It was October 2000 or thereabouts and Jacob Lund Fisker wanted to know if someone could live a sustainable and rich life.
“I did a little back of the envelope math. We physicist restrict ourselves to post it notes typically. I took the global GDP, divided it by the global population, and took our ecological footprint number and divided by it as well. If everyone did what I was setting out to do, the maximum each person could spend was six thousand dollars per person per year.” – Jacob Lund Fisker, Through Conversations, November 2021
There’s a few things going on with FIRE. One is attention grabbing, everyone has a means to share their story and the atypical gets attention. Another is the financial conditions, it’s easier (though not easy) than ever to make a large amount of money, in a short amount of time, and invest in a mostly up market. The last and staying part of FIRE is the intentionality. It is impossible to FIRE without prioritizing one’s life.
Fisker’s philosophy is my favorite because he’s a system thinker. Early Retirement Extreme is a book that starts with systems and ends with personal finance. Saving half of one’s income is the act but you can’t do just one thing.
We’ve looked at spreadsheets for emergency funds, 401Ks, and how many touchdowns a quarterback will throw. Spreadsheets offer precision with numbers but don’t address our systems. Basic math is fine if the system is great but it doesn’t matter how great the math if the system is shit.
My mother-in-law has a problem when she goes out to eat. The problem is a combination of information, imagination, and conceptualization. The problem is: my mother-in-law doesn’t know what to order.
But she’s 70 years old. She has solutions. Is it familiar? Is there a picture? Is it recommended? Everything she orders falls into those three buckets. And thanks to Covid19 all that can change.
Part of the (uneven) Covid19 strategy are QR menus. These codes mostly link to a pdf version of the old menu. Consequently, these menus mostly suck. PDF or HTML menus take all of the worst parts of ordering food and make them more difficult to see. But things don’t have to be this way. QR codes for menus are the perfect opportunity for this peripheral technology to become a main course.
Here’s the pitch: a startup that builds interactive menus.
This is a hard problem. Restaurants are hectic, restaurant retention is tough, and there’s not a lot of excess capital for investment, but QR code menus may be a wise pairing thanks to framing.
Restaurant menus are terrible at framing. A paper menu is static and the only form of framing is the relative price framing. I’m not buying the most expensive or cheapest so this middle item seems fine. A digital menu can be dynamic. The options for choice architecture are abundant.
Guests who liked this also liked this.
The chef recommends this with that.
Add in this appetizer for only $3 more.
This item has been ordered 1,000 times this month.
All this startup needs is a few salespeople, a copy of Cialdini’s Influence, and an AWS account!
Restaurants are hired for multiple jobs: food, atmosphere, social status, signaling, and so on. Restaurants are also hired to make things easier: I don’t have to cook, clean, plan, or shoulder the burden of honey-what-is-for-dinner-tonight? A well built menu can reduce the diner’s decision demand.
This startup isn’t obvious because customers won’t articulate why they had a nice time at Dariano’s Diner but they will have a nice time because it’s a better experience which begins with the menu.
Yes, there are many restaurants to sell to – but this startup is competing with non-consumption. This isn’t a better reservation system (though it could be) or a better procurement provider (it could be that too), it only has to be better than a PDF or webpage.
So join me in raising funds for some QR IQ, a business that will build on human psychology to create a better dining experience.
March 3, 2022 update: This works! At least for automotive. The full video is here but according to one ex-industry person the digital signing of documents can increase (via framing I’d wager!!) back-end profits by 25%.
Maybe narratives are a sort of storage optimization solution. I can’t remember everything so a narrative is created to remember the thing.
Tom Brady hasn’t always been Tom Brady. “We’ve gone back and retrograded 2006 and 2007,” said Eric Eager, “and when we retrograded ’06, Peyton Manning was something like two standard deviations from anybody else. Tom Brady at the time was just kind of average. It was remarkable to see. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing Tom Brady as this great player and probably one of the best of all-time, and when we turned on the tape it wasn’t quite that way.”
Lastly, Native deodorant per Sam Parr, hasn’t always been a mission driven company. Founder Moiz Ali was looking for a business to start and ended up on deodorant thanks to his pregnant sister and unit economics. He wanted a business with repeat purchases and minimal shipping costs. Mattresses didn’t fit the bill but deodorant did.
We are narrative creatures, and these narratives are true but they are not the full story. Maybe the way to think about origin stories is like a movie trailer: it’s a short way to communicate the gist.
This post is part of our thinking about ease and its counterpart design.
Football in Florida in February
John List begins his book, The Voltage Effect, with the example of Nancy Reagan’s D.A.R.E. program. That program, failed, List notes because it was based on a false positive. “It was a pretty large scale study in Honolulu,” List said, “the problem was it was only one study, it was never replicated, and it was never the truth.” Part of the reason D.A.R.E. is a case of something is always happening is the social incentive. It felt good to have a solution. It felt good to align with Nancy Reagan or local law enforcement or your child’s school.
A modern parallel is Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! program. My year of AmeriCorp was in this heyday and it felt good to align with a political party or athletes or your child’s school.
Contrast Obama’s and Reagan’s initiatives with what I witnessed the first week of February: Florida football. This park was swarming with kids. Every NFL team was represented (and what a rollercoaster the kids on the Bengals team went through) and the parents were into it.
There’s no lack of football in Florida. If the current First Lady wanted a win, she should create a program that further promoted football in Florida. And the reason why is the ease. There’s not friction for Florida football. The weather is good to great (though dangerously hot) all year long. The culture welcomes football. There’s lots of people already doing it, so doing more of it wouldn’t be too much. Contrast Florida football with ‘Just Say No!’ or ‘Let’s Move!’. All the things in favor of Florida football are missing for the former First Ladies.
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How to vaccinate the world: Hire the smartest, most attractive, and persuasive medical students (doctors and nurses) to go door-to-door across the country. Or along the football theme, get the best recruiters. Have them sit on the couch, look the person in the eye, and sell them on vaccination. That would work. But like ‘Just Say No!’ and ‘Let’s Move!’ it takes too much energy. But football in Florida? No energy needed.
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There’s a gap between things I would like this person to do and things this person does. Energy closes the gap. Wordle wonderfully demonstrates energy. It’s easy to learn, easy to share, easy to play, easy to habituate. But Wordle will fade because it struck kindling. Unlike football in Florida there’s not a lot of factors working in its favor like with Facebook or automotive culture or take-out-pizza.
Energy, ease, friction, design – they’re all ways to address the same idea, how to change.
What I watched, listened, and read this week. Another experiment on note taking.
Business Breakdowns, Basic Fit. Through controlling costs (no pool, economies of scale for equipment, low payroll thanks to technology), Basic Fit serves the fitness JTBD. The company also has psychological advantages: not going to the gym is different than cancelling and some members don’t churn because the membership is like an ‘option’ to workout.
Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Chuck Klosterman. A visit to the ’90s. An answer to the question: Is the United States the best counter-cyclical asset? And, moving the goalposts after a lifetime of work.
The Science of Change: Netflix. In the DVD days customer satisfaction was driven bytaste and selection. Do you have what I want and how fast can I get it? Netflix addressed this two ways. One, create many distribution centers which reduced shipping times. Two, showcase (aka framing) DVD titles available at the nearby centers. Netflix’s internal question: Does this delight customers in hard to copy margin enhancing ways?
Wharton Moneyball 2/16/22. In a talk about transgender athlete the hosts note that at the extremes men and women are not competitive but on average they are. Another case of average ‘meanings‘.
Acquisitions Anonymous. Selling $9mm of golf clubs in year? DTC brands are best to begin, not buy.
The Indicator, How Hollywood changed the wine industry. Did the 2004 film Sideways lead to more Pinot production? Apparently yes, 75% more.
ILTB, Peter Chernin. Some businesses have more advantages than others and one way to notice them is merchandise. Another may be: will people stand in a line for this?
The making of Wordle, an interview with Josh Wardle on Spectacular Vernacular. Wardle, like the iPhone engineers, built a game prototype for his partner to play which led to the database of words. He also iterated with sharing and watched users. 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
The number of crypto commercials during the 2022 Super Bowl made me wonder how interested people are in something like Bitcoin. The results were surprising.
In the beginning, we measured the world one way. Then another way came. This way offered different fidelity, and we used that. Sometimes the thing we measured was a fixed supply, and the new fidelity changed demand and prices. Then a new new way came. The first two examples are this. Sometimes there is is no supply constraint and no change in price. The second two examples are that.
Investing. There are at least two areas where the invisible became visible. One is quantitative. It’s in the numbers, not the stories, where good investments can be found. A second is in scale. It’s the size of the company where there’s information which is invisible at one scale but very clear at another.
Moneyball. Like quant investing, Moneyball is a way to use numbers to find patterns and to frame our thinking.
Personal. “You work with a lot of teams”, Shane Parrish prompted, “what have you learned about making good decisions?” Well, says Diana Chapman, “people don’t practice nearly enough candor.” The whole episode (#130) is basically about this, making the invisible visible in our collection of relationships. How? Through candor.
Jobs to be done. The JTBD framework is a way of articulating purchase decisions. People take action to change what? We’ve many examples of this: Leatherman tool, Headspace meditation, and Instagram stores.
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One way to find the recently visible is in words. What was so great about Chapman’s podcast with Parrish was the embodiment of her ideas. Chapman is physical: use notecards, stand here, dress like this and act accordingly. We are a visual species. Today’s prompt then: What is invisible here?
It is surprising there are not more anti-science beliefs.
1. Science isn’t static, there’s not much canon.
2. Science is mostly not a putting-a-man-on-the-moon problem.
3. Science communication persuasion is difficult, especially relative to cultures, norms, and habits.
4. Science belief doesn’t follow formal logic, it is contextual. There are plenty of people who don’t trust a medical engineering but trust engineered medicine, or vice versa.
One way to think about all the non-science beliefs is as three states of the world: -1, 0, and 1. Put another way: anti-science, ignorant, pro-science.
Sometimes science denial is an information problem. If people only knew…. But that’s not quite it. Yes, sometimes scientific knowledge is zero, ‘they just don’t know the facts’.
“The other thing I think is wrong about how the media portrays it (science denial) is as misinformation. Science denial is about disinformation. Someone has intentionally created the theory that rebreathing into a mask will give you CO2 poisoning. Someone has made that up and filtered it out through the internet where it hits someone’s cognitive bias and they start to believe it.” – Lee McIntyre, Behavioral Grooves, November 2021
Most of life is not a ‘they just know the facts’ situation. C’mon, how many things do you dear reader not hold an opinion on. More often, it’s not non-consumption, but belief in something else. Weight Watchers and financial education are also examples of this state. Plus, our views on science and medicine, finances, and diet-health-lifestyle all have a strong identity component. If someone said, “Look, I hear what you are saying but I don’t trust the experts and this online community are my people,” you would have no idea if they were a Boglehead, a CrossFit participant, or anit-vax father of two.
The case at hand is like an errant Sudoku puzzle, there’s something else in that spot and it’s attached to a person’s identity.
Around here we try to skip the ‘they just don’t know the facts’ stage and go right to designing change. Personal finance is about shifting what we buy, often time rather than stuff. Heath is about shifting what we eat and what we do, replacing one thing with a healthier option. Anti-science persuasion then must replace the anti-science beliefs with something else. The trick here, says McIntyre is to plant a seed. Rather than ‘the facts’, be empathetic and offer suggestions. Reframe your aim from conversion to combustion, be the spark but let them do the work.
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It is wild how many things we do become part of our identity.
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Update February 15, 2022. Even ‘hard’ sciences are hard. Only forty percent of cancer biology studies replicated and eighty percent of pharmaceutical studies in academic labs cannot be replicated in industrial ones. Also, plastic recycling has (always?) been a sham: NPR Planet Money.
The best analogy to understand Loretta Breuning’s book Status Games is calories.
For many years survival was difficult. One problem was calories. So ‘evolution selected’ creatures with a mutation where certain foods (fat, sweet, salt, etc.) released good brain chemicals. Those creatures did better than others and became dominant. In a world with plentiful food those same adaptations aren’t as helpful.
For many years survival was difficult. One problem was predators. So ‘evolution selected’ creatures with a mutation where certain social group circumstances released good brain chemicals. Those creatures did better than others and became dominant. In a world with fewer predators those same adaptations aren’t as helpful.
Evolutionary life was hard so species adapted. Tigers and orangutans have no predator and tigers and orangutans are the only mammals to live alone. Like five fingers on a hand, something about social was splendid for survival. These groups included a pecking order and status games – which have at least two advantages.
Status games as alchemy. In a nod to Rory Sutherland, status games are a form of marketing where there’s a large reward for a not very large cost. Actual fights among mammals are rare. This makes sense. Fights reduce survival chances. Having a way to find out who is right/strong/better/whatever without the fight is quite nice.
Status games protect the group. Status games trim the tails of an individual’s outcome but make reproduction more likely. Any individual mammal is more likely to survive somewhere in the middle of the pack rather than in a non-stop quest to be ‘top dog’. And, Loretta writes, “It enables weaker individuals to enjoy the protection of stronger individuals in the face of common enemies.”
Groups are good for survival and status games are good for groups. So status became part of our human operating system.
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One analogy for the human brain is the elephant and the rider. The rider is our conscious brain and it is giving directions, narrating the story, and feeling in charge but really the elephant is going to go where it wants to go – and per Breuning the elephant wants to travel on well trodded paths. “Your animal brain just strives to repeat behaviors that trigger happy chemicals and avoid behaviors that trigger unhappy chemicals.” Thanks to the evolutionary advantage of being in groups, our brains have a simple set of chemical instructions.
Good: being in a group, ideally higher up.
Bad: being separate from a group, demoted in a group.
Groups are important so we seek groups. Everywhere are groups and everything is a status game. Fancy cars are status games. But so is ethics, morals, politics, house size, neighborhood, intelligence, partner, ability to drink, family heritage, even hardships. Find the chemical rewards and you will find the game. “Each brain sees the world through the lens of the neural pathways it has,” Breuning writes.
So, status games are normal but maybe not as helpful as they were. If we have to play, then we can play wisely. Remember, explains Loretta, it’s the dopamine that makes something feel good, not the thing. “The simple way to do this,” Breuning concludes, “is to put yourself up without putting others down.”
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I have no idea how much of this book is true but I liked it for a two reasons. First, it acknowledges the world as it is. Animals compete and form cliques, just like us, because we are animals. Two, the book’s perspective is action oriented. This is how things are and this is what you can do, I imagine Breuning advising. Most of all this book reminded me of Spent, we are all signaling and we are all playing status games.
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Comments: it is ironic that ‘pecking order’ is from domesticated chickens. Also, ‘evolution selected’ is just how we assign action and our brains like effects from actions. Examples include Headspace, poker, and international espionage and it is the source of the expression ‘don’t shoot the messenger’.
May 2022 Update. Scott Alexander’s review of The Gervais Principle offers an example of status games, and why they are helpful, in the context of Seinfeld.
Our this time is different examples have noted that when the overall system (airline regulation) or when the technology within the system (high jump pads) changes then this time is different. While confirming evidence isn’t a perfect indicator, it’s nice to note:
“If you have a mining business then base rates can tell you something. But over the past ten years there’s a new crop of businesses that have no historical analogs. This sounds like ‘this time is different’ but sometimes it kind of is. These businesses (software SAAS) grow fast, they grow organically. In a couple years they have global reach and no capital requirements. They can click a few buttons on AWS and suddenly they have more servers. They have expensive stocks so they can hire the best engineers, all around the world because everything is remote.” – LibertyRPF, Infinite Loops, October 2021
Often, TTID is used to support a narrative claim, and in general it pays to ‘short the narrative’. But sometimes TTID is right, the world changes. It’s a bit like finding a needle in a haystack (if there even is one).
The base rate for TTID is low. But when systemic rules or new technology allow the job to be done we can look closer.
The Waiter's Pad 