The vet injects Leia with a small dose of apomorphine, which stimulates dopamine receptors located in the area of the brain reserved for vomiting. She’s uncomfortable for a few minutes, heaves, and we get the sock back. Bombas claims they give a pair to someone in need every time they sell a pair. I wonder if that person feels nauseated when this happens, similar to a rabbit’s blood pressure rising after a sibling rabbit dies. The previous sentence is ghoulish even for me.

But this isn’t a dog post.

Debbie Downers

Only 10% of the nation feels positive about the economy, and last month consumer sentiment hit a record low. Americans are more anxious than they were even in 2008. Inflation is raising our collective blood pressure, and the media’s love of bad news is tipping us into hypertension. Anyone with a phone and a New York Times subscription has seen, over the past six months, 20 headlines regarding rising gas prices vs. 1 on their equally precipitous fall.

We’re witnessing similar pessimism among investors. Six in 10 fund managers say they’re taking less risk, the largest share … ever. Cash vs. stock allocation has surged to its greatest level since 2001, and more than half of managers say recession is likely.

Both And

A difficult concept to grasp is that contradictory things can exist concurrently. This is partly what makes markets so challenging: A company reports significant revenue growth but the stock declines, as price is a function of millions of signals creating a set of expectations that are reflected in the stock leading up to earnings. It’s impossible for the human brain to process all of them. So we cling to binaries — up/down, good/bad — wherever possible. But binaries are black and white, and markets are in color.

U.S. GDP just contracted for the second quarter in a row — and for some people, that means a recession has already arrived. But … it hasn’t. I know this, because I just paid $140 for one adult and two kids tickets to “The Color Factory.” After waiting an hour, we were exposed to a “one-of-a-kind experience that immerses you in joy and color.” Not sure much joy was registered, but I did find out my “spirit color” is Majestic Gazpacho. Point is, there were several hour-plus lines in SoHo this past weekend so you could jump in ball pits, sample beauty products, or try on running shoes. Other anecdotal evidence: It’s become a foregone conclusion we were going into recession, which often means … we’re not.

A more robust determination will eventually be rendered by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and according to its chairman, the whole negative-GDP-in-two-consecutive-quarters thing “doesn’t make any sense.” Per the NBER, a recession is “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” And even that’s just a rough guide. Case in point: The group identified the early days of the pandemic as a recession, though the contraction lasted only two months.

Employment has risen every month this year. We added more than 500,000 jobs in July, and the unemployment rate is near a 50-year low. Personal consumption (70% of the economy), adjusted for inflation, has been up in five of the last six months. (See above: “The Color Factory.”) Over half the S&P 500 has now reported second-quarter earnings — two in three companies have beaten Wall Street’s revenue estimates, and three in four have beaten earnings estimates. Our fears, one economist says, are “completely at odds with the reality. I’ve never seen a disjunction between the data and the general vibe quite as large as I saw.”

The red lights on the dashboard: Inflation is still high, household debt levels are rising (because of inflation), we need the GDP growth number to turn positive, and the war in Europe presents real risk to everyone everywhere. That consumers and investors are so anxious is itself cause for concern. Mass feelings of pessimism (warranted or not) can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Oh, and there’s this:

Gag Reflex

Just as we all became virologists when the pandemic hit, many of us now fancy ourselves economists. Every third tweet is a hot take on supply chains, and interest rates are cocktail party conversation. With the exception of a brief pandemic lapse, the market has been on a more than decade-long bull run. We saw “up and to the right” as the natural backdrop for stocks. Now that we’re seeing red, we’ve convinced ourselves that the market is suffering some sort of severe illness. Recession? Depression? Global collapse? Maybe. But more likely: The market is vomiting up stocks that should never have been ingested.

If we look at the stock market by sector, things aren’t that bad. Energy (albeit a Russia-Ukraine anomaly) rose 65% over the last 12 months. Utilities climbed 14%. Most other sectors, including real estate, industrials, and tech, are down, but not by much — and no more than 10%. There is, however, a vast force pulling the market down: unprofitable tech companies. Think Snap (down 86% in the last 12 months), Peloton (down 90%), and Roku (down 80%).

Within a year of the pandemic hitting, unprofitable tech stocks rose an average of 250%. These price movements made branded speculators, including Cathie Wood, wealthy. But the market’s mania for these sorts of equities was neither healthy nor normal. Most of these companies showed little-to-no evidence they could reach profitability, yet valuations promised sector domination, and many Web3 ventures were leveraged Ponzi schemes. The market’s apomorphine is fundamentals, and many companies, tokens, and platforms (e.g. Robinhood, most SPACS, all tokens sans BTC/ETH, and Celsius) were regurgitated by the market. This is healthy. And the healing may have begun: Many enduring tech companies just registered one of their best months in history.

The pain we’re seeing in the stock market is the autoimmune response of a healthy, functioning economy. We thought we had an iron stomach, that we could digest anything — from synthetic shitcoin derivatives to Opendoor shares — but these were unwholesome, even pestilential.

Floor

In recent weeks, markets have rallied. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit lows in mid-July and have since risen 13% and 18%, respectively. Bitcoin appeared to hit a floor of $19,000 — it seems to have now stabilized at around $23,000. Ethereum’s up 50% for the month. The NFT market crashed spectacularly in early 2022; but I recently got an update from a crypto cold-storage company I’m invested in, Ledger: The company listed 10,000 NFTs for sale that will allow owners to get first access to a marketplace they’re launching — and sold out in 24 hours, generating more than $4 million.

Put another way, there’s still a market for many of these assets, which signals they’ll be enduring. Crypto and growth stock bubbles popped, but people still want Bitcoin and Ethereum and many tech companies are muscling through. Uber, for example, is a serially unprofitable business whose stock was halved between January and July. This week, however, the company posted positive free cash flow of $382 million in the most recent quarter — and the stock rebounded 20% in a day.

Digging in the Wrong Place

About a month ago I spoke with Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group, on the Prof G Pod. Ian made a great point: We’ve all been talking about inflation and interest rates, but we’re focused on the wrong recession.

Ukrainian troops are camped along the front lines outside Kherson awaiting gunfire and airstrikes. Climate change is submerging or parching dense and developed regions all over the globe: The Rhine river is 14.5 inches away from being too shallow for cargo to pass through, half of the EU is at risk of drought, and the death toll from mass flooding in Kentucky is 37 and counting. Six in 10 Americans view members of the other political party not as political opponents, but as their enemy, and that number continues to climb. The greatest threat to our nation isn’t an economic recession, but losing the script re: what it means to be a country and a citizen. We have forgotten that Americans’ greatest allies will always be other Americans.

Our innovators shitpost the government when things are good and then expect a bailout when things get real. Just as the far right is attempting to conflate Christianity and masculinity with extreme conservatism, there is a dangerous smell of false equivalence emanating from the Valley, where a lack of respect for institutions and flouting any code of conduct correlates to innovation.

We each need our own stimulus, to be more enduring friends, neighbors, and citizens. To be kinder to each other, to realize our government is us, and to demonstrate more reverence for the most noble organization ever assembled, the U.S. government.

Rear Window

We’ve left the vet, headed home. Leia lays in the back, still queasy, and sulks for a few minutes. Unable to resist the open rear window, she soon has her ears flapping in the humid Florida breeze, taking breaks only to lay her head on the center console. Gas is $6, my stocks are down, and my sons’ socks no longer match. But Leia knows better — she’s focused on what’s important. I see her ears in the side-view mirror and have one thought: We’re going to be fine. We get back home, where the boys greet her and return to their devices. A sense of relief washes over me. Then Leia sprints up the stairs to my youngest’s room.

1 in 38,461

Hodgkin Lymphoma is a rare blood cancer that — unbeknownst to me earlier this year — can strike young adults.

The disease occurs when infection-fighting lymphocytes start growing out of control and create tumors throughout the body. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is unique in that a new type of cell appears on the scene — something called a Reed-Sternberg cell. The Reed-Sternberg cells attract tons of healthy immune system cells into the lymph nodes, causing the types of swelling I experienced in March and April. Nobody quite understands what causes the Reed-Sternberg cells to appear in the first place, or why the healthy immune cells are unable to target the rogue cells despite surrounding them within the lymph nodes. However, what is clear is Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is an aggressive cancer that — left untreated — would have killed me within a few years.

Thrust into a Medical World

It’s a running joke in my overwhelmingly medical family that I’m completely disinterested in medicine. And yet, with a growing mass in my neck and an unresolving series of illnesses, I started to appreciate that something was potentially wrong. Concern really set in when a CT scan at Penn Hospital revealed not only the one mass in my neck, but several throughout my chest and lungs. I’ll never forget the furrowed brows days later at Johns Hopkins during my biopsy — among them, my brother’s, an oncologist himself who would find himself orchestrating my care.

By the time I got the call, the diagnosis was almost a relief. We had a name for what I had. It was treatable, curable even, and I would start chemotherapy within the week.

My initial PET scan, with areas in orange lighting up with my lymphoma

You Have _____

One reflection on getting cancer as a 31-year old is to recognize that the way we talk about cancer is a little lazy. Every cancer has a unique pathology. For me, I have Stage 2a nodular sclerosis Hodgkin’s Lymphoma — but even that stops well short of describing the unique characteristics of my cancer relative to others in the same bucket. Two people with breast cancer who have identical ages and medical histories almost surely have two very different cancers. The only thing they have in common is that they started from a breast tissue cell.

I knew next to nothing about chemotherapy before starting my treatments, but I was surprised to learn that the four chemicals they use in treatment for my cancer (doxorubicin bleomycin vinblastine dacarbazine) are almost entirely unique from the chemo drugs they give for other cancers. So of course everyone’s experience going through treatment will be different from one another: we aren’t even getting the same drugs. To be a good ear to someone going through cancer treatments is, I think, to move beyond the preconceived notions of what a cancer patient should look like, feel like; how they should be feeling about themselves in that experience. It’s all very individualized.

The Drip Drip Drip

Getting this diagnosis in 2022 is both to appreciate recent advances in medical technology, and also to wonder what could be in the future. Back in the 1970s, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was one of the first cancers to be shown to be potentially curable with chemotherapy alone. Back then, a regime known as MOPP was used to treat patients (I remember the acronym by thinking of a kitchen sink approach), which had the benefit of curing as many as 70–80% of all patients, but with one important side effect: most of the patients turned up back in the hospital years later with a host of issues, among them secondary cancers, leukemias, and permanent immunosuppression. The 1980s brought a new chemotherapy regime, called ABVD, which remains the standard of care for front-line therapy today.

As I’ve sat through 7 chemotherapy sessions overlooking a plush lawn in Baltimore, I’m struck by how primitive chemotherapy really is. The basic principles of chemotherapy were established in World War II, when it was found that many of the chemicals invented for human warfare could be dialed down slightly for medicinal benefit. The irony is not lost on me when my nurses come to my little station wearing full body protective equipment to ensure they do not make any contact with the very drugs going directly into my veins.

Chemo is not fun, and it comes with a host of injustices that can otherwise fade into the background against the narrative of the triumphant cancer survivor. In order to even get my treatments, I have had to do bloodwork every two weeks to ensure I have enough healthy cells left to accept a new infusion. Midway through my treatments it became clear that my veins were starting to reject the drugs and were no longer providing a blood return. This forced needles into more and more unsavory places, alternating arms, elaborate PIC lines — all before I even got the drugs. On one particularly traumatic chemo day, I was pricked and prodded 14 times before the nurses could establish an IV to my blood stream. 3 full hours of needles probing in and out of collapsed veins. To add insult to injury, a few days later I developed an allergic reaction to the gel they used to place the IV and broke out in hives.

My arms after a particularly bruising day of chemo

To Work, or Not to Work

I started Magnolia with my business partner, Mark Bernstein, in 2016. Six years later our company operates nationally, developing environmental markets and managing conservation projects with a lean team of ten full time employees. When I was diagnosed I had no idea if I would be able to work during my treatments, or if I would even want to. I’m incredibly appreciative of the fact that, as a founder and business owner, I didn’t need to negotiate the terms of my engagement with anyone. I would work as much or as little as I chose.

As it turns out, I chose to work throughout my treatments, taking roughly 1–2 days off each cycle to recover from chemo. I say this not to elicit some heroic response from the audience, but to say that I found work a healthy distraction from my medical journey. Tomorrow, my “Out of Office — Chemo Day” repeating calendar alert will chime for the final time.

One surprising thing is how open I felt talking about my journey with some of our trusted clients. I remember one morning just prior to starting treatments, I took a call from one of our buyers while I was driving to a fertility clinic to deposit a ‘sample’ for sperm banking. He asked how I was doing, I’m sure blissfully unaware of the Pandora’s Box he was opening. I fully answered the question and explained the drive I was making. I didn’t expect the response I got on the other side of the phone. It turns out many have been touched by cancer or experienced similar events in their lives, we just don’t talk about it openly, especially in a business setting. I would receive texts and emails from all sorts of folks I’ve interacted with only in a business setting. It’s a beautiful thing about business that the relationships you make can transcend their origin stories.

Lightning Strikes

Intellectually we know that bad things happen to good people. That lightning strikes, and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it. Those who know me understand that I take my health seriously. I run, I crossfit, I Strava: I do these things not only to perpetuate a millennial stereotype, but also because I derive satisfaction from accomplishing things physically. None of that mattered to my cancer. One day, I was suddenly thrust into a numbers game. Gone were the mile PRs and WODs; in were the 5-year survival curves, Deauville scores, and relapse rates.

On an otherwise unremarkable infusion day, a small amount of chemo leaked out of a vein in my bicep and — several weeks later, would start to cause unrelenting muscle twitches in my arm. The only problem was that I didn’t know the chemo leak was the cause of my twitching. Instead, grappling with the whiplash of my cancer diagnosis, I briefly became convinced that I had not one but two rare diseases: Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in my neck and chest and ALS everywhere else. That paranoic curiosity led me to a famous speech delivered on July 4, 1939 by then 36 year-old Lou Gehrig in which he famously coined himself the luckiest man alive weeks after his diagnosis and retirement from Major League Baseball. Lou Gehrig would succumb to ALS just two short years later, his brain sharp but body completely failed. 80 years later we still do not have effective therapies against ALS.

I’m still coming to terms with my newfound appreciation of lightning. Previously a concept, something I read about, maybe saw in the distance — I’ve now felt it. It’s run through my body, and out my toes, burning a little scar in my shoe maybe. I think there can be a healthy appreciation for lightning, one that recognizes that we are owed nothing in life, but channels that uncertainty into a productive empathy. My cancer is but one form of lightning: I think here of those who have ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time; the victims of gun violence in America, of freak incidents or terminal illnesses. These days I see lightning a little too brightly, but I expect there will come a day when the anxieties over the next scan, the over-googling of the next side effect, all of that will be replaced with a more balanced energy. We live in a world of lightning. We live, in a world of lightning.

Coming Full Circle

I come from a family of doctors. My father, Robert Yarchoan, developed some of the first effective therapies used against HIV. My mother, Giovanna Tosato, studied essential stem cell processes and resultant tumors as a researcher at the National Institute of Health. My brother is a rising star in his world of oncology, serving as an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins. And then there is me, the disinterested cancer patient.

My brother, preparing to establish my IV

Growing up I thought my family was a little too fixated on people who were dying. I remember conversations at the dinner table revolving around cell processes, new drug conjugates, all the rest of it. If only the same attention were given to living, I thought, then we’d really be onto something.

The fact is I’m tremendously proud of the work my family, and all the medical professionals out there, have done to advance our understanding of health and wellness. My diagnosis was a death sentence until suddenly it wasn’t, and I look forward to the day we can say the same about other cancers and diseases. Money that is spent advancing these research initiatives is money well spent, in my mind. If we can launch a telescope into space that can peer into galaxies far away, we can find better therapies for cancer than some chemical compounds invented for warfare eighty years ago. We can and should do more to incentivize innovation in this sphere.

The People Who Help You Through It

It is absolutely true that you learn about yourself, and the people around you, when going through an experience like this. My long-term boyfriend Andrew and I developed our little rituals. We would drive down every two weeks for my treatments and stay with my brother’s nurse practitioner, Paige, the night before chemo. The next morning, it was a brisk jog followed by the big inhale into the hospital. And then the awful, steroid-y, metallic, nauseous few days to follow. Gone was our trip to Europe; in were the walks in Mantoloking, NJ where his family has a beach house. It wasn’t a lost summer, just a very different one than we had planned.

I am extremely grateful to have such an incredible collection of friends from different stages of my life. I received some of the most thoughtful messages and trinkets during my treatments. It was never the thing but always the thought that mattered. If you’ve read this far and you fall in this category (not the giving; just the being): thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Opening a care package in Baltimore after treatment

Where We Go from Here

When I was first diagnosed, I figured I would have a very weird and uncomfortable five months, followed by a large party and a return to my prior life. As I approach the end of that five-month weirding, I have come to appreciate the anticlimactic experience of cancer. Sure, the diagnosis part is a little dramatic. But the rest is a slow burn, and then a void — first of not knowing whether the treatments really worked, and then constantly needing to check to make sure they are still working. Stepping beyond the physical side of treatments, the mental side I think will take even longer to heal.

Roughly 15% of people with my cancer will eventually relapse and need salvage therapy, which usually entails a stem cell transplant along with more exotic immunotherapies. However, almost all of the relapses occur within the first 5 years. If I make it to 36 without a relapse, some angel somewhere will deem me cured of my Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Of course, I’m soberly aware of the data on long-term outcomes for lymphoma patients who undergo the treatments I will finish tomorrow. For a variety of reasons — some of which is attributable to the chemotherapy drugs themselves, and some of which is still unexplained — Hodgkin’s survivors suffer other health issues and malignancies at a significantly higher rate than the normal population. Sometimes the secondary cancers are other blood cancers; sometimes other solid tumors. As a group, we just seem to have more health issues as we get older.

I have come to terms with having a close relationship with scans and perhaps even oncologists for the rest of my life. But I think there’s a silver lining to having an intimate encounter with mortality at this age. Nothing is promised. Nothing is assured. I can’t wait to make the most of the years ahead.

The increased spread of monkeypox, including in countries where it hasn’t spread widely before, reveals a lot about this neglected disease, including its inaccurate and inappropriate name. “Monkeypox” is a misnomer (it doesn’t originate in monkeys) and many find the name to be stigmatizing. It really does need to change, and the sooner the better, but until it does I’ll use the name since that’s what people are most familiar with now.

As cases of the virus increase, it’s important to be clear about how we got here, how it spreads, and who is at risk of infection now. To contain this outbreak, we must act fast — and we must work together globally to find and stop health threats BEFORE they get out of control.

Unlike the novel coronavirus, which we hadn’t seen before it emerged, monkeypox has been spreading for more than three decades in Africa. Unfortunately, scientists’ warnings about the virus weren’t heard and they didn’t get the resources needed to better understand and stop it.

CDC has one of the world’s leading experts on poxviruses, and she has been traveling to Africa for years to try to learn how to curb outbreaks, but lack of funding held up the project. If we had addressed monkeypox then, we might well not be dealing with it now.

Based on what we’ve seen in this and past outbreaks, monkeypox is not nearly as transmissible as Covid. The data so far is clear. Close contact, including sexual and skin-to-skin contact, is the main driver of the current outbreak outside of Africa. This means it is circulating within social and sexual networks. But it could reach other populations, just as HIV did, and we need to stop the virus to protect the community it’s spreading in and prevent it from taking hold in vulnerable groups or new animal hosts and try to stop it from becoming endemic.

According to WHO, 98% of monkeypox cases have been among men who have sex with men, and those with multiple sex partners are at highest risk. A recent technical report from CDC echoes this data, finding almost all U.S. cases have been among men, disproportionately Black, Latino, and HIV positive men, and 94% of them reported sexual or close intimate contact with other men.

The CDC report, which includes demographic and transmission data as well as priority research questions, is great. I hope we’ll start seeing more briefings from them about this data, and that the media will highlight the actual risks of monkeypox to reduce fear and stigma.

Some have wondered whether the high proportion of cases in men who have sex with men is because of who we’re testing (or not testing). In the UK, test positivity remains high in men who have sex with men and low in other groups, such as women and children — indicating we’re likely not missing a lot of cases in those groups at this point. If the virus was easily able to spread via respiratory droplets or common touch surfaces, we’d likely see a much different demographic pattern of cases.

Although anyone can get monkeypox, not everyone is at equal risk. Failure to draw that distinction and focus our response effectively could make this outbreak much more difficult to contain.

The best way to keep people safe and to limit transmission now is to direct vaccines and treatments to the group at highest risk — men who have sex with men — and empower trusted messengers to communicate information and guidance. If the outbreak evolves, we’ll need to adjust our response and messages.

With monkeypox, we’re not starting from zero — we have knowledge and tools that can make an impact. So far, there haven’t been enough vaccines to meet the need, but commercial labs have increased test capacity and hundreds of thousands of doses of the Jynneos vaccine are said to be coming, though they may not be available for months.

We must work quickly to distribute vaccines, collect real-time data on effectiveness, communicate and engage stakeholders, and scale up production of vaccines around the world.

We must also make getting tools to outbreaks in Africa a priority. Countries on the continent should not be at the end of the line for tests, vaccines and treatments as they have been during the Covid pandemic.

Photo: Lucas Vasques / Unsplash

Control of monkeypox would require:

• Rapid diagnosis, including a high index of suspicion by physicians

• Effective contact tracing to the extent possible

• Isolation of infectious people

• Vaccination of contacts and those in the social and sexual circles around patients.

Covid laid bare the weak state of public health in much of the country. We still need to fix data access, increase contact tracing capacity, strengthen community engagement, improve communication, and increase trust. These things take time.

The plain truth is monkeypox and Covid will not be the last health threats we see. Disease outbreaks happen frequently and we need to strengthen the ability of every country to rapidly detect and stop outbreaks. That’s why Resolve to Save Lives is partnering with countries to implement the 7–1–7 goal: Every new health threat detected within 7 days, reported with investigation begun within 1 day, and response fully in place within 7 days.

Although Covid and monkeypox are very different, both have revealed vulnerabilities in our public health emergency response systems and highlight the work we need to do to strengthen public health globally. We must stop the cycle of panic and neglect. Microbes outnumber us. Will we outsmart them?

Things moved quickly. In November my local draft board reclassified me 1A and ordered me to report for induction. I tried an appeal but it was short-lived. The lawyer assigned to me by the draft board, who was supposed to support my appeal, denounced me as a communist and said he hoped I was drafted soon. With an induction date set for March, 1968, I faced three choices: go into the army as an anti-war GI (where I feared I would suffer “blanket parties,” beatings for being a leftist), go to prison (where I would probably face two to three years), or go to Canada, where they were accepting Americans and not returning them. I headed north.

Canada in the late 60’s was the landing point for thousands of people either resisting the draft (“draft dodgers”) or escaping after they were already in the military (“deserters”). Migrating to Canada was not the end of the story. Besides the personal life of these new Canadians — jobs, loves, growth — the political landscape they were part of was endlessly complicated. Dee Knight’s compelling new memoir, My Whirlwind Lives, expresses the shape and the feel of those years and illuminates the issues that were at stake. He captures the many ways that Americans in Canada came together to question and debate what we were doing there and how to continue the struggle for peace and justice.

My first point of contact with the new immigrants, as well as Dee’s, was the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, a community center that provided counseling, legal help, survival networks, and political organizing. I got to know Bernie Jaffe there and ran into friends from Ann Arbor who were making the same trek northward. Everything was up for debate. For instance, should we regard ourselves as exiles or expatriates? There were serious implications with each term. Those who felt disgusted with the whole US enterprise, who wanted out for good, preferred expatriate. Others argued that we were still part of the struggle against the war, and that we had been exiled — and were, then, exiles.

There was another dimension to this distinction. If we were only focused on the US, only looking south, were we arrogantly refusing to understand Canadian politics, the huge struggles there around social programs, First Nations sovereignty, independence for Quebec? Now that we were new Canadians, weren’t we responsible to be where we were? Dee Knight takes us through these dilemmas and his activism on both fronts, opposing US imperialism and joining social struggles in Ontario.

In August, 1968, I sat in a friend’s living room in Toronto watching the police riot at the Democratic Party convention. It was agonizing seeing my friends beaten, my comrades’ political fight against the war coming to a head. And where was I? Safely in Canada. Sitting it out. Was this it? Was absenting myself from the war the whole of my contribution? It was a terrible feeling. Many people today consider leaving the US as the fascist political movements ascend, to protect themselves, to protect their children. But exiles typically face a deep sense of ambivalence and contradiction. I did; Dee Knight did. I was out there, away from the front lines, while my brothers and sisters were caught in the vortex, still in the cauldron, still battling. Exile is a possible option, but it’s neither pain free nor easy — it’s not the end of the doubts or fears, the questions or tough choices ahead.

In his memoir, Dee Knight also explores the class and racial divisions in the American exile community. Generally the dodgers were college kids, those with the social mobility and contacts to get out ahead of the draft. The deserters, who were more and more numerous as the 60’s wore on into the 70’s, were mostly working class, often Black or Brown. They had gotten pulled into the draft and then confronted the reality of imperial invasion and occupation up-close — and they made the courageous choice to join the great migration away from war. Canadian immigration law itself was an oppressive sorting mechanism, with a point system that gave priority to those with more money, more education. Often army deserters were the ones who continued to be fugitives, even in the north.

When I moved to Vancouver, I got involved with projects that prioritized working with deserters. We called ourselves neither expats nor exiles, but refugees. We set up a free hostel as well as counseling. We arranged job opportunities and even some immigration marriages. Facing an impossible immigration system, we started learning how to make fake Canadian identification papers. Breaking the law seemed completely legitimate in the face of the illegal and genocidal war that was raging.

The next chapter for me took me to the other side of the resistance movement — into the military. While in 1968 I thought that the military culture would be gung-ho and isolating, by 1969 it was clear from my work with deserters that the US military machine was in crisis, was falling apart, in the face of the defeat they were suffering in Vietnam. By 1969, anti-war Vietnam veterans as well as active-duty GIs were a leading force in anti-war activities and the front line in all large demonstrations. So I headed back to Chicago, along with my partner and her daughter, to turn myself in and accept induction. I openly organized anti-war sentiment while training at Fort Leonard Wood, MO, and Fort Polk, LA — which is another story. But I could never let them ship me to Vietnam so in March, 1970, I went AWOL and my path entered another crossroads with the Dee Knight story, the struggle for amnesty.

In most countries, the end of a war means a general amnesty for combatants of all sides. Since so many have been fighting, there would never be an end to conflict unless they allowed most people to come back in. But amnesty is a hard pill for US war-makers to swallow. What was at stake was how to understand the war itself — the war to explain the war. The politicians wanted some kind of conditional amnesty — perhaps requiring a few years of civilian service or perhaps giving more severe punishment to army deserters than to the draft dodgers. The anti-draft and anti-war community fought for years, from 1972 to 1977, for a full, unconditional amnesty.

In fact, I got back from being underground under that amnesty. I flew from Toronto to New York in March, 1977. The police at Kennedy airport wrestled me to the ground in a dramatic arrest but then sent me to Fort Dix, NJ. There I was housed with hundreds of other returning AWOLs. In a few weeks I was simply discharged, with a “less than honorable” status.

Dee Knight gives a good accounting of the many ups and downs of the struggle for amnesty, including a thorough analysis by himself and outspoken army deserter Jack Calhoun of the amnesty debates. It highlights the real questions that we are still grappling with. Why do we consider killing for the empire honorable and resisting the killing cowardly? Why aren’t antiwar fighters honored as veterans? Why is John McCain, a war criminal who bombed civilians, held up as a great American, and those who forced the war to an end described as the problem?

It all has to do with the next war and the one after that. The war-makers needed to besmirch the resistance, to lie about the horrors of the war and why the US lost, out of fear that the appetite for invasion and aggression will erode among the American population. The subsequent wars and invasions of Grenada and Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan, all depended on keeping the lies of American innocence and good intentions intact. My Whirlwind Lives is an important reminder of the stakes of war — in the lives of those who are invaded, and in the lives of those in the imperialist center.

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Standing in our bedroom on the afternoon of December 18 I texted my wife, who was downstairs with our two college-aged daughters, suitcases more or less packed for the five-hour drive to grandma and grandpa’s house and the customary expectation of days with extended family and friends. “Think about what we would do if I had COVID.”

Took her a minute to understand what I was saying, then things became very clear. No long drive, no holiday with the family, not anymore, and hopefully that would be the least of it. I escorted our dog who never leaves my side out of the room (Google said to stay away from pets when you have COVID), closed the door and — except to briefly leave the house for a confirming PCR test a couple of days later and to retrieve the steady supply of food and drinks left outside and punctuated each time by two sharp knocks — didn’t open it for 10 days.

Everyone has experienced plans that fell through or changed at the last minute, that’s part of life. But, like everything else associated with COVID, this felt different. Sudden, sweeping, inexorable. There was a famous book and several movies about a big green guy who carried out an elaborate plan to steal Christmas from a small town, ultimately even he decided he couldn’t do it. Our grinch was a little piece of cardboard displaying two pink lines, and once they showed up there would be no reevaluation, no pulling of heartstrings, no appeal. A decades-long, multi-generational streak of gathering together on the morning of December 25 and making the base of an indoor tree our collective focal point was broken.

We got lucky. My case was relatively mild. After a few uncomfortable nights the symptoms wound down to a persistent cough and, most significantly, no one else in the house got it. I left our room on day 10, still showing a positive rapid test, so I wore a mask and kept my distance as we joined to open presents and have something of a Christmas morning around lunchtime on December 28. Life returned to however you would define our new normal shortly after that.

We have all lost something to COVID. More than a million people in the U.S. have lost everything, and the people closest to them have lost something in between. The impact of this pandemic is hard to track and hard to overstate. But one of its lingering effects is the loss of certainty over what comes next, the ability to arrange for things to happen and feel any degree of confidence they will materialize until that moment has actually arrived. It’s a way that few of us have lived before. Along with everything else the virus took from us, it took away this thing we used to consider plans.

As we move into this new mode of living, new way of being, it requires making peace with a baseline level of flux and flexibility that is, for so many, entirely new terrain. Maybe we’ll see you next month. Maybe we’ll get that dinner. Maybe the kids will be able to go to (and stay at) summer camp. Maybe we’ll celebrate your birthday in person. Maybe I’ll make that meeting in the office. Maybe we’ll get on the plane for that long-booked trip, if it all works out and no one tests positive or is a close contact. Maybe we’ll get back home on our original timetable. It’s boom times for pencils, because no one is writing anything down in pen.

This new mindset is getting caught up in the swirl of moving forward, but it’s worth acknowledging. It requires a new perspective and a more fluid approach to our day-to-day as we move from one moment to the next. The certainty of plans (within reason) is an edifying and grounding thing. Sure, someone could always get hit by a bus on the way to lunch. But most times, they don’t. The headline of this piece is intentionally dramatic, obviously the idea of making plans hasn’t ended. But I’d argue the way we perceive them, in the moment and as forward-looking pegs and focal points, has fundamentally shifted.

The flip side of our new normal, the more positive and maybe even affirming side, is an enhanced appreciation for the moments that ***do ***happen. How many meals, family events, nondescript events and gatherings passed by in the pre-COVID times with the expectation there would always be another, maybe just a few days later? No need to make such a big deal about sitting around a table or arriving at some new or favorite destination. We just decided to do this stuff, made some arrangements and it happened. What else did you expect?

The only way to adapt to a world that includes the end of plans is to elevate the awareness, engagement and significance of the moments that come to pass. This thing we talked about doing actually occurred, we made it, we all got to this place at this appointed time, so let’s fully lock in and appreciate what is happening — for us and with us and because of us.

John Lennon famously said that life is what happens to us when we’re busy making other plans. Maybe one of the unintended consequences of COVID is to give us the motivation and awareness to focus more on the life and less on the plans. As our ability to predict the future with any degree of certainty has diminished, the significance of the present is necessarily elevated, I’d argue to its more rightful place. The conversation we’re having right now, the meal, the activity, the glass of wine, the view, whatever. Breathe it in, don’t take any of it for granted. It’s not a terrible shift, even if it came from a terrible thing.

Humans have always been messy and haphazard in the sociocultural systems that we’ve built. Throughout history we’ve tried many political systems. Much of the ideas of the Enlightenment that drove Western European thinking, societal and political models actually came from Native American societies such as the Mi’kmaq and Algonkians, especially human rights. The technologies that evolved from different cultures and became digital did so in chaotic ways. The internet itself is the combining of a number of pre-existing technologies.

We have this notion, because it’s easier for our minds to process, that big social changes happened overnight. One day we’re picking berries and the next we were planting berry bushes. In reality, it took thousands of years for agriculture to evolve. Or one day we just switched from feudalism to democracy or communism. Political processes and today’s dominant models took hundreds of thousands of years. And we’re still figuring this out.

It took the internet nearly 40 years to become mainstream in consumer society. But once capitalism got hold, well, the rest is history. The internet is, perhaps, the first global scale sociocultural system humans have ever built. It is, in a way, magical. It is humans applying language to metal, spawning new ideas and solving problems unlike ever before. It is chaos theory at work. It is wonderful.

The internet has become the warp and woof of our global society. Social media, the technology that enables humans to ideate unlike ever before. Cave drawings on steroids. Through social media, we are sharing culture, many cultures. Humans use culture as our very means of survival. Technologies have evolved to where they are because they’re part of our cultures.

It is only now that governments around the world are really starting to understand the true implications of the internet. Some have been faster to realize this than others. Some, such as authoritarian governments like China and Russia have used it to control their societies. Democracies see the internet as a bastion of free speech and capitalism. Other governments are somewhere in between.

It is absolute chaos. And it’s going to be for a while yet. Perhaps it always will be. The very nature of the internet is a reflection of human cultures and societies and it has become deeply integrated to our current state of affairs. We are constantly experimenting with it as well. And that is part of its magic.

The internet has enabled us to invent cryptocurrencies, blockchain, scale Artificial Intelligence, explore new ways of building more egalitarian ways of working and living and likely saved us from global economic failure during the pandemic.

The internet however, is poised to undergo some rather significant changes in the coming decade. Changes that will impact us al in both big and small ways. There is a shift underway. It is perhaps, inevitable just as the evolution of human society is inevitable. We have been adapting to the internet and our digital lives for a very short time. Our brains are having a hard time keeping pace. This will get harder in the short term.

In my next article, I’ll explore how the internet might change in the coming decade. But one thing will stay constant; the internet will remain chaotic and messy. Because that’s how we do human.

Last week, I published The End of Social Media and the Rise of Recommendation Media, detailing how and why platforms were shifting away from social graphs and leaning into algorithmic, recommendation-based models of content distribution. If you haven’t read it, here’s the TLDR:

• Distribution of content through friend graphs isn’t efficient for platforms. More importantly, it drives massive costs in the form of huge moderation teams, severe damage to platforms’ brands, and opportunities for challengers to find more efficient models.

• Recommendation media, which distributes content via user-targeted algorithms is more efficient, more defensible, and less prone to abuse because platforms are in control of what gets seen and when, not creators.

• In the future, platforms will seek even more control and efficiency in feeds, and will likely turn to forms of synthetic media to create the perfect content for each user at the right time.

The media platform landscape is vast, with myriad stakeholders contributing to the business of content being created, shared, and consumed on the internet. In a world where recommendations take over for friend graphs, it’s clear that the platforms themselves are clear winners that benefit from the paradigm shift.

But who are the losers? Which stakeholders’ businesses will likely be disrupted as a result of this dramatic shift in content distribution? Let’s dive in…

Photographers

Photos have long been one of the key forms of currency on social media. In the early days of social media, photos came in the form of family photos dumped into gigantic Facebook albums, giving people the ability to easily share pictures of family vacations or shots with their friends’ at last night’s party. Then, Instagram made everyone an artist through beautiful filters that could transform photos with the tap of a button. But it was Snapchat that turned photos into a true form of communication on social media through disappearing photos, and ultimately, stories (both boosted by an arsenal of fun tools to reduce the friction of sharing photos). As a result, sharing photos is now as casual and ubiquitous as sending text messages.

However, it’s no secret that videos have proven to be the far more valuable form of media when it comes to engagement, with nearly every platform doubling down on the format in recent years. Videos naturally convey far more context and information, therefore demanding more attention from consumers. If recommendation media is all about content distribution for the purpose of maximizing engagement, we should all expect to see a lot more video in our feeds. This will inevitably come at the expense of photos and the influencers who have built large followings (and careers) off of sharing photos to platforms like Instagram. As a result, I expect many photographers to explore new means of creative expression if they struggle to find distribution for their photographs.

Influencers

But it’s not just the photo-sharing influencers who will be impacted; instead, it’s anyone who’s invested a large amount of time in building up their follower count. As I briefly mentioned in my previous piece, it’s no wonder why Kylie Jenner (one of the most-followed users of social media) opposes the shift to recommendation media: she will simply have much less programming power. Less programming power means less engagement from her content which means less demand from advertisers, brands, and sponsors for access to her followers.

But recommendation media won’t just affect Kylie Jenner and the world’s biggest influencers; it’ll reduce the overall value of an individual follower on all major platforms. Millions of people who have spent years investing in cultivating an audience for the purpose of distributing content will need to re-think (or abandon) their approaches to content creation in favor of new playbooks that prioritize creating hit content instead of personal brand loyalty. This will be especially challenging for creators given the lack of transparency around what specifically drives engagement via platforms’ algorithms. In social media, the playbook was simple: build a following, get distribution. In recommendation media, the playbook will instead be: create content and hope for the best. Through this lens, it’s easy to see how the business of being an influencer is about to change dramatically.

Friends and families

Let us not forget the core reason why many of us started using social media in the first place: to connect with friends and family. Despite the downsides of friend-graph based content distribution (such as “guaranteed distribution” for problematic content, echo chambers, etc), social media has played an enormous role in our collective ability to stay connected as human beings over the past few decades. And the need for this type of remote connection has only increased over time as we’ve all moved more our lives online, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ability to easily share life updates with each other may not come as easy for much longer. In social media, we could share a photo to Instagram feeling confident many of our friends and family might see it in the coming days. But in recommendation media, that same photo would be at risk of being bumped out of the feed by a valuable video from a complete stranger. As a result, I expect people will become much more intentional about how and where they share personal content with friends, such as in private messaging apps such as iMessage, WhatsApp, or Messenger, but not on recommendation platforms.

Startups

Broadly speaking, there are two key ingredients platforms need in order to have a successful recommendation platform: a huge, diverse catalog of content and best in class machine learning algorithms. The former is needed to ensure each unique consumer on the platform can be perfectly matched with content that best suits their unique interests, while the latter is needed to actually do the intelligent matching between constituents. Both necessitate massive platform scale and capital, which the major platforms already have. However, startups who are hoping to challenge the platforms will be at a greater disadvantage in a recommendation media world. Whereas many new social networks rely on friend graphs to distribute content, the platforms will be doing perfect matching of content and consumer with far greater efficiency through the strength of their best in class ML.

However, on the flipside, this new dynamic may also open a door for pure social media startups to find relevance. While it’s clear the major platforms believe a better business awaits them through algorithmic content distribution, that doesn’t necessarily mean a great business model can’t exist for a challenger through social distribution. Given the void in human connection that may increase as our newsfeeds contain less content from our friends and family, new startups will attempt to pick up the pieces. We’re already seeing this happen to some extent, with pure social apps like BeReal dominating the App Store charts. However, in order for these new platforms to maintain relevance, they’ll need to do something truly unique with their format so they can’t be easily replicated by the major platforms.

We forget how hard scrolling webpages used to be. Most users would painstakingly move their mouse to the right edge of the screen, to use something ancient called a ‘scrollbar’:

As a pro, you probably used a mouse wheel, cursor keys, or trackpad, but you were way ahead of most users.

In 2015 it’s far easier to scroll than it is to click. On mobile, you can scroll wildly with your thumb. To click on a precise target is actually more difficult — the complete opposite of what we’re used to on the desktop.

As a result, we should expect more and more websites to be built around scrolling first, and clicking second. And of course, that’s exactly what we’ve seen everywhere:

There’s every reason to expect this trend to continue as mobile takes over more of the market. Modern sites have fewer things to click, and much more scrolling. We’ll see fewer links, more buttons, bigger ‘clickable’ areas, and taller pages that expect to be scrolled.

Websites which spread their articles onto multiple pages will soon learn this lesson. Expect these to turn into longer single pages or even, like TIME magazine, into infinite scrolling pages:

It’s too early to know if the web will expand itself onto devices like watches, but if it ever does, you can bet it’ll be almost entirely driven by gestures.

2. The fold really is dead this time

Now scrolling is so cheap, and devices are so varied in size, ‘the fold’ is finally becoming irrelevant.

Designers are increasingly free to not cram everything at the top of a page. This leads to a design trend popularised by Medium — full-screen image titles, with no content visible until you start scrolling:

With tall, scrolling pages, designers have the chance to do what magazines have taken for granted for years: fill their pages with big beautiful images. In 2015 expect to see more designs that take up much more space — especially vertically — and a lot of larger imagery like this.

3. Users are quicker, websites are simplifying

Today every young adult is an expert web user. And even the amateurs are acting like pros: using multiple tabs, and swiping to go back a page.

The result is that everything is faster. And we’ve all learned to become impatient. If you want to make a mild mannered person explode with annoyance, just make their Internet really slow for a minute.

Now websites are forced not just to become faster (a technical problem), but to become faster to understand. Designs which slow the user down have the same impact on their audience as these websites which don’t load at all.

Simpler designs are easier to scan, which means they’re faster to appreciate. It’s easy to see which of these two designs is newer, and it’s because it’s the one that user’s can enjoy the fastest:

This is the biggest reason for the death of skeuomorphic design: users are more perceptive, less patient, and clutter only slows them down.

Apps put most websites to shame with super-minimal, beautiful interfaces. And they’re doing this because minimal interfaces perform better.

Flat design is just the beginning. The real trend is towards simplicity and immediacy, and we expect that to go further than ever in 2015.

4. The pixel is dead

On a desktop, a pixel was a pixel. You even had an idea of how many pixels made up an average inch: 72 dpi. Nowadays very few people know what a pixel is.

With responsive design, we’ve seen a move towards grids and percentages. But one huge area remains still unchallenged: bitmap images.

Almost all of the web is built with images that have half the resolution of a modern display, and they don’t scale. With Retina displays and modern browsers, the time is right for vector images to become more popular in 2015.

We can see this trend already happening with the font-based icons and Google’s Material design. The website loads faster and scale the icons to any size without losing quality. That makes them ideal for designers and modern web browsers.

One question Jeff Bezos is often asked is one we all need to ask ourselves, “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?”

It’s a profound question because the world is changing so rapidly, and because the decisions we make now will determine our destiny.

Decide wrong, and you might find yourself on a sinking ship, watching as your whole industry goes bankrupt and the skills you spent years honing become obsolete. Millions of people from journalists to financial analysts now find themselves in this position.

Decide right, and you could be set for life. The top artificial intelligence programmers, for example, make as much as NFL superstars. These programmers have suddenly found that the skill set they spent years honing has become incredibly valuable.

These two groups, top AI programmers and people whose skills have become devalued, might have spent the same amount of time learning and be equally smart. But selecting different fields took them down completely different paths.

Over the last few years, I’ve come across a group of people who have spent their whole careers expertly predicting the future, investing based off of their predictions, and then massively profiting decade after decade. What I’ve noticed is that they share a common and completely counterintuitive approach toward investing their money and time that bucks conventional wisdom. In this article, I’ll share how you can copy the approaches of self-made billionaire entrepreneurs and investors like Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, and Warren Buffett so that you too can ‘win’ your future.

“What’s Going to Change?” Is The Wrong Question

Like I said above, Jeff Bezos is often asked, “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” That’s actually not the key question though. Listen to how he reframes it (emphasis mine):

That is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s NOT going to change in the next 10 years?’

And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

He then goes on to explain how Amazon has profited from focusing on the second question (emphasis mine):

[I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible.

And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

I remember the thoughts running through my head the first time I read this quote. It felt intuitive and counterintuitive at the same time. On the one hand, I thought to myself, “This makes so much sense! Why not just focus on what’s guaranteed to be valuable rather than speculating?” On the other hand, Bezos’ response flies in the face of conventional wisdom and was jarring. The typical approach to planning for the future resembles betting at the roulette wheel:

• Identify what you think is going to be really important (i.e., artificial intelligence, virtual reality, blockchain, synthetic biology, nanotechnology).

• Pick one of those areas to invest in and master.

• Hope it hits big and that you have the right timing so that you can profit.

While the conventional approach does sometimes work, it’s not a dependable strategy. It’s not what I’d tell my kids to do. A 2012 study from the Kauffman Foundation shows that “The [venture capital] industry hasn’t returned the cash invested since 1997.” And if you take out a few companies like Uber, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, the returns are abysmal. In other words, the odds of you investing in, starting, or being an early employee at a billion-dollar company are like the odds of winning a lottery. Just 200 out of all the startups out there are valued at $1 billion or more right now! You have a tenfold better chance of being hit by lightning.

Why doesn’t focusing on trends work as well as you might think?

Why Future Prediction Doesn’t Work

“You can’t predict, you can prepare.” — Howard Marks

Self-made billionaire, entrepreneur, and investor Howard Marks runs the investment firm Oaktree Capital and has $100 billion under management, making it one of the largest hedge funds in the world. Each year, Marks writes a widely-circulated letter to shareholders. One of these memos gives a masterclass in how investing in future trends isn’t always smart:

1. The seemingly sure bets will have the most competition, which will make them less profitable. Marks writes: “Most great investments begin in discomfort. The things most people feel good about — investments where the underlying premise is widely accepted, the recent performance has been positive and the outlook is rosy — are unlikely to be available at bargain prices. Rather, bargains are usually found among things that are controversial, that people are pessimistic about, and that have been performing badly of late.”

2. Luck and randomness are big, unavoidable factors. ”It’s far from certain that even ‘right’ decisions will be successful, since every decision requires assumptions about what the future will look like, and even reasonable assumptions can be thwarted by the world’s randomness,” says Marks. There are certain random events that are so influential that they completely change the game for everyone. Nassim Taleb calls these events “Black Swans.” (A great example is the 2008 financial crisis.)

3. It’s much harder than you think to be consistently right. “It’s hard to consistently make decisions that correctly factor in all of the relevant facts and considerations (i.e., it’s hard to be right),” Marks notes with humility, a key trait of many of the world’s top-performing investors. Self-made billionaire Ray Dalio, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, drives home how hard investing is in the first sentence of his new book: “Before I begin telling you what I think, I want to establish that I’m a ‘dumb shit’ who doesn’t know much relative to what I need to know.”

4. Even if you get the prediction right, you are likely to get the timing wrong. Marks says: “Even well-founded decisions that eventually turn out to be right are unlikely to do so promptly. This is because not only are future events uncertain, their timing is particularly variable.” And the problem with this is that having the wrong timing is functionally equivalent to making the wrong decision.

The field of artificial intelligence is a case in point for Marks’ argument. While artificial intelligence sounds like a sure bet now, it wasn’t always that way. From 1974–1980 and 1987–1993, the field went through “AI winters.” In these periods, AI reeled from being overhyped and lost credibility and funding. Talented young programmers left in droves. Many of the most successful people in the field now are those who survived these winters and kept going even when it didn’t seem smart to do so. Now, someone entering the AI field has to compete against droves of the smartest people in the world.

My point is that picking which fields will be hot in 20 years is not as simple as it sounds. Predicting third-, fourth-, and fifth-order consequences is almost impossible. Who would’ve predicted in the early 1900s that the invention of the automobile would ultimately lead to the creation of suburban sprawl, the hotel industry (because of the Interstate highway system), and the insurance industry.

Notice how Warren Buffett, the best investor in history, doesn’t invest in the hottest tech startups of the day. Instead, he has made his career by identifying businesses whose rock-solid fundamentals don’t change, or which change very slowly. As a result, Buffett is able to invest in companies for the long-term. He’s held stock in companies like Geico, Coca-Cola, and American Express for decades.

So if predicting the future isn’t the answer, what can you do instead?

Introducing The Trunk Technique

“Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.” — Warren Buffett

At the heart of the methods used by Buffett, Dalio, Marks, Taleb, and Bezos is a common theme: focus on areas that are virtually guaranteed to be valuable in the future no matter what happens.

Bezos talks about how focusing on stable customer preferences is a powerful foundation to build a company around. I’d take that a step further: focusing on stable knowledge is a powerful approach to build a life around. I call this skill the Trunk Technique…

Some forms of knowledge arise quickly and then just as quickly become obsolete. Other forms stay relevant for a very long time. In my article, Why Being Great Is So Much Harder Than People Realize, I share how the rate at which information goes obsolete is increasing:

One academic study, for example, found that the decay rate in the accuracy of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis was 45 years. In other words, if you’re talking to a 70-year-old liver specialist who hasn’t updated his skills, you have a 50 percent chance of getting bad information. Engineering degrees went from a half life of 35 years in 1930 to about 10 years in 1960.

So what’s the difference between knowledge that expires relatively quickly versus knowledge with staying power?

Broadly speaking, “transitional” or quickly-expiring knowledge is the kind that helps us navigate a specific environment (such as the specialized field of liver medicine). Whereas “pillar” or longer-lasting knowledge is based on fundamental principles and mental models that can be applied in many contexts including unforeseen future ones.

Let me explain. As I share in How Elon Musk Learns Faster and Better Than Everyone Else, when most people think about knowledge, they think about it horizontally, viewing knowledge across different subjects. The problem with this is that when you look at things in one dimension, you miss important connections:

What many miss is that knowledge is vertical as well. Great thinkers and doers, I have noticed, view reality this way. There are deeper principles and mental models that connect the various subjects that we study:

In the example above, by learning the universal mental models of network science that apply to all networks, you can more easily understand specific patterns in how the brain functions and how social networks work.

And it’s not just one layer deep. There are many layers. In one of Elon Musk’s Reddit AMAs he explains it like this:

It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang onto.

Here’s one way of visualizing Musk’s semantic tree:

People who use the Trunk Technique focus on mastering the fundamental mental models or first principles first and then move on to the leaves second. By doing this, they build a more stable and adaptable tree, and therefore career. Trees lose their leaves every winter, but they thrive for decades (and sometimes hundreds of years) because they have strong trunks and roots.

Let’s take the topic of experimentation as an example. Understanding the 10,000-experiment rule is crucial for success at an individual, company, and societal level. The Leave Approach to getting better at experimentation would be to first focus on hacks like understanding how to A/B test a button on your website. The Trunk Technique would be to understand what the scientific method is first (i.e., controlled experimentation; peer-reviewed refereed journals; blind, randomized design; falsifiability; controlled placebo; double blind experimentation; computer simulations; and meta-analysis). By understanding the few core principles that make up the scientific method, one can then create thousands of experiments across every area of life and career forever. As new hacks and software tools arise, you’d be able to quickly understand their significance and use them. Then, when those specific tools become obsolete, you’d still have your trunk to grow new branches and leaves from. I attribute a large part of any success I’ve had as a writer to applying the scientific method to the creation of ideas.

Another example: I’m obsessed with health, so I’ve learned hacks for getting micronutrients, intermittent fasting, cold showers, saunas, and interval training. These are fine, but even more fundamental to my health has been learning the underlying principle of post-traumatic growth. All of the hacks above can be derived by understanding that systems grow by being stressed and then being given time to recover.

I share more details on how they specifically apply the Trunk Technique to your life in How Elon Musk Learns Faster And Better Than Everyone Else, How One Life Hack From A Self-Made Billionaire Leads To Exceptional Success, and How To Tell If Someone Is Truly Smart Or Just Average, which have collectively been read over 1 million times.

In summary, the Trunk Technique allows you to:

• Build a knowledge tree that lasts forever. Winston Churchill once said: “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” More recently, this phenomenon has been called the Lindy Effect: “The future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.” The corollary of this for the information age is: “The more you focus on fundamental knowledge, the longer your knowledge tree will last.”

• Adapt to any future fast and thrive. The nature of fundamental mental models is that they appear across all fields. Therefore, when you go into an emerging field, you’ll enter with a head start, because you’ll immediately see how the principles you already know are relevant.

• Better understand what’s happening and what it means. Similar to how an expert chess player can see several moves ahead, mental models will allow you to put what’s happening in context so you can react appropriately and think farther ahead.

• Reduce the risk of investing in an area that turns out to not be a winner. In this article, I’m not suggesting that you ignore the future completely. What I’m saying is that you balance your understanding of trends with what is never going to change: timeless principles and mental models. In his book, Antifragile, Nassim Taleb, a very successful investor rumored to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, suggests an approach to investing resources that maximizes returns while eliminating losses*.* He calls it the Barbell Strategy: the idea of building a portfolio of extremes (extremely safe assets + high risk-reward assets) rather than building a big mix with everything in the middle.

Yet today SQL is resurging. All of the major cloud providers now offer popular managed relational database services: e.g., Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL (Azure launched just this year). In Amazon’s own words, its PostgreSQL- and MySQL-compatible database Aurora database product has been the “fastest growing service in the history of AWS”. SQL interfaces on top of Hadoop and Spark continue to thrive. And just last month, Kafka launched SQL support. Your humble authors themselves are developers of a new time-series database that fully embraces SQL.

In this post we examine why the pendulum today is swinging back to SQL, and what this means for the future of the data engineering and analysis community.

Part 1: A New Hope

To understand why SQL is making a comeback, let’s start with why it was designed in the first place.

Our story starts at IBM Research in the early 1970s, where the relational database was born. At that time, query languages relied on complex mathematical logic and notation. Two newly minted PhDs, Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce, were impressed by the relational data model but saw that the query language would be a major bottleneck to adoption. They set out to design a new query language that would be (in their own words): “more accessible to users without formal training in mathematics or computer programming.”

Query languages before SQL ( a, b ) vs SQL ( c ) (source)

Think about this. Way before the Internet, before the Personal Computer, when the programming language C was first being introduced to the world, two young computer scientists realized that, “much of the success of the computer industry depends on developing a class of users other than trained computer specialists.” They wanted a query language that was as easy to read as English, and that would also encompass database administration and manipulation.

The result was SQL, first introduced to the world in 1974. Over the next few decades, SQL would prove to be immensely popular. As relational databases like System R, Ingres, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL (and more) took over the software industry, SQL became established as the preeminent language for interacting with a database, and became the lingua franca for an increasingly crowded and competitive ecosystem.

(Sadly, Raymond Boyce never had a chance to witness SQL’s success. He died of a brain aneurysm 1 month after giving one of the earliest SQL presentations, just 26 years of age, leaving behind a wife and young daughter.)

For a while, it seemed like SQL had successfully fulfilled its mission. But then the Internet happened.

Part 2: NoSQL Strikes Back

While Chamberlin and Boyce were developing SQL, what they didn’t realize is that a second group of engineers in California were working on another budding project that would later widely proliferate and threaten SQL’s existence. That project was ARPANET, and on October 29, 1969, it was born.

But SQL was actually fine until another engineer showed up and invented the World Wide Web, in 1989.

Like a weed, the Internet and Web flourished, massively disrupting our world in countless ways, but for the data community it created one particular headache: new sources generating data at much higher volumes and velocities than before.

As the Internet continued to grow and grow, the software community found that the relational databases of that time couldn’t handle this new load. There was a disturbance in the force, as if a million databases cried out and were suddenly overloaded.

Then two new Internet giants made breakthroughs, and developed their own distributed non-relational systems to help with this new onslaught of data: MapReduce (published 2004) and Bigtable (published 2006) by Google, and Dynamo (published 2007) by Amazon. These seminal papers led to even more non-relational databases, including Hadoop (based on the MapReduce paper, 2006), Cassandra (heavily inspired by both the Bigtable and Dynamo papers, 2008) and MongoDB (2009). Because these were new systems largely written from scratch, they also eschewed SQL, leading to the rise of the NoSQL movement.

And boy did the software developer community eat up NoSQL, embracing it arguably much more broadly than the original Google/Amazon authors intended. It’s easy to understand why: NoSQL was new and shiny; it promised scale and power; it seemed like the fast path to engineering success. But then the problems started appearing.

Developers soon found that not having SQL was actually quite limiting. Each NoSQL database offered its own unique query language, which meant: more languages to learn (and to teach to your coworkers); increased difficulty in connecting these databases to applications, leading to tons of brittle glue code; a lack of a third party ecosystem, requiring companies to develop their own operational and visualization tools.

These NoSQL languages, being new, were also not fully developed. For example, there had been years of work in relational databases to add necessary features to SQL (e.g., JOINs); the immaturity of NoSQL languages meant more complexity was needed at the application level. The lack of JOINs also led to denormalization, which led to data bloat and rigidity.

Some NoSQL databases added their own “SQL-like” query languages, like Cassandra’s CQL. But this often made the problem worse. Using an interface that is almost identical to something more common actually created more mental friction: engineers didn’t know what was supported and what wasn’t.

Some in the community saw the problems with NoSQL early on (e.g., DeWitt and Stonebraker in 2008). Over time, through hard-earned scars of personal experience, more and more software developers joined them.