My dad, life and death, and grief

My dad died two weeks ago today.

I've been thinking about him, about life and death, about grief.

My dad was 79 years old. He was old, but not that old. Of the people I know in advanced age, I’d have picked him as one of the healthiest. He was active and ready to do just about whatever needed doing. He rode his bike regularly. He loved gardening. He liked having guests over and loved traveling. He loved his family most of all, especially his grandkids.

The last thing he asked me to do was to bring my three year old daughter Juniper over to visit. He was dropping off my boys Bruce and Tommy after getting them birthday presents. I casually said bye to him as he walked out my front door. I don’t think I said “I love you,” can’t remember. I know I didn’t hug him. That was the last time I saw him alive.

I wasn’t ready for the phone call that said he was gone.
I wasn’t ready to spend time with his lifeless body.
I wasn’t ready to have the casket closed.
I wasn’t ready to burry him.

But nobody asks if you’re ready. For that matter, I know he wasn’t “ready” to die. He certainly wasn’t planning on dying that night. He had notes on his bedside tracking his daily blood pressure. He was dieting and exercising. He’d just given a lesson at church about taking care of your body.

But nobody asks if you’re ready.

I’m not somebody who has grieved a great deal in my life. My last grandparent died when I was 18. That was a long time ago. Since then I’ve only grieved lost relationships, but losing a girlfriend (because she broke up with you) is a lot different than losing a parent because they died. We can and do move on from lost relationships. But I’m not going to have another dad.

In one sense, we all know and understand what death is. The body simply stops working. Wears out. Breaks. Toddlers are familiar with the concept, and every thinking person knows that eventually, we all will die.

But I think there’s a very real part of our brain that doesn’t, that can’t, comprehend death.

My parents have been there for me my whole life, forty plus years. And while I lead a pretty independent life now, I always knew they’d be there for me if needed. But now one half of that duo is gone.

It’s the ultimate problem with no apparent solution. The irrational impulse I had in the days following his death was that this injustice needed to be addressed. My family has been short-changed. Where can I submit a complaint? Is there an appeals process? I’m sorry, somebody up there must have made a clerical error. How can I escalate our case?

Of course there’s nothing. You can do nothing to solve this problem.

I struggle to even know what to compare it to. It’s like if somebody told you one day that the sky was gone. It doesn’t make sense. You might laugh at them. In addition to being nonsense, it’s also impossible. The sky can’t be gone. The sky has and always will be there.

But then you go outside and look up… and somehow, beyond any understanding, the sky is indeed gone. And you know it won’t be coming back.

That protective covering that you hardly thought about, and certainly didn’t fully appreciate, is gone.

I don’t think one can comprehend the experience until it happens to them. I’ve noticed in the people who reach out with words of comfort, I can usually tell who among them has lost a parent themselves. Their words of consolation come from personal experience, and you can tell.

“Sadness” is too simple a description. It’s soul wrenching. It’s heart shattering. I said to my friend Daren that I didn’t know when I would feel “normal” again. He said his mom died 12 years ago, and he’s never gone back to “normal”. You don’t really heal from this, because it’s very much a part of you that dies.

Our family, especially our parents, make us. There’s the obvious genetic component (I often look and sound and act just like my dad), but there’s also the formative years when parents shape you. Their lessons, examples, values — all distilled into your very being. You couldn’t separate yourself from that history if you tried. They’re more than part of you, they made you. And then one day the author of you… is gone.

My kids are too young to understand any of this. They’re incapable of being sensitive. They ask me every day, “Dad, are you sad? Do you still miss your dad?”

Yes, kids. Like I said yesterday, I still miss my dad. And I’ll keep missing my dad for the rest of my life.

I don’t know what else to say. There’s too much to say. So I’ll end here.

Storytelling — The Map is Not the Territory

Another News Writing Tip of the Day (see previous post for context):

Let’s talk about what a “story” is. This applies to more than news writing. This is about media literacy.

Stories don’t exist in nature. They don’t grow on trees. They aren’t some geological artifact. They aren’t a physical reality.

Stories are mental models, heuristics, tools to help us understand the world.

Stories are 100% made by people. They’re like maps — it isn’t the real thing itself. It’s a representation of the real thing, meant to help people navigate reality.

No other animal uses them. Snakes don’t tell stories. Squirrels don’t gather around the campfire. This is a uniquely human method of making sense of an otherwise chaotic world. It’s our native language, before and above spoken language. If there’s any question about the importance of storytelling, realize that small children understand stories before they can recognize physical threats. They’ll understand a puppet show before they can speak. We naturally gravitate toward narrative — characters, relationships, motivated action and reaction. We human beings actively seek them out, because it’s our primary sense-making mechanism.

This may all sound very academic, like it only matters in a classroom, but that’s not true. This is critical to your ability to understand media, and produce media, whether that be in the form of a news article, a movie, TV shows, podcasts, or just random memes you see online. This is critical to your ability to navigate an increasingly complex and narratively conflicted and saturated world.

Here are lessons we understand as soon as we appreciate the nature of storytelling:

• Nobody is objective. Every storyteller is doing so with a purpose.

• We think of stories as “true” or “not true”. This isn’t really that constructive. People on opposite sides of a court case will tell very different stories with the same set of basic facts. Ask instead if your information is accurate and constructive.

• If you’re introducing more questions than answers, the story isn’t doing its job. Don’t include information that unnecessarily complicates the story, even if it’s accurate.

• A story is much more than a sequence of events. It has form and structure. If that’s not respected, the audience won’t understand the story, they definitely won’t like it, and they probably won’t finish it. The sequence and kind of information matter.

If we take stories at face value, if we fail to understand that they’re a human creation, then we can be very easily deceived, intentionally or unintentionally. Much of the turmoil we’ve seen in the country and the world in the past few years is because people are living in “alternate realities”. They uncritically believe stories presented to them, as though narratives were some objective fact. They aren’t. They’re tools. They’re maps. Some maps are useful. Some are overly simplistic, or overly complicated. Others are simply wrong. Still others are deliberately deceptive.

Remember this: the map is not the territory.

Persist Toward Mastery

I’m writing and editing at TechBuzz.News these days. Part of my work is training interns in news writing. And every day, I share with them News Writing Tip of the Day. I thought today’s tip was worth sharing widely, beyond our modest Slack channel. This is what I’ve shared with the TechBuzz Interns.

Long story, but please stick with me. This is really important.

Do you know about Ira Glass?
Can I tell you about Ira Glass?

Ira Glass is one of the most famed storytellers and broadcasters of our time. In the mid-90s he started a radio show in Chicago called “This American Life”, telling the individual stories of regular Americans from all walks of life. It sounds unassuming, and it is in a way, but This American Life became the model for what audio storytelling could be. It was (and continues to be) funny and heartwarming and eye-opening. It puts you in the shoes of another in a way few other programs can. It’s the model that countless podcasts have tried to emulate, to the benefit of every listener. It’s won so many awards that there’s a whole section about “Awards” in Glass’s Wikipedia entry.

But here is something not everybody knows. When Ira Glass started writing and broadcasting… he was abysmally bad. He was awful. It would be reasonable to have called young Ira Glass a talentless hack.

So what changed? Just one thing. Practice. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Glass stuck with it, and became one of the best story-tellers on earth.

Glass himself admits as much in his instructional booklet, Radio: An Illustrated Guide. I don’t have a link, but I once heard a radio piece Glass produced at the beginning of his career. I think he started right out of high school. He was still a teenager. And the piece is awful. It was a news radio segment about trade in a specific industry. It was incoherent. I don’t remember much, but I do remember that I didn’t understand any of it, not because it was a complex topic, but because he did such a bad job of explaining.

This… is totally normal. I did the same thing.

I went to BYU, and if you don’t know, BYU had (probably still has) an excellent communications program. We, the broadcasting students, produced a news show every day, which no other university in the country could claim. We had lots of practice, and students routinely won awards. Once we were doing “live labs”, which is something younger students do where they essentially do a dry run. We’d go through all the motions of a live broadcast without actually broadcasting anything — it just went live to the classroom. I’d memorized my story to share. I was standing outside the broadcasting building, in a suit in front of the camera, ready to go, microphone in my hand, earpiece in my ear.

The producer standing behind the camera looks at me, says, “We’re live… in 5… 4… ” then hand motions — 3, 2, and 1.

A light turns red. I’m on camera. My classmates are watching. And I… freeze. The lines I’d memorized are gone. I can’t even remember what story I’m supposed to share. I stand… silently.

“You’re live!” my producer nervously whispers.
“I know.” Even my two words sound painfully anxious.

I stand, speechless, for much much longer than you’d think I could. Longer than you’d think they’d keep the camera on. All of my classmates watch. Everybody is embarrassed for me. I’m just staring at the camera in horror the whole time.

Eventually, I remembered my story. My mistake was in memorizing a word-for-word script. Forget the first word, and you have nowhere to start. From then on, I just remembered the basic points of a story. I never relied on verbatim scripts again for live broadcasting.

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I think I still have the tape somewhere. I should dig that out. People today tell me I’m a natural on camera, that I radiate charisma and presence. To the degree that is true, it is only true because I’ve practiced on camera, thousands of times.

The details may change, but I think everybody goes through this. Almost nobody starts out great at what they do. Maybe there are exceptions. Orson Scott Card says he wrote the sci-fi classic “Ender’s Game” without editing at all. He just completed the final page, and was done.

Well… screw you, Orson Scott Card. The rest of us have to practice. And we have to keep practicing for years before we’re any good. We wade through years of producing bad work — garbage — the product of our hands and our own minds, just embarrassing to look at. But there’s no shortcut. You get good by starting really bad. And then you just keep going.

I’ve had to do this over and over in my career. I launched a film festival. I’ve made hundreds of commercial videos. I made a documentary film. I made a TV show. I led marketing at a startup that raised $30M. I made a couple premium podcasts, that were scripted, researched, and produced (as opposed to the Joe Rogan style of 3 hours of live conversation unedited; who has time to listen to that?). And now I’m editing a news site about tech and entrepreneurship.

You could call it diverse, or eclectic, or if you’re inclined to be a bit more harsh, you could call it flighty, bombastic, or unfocused. There are reasons my career has played out the way it has, but I won’t go into those here.

The point is, I’ve had to keep learning the whole time. I’ve had to start over with new things again and again. And each time that happens, I’m a novice all over. The only way to get better… is to practice. To push through. To produce lots of awful work until it starts to look like good work.

Keep going. Don’t get discouraged. The only reason your work looks bad now is because you know what good work looks like. Whether you want to become a news writer, or a painter, or sculptor, whether you want to be an essayist or songwriter or, heck, if you want to be a statistician or actuary or whatever, just keep practicing. Keep going. The persistent amateur will eventually overtake the negligent prodigy. You’ll get there. Keep going.

Enjoy some words of wisdom from our friend, the talentless hack who became the best in the world, Ira Glass:

We Live in the Stone Age

There are things we do every day that our grandkids will see as insane. They'll joke about how their grandparents (all of us) lived in the stone age. I mean, just look at how they lived.

"They used small gasoline engines to do yard work; mowing lawns, edging, etc. Like, handheld machines that harness a rapid sequence of literal explosions, and spit out noxious fumes and a LOT of noise. Just so they could cut grass to look pretty."

Most of our grandkids won't have personal lawns anymore than most of us have farms, and the gasoline engine will seem... just bonkers. Downright irresponsible. They'll likely have communal parks maintained by a quiet, robotic, electric fleet.

"I heard my grandpa used to eat meat made from REAL animals at *every* meal. And the way they grew and bred animals was mass torture, keeping pigs and cows in small, filthy cages, pumped full of drugs to keep them alive just long enough to have some meat on their bones. Just so they could have a pulled pork sandwich when they wanted."

Our grandkids will eat proteins that didn't come from animals, at least not in the sense that we do. They might eat plant-based protein, or lab grown bio-identical meat from cells cultured to grow a "steak" that was never part of an animal. They might eat "eggs" and other proteins secreted from genetically engineered yeast. Maybe they'll eat protein from insects, which have a minuscule fraction of the environmental impact as large animals, are easier to raise and breed, are a vastly lower ethical dilemma, and in some ways are just better protein.

The industrial meat and dairy industry will look as barbaric to our grandkids as human slavery does to us.

"Our grandparents, almost all of them, used to drive cars manually, starting when they were teenagers, and piloting cars as large as a couple tons. They had to pass a test basically once, and then they could drive whatever they wanted. And of course tens of thousands of people were killed and maimed and disabled in high-speed crashes, almost all of them from pilot error."

Our grandkids won't "drive a car" any more than most of us ride and reign horses. It'll be a romantic throwback activity, probably reserved for the rich, who have the time, money, and designated space to "drive" a large and dangerous vehicle.

"And get this... in the 20th century, almost nobody had anything that we'd recognize as the Internet. If they wanted to learn something new, they had to go to a physical library, a place that kept all the books. Even their phones had to be wired down in their house, and everybody at a house would use the same phone. So you wouldn't call, like, your friend Johnny. You'd call Johnny's house, and if somebody else answered the phone, you'd have to just ask if Johnny was there and if you could talk to him."

That part will just be incomprehensible to our grandkids.

Believe it or not, compared to your grandkids, we all live in the stone age.

Combat Games, Pod Racing, and Real Consequences

We increasingly live in a world where all contests are virtual, the stakes pure artifice. And barring professional athletes and gamers, no matter how spectacular the play on the court, it will never have any impact on reality off the court. No matter how incredible somebody’s speed play in a video game, it will never impact their real life (again, barring paid professionals).

The call to adventure is dead, because you aren't called anymore. You have to go looking for it.

Is there a way to change that without devolving to the raw, brutal state of nature?

One way you might invoke real consequence is physical. MMA has grown dramatically in popularity. I believe that is because there are real physical consequences. You really will get hurt. Badly.

CrossFit has also grown in popularity. Torturous races have grown in popularity.

The reason these are growing in popularity is because people are yearning for an authentic, real experience, with real consequences. Regardless of your other worldviews, physical pain is undeniably real to those experiencing it.

I think a successful enterprise/movement could be something I will call “Combat Games“. Combat Games would combine all of these, with a little bit of gladiator flare. A scenario could be as simple as capture the flag. But the threat and consequence are much higher.

Imagine the a field of modest obstacles with two contestants on either end. Each contestant has a simple objective. One is tasked with getting their flag to the other side of the arena. The other contestant is meant to stop them. All the same rules as MMA apply. You can hit, kick, knock your opponent over. Real physical harm is not only possible, it is likely.

I think you’d find a (to some surprising) number of men who lead otherwise totally civilized lives seeking this out. There’s just no other outlet for aggression in a developed society. Regardless of that primal urge to engage physically, we have nowhere else to put it. You might find men going from their desk jobs to the Combat Games club, practicing for the upcoming tournament, where they will face off with other men in their skill and weight class. And at the end, they’ll feel satisfied in a way they couldn’t anywhere else, and likely closer to each other.

Another way real costs could be invoked is economic. Drone racing is becoming increasingly popular. But the drones are small, relatively affordable. In a way they’re unremarkable and almost disposable.

What if they weren’t?

What if they were big and extremely expensive? A bit like “pod racing” from Star Wars Ep. 1. And what if they were tokenized, and the token holders got to vote on the core management team and pilot? This would take the best of fantasy football, drone racing, NASCAR, and the floundering effort to start a mech combat league. Plus it would be a fascinating experiment in tokenization.

What other ways could you create a setting where very real (but tolerable) consequences could be engaged with?

Follow Your Creative Impulses (All The Way Through)

I uploaded a couple videos in January that (to my great amazement) went low-key viral. Together they got ~470,000 views on a YouTube channel with no prior subscribers or views*.

There are funny details about that experience I should share some time (would make a great TED talk), but details aside, the experience reminded me of a few things.

I like making things.

I like sharing things.

I should be doing those things regularly for my own enjoyment.

I do make and share with some regularity, but it's almost always tied to work. It's stuff I'm getting paid to make. And that's great, whether it's a video or a podcast or whatever. But if I'm going to grow creatively, I need to make things for my own enjoyment. I need to make things the way I want to make them, because I want to make them. And I need to stop getting hung up on things being "ideal" or "perfect".

This is a video I made in March with my nephew Jacob. We went to Topaz Mountain in Utah. It was a really fun day. I filmed and edited this just as you see here, but never uploaded because I wanted to film an ending... that I never got around to filming. Again, getting hung up on things being ideal or perfect. I get SO hung up on that... and it never helps, not once, ever.

This video isn't really even finished, but I'm uploading it anyway. It doesn't have intro and outro graphics. It runs way too long. It *definitely* won't go viral. But I had fun making it, and I'm going to try to make more, just for myself, because I like to.

I used my iPhone, Snap Specs V2, and my Rylo 360 camera. They did a great job, and I should use the easy cameras more often, because I get too in my head with more complicated gear, and it just throws sand in the gears of production.

I think good things happen when you follow your own creative impulses. I'm going to try to do that more often.

*A little window into those videos and the unexpected sequence of events.

Guest Appearance on Mission Daily Podcast

I was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts. Which is pretty cool.

A while back I tweeted some ideas that had been percolating. I even blogged about them right here after the fact. I tagged a few people I respect to seek feedback. One of them responded and asked me to come on his show. The episode went live today.

Flash forward a few months, and we’re now working together to produce a new show.

Life is funny and unpredictable. I hope you enjoy the interview.

#Loopholes #MissionDaily #podcasts

If you're leading with anger, you've already lost.

I’ve felt this way often in my life.

Maybe you know this about me, maybe you don't.

When I was a kid, I had anger issues. Among family and friends I was famously angry and easy to provoke. That didn't translate into being feared (I was skinny enough to be non-threatening, even in a fury). But there it was all the same, anger on tap, rage that things weren't the way they "should" be.

And let's be honest, it's still a struggle to curb anger sometimes.

But I actively work to dissipate that anger, because it never, literally never, served anybody's real interests, least of all my own. It hurt my relationships, my physical property, and sometimes my fists. There was not a virtuous silver lining. It was exclusively destructive, every single time.

And so it remains today with all anger.

It astounds me how "popular" anger is in the zeitgeist. There are a million strains of "righteous" anger, each a different stripe, but remarkable similar in quality.

Post the right zinger slamming your ideological opponent on social media, and you'll have accolades pile on from your tribal cohorts.

But this behavior will, every single time, drive a wedge between your tribe and anybody outside the tribe. It will convince nobody, and will engender defensive anger in many. They will retreat to their own preferred principles and points of argument, just as you've retreated to yours. And you may tell yourself that it’s cathartic, that it gets the anger out of you to express it. But ask yourself honestly; have you ever felt better after indulging anger? I haven’t. I’ve only felt more sad and tired and hurt than I was before.

The warm attitude toward public outrage reminds me of the 1976 drama Network. Protagonist Howard Beale has one of the most famous monologues in film history. After decades as a news anchor at a national station, he finds he'll be dropped because of declining ratings. It's the trigger that unleashed all his anger... about everything.

“I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'“

What does this accomplish in Network? Nothing. After decades of reciting every horrible thing that happens in the world, Howard’s outrage at the spectacle of injustice becomes the spectacle of injustice. He thinks his infectious rage can be a catalyst for change, but instead serves to spin-up the public anger flywheel. In raging against bread and circuses, he became the circus, and to mix metaphors, grist to the mill.

SPOILER: At the end of the movie Howard is killed in a staged assassination on live TV to drive up ratings.

The same theme was echoed decades later in the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits. The protagonist’s deserved and defiant outrage gets entirely commoditized and sold to profit the very system he rallied against.

This lesson is so deeply enmeshed in our psyches that it recurs in fiction constantly, including our most widely beloved stories. To cite another fictional universe, Yoda teaches that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. It’s the Emperor that wants others to “give in to [their] anger”, explicitly so he can control them.

More recently, author Ryan Holiday has done an excellent job outlining the many problems with anger, and dismantles the idea that anger can be somehow helpful (read here). He should know. Holiday’s books of the past few years focus on Stoic philosophy, the view that managing emotion is dramatically more helpful than emotion managing you. But his first book, the book that made him famous, was about his life as a self-described “media manipulator”. Holiday spent years stoking outrage for profit. He wasn’t even in the news business, he was selling plain color t-shirts. But as he tells it, you don’t have to sell something outrageous to profit from the rage.

Just ask Facebook, Twitter, or any other platform that turns clicks into views into money.

Next time you’re feeling riled up, pause and consider whether you (or anybody) will be better off for indulging the anger. Every time I’ve had the presence of mind to consider, the answer for me has been a clear No.

In a World Full of Data, Why is it So Hard to get Good Data and Prompts?

I'm 100% playing the stereotype by saying this, but I went to a crossfit style class this morning. But I don't want to discuss the class (my whole body hurts right now). I want to talk about my Apple Watch.

I know there is an app for workouts, and that app has an option for indicating you're doing a high-intensity interval workout. That's great. But I forgot to use it. It was my first time doing a class like this in three years, and I had other things on my mind. Do I need to weigh in? What do I do after the deadlift? Medicine ball? I don't understand the circuit. Somebody please help me.

So having given my Apple Watch zero thought, I was surprised after the workout, staggering to my car like a particularly decayed zombie, to see that it had registered, not thirty minutes of intense interval training... but one minute. It had registered one minute of generic exercise

What gives, Apple? How is this so grossly inaccurate? This isn't an anomaly. The other day it showed that I'd been active for twelve hours that day, but didn't hit my stand goal of twelve hours.

So... so I'd been "active" while sitting down? I'd been moving and pumping my muscles... in my chair? Granted, that's fully possible for a person to do, but it wasn't true for me.

Having an Apple Watch (or a Fitbit or other measurement device) certainly helps me be more aware of my activity. Just being aware will improve activity. But it's annoying when I know it's not measuring properly. It makes me want to use the device less. And this happens often.

From a technical perspective, how hard is it to accurately measure activity? Here’s what I think would help, and I don't see it on the market. This is a solution I'd use. Tell me if you think you would or wouldn't.

If I was wearing a low-profile device on each limb, the measurements could be very accurate. Some people think this is overkill, and that's fine. Maybe it’s not a solution for everybody (not everybody wears an Apple Watch, or works out, or cares about health). But I'd happily wear a slim inconspicuous device on each wrist and each ankle if that meant that I could have extremely accurate and totally passive measurement of my activity and the subsequent impact on my body, like calories burned.

I wear an activity monitor because I want that information. If that information is blatantly inaccurate, I'm discouraged from wearing the device. But if the information was extremely accurate, then I'd happily wear more devices more consistently, especially if they're unobtrusive.

That information, coupled with the right apps and outside expertise, can give just the right nudges to make the right choices a thousand times a day. Our life outcomes, whether they be in physical health or financial wellbeing or even relationship satisfaction, are a product of the small decisions we make frequently, far more than any grand gesture we consciously strive to commit to (for instance: a 6-week crossfit boot camp).

I want a system that will reliably and accurately give me the right prompts, the right nudges, at the right times to produce the best long-term outcomes for my life goals.

From what I can see, that kind of device ecosystem is shockingly hard to find.

UPDATE: Day two at the gym. I remembered to start the workout timer on my watch, but paused it to listen to another minute of instruction from the coach… and forgot to start it again. After a brutal workout, with a racing heart and constant motion, I had fully zero minutes of exercise recorded.

Hitchhiker

I picked up a hitchhiker yesterday.

It was in a residential neighborhood in Utah Valley. I thought he may have just run out of gas. He had a perfectly clean white shirt, nice jeans, and new shoes (not a fleck of dirt on them), a neatly groomed beard and haircut, probably in his late 50s to mid-60s. Just a perfectly normal dude who needed a ride.

He thanked me profusely, said he'd tried to wave down 40 cars previous, said I must be the last remaining charitable Christian around. Glad I could help.

But it was clear within 30 seconds of the ride that he was not a perfectly normal dude. Totally unprompted, in an uninterrupted stream of consciousness, he started telling me... everything. Everything going through his brain.

He told me how he went to BYU (my alma mater) studying business and economics. Got multiple degrees. He got into oil and gas when he graduated, and was making a fortune instantly, but a prolonged legal case tanked his company. Told me how there was gold and silver and oil ALL OVER Utah in totally untapped veins, more than Saudi Arabia or Alaska or anywhere else. Just sitting there waiting, and he was going to start the company to get it all. Said he was going to get investment from the Saudi royal family, through a friend of a friend, to start his new oil company that would commercialize those resources.

Told me he used to work for the mob in Las Vegas. That his old boss was a cold-blooded murderer, one of the top mobsters in the world, who had federal authorities, celebrities, and politicians in his back pocket. Not that my passenger was a criminal, you see, he was just an employee. Said he tried to get the FBI to take down his own boss multiple times, but the FBI did nothing. Said others tried to do the same, and they got gunned down, but somehow my passenger evaded that fate.

Told me he was going to be rich and powerful soon, just had to get things in place. He was going to clean up the country, in business and politics. Said he was going to get the right people to lead industry and the White House.

All of this was peppered liberally with apocryphal Mormon prophecy and scriptural reference/interpretation. It would have been all the more baffling for somebody unacquainted with the culture (I’m well acquainted). The Constitution would hang by a thread, and he would save it, as it’s prophesied the Mormons will do.

At some point in the conversation, it went from him saving the country and kicking out the secret combinations, and turned into US saving the world. Like... having barely uttered a word myself, I'd unwittingly become his collaborator in these grand ambitions. I was good people, he could see. Reliable and smart. He could tell.

Usually I'd agree with that sentiment, but given the circumstances, I was beginning the question my own choices.

We got to the Provo bus station that he wanted to go to. He was halfway out of the care when he turned to add another thought. He continued to speak in that half-exited posture for another thirty-five minutes.

He was really nice. And frankly, it seemed clear that in a prior time of life, he and I could have had a normal, pleasant conversation. He went to the same university as me. Came from the same faith-tradition. Had been married. Had been involved in business and industry. He wasn't making any of this up.

But clearly at some point in... it all got... jumbled. He lost some marbles.

He and I likely aren't that different, except in age and a few pivotal moments in life.

When he finally did exit the car (after giving me his full name and full contact information and several notes of things I should look up, including the June 1989 issue of Vanity Fair magazine with Kim Basinger on the cover), I called my wife Beccy. Had to tell somebody about this odd encounter.

She reminded me that this wasn't the firs time I’d picked up a hitchhiker, that we'd picked somebody up together around the time we got married. And that person wasn't stable either. Probably on drugs... possibly on their way to a drug deal (or worse). That experience was honestly frightening. And somehow I'd forgotten (or suppressed) the memory.

I'm two-for-two on hitchhikers. Both... unwell. What a weird thing.

Loophole

This post is the product of dialogue and prior posting on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

If you’ve seen Punch Drunk Love, then you’re familiar with the scheme of David Phillips, aka “The Pudding Guy”. In May 1999 he accumulated 1.25 million frequent flyer miles in a Healthy Choice Foods promo, even donating the food to charity for a tax deduction.

Stories like this fascinate me. I love when people figure out a secret hiding in plain sight, and win big. It’s the thrill of a bank heist but totally legal. They’re usually normal people who pay attention and think deliberately. Do you know any more like this? Here are some of my favorites.

Jerry and Marge Selbee, 80 and 81, made $26 million in the lottery over ten years. In 2003 Jerry realized he could almost guarantee a profit playing a lottery called "Winfall". Unlike most other lotteries, the jackpot rolled over to lesser winners every time it reached $5 million. Buy sufficiently many tickets then, and winning becomes probable.

Terry and Linda Kniess loved The Price is Right, and noticed many products were recurring. They memorized prices from every episode and attended the show. Terry was chosen to play, guessing the price exactly, then did it again in the showcase showdown, doubling his winnings to $53,473.

In 1984 Paul Michael Larson noticed the patterns on the Press Your Luck game show weren't as random as they first appear. He studied and memorized the patterns. Larson became a contestant, ultimately winning $110,237 (equal to $266,000 in 2018), over three times more than anybody had ever won on any game show.

Did you hear about sky-miles hackers and the US mint? People realized they could order currency from the mint, pay with their credit cards, and get free shipping. The physical coins were then shipped to their house or directly to the bank, with instructions to immediately pay off the card. They accumulated millions in sky-miles.

Maybe you’ve heard the story of the MIT Blackjack Team? It’s the basis for the book Bringing Down the House and two movies, 21 and The Last Casino. The story recounts how a group of MIT math students trained themselves in card counting and took to the Vegas Strip, winning millions.

It even works in sports. Prolific author and investor Tim Ferriss has also won several athletic titles, including the 1999 national Sanshou (Chinese kickboxing) championship. He realized you could win by TKO if an opponent left the ring three times in a match. He also noticed that nobody was using the weight-cutting techniques common in Greco-Roman wrestling. He cut weight, bulked after weigh-in, then pushed his opponents out of the ring. Judges didn’t like it, but there was no rule against it. He won every match by technical knockout, becoming the national champion after training for one month.

Clever gamesmanship can even take you to the Olympics. Skier Elizabeth Swaney analyzed the process for joining the Women’s Olympic Halfpipe team. Skiers must rank in the top 30 in several qualifying competitions. Swaney deliberately chose qualifying competitions with fewer than 30 competitors. By simply skiing without falling down, she registered a score and ranked. And despite her birthplace of California, she could claim Hungarian citizenship via her Hungarian grandparents. She joined the Hungarian team, not traditionally a serious competitor in the Women’s Halfpipe. Her 2018 Olympic performance was described as "perfectly mediocre". She barely attempted any tricks in either of her two runs. She placed last. The incident prompted the Hungarian Olympic Committee to reevaluate its selection process, and possible changes to the Olympic quota system.

She didn’t win medals. But she set out to compete in the Olympics, and she did. How many can say the same?

I’d love to gather as many of these as possible. They don’t have to be multimillion dollar schemes, though that won't hurt. These people aren’t cheating, they aren’t being dishonest. They’re just way way better at “the game” than anybody expects. What other stories are there?

TV News Is Just "Reality TV" — And Portrays Unreality

Reporter: "So bigfoot does not live in Provo?"

Professor: "NO, OF COURSE NOT!"

This Just In: Bigfoot Probably Doesn't Live In Provo Utah!

I know you're all shocked. Fox 13 News in Salt Lake did a story on the "bigfoot sighting" of a couple weeks ago. Let's leave the subject of "bigfoot" aside for the moment*, and look at how this story came together.

There's a newscast every night, even several! And they have to broadcast *something* to fill the air, even if there isn't much to talk about, and even if that story is half-baked, the SHOW must go ON!

So... they leave out important details, frame it in simplest terms... and basically invent a narrative.

Here are the salient details Fox didn't include: I never saw a bigfoot, and never claimed to see one. My friend saw *something*, and we hiked up to investigate. We recorded a video of our hike. We found nothing interesting.

We found NOTHING interesting. Especially without commentary from the actual witness, this is a COMPLETE non-story. "Inconclusive" is the word used multiple times. But that's not interesting, and as mentioned before, they have to broadcast something every night. So... somehow I end up credited as a "bigfoot witness".

I've worked in various positions in front of and behind the media for a decade. I've worked at companies that have received extensive press coverage. I've worked at news stations. I've hosted, written, and produced TV shows. I directed a documentary. I've written press releases. I've worked on political campaigns. I've had a fair amount of exposure to this type of machine.

Here is what I've learned: The systems we build have biases built in. Systems like corporations, biased toward whatever increases immediate profit and "shareholder value". Systems like broadcast news, biased toward whatever is easily understood, fits inside two-minutes, and appeals to the widest audience. Systems like social media, biased toward whatever will suck the most time from users to drive advertiser spending.

Generally speaking, the news is not essential, or even enlightening. TV is a medium of entertainment, and if media theorist Marshall McLuhan is to be believed, "the medium is the message".

Another media theorist, Neil Postman, took this a step further. I read his book "Amusing Ourselves To Death" a couple years ago, and though it was published first in 1985, what Postman described was very prescient:

"I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

One more thought from another great thinker, though one less formally credentialed:

"News (like alcohol) is better as a periodic indulgence than a constant compulsion." @TheStoicEmperor on Twitter

Turn off your TVs. Curate a few carefully chosen sources online that prove themselves to be accurate, even if (especially if) they occasionally challenge your views. You'll not only have more peace of mind about the world you live in. You'll actually understand it a great deal more.

*If you want to know what really went down with the "bigfoot hunt", just watch my original video. That's what Fox pulled their footage from, and frankly it's much better than what they put together.

Once upon a time, I was a TV producer.

Variety just announced a new show from Steve Carrell and Greg Daniels of The Office. Basically, it's like The Office, but in space!

Once upon a time, I was a TV producer.

It was only one season of one show on one network*, but all the same... TV producer.

But TV producers don't just make a single show. If that's your career, you need multiple shows, multiple projects to work on. So along with my partners Jordan and Jared, we concocted a couple other concepts to pitch around.

I’m still really proud of those concepts, including Martians.

You see, Martians was just like The Office… but on Mars!

We worked with a group in LA to pitch this to as many studios as would listen, including Crackle, Amazon, and Netflix. I have no illusions that my idea was stolen (I’m not sure I even believe in that as a concept), but the announcements of this new show tells me one thing.

It wasn’t a lack of great ideas that ended my stint as a TV producer.

*The name of my show was The New Creatives and it was on BYUtv and you can watch all of it on their site.

Where and How to Securely Store Cryptocurrency

I've had a lot of people asking me about cryptocurrency lately. It's a predictable pattern when the price goes up. People know I've been in to bitcoin for years now (even made a movie about it).

One question that's been asked several times is, "How do I store my cryptocurrency?"

That seems like a straightforward question, but it really is not. It depends on your level of knowledge, your priorities, and the resources you're willing to dedicate to storage. 

I'll attempt to address the spectrum of options, though not at all exhaustively. 

NOTE: The first line of security in storing your bitcoin is education. That may sound like a hollow platitude. It’s not. If you don't understand and correctly implement basic security measures on your devices, nothing else will matter. You need to be smart about this. Don't use obvious passwords. Don't use short passwords. DO use a password manager, like 1Password or Lastpass, and DO make sure your master password is long, like a full sentence. NEVER click on links from people you don't know or trust, and ALWAYS check the security certificate on sites you visit (the little "lock" icon at the top of your browser, next to the website address). And use a REPUTABLE virus scanner, like Sophos Home.

If you're not doing these things, you will eventually get hacked. When you get hacked, you won't know it till your funds are just gone one day. And there is no way to get them back.

Okay, if that didn't scare you off... let's proceed.

If you intend to be moving funds in and out of your wallet often, and want easy access with modest security, a cloud wallet is an acceptable choice.

Addition in 2021: I do not recommend PayPal or Robinhood. These services don’t really sell you bitcoin. They sell you an investment in bitcoin. You can’t ever actually take custody of the coins. All you can do is sell it back to them for US Dollars at a later date. There are numerous problems with this. If you’re going to own something, just own it. 

Coinbase or Gemini are popular starting points for people first buying cryptocurrency (it’s what I recommend, first-timers can click here or click here). But contrary to the common perception, Coinbase and many others don’t really give you a "bitcoin wallet", so much as they give you a Coinbase account. It's like PayPal, in that your funds are managed by them. They make it easy, but the downside is that you don't actually control the funds. They do. Many users are upset with a recent ruling that Coinbase will have to turn over all records to the IRS. This just happened recently, but was a predictable outcome.

Similarly, if there were a catastrophic economic event (the outbreak of war, economic collapse, large-scale natural disaster), there is every reason to believe that Coinbase would lock up your money, just like banks impose "bank holidays" when they think there will be a run on the banks. And to really add a punch to that scenario, a catastrophic economic event would send bitcoin skyrocketing in value. You'd have no access to your money. That's the risk with Coinbase. They're fine, as long as it's just business as usual.

If you're going to be moving funds regularly but want something that offers you more control, a cloud based wallet like Blockchain.info is much more private. It allows you to interface with the bitcoin blockchain directly, rather than acting as a manager or intermediary like Coinbase does. You control the money, and nobody else has access. This would prove to be a huge advantage in the above listed scenarios. The downside to this approach is the technical hurdle. It's not always easy or straightforward. Especially when you're dealing with large sums of money, it's nerve-wracking to move it around. If you make a mistake, there is nobody there to hold your hand or save you. There is no safety net. The responsibility is on you to manage those funds. There is no FDIC in the bitcoin world. If your personal information is compromised somehow, those funds are stored "in the cloud", and would be immediately available to anybody willing and able to steal them.

If the cloud sounds too risky to you, another option is to have a localized wallet on your phone or computer. This is simply a piece of software that you download and keep on your device. This has the advantage of giving you full control of the funds, and being offline when you're offline. The downside is a physical device, like a laptop or smartphone, can be lost, stolen, or broken. If your plan is to store your bitcoin locally, it's important to store backup information in a very very secure secondary place. More on this later. A good option for a local wallet on your laptop, desktop, or smartphone would be Mycelium.

The third option is a hardware wallet. This is a device designed expressly to securely store cryptocurrency. This is one of the best options out there. They’re more secure than other options because the “private key”, the string of alphanumeric characters protecting your bitcoin through cryptography, are stored on the device in a way that is totally inaccessible. They can’t be “downloaded”, and you can’t open the device to extract them. They’re basically impossible to get to, unless the secure protocol is followed for sending or receiving your cryptocurrency. This is a prefered method for people who hold a lot of cryptocurrency and are serious about their security. Two popular choices are the Ledger and the Trezor. 

But every security measure has weaknesses. Nothing is fool-proof, meaning if you’re foolish, you’ll be taken advantage of. Somebody could steal your bitcoin from a hardware wallet, but there are more steps to the process, and it would be harder for them. They would have to do one of the following:

1. Steal your device AND your access code

2. Steal your backup seed phrase and duplicate the wallet

“Wait, what’s a backup seed phrase?” Good question, let’s address that. Many wallets have the option of creating a backup seed phrase, which is a random string of words, something like “correct horse battery staple”. The phrase can be as many as 24 words long. They don’t mean anything, but together they constitute so many individual alphabetic characters that no computer on earth could just guess the access code. Not in a million years.

Using this phrase, you could recreate a lost wallet, and get access to all the funds.

Did you catch that? With the seed phrase, you can get access to all the funds.

Do not lose the seed phrase.

Be smart. Hide it in a secure and obscure place. Some people store half the words in one place, the other half in another. Some people put it in a safe deposit box. Some people will imprint the phrase on a strip of metal, then dip the metal in  wax to cover it up, thus making it tamper-proof. Like I said, this is serious.

Oh, and there are paper wallets, but if you're technically capable enough to securely put one of those together, there's no reason for you to have read this far. Link if you're interested in learning more.

As you’ve gathered, there are a lot of options here. That’s the blessing and the curse of cryptocurrency. It’s yours to do with as you please. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the most important thing is education. Learn how security works. You don’t need to become a cryptographer, but it wouldn’t hurt to learn the basic mechanics of cryptography. If you're interested in those basics, you should check out this excellent video from SciShow about how bitcoin works. 

The Power of Cryptography

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use an array of technologies to do what was previously thought impossible. One of those technologies is cryptography.

"Cryptography" is the study and practice of secure communication. It comes the Greek word "kryptós", meaning hidden or secret, and "graphein", a word for writing. Literally translated: "Secret writing".

Cryptography has been around for millennia. The Encyclopedia of Security Management describes several techniques used by Greek armies:

"When the ancient Greeks wanted to communicate between armies separated by hostile territory, they would shave the head of a slave and tattoo the message on his scalp. When his hair grew, they would send him through the lines."

From the same book:

"One General would wrap a leather belt around a baton and write his message lengthwise along it. The messenger was given the belt to wear. The general receiving the message would wrap the belt around his batton and read the message off."

It's clever. But modern tools have gotten much, *much* better than leather and tattoos.

When people say that cryptocurrency like bitcoin is secure, they're referring to the cryptography built into the protocol. Nobody can get your coin without your "private key", or the random alpha-numeric password generated by the system. As of now, breaking just one key would take trillions of years to decipher.

This video does a fantastic job visualizing the impossible odds against anybody trying to break in.

Digital Distraction

The thoughts expressed here were originally posted on the Pocket Film Productions blog. They were spurred by personal experience, this facebook conversation, and this podcast episode.

In my career, people come to me for creative video, social strategy, or insight on trends. But those strengths are hindered by a trait I’ve always struggled with. I am easily distracted. My perpetually darting mind is not a positive quality, especially as a trait I can’t really control. I end up frustrated, overwhelmed, and constantly in doubt of my abilities.

While that hardship is mine to bear and overcome, it wasn’t really created by me. It was fostered, very deliberately, by the architects of our digital world.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

— Data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher

Virtually the whole Internet is monetarily driven by advertising. And as somebody who makes ads for a living, let me tell you why this does, indeed, suck.

Media outlets measure success in several ways, but there’s one important measurement we’ll consider here: time. The more time you spend with Facebook, YouTube, Buzzfeed, Clash of Clans or elsewhere online, the more those channels pat themselves on the back.

It makes sense. With more time, the more you’ll click around, the more ads they’ll show, the more advertisers get seen, and ostensibly the more people buy from advertisers. Everybody wins, right?

Not necessarily. What you need and what you’re inclined to do are two very different things. Heck, what you want right now and what you really want in life are different things. Right now I want a milkshake, but what I really want long-term is to look like Captain America.

They’re polar opposites.

Another thing I really want? Clarity. Peace of mind. Ample time spent on fulfilling endeavors. None of these things would help the social channels I use, or ultimately the advertisers who pay for those channels.

I’m not anti-advertising. It absolutely serves a critical role in bringing producers and consumers together. When the right advertiser finds me, and serves an ad for something I truly want, then I’m actually glad I’ve been targeted and advertised to.

But when the advertising-driven model of commerce is seemingly the only option in media consumption, perverse incentives creep in.

One of my favorite authors discussed this in his first book, “Trust Me, I’m Lying”. Self-confessed media manipulator Ryan Holiday was an advertising prodigy. As head of marketing for American Apparel, he took the brand from obscurity to a household name. As you may guess, he accomplished this without Super Bowl ads, but by manipulating weak points in the media landscape. He did stunts that brought attention to the company, like buying ad space on porn sites when nobody else would. He started false rumors about the company, knowing edgy publicity was better than obscurity. He gave false tips to local press, then when they published his gossip, he’d use that as a lead for bigger press outlets, working his way up the chain till he was on national media. It’s the skill-set of a con-man, even if he didn’t technically break any laws.

Holiday only stepped away from media con-jobs when he saw how damaging it could be. His own company was the subject of an entirely false rumor that CNN asked him to comment on. Even publicly denying the accusations would have hurt the company, as it partially legitimizes the entirely false accusation. He deftly persuaded CNN to shut down the story, but it was enough to demonstrate the potential fallout. He’d gone into media manipulation like it was just a fun game, then realized how directly this impacted people’s lives.

“You can never get enough of what you don’t need, because what you don’t need won’t satisfy you.”

— Dallin H. Oaks

Here is the conundrum. I don’t think Facebook, Google, and others are nefarious predators. I don’t think advertisers are trying to ruin your peace of mind. But I do think we’re all subject to the systems we build, and this particular system has weaknesses that should, to everybody’s benefit, be engineered away.

I've had an iPhone for six years, and have never played games for more than two minutes. But take a look at the App Store's suggestions. It's overwhelmed with games and *&$%# stickers. Because that's what I need more of in my life. Just not enough stickers.

What if instead of optimizing for time on site, Facebook optimized for relationship satisfaction? It is a social network, after all. Shouldn’t my social network improve my real-world social life, meaning time away from my screen? What if instead of optimizing for dollars spent, Amazon optimized for tranquility? What if when I search Google for answers to my personal problems, it directed me to look inside myself? You might think this is nonsense hippie talk, but it really isn’t. This could be an incredible business.

Amazon Prime is $99 a year. The price has gone up, I think it used to be more like $70 per year. But the convenience is worth it, so I didn’t flinch when the price went up.

But what would I pay for a service that credibly offered to increase, not my convenience, but my happiness, fulfillment, relationship quality, and inner peace? I’d pay hundreds. I’d pay thousands. I might pay tens of thousands a year, depending on how believable the claims were.

Any of the big four tech companies (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or Google) could do this. I’d like to say a well-funded startup could take on the challenge, but it’s not likely. This needs to be implemented at the operating system level. Having a meditation app doesn’t do much good if the device itself is designed to distract us. Increasingly, operating systems are operating our lives. They’re our calendars, reminders, personal assistants. Are you ready to give up your iPhone for a small no-name OS? Didn’t think so. At least one startup already tried and failed.

Who will take this on? Who is going to pivot their business to help directly and dramatically improve lives rather than advertising? Maybe a program called Facebook Now? Amazon Prime Plus? Google Life? Apple Integrated? I think they'd have a lot of eager buyers.

Until that happens, I only have a couple suggestions. I just started using the Moment app. It tells me how much time I spend on my phone in each app. Simply being aware helps me curb the behavior.

The other thing that helps is getting outside. Go for a hike. It's summer. You'll be glad you did.

Summer 2017 Update

Guys, there has been a lot going on. Big things. I've been too busy to stop and take note of it all until now. I'll be brief.

• The feature documentary project I started into four years ago, Life on Bitcoin, was finally released. The film was released as a VidAngel original, part of their offering of original premium content. If you want a full update, and a good run-down of why it took so long, you can check out the update posted to our Kickstarter page.
• The TV show I co-created premiered five weeks ago! Tune in Tuesday nights at 8:30 MT to see The New Creatives, and exploration of creative the life and process.
• Beccy and I bought a house! It's old, and we're thoroughly renovating the entire place. We tore down walls. We ripped out the kitchen and the bathroom. We've laid new floor. It's been a challenging project, but we'll have just the home we want in just the right location when we're done... hopefully soon.
• We're headed to Canada soon for a family reunion. If you've never been to Banff, it's a thing to behold. 
• Spider-Man: Homecoming was great. Ya'll should check it out.

Wowmakers Best Tools for Marketers — My top tips

I was happy to be included in Wowmakers' list of thirty marketing pros and our best advice for 2017. 

They asked for my top tools, but the reality is so much of my thought process focuses not on tools, but on messaging. So that's what I gave them. Click here or the image above for a full-writeup.

Why Bitcoin Will Go The Distance

My last blog post here was 5 months ago, and there is plenty I should (and hopefully soon will make the time to) write and update. But in the meantime, here is something I was self-compelled to write a few days ago when bitcoin was getting a lot of naysaying in the press. This modified version was originally published on my facebook timeline here. 

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With the price of bitcoin shooting up (1 BTC = $1,088 right now), there's been a lot of buzz about the world's leading cryptocurrency lately. And the pundits seem to think it's doomed. Let's look at their analysis.

Dan Crumb, Capital Markets Editor a the Financial Times, argues that while bitcoin is trading at over $1000/BTC, the market capitalization for the whole bitcoin ecosystem is still a rounding error on the scale of the global economy.

NOTE: You'll only be able to view this link once before hitting a paywall.

Is that really your argument, Crumb? You're criticizing bitcoin because it's... small? The level of hubris and shortsightedness here is hard to exaggerate. Where do I even start?

Let's look at this 1995 article from Newsweek titled "WHY THE WEB WON'T BE NIRVANA". Clifford Stoll, who I'm sure is a smart, capable man in his own area of expertise, enumerated the many reasons the Internet would never deliver on the apparent promises. One of Stoll's big objections was how small the Internet was. In Stoll's own words:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

The failure to think in exponential terms is one of the most persistent shortcomings of tech forecasters. Exponential systems move very slowly... and then very quickly. Human brains don't naturally grasp this. We evolved to understand the world linearly, as most of the natural world around us operates by those terms.

Mother Jones published a perfect visual example of this in 2013. Their subject was artificial intelligence, but the dynamic is exactly the same.

Back to Dan Crumb. His next objection is that bitcoin is a terrible currency because of the volatility.

Okay, sure. Bitcoin is historically volatile. But you know what thrives on volatility? Speculative investment. And that's a big part of how bitcoin is growing right now.

There's an interesting tradeoff between bitcoin's volatility or stability and its use as a currency or investment. In bitcoin's early years, it is (and will continue to be) volatile. That makes it an investment opportunity with potentially huge returns. As it matures, the investment opportunity will dimish, right in line with its use as a stable currency. As the investment opportunity decreases, the currency utility increases. The two are inversely proportional, and that dynamic will make it possible for bitcoin to climb the seemingly insurmountable mountain of becoming a globally used non-national currency. Volatility isn't bitcoin's weakness. It's the growth mechanism.

Crumb's final epithet against bitcoin is that it "has all the attributes of a pyramid scheme, requiring a constant influx of converts to push up the price, based on the promise of its use by future converts. So the ultimate value for bitcoin will be the same as all pyramid schemes: zero."

Crumb either doesn't understand pyramid schemes, or network systems, or both.

What good is a fax machine if you're the only one who has one? Who did the first person on facebook talk to? They needed more people to join the network. And the more people who joined, the greater the value of that network, and the greater the incentive for more people to join. This is called the Network Effect, and it's the functional dynamic of virtually every example of information technology.

This is the literal opposite of a Pyramid Scheme.
As pyramid schemes grow, their liability grows.
As networks grow, their value and utility grow.

Pyramid schemes have no inherent value. None. Zero. If they're selling a product, it's just a lure, a red herring, not the product. Bernie Madoff's investors were doomed from the start, because they weren't investing in anything with utility. It was a locked but empty safe, a house of cards, there was nothing behind the curtain.

That does not describe bitcoin at all.

Bitcoin accomplishes what experts previously thought was impossible. It transmits information and value without a trusted third party. Mathematicians literally thought this wasn't doable, as every prior system relied on trusted third parties. It's a well known computer science conundrum called the Byzantine Generals' Problem.

In practice, bitcoin overcomes this. With bitcoin, users are able to transmit virtually any amount of money to anyone, anywhere in the world, instantly, at virtually no cost, with no third party intervention. The value of that ability is hard to overstate.

Blockchain technology, and it's most prevalent implementation in bitcoin, are a Pandora's box that can't be closed again. It will need to grow, adapt, and change in order to serve a dramatically wider group. So did the Internet. So did the cellular grid. So does every system.

I know Crumb is probably an intelligent person. But intelligence doesn't matter if your model is wrong. Just as sophisticated hardware can't work without proper software, intelligence is useless (or worse, dangerous) without the proper mental models.

Remember Clifford Stoll? The guy who wrote the 1995 Newsweek piece about the doom of the Internet? He made an interesting observation.

Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

A lack of salespeople is just silly. Salespeople appear as soon as there are willing buyers. But what's not silly is a "trustworthy way to send money over the Internet". E-commerce first used PayPal and similar third-party transmitters. Now a better method is developing, one that I think even Stoll and Crumb will be using before too long.