Healthy 60yo’s, bored with retirement, discover longevity breakthrough’s: “Cool! I can look forward to 30-50 more productive years!”
Then: Hey! I have time for a new, 3rd career!
This time I’m going to be an author! <begins writing>
[ping!] Oops, a Discord IM from one of my online communities. Lemme check that…
[ping!] Oh, Facebook engagement; let’s keep that conversation going with a fun little quip…
<eventually gets back to writing …two paragraphs later…>
[ping!] Instant message from wife. “Time for lunch?”
<After a leisurely lunch…>
Ugh, this post-meal lull… I really need a thousand more words today- Hey! Look, there’s a track weekend coming up! Ooh, and omg, the 2022 Porsche 911 Turbo S does 0-60 in 2.2 seconds! That bears deeper investigation!
<refocuses, writes two sentences>
[ping!] Oh! A new twitter follower! Wait, am I becoming an influencer? Man, that’s a lotta pressure. I better do some Googling on what that entails. It might be a lot of responsibility and you know what they say, “If you’re going to do something, do it well…”
Oh look! Richard Branson’s flying into space! I want to fly into space. I wonder how I book a ride on the vomit comet to see if I’d like free fall?
<a “moment” later…>
Hmm…where should I go with this next chapter… Hey! You know what would be a cool new tech venture?! A new social media platform where you could…
[ping!] Instant message. “Honey, are you coming up for dinner?”
Damn! Where’d the day go?! Okay, TOMORROW morning, I’m really gonna buckle down!
(1) Accept that when it comes to forecasting crypto or stocks, nobody knows anything; people making forecasts are simply selling you something. If their model is not monetary gain, then it’s influence or follower gain. The “forecasters” have realized their KPI’s are not reliant on their accuracy over time. By the time they’ve told you about a real “deal,” it’s too late to take advantage of it, if it even exists.
(2) The key to consistent success for most people is HODLing with some diversification for risk mitigation. In a near-perfect market nobody has an “edge” except the whales, who’re using hyper-fast, hyper-efficient trading algorithms with very large trades. That ain’t you.
(3) Chasing the next big thing, for 99% of people, means being doomed to a cycle of always being just a little too late to capture the full upside or bail before the downside most of the time …but those people doing that will focus on the once or twice they manage it and as a result suppress the more frequent times they don’t …because, human nature (it’s the same thing that fuels casinos).
Preface: I’m afraid I approach journaling in much the same way as meditating – I know it’s productive and I should do it regularly …and yet somehow neglect consistently making time for it.
One part of a good journaling habit should include writing down your dreams as soon as you wake. So this is me trying to do that while explaining what a strange mind I live within… except, of course, this isn’t really journaling, which is something you do knowing no one will read it but yourself. This is …something else. [yeah duh – it’s called blogging. -Ed.]
I often seem to wake up with earworms these days, usually songs from the 70’s.
See, I’ve been working on sleep hygiene this past year. One of the benefits of succeeding is that I’m getting more uninterrupted sleep. Consequently, I’m dreaming more …or at least remembering my dreams more. That makes for some unexpected entertainment.
The inside of my skull, as it turns out, is an even weirder place to be than I knew.
Some of my dreams are recurring. Apparently, that’s not unusual. But these days they’re sometimes serial. Like an ongoing story. Those are the coolest ones to remember upon waking because they come with this satisfying sense of continuity.
One series of dreams, including last night’s, begins with my wife and I having bought a new home.
That I dream about this is easily explained; we have been engaged in ongoing downsizing efforts with questionable success (we keep buying too much house and then want to downsize more or change locations within a year or two).
In the dream we’re in a new home and doing some renovating. This is bizarro world because only in my dreams (nightmares!) am I interested in being a DIY’er and doing my own renovating! The room is all white – unfinished, sanded drywall, drywall dust covering the floor, daylight filtered by white dust on the windows. Even our clothes’ are dusted white. What furniture and other boxy items still remain in the room are covered in white sheets (because, um, I guess that’s what you do when renovating?).
If you remember when MTV actually played music videos (before MTV killed the video star), it feels like one of those sets.
This is where the dream takes the outlandish twist that makes remembering these dreams so much fun.
Working with us on this home renovation are several long-haired dudes. As it turns out, they’re the band Blue Oyster Cult. As far as I know, I don’t think about BOC much these days. But that hasn’t stopped them from invading my slumber.
At some point in the dream, I realize there’s an additional person in the room. I have the sense this shadow person is famous, but I don’t recognize them. This too is easily explained; I’m kind of face blind and am never the guy who’d spot and then identify a celebrity in the wild. When I see someone – even someone familiar to me – in an unfamiliar context it always takes me a few ticks longer to recognize them than it probably should.
Some indeterminate moments later (time passing in dreams being what it is), the band members look to each other inquiringly, give mutual nods, and one of them asks the celebrity if they’re ready. After some apparent trepidation, sometimes a little cajoling or encouragement from the band, the VIP acquiesces and take hold of a mic stand that’s materialized for them. I notice the band members now have their instruments (apparently they were under the white sheets, along with the stacks of amps that are now visible?).
Moments later the familiar, slow building interlude to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” (album version!) begins. That famous BOC guitar riff ripples through my dream room. Then the guest singer begins to sing …but they’re always singing completely new words to the song. In this ongoing dream series, BOC has turned “Don’t Fear the Reaper” into an endlessly lengthening song, with the band (and apparently me and my wife) conveying to specially chosen celebrities the immortality of having been graced with the right to add to new verses to the “official” version of this classic rock anthem.
So much cooler than just doing a cover of someone’s song, yeah?
Then I wake up with an earworm that’s likely to last much of the day. Damn me if I can ever remember those new words that were added to this classic, though, alas.
“Then the door was open and the wind appeared The candles blew then disappeared The curtains flew then he appeared, saying don’t be afraid…”
Non-Dream Fun fact: You could go to Youtube and begin listening to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” covers and never finish. There are a lot of them. Many are quite excellent. And they’re being added faster than you can play them all the way through.*
* I just made that last bit up. …but it might actually be true! 😉
For much of my adult life that was my favorite toast. It spoke to the dream of one day exiting the rat race, able to afford the kind of boat you’d want to live aboard (at least for moderate periods of time). More recently it became the siren song toward haven, the vehicle by which one might leave the COVID-ridden and politically-rabid masses far behind. Island hopping around the tropics became the fantasy route toward escaping the hordes of cell-phone zombies shambling around our sidewalks and motorways.
Anchored off exotic shores, as the fantasy went, we’d sip fancy concoctions saturated with rum or tequila while luxuriating in everchanging views filled with expanses of soft white beaches lapped gently by crystalline, aquamarine waters and drenched in the golden sunlight. “Boat drinks!” didn’t just refer to those sugary libations; it encapsulated the entire dream.
Years passed. We got older. Warm nourishing sunlight transmogrified into potentially deadly, damaging UV. Still the fantasy thrived! Boat drinks!
But sail-powered catamarans are slow, ungainly, and fit only for a narrow range of weather conditions. Conversely, anything powered by diesel engines is loud, smelly, and requires constant refueling, servicing, and other maintenance. Such hassles were at odds with our carefree Boat drinks! fantasy.
So, when a friend forwarded an article about a new solar-powered catamaran, the Silent 55, built by Silent Yachts, my imagination fired up. Hmmm …Boat drinks?Finally?
The images and lifestyle were tantalizing. I became entranced. For weeks I was awash with visions of ocean-going freedom, swishing through the Caribbean from island to island at whim, spending a week here, a week there, anchoring for lazy days off breathtaking tropical beaches or secluded island coves. Basically, living la vida boat drinks…
It sounds awesome to just say “I’m going island hopping around the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean …and may even cross the Atlantic and cruise around the Mediterranean!” But while no one would say age has taught me wisdom, it’s at least nudged me enough to take a second look before leaping. What, I had to ask, would small yacht ownership actually involve from one hour to the next (assuming, of course, that I had the ducats to drop onto a pretty, white, ocean-going Tesla)?
Thus began my deep dive down the small yacht ownership rabbit hole. Like many, I started with immersion into Youtube’s yacht review channels. Of course, they’re mostly sunshine and moonbeams. That’s because “first glance” (SEO optimized!) content is mostly marketing, often produced by third parties who are rarely disinterested or unbiased in their reviews.
Now, playing the game with me, my wife and I decided if we were going to live aboard a boat, it would have to be a catamaran. We liked the idea of some stability in our “new home.” And we liked the space. It’s not for nothing that couples who’ve lived aboard their boats say, “You lose 100 sq ft of space for every week you spend aboard together.” We figured we’d better start with a LOT of space or somewhere around week three of this island hopping fantasy one of us was likely to begin typing out “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…”
Then I graduated into investigation of what catamaran ownership and, more importantly, use, would be like on a day-in-day-out basis. This required some pointed questions, sometimes to sales people, sometimes to caretaker/captains on a boat in a marina, once or twice to strangers that I found living aboard their boats. Gradually, I teased out the reality of living some part of your year aboard a 42-60 foot catamaran.
During this period, while still getting the rose-colored lenses knocked out of my spectacles, I went even deeper. Even though the smallest boat that Silent Yachts recommends (their Silent 60) was too expensive for fit into our fantasy budget, that didn’t stop my wife and me driving from Naples, FL to Key West to check out an early-production version of a Silent 55. When the Silent Yachts ambassador/boat captain asked if we’d like to go out for a short sea trial, how could we say no?
Even though everything about the newer-generation Silent 60’s is bigger, better fitted, and more impressive in every way than that older Silent 55’s, we came away seriously wowed. That 55′ cat impressed! She slid through the water. She was smooth, quiet, and stable. Best of all, her 10-12kw solar panels rendered her pretty much independent of any need for shore-based electrical power. Not only did she produce enough electricity to run all your creature comfort appliances, she could make more fresh water per day than you’d ever be likely to need. All without any need to even run the generator that the boat comes with, just in case you want more speed/range on a cloudy day than the batteries have range.
From a “hassles” perspective, unlike the 50-to-100 hour service intervals of diesel powered engines in a salty environment, the powertrain service requirement of the Silent Yachts electric drive train was — and this is crazy — a maintenance free 100,000 hours!
Dinosaur-powered yachts are completely tethered to marinas. Solar powered yachts? Not so much!
Boat drinks!
Now this, I thought as we powered soundlessly through an off-shore chop at an easy 16 knots, was a boat built for that live-aboard, island-hopping fantasy! You could anchor offshore even on a slightly overcast day and run your A/C, your refrigerator, your oven, and your washer/dryer when necessary. No marina power hook-up required. No scrimping on creature comforts that way boats requiring diesel generators for power demanded. And none of their attendant noise. Clean, quiet, endless electricity. Like the yachting equivalent of finding Shangri-la!
Still, I dug deeper.
Alas, that’s where the fantasy began to unravel.
Here, gentle dreamer, are some of the admittedly first world problems of owning a 55’+ catamaran in and around Florida.
When you have a boat of this size, you need to keep it somewhere! (Duh!) Once you get into the 48-55′ range and up, a big catamaran’s beam — its width — begins to make finding slip space challenging if not impossible. How challenging? I pretended I was taking delivery of such a behemoth in a few months and spent a half-day calling around looking for a place to berth my new boat. Only two marinas in Florida (including the Keys) had ANY slip space available. Neither of those offered particularly open access to the ocean — you had a bit of a cruise through a canal network to get to any open water. Neither allowed you to live aboard your vessel. So much for THAT aspect of the fantasy! Now we’d have to find space for the boat AND still maintain a condo down here, somewhere. That hurt our fantasy budget!
When you can find a slip wide enough for your cat’s big-ass beam, it turns out they’re pretty fuckin’ expensive, costing upwards of several thousand dollars a month “rent.” In some marinas (i.e, those near places you’d be interested in living), you buy title to the slip. They cost upward of $100,000 to $200,000 or more, when they’re available. And they *still* have add’l monthly fees, kind of like buying a condo. Basically, in the nicer marinas boat slips are like real estate and the good ones are like waterfront property — scarce and expensive. Another ding to our fantasy budget! Ouch!
Slip scarcity impacts other aspects of the Boat drinks! fantasy, too. In my case, the dream naively included a component where once we’d bought our boat, we would move up and down the coasts of Florida, out to the Keys, and even all the way over to the eastern Caribbean (Martinique, anyone?) following our whims and the weather. The reality looked more like: You will live wherever you can find a slip for your boat, if you can, and whether you’re interested in that area or not.
Then there’s the additional nomad-crushing reality that for most people who’re no longer footloose and fancy-free twenty-somethings, if you’re going to live somewhere, we really need at least a semi-permanent anchorage (so Amazon delivery drivers can find us!). Worst case, this means an anchor buoy in a marina field somewhere, in which case one accepts having to hop in and start up the cat’s 8-12′ outboard tender into the marina or some other dock every time you want to go ashore — not something that’ll always be fun at night or during a storm. Or one rents an actual slip, which is much more convenient …and expensive.
Now, this arrive-and-find-vacancy fantasy can kind of work …for any reasonably-sized, single-hull cruiser. It even kind of works, though less reliably for catamarans under 44′ (with beams under 22′). Many marinas, if not necessarily the most choice ones, seem to frequently have slips available for transient boats that short and that narrow. But once you get over 50′ in length and especially once your beam exceeds 22-23′, slip space becomes rarer than hens teeth. The island hopping fantasy becomes a logistical goat rope. Trip planning becomes a function of trying to find future space for your boat in a here-and-now service industry not known for making promises about future availability. In most marinas very few slips, and almost no very large slips, are kept “free” for transient, short-term or seasonal rentals.
Maybe once one becomes a boat owner and learns some secret handshake, this slip-availability landscape changes, but…
That wide beam creates other challenges, too. When you have a boat with that wide a beam, there are only two marinas in FL that even have the capability to pull your boat out of the water. As one might imagine, that can be a problem anytime anything more than a cat 3 hurricane heads your way. But guess what? That’s not the only time you need to pull your boat out of the water!
What an education this turned out to be.
With warming water temps and other environmental changes, a boat left in Florida waters these days has to have its hull scraped free of barnacles and mussels by a diver EVERY week during the warm months and every couple weeks during cooler winter months! That’s about $500-$700 per scraping for a large catamaran. But wait, there’s more!
Because the hull must be scraped so often, the boat must be pulled completely out of the water annually to get the bottom of the boat refinished. That service typically runs $7000 – $10,000. Or more. Not counting the time, expense, and hassle of moving your big-ass cat to the one of two places where it can be serviced, and then back again whenever it’s done. Oh, and were you living aboard? Find somewhere else to live while this is being done, my friend.
Oh, and it’s not just the bottom of the boat that requires frequent maintenance, of course. Salt sea air is corrosive. And the dew fall (and near-daily rain, during some seasons in the tropics) on and around shore is coming through air pollution, of course. That leaves black water spot rings on your shiny white boat. It’s also a roosting place (or bombing target) for waterfowl now and then. So it needs to be washed down pretty much every other day. Stem to stern. And the metal work should be wiped down, often with some protectant to prevent corrosion (even with anodized or “stainless” steel fittings, because down here, stainless steel …isn’t). Teak needs to be oiled. Rubber fittings need to be treated. There’s more, but you get the picture.
Naïve me never figured Jim Croce’s “Working At The Car Wash Blues” would factor so prominently in my Boat drinks! fantasy!
Then there’s the whole “sewage” thing… One question we had was, what the heck do we do with all our fecal goodness (aka “fish food” 😁) on a day-to-day basis or while island hopping?
One of the yacht “veterans” I spoke to told us there’s no dumping of “black water” (sewage from the toilet) or “gray water” (waste water down the boat’s various drains) within 100 miles of shore. That turned out to be erroneous, so it must have been an eco-religious thing with him. Regardless, you only have about 130 gallons of waste storage tank volume even on a large cat. So that means having your sewage pumped, constantly, if you’re living aboard your boat in a marina. Especially if you’re entertaining guests and have 4-6 people aboard instead of just two. And it’s worse if you serve a lot of Mexican food… So that regulation seemed constraining. But reality vs. fantasy? All those days and nights we dreamed about, laying at anchor off tropical beaches or in secluded coves have to be broken up with constant shuttles into the nearest marina to get your shit pumped. Yay.
Further research indicated that the law around the US only limits waste water dumping within 3 miles (not 100 miles!) of shore and coastal waterways or NDZ’s (Non-dumping zones). I also found that many boats come with onboard sewage treatment facilities. So this may or may not be a major hassle, depending on the boat’s outfitting and how much time is planned out at sea. Whether you even have the ability to dump sewage at sea or must instead have it pumped out of a holding tank depends on the kind of MSD (Marine Sanitation Device) the boat has installed.It’s an important consideration!
Okay, so in our fantasy, we actually have the money for the boat and all the attendant expenses and, seemingly unlike almost EVERYONE ELSE who owns a boat in every marina we visited, we’re actually going to use ours. A lot. What does that really mean? Because the distances between islands can often take 2-5 days to traverse in this area. The answer?
Days at sea filled with beautiful …glaring boredom (occasionally interrupted by drudgery)!
That dreamy view, for days on end…
Large, luxury boats these days come with autopilots that make course plotting easy peasy. There’s only one problem with using them in and around Florida and many Caribbean islands. There are shoals everywhere, including many surprisingly far offshore. Some shoals are only problems during low tide. Course plotters and auto-pilots don’t know to route you around waters that may be too shallow for your boat at times. It’s stunning to neophytes how much water around Florida and the Keys, especially around marinas, is only 3-5′ deep …or less. Most of these small yachts draw almost 4′. There’s little margin for error. Straying from a channel means a scraped or splintered hull, a fouled or bent prop, a long wait for a towing service, and an expensive repair (which can be a real problem if there’s nowhere nearby that can pull your big-ass beam out of the water. So the wary, “watch the charts and stick religiously to channel markers anywhere near shore.” Gotcha. Seems like a blinding flash of the obvious. If all the hazards were actually marked. Some aren’t.
Crab traps and traffic, for starters! That shallow water, even tens of miles from shore, also means that crab and lobster pots (and their marker buoys) are EVERYWHERE down here. Steering clear of them requires constant attention so you don’t snag someone’s trap and foul a prop. Also, boat traffic is heavy in this part of the world, especially in winter. So while the boat is underway, someone has to be watching for other traffic and steering the right-of-way adjustments ALL the time. If one’s fantasy went no deeper than pointing the boat in the general direction of, say, the Virgin Islands and kicking back with drinks or a good book for the next day or three while motoring along, think again. The reality is more like driving an RV down the highway…except your scenery is less diverse. Those 2-3 day crossings between islands at a meager 6-7 knots for most powered sailboats or a Silent Yacht, or even the 16-19 knots if you run the Silent Yacht’s generator, (which of course makes it a lot less silent!), mean spending most of your long days diligently scanning the expanses of water ahead of you. Because they will look empty right up until they’re suddenly not. The novelty of “being at sea” wears off fast for many people, leaving the helmsperson with hour after hour of squinting into the glare off the water, trying to spot and avoid hazards before it’s too late.
There are more caveats for boat buyers. It’s only fair that I leave some research thrills for others to discover. Besides, by now I’ve divided readers into two camps. One is thinking, “Whew! There but for the grace of God go I; now what should I put my fantasy money toward?” The other group is thinking smh, “A few little inconveniences were enough to put him off buying a yacht! What a whiny little bitch! Puh-lease!“
But Dreams Die Hard.
Is the Boat drinks! fantasy as dead as my childhood dreams of being an astronaut? Fuck no! But I’d have to make shitload more money before the dream could be well and properly sated. Having one full-time crew member would change the entire picture, as long as one also abandoned the whole “live aboard full time” silliness.
But there’re other options. We grow up and realize the key is to evolve one’s dreams as we and they age. We change. Priorities change. Needs change. Dreams change, too.
Surprisingly, one can charter one of these beautiful boats in or around almost any island group one might care to visit. No, you won’t be chartering a Silent Yacht, but both sail and powered catamarans can be chartered with or without a crew for any length of time from a few days to a few weeks — plenty of time to live la vida boat drinks until your appetite is sated …and when you’re done? Hand that fiberglass maintenance headache back to to the charter company while you traipse your carefree ass back to whence you came. All the joy; none of the pain.
And you can charter a hell of a lot of boat time for fractions of the costs you’d be soaking up in depreciation and maintenance expenses, all without having a literal boatload of cash sunk <cough> in a depreciating asset.
In most places, there isn’t even any course work or certification required for you take rent one of these large catamarans. They’ll give you the instruction you need, (probably) give you some pointers about areas or shoals you should watch out for, and send you on your soon to be inebriated way (but don’t drink and drive, ofc!). Don’t even want that bit of responsibility? Charter the boat with a crew member. The advantage to that is that they’ll know the waters, the best spots to anchor, and as a matter of thumb, boat people are delightful company.
So, boat drinks?
Hell yeah. Let’s go rent a 50′ catamaran. Sure, it’ll have loud, obnoxious, smelly, diesel engines pounding away while our captain (and new island friend!) motors us from sunlit beach to secluded cove. But once the engines are shut down (and all those terrorized birds of paradise recover from the shell shock from their shattered quietude), the sights and sounds of tropical havens will surround us like a gentle onshore breeze. And then?
I write my Friday Forecasts about as consistently as I do anything (not very) and publish them even less so. But this week a Thursday dollop aimlessness coincided with an ebb in introversion and a few provocative headlines. The resulting stew pushed my prophetic tendencies past escape velocity and into public orbit. So now I get to dare you to go on record yourself and shout me down if you think these are a swing and a miss. Am I wrong? Am I even serious? Tell me why and raise my hopes (or not). Change my mind in the comments. Or better yet, pen a prediction or two of your own! I work at keeping my worldview flexible if not totally rubberized so here is a rare chance for you to change a life!
(This post is brought to you by Green Day, who popped up in my playlist while I wrote. I’m calling it…)
“Wake Me Up When September Ends (…in 2021). Forecasting New Normals.”
Preface: (this is where Wayne and Garth do their hand-wavy thing to take you back in time (from the future)):
It was back in August 2020 that headlines began including phrases like, “First cases of COVID-19 reinfection verified…” and CDC statements that, “Coronavirus antibodies could give ‘short-term immunity…’” began arising. Such headlines soon coincided with rapidly accumulating clinical studies finding that COVID-19 immunity had a short half-life (3-6 mos.), along with CDC assurances that their recommendations (unlike so much other 20th– and 21st-century science) were only ever driven by data, never politics….
A year later, in September 2021, here is our landscape:
Prediction 1: VaaS (Vaccines as a Service) A New, Big-Pharma, Direct-to-Consumer Business Model.
More people are getting flu shots, because multiple studies have shown the flu vaccine has been shown to reduce COVID infection severity). By late 2021, about 60% of the population routinely gets an annual flu shot (up from 45% in 2019). Many who don’t (yet) trust the COVID-19 vaccine, which first became available in December 2020 and was widely available from multiple venders by February or March 2021, have now begun to at least get a flu shot. A large section of the population continues to disbelieve in the safety or efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine, in many cases because they trust random strangers on the internet for medical advice more than they do their primary care physician.
The COVID-19 vaccines, now offered by in least four variants, have one thing in common: They require semi-annual boosters to maintain immunity. As it turns out, the billions invested by the big Pharmaceutical companies have resulted in a vaccine against this stubbornly ever-present virus that unfortunately requires a semi-annual booster …meaning two shots a year for the foreseeable future. You first get your primary vaccination, which is administered anywhere you can get a flu shot; then you get semi-annual boosters, which can be self-administered at home. The boosters are available via subscription service and are mailed directly from the manufacturer, which saves you 30% versus getting them from a pharmacy or doctor’s office (and the subscription includes free delivery!).
40% of the population still distrusts the COVID-19 vaccine (because, you know, Facebook and misinformation, etc). This guarantees there will continue to be endless COVID infections (and deaths) throughout the world, ensuring ongoing, perennial sales for the Pharmaceutical companies selling their vaccines. Weirdly, legislators seem uninterested in changing this situation.
Prediction 2: The Growth of Poducation (The Decentralization of Primary Schooling).
The ongoing, low-grade (but still occasionally media-hyped) threat of COVID-19 has resulted in Federal and state mandates that public and private schools require students to be vaccinated prior to (and throughout!) the school year. Only a few mid-western states have refused compliance. This has driven an unending chain of (thus-far unsuccessful) lawsuits and protests from those who’ve decided the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease (despite an absence of more than one or two reported instances of the vaccine causing a problem). The new laws have spawned an explosion in home-schooling, with most of that now being done in small “pods” of students where families or small community groups have organized to share the educational load.
An unfortunately-named (but astoundingly successful!) “Port-a-Poddies.com” Montana-based startup has become the first post-COVID educational unicorn (with a $2.5B valuation as of 3rd quarter, 2021) by becoming the “Uber of Homeschooling.” It decentralizes education by matching pods of students with qualified (mostly young, or vaccinated) instructors willing to work in a maskless environment, thus freeing parents who either don’t approve of public schooling, want more personal instruction for their children, or don’t want to vaccinate their kids, to embrace their anti-vaxxer beliefs and still get their kids an education.
Bonus prediction: The Supreme Court has agreed to rule on legislation requiring Federal, State, and local governments to redirect the public funds allocated per child for schooling (~$12,100 per enrolled child, on average across the country) to whomever is actually educating the child. If not overturned, this threatens to take billions of dollars from local school districts and give it directly to the child’s parents (or pod).
Opponents mockingly call this legislation “The Porta-a-Poddie Relief Act.” Forecasts are that a predominantly conservative Supreme Court will rule in favor of the Act, something that is driving incredible valuation leaps in Porta-a-Poddies.com stock. Unknown is whether a favorable ruling by the Supreme Court will result in families who are “poducating” their children receiving a merely a tax credit or direct monthly government checks. Either way, adversaries of The Act (from administrators to the teacher’s union) have claimed that having “the funds follow the child” will be catastrophic to the public-school system, given the mass migration away from public schooling. Schools have already begun cutting deeply into their administration and other non-teacher payroll expenses.
Prediction 3: Fleeing the Petri Dish – an Urbanite Diaspora.
Even the availability of COVID-19 vaccines has failed to slow the migration of people away from the high-density urban environments that have become recurring COVID hotspots. The events of 2020 and 2021 have reversed the multi-decade trend of population movement from rural to urban areas. Neither tax incentives nor threatened penalties have slowed the business and worker exodus from many major downtown areas. Residential and commercial property values in and around major cities continues to plummet, with office and residential inventories at record high levels on the west and east coasts.
Led by tech and finance companies, and other knowledge workers whose employers realized early in 2020 that they no longer needed expensive office space for many employees, the depopulation of mobile demographics from cities has created a cascade of economic implosions. Downtown environments that remained veritable ghost towns even after COVID lockdowns eased in 2020 crushed the last life of those few service businesses that survived Spring and Summer of 2020. The Fall and Winter COVID surges put a final nail into many of those coffins. Then lay-offs from shrinking or closing 2nd-tier “support” businesses and service industries fueled the second major diaspora. City governments facing huge budget deficits “furloughing” even union-protected public sector workers (most of whom seem to recognize that their jobs aren’t coming back anytime soon, if ever) created what is forecast to be a third migration wave away from urban areas.
Huge forces (and lots of money) are being thrown at the problem as people struggle to resurrect dying city centers, but whether that will work, how that will happen, and whom they will attract back remains to be seen. Not surprisingly, crime is up across the board in those cities as police presence decreases. If there are bright sides, it’s that suburbs and even rural areas are benefitting from an unexpected economic and population surges (although that’s not without its own problems). Also, commute time is WAY down (for those few that still commute).
Prediction 4: Domestic Tourism is WAY up!
The closure of many foreign countries’ borders (including Mexico and Canada) to anyone from the US who cannot demonstrate proof of COVID vaccination has collapsed some sectors of the tourism industry while creating several entirely new domestic tourism segments. Cooperatives branding themselves as “Playcation” networks are establishing themselves in remote areas around the country and offering a wide (and wild!) range of “geo-focused” experiences. Taking advantage of cheap land throughout rural America (a la Walt Disney, circa 1965), numerous domestic and international mega-conglomerates (and several of the billionaires who own large tracts of Montana!) continue to roll-out rapidly constructed facsimiles of international destinations that in many ways are surprisingly authentic (especially if you’ve never been there!). As one example, the recently opened “PARIS!” theme park is widely renowned to be incredible, complete with snooty Parisian waiters in overly crowded restaurants who refuse to admit they speak English (signed COVID liability release waiver required). The views of the (augmented reality) “Arc de Triomphe” and “Eiffel Tower” are reputed to be extraordinary. Other Playcation hotspots include activity-focused attractions designed to excite (or exhaust) you (or your kids) for 1-3 day stays. And you can always rest up on the train to the next experience, because…
Many of these Playcation resorts are or will soon be joined by the rapidly growing network of “Casino Trains” that are driving a resurrection in the American railroad and, more importantly for vacationers, allow gambling while traversing interstate rail (due to an obscure 19th century railroad law). These casino trains take vacationers from one Playcation resort to the next in incredible, connected, comfort, allowing families to hit any number of Playcation hotspots that they want without having to fly or drive (which is important, because flying on the two airlines that still allow unvaccinated customers is expensive!).
It won’t surprise you that these Playcation destinations are drawing the service industry workers who’ve left the cities for the greener pastures (literally!) of rural America. Many find that they’re enjoying a heightened standard of living, even though many are now living in what is essentially…
Prediction 5: The Re-emergence of the “Company Town.”
Company owned towns are rapidly becoming (more of) a thing, again. Created first by Google and Apple, but now springing up everywhere, especially around Playcation hotspots (and constructed by the Playcation conglomerate), “Company towns” like those once common in coal-mining country back in the late 1800’s are back en vogue. The first (modern) company towns were created by large tech companies who found out quickly that while working from home created productivity opportunities while cutting expenses, many employees actually *missed* the socialization with their co-workers (and found they didn’t necessarily have a lot in common with their new suburban or rural neighbors). Enter the Company Town – a fully contained urban eco-system (often even with a small commuter airport) dropped into a rural, wooded, otherwise remote area, or in some cases, large abandoned shopping malls purchased for pennies on the dollar and renovated to offer luxury condos and complete town squares, night clubs, and other amenities! Company employees living in such “towns” (often gated off from any surrounding, non-company population) gain access to affordable housing (rent paid to their employer, of course), gourmet grocery stores (groceries paid for simply via payroll deduction!), convenient full-service banking (at the First Bank of Google, for example in one Google town), and various, constantly refreshing entertainment options (cover-charge, alcohol, and other expenses conveniently deducted from your salary!). Many of these company towns are functioning models of the long-awaited cashless society. (Rumor has it that the ONLY way one will be able to pay for ANYTHING in the first Apple company town (currently under rapid construction) is via Apple Pay. No cash, Visa, MasterCard, or American Express accepted!)
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That’s probably enough for now, don’t you think? For the one or two of you still reading: I hope you enjoyed my Friday Forecast for the work week ending 8/28/20. This has been another of the episodic cases of bloggarrhea that I call missives (because calling bundles of predictions hittives sounds presumptuous). Hope you had fun.
It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds dumps on us!
The events in Charlottesville, VA, over the weekend beginning August 11th, which included the death of one woman and the injury of dozens of others were tragic. My heart goes out to the family, the friends, and the community to which the slain woman, Heather Heyer, belonged, and to all those injured when a homicidal white supremacist drove his car into a crowd.
My hope is that James Fields, allegedly the man behind the wheel, will be found guilty and sentenced to death — a sentence that gets carried out in Virginia faster than any other state.
I no longer live in Charlottesville, though I did once. As a result, I’ve a great many contributors to my social news feeds from that wonderful city. All are saddened; most are broadcasting anger.
As a beginning Stoic, I ask: What do we want to accomplish? How best will we get there?
Many of those affected by that weekend’s events are clamoring for censure, some for the removal of freedoms that underlie our society. As an American, I understand their hurt, their rage, but believe that it’s not just the wrong answer, but a counter-productive one. It won’t solve the problem, it would exacerbate it and cause greater ones. (Full disclosure, I believe that to be true for most “solutions” that seek to apply the power of The State to force constraint, control, or the limit of freedoms, upon The People.)
Ramez Naam, a born Egyptian who rose to prominence in the US as a Partner and Director of Program Management at Microsoft, an award-winning author, a patent-holding entrepreneur, futurist, and technologist, posted this on his blog today:
“Don’t let the terrorists win.”
We said that a lot after 9/11, and have for the last 16 years. As air travel became absurdly cumbersome, as civil liberties were eroded, as people were arbitrarily blacklisted or detained without room for appeal – we said the terrorists were winning, causing us to undermine the underpinnings of our own society, to crack down on the freedoms that are central to the principles of the United States.
Now, I see friends calling for cracking down on freedom of speech, for restricting the First Amendment, taking away its protections from speech they (and I) consider loathsome. I even see friends advocating for physical violence against people because of their speech.
That, my friends, is letting the terrorists win.
I loathe the ideology of white supremacy. But to let fear or anger at it undermine our notions of civil liberties or civil society… that would be letting the terrorists win.
We’re bigger than that. We’re stronger than that. Don’t let the terrorists win.
In all the footage I’ve seen of those rally’s, without exception, “counter-protesters” are broadcasting hate, vitriol, and disgust at assemblies of white supremacists and neo-nazi’s, who are themselves there to trumpet their irrational hatreds and disgust toward anything “other.”
It’s an emotional, understandable reaction for even rational, tolerant humans, as deeply wired into us as our core values. Emotional responses often come from deeper places, stemming from shared heritage, cultural identity, or our own experiences with justice or lack thereof.
But nowhere among the thinking, the tolerant, does there seem to have been consideration of the question: What do we want to accomplish?
Because, sure as shit, answering hatred with hatred has never worked worth a damn. We know that! In fact, we as a civilization know pretty fucking well at this point that anger, loathing, denials — even the threat of (or actual!) violence — has never done a damn thing to knock a fundamentalist movement from its ideological perch.
When you apply force that will not be sufficient to break a belief, you only strengthen it. Knowing that, why would we choose to strengthen the voices of racists for them? You don’t kill ideologies by denouncing them any more than you do by making martyrs.
Denunciation didn’t work against the original Nazi’s. It doesn’t work with Islamic fundamentalists like Isis. And it won’t work with any other form of dogmatic, institutionalized, hatred like that paraded by supremacists. The most it can do is drive such movements underground where they fester like a cancer until achieving metastasis. Then there’s really hell to pay.
Answering hatred and intolerance with hatred and intolerance is like deciding it’s smart to put out a fire with gasoline. When you see someone doing that, you have to ask, “What exactly are you expecting to accomplish?”
Martin Luther King knew that. He knew that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Mahatma Gandhi knew that. He knew “You must be the change you wish to see in the world. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” Most importantly, he knew that “Anger is the enemy of non-violence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.”
Hell, even Aesop, the storyteller and slave in ancient Greece back around 600 BCE taught that lesson in his fable, “The Wind and the Sun.”
The Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger. Suddenly they saw a traveller coming down the road, and the Sun said: “I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveller to take off his cloak shall be regarded as the stronger. You begin.” So the Sun retired behind a cloud, and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveller. But the harder he blew the more closely did the traveller wrap his cloak round him, till at last the Wind had to give up in despair. Then the Sun came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveller, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on and took it off.”
The moral, of course, is: “KINDNESS EFFECTS MORE THAN SEVERITY.”
These great men knew that meeting hatred with hatred was counter-productive. And in that knowing, they accomplished the seeming impossible. Why have we forgotten that?
As citizens in a complex society, filled with partial information and misinformation, we should know that often the intuitive, emotional response is the wrong one, the least productive one. And the more complex or deep-rooted the problem, the more counter-intuitive the solution will often be.
It’s one of the reasons why societies ruled by demagogues or tyrants inevitably collapse.
What do we want to accomplish? How best will we get there?
Well, we know for damn sure that you cannot bully people away from an ideology. You cannot soften a mob’s will by flipping it the bird, shouting epithets, or throwing stones. So if you’re not willing to employ lethal force to “change” someone’s mind, the only rational response is to embrace an approach that will work over time. Be cool. Be measured. Be smart. Because peoples’ minds change slowly, when they change at all.
When a little kid throws a tantrum, the fastest way to suck the energy out of it is to deprive it of an audience. That’s why timeout is so effective.
At the same time, when you want to kill a fire, you don’t spray water at it’s top. You take away its source of fuel. You wet what hasn’t yet burned.
When your war is one of ideology, the only way to win is over time.
You undermine its recruitment. You make the beliefs so ridiculous that the cult’s target recruited demographic does not want to be associated with it. In short, you starve the movement of fuel.
You educate whom you can. You remain human, and caring. You contribute to the society you believe in. You stop fanning emotional fires by attempting to put them out with facts — they don’t work. You look through those trumpeting irrationality and vitriol. You give no voice to those who would tyrannize or terrorize others. And you bide while waiting for intolerance to die. In the meantime, give racism, hatred, NO audience. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Because mobs and fundamentalists are like two-year-olds. And you don’t raise a two-year-old into an adult by mirroring their own tactics back at them. That’s no more likely to accomplish anything meaningful than, well, showing up at a bigots’ rally about hatred with a bucketload of your own.
Much more effective, especially against adults, are leadership by example; gentle, consistent, persuasion; and pity. King knew it; Gandhi knew it; Marcus Aurelius knew it; and even the lowly Aesop knew it, more than 2500 years ago.
What would happen, I wonder, if counter-culture rallies proclaiming the embrace of ignorance, the spreading of barbarism or self-serving revisionism, went completely ignored? If nobody showed up? If nobody gave a damn that a bunch of crackpots chose to demonstrate their conviction that the world was flat, or (as in this current case) that others should be blamed for ones’ problems simply due to the color of their skin; their willingness to work smart or hard; or for their choice of beliefs?
What would happen if such rallies were completely ignored or, better, that those who witnessed such displays in passing, going about their peaceful, productive day, simply shook their heads, half-smiled with visible, sad pity, then went about their business?
What if no news broadcasters showed up to amplify delusional voices? Because people declaring sad, ludicrous beliefs are NOT NEWS?
If you cannot, will not, or should not, use force — especially deadly force — to change minds, you must use persuasion. You must find and use the leverages that are inherent in our being a social species to shape amoral or aberrant behaviors over time. You find the vulnerabilities, then apply pressure when and where it will be productive.
Many people like to embrace anger as their first response. It’s as natural as flight-or-fight in response to a perceived threat. But no one rational, no one who’s educated, no one who’s studied history’s errors and would avoid repeating them, jumps to anger as an answer when the questions they should be asking aren’t how do I feel right now, but: What do we want to accomplish? And, How best will we get there?
Obstacles are opportunities.
What happened in Charlottesville was tragic. And this is going to happen again, and again, there and elsewhere, if we as a society continue to take our responses from ideologues that are like carpenters whose only hammer is anger.
For me, it’s always great to get back home from a trip. We had a wonderful time …but of course, like people often do, while touring Italy I allowed the excuses of “vacationing” and “environment” for a solid week of lazy exercise and detrimental dietary choices.
Unsurprisingly, Italian food, commonly served in 3- or 4-course meals, always with wine (and desert!)(at least on the group tour we took, where many of the meals were pre-ordered for us) created an easy +5lbs in 9 days. Because, “Hey, everyone else is ordering that way!” It’s ridiculous how easy it is for me to fall back into nom nom nomming foods that reinvigorate those American-bred, fattening, aging, sugar and wheat addictions! It’d be easy to shift blame to those childhood “clean your plate!” instructions, but let’s face it: If I claim sentience I also have to accept responsibility for the food I shovel into my pasta hole!
So I always feel that one of the best parts about coming home from a trip is resuming the healthy lifestyle that is too often the first casualty of world travel. That feeling made this recent post by Rohan Rajiv, whose blog I follow, resonate this morning (@4am, because of course my I’m still recovering from a week on European time!):
We get awesome thunderstorms in the Midwest. I love them.
Karly H., aged twelve’ish.
My dog? Not so much. As you can see here, during any stormy rumblings, she will only be found down in the basement, in my writing cave, hunkered under my desk.
Today, while Debbie and I were sitting at the table eating taco salads for lunch, looking over a backyard being inundated with needed rain (about thirty minutes before the adjacent picture was taken), Karly and I had the following exchange:
[Scene: Two humans are seated at a dinner table. Their faithful canine companion is curled beside the man’s chair, snoozing (and perhaps snoring) as only twelve-year-old dogs can do within 8 seconds of laying down, anywhere, anytime. Lightning flashes.]
Man: “Oooh, that’ll be a good one.”
[Thunder rocks the house. The dog sproings from sound sleep to stiff-legged alarm. She pivots toward the stairs leading down into the basement.]
Man: “Karly, it’s just a little Spring storm. Stay and watch with us.”
[The dog pauses, perhaps recognizing the word “stay” in her master’s speech. A command? Really? Now? Is he freakin’ kidding? She looks over her shoulder. “Hooman,” her eyes say with deep sincerity, “fifteen thousand years ago, when our kind first began living with your kind, there were two kinds of dogs. There were my kind — those smart enough to know full well that storms were dangerous and the only wise thing to do when the sky growls is *always* seek shelter below ground, where dens are supposed to bedug (for good reason!) — and there were the other kind of dog, those who left risk determinations in the hands of their supposedly smarter hoomans…
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one kind of dog left.
Edit: This article was updated on Jan 25th, 2017, after an exploratory conference call with the Ambrosia, LLC, Founder. -KH
So, do you wanna live forever?
When I began writing my number one non-selling book, “Surrogate Threats,” I was motivated by the idea that advancements in medical science had put us near the cusp of consumer-accessible life extension. Even back in 2015, a growing number of very smart people were predicting near immortality within ten years. My contemplation of that possibility spawned the creation of a fictional antagonist named Ryk Marius who, obsessed with the desire to become immortal and unwilling to be constrained by regulatory brakes or cumbersome morality, developed a plausible plan for life extension using today’s (and, okay, a little bit of tomorrow’s) medical technology. As an entrepreneur, I had such great fun hashing out my antagonist’s business model and innovating through his logistics challenges, I ultimately put his company, Marius Technologies, online at Rejuvi.me.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to spending part of 2015 caught up in recurring fantasies about extracting the (mostly) legal aspects of Marius Technologies to create and fund an actual bio-tech venture. If I’d known then what I know now, I might just have done it!
The Tantalizing Business of Life Extension
My sticking points in 2015, other than a chickenshit reticence toward funding legally gray, outlandish, futurist ventures, were (1) that I didn’t think I’d be able collect quite enough funding to get my life-extension venture off the ground; and (2) that I’d have to move out of the country to get around the United States’ oppressive regulatory environment when it came to building businesses out of experimental bio-tech. Put another way, I’d pretty much have to become a full blown Bond villain to develop this world-changing therapy into a profitable business. So I was stymied.
What made it more frustrating was that I was pretty sure someone could actually pull my plan off, if those meddling kids (and, you know, the rest of the world) would just leave them (and me, and my imaginary investors) alone to do it!
I needed a way to advance the vision that the rest of the world wouldn’t consider insane, ethically dangerous, and/or shudderingly creepy. Aye, therein lay the rub!
I was stuck.
Then, a week ago, I was stunned to learn I could have worked within the current US regulatory system to offer experimental age rejuvenation services while collecting substantial revenues — even if the process ultimately didn’t work! After all, while Winston Churchill once said,
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm,”
Kevin Higgins adds, “…and, even better, with no loss of your own money!”
Buried about three-quarters of the way into that article, in a section about the four main areas of stem cell therapies to watch, was a section on parabiosis. (For those not into linking away while reading, parabiosis was the term originally coined in the 1860’s (!) for linking the circulatory systems of two creatures, one young and one aged. The resulting blood sharing was found to literally, significantly, reverse the age of virtually all bodily tissues in the older creature. More recently, parabiosis is a term used to describe a process where blood (or plasma) from young donors is provided to elder recipients. The most energetic studies of parabiosis potential today in the US are being done at Stanford, where the treatments are being explored for their potential to stop (or reverse!) the progression of Alzheimer’s. Similar studies are being pursued at many other universities and research clinics elsewhere in the world.)
It’s really not science fiction that hordes of our most advanced researchers are beginning to view aging as a disease that can be cured.
It may turn out that Ponce de Leon’s long-sought “Fountain of Youth” was circulating through the arteries of the Utes* around him all the time!
This is the part where your inner mad scientist says, “Well, wait. If learned and aggressive clinical research doctors are securing valuable (and always scarce) funding to explore whether parabiosis rejuvenates aging, Alzheimer’s-riddled brains …and a full century of parabiotic experimentation with animals has created reams of peer-reviewed findings documenting the reversal of cellular age in virtually all bodily tissues …then maybe parabiosis has a strong chance of becoming at least one part of a multi-faceted strategy to cure people of aging!”
And your inner entrepreneur says, “Holy crap — that’s one of the Holy Grails of bio-tech!” (the other, of course, is to resolve once and for all whether a European Swallow might carry a coconut)(sorry, that was obligatory after a Holy Grail reference, but I digress)
Meet Dr. Jesse Karmazin, MD, Founder of Ambrosia, LLC, and your Conductor on this Entrepreneurial Train to Sci-Fi Town. Because what Dr. Karmazin has figured out, which I missed back in 2015, is (1) how to offer old (and perhaps wealthy, or desperate, or both) people access to the blood of youths via transfusions of plasma (a modern day, lower-risk take on actual parabiosis), while (2) operating under FDA regulations in the US, AND (3) get the applicants to pay the cost of the clinical trial! Genius!
Karmazin realized that as part of the Federal Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (one of many regulatory evolutions that opened up and increased transparency around clinical trials), establishing a clinical trial has become much more accessible (read: cheaper). He also pieced together two additional key allowances that made Ambrosia’s study viable: (1) (some) patient-funded clinical trials now fall under less scrutiny than they used to, and (2) the FDA doesn’t require approval for processes that are well-established, standard treatments. As you might expect, common blood transfusions (and, especially, even less-risky plasma transfusions) fall under this category!
One valuable type is genius is the ability to solve Gordian Knots of bureaucratic red tape with Alexander-like clarity.
Having found a way through the regulatory maze that I thought would require going offshore, Karmazin next had to develop a capitalization scheme — never an easy prospect when your core enabling technology (blood or plasma transfusions) isn’t protectable via patent. Because without developing a barrier to competition, finding Angel Investors, let alone Venture Capital, is a low-probability moon shot!
Still, the financial prospects were persuasive: 600 participants at $8000 USD per enrollee …comes to a cool $4.8MM in potential revenue for this study! …if you can find that many applicants.
Advancing science while making money? That’s enough to make the Pet Shop Boys sit up and take notice!
And the costs? Here’s my personal speculative back of the napkin work: The wholesale prices for getting blood tested and bio-markers reported can be found for less than a couple hundred dollars (depending on the various markers being evaluated and the accuracy desired). [Update: this may cost significantly more, given the vast number of biomarkers being tracked in this study.] You’ll need that done at least twice. And the cost of an actual unit blood plasma? Only about $61, on average. (Maybe one might pay a little more for the special order, primo stuff — like the plasma of Utes). [Update: this article’s initial calculations were based on erroneous information found online. Dr. Karmazin’s study is for an initial infusion of seven (7) units of Ute plasma, not the ~3 units originally reported.] Add in some consumables here and there and that creates estimated testing and plasma variable costs of about $1000 for each study enrollee. But, then it gets harder; you have to have a place for the participants to go for initial testing and qualifications, to receive the transfusions, and for subsequent blood draws and foll0w-up. That requires staff and office space. And, as every entrepreneur knows, fixed costs can be a bitch for a small venture (it’s why we so often start them in a garage).
[Update: At about an hour per unit of infused plasma, the seven (7) hours of clinic “seat time,” which is spread over a two-day period, will have to be factored into the variable costs.]
Enter young Dr. Karmazin’s savvy choice of business partner, Dr. Craig Wright, a longtime luminary in the field, a board-certified physician with over 30 years experience in seeing patients and working in the biopharmaceutical industry, an innovator (he holds over 15 patents), and a man with one additional important contribution: He’s already come out of retirement to open and operate an infusion clinic in Monterey, CA! With one brilliant partnership, that smashes our fixed costs flat and flattens out many of the other logistical hurdles — opening and managing clinical office space, tapping into an existent business for insurance and regulatory compliance, hiring technicians, etc. And it’s a win for Dr. Wright — his clinic is (presumably) already operating in the black; this is yet another source of (high-margin) revenue that doesn’t increase his existing fixed costs.
Work your way through the creation of a clinical trial and register it on the FDA’s clinicaltrials.gov web site, pay the requisite fee, and Voila! You’re in business!
[Update: And there’s an additional business model strength. The shortness of the clinical trial (one month) introduces opportunities for participants to come back for multiple transfusions, enabling this clinical trial to perform financially more like a therapy. That’s beautiful. As an entrepreneur, being able to sell deeper into your market, tapping satisfied customers, is usually a more profitable course than having to acquire new customers for additional revenues (assuming your therapy works).]
So, who wants a chance to feel (and perhaps actually become) younger? As a bonus, you may help advance the science of longevity, of anti-aging.
Step right up. You pays yer money and you takes yer chances.
Now that, thought I, as a self-identified (paranoid) entrepreneur and occasionally penitent bad sharer, looks like something I should read. Because while a mere idea is the 1% inspiration to the 99% perspiration required to breathe life into a new venture, that flash of what often feels like original genius is the inciting element that starts every entrepreneurial snowball rolling down Mount Disruption. That lightning-like “Eureka!” moment strikes rarely and without warning, so it’s natural to adopt a Gollum-like protectionism over your conceptual Precious, less some sneaksy Bilbo-analog snatch away your visions of changing the world.
The hard truth, of course, as Nir writes, is that that attitude is the “Sign of a Novice.” He explains,
“People tend to believe ideas are rare things, gems to be collected and hoarded. But in fact the nature of creative work, be it corporate innovation, academic research, or artistic endeavor, tells us quite the opposite—that if a useful insight pops into your head, it’s most likely in other people’s minds as well.”
Well, that stings. I’m a serial entrepreneur and I still want to behave that way when I get speared by inspiration out of the blue.
Nir continues,
“It’s called the ‘multiple discovery theory,’ which, contrary to the ‘heroic theory of invention,’ posits that discoveries are most often made by multiple people, not by lone ‘geniuses.’ History is littered with examples: the formulation of calculus, the discovery of vitamin A, the development of the telephone, the light bulb, the jet engine, the atom bomb.
‘When the time is ripe for certain things,’ the mathematician Farkas Bolyai said, ‘these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.'”
Of course, most people who think they’ve stumbled onto some novel idea discover truly original insights are as rare as Astatine shortly after rushing off to uspto.gov (or Google) to execute a quickie patent search.
Mr. Eyal and Mr. Bolyai are inarguably correct. One’s idea is almost certainly not unique or novel to the world. But that doesn’t suggest that dismissing such shower thoughts, or approaching their development with slow deliberation, is the sane course of action. On the contrary, embracing the slavering enthusiasm that such ideas fire is what separates entrepreneurs from those preferring the path most trodden. The thing to recognize about such ideas is that they fuel the furnace that creates the steam it takes to start an entrepreneurial locomotive up Disruption Mountain.
But here’s the thing I would add to Nir’s article: That those flashes of inspiration are almost always shared by others does not mean they are not scarce. Nor does it imply that birthing an idea simultaneously with (or after!) some other inventor(s) dilutes one’s chances of fanning that baby into the kind of conflagration that burns yesterday’s paradigms down.
It’s an adage that while many people get ideas; few do anything with them. But that’s not entirely true and it’s a worldview that can be dangerous for the erstwhile entrepreneur. There are a lot more people that, once shown the path, can figure out the execution than there are those who can see the path to begin with.
Each of those ‘Amazing ideas’ (assuming you’re not delusional) may represent what I think of as a sliding window of opportunity. Once opened, they’re only going to remain that way for a short period before someone else will slam it shut. The risk that makes inventors averse to sharing should not stem from fear of theft. The greater danger is that sharing an idea beyond a select few known and trusted fellow visionaries wastes time that could be spent in research, refinement, and development. In the early stages of business conception, after commitment to the unicorn-like Golden Idea, sharing and the doubt that can introduce from people who don’t have time or interest in your vision can slow one enough that they never get out of the starting blocks.
Sometimes, that instinct to guard one’s embryonic inspiration with at least some level of discretion is the best way to convert innovative adrenaline into the most precious of all entrepreneurial elements: The will to begin the work of building a product. That protecting your Precious reduces the chance of theft and exploitation by a pent-up competitor is merely a bonus.
The inciting element in this week’s narrative was a blog post on the site 
Sunning My Inner Lizard 