.money to get a sense of where you’re spending money.

Are you consistently spending more than 10% of your salary on eating out, entertainment, shopping, subscriptions, or travel? These are all fun ways to spend money, but they’re also fairly flexible categories that can dramatically affect your financial well-being. If you’re spending a lot here, consider setting a budget for each category and saving up for big expenses. All of the apps listed above should be able to help.

Cars are usually much harder to reduce. If you lease a car, consider the cost relative to how much it’s used each month. If your lease is a considerable part of your income, consider something more moderate when it’s up for renewal. If a lease is a very large part of your income you may be able to end the lease early for a small penalty. If you own your car outright and it isn’t too expensive to maintain there probably isn’t much worth optimizing.

Housing is probably your biggest expense, but reducing it can be tough. If you work from home be particularly careful about making changes. Don’t save a few dollars at the expense of your productivity. With that being said, if your home takes up a considerable amount of your income, consider if you’re paying for more space than you need or if you’re paying more than similar apartments nearby. If so, it may be worth the hassle of moving. You can also consider living with friends, a partner, or even in a group house.

Earning problem

If you’ve analyzed all your expenses, made cuts where possible, and are still struggling, you may need to increase your salary. This may affect your company’s financial health and attract the commentary of some investors (especially if the company is losing money), so this should be relatively far down the list. Ultimately, raising your salary can be win-win for you and the company if it ensures you are focused on the company and not constantly worried about money. This makes especially strong sense in cases where you have a child and the additional salary allows them to go to daycare so you aren’t constantly distracted, or when you have ever compounding student loans that are putting pressure on you to find an additional income stream.

Generally, if your company is fairly stable it’s better to pay yourself a bit more so you can keep up this pace for the many years it takes to find success. If your company has plenty of money in the bank, it’s silly to need to stop working on your startup because you’re stressed about your personal finances.

Other debt like student loans, large medical bills, or credit cards (unrelated to the company)

These are a bit less clear… It is not really any of your investors’ fault that these things happened but it’s also not in anyone’s interest for you to have undue stress or distraction from these situations. Be reasonable and don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your investors to find out about.

When to consider making changes to this system

The pay you set today shouldn’t be stagnant in the same way your startup’s financial situation won’t be stagnant.

At a minimum, you should probably adjust to the new benchmarks each year. Other events may be reasons to make larger changes including:

Raising a new round of funding

New Company Stage = New Salary Benchmarks

Aside on secondary sales

As your company matures, you may be able to sell some of your personal shares in a “secondary” transaction. This can make a lot of sense if you’re focused on building a really large company that might not go public for many years. A secondary sale can help you meet immediate financial needs or ease potential pressure to make short-term decisions since so much of your net worth is in your company’s stock.

Secondary sales can also have some signaling risk if you sell too much — Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook says 10% max.

You should also be aware that if you’re selling the same common stock you issue in options to your employees your sale may have an impact on your future 409a valuations (they might be much higher).

PMF / giant uptick in revenue

If you substantially grew the business or reached PMF and are scaling you should probably make more money.

Profitability

You should probably make more money.

Your initial stock grant is fully vested

If you are fully vested in the shares you were granted when you founded the company, you should probably receive an equity refresher or, alternatively, an increase in your salary. This should be based on what the company would pay to someone new hired for the role.

Big life changes

This one is more nebulous, but if your financial situation changes because you have a child, need to take care of a parent, your partner can’t work anymore, etc, you should reassess what makes sense.

What to do with your money

Two schools of tech-money thought

Double down on what you know

You spend your life in the arena! Who could be a better judge of new startups and existing public companies benefiting or being disrupted by the latest cycle?

This leads to investments in your friends’ startups and technology you’re an expert in because you know it’s going to be the next big thing.

Diversify your lifeboat away from exposure to things that could also kill your company

You spend your life in a rickey boat full of holes you’re trying to build into a cruise ship. If there’s a storm, your boat might sink, and it would be really nice to have a submarine that isn’t really affected by the storm rather than a flotilla of other boats that the same storm will probably also sink.

This leads to investments in more traditional assets like index funds, real estate (probably outside of techland), and bonds / cash.

My middle ground: secure a lifeboat then double down with the rest

Tech money sometimes has a transient nature. Equity can be locked up for a decade or be wiped out in a recapitalization. I don’t like this level of insecurity for the money I need to pay my core expenses like rent and food.

I have a pretty diversified set of investments along with enough cash to get through any hiccups.

Emergency Fund: cash in a high-yield savings account

I keep 3-6 months of expenses in case anything happens. This makes it so I’m not ever strapped for cash and have to borrow money or sell something too early.

Some good options: Ally Bank, Amex Savings, Citizens Bank, Lending Club (just Google and find one you like that pays something close on the higher end)

Roth IRA Retirement Account

You can contribute up to $7,000 / year to this tax-advantaged account each year. You pay tax on the money you deposit but it grows tax-free and can be taken out when you reach retirement age.

Once you raise a Series A or B your company will probably start offering employer “match” to IRA contributions as a benefit. This is free money you should take advantage of!

I use Vanguard but it doesn’t really matter

Brokerage account with index funds

I like to invest in the US (and sometimes global) stock market since it should be more resilient (if a little less growth-oriented) than just tech stocks.

I only buy Vanguard index funds (the fees are usually much much cheaper since Vanguard is member owned and not a for profit company). Specifically 60% VTI (US market), 20% VXUS (international), 10% VB (smaller companies since large companies are so represented in the market these days), and 10% VNQ (real estate). These are all ETFs but the mutual fund flavors are basically the same thing. You should strongly consider buying 100% VTI unless you have a strong view on this type of thing.

There’s an endless number of brokerages to choose from. Pick one with no fees for buying index funds that has some auto-invest capability to put building your lifeboat on autopilot.

Real estate I don’t live in

I ran a real estate company for ~4 years, so I understand the market. I plan to purchase properties outright as their cost becomes a smaller percentage of my net worth. For now, I just invest 10% of my index fund money into VNQ — an index of real estate holding companies (REITs). It probably won’t grow as much as the normal stocks but it generates reasonable, consistent income.

Other ways you could use your money

Angel investing

It’s awesome to support your friends but you shouldn’t expect to get anything back for a decade plus (if at all). You shouldn’t angel invest any money that you can’t afford to lose or would change a longstanding friendship. I personally wouldn’t ask my friends or family (who aren’t already investors) for money unless it was like <0.1% of their net worth.

In general, to be successful at angel investing you need a large portfolio to have a good shot at actually hitting a home run and making back more money than you invested.

I already have extensive exposure to the startup economy, so I don’t plan to personally allocate more than ~10% of my liquid (not my who-knows-what-it’s-really-worth startup equity) net worth to this. I’m sure this number will change as my wealth grows and my fundamental needs and flexibility are more assured.

Investing relatively little of your net worth and making a lot of (probably pretty large) investments makes it hard to start angel investing early. If you really just want to support your friends consider asking them if you can do a smaller check. I’ve seen some founders accept $1,000 checks from good friends or folks they know will be extremely helpful and easy to work with.

Buying a house

Buying a home is really expensive :(

In some markets like the Bay Area, paying rent can also be cheaper than having a mortgage for the same-sized home (thanks Prop 13!)

Ultimately, buying a home will always be an emotional decision (it’s hard to beat owning once you have kids and really want to invest in a place), but here’s a good rent vs. own calculator that will help you understand the financial picture.

If you do want to buy a house and will need to borrow money (get a mortgage), you’ll probably need to find an alternative financier if your startup loses money and you own >25% of the shares. In the past, First Republic and SVB were the primary providers of these loans.

Today, it’s less clear but pledged asset loans from the private banking division of someone like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, or Goldman Sachs might work. There are also general asset-backed loans and “trust-based applications” if you have other liquidish assets but don’t want to have to sell them to buy a house. You should probably talk to a CPA that works with founders about these things.

Crypto

If you want and understand the industry / hype cycles well. 99% of crypto projects are probably going to die / are scams but maybe you know something I don’t!

Also fyi crypto seems highly correlated to the price of tech stocks. If tech stocks go down, your crypto is probably going down too so it doesn’t really seem like a good way to diversify.

SPVs of Late Stage Tech Companies

This is a really tricky area since there is such a wide variety of companies, prices, and fees to access them.

Investing directly onto the cap table of a company you think is undervalued or reasonably valued? That seems pretty straightforward to develop an investment case.

Investing in an SPV of an SPV that bought shares off an early employee who may or may not have been authorized to sell their shares? Here be dragons…

In more complicated structures it is a good idea to figure out things like:

To what degree does the company condone my purchase of these shares?
How much in fees will I pay upfront, every year, and when there’s a liquidity event?
How much money does the investment need to go up in order for me to break even on my investment after all those fees? (if you have annual fees check this on a 1,3,5, etc year time horizon.)
If via an SPV how much is the sponsor investing alongside me (eg are they rolling their fees into the equity or taking cash out?)

Debt & credit scores

When to consider using debt

TLDR probably only when you buy a home

Debt (or as we say in finance, leverage) adds risk to whatever system it is introduced to. Debt requires you to constantly make payments against it and restricts your flexibility.

Sometimes this feels like a necessity to enable something like purchasing a home. Other times it feels like a way to get something faster like a car, boat, vacation, or pony. The later category (what we call “consumer debt”) is often hazardous. Consumer debt psychologically enables you to live beyond your means and can be very expensive financially (30% interest rate anyone?) and in your headspace.

It’s probably best to avoid debt unless it is the only way to truly meet a need. Be very aware of the total cost of the debt relative to what you would have paid using only cash. Ask yourself how you would pay the debt back if you lose your job or your company closes. Only agree to take on debt if you are aware of the risks and tradeoffs it brings.

Existing debt

You may already have some debt. This debt adds risk to your personal financial situation in addition to the risk that your startup already brings making it particularly dangerous.

I would strongly encourage you to pay back any existing debt (perhaps with the exception of a home mortgage because of their unique characteristics) as quickly as possible, even if the interest rate is low. Ideally this is done by consistently living below your salary rather than increasing your salary and using your investor’s money to pay for your past purchases.

Student loan debt is perhaps a special case — especially if you have a lot of it, previously had a very high paying job to make payments towards it, and your investors are aware that you will need to use some of their money to take care of this obligation. Even still it isn’t an ideal use of your company’s money.

Credit score

Your credit score affects your ability to borrow and the terms that you’ll receive. If you follow the above advice, this is only really important when you go to buy a home and (much less importantly) over-optimize your financial life by getting a lot of credit cards.

It’s relatively easy to have a good credit score

set up auto-pay so you never miss a payment on a credit card
- this is the fastest way to drop your score
don’t owe a lot of money outside of a home mortgage
- you read the part above about not doing this, though :)
don’t forget about things like medical bills
- if they get sent to a collections agency your credit score will drop
check your credit score a few times a year to make sure there aren’t any errors
- if there are errors report them
- Credit Karma is a good, free tool for this

Hygiene — don’t mix company and personal expenses

Don’t pierce the corporate veil

Your company is technically a different “legal person” than you. This means that if it hurts someone or does something bad you generally won’t personally be at fault. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a clear separation of your finances, this “corporate veil” of protection can be “pierced,” and you can be held personally liable for your company’s actions. This is really serious and can really mess your life up so needs to be done at a bare minimum.

Don’t make the IRS mad at you

The US Government’s Internal Revenue Service is in charge of taxing the income you make which is made up of your revenue and expenses. Some expenses can be very obviously deducted against your revenue and others exist more on a spectrum of defensibility.

The IRS writes a lot of very long documents to clarify what is allowed and there’s a whole discipline called “tax mitigation” that can help you optimize this system. You should probably talk to an accountant if you want to do this in any real amount of depth. As a fun exercise, though here’s a list of some things that your company can and can’t pay for

pls don’t rely on this i’m not an actual tax person i’m just some stranger on the internet

Things your startup probably can’t pay for

The rent for your apartment
Your groceries for your apartment
All of your Ubers around town
Your 8Sleep and Oura Ring

Things your startup probably can pay for

Business travel
- which could conceivably if documented correctly and for a short enough duration be an apartment
Meals when you are on a business trip or discussing business matters
- the later is usually only 50% deductible
Transportation to business events
Your health insurance or medical devices

Another good rule: what would your investors say?

As a broader (and sometimes separate from what the IRS says) rule, consider if all of the expenses your company had were seen and asked questions about by your investors (they probably will be at some point!) If that doesn’t sound like an enjoyable experience it might be time for a change :)

Insurance and other risk mitigation

Health insurance (USA)

If your company doesn’t offer it, you must buy health insurance for yourself. You’ll be fined if you don’t have it, and not having health insurance can literally bankrupt you…

If you’re under 26 you can be on your parents’ plan. Check to make sure their plan is actually good (deductible, out of pocket max).

Buying insurance yourself is straightforward but annoying. The Affordable Care Act (ACA aka Obamacare) established marketplaces in each state that offer plans you can enroll in whenever you switch jobs, get kicked off your parents’ plan, or November 1 - January 15 of each year.

To compare ACA coverage, go to HealthCare.gov. Look at the monthly cost, deductible (amount before insurance starts paying), out-of-pocket max (the max cost you’ll pay), covered services (the ACA requires things like a yearly physical to be covered, but check how much a hospital stay would cost), and reviews from sites like Reddit. Sometimes, there will be plans that cost more with worse services 🙃.

If you’re young you can also probably get a “catastrophic plan” that will basically not pay for anything until you’ve spent ~$10,000 out of pocket. These plans might make sense if there’s a huge savings but do the math. I broke my leg skiing which needed an outpatient operation and the insurance paid over $43,000! I’m really glad that I only had to pay $1,000 instead of $10,000+ for that. In my state, catastrophic plans only save ~$30 / month so I’m happy to pay an extra $350 / year to reduce the risk of a big financial hit.

Life insurance

Strongly consider this if people depend on you / your income. There are a few types, mainly “term” (which covers you for X number of years) and “whole” (which covers you as long as you pay for the plan). You should only really consider term life insurance policies since they are cheaper and more effectively get rid of the risk that you die and your family can’t pay the mortgage without your income (hopefully no one is relying on your income when you are 90).

Estate planning / having a will

Your shares and the votes they have are (hopefully) worth a lot. If something happens to you and you don’t have a will, the government will undergo a very long and expensive court case (probate) to determine what should happen to the things you own. A will is essentially a document where you say what you own today and who should own it if something happens.

This would be pretty terrible for your company and co-founders so you should probably have a will. I’m not a lawyer but many online services exist to make it easy to quickly create a draft will that a lawyer could then help you edit. It’s a good practice (and sometimes the law) to have your will notarized (you can do this at the bank or the UPS store) and to share it with people you trust.

You should probably consider granting a proxy (right to vote your shares) to someone at your company like your co-founder if you don’t think the person you’d leave your shares to is in a position to engage in governing a startup.

Tax planning

The money you make is classified either as income or capital gains. In general, capital gains are the difference between the price you paid and the price you sold something (like your startup shares) for and the taxes are a lower rate.

If you hold your shares for more than five years, the shares are probably considered Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) which means that you won’t be taxed on the first $10m of gains. If you make more than $10m (nice!) or if you didn’t hold the shares long enough there are ways to “stack” QSBS and structure things to reduce your tax burden.

There are many people who spend their whole lives thinking about how to navigate the incentive structures that Congress creates through the tax code. If you’re in a position where you may be liable for millions of dollars in taxes it’s probably a good idea to talk to one of them who specializes in situations similar to yours.

Tools and reading material

Tools

Empower Personal Wealth: track all of your bank accounts, investments, credit cards, etc in one place)

YNAB (You Need a Budget): budgeting tool

Credit Karma: see your credit score for free)

Suggested accounts

Fidelity Cash Management Account: probably the best bank account for most people

Reasonable UI
Free ATM withdrawals (even abroad)

Robinhood: probably the best brokerage account

good UI
no fees
bonus for transferring assets In
if you don’t want a second account just use Fidelity

I wrote a guide — Founder’s Guide to Credit Cards** — to credit card points if you’re interested in learning how to travel for free and really want to optimize your rewards.

If you don’t travel a ton or spend >$100k / year on credit cards you should probably just get a 2% cash back card.
- Fidelity is a great option if you want to keep things super, super simple.
- RobinHood Gold is also a strong option

Traveler’s Guide to Vaccine-Maxing

2024-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

This guide is for a mainly US (possibly Canadian) audience who travels to much less developed countries in (generally) Africa, Asia, and South America and wants to save thousands of dollars by getting their travel vaccines at Costco’s Pharmacy.

You should start thinking about this at least a month (maybe two) before you leave. Time gives you the option to use the much cheaper Costco instead of a last-minute travel clinic that will charge you 10x. If you’re planning to travel many many months in advance your primary care physician could also help you get these shots closer to Costco’s pricing.

Updated November 2025

🧑‍⚕️ This guide’s whole point is to encourage you to work with the medical staff at Safegard to create a customized plan for your own travel needs. You should take their advice over anything I say here — this guide isn’t medical advice I’m just some internet person with a vaccination hobby!

🗺️ Some travelers have had success getting vaccinated in their destination countries (J got a full rabies set for <$5 by getting bit by a dog in India!). I don’t think this is a good plan A — it doesn’t sound very fun to spend days of my life navigating an unfamiliar medical system that may have lower standards for transporting, storing, and administering death-preventing care.

At the same time, if you have some hack to do this stuff for much cheaper in a super developed country, email me and I’ll add that here!

See you at Costco!

How to quickly/cheaply get vaccine-maxed with Costco

As of November 2024 available in: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington & Wisconsin.

Not available in NYC but Bayonne NJ Costco (where we got the shots) is a ~35 minute Uber from midtown Manhattan and close to EWR airport if you ever go there).

Step 1: Safegard

Buy a virtual consolation from Costco’s Safegard partner for $40. Fill out a questionnaire about your vaccination history and all the places you’re planning to travel (I was very liberal in sharing where I might go in the next five years) and they prescribe you the vaccinations and other travel pills appropriate for those locations.

I got the vaccines listed below by sharing that I was planning to travel to: Brazil (Amazon rain forest), India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, Tanzania (Mt. Kilimanjaro) for over a month each.

On the form you list the Costco you want to get the vaccines at. You can call the Costco pharmacy and they can transfer it to another Costco (maybe somewhere else too..?)

Step 2: Coordinate with Costco’s Pharmacy

Safegard ~faxes Costco’s pharmacy your Safegard form and their recommendations. Their pharmacist will call you a few days later to figure out which of Safegard’s recommendations you want to receive. If you give them your insurance info they should be able to tell you your out of pocket cost for each vaccine. All of this stuff should also be HSA eligible (ask). All of the vaccines are special order from a wholesaler so they’ll schedule you for an appointment a few days or even a week later.

Step 3: Get vaxxed

Pretty self explanatory. Some vaccines require multiple doses spread 1-3 weeks apart. They’ll typically only give you ~five? shots at a time. The pharmacists are all very friendly and good at doing the shot thing but they didn’t know much about the diseases since they’re not really found in the US.

Vaccinations to consider

I got all of these. I have weird last minute travel habits and didn’t want to think about this very often.

Your recommendations could include a bunch of other vaccines if you aren’t current on the standard recommendations. You should probably get those whether or not you’re going to travel…

Typhoid (Vivotif)

Highly contagious bacterial infection from contaminated food or water. Particularly common in South Asia (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh), Africa, and Latin America.

Amount I recommend	Get it.
How long does it last?	Pill: 5 years Shot: 2-3 years
How much at Costco?	$110 before insurance - $0 with
How much at other clinics?	~100
Covered by insurance?	Not by mine
How painful / annoying is it to get vaxxed?	One shot or four pills taken over a week

Yellow fever

This is the (probably along with possibly Cholera) the only one you’ll ever be asked to show proof of having to enter a country (especially in Africa).

The disease itself is pretty bad and super common in Africa and South America.

Amount I recommend	Get it.
How long does it last?	Lifetime
How much at Costco?	$182
How much at other clinics?	$150 - $350
Covered by insurance?	Not by mine
How painful / annoying is it to get vaxxed?	One shot

DPT / Tdap (Diphtheria, Pertussis (whooping cough), and Tetanus) Booster (Boostrix)

This will probably be a booster for you — most people get those every ~10 years or after a big cut / burn. One shot, three pretty bad diseases. Tetanus is everywhere in the world if you get a contaminated wound.

Amount I recommend	Boost if needed
How long does protection last?	10 years
How much at Costco?	$60 before insurance — $0 with
How much at other clinics?	$40 - $100+
Covered by insurance?	Mine covered 100%
How painful / annoying is it to get vaxxed?	One shot

ACWY Bacterial Meningitis (Manquadfi)

This will probably be a booster for you — most people get those every ~5 years.

This is a hard-to-diagnose brain infection that kills 10%-15% of people infected in 24-36 hours after infection. Another 20% lose their hearing, lose a limb, or have brain damage.

Amount I recommend	Probably should boost - especially if going to Africa
How long does it last?	Lifetime — high risk people boost every ~5 years
How much at Costco?	$200 before insurance - $0 with
How much at other clinics?	$150 - $250++
Covered by insurance?	Mine covered 100%
How painful / annoying is it to get vaxxed?	One shot

Japanese Encephalitis (JE)

This is an incurable virus that kills up to 30% of the people it infects and leaves most survivors with brain damage.

Everyone in East Asia / Australia gets this as a kid and you probably should to if you’re going to these places.

Amount I recommend	Get it if you’re going to East / Southeast Asia — especially rural areas.
How long does it last?	Lifetime - high risk people boost every ~10 years
How much at Costco?	$620
How much at other clinics?	$400 - $1,000
Covered by insurance?	Not by mine
How painful / annoying is it to get vaxxed?	Two small shots given 7-28 days apart.

Polio Booster

This will pretty much certainly be a booster for you.

Polio is almost exterminated (only endemic in Afghanistan, Pakistan; occasionally found in some South East African countries) but it also can paralyze you.

Amount I recommend	Not strictly necessary but why not
How long does it last?	Lifetime
How much at Costco?	~$50 before insurance - $0 after
How much at other clinics?	$50 - $100
Covered by insurance?	Mine covered 100%
How painful / annoying is it to get vaxxed?	One shot

Rabies (Rabavert)

This is by far the most expensive and annoying one. Three expensive doses, each a few weeks apart. Rabies is pretty horrible though (once you have symptoms you are going to die) and you need the shots ASAP if you’re ever bitten by a mammal and don’t know 100% it doesn’t have Rabies. It can be extremely hard to get this even in the US and there are horror stories of people spending >$10k to get this in major US metros. Typical pre-exposure dose is two shots for ~5 years of protection or three shots for “lifetime” protection.

I’ve almost been bitten by a dog while traveling a few times and have two friends who have been bitten.

Amount I recommend	Depends on your tolerance for getting a bunch of shots… You should probably get this if you’re going somewhere really remote with animals or like to pet third world floofs.
How long does protection last?	Lifetime if 3 doses
How much at Costco?	$390 x 3 = $1,170
How much at other clinics?	$1,200 - $5,000 for all three doses
Covered by insurance?	Not by mine as prevention
How painful / annoying is it to get vaxxed?	3 (very high volume) shots over the course of 3 weeks

Cholera (Vaxchora)

This is a bacterial infection from contaminated water. It’s usually treatable but is like super extreme food poisoning.

The vaccine in the US (Vaxchora) is kind of weird. It’s a drink, and it wears off after about 90 days. I got this right before going to India for a month, but I don’t think I’d get it again.

Amount I recommend	Only if you’re about to travel to a super high risk area.
How long does it last?	90 days
How much at Costco?	$275
How much at other clinics?	$315 ++
Covered by insurance?	Not by mine
How painful / annoying is it to get vaxxed?	One easy drink

Travel pills to consider

Traveler’s diarrhea (Azithromycin)

If you didn’t grow up or take extremely long trips to the developing world, your gut will fail you at some point. This antibiotic will help you quickly recover and keep going.

Amount I recommend	Get it
Dose schedule	Daily for 1-3 days depending on severity
How much at Costco?	Maybe $1 / pill?
How much at other clinics?	$0.70 - $4.00 / pill before insurance
Covered by insurance?	Not by mine

Altitude sickness (Diamox)

If you’re planning to do strenuous activity above ~8,000 feet (and definitely above 11,000 feet) Diamox has been shown to reduce altitude sickness by ~50% by helping your body breathe faster/deeper and get the oxygen it needs. This is particularly helpful if you don’t have a ton of time to acclimate.

Amount I recommend	Useful if you’re going above 8,000 feet to hike / work hard. Especially important if you don’t have much time to acclimate.
Dose schedule	2x daily for 1-2 days before ascending and for 2-3 days after reaching peak elevation
How much at Costco?	~$1.50 / pill
How much at other clinics?	$1.40 - $2.20 / pill before insurance
Covered by insurance?	Not by mine

Malaria (Doxycycline, Malarone, or Mefloquine)

Malaria is horrible (and causes lifelong muscle and brain damage) but the prophylaxis for Malaria can also have strong side effects.

Research the places you’ll be going and the activities you’ll be doing— cities are usually better, mosquitos usually don’t live above 6,000 feet elevation, and Malaria doesn’t typically spread below 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

All Malaria prophylaxis seem to require continued dosing for at least a week after leaving the Malaria area. This can make it hard to use these for shorter trips.

There are three major options available to prevent Malaria:

Malarone (Atovaquone/Proguanil) - my prophylaxis of choice

Malarone generally has the fewest side effects — especially when taken with a large meal. I have taken ~50 doses of Malarone and have only ever had a bit of nausea when I took it on an empty stomach.

Dose schedule	Daily starting 1-2 days before entering the Malaria area. Take for 7 days after leaving the Malaria area.
Side effects	Generally well-tolerated. It may cause nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Take with milk
How much at Costco?	~$110 / month before insurance
How much at other clinics?	~$270 / month before insurance
Covered by insurance?	Mine covered enough for up to a 30-day trip.

Doxycycline - cheaper but longer end-of-trip dose requirement

I haven’t taken this, but it seems fairly similar to Malarone. If you need to refill a prescription while abroad Doxycycline is generally much more available.

Not for children <8 or pregnancy

Dose schedule	Daily starting 1-2 days before entering Malaria area. Take for 28 days after leaving the Malaria area.
Side effects	Sun sensitivity, gastrointestinal upset, yeast infections
How much at Costco?	Unsure
How much at other clinics?	$120 - $180 / month before insurance
Covered by insurance?	Mine covered enough for up to a 30-day trip.

Mefloquine - not recommended

Some Southeast Asian strains of Malaria are resistant to Mefloquine, and it anecdotally has the worst side effects.

The major benefit is that you only need to take this once per week, so if you’re really bad at remembering to take medication, this might be a good option.

Safe for pregnancy
Not for those with psychiatric/seizure disorders.

Dose schedule	Weekly starting 2-3 weeks before entering the Malaria area. Continue for 4 weeks after leaving the Malaria area.
Side effects	Higher risk of neuropsychiatric side effects like anxiety, depression, and vivid dreams
How much at Costco?	Unsure
How much at other clinics?	$110 / month before insurance
Covered by insurance?	Mine covered enough for up to a 30-day trip.

Bonus: Mpox aka JYNNEOUS (Smallpox)

Mpox (monkeypox) is a flu-like illness that has recently emerged and spreads easily.

Smallpox was deadliest disease in human history before it was eradicated in 1980. It spread extremely easily and killed ~1/3 (some strains up to 90%) of people infected.

Monkeypox is not a fun disease and if you’re in an (at risk group)[https://www.cdc.gov/monkeypox/vaccines/index.html] (which it seems like almost anyone in San Francisco is…) that is a pretty good reason to get the shot.

More long tail-risk oriented though, the same JYNNEOUS vaccine administered for mpox is the exact same vaccine the US Military gives its service members to protect them against the potential use of smallpox as a bioweapon.

If you read this whole guide and are actually getting all these vaccines, you are probably the type of person that would like this vaccine for both these reasons.

Amount I recommend	Medium - depends on your risk profile
Dose schedule	2x shots spread ~1 month apart
How much at Walgreens?	$0 on my insurance (but also maybe generally in SF?)
Covered by insurance?	Mine paid 100%

Founder’s Guide to Credit Cards

2023-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

I wrote this guide to help founders get the most from their business and personal spending. As a founder, money has always been tight, but setting up simple systems for my business and personal spending has allowed me to travel the world for free, reward employees, and reduce our company’s burn.

See you at the airport!

We Probably Won't Fight Wars over Water

2023-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

A cost of $1/m3 for seawater desalination and $0.6/m3 for brackish water would be feasible today. The costs will continue to decline in the future as technology progresses.

- A study from 2005. We've more than halved the cost of desalination since then.

Much has been said about how wars of the future will be fought over water. This is probably true, but the scope of the conflict seem like they will be considerably smaller.

The majority of the earth’s surface is covered in water and desalination is already extremely cheap and has dropped ~50% in raw cost over the last decade.

One gallon of desalinated water costs ~1/6 of a penny ($0.0016) so even water-intense foods like growing an avocado (50 gallons) or one pound of beef (1,847 gallons) will be relatively unaffected (+$0.08 / avocado or +$2.95 / lb for beef) even if the water needed was all desalinated.

Access to fresh water seems okay – at least if you’re anywhere near an ocean…

The original study that adds some additional cost to the transportation of water. Interestingly “A 100 m vertical lift is about as costly as a 100 km horizontal transport ($0.05–0.06/m3).” I wonder how long it will be before we have pipelines for desalinated water the way we have for oil (or even just aquifer water for places like LA lol).

Usually, the country downstream on a river is the one who gets screwed, but Egypt might be special. Ethiopia has dammed the Nile and Egypt has threatened to bomb the dam. Egyptian identity is uniquely tied to Nile and 95% of its population lives near and relies on it.

Founder’s Guide to Hiring an Operations Team in the Philippines

2023-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

I wrote this guide to help founders work with global talent (generally in the Philippines). At my last company (Rent the Backyard YC S19), we built an operations team of nearly 20 based in the Philippines. The team helped us with everything from payroll to sales proposals to procurement. The team helped extend my capabilities as a founder while extending the company’s runway and our chance of success.

The below methods are a combination of what’s worked for me and what I’ve seen others use.

Why the Philippines?

Great English

English is widely spoken and used in business, school, and media.

Well educated workforce

Filipino culture values education and the country has a strong set of colleges.

Cost-effective

Average incomes in the Philippines are around $300 per month (<$2 / hour). You can hire excellent talent for around the US minimum wage.

Traffic in the Philippines is notorious and post-Covid, many of the best workers in the country are now considering remote work.

Cultural Alignment

The US administered the Philippines from 1898 until 1941. >90% of Filipinos have a positive impression of the US. Many of the Filipinos I’ve worked with have watched shows like Friends.

Experience with Western companies

It’s common for Filipinos to work with Western employers. Amazon, Microsoft, and others maintain large offices there. Many workers are accustomed to U.S. hours (with some restaurants even serving 2 a.m. “lunch” breaks).

That said, you’ll often get better talent by offering flexible or asynchronous schedules so your team doesn’t have to stay up all night.

What kind of work can operations team members do?

I’ve had the most success delegating tasks that:

Have a clearly defined goal
Require pattern recognition, personalization, or discretion
PDF of 220 possible tasks

Working styles

Hire directly: cheap, most control, takes more time

Source via OnlineJobs.ph.

Very much like a traditional hiring process. Focus on matching skills and past experience to what you need done.

Always pay for a representative sample task (can be done before an interview).

OnlineJobs.ph offers generic contracts

Pay via Wise

Use a headhunter: faster to high quality, more expensive

If you don’t have much experience hiring, it’s a pretty good idea to work with a headhunter to see what good looks like.

Catena

Headhunter agency my Filipino ex-McKinsey friend Monty started.

Email monty@withcatena.com and tell them Spencer sent you for extra good service :)

Somewhere

Headhunter agency buzzy on Twitter. No first-hand reports.

On demand work: pay per result, less relationship

If you have a large quantity of the same work (especially if it isn’t ongoing), use one of these services.

Pareto

Great for high-volume work on the same tasks (data collection, sourcing, labelling, etc). Started by my Stanford friend Phoebe.

Mechanical Turk / similar

Good for cheap, super high volume work but quality can be very poor

How to work with operations team members

Favor asynchronous updates. For managers, add regular 1:1s as you would with local hires.

Instructions / tasks

Record yourself doing the tasks with Loom and narrate what you’re doing
Ask hires to create SOPs from your videos and store them in Notion / similar to make onboarding / delegation easy as the

Accountability

Track tasks in Linear / Asana / Notion / similar
Track hours with Clockify (or via a daily “what did you get done” email)
Use Slack or WhatsApp for communication

Cultural norms

You will probably be called sir or ma’am quite a bit.
Whenever anything is slightly wrong you will probably receive a very quick, (sometimes over the top by American standards) apology. People will occasionally resign if they think they have done particularly poorly (don’t worry - you can usually get the back and they will appreciate you more).
People in the Philippines are generally very deferential to their bosses. If you would like your team member’s input / honest opinion you should ask them a lot of questions and try to avoid letting them know what your opinion is.
It is generally expected (and is the law for employers in the Philippines) to give “13-month pay” (one month’s pay as a bonus) in early December. If you’re going to do this include it in the job description.

Retention

Turnover may be high in the first couple of months, but once someone settles in, they tend to stay long-term.

More resources

OnlineJobs.ph has a helpful YouTube channel

My job posting and hiring flow

You’ll receive a lot of applicants. Requiring a specific response format helps you quickly see who actually read the description and saves everyone time.

I lean toward relatively complex trial tasks to confirm the candidate is detail-oriented and can follow written instructions and Loom videos.

Pay will vary by role. Look for comps online and include a (fairly wide) range in the description.

Example job description

I’m looking for full-time help with basic research, staying organized, and creating customized marketing proposals for customers.

Some tasks you will do to help my company, Rent the Backyard:

Track purchases being made
Prepare presentations for customers by filling out templates
Document what questions are being asked in Facebook groups. Help prepare responses and build a “answer bank.”
Search LinkedIn for prospective job candidates based on clear background and experience criteria

The most important skill for this job is strong organizational skills and attention to detail

I’m also looking for someone with

A “can do” attitude and willingness to take on tasks of any size
At least two hours of overlap with US Pacific business hours (07:30 - 19:30 in UTC-07:00) Monday - Friday
Pay: . This will depend on your level of skill and other people that apply for the job

Perks

Flexible hours—as long as you have at least six hours of overlap with U.S. Pacific business hours (07:30–19:30, UTC-07:00) Monday–Friday.
Salary plus overtime (paid for hours >40/week).
Flexible vacation (just coordinate in advance).
Opportunities to advance and earn bonuses for strong performance.
13 month pay.

About me

I run a company that builds houses in a factory (Rent the Backyard). I have been working with folks in the Philippines / VAs for about four years now and all my team members have been very happy to work with me. You will be given the opportunity to speak with a current team member before you are hired.

To apply

Email me with the subject line: “I want to work for you and [insert my co-founder (business partner’s) name]”
At the top of the email, write two sentences on why you want this role and why you’re a good fit. (More or less than two sentences will disqualify your application.)
Below that, include the following (use the letters A/B to label your answers):
- A. Years of experience with research and purchasing
- B. Software you’ve used for these tasks

Make sure to follow all of the steps above. This is a great opportunity with the ability to get bonuses and raises, so I will only look at applicants that really want the job. If I decide to interview you, there will be a short call between us where video will be required. I will also give you a quick (paid) trial task before an interview.

Thank you and I look forward to reading your application,

Spencer

Reply to a correctly formatted application

Hi [Name],

You look like a strong fit, and I’d like to interview you.

Please pick a time here: [Calendly link]

Then email me at [email] with the subject line “I have scheduled an interview with you” and include the time you selected in the body.

If none of the listed times work, let me know. I try not to ask candidates to stay up late or wake up early, given the time-zone difference.

Before we meet, please complete this short sample assignment: [link to assignment]

You will be paid $10 via PayPal or Wise for completing it.
Please track how long this takes you to complete it.
Deadline: Midnight U.S. Pacific (UTC-07:00) the night before our interview. If we’re interviewing today, it’s due by 11:00 a.m.
If I don’t receive the assignment, I’ll assume you’re not moving forward and will cancel the interview.

Thank you,

Spencer

Example project from a friend’s CPG nutritional company

Project for VA - English Writer

I’m very excited to see your results on this small project. Hopefully, it will not take too long. If you need help along the way, please let me know.

The instructions below will help guide you through the assignment. Most of the information will be gathered from the internet. Please send everything in one email to « email » with the subject line “I am Ready To Start Working”

Go to http://www.speedtest.net/ and take a screenshot of your test results and attach it.
Take a screenshot of how much free space you have on your hard drive as well. We will be sharing a Dropbox so the more free room the better, but if you don’t have very much that is okay as there are workarounds.
This is a link to our website: performancenutbutter.com. Please send back the following:

The link to our five closest competitors
Why do you think these products are competitors?

Please create a Google spreadsheet with the following information: -Title - Performance Nut Butter Social Media

Please make the following columns. Instagram Handle of Account, Instagram Post Link (link to instagram image), Potential Comment, Notes (How you found them)
One of your possible tasks would be finding people who would potentially be interested in buying Performance Nut Butter and commenting on their Instagram. I would like you to find 5 users of Instagram who fit this criteria and come up with a sample comment you would leave on one of their posts as if you were posting from the PNB account. Please also fill out the notes section on why you choose them.
Include a sharing link in the email response to me. I must be able to edit the sheet. Not simply view it.

Put the link to your OnlineJobs.ph profile.

Please email this back to me by 11:59 PM (PST) the night before your interview. If I do not receive this from you, I will not interview you. If there’s anything that needs to be clarified, please let me know. It’s my job to offer help when I can.

If they did well on the project

Subject: Next step — Interview confirmation

Thank you—excited to interview you.

Please note the time is U.S. Pacific (UTC-07:00). If that’s not what you expected, use the calendar invite link to reschedule or tell me what works and we’ll find a time.

This is a video call and video is required.

Thanks,

Spencer

If they did poorly on the project

Subject: Application update

Hello,

Thank you for completing the project. Unfortunately, I don’t think this role is the right fit at this time, so I’ll cancel the interview to save us both time.

I’ll keep your information on file and may reach out for future roles.

Thank you,

Spencer

Interview questions & scoring

Schedule 20 minutes; aim to finish in 15. Skip as needed, but always ask about preferred name/nickname, prior VA (virtual assistant) experience, and English-language work.

| Profile Rating | Project Rating | Interview Rating | Other Rating | Desired Salary | Note s | | — | — | — | — | — | — |

Questions

Hi [Name] — do you prefer to be called [Name] or another name/nickname?
- This is the most important question in the whole interview. Some people go by nicknames that are very different and will often not correct you…
Are you currently working? What do you do now?
Tell me about your last job.
What did you like most about it?
How would your manager describe you?
How would your best friend describe you?
What do you like to do outside of work?
Beyond a paycheck, what are you hoping to learn or get from this job?
What does a good manager look like to you?
How many hours a week do you want to work?
Do you have your own computer and reliable internet?
What do you do if the internet goes out?
Have you worked for foreign (English-speaking) employers before?
Where will you work from?
1. Is it a quiet environment?
Where are you located in the Philippines?
If you could talk with anyone (living or dead), who and why? (Optional—can get emotional.)
What monthly pay are you looking for? I’m hiring full-time.
Who do you live with (if anyone)?
What are your plans over the next five years?
When could you start?
I liked this conversation. As a side note, how many other companies are you interviewing with right now?
Here are the next steps in the process: [outline them].
Any questions for me?

Hiring email

Subject: Offer: [Role Title] at [Company]

Hi [Name]—thanks for speaking with me.

Congratulations! We’d like to offer you the position of [Role], starting as soon as today if you’re available.

Compensation: USD $[amount]/month, plus the following perks:

Work whenever you want with at least six hours of overlap with U.S. Pacific (09:30–19:30, UTC-07:00), Monday–Friday
Fully flexible schedule (around 40 hrs/week; more if you choose)
Overtime paid for hours >40/week
13th-month bonus (first year prorated)
Team bonus tied to company goals
VA Retreat: All-expenses-paid 5-day retreat around Feb/Mar next year (somewhere in the Philippines but possibly internationally like Bali or Vietnam)
Flexible vacation (coordinate in advance)
Clear growth path with raises/bonuses for strong performance

I’ve sent your employment offer via [platform]. Please let me know if you have questions. I’m very excited to work together!

Spencer

My first-day email

Subject: Welcome to [Company]: Start Here

Hi [Name],

Welcome to [Company]—we’re excited to have you!

Please start by reviewing our onboarding doc: [link]

This covers tools, expectations, and includes a short intro prompt.

You’re one of the first to use this version. Please let me know what parts are unclear so we can improve them.

You’ll work closely with [Teammate] (cc’d) this week. After onboarding, they’ll assign your first tasks.

Thanks and welcome aboard!

Spencer

Another person’s first-day email

Hi [name],

Here is the first day orientation doc

https://docs.google.com/document/d/189Pb3SlNZk8z5SQnfPQywlqnKsmV1PZsEZ464j3jiIg/edit?usp=sharing

Throughout this whole process your job is to tell me anything that doesn’t make sense.

I want to hire a second person soon to help me with social media, and I want them to be able to learn everything without me teaching them. Meaning that everything they need to know including the step by step should be organized.

A lot of it already should be organized but anything that isn’t it’s your job to make it more clear so the next person we hire will be able to read the documentation and know what to do without you having to teach them.

Hopefully get some of this done before your first day so we can hit the ground running but if you don’t that is okay.

Please keep track of your time while you are setting everything up. I will be paying you for this time. But in the future we will be using hubstaff to track your time.

Thank you, [your name]

Travel Difficulty Index: My Tiered List for English Only Americans

2023-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

This is a list of the difficulty I perceive it to be to travel (as an English speaking American) to different parts of the world that I have been to or am familiar with.

These rankings are probably most useful if you haven’t done much international travel. There are a lot of pretty easy-to-visit places that are still very interesting, so you should probably start there. I wouldn’t advise going more than one level higher than you’ve been before unless you’re visiting a local friend.

Geopolitics are dynamic so you should always check the latest news and do your own research. I visited these places at different times than you will and have different travel experiences. The US, UK, and Australian governments all produce pretty comprehensive guides. If you are based in the US, I also recommend enrolling Geopolitics are dynamic so you should always check the latest news and do your own research. I visited these places at different times than you will and have different travel experiences. The US, UK, and Australian governments all produce pretty comprehensive guides. If you are based in the US, I also recommend enrolling in STEP (Smart Traveler Enrollment Program).

Updated February 2026

I haven’t been here but have heard from friends = *

0: Incredibly safe land of English speakers

Bermuda*
New Zealand*
Singapore

1: Easier to navigate or safer than the US

Australia
Canada
Denmark
Finland
Iceland
Ireland
Maldives
Netherlands
Norway*
Qatar
Sweden*
Switzerland

2: As easy to navigate / as safe as the US

Austria
Germany
Hong Kong
Kuwait
Oman*
Taiwan
UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi)
UK
Uruguay*
US

3: Slightly more difficult than the US

These places often have a larger language gap, petty crime, infrastructure challenges, or a dynamic geopolitical / security situation.

Argentina
Baltic States* (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania)
Belgium
Costa Rica
Cuba
Czechia
France
Georgia*
Hungary
Israel
Italy
Japan
Malaysia
Namibia*
Panama*
Poland
Portugal
Philippines
Saudi Arabia
Slovakia
Spain
Thailand
Vietnam

4: Substantial challenge

You should spend a lot of time researching these places. They often have security concerns in some parts you should learn about and avoid, serious language gaps, or technical challenges (Google Maps not working, payments via a mobile app foreigners can’t use, etc).

Albania
Botswana*
Brazil
Bulgaria*
Chile*
Colombia*
Croatia*
Ecuador*
Egypt*
Georgia*
Greece*
Indonesia*
Jordan*
Kenya
Mexico (CDMX and possibly Tulum / Cancun are a 3 – many places are a 5. Check the US State Department)
Morocco*
North Macedonia
Peru*
Puerto Rico
Romania
Rwanda*
South Korea (totally different apps)
Tanzania*
Turkey

5: Serious obstacles, research and make a detailed plan

These countries can be extremely dangerous, have very low or no English speakers (find a friend who speaks or hire a guide), technical limitations (firewall, entirely different apps), or suffer from governmental challenges that adversely affect foreigners.

Belarus
Brazil
China
Dominican Republic* (Americans love to visit but it’s actually quite dangerous!)
Ethiopia*
India
Lebanon*
Nicaragua*
Madagascar*
Russia*
Serbia*
South Africa*
Ukraine

Founder's Guide to Building a Second Brain

2023-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

Founders spend their days putting out fires. Context switching is constant and it’s important to step back and make sure the tasks you’re doing continue to line up with your long-term strategy.

The best way I know of working through these challenges is to be in a clear headspace. Clear headspace facilitates focus and enables you to do your best work.

When you are worried about forgetting a task, insight, or other important piece of information you aren’t able to fully dedicate your brain’s resources to a task.

The solution as Tiago Forte’s book lays out is to build a “second brain” when you log projects that need to be done, areas you’re responsible for, resources you can quickly reference, and an archive to look back on.

This takes a bit of effort but once you’re set up you will be able to focus on tasks for longer and with greater cognitive levels. If this guide is helpful you should read Tiago’s book for more depth.

Building a Second Brain in three easy steps:

Set up the system

Decide what you want to capture / focus on

Improve communication across your business.
Make the content you read more actionable
Avoid repeating work.
Reduce the amount of time you spend searching for things.

Identify your inboxes

Where do things already accumulate? For me they are

Computer desktop
Downloads folder
Apple notes (since I use Notion for second brain)
Camera roll / photo library

Choose a notes app

Just make a choice. I use Notion.

Computer scientists / power users might like Obsidian
You can also just use Apple Notes (I use Apple notes for quick input)
Some people also like OneNote or Evernote — just pick one to use

Select Capture Tools

Use a read later app like Matter

People also like Pocket and Instapaper but Matter is free and syncs really easily

Download your note app’s web clipper if it has one

Make PARA Hierarchy Everywhere

Projects

Short term things that have a definite end date.

Don’t be afraid of having “too many”

Areas of Focus / Accountability

Ongoing things you are responsible for for a long term. They might not have a clear end date.

Resources

Things that might be useful in the future. No specific actions are required.

Do this in your

Computer File System
Google Drive, Dropbox,, etc
Notes App
Email

Start using the note system

Make a folder for each active project. You should feel fine about having 20+ projects. Even 50+ isn’t a big deal.

Make sure you have these projects:

Someday / Maybe (things you want to or might do at some point)
12 big problems you’re thinking about (personal, professional, academic - whatever strikes your interest)

### Start by getting inspired by writing down 12 big problems you’re thinking about

You can just drag everything that already exists into archive (remember you can find it later by searching)

Choose a task app

I use Things3

People also like Todoist, Wunderlist or TickTick — the important thing is just to pick one

Make these projects

Projects in your notes app

Waiting for (with the date you first asked about the thing you’re waiting for)

Delegated (if you’re a manager who oversees a lot of important projects)

Schedule your first weekly review

The weekly review is essential for getting current on everything going on in your life and feeling like you are on top of what’s going on.

Copy my checklist below and adapt it for your system

I do Sunday ~8pm

Others do Thursday afternoon or sometime Friday so they can have a clear head going into the weekend

Purpose: get clear, get current, get creative

Collect interesting things

Keep track of interesting problems you want to keep thinking about

Feynman did this and people were always amazed at how he connected random things in his life to big problems. It was because he kept them top of mind.

Use a read later app to take control of your content diet

I like matter

they take away the urgency of needing to read something immediately or never at all

you end up reading less because you realize things aren’t important in the context of your entire read later app

you can batch all your random internet reading into a more deliberate time you pick

it’s really easy to highlight things and save them

no ads

Web clippers can do the same thing for websites

YouTube has a watch later feature too!

I want to put a rule where I can’t watch any videos I see for 24 hours

I am looking for a tool where I can highlight YouTube video transcripts right into Notion

Email excerpts are an unsolved problem

Some may say that using something like this is just an excuse to not build discipline. I am somewhat sympathetic to this argument but you require an order of magnitude more discipline than previous generations because teams of PhDs sit around all day engineering their products to be addictive. You need tools to fight this.

Types of things to collect

Highlights of passages

Quotes

Bookmarks to favorite websites

Voice memos

Meeting notes / agendas

Photos

Takeaways / lessons learned form things

Favorite stories (yours or even other people’s)

Memories

Reflection

Insights / realizations

Musings / random thoughts

Anything that inspires you

Type of things not to collect

Information that would be useful to a hacker like ID docs, finances, passwords, sensitive health records etc

Special file formats that are hard to open in your notes app

Very large apps that will make the app lag

Things to work collaboratively on (though Notion is probably okay)

Review important notes twice (or even three times)

First bold everything that’s important

Second read all the bold things and highlight what’s most important

Write an executive summary at the top if a you review the note a lot or many people will review the note

This is an important part of starting the creative process and preparing for meetings.

Sort all of the interesting things once a week

Here’s a flow chart from the book:

What happened to Pippin / Rent the Backyard

2022-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

In 2018 I co-founded Pippin, a housing factory startup, and our backyard home (ADU) brand Rent the Backyard. Our goal was to use California’s new ADU laws to build a lot of homes quickly by helping homeowners make the most of their unused land. After 4 years, 10 homes built, and a $10m+ contracted revenue annual run rate, we announced that we’re shutting down.

When I founded this startup, I thought my co-founder and the rest of our team could do anything. This carried us through all sorts of obstacles — finding the first few customers who trusted us to build them a new home, convincing our first few employees to leave stable work for a shot at greater impact, and opening our own factory to deliver those first homes.

Starting a company means you have to believe in yourself to the extent that you can solve any problem. This belief carries you through a lot of challenges — expected and unexpected. You fall, you learn, you grow, and you fix what you can. But sometimes, you can’t fix things fast enough to keep yourself alive.

I learned many difficult lessons from this startup, and shutting it down has been painful. I hope these reflections can help if you’re creating something similar.

Rent the Backyard was made up of me, my co-founder Brian, and many other people. This post is my perspective on what transpired with the business. I may refer to “we” or “our” in a company sense, but these are my personal reflections.

How we died

Our company died from not reaching a profitable scale and having a fragile cash cycle. Below, I’ll share the lessons I learned from navigating these two issues.

Not reaching profitable scale

Our company’s main costs were to run an ADU factory and invest in research and development. The factory had high fixed costs it struggled to cover with ADU production. This meant that nearly all research and development costs increased our burn.

Lesson 1: Do many repetitions to improve quickly

While we saw continuous improvements at the factory, our rate of improvement was limited by our small size. Since our assembly line had only six stations, each worker had to learn how to build 1/6 of a home. Since a lot of work was done at each step, homes did not move down the production line very often. Workers were not very specialized and did not get the chance to practice each step very often to help them improve. This meant a lot of the wages we paid were for on-the-job training. We anticipated specialization and its benefits would come as we increased in size but the lack of specialization and sufficiently skilled labor limited the rate we could expand profitable production.

Lesson 2: Pay for the right expertise when you start

We made a very active choice to hire labor that was much less skilled than the typical construction site. That was a mistake. We believed that on an assembly line, workers with limited skills could be quickly trained and perform just as well as workers who would cost twice as much to employ. In hindsight, we should have taken the short-term more painful and expensive path of hiring experienced leaders for each trade or station. Building our assembly line by starting with more experienced tradespeople would have helped us more quickly reach the scale required to be profitable and would have helped us grow into our long-term vision for more cost-effective labor.

Lesson 3: Consider existing frameworks. But don’t be dogmatic

Many companies starting in the physical world like to follow what worked for Tesla:

Build [luxury] sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car …

This is an appealing and tested path. Focusing on a luxury product with higher margins decreases the scale needed to operate profitably, keeps you focused on building the best possible product, and confers a halo of quality and desirability when you build into a more accessible market.

Unfortunately, we believed (still do) that this wouldn’t work for homebuilding because “luxury” homes are generally defined by the level everything can be customized.

Since factories that produce “luxury homes” build to and are designed to accommodate a broad range of customizations, we believed this path would lead to a local optimization — making custom homes accessible to more people. This wasn’t very compelling to us. We wanted to make a quality home accessible to everyone.

Along with these concerns, we also worried about the cyclical nature of custom homebuilding (amplified by both its extreme cost and the bespoke nature of the product). Many smart, ambitious, and well-funded companies have tried to create homebuilding factories since before the Second World War. While many of these attempts were aimed at the luxury market, the companies that have survived the longest — among them Berkshire Hathaway’s Clayton Homes — have been aimed at the lowest end of the market building mobile homes.

We compromised in the middle of the market selling to cash-flow-focused buyers who would let us build the same type of simple, quality home very efficiently over and over. With a much simpler manufacturing process, we traded higher margins for a clear path to higher production rates. This worked pretty well — our customers were very easy to service relative to the size of their purchases.

Fragile cash cycle.

Our sales were far greater than the money we raised from investors. It was exciting that we were selling units so fast but it became very difficult to order items with long lead times without credit facilities or more equity financing. We began to make large purchases of materials to ensure production wouldn’t stop and to limit the effect inflation had on our margins. This pulled cash out of the company and destabilized our financial position.

Lesson 4: Selling something you can’t deliver for a while is dangerous

We worked hard to maintain a backlog of orders for the factory to fulfill. Having a lot of sales and accompanying customer deadlines to meet was exciting and motivating for the whole company. Unfortunately, selling so many homes in advance began to compress our margins as the price of materials increased between the time we sold a home and built a home. While we were able to collect some money from customers when they purchased a home, most customers took months to finalize the financing that enabled them to make such a large purchase.

Some materials like cross-laminated timber panels, rigid-board insulation, and appliances increased by as much as 30% and our unit labor costs increased by nearly 50% over the two years we ran our factory.

Lesson 5: Overcapitalize companies that move atoms instead of bits. Budget as if you will never raise money (even debt) again

When we raised our Seed Round, we projected that we would need much less money than we actually did. Raising too little money led to a low margin for error and an extremely high hurdle rate for investments and experiments. We weren’t able to afford many of the most promising ideas like buying an overhead crane or hiring specialists for each building trade because we undercapitalized the company.

Once we realized this, we repeatedly sought and were turned down for venture debt, inventory financing, accounts receivable financing, and other debt facilities. We also spent considerable time raising equity financing but were far from most investors’ typical focus.

Lesson 5a: Be mindful of where the money you have needs to go

As we became more concerned about the company’s financial situation, we started to model what a shutdown would cost and what our obligations to return customers’ progress payments would be. We quickly realized that it is very expensive to close a factory and that most of the money we had in our account would need to be returned to our customers. Our customers’ nearly always borrowed money against the value of their homes to pay us. If we were unable to deliver them a home, they would lose all of the money they borrowed and entrusted to our company.

Knowing our “shutdown cost” helped us to better understand our cash position and to make a more informed decision to shut down. I am proud to share that all of Rent the Backyard’s customers either received their home from us or received a 100% refund.

Some shutdown costs you may have:

customers: refunds, ongoing customer service costs
your team: severance, paying a small team to run a tidy shutdown process
anything the founders or other employees have personally guaranteed: leases, credit cards, etc
anything the corporate veil can be pierced to collect on: unpaid wages, tax liabilities, etc

The amount you would need to shut down will probably be much more than you would guess.

Lesson 6: Planning is often the highest leverage work

These points of failure were exacerbated by not having a more specific plan for how we would open and run a profitable factory.

We were very eager to “move fast and break things” by starting to build as quickly as possible. We soon learned that opening a factory is not as iterative as building a software product.

We spent significant time discovering industry best practices from first principles (instead of just paying a specialized consultant) on our way to inventing new ones that had the opportunity to change the way housing is built.

When designing something to be built multiple times, any complexity eliminated during the planning phase will result in a compounding advantage. The same applies to organizing a factory to reduce unnecessary work.

I have a lot more thoughts on this — if you’re planning to open a homebuilding factory or other atoms heavy business, let’s chat :)

Thank you

It’s been an incredible journey to get to this point. We saw a giant problem, iterated for a way to approach it, found one of the most interesting and underdeveloped markets in the world, and built a business with an annual run rate of over $10 million, with the opportunity to bring that to tens of millions in the years ahead.

While the homes we built around the San Francisco Bay Area are a legacy smaller than what we hoped it would be, they are a legacy others can follow, and the impact they have on their owners, tenants, and communities will last for generations.

We are so grateful to have had so many people believe in us: family who hosted us, friends who shared our dreams over dinner, customers who believed that our product would change their lives, the team who poured themselves into our collective work, and the amazing investors who saw our vision for the future and put their hard-earned money behind it.

Thank you all. I am forever grateful.

Spencer

Inspired by:

Jason Crawford @ Fieldbook
Abhi & Rashid @ Hutsy
Countless others in the YC and greater startup community who contributed the lessons they learned from their companies’ failures.

Thanks to Bret Burleigh, Brian Bakerman, and Phoebe Yao for reading drafts of this.

Gramps

2021-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Gramps died last night.

My great-grandfather died last week. He was just shy of 100 years old. Gramps lived up in Otis Maine — a few miles from Acadia National Park. When I was growing up, Gramps would often stay a few days with my family on trips to visit his sister. We’d walk down into the creek near my house and while my brother and I fished, Gramps would tell us stories about growing up in not-so-rural anymore Connecticut and carve us bows and arrows from saplings.

I wrote a piece back in high school that I planned to share on Gramps’ 100th birthday. He didn’t quite make it but he was ready to go.

I feel lucky to have met four of my great-grandparents and to have known one of them well.

I’ll miss you Gramps.

—

Gramps’ black leather loafers step silently across the old asphalt of the road, and the end of his checkered red scarf wraps itself further around his deep coffee overcoat in the light breeze. His thin white hair whips in the breeze that blows down the hilly half plowed road occasionally covering his whiskey rectangular glasses. He’s on his daily walk, but today it’s a little different.

It’s Christmas time and Gramps is spending some time with his granddaughter and great-grandchildren. He may be two hundred miles south of his home in Otis, Maine but that won’t stop him from taking his daily walk to take in the fresh air and the sunshine.

With family dog in tow, Gramps and his great-granddaughter set out. They move briskly, the dog stopping often to absorb some incredible stimulant of the olfactory that to us is just dirt. At one of these spots, the foolish dog stops abruptly in front of Gramps, and he nearly trips and falls onto the cold asphalt the dog is so enamored of. Gramps catches himself; he’s fast on his feet. Casually leaning over, Gramps pats the dog on the head and takes one of her ears between his worn forefinger and thumb.

“Get along then.”

Gramps pats her once more on her head and they’re off, dog’s tail wagging as she runs ahead. Gramps likes dogs, he’s had one most of his life, starting with the first springer spaniel he bought alongside his first shotgun when he was twelve.

“The sporting good store didn’t want to sell me the gun because they said I was too young, so my older sister went in there and bought it for me.”

Spending a good part of his boyhood in the forest outside his boyhood home in Danbury Connecticut, Charles Malarik—or as the family calls him, Gramps—had collies and springer spaniels for both hunting and companionship.

“I like them as a companion first of all, and I always like springers because they always stay right close with you … I’ve had eight or ten [dogs] maybe [over my life].”

Gramps bends over and frees the dog from her leash as they enter the house. She bounds up the stairs after Gramps’ great-granddaughter. Gramps walks up the short flight of stairs to the kitchen and settles into a dark upholstered chair. Sometimes he likes to just sit and watch his world—the family—move. Today he’s taking it in with black tea—his favorite drink. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by the houses’ chaotic din and the constant movement of the family from one room to the next.

After all, chaos was something Gramps became accustomed to early in life. As a Jeep driver in the Second World War, he became intimately connected to chaos.

Drafted into the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Gramps and forty or so other young men from Danbury were loaded onto a school bus and shipped to Fort Devens in Massachusetts for a physical and to be assigned to a particular branch. Sent to Europe to fight the Nazis as an infantryman, Gramps disliked the heavy pack associated with the job and applied to be a Jeep driver after seeing an ad. Scoring well on a written exam, he was reassigned and deployed to Cherbourg, France where he ferried platoon commanders between headquarters and the line. Advancing all the way to the Elb River on the outskirts of Berlin, Gramps was on his third Jeep at the end of the war after the previous two were destroyed.

“I would be driving along and then I’d get caught in a [barrage of]… artillery, you could hear it whistling a little, but the mortars, you don’t hear them. All of a sudden they’re exploding. I would dive out of the Jeep and it’d roll in a ditch or roll down the road a little ways and when [the artillery barrage] stopped I would get back in and get out of there.”

The intersections were the most dangerous.

“The Germans would target [those] as there’d be more traffic there. When I would get through one of them, I always felt relieved.”

Gramps’ granddaughter chops tomatoes on the kitchen’s cool granite island. His great-granddaughter throws a toy for the dog near where Gramps sits in the living room, sipping his tea, absorbing the family’s lives from his relaxing coffee armchair. The great-granddaughter, looking for new amusement, pulls a Parcheesi board from a tall oak shelf and sets it up on the long maple kitchen table. She calls her mother, her brother and Gramps to the table as she sets the bright tiger, elephant, oxen and camel pieces in their home spaces. Gramps listens as his great-grandson explains the rules. The game begins, and the pieces start their journey around the board. Gramps just watches and takes the suggestions his great-grandchildren offer him. It isn’t too bad of a strategy as Gramps finishes second, but he’s rather indifferent to this. His granddaughter offers him another cup of tea but he’s “good” for now.

Gramps is always “fine” or “good”—he’s a very agreeable man. He enjoys eating out and being with his family but goes along with most whatever else his family does. That’s what brought him north after the war. That’s how he came to work for Mr. L. L. Bean.
After his time in the service, Gramps, tired of Connecticut’s cold winters, decided to move west to California. Taking a southerly route, Gramps stopped in Dallas to stay with a friend.
“I never left there, I liked the place. It was a fun town.”

Having only been previously employed as a tree surgeon and wanting to try something new, Gramps enrolled in electronics school.

That’s where he met his wife, Elizabeth (known by everyone as Ted).

“…I met her [while I was] going to electronics school at nights. I made friends with another one of the men that was going there, and his wife worked in a restaurant as a waitress and [Ted] was a hostess there. She knew that [Ted] didn’t have any boyfriend or anything, so she introduced us. That’s how we got together.”

It was she who brought Gramps to Maine and to work for Mr. L.L. Bean.

“[Her best characteristic] was her personality. She could get mad, but she would laugh quite easily. She was easy to get along with.” Others would say differently, including her granddaughter and several employers.

“We were living in Texas, [I was working at Love Field rewiring airplanes] and she wanted to move, so she wrote to [Mr.] L.L. Bean, [and] they hired us. It didn’t amount to much at the beginning, but Ted was a smart person and they hired her as a housekeeper. I was his chauffeur, and I worked up there in the store as a clerk.”

Gramps and Mr. Bean quickly became friends as they bonded over their love of the outdoors. Mr. Bean showed Gramps brooks where he could fish, and they went hunting together in northern Maine. Each year when Mr. Bean went to Florida during the winter, he would rent a boat and Gramps would accompany him deep sea fishing. After a couple of years, Mr. Bean gave Gramps a Smith and Wesson .22 that he had carried with him to shoot partridges when he had been hunting.

“[Mr. Bean] had a two car garage, and there was a storage area up above there, and that’s where the gun was. When he was done with hunting, he had someone put it [along with all his other hunting stuff] up there.”

“[When he gave it to me,] he told me one time he was deer hunting with his brother and two other friends and there was one of those Canadian Jays up in the top of the tree, and they bet he couldn’t hit it with his pistol and he proved them wrong.” Gramps’ good natured laugh fills the room.

Gramps carried the gun with him for many years after it was given to him, and it still functions today.

“I carried it around; I used it. I did some target practicing with it and I might of shot a couple of birds with it, but I didn’t see too many when I carried it with me.”

After four years of working with Mrs. Bean, Gramps’ wife moved on to an office management position to earn more money. Gramps followed soon after to a job as a pattern cutter at the same factory.

The next day, the family bundles up and heads out to lunch. The cold wind whips the heat from their bodies as they walk, but Gramps doesn’t seem to be bothered by the cold as he has a heavy wool overcoat and red plaid scarf. On his feet, Gramps dons a worn pair of L.L. Bean boots.

“I wear them all through the winter. They’re insulated and the rubber bottoms keeps your feet dry, so yes, I wear them right through the wintertime.”

Japan - So Many Nuggets

2020-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

I spent a bit of the holiday season in Japan visiting friends and riding the Shinkansen (bullet train). There is a lot to like. From clean, sprawling, dense, and affordable cites, to strangers offering to help an oftentimes extremely lost Gaijin (foreigner).

Yet, I leave the Land of the Rising Sun with more conflicted thoughts than I have for my own home. Things are so familiar and so different. There is so much peace and so much chaos. There is so much hope and so much despair.

I am also accumulating quotes about things far faster than I am writing about them so I thought I’d grab ones about Japan and smoosh them all together in the hope I can simulate the same conflict I feel as I depart.

The Economist recently published a special on housing in the west. One of the articles details how housing policies have increasingly caused wealth to be transferred from the poor, young, and members of ethnic minorities to those who are richer, older, and in the ethnic majority but calls out Japan for largely escaping this trap.

Overall housing costs in America absorb 11% of GDP, up from 8% in the 1970s. If just three big cities—New York, San Francisco and San Jose—relaxed planning rules, America’s gdp could be 4% higher. That is an enormous prize.

It does not have to be this way. Not everywhere is afflicted with every part of the housing curse. Tokyo has no property shortage; between 2013 and 2017 it put up 728,000 dwellings—more than England did—without destroying quality of life. The number of rough sleepers has dropped by 80% in the past 20 years.

In Japan, zoning limitations (height, “setbacks” from other properties, density, etc) are much less restrictive than in the United States and other Western nations. Building projects (often at a massive scale) continue with limited challenge¹, and though Japanese culture is generally more communitarian which probably explains some of the permissiveness, Japan also lacks the explosive growth in property values see in centers of the West’s housing crisis such as the San Francisco Bay Area.

First, let us consider the wealthy Japanese families of the late-twentieth century. During the 1980s, Japan’s economy experienced an incredible boom. From 1985 to 1989, the Nikkei stock index tripled in value, reaching an all-time high of 38,957.11 yen.

By 1993, half of the world’s billionaires were Japanese, and they held almost 13.6% of the global wealth of billionaires. Today, that figure has shrunk to only 1.4%. On the other hand, while there were no billionaires in mainland China in 1993, today’s top-earners in China hold 8.1% of the world’s private wealth.

What caused this extreme reversal in fortune for wealthy Japanese families? Put simply, these Japanese billionaires mismanaged their fortunes. As Japanese real estate appreciated, Japan’s wealth grew. This extreme and rapid appreciation of real estate and stock market valuations, however, created an enormous asset bubble. During the 1990s, the Nikkei index saw sharp declines, and real estate in Japan quickly lost value. By 2004, Tokyo residences were worth only 10% of their 1980s peak value. Similarly, the value of Japan’s most prized land in Tokyo’s Ginza business district lost 99% of its value. Moreover, twenty years after the 1989 peak, the Nikkei index closed at 7,054.98 on March 10, 2009, a full 82% lower.

Due to the combination of falling real estate values and the depreciation of Japanese equities, many Japanese billionaires saw their fortunes disappear. Billionaires could have seen their fortunes grow through intelligent, diversified, and calculated investments that compounded over years. Instead, their wealth is lower today than it was in 1989. While billionaires in the rest of the world grew wealthier, Japanese billionaires only experienced wealth stagnation and loss.

The Nikkei closed 2019 at 23,566.72, ~40% below 1989’s all-time high. It has been 31 years since 1989.

Japanese equities often swing wildly from year to year. This is surprising given that Japan is the world’s third largest economy (and second largest stock market), the index is dominated by large multinationals who don’t seem to be facing much local disruption, and the country has a strong institutions, rule of law, and general stability.

Last 30 Years Change in the Nikkei:

Year	Closing Level	Percent Change in Index
1989	38,915.87	29.04
1990	23,848.71	-38.72
1991	22,983.77	-3.63
1992	16,924.95	-26.36
1993	17,417.24	2.91
1994	19,723.06	13.24
1995	19,868.15	0.74
1996	19,361.35	-2.55
1997	15,258.74	-21.19
1998	13.842,17	-9.28
1999	18,934.34	36.79
2000	13,785.69	-27.19
2001	10,542.62	-23.52
2002	8,578.95	-18.63
2003	10,676.64	24.45
2004	11,488.76	7.61
2005	16,111.43	40.24
2006	17,225.83	6.92
2007	15,307.78	-11.13
2008	8,859.56	-42.12
2009	10,546.44	19.04
2010	10,228.92	-3.01
2011	8,455.35	-17.24
2012	10,395.18	22.94
2013	16,291.31	56.72
2014	17,450.77	7.12
2015	19,033.71	9.07
2016	19,114.40	0.42
2017	22,764.94	19.10
2018	20,014.77	-12.08
2019	23,656.62	18.20

The government has tried many things to encourage the economy to grow, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” efforts with quantitative easing, fiscal stimulus, and structural reforms to make the country more competitive abroad have been a key push that started in 2012.

As a Wikipedia Article about Japan’s world-high national debt to GDP ratio explains:

Abenomics led to rapid appreciation in the Japanese stock market in early 2013 without significantly impacting Japanese government bond yields, although 10-year forward rates rose slightly. Around 70% of Japanese government bonds are purchased by the Bank of Japan, and much of the remainder are purchased by Japanese banks and trust funds, which largely insulates the prices and yields of such bonds from the effects of the global bond market and reduces their sensitivity to credit rating changes. Betting against Japanese government bonds has become known as the "widowmaker trade" due to their price resilience despite fundamentals to the contrary.

Capital staying within a large developed economy makes plenty of sense but Japan still exports a far greater share of its goods than the United States² and has remained consistently competitive in the automotive, electronics, electrical machinery, and medical device spaces.

Japan builds particularly good cars, and the gap between Japan and the rest of the world was even wider in the 80s. Things were so bad at GM’s Fremont plant they shut it down until they started working with Toyota on their “New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc” (NUMMI) joint venture.³

One of the expressions was, you can buy anything you want in the GM plant in Fremont,” adds Jeffrey Liker, a professor who studied the plant. “If you want sex, if you want drugs, if you want alcohol, it’s there. During breaks, during lunch time, if you want to gamble illegally—any illegal activity was available for the asking within that plant.” Absenteeism was so bad that some mornings they didn’t have enough employees to start the assembly line; they had to go across the street and drag people out of the bar.

When management tried to punish workers, workers tried to punish them right back: scratching cars, loosening parts in hard-to-reach places, filing union grievances, sometimes even building cars unsafely. It was war. In 1982, GM finally closed the plant. But the very next year, when Toyota was planning to start its first plant in the US, it decided to partner with GM to reopen it, hiring back the same old disastrous workers into the very same jobs. And so began the most fascinating experiment in management history.

Toyota flew this rowdy crew to Japan, to see an entirely different way of working: The Toyota Way. At Toyota, labor and management considered themselves on the same team; when workers got stuck, managers didn’t yell at them, but asked how they could help and solicited suggestions. It was a revelation. “You had union workers—grizzled old folks that had worked on the plant floor for 30 years, and they were hugging their Japanese counterparts, just absolutely in tears,” recalls their Toyota trainer. “And it might sound flowery to say 25 years later, but they had had such a powerful emotional experience of learning a new way of working, a way that people could actually work together collaboratively—as a team.”

Three months after they got back to the US and reopened the plant, everything had changed. Grievances and absenteeism fell away and workers started saying they actually enjoyed coming to work. The Fremont factory, once one of the worst in the US, had skyrocketed to become the best. The cars they made got near-perfect quality ratings. And the cost to make them had plummeted. It wasn’t the workers who were the problem; it was the system.

An organization is not just a pile of people, it’s also a set of structures. It’s almost like a machine made of men and women. Think of an assembly line. If you just took a bunch of people and threw them in a warehouse with a bunch of car parts and a manual, it’d probably be a disaster. Instead, a careful structure has been built: car parts roll down on a conveyor belt, each worker does one step of the process, everything is carefully designed and routinized. Order out of chaos.

With relations between labor and management portrayed so positively, I wasn’t super surprised to hear that in the 50 years of the Shinkansen bullet train’s operation, none of the network’s 10+ billion passengers have died in a train accident. All of this in a system whose average delay was 0.9 minutes which include delays caused by the earthquakes and typhoons which often strike Japan. While the dueling mandate of safety and punctuality hasn’t resulted in a tragedy on the Shinkansen, a speed related derailment of a commuter line outside of Osaka in 2005 brought scrutiny to the punctuality standards enforced upon train drivers.

Drivers face financial penalties for lateness as well as being forced into harsh and humiliating retraining programs known as nikkin kyōiku (日勤教育, "dayshift education"), which include weeding and grass-cutting duties during the day. The final report officially concluded that the retraining system was one probable cause of the crash. This program consisted of severe verbal abuse, forcing the employees to repent by writing extensive reports. Also, during these times, drivers were forced to perform minor tasks, particularly involving cleaning, instead of their normal jobs. Many experts saw the process of nikkin kyoiku as a punishment and psychological torture, and not as driver retraining.

A similar severity is brought in the criminal justice system. After the 1995 sarin-gassing of the Tokyo Subway by a doomsday cult, the response was more severe than the United States’ response to the Boston Marathon Bombing 18 years later.

When the police finally moved, they did so with overwhelming force. Two days after the subway attack, 2,500 of them raided a dozen cult properties with riot gear, gas masks and caged canaries. (With a straight face, a spokesman said they were investigating a kidnapping.) They arrested Aum acolytes for jaywalking and bicycle theft, and questioned them for weeks to find out where Mr Asahara was hiding. (Suspects can be held for 23 days without charge in Japan.) They eventually found him in a crawl-space in a building they had already raided several times.

It then took 23 years to hang him. The outcome of his trial was never in doubt: the conviction rate in Japanese courts is over 99% and there were literally warehouses full of evidence against him. Yet his first trial lasted seven years—like many in Japan, it was not held on consecutive days. His appeals dragged on until 2006. He lingered another 12 years on death row, never knowing each morning whether he would be hanged that day. This is how Japan treats the condemned. It is not how anyone should be treated, not even a monster like Mr Asahara.

At the same time, institutions like the police are almost always remarkably personable in everyday interactions.

Wherever I travel somewhere, I ask myself if I would live there, and if I would raise children there.⁴ Here too I struggle to make a decision. One of my favorite bloggers — Patrick McKenzie — lives in Japan and offers this anecdote:

People often ask me why I live in Japan. A part: is that it is a place where I could take my daughter to lost-and-found to ask about an acorn, knowing that someone would return an acorn, knowing that someone would clearly expect a lost acorn to be returned and therefore ask.

There are so many things I like about Japan. The streets are clean and safe, public transit is often faster than a car, employees take pride in their work and are extremely helpful. At the same time, I struggle to think about what it would mean to live in an economy that doesn’t really grow, and with a social structure much more rigid than the one I am used to.

Since I am still young and trying to grow and learn as much as possible, I worry how these things might change and limit me. But, as a place to live with a family unit — especially with young children - I think Japan offers most of the world stiff competition.

Let’s stay in touch - I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and other posts! Email me at spence dot burleigh at gmail and sign up to get the next post in your inbox.

1: Though the construction of Tokyo’s Narita Airport was extremely hard fought — protestors built a 200 foot tower at the end of a runway

2: 16.1% vs 11.9% — though both are far below the world average of 28.5%

3: (This American Life)[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010] did a story about the plant when it was closed in 2010. It later sold to Tesla — becoming that company’s first factory.

4: I ignore a good deal of practical things (language, proximity to family, mostly what I would do for work) and be somewhat flexible with my (Western) values when I think about this. I try to make asking myself if I would live somewhere a more micro than macro question about the livability of a place and the way I feel about it. Asking yourself if you’d raise kids somewhere is much more of a macro and culture question since environment will define a big part of who a kid becomes (though I’d also assume they would be in an international school…)

This is honestly just more quotes about Japan with some interjected thoughts that has less flow than above :/

Everyone loves cross laminated timber!

Japan’s government has long advertised the advantages of wooden buildings, and in 2010 passed a law requiring it be used for all public buildings of three stories or fewer.

It has been interesting to contrast Japan with much more familiar Germany. Japanese War Crimes during the Second World War were exhaustive and the country has responded very differently from Germany and continues to be a sore point with its neighbors.

Denial and revisionist accounts of the Nanjing Massacre where 50,000 to 300,000 people were murdered by Japanese troops at the start of the Second World War is a “staple of Japanese Nationalism.” The Chinese took to calling their invaders “Japanese Devils” during the war and the phrase seems to still see occasional use.

《谶言一种》
"A Kind of Prophecy"
村里的老人都说
Village elders say
我跟我爷爷年轻时很像
I resemble my grandfather in his youth
刚开始我不以为然
I didn’t recognize it
后来经他们一再提起
But listening to them time and again
我就深信不疑了
Won me over
我跟我爷爷
My grandfather and I share
不仅外貌越看越像
Facial expressions
就连脾性和爱好
Temperaments, hobbies
也像同一个娘胎里出来的
Almost as if we came from the same womb
比如我爷爷外号竹竿
They nicknamed him “bamboo pole”
我外号衣架
And me, “clothes hanger”
我爷爷经常忍气吞声
He often swallowed his feelings
我经常唯唯诺诺
I'm often obsequious
我爷爷喜欢猜谜
He liked guessing riddles
我喜欢预言 I like premonitions
1943年秋，鬼子进
In the autumn of 1943, the Japanese devils invaded
我爷爷被活活烧死
and burned my grandfather alive
享年23岁
at the age of 23.
我今年23岁
This year i turn 23.
-- 18 June 2013

Similar issues with Korea where Japan ruled from effectively 1895 when assassins snuck into the palace, killed the empress and burned her body.

In 2017, Japan recalled its ambassador from South Korea in protest of a statue to honor the “comfort women” sex slaves taken by the Japanese army across from the embassy. Tensions have even run high in the United States when San Francisco approved a statue of a comfort woman and the mayor of Osaka (Japan’s second largest city) threatened to dissolve the “sister city” relationship the two cities had shared for over 50 years. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like this will be figured out anytime soon.

History gives the Japanese and the Koreans ample grounds for mutual distrust and contempt, so any conclusion confirming their close relationship is likely to be unpopular among both peoples. Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are joined by blood yet locked in traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia as in the Middle East. As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

Delta - Be Better

2019-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

While the usual suspects ended up buying a handful of A380s due to national pressure (Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways), delusions of grandeur (Malaysia, Thai), or me-too syndrome (Asiana, Etihad, Qatar), there was really only one airline that truly loved the airplane. That was Emirates.

- A cool airplane blog I like to read

Airlines and their routes are fun because the decision to fly a plane from one city to another can be made from more than just an immediate profit seeking perspective.

Air Canada flies from Seattle (SEA) to Vancouver (YYZ) — a distance of 126 miles — to feed its Asian and domestic Canadian flights. Delta and Alaska fly the same route to feed their domestic US flights.

American Airlines started flying from Dallas (DFW) to the airport near Reykjavik Iceland (KEF) when WOW Air (now defunct) and Icelandair already flew the route to protect their dominance in the Dallas market.

And Qatar Airways flies from Doha (DOH) to Atlanta (ATL) “in order to rub salt into the wounds of Delta” according to its colorful CEO Akbar Al Baker.

Delta has long alleged the three largest Middle Eastern carriers — Emirates of Dubai, UAE, Qatar Airways of Doha, Qatar, and Etihad of Abu Dhabi, UAE — collectively ME3 are in violation of the treaty that allows the airlines to fly to the United States because of the money they (do almost certainly receive) from their respective governments, but I’m not very concerned.

ME3 have collective orders for hundreds of American manufactured planes - directly providing American jobs. Delta has four outstanding orders for planes manufactured by American companies.

What’s more, American Airlines, directly partners with Qatar Airways as part of the One World Alliance, giving it a share of revenue on passengers traveling to destinations it doesn’t serve (India, Africa, etc). JetBlue and its minimal international route network benefits even more — connecting passengers to all of ME3.

Delta too has only picks convent times to complain — throwing a regulatory fit at Qatar Airways’ investment in tiny (15 plane fleet — only five of which can fly across the Atlantic) Air Italy while standing aside as Etihad invested billions into Delta partner Alitalia.

Delta is widely known to the be the best mainline carrier in the United States. They should focus on expanding that excellence beyond an airline that makes no money flying passengers and one that drags doctors off overbooked flights.

Dallas (DFW) is what is known as a fortress hub — which arguably do more to hurt the traveling public than anything else.

Travelers often prefer nonstop flights — which airlines are increasingly able to offer with aircraft like the Boeing 787 and A350. Singapore Airlines flies nearly 20 hours from New York to Singapore, Qantas flies a similar distance from Perth to London, and even Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania now has a non-stop to London. As routes like these only grow in scope, airlines of the newly connected city pairs will have a material advantage over airlines that require a connection — lessening the impact of ME3 on their passengers even further. Indeed, the Middle East is not a particularly efficient place to connect passengers traveling from the United States to Europe, South America, or (north) Asia.

(It is worth noting here that so-called “fifth freedom” flights like the one Emirates operates from New York to Milan, Cathay Pacific has from New York to Vancouver, or Singapore Airlines offers from New York to Frankfurt are not particularly common).

Also worth noting that while Delta has orders for foreign designed planes like the Airbus A220 and A320, these planes will most likely be manufactured at Airbus’ facility in Mobile, Alabama.

Sukuk - No Interest Here

2019-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

How did all this get financed? Islam doesn’t seem so big on charging interest so bonds wouldn’t be an option.

- me wondering about all the nifty architecture and skyscrapers in (relatively) oil poor Dubai

I just arrived back in Pittsburgh after spending a week at Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Doha, Qatar. My time on Doha was incredible and something I’ll very much be digesting over the coming weeks and may write about soon on this blog. I wanted to thank all of the students at CMU-Q for their hospitality (I had heard much about Arab hospitality and was still blown away by the generosity and kindness I was afforded) and for the administrators at CMU (Kevn D’Arco, Elizabeth Coder, Lenny Chan, and especially Renee Camerlengo) for all the work they did in to make this trip possible. They enabled our two groups and all the others who we interacted with to see the world as a smaller, more similar, place. I also wanted to thank my CMU-Q partner Rameez who got excited when I told him I had a blog and has definitely read more of these posts than my mother :p

I took a class on the contemporary Middle East a couple years ago and my final paper for the class focused on how many countries fund their expansion while remaining in compliance with Islam and its prohibition on charging interest. While Doha is more conservative (and far more wealthy) than the focus of my work, relatively oil poor Dubai, Dubai is often seen as a model for development in the region and Doha too relies on Islamic Finance instruments such Sukuk to power its growth. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I did researching and writing :))

Babel to Burj

In the book of Genesis, Noah’s descendants settled on the plain of Shinar — not far from the Persian Gulf — and said: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves”. Seeing the people’s desire to best him, God confused the people’s languages and “scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city”. Known as Babel, the tower was abandoned, and the world’s people would never again speak the same language. In contemporary times, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, a modest fishing village rose to be a global financial hub in just 20 years. Built on migrant labor and populated primarily by expatriates, Dubai expanded its 65 kilometer coastline to over 1000 kilometers — building the world’s only 7 star hotel, an archipelago in the shape of the world and visible from space; indoor ski resorts; and the world’s tallest building that rises over half a mile above the inhospitable desert — just like Babel’s planned tower. And, just as Babel’s tower incurred God’s wrath, Dubai’s economy as represented by the Burj Dubai/Khalifa, was punished for its over-reaching ambition. Sideswiped by the global financial crisis of 2008, Dubai’s glut of real estate, once “gobbled up by voracious buyers who were eager to indulge” and “flip (property) three or four times before a single grain of sand (was) moved” was exposed for what it truly was — a colossal bubble. To attract tourists, to differentiate themselves from the historically more powerful and wealthy emirate of Abu Dhabi to the south, and to divest the economy from reliance on its limited oil reserves, Dubai mirrored the West by developing sophisticated financial instruments to catalyze this change.

Dubai built its economy at an unprecedented pace over twenty years. As Silvia Montero, an expatriate from Spain who came to Dubai in the 1980s recalled, “When I got here, there were no paved roads. People kept their goats and camels out in the backyard. It was incredible; to me it was like the Third World. And now it’s become the other extreme. Now they’ve become too sophisticated for my taste … now I’m the one who comes across as the local yokel”. When Sheikh Rashin bin Said al-Maktum — the leader of Dubai — died in the mid-1990s, his four sons dedicated themselves to building an economy free of a dependence on hydrocarbons and their volatility. Dubai capitalized on its status as a small trading center, creating tax free zones and providing incentives for companies such as Microsoft, Dell and Reuters to base their Middle Eastern operations in Dubai.

Analogous to Singapore, Dubai set its sights on economic parity with first world nations — utilizing a pro-business authoritarian structure to do so. Government led economic development through its conglomerate Dubai World. Sheikh Muhammad, Dubai’s leader (and the third son of Sheikh Rashin) embraced the emirate’s nickname Dubai Inc. by saying, “I change the way of government to make it like a big company”. Even though Dubai is under authoritarian control, “You get a sense of freedom when you are in Dubai” recounted Dr. Rochdi Younsi, lead analyst for the Eurasia Investment Group, “you do not really feel that you live under an oppressive regime [though] freedom of expression is not guaranteed”. Most Emirati — the native people — like this system. As Sheikh Muhammad boasted to 60 Minutes in 2007: “I want (Dubai) to be number one. Not in the region, but in the world … high education, health, housing. [I want] my people [to have] the highest way of living”.

When the tidal wave of the 2008 global financial crisis hit Dubai’s shore, it seemed just a ripple. Solvent and stable through the initial global shocks of the crisis, the emirate quickly became a haven for capital and began to attract thousands of people seeking work. With 95 percent of the population expatriates, these newcomers quickly integrated into the city and found jobs. For Brooke Butler, a 24-year-old recent graduate of Dallas Baptist University, who was laid off and was subsequently unable to find a job, the choice was simple. “Should I get another lame job in the States, or should I live in Dubai?”. She went online, applied for a job and arrived a month later. As Brooke recalled in a 2008 New York Magazine article, “Within a year, I’ll be a millionaire. It’s not that difficult over here … I know a girl who made $2 million U.S. in commissions last year”. Reminiscent of Joseph P. Kennedy’s fabled encounter with a shoeshiner predicting the market’s movements before the Great Depression, and his conclusion that “if a mere boy could predict the movement of the market, then it certainly was no place for a man with plenty of money to lose”, the absurdity of young recently laid-off Americans coming to Dubai and making millions warned of the impending collapse.

As the global crisis thickened, interest in Dubai grew to new heights. As James Ruiz, a banker who moved to Dubai only 6 months prior, mentioned in the same New York Magazine article, “Once or twice a week since I’ve been here, I’ve gotten calls from New York from people looking for jobs” and from August to November of 2008, “it’s just snowballed”. These sentiments are understandable. The same day the US Treasury pumped billions into failing US banks, Dubai held a grand opening for their new $1.5 billion Atlantis seaside resort complex.

Though some investors were still skeptical of Dubai’s claims to solvency, the Islamic nature of its financing eased these concerns. In Islam, where collecting Riba (interest) is prohibited by Shariah (Islamic Law), traditional financing through securities such as bonds is not permitted. To unlock the benefits investment brings to economic development, instruments consistent with Islamic law known as Sukuk were developed. Instead of loaning money based on credit history and assessment of a borrower’s ability to repay a loan, Sukuk are based on the value of revenues generated by an asset or business offered that creditors temporarily own a stake in. A shell company leases control of an asset to an SPV (special purpose vehicle) that then issues shares in the revenues generated by the underlying asset. The SPV then leases the asset to another shell company which pays for the right to use the asset. If a borrower is unable to pay, the SPV can seize and liquidate the asset to make investors whole.

While many Islamic scholars assert that in the spirit of Riba’s prohibition, Sukuk valuations should be entirely dependent on the revenues generated by an underlying asset, this is not practically true. To protect their purchasers and to make their instruments more attractive, Sukuk issuers often pledge a certain percent of the Sukuk’s shares to another shell company that will distribute these shares to investors should the underlying asset depreciate. Alternatively and more dubiously compliant with Shariah, issuers will often explicitly guarantee repayment of a Sukuk’s forecasted value. Securities such as these are analogous to bonds but are fundamentally less risk prone given the collateralized nature of an underlying asset.

While Sukuk inherently hedge the risk of an issuer’s default, the security they offer can be disrupted by adverse changes in the valuation of the underlying asset. When the global financial crisis began, and investors lost confidence in the solvency of debtors across the world, Dubai did not suffer because of their Sukuk’s collateralization. As the real estate bubble popped in Dubai in late summer of 2008, however, property values plummeted more than 60 percent, and over $750 billion in projects were put on hold. The stock market collapsed too, causing even government backed “blue chip” stocks such as Emaar Properties to fall more than 80 percent. As fall of 2008 ended, hundreds of cranes hung silent over the skyline and even Dubai’s infamous traffic began to ease. Against the backdrop of a string of cancellations of large projects, the Dubai government revealed the deep insecurity it had about the economy through its censorship of speech against the economy — holding investigative journalists without charge, and even removing The Sunday Times from newsstands when it ran an article criticizing the economy.

For Dubai’s Sukuk, the massive collapse of the real estate market removed the security that had made Dubai a haven for capital. Since property values fell well past levels where share pledges could restore investors, only Dubai World’s explicit guarantee and the Dubai Government’s widely assumed implicit guarantee of debt remained. Amidst credit downgrades from the major agencies, Dubai announced that it had accumulated over $80 billion in debt but that its sovereign wealth fund was sufficient to cover the debt. Investors, however were skeptical given global asset depreciation in the wake of 2008’s financial crisis. It would take intervention by Dubai’s oil-rich southern neighbor, Abu Dhabi to normalize the situation.

While Dubai extravagantly developed away from oil, Abu Dhabi developed conservatively, leveraging its massive hydrocarbon reserves to expand across the world through investment. Since its escape from Abu Dhabi’s control, Dubai has sought to differentiate itself through liberalism, secularization and massive projects like the Burj Dubai — the world’s tallest building.

Eager to divest from its small hydrocarbon deposits, Dubai had become reliant on property and speculators who provided demand for new projects — forever increasing in profligacy. For some like Iñaki Aris, who came to Dubai as a banker, real estate speculation had become the most lucrative job in the city. As he explained: “(The) apartment where I live now has doubled in value in just under two years, and the one in Marina has gone up 20% in a year, and I’ve just bought another one. I expect it to go up another 20% in (a year)”. Abu Dhabi, already at the top of the UAE’s power structure and with 90 percent of the UAE’s hydrocarbon reserves, was just the opposite.

With the UAE’s global reputation at stake, Abu Dhabi was compelled to help support its “flashy and free-spending” neighbor when it first faced trouble in late 2008. Extending $15 billion in assistance to help stabilize the emirate. A year later, in November of 2009, a new crisis far more severe struck when Dubai World announced that it would not be able to meet payments on a $3.5 billion Sukuk issued by Nakheel — a property developer — and that it would need to restructure an additional $26 billion of debt. With the security provided by the collateral already gone, and now, the implicit guarantee many believed Dubai’s government to have over its wholly owned subsidiary formally declared to be nonexistent, financial markets across the world fell temporarily, and markets in the Middle East plummeted. Abu Dhabi was initially more hesitant to save Dubai the second time and investors were unsure if the emirates’ weak relationship could be overcome. As markets continued to crash however, the emirate saw the need to stabilize the region and they extended a jaded hand, attempting to gain equity in Dubai’s best assets and ultimately succeeding in changing the name of Dubai’s pride — the tallest building in the world — from the Burj Dubai, to the Burj Khalifa, in honor of Sheikh Khalifa — the leader of Abu Dhabi. Ultimately, with an additional $10 billion capital injection, and affirmations that “Abu Dhabi has stood by Dubai and will stand by Dubai” from people like cabinet minister Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Dubai reached new payment terms with their investors and markets generally recovered.

Dubai sought to best its richer and more conservative neighbor through extravagant and luxurious developments. Ultimately though, they leveraged complex financial instruments to gain easy credit to build their golden city — weakening the base of their economy. With the collapse of the real estate market, the complex financial instruments failed and the focus on real estate that had made Dubai so successful, brought the economy to its knees. Only with an intervention from Abu Dhabi did Dubai remain solvent. The city built, but did so unsustainably. They wanted to be the best, but in the end, the dream dissolved into the confusion, discord, and ultimate failure of Babel.

Pierogis - with Bryndza Sheep Cheese

2019-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

English please

- A waiter at this really yummy pub in Bratislava, Slovakia, the other day after I asked if he preferred English or German

I know Slovakians speak Slovak. I just found it really interesting that in Bratislava – less than two miles from the border with Austria that English was the language of choice after Slovak (for both the waiter and the menu). This interest is perhaps misguided and it’s entirely reasonable for former countries of the Eastern Block to speak languages (Czech, Polish, etc) reflective of their history behind the Iron Curtain but it’s been nearly 30 years and Slovakia makes an exceedingly large number of (mainly German) cars.

The English = lingua franca argument is an pretty developed one that seems to go:

—> British Empire had a bunch of colonies that kicked things off —> the United States became a major world power after winning the Second World War exporting its culture and language pretty much everywhere —> the internet was invented and a lot of the early people on it were from American universities —> massive network effects

While it’s pretty useful that English gets me by just fine in Slovakia and a whole host of other nations and people from countries with comparatively few native speakers (and some from larger ones that seem to think English is really cool like in Germany) will probably continue to learn English or another “world language”, I wonder if increased communication over the internet and rapid advances in machine translation will change the world less than we think.

Later on this trip in Lyon, France, my friend and I found ourselves with an extremely kind and excited AirBnb host who spent 45 minutes giving us a tour of his loft and pouring over a map of the city entirely in French. Helped by cognates between French and Spanish, a lot of smiles, and the Google Translate App, we made it through but this is a UX I would definitely take steps to improve if I expected to encounter it with any frequency. At this point, the only way to improve would seem to be to apprendre le français.

The Slovak Pub’s menu is almost enough to make me get on a plane back to Slovakia right now. We had 207: Slovak Platter for Two with dumplings with bayndza’ sheep cheese, pierogi also with bayndza’ sheep cheese and the dumplings with cabbage and bacon (where dumpling are more similar to macaroni and cheese then what you would find at dim-sum).

Machine translation is usually pretty great for ordering food and other simple things but even then it messes up like in this case:

“a Palestinian construction worker wrote “good morning” in Arabic on Facebook. The company’s automatic translation service translated the post to “attack them” in Hebrew and “hurt them” in English, prompting the Israeli police to arrest the individual.”

Cool travel tools:

People sporadically ask me for a list so here we go:

I’m a big fan of TripIt to make pretty itineraries and to track things, Citymapper for transit maps in places Google doesn’t have (Lyon smh), Ofo/Mobike/Lime for magic dockless bikes, the AR translate in Google Translate they integrated after they bought WorldLens, and ofc T-Mobile for the magic international (albeit somewhat slow) service that’s only failed me in Cuba.

Chicken - Inconsistent with the UK's Brand

2018-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Do you have a view?

- interview the other week

I’ve become convinced British Prime Minister Theresa May is playing chicken.

The other day, the Tories (Conservative) held their party conference where May declared an end to austerity, called for a softer Brexit and declared that “there are better days ahead.” I fundamentally don’t understand how this can be true given the mindset of its leaders across both parties, an ugly superiority complex fundamental to national identity that the country has failed to shake since the dissolution of the Empire, and a general failure to grow.

The United Kingdom has a mandate to withdraw from the European Union before March 29, 2019.

No trade deals have been secured.

Multinationals continue to switch the headquarters of their European operations to the mainland. The future of the border with Ireland (a member of both the EU and the common market - though not Schengen) has not been resolved.

They don’t have the necessary legal framework to even have a moderate degree of success here. May’s only plan for Brexit seems to be for her and her party’s inaction to prompt a redo of the whole referendum because the consequences otherwise would be so severe.

May isn’t the British leader with a destructive mindset. In her own party, former mayor of London and Home Secretary (British equivalent to Secretary of State) Boris Johnson sews discontent with dreams of a crisis in which he can become a modern day Churchill, and resignations have been manifold in the Cabinet.

The opposition party too is in disarray. Labor party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn is mired in an ugly string of anti-Semitic allegations, reshuffles and resignations have been extremely common in the Shadow Cabinet over the last two years and Sadiq Khan’s (the current mayor of London) government has just filed a judicial review claim regarding a planned third runway at Heathrow – this is desperately needed: London’s other major airport Gatwick is the busiest single runway airport in the world and both airports already operate over capacity.

British growth for the past three decades has been buoyed by an influx of foreign money seeking stability. Russian, Arab and African capital flows employ the ice cream scoopers at Harrods, builders of investment properties far beyond the Green Belt, and countless humble Bentley, Lamborghini, and Porsche dealers. London and a good chunk of the rest of the United Kingdom have built their economy on being a safe harbor. If Britain continues to coast on the basis of stability its leaders are actively undermining at the highest level, the music will stop and the money will move (perhaps to the US — though we have a case the same disease with less intensity, maybe to Canada — look at Chinese capital in Vancouver –, Singapore, or the Nordic countries).

Institutions, Institutions, Institutions

2018-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

- New York Times Anonymous Oped this Week

One of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s overarching theses in Why Nations Fail is that the success of a country is predicated on the inclusiveness of political and economic institutions (which in turn underline an equal rule and application of law). I think many Trump supporters will be upset about the stance taken by the senior administration official, but it’s important to remember that all of these officials (including the President) took an oath specifically to the Constitution and in turn to the precedent set over the last 200+ years. It generally seems best that government is slow to change. Consistency allows people and businesses to feel confident in the future and make investment in themselves and their communities accordingly.

At one point I heard some pretty convincing arguments that Trump was pursuing a madman strategy like Richard Nixon did during the Vietnam War but I think my confidence in that theory falls more each news cycle.

Snap - When your Core Competency is a Loss Leader

2018-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication — things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.

- Evan Spiegel

I’m increasingly receptive to the narrative that Snap is becoming the new Twitter. While the revenue of both are restrained by the limited degree to which they have information in the user (and such can’t charge advertisers a premium for really direct targeting like Google and Facebook), Snap also suffers from the lack of a feed users can be sucked into.

Snap’s core competency is messaging by way of photos. This has been a notorious segment for monetization. Specifically, Facebook Messenger puts ads in between messages and it’s a horrible user experience, WhatsApp just charges $1/year after the first year, and even WeChat/KakaoTalk just use messaging as a loss leader (beyond simple things like sticker packs) to pull people into their wider ecosystem based around their specific messaging app. If we’re being honest, Facebook is using messaging as a loss leader too.

The problem with Snap is that messaging can’t be a loss leader.

This means that Snap can only advertise in areas outside of its core competency and has to both create new channels for its customers to interact with, and monetize it at the same time. This leads to a really bad user experience which leads to lower advertising premiums. When the data you collect on users is also sparse, (Snapchat must have orders of magnitude less data on each user than Facebook) ad premiums suffer even more and their relevance drops. I’ve come to really appreciate Facebook Ads and interact with a good number of them, while all I want to do when I hit a Snapchat ad is to continue clicking. If Snap dies, it will be because of this spiral (poorly monetized core competency + a lack of user data leads to a bad user experience and low rates of interaction which leads to lower quality advertisers which only reinforce users idea of a Snapchat ad).

Snap seems to have really good international reach — 13+/32 million in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia seems remarkable.

I think Snap suffers from one of the same core problems as Twitter - particularly its defunct Vine division. Users have some tolerance level for the percent of their time they will spend on a platform engaging/tolerating ads during any given session and Snapchat Stories/Vine sessions are just too short to ads to exist at any meaningful scale without being disruptive to a user’s experience (feeding the aforementioned cycle). Feed based social networks like Facebook (and increasingly Twitter) have longer sessions and a more natural place to put ads).

Having more user data would probably help Snap deliver “an experience that’s fun and informative”. I find Facebook ads so good because they’re so targeted for my niche interests. All I see on Snap are body building videos, pyramid schemes, and fraternity formal planning sites (I guess they know I’m on a college campus…).

Melting Pots - Not Quite Everywhere

2018-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

In China, there are only fifty-six legally defined minzu [hard to translate but basically nationality/race] one indicated on every citizen’s identity card…

- Peter C. Perdue - Demystifying China, New Understandings of Chinese History

This term I’m taking a class on Chinese History since the Qing Dynasty. Our first reading was from Naomi Standen’s book “Demystifying China and I think the first chapter is one of the best introductions I’ve seen to Chinese History and the mindset of its current leaders.

I think a lot of people have the tendency to project their model of the world on other societies and people (creating a poor base of understanding from which mistakes are made). This bit seems particularly important to helping specifically Americans in this quest because of how comparatively loose we usually are with this type of thing.

I had a similar experience to this in a course I took on Imperial Russia my senior year in high school with a chapter from Richard Pipes’ Russia Under the Old Regime (specifically the chapter titled “Consequences of the Environment”).

Pipes’ thesis is that as relatively poor fighters, the Russian people (worth noting the Russian language makes a distinction between ethnic Russians - русский - and citizens - россияне) were pushed into the Eurasian Steep where there was little rain and bad dirt. This in turn led to a more decentralized society that limited the development of cities and markets. As such, the rare surplus was turned to alcohol, and capital accumulation did not occur as it did in the rest of the world. According to the author, these factors set the stage for a Russia whose Eastern Orthodox beliefs find piety in suffering/struggle, and a unique identity distinct from the rest of the world. It was a really wonderful introduction to Russian History/thinking and definitely helps you avoid projecting your own cultural background/experiences on a country that is distinct from its neighbors in Europe and Asia.

The Saudi Spat with Canada - Messy

2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Saudi Arabia expelled Canada’s ambassador, froze trade with the country and will reportedly dump its Canadian investments. The kingdom’s ire was raised by a series of tweets from Canada’s foreign minister, in which she called for the release of Saudi human-rights activists. The Saudi government insisted that only a full Canadian climbdown would “fix its big mistake”.

- The Economist, Espresso 8.11.18

Kind of continuing from last week’s theme about authoritarianism, the Saudis are demonstrating how liberalization requires harsh stances to be taken to prevent a slippery slope away from government control. [1]

Saudi foreign policy recently has struck me as quite odd. There’s a really intriguing NewYorker Article that runs through it — don’t let title throw you - there’s definitely a lot of stuff on Trump and Kushner but the meat is on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) and his ally the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ). War in Yemen [2] and a united Sunni movement against Shiite Iran has reshaped the politics of the Middle East (article focused specifically on how this has affected the PLO’s efforts) and have surely served to only strengthen domestic support for the young princes.

Continuing on the theme of external crisis, there seems to be a strong correlation between external crisis and approval rates of leaders. Vladimir Putin has harnessed this phenomenon over the last 20+ years to keep domestic support high (the dubious Russian Apartment bombings helped lead to the Second Chechen War and conflicts like the Russo-Georgian War and the seizure of Crimea have served to galvanize the Russia public against the West and encouraged Putin’s rule of the Russian Federation. Even George Bush saw his approval rating spike 40% in the wake of September 11th attacks and ~10% both after the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein.

I don’t totally understand why this correlation exists but I don’t have strong memories of transformative events like this. It’s probably a sense of nationalism and fear that leaders play well to when they show strength in a crisis but would love to hear your thoughts [3] :)

When I cross posted this on my Medium on 07/06/19 I added some reflection:

[1] MBS had me and many others optimistic that he would be a liberalizing force in Saudia Arabia. After the slaying of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in late 2018, we aren’t so sure :/

[2] A war that seems to only become more brutal and wrought with crimes against humanity as the conflict lumbers towards its fifth year.

[3] also to feel that someone is in control when there’s chaos

Protest in the 21st Century - Harder

2018-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

The Soviet Communist dictatorship, like any other system, seeks to preserve its own existence. To do this it is forced to stamp out any spark of dissidence which appears, either on its own territory or beyond its borders.

— Viktor Suvorov, Inside the Soviet Army

I study Statistics and Machine Learning. Most of the time it’s really exciting to be so close to the frontier, but sometimes it’s terrifying because you understand how (relatively) easy it will be for totalitarian regimes to apply really powerful open-source software to do things like track their entire populations and automatically predict who might act out.

Facial recognition systems using technology like CNNs (convolutional neural networks) has proven itself to be extremely accurate on a small scale, and as the components involved in a large scale deployment (cameras, storage, and general computing power) become orders of magnitude less expensive, accessibility to even the poorest dictator improve. To this end, the general development of AI will make the process of revolting against authoritarianism and protesting where that right is not strongly protected much more difficult (read costly).

I like to think that every person has a threshold of activation that once crossed drives them to rebel in some fashion. This threshold vastly differs because of expectations (I sure like to write about those!) about the society to which they belong and personally how non-confrontational they are as a human being. For citizens of liberal democracies, protest is often a matter of being irritated enough to act and protest is an important part of the political process, but consequences on a grand scale probably don’t factor into their decision-making process that much.

Consequences are perhaps the most important factor in dissuading protest in the most repressive authoritarian states. North Korea’s historical punishment of three generations of a defectors’ family being perhaps the most infamous contemporary example but I’ve heard of similar family-based punishment being used in Syria, the GDR and the USSR as well. Having the threat of the death of one’s family hanging over you is pretty unimaginable but even then, decisions are probably influenced by an assessment of how likely you are to be caught. AI systems and their ability to identify people from security camera images or to track unknown people as they move through a country will raise that likelihood significantly and probably dissuade some people from revolting.

I’m hopeful this isn’t that case. Truly terrible regimes cultivate such animosity in the lives of their people that some no longer care about their own lives (or even the lives of their families).

While some protest that may have occurred otherwise will be dissuaded by technology, some have such strong convictions that nothing matters. When Mohammad Bouazizi lit himself afire in front of the governor’s office in his small Tunisian town, the world changed. Catalysts like this, captured and spread quickly by technology in all but the most repressive regimes will probably serve to accelerate the spread of protest once they begin.

When people rebel, governments have a choice to make and they aren’t actually all that good. Precedents not soon forgotten are set fast and the dueling options of acquiescing or resisting are antipodes.

Acquiescence is to let go of power - something democracies and perhaps only the most self-aware authoritarians are capable of doing (the Saudis on women driving isn’t a terrible example). The fabric of society is different and changemakers are often emboldened to continue their campaign — more confident in their own safety (notice how the Saudi government seems even quicker to push back recently to avoid this slippery slope).

This is why most authoritarian governments favor suppression. When done quickly, the status quo does not appear to have undergone change but this is perhaps naive in the long term. Brutalism begets more resistance (perhaps only in the mind for the time being) from those aware of the suppression.

As such, it seems that authoritarian states have already lost the fight (against specifically change but perhaps against much more) when people actually rebel. I can only hope the drive of technology will equally benefit governments and those they oppress.

It is worth noting democracies are good at letting go of power and respond to protest because they exist by mandate of the governed — to ignore protest is to invite defeat in the next election.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m a big proponent of liberal democracies but I’m respectful of the right of a people to collectively make a decision about how they want to be governed. Traveling to Singapore gave me weird technocratic vibes and a feeling of being generally surveilled but by most any standard, the people are free, happy and prosperous. That is better than so many others in our world.

All of the effects on protest I expect to see from AI have come about before (the development of technology has generally improved access to information and facilitated coordination). And while this benefits both sides of an engagement, (we saw protestors use technology to organize themselves during the Arab Spring) those in power with more organization to manage benefit more — these groups can (and do) use their power to restrict access to the opposition.

I think it’s really important to remember the name and story of specific individuals who made sacrifices and caused change for the better. When Mohammad Bouazizi went to the market the day he died, he just wanted to sell fruit (he made ~$140/month) and support his family. Endemic corruption and abuse by his government prevented this and drove him to self-immolation. Mohammad Bouazizi’s death ignited a movement that ultimately fell short of its goals, but in the town of Sidi Bouzid today, the people elect their own leaders and enjoy what Freedom House calls “unprecedented political rights and civil liberties” but which is also challenged by ghosts of the old regime. Here’s more of his story.

Remembering - Looking Forward

2018-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’m in Germany this week and the Airbnb we’re staying at in Berlin overlooks the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I was born in this country (in a little town called Wremen at the base of the Jutland Peninsula right on the North Sea) and while not a dual citizen, have always felt a connection to this place.

With that being said, I think it’s important to acknowledge the genocide the Nazis perpetrated here during the late 1930s/1940s.

~17 Million people died.

~6 million of them Jews.

I think it’s important to give space to the stories of those who died - either in concentration camps as a persecuted minority or as those fighting the tyranny against their fellow citizens.

Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the concentration camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf. Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend.

Gerda Weissmann Klein - found on the wall of the New England Holocaust Memorial (one of the memorials I’ve been most struck by)

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

Sophie Scholl member of the nonviolent White Rose movement on the day of her execution for the distribution of pamphlets.

Four months after the failure of Evian, in November, came Kristallnacht. At the time, Karola Ruth Siegel was a ten-year-old Jewish girl living with her parents in Frankfurt. Nazis showed up at their apartment to arrest her father, a salesman. As they marched him off into a covered truck, he turned around and looked at Ruth, who was watching from the window. She waved, and he waved back. Then he smiled, so that she wouldn’t cry. She never saw him again.

Two months later, in January, 1939, Ruth’s mother placed her on a train with other German Jewish children bound for Switzerland—part of the Kindertransport. Her mother hugged her on the platform, Dr. Ruth told Merkel and the rest of us, and, to keep herself from crying, she began to sing songs during the train ride that would bring her back to the happy time when their family was together. Dr. Ruth survived the war and the Holocaust in Switzerland. Her parents perished in the Nazi death camps. “The Evian Conference gave us no help,” Dr. Ruth said. “If not for the Kindertransport, I would not be here today. I hope something more comes from this conversation about the Syrian refugees than came from Evian.” At this point she was looking directly at Kissinger. Now I understood why Merkel had wanted her at the dinner. There wasn’t a trace of accusation in her voice—the whole time she’d been telling the story in the same half-apologetic tone—but no one, least of all Kissinger, could have missed her point: You and I were the same as each other, the same as the Syrians. I have not forgotten. Have you?

From a brilliant New Yorker Profile of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. I find Merkel very clever and her continued efforts to accept Syrian refugees against a tide of self focusedness admirable. I hope history remembers her as such.

—

Not really trying to say anything political here but I think the greatest power of remembering things like this is its ability to shape actions into the future. I think the German people collectively do a good job acknowledging the crimes of their parents and trying to do the right thing to protect displaced and persecuted people through their actions in admitting refugees and in forums like the International Criminal Court. I went for a bike ride on the runway at Berlin’s abandoned Tempelhof Airport yesterday. While designated a park, a great number of Syrian refugees now inhabit the outskirts abutting the gargantuan (it’s still one of the largest building in the world) terminal Adolf Hitler constructed during the late 1930s.

Storytelling and Hope - Everywhere in Life

2018-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

And I believe we have no choice but to move forward, that those of us who believe in democracy and civil rights and a common humanity have a better story to tell. And I believe this not just based on sentiment. I believe it based on hard evidence: the fact that the world’s most prosperous and successful societies, the ones with the highest living standards and the highest levels of satisfaction among their people, happen to be those which have most closely approximated the liberal, progressive ideal that we talk about and have nurtured the talents and contributions of all their citizens.

- Former President Barack Obama during his lecture on the occasion of Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday

I generally agree with The Economist’s characterization of Mr. Obama’s tenure as President of the United States. As this characterization notes, Mr. Obama’s presidency was very much defined by the speeches he gave — from the 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote, to his victory speech in 2008 onward to his Nobel Peace Prize lecture and his assertion that “every time I think about those kids it gets me mad” in the wake of the Sandy Hook Shooting (starts at 0:20, quote at 1:02) (this was one of the first quotes I wrote down in my notes), there’s even a highlight video — and indeed this has probably been his best skill/trait (along with being an honorable man who clearly cares deeply for his country and his family). I don’t want to just regurgitate The Economist’s view that Mr. Obama was sometimes plagued by difficult external forces sometimes mismanaged, did too much in Libya, too little in Syria and the executive orders he fell back to amidst political gridlock late in his second term, but I think this summary is worth stating for those who won’t click the link and read the wonderful Economist article (smh).

The key takeaway I have reflecting on Mr. Obama’s legacy is the importance of telling a good story and the importance of hope. It’s interesting that Mr. Obama reflects on both of these things in this lecture on the story Nelson Mandela projected and the inspiration that brought:

“Madiba’s light shone so brightly, even from that narrow Robben Island cell, that in the late seventies he could inspire a young college student on the other side of the world to reexamine his own priorities, could make me consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the world towards justice. And when, later, as a law student, I witnessed Madiba emerge from prison, just a few months, you’ll recall, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I felt the same wave of hope that washed through hearts all around the world.”

To address hope: hope is so powerful that unchecked hope can become dangerous if we overextend ourselves and live in the future we hope for rather than the present (I find myself struggling with this sometimes). Einstein reflected on this by advising: Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” Perhaps the disappointment the Obama Presidency brought some Democrats stemmed from a lack of this questioning amidst geopolitical and congressional reality (along with a good serving of not properly managing exceptions - probably the subject of a future post).

To address storytelling (more formally ~narrative construction~): across our lives in relations with our family, clients, and coworkers, crafting a strong narrative and getting others’ support is essential to moving forward and is the foundation of leadership. Mr. Obama has clearly mastered this act. Perhaps he will be more widely admired (though his approval rating has certainly benefited from the current administration) as Carter has through his humanitarian work and ability to help people dream about a better tomorrow. I wish him the best and look forward to many more lectures like this one :)

The full text of the lecture. It’s a good story.

I found this particularly powerful — agree with it or not, it’s a very clear articulation of Mr. Obama’s view of the world and offers a lot to discuss:

But what’s nevertheless true is that, in their business dealings, many titans of industry and finance are increasingly detached from any single locale or nation-state, and they live lives more and more insulated from the struggles of ordinary people in their countries of origin. Their decisions to shut down a manufacturing plant, or to try to minimize their tax bill by shifting profits to a tax haven with the help of high-priced accountants or lawyers, or their decision to take advantage of lower-cost immigrant labor, or their decision to pay a bribe, are often done without malice; it’s just a rational response, they consider, to the demands of their balance sheets and their shareholders and competitive pressures.

But too often, these decisions are also made without reference to notions of human solidarity or a ground-level understanding of the consequences that will be felt by particular people in particular communities by the decisions that are made. And from their boardrooms or retreats, global decision-makers don’t get a chance to see, sometimes, the pain in the faces of laid-off workers. Their kids don’t suffer when cuts in public education and health care result as a consequence of a reduced tax base because of tax avoidance. They can’t hear the resentment of an older tradesman when he complains that a newcomer doesn’t speak his language on a job site where he once worked. They’re less subject to the discomfort and the displacement that some of their countrymen may feel as globalization scrambles not only existing economic arrangements but traditional social and religious mores.

Which is why, at the end of the twentieth century, while some Western commentators were declaring the end of history and the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy and the virtues of the global supply chain, so many missed signs of a brewing backlash—a backlash that arrived in so many forms. It announced itself most violently with 9/11 and the emergence of transnational terrorist networks, fuelled by an ideology that perverted one of the world’s great religions and asserted a struggle not just between Islam and the West but between Islam and modernity. An ill-advised U.S. invasion of Iraq didn’t help, accelerating a sectarian conflict.

Russia, already humiliated by its reduced influence since the collapse of the Soviet Union, feeling threatened by democratic movements along its borders, suddenly started reasserting authoritarian control and, in some cases, meddling with its neighbors. China, emboldened by its economic success, started bristling against criticism of its human-rights record; it framed the promotion of universal values as nothing more than foreign meddling, imperialism under a new name.

Within the United States, within the European Union, challenges to globalization first came from the left but then came more forcefully from the right, as you started seeing populist movements—which, by the way, are often cynically funded by right-wing billionaires intent on reducing government constraints on their business interests. These movements tapped the unease that was felt by many people who lived outside of the urban cores, fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding, that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.

And, perhaps more than anything else, the devastating impact of the 2008 financial crisis, in which the reckless behavior of financial élites resulted in years of hardship for ordinary people all around the world, made all the previous assurances of experts ring hollow—all those assurances that somehow financial regulators knew what they were doing, that somebody was minding the store, that global economic integration was an unadulterated good. Because of the actions taken by governments during and after that crisis—including, I should add, by aggressive steps by my Administration—the global economy has now returned to healthy growth. But the credibility of the international system, the faith in experts in places like Washington or Brussels, all that had taken a blow.

A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment began to appear, and that kind of politics is now on the move. It’s on the move at a pace that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. I am not being alarmist. I am simply stating the facts. Look around. Strongman politics are ascendant, suddenly, whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained—the form of it—but those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning.

Success Bias Reply - Maybe the Opposite

2018-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Interesting post on society’s tendency to focus on successes rather than failures. Quite right about how failures don’t really constitute sexy television or YouTube videos. I’m not entirely sure that the advancement of the likes of YouTube and Facebook (and whatever else there is nowadays) would see an increase in that particular observation… Sure, more people would search for clips of “successes.” I do think, however, that just as many would be likely to be exposed to failures and disasters and the like through channels like YouTube. You mention people are more likely to watch successes than to watch weekly or daily videos, but I think YouTube trends show just the opposite. ‘LastWeekTonight,’ the British parrot John Oliver’s YouTube channel, has, at present, 6,308,392 subscribers. His most recent video, which, by the way, isn’t really his usual weekly coverage of a global event or topic of interest, but rather a collection of funny graphics he never got to use, has garnered 1.7 million views within just four days of release. I can only remember this particular channel off the top of my head, but I’m aware that there are plenty of others like ‘LastWeekTonight.’ And goodness knows John Oliver doesn’t sugar coat anything he covers, which range from government surveillance to floods. My argument, that YouTube and the like will actually increase our recognition of failures, costs, risks, etc., rather than leave it the same or reduce it, of course, relies heavily on YouTubers like John Oliver staying on top of their world views and providing coverage that deal with those things. Normally a pretty big if, but it seems like more and more people are “waking up” to things and relying less and less on what traditional channels of news / information tell them. I mean, people use to believe whatever was said on the radio (which, in turn, was provided by the government) a few decades ago… now people don’t trust CNN… so… 😐 (and much less governments).

I generally agree with these thoughts. Things that go viral today definitely weren’t what we saw on television 20 years ago. I don’t know how large the scale of covering failures (aside from those of such large magnitudes or with a comic viewing experience) will be but I definitely agree that if you seek out such information, it is far more accessible today.

Apollo - Success Bias

2018-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

In Event of Moon Disaster:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”

- Richard Nixon if something had gone wrong with Apollo 11

On the 49th anniversary of the Apollo landings (actually that’s in two days - July 20 but I ship this blog every Wednesday), I think it is important to reflect on how different and daring what Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin did when they separated the lander from the command module and descended to the surface of the moon (indeed they almost ran out of fuel and aborted the landing). This is a well told (and televised) story, but this speech, written in anticipation of disaster helps frame the risks that these men took. We always remember the first successful attempt at something because of the publicity it attracts and its later memorialization across our collective memory. This seems unfortunate as it might have the propensity to dull our appreciation of the risk and expectation of difficulty for tasks that we will attempt (at least after some passage of time - major disasters have the tendency to linger). Progress is hard. For every Hillary and Norgay on Everest, there’s a Mallory and Irvine, and for every “one small step for man”, there’s a fire on Apollo I.

It’s probably more appropriate to classify this as a bias towards extremes moreso than a bias towards success. Evolution has ingrained in us a strong appreciation of danger, and we long remember and change our behavior in response to events like terrorist attacks and crime (perhaps a bit too much). For things like summiting large mountains and putting man on the moon, everyday people are sufficiently divorced from the struggle and personal sacrifice required to succeed and failings if not large in scope will probably not be covered as extensively as their complimentary successes (perhaps because covering the status quo is boring). I wonder if the democratization of media through sites like YouTube and the increase in proximity they bring with it will begin to change this [2]. My intuition is that this would lessen but not eliminate the effects as far more people would presumably be exposed to headlines celebrating success than would watch daily or weekly videos.

I’m a pretty big data nerd and bayesian at heart so I’m always on the lookout for types of bias that lead our mental models of the world astray. Survivorship bias is one of the most interesting — famously used by statistician Abraham Wald during the Second World War to more accurately determine where armor should be placed on planes bombing Germany (spoiler — don’t fortify the areas of the planes that have bullet holes in them, fortify the areas that are free of them). There are a lot more types of statistical bias that are quite interesting. I like to double check my certainty of understanding events by trying to estimate my exposure to biases like these.

When I cross posted this on my Medium on 07/01/19 I added some reflection:

[1] People don’t like Nixon for reasonable reasons but have you heard about his Vice President before Gerald Ford - Spiro Agnew? Agnew was a straight up take money in the Oval Office type of crook. MSNBC did a podcast called Bag Man on him.

[2] In the startup world there’s been a big development of a “hustle porn” culture which fetishizes failure and looking really busy. This feels less like the failures I’m writing about and more like reality TV.

21st Century Moats - Your Brand

2018-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

No one has a Suzuki tattoo" [1]

- a nugget from an otherwise so-so Medium article

The numbers are clear though. As the article notes, half of Harley Davidson’s revenues come from deals to license their name and the sale of apparel. This is the power of branding — something apparel companies do particularly well (Vineyard Vines, Carhartt, etc) but they all do it — so the comparative gains to be had are probably minimal. Harley Davidson has probably found such success because Suzuki and its competitors don’t do this on the same level or at all.

Today Yeti Coolers is one of the best (in terms of their growth). For the uninitiated, Yeti started with $200+ heavy duty coolers and an appeal to outdoorsy millennials to embrace the weekend and protect their beer. Consuming the niche luxury cooler market, they have since shifted to mugs and thermoses ($30 - $50), ice packs ($15 - $30), and even 5 gallon buckets ($40) that one customer admits: “I bought this just to have a bucket with the yeti logo tbh”. They’ve gotten here by taking the same steps companies like Apple, Nike, and of course, Harley Davidson have taken: design high-quality products, use influencers to market to a specific niche, expand beyond your core offering and improve accessibility.

In an era where moats are increasingly small/don’t exist (recall the rise of hoverboards and how without a brand, even a patent didn’t protect the creator from mass knockoffs), creating customers like my grandfather whose back problems prevented him from ever owning a Harley, but who had all sorts of apparel and glassware, will be increasingly important to avoid commoditization of your products and services.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery kind of ripped into Snap a little while back when they declared in their S1 IPO filing that they don’t have a moat and they can’t develop one — specifically: “In a world where anyone can distribute products instantly and provide them for free, the best way to compete is by innovating to create the most engaging products. That’s because it’s difficult to use distribution or cost as a competitive advantage—new software is available to users immediately, and for free.”

When I cross posted this on my Medium on 06/30/19 I added some reflection:

[1] I went back and forth on using this quote because some people do have Suzuki tattoos. I ended up writing this because I convinced myself they are orders of magnitude apart.

Duty - A Definition

2018-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.

- The Unknown Citizen: WH Auden, 1939

WH Auden’s The Unknown Citizen is a cynical response to perceived bureaucratic encroach by western governments in the 1930s so this is admittedly a pretty odd poem to write a July 4th post about but I found it odd that my residential advisor would post it in the hall [1] of my dorm freshman year so here we are. For some reason, these middling stanzas have stuck with me as a good definition of doing your duty to country.

American (indeed most Western countries’) culture is largely focused on the encouragement of individualism. Great wealth has been created through the hard-fought execution of people’s crazy ideas. As a people surrounded by this individualistic culture from childhood, giving any of this freedom up is difficult. Sacrificing all of this freedom temporarily or permanently is particularly noble.

Thank you, Dad, Grampy, Gramps, and all others who have heeded our country’s calls for help. The rest of us wouldn’t be here without you.

The Unknown Citizen is a parody of Melvin Tolson’s The Unknown Soldier – I like this poem and its ending:

"I am the Unknown Soldier: I open doors
To the Rights of Man, letters incarnadine.
These shrines of freedom are mine as well as yours;
These ashes of freemen yours as well as mine.
My troubled ghost shall haunt These States, nor cease
Till the global war becomes a global peace."

a lot more than Auden’s parody. Of course the United States (and many other countries) maintain tombs housing the remains of soldiers “known but to God” as the American tomb’s inscription reads. It is worth a visit if you find yourself in the DC area [2].

When I cross posted this on my Medium on 06/29/19 I added some reflection:

[1] White lie I need to confess to here. My RA posted this poem on the door of a stall in the bathroom as part of his “poo for poetry” initiative or something like that.

[2] 99% Invisible recently had a fantastic episode about how the remains in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier representing the Vietnam War were identified and brought.

Photos - Ubiquitous, Worthless?

2018-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

People wonder why their daughter is taking 10,000 photos a day. What they don’t realize is that she isn’t preserving images. She’s talking.

- Evan Spiegel, CEO Snap

Snapchat fundamentally changed the way we think about what a camera is. This is perhaps the natural conclusion of the spread in accessibly and volume of images in the last hundred years. First were the formal portraits you sat for once that your family framed and kept on the mantle that your grandparents still have today. Equipment was expensive and you didn’t even take the photo yourself.

Next came the handheld film cameras that our grandparents took pictures with on vacation and diligently scrapbooked away. You took and could develop these yourself (if you were adventurous like my mother), but aside from the Polaroid and similar cameras, there was a disconnect between capture and viewing. Of course, film was a thing too and each photo taken had a non-negligible cost.

Digital cameras are perhaps the final step. Photos are free and (though my iPhone loves to tell me its storage is full) [2] effectively limitless in volume. Review is instant and we now take photos to send to one person who can view it once before it disappears forever (to us at least, Snap and others probably do some sketchy stuff with our data).

I have about 10,000 [3] photos on my computer chronicling my travels and experiences over the last eight or nine years depending on how generous I’m being with my younger self. I’m fairly obsessive cataloging them with albums for “Fishing 5/12/2018” - eight photos, “Donut Day 6/4/2015” - one photo, and more recently “Skiing at Peter’s 1/4/2018” - six photos. There’s even “Pretty Planes Pictures” which has 500 [4] or so images I’ve taken of and from planes (sunsets are a favorite) [5].

I don’t look at these though. I might occasionally show someone a picture of a mountain I climbed, a friend that I have, or my dog which I miss, but I don’t interact with my this library on even a monthly basis sometimes aside from editing new photos and casting them into designated albums

If these photos were to disappear however, I would be enormously sad and literally feel like a part of me had died. With a Snapchat “score” of nearly 90,000 [6] amassed over the last five years though, that very thing has happened ~nine times. Those photos weren’t all worth keeping for sure, but some probably were. While I might have been “talking” as Spiegel puts it, I can never refer back to those conversations I had like I can with a text, Facebook Message, or email. Of course, most people generate far more content speaking to one another then they do through asynchronous channels and none of that is captured so maybe it’s okay. I probably wouldn’t look at those 90,000 photos anyway.

The ubiquity of really high-quality smartphone cameras has really depressed the market for stock and travel photos for magazines. I’m glad my mother didn’t end up being a travel photojournalist… (though hard times may be coming for teachers too).

A nice timeline of the progression of photography

When I cross posted this on my Medium on 06/28/19 I added some reflection:

[1] I’m glad this blog gives them a purpose!

[2] After I lost my phone I bought a phone with more storage and somehow that’s filled up now too smh

[3] A year on it’s a little less than 15,000 photos.

[4] Now 851!

[5] Raindrops too! See image ^^

[6] I crossed the 100k mark the other week!

[7] #lambdaschool?

American Words - Still Everywhere

2018-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

There is no such thing as Rohingya, It is fake news.

- U Kyaw San Hla: officer in Rakhine state security ministry.

From a great interactive piece in the New York Times about the genocide currently being perpetrated against the Rohingyan Islamic minority in western Myanmar. It looks like the export of American language is alive and well 😕 [1]

An overview of who the Rohingya are and why they aren’t “fake news” and a call by The Economist hold the Myanmar government accountable at the International Criminal Court.

When I cross posted this on my Medium on 06/27/19 I added some reflection:

[1] This is an ongoing mess that has gotten a bit better but is still bad

Unified Korea - An Ongoing Problem

2018-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

The South Korean constitution recognizes all Koreans as its citizens.

- An interesting Reuters article

I didn’t have a quote in mind with which to really start this blog and going from zero to one is tough, so I checked the front page of Wikipedia. Of course, the recent US - DPRK (North Korea) summit was at the top of the list and a search in my doc for Korea revealed this interesting manifestation of the 1953 armistice.

I was in South Korea a couple of weeks ago and I’ll probably speak to my thoughts on South Korean culture (hyper-consumerist!) in a later blog post but I’d like to focus today on the step required to fulfill the sentiments expressed by both ROK (South Korea) President Moon Jae-In, US President Donald Trump and DPRK Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un to formally end the war and what the Korean Peninsula make look like going forward.

The heart of the problem is that both the DPRK and ROK claim to be the sole legitimate leader of the Korean peninsula (kind of like the PRC/ROC (China/Taiwan) debate but one between more equal parties at least in a geographic and (nuclearized) military sense) and refuse to recognize the sovereignty of the other in international forums such as the UN. Ending the war requires formally acknowledging that there are two Koreas - a blow to the pride of both leaders - or reunifying the country (the less likely but more interesting hypothetical to explore). [2]

Even with genuine will on both sides of the DMZ to reunify (this short sentence has many more known unknowns and unknown unknowns than words in it). Korean unification faces severe geopolitical barriers given the untenable nature of such a deal to the proxies supporting either country - not to mention the extensive cultural and economic issues that would follow if the border were to simply be opened (a future post perhaps).

If the South maintains the strong alliance it has had with the United States (wherein ~25k US troops are installed on the peninsula), South Korean control of the country is untenable to the Chinese. This was seen in October 1950 when Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River and pushed UN Forces who had nearly defeated communist forces back to the 38th parallel. It is worth noting that the 38th parallel has marked the North-South split since the conclusion of the Second World War when Korea was partitioned into US and Soviet occupation zones (an effect of the nearly 40-year Japanese occupation which limited Korean capacity for immediate self-governance). The Chinese also supported the efforts of the North Vietnamese to take control of their South. More recently, Sino-South Korean relations suffered in early 2017 after the installation of the US designed THAAD anti-ballistic missile system - severely impacting Chinese tourism to South Korea and South Korean businesses within China. [3]

While the global order in which the US has played a central role for the last 70 years may be shifting amid the rise of China, the US has had an active military presence (including the deployment of nuclear weapons) in South Korea for the entirety of this order and there is strong momentum in favor of this continuing.

Though parties and motives have shifted, the Cold War is very much alive on the Korean peninsula and I find myself reflecting on the inscription on both the Korean War Veteran’s Memorial in Washington DC and at the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul:

“Our nation honors her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met.”

Some may argue that the names of the Allied Forces written in the tall airy wings of War Memorial of Korea’s are those of soldiers who did very little; the war is not over, the border across the 38th parallel is the same as the original 1949 partition, etc. They are not correct. South Korea is a prosperous nation and a wonderful partner of the United States in the spread of democracy and freedom across the world. I sure hope it stays that way.

An interesting exhibition of the design of objects and utilitarian focus given lack of competition in the DPRK. I noticed this a couple of years back when I was in Cuba - billboards were advertisements for the state.

When I cross posted this on my Medium on 06/26/19 I added some reflection:

[1] If you click the Google Maps link you’ll realize it’s not the best way to get around Korea. Try the maps made by Kakao!

[2] So um, yeah, nothing really happened in the last year… of course, there was the hug and stuff but it seems like a continuation of the cycle that’s played out over the last three-ish decades :/

[3] People seemed quite worried about this when I was in Korea but seems like this got fixed.

Getting Started

2018-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Dad I'm going to start a blog.

- me the other day

I spend a lot of my time reading. The Economist and its English wit is a favorite. TechCrunch somehow makes the show Silicon Valley funnier. And The New Yorker’s longer form articles and works of fiction are just so pretty. As my father knows from his quest through my 700+ email deep inbox [1] for an elusive Amazon security key when I left my phone in a taxi [2] the other week, I also subscribe to a large number of newsletters, personal blogs, and syndicated RSS feeds focused on everything from finance to cooking [3].

Since beginning college, I have made an effort to be more methodical and deliberate in my thinking. A byproduct of this is a single-spaced word document spanning nearly 50 [4] pages that contain quotes I thought particularly engaging, insightful, and beautiful.

I really enjoy debate and have found putting my thoughts to paper helps me to solidify what I hold as my truth and how individual truths shape the way I see the world. Thus starting from this week [5] for as long as academically tenable ;) I will be posting a new quote and my current truth and thoughts regarding it on this site. If you’d like to follow along and receive each new post in your inbox, you can sign up over on the fun sidebar thingy [6]. Apparently, my generation doesn’t like email so if you give me your phone number maybe someday I’ll throw together a Twilio [7] integration or something to text updates out.

Looking forward to the journey ahead and hearing your thoughts!

When I cross posted this on my Medium on 06/26/19 I added some reflection:

[1] I’ve since learned to use email filters to sort inbound email!

[2] When I lost my phone it was in Airplane Mode. It hasn’t connected to a network in the last year. I don’t keep my phone on Airplane Mode anymore.

[3] That became a blog post when people badgered me.

[4] Quotes is now 249 single-spaced pages with 130,080 words with a bunch more to load in on my phone. I wonder if Pages has a word limit…

[5] The weekly thing lasted the entire Summer (yeah I was surprised too)

[6] Now you can subscribe to my Medium too! That’ll be more reliable than the email box because I’m lazy.

[7] I still like this idea but I’m lazy