It's quite tempting, with new ideas, to start the introduction of the thing with, "I've always..." Always is probably never the case. 

In this case, I do have a new idea and it's not something I've always done. Still, that's how I was tempted to open this blog. 

Anyways, starting tomorrow, July 1, 2024 I'm going to run every day, or nearly every day, for the next 6 months. Until January 1, 2025. 

I have 2 main goals/reasons: 

1. Get better at running

2. Get better at story telling

My in-laws live (as the crow flies) 2,219.93 miles from my house. They're in Albany, Oregon. We're in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Over these next 6 months, I'm going to run that distance. Not to their house, but mimicking the distance while staying mostly nearby my house. 

By running this consistently, somewhere around 12 miles a day or 84.5 miles per week, I'll get better at running. 

By writing about it and making videos, I'll get better at storytelling. 

Here's the project's front page on the internet.

Some sub-reasons/goals I'm doing this:

1.1: to show that we can definitely do more than we think we can (across many skills/disciplines/interests

1.2: to show that long-distance running is accessible and can be as close to free as you want to make it

1.3: to show you don't need all the right gear to be a runner

2.1: to show you don't need all the right gear to be a storyteller

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Hope you'll follow along, subscribe to my stuff, and share what you're working on too :)

Right now, I've got several lettuces in the ground, some red okra, yellow squash, watermelon, and broccoli. 

If all of it would turn out, we would have a great menu of veggies throughout the summer and into the fall. Likely, too much.

The watermelon were transplants from the garden center at the nearby Ingles grocery store. They looked pretty sickly for the first few days but have grown strong and lengthened their branches in the last few weeks. They might do alright.

Everything else has been directly sown. I should have some lettuce to eat in a salad in the next two weeks, should the rabbits tarry. 

The broccoli isn't looking great; there are three of those. I put some wood chips around them last week to try and prevent weeds and retain moisture, but there's no growth. It also did not grow last year; I've shifted it to the west end of the bed from the east end of the bed as well.

The yellow squash came up great! I mounded the soil and put three seeds in each -- 7 mounds in total I believe -- and if I recall, 5/7 bloomed all three seeds. Last year I let the squash grow too big. They get hidden under the gigantic leaves and seem to grow so much of their size in a short amount of time if you leave them too long. I'll plan on watching that this summer and having smaller sized fruit. 

This red okra I am excited about. I grew up with fried green okra at Sunday meals at my grandmother's house. I doubt I'll fry them (covered in flour, cooked in canola oil on high heat) because grilled/sautéed is wonderful and less intesive. I'm a bit concerned they'll get shaded out by the squash, though. Instead of weeding the other half of the garden, I decided to pack it in. 

Generally, I've used a bit too much space in the garden so this summer is an attempt to grow in tighter spaces.

I've still got some seeds I'd planned to get in the ground (peppers, bush beans, etc.), but I might end up doing transplants there.

So far, I've spent more time cultivating things post-planting than I did at this time last year. I'm great at planning and planting, lazy at weeding.

I just bought a new iPhone. With taxes, it was $1,175.93.

I didn't pay that all at once of course. I used Affirm like a normal person, for mysteriously interest-free monthly payments.

A thousand dollars is a lot of money. I bought a car for that just like seven years ago. A Toyota Echo, standard with no power windows or A/C. 

Cost isn't the only value we use to measure something. It might not even be the main measurement. Things like status, trendiness, and virality are really the powers that cost is raised to. 

Since the iPhone does cost a lot of money (same as a Macbook Air almost), it's an interesting starting point.

So, what's it an iPhone worth?

Is its value objectively measurable, or is it subjective? A few guiding questions:

• What's its value if you can intuitively learn all of its features and integrate it seamlessly into your life?
  • i.e., a Gen Z'er for whom no learning curve exists
• Maybe it's more valuable if it significantly improves one or two things in your life?
  • i.e., you're 82, live alone, and your daughter shows your how to FaceTime the grandkids
• What if you're a young person in Nigeria and can get an Android and a year of data for ~$250?
  • e.g., then you can get a job as an Uber driver and unlock a wealthier life

Value is hard to measure

I recently tried to measure how valuable Spotify is to me based on the playlists I create each new season of the year (subjective).

There's a whole philosophical discipline (Axiology: "questions about the nature and classification of values") devoted to studying value. It's an interesting question, and problem, because how we measure it influences (determines?) where we put our time and energy. And we don't always assign value explicitly which makes the exercise of doing so hard, but useful.

In the iPhone's case, I think we can measure its value in three ways:

1. Use: How much do I use it?
2. Usefulness: What can I do with it while I'm using it? -- Or -- How does it improve my life?
3. Durability: How long can I reasonably expect it to serve my purposes?

Use

Use is straightforward: How often is the thing used? It's kind of boring, but also an interesting measurement.

Turns out, we use them a lot. On average, we check our phones 144 times a day (PC Mag). How useful those 144 times are is a different consideration, and one we'll talk about, but that's a lot of pure use.

For my $1,175.93, each check costs about $0.00895. If an iPhone battery lasts, on average 2.5 years (or, 131,400 checks) before significant loss in capacity, this actually seems like a great return on investment.

thank you, ChatGPT

Not all checks are equal though, so let's look at the second way to measure value: usefulness

Usefulness

Let's be generous and say that 50%, or 72, of those 144 checks are compulsive type pickups. I've done it, and you've seen it: Someone in the airport waiting on their flight, AirPods in, opens up their phone and swipes their thumb to the left through each page without ever really doing anything. Some version of that likely makes up a decent amount of our 144 checks. These aren't very useful.

Usefulness is pretty subjective. You might find playing Candy Crush anywhere you want, anytime you want, highly useful. Or, maybe you run an eBay store for rare coins and being able to manage your store from anywhere is highly useful.

So, in your case, even 7/144 of your daily-pickups may make your CPC (cost per check) highly valuable. In the case of Candy-Crush-guy, high ROI on enjoyment. In the case of eBay-rare-coins-lady, high ROI on dollars.

how useful is a tiny super computer?

We went to the moon pretty much because we (JFK) stated it as a goal, got geo-politically competitive with the USSR, and made it happen. That's a pretty simple reason in comparison to all the philosophical and practical reasons that we could have led with; i.e., the beginning of exploring what's out there or advancing our technologies back on Earth. 

Our logic for going to space, is about the same as asking your friend Jason why he decided to marry Paula and he goes, "Because we wanted to beat the national divorce average. And, also the tax break." 

Both are reasons, but they're not necessarily inspiring or beautiful reasons.

Now, the tiny super computer: 

Comparing Instruction Processing Speed and Memory, an iPhone 15 Pro is lightyears ahead of the Apollo Guidance Computer. 

The same thing you use to order DoorDash, that's half the size of a piece of bread, has about 125,000 times more memory and 35,000 times more processing speed than the Apollo Guidance Computer. That's fascinating!

Super computers in 1969 were often in huge rooms or even whole floors of buildings. This is what the room would've looked like to house the same level of compute that the iPhone 15 Pro has (according to DALL-E).

One last note on the Apollo/iPhone comparison: It's probably not a totally fair one. 

The AGC was built for a very narrow task: Guiding a shuttle containing humans to the moon. It didn't necessarily need the same compute as an iPhone. It might not could have even used it if had it. a bit more thought in the Xtwitter thread.

This is why Usefulness is a worthy measure of value: How you make something useful is more interesting than how much of something you have. There are a million human examples of this, and you often hear "successful" people reference how much more clever and productive they were when they had less.

You can, and kind of do, have all the capabilities you could possibly need on a credit card-sized super computer in your pocket, that's an extension of your dominant hand, but how's that interesting if you're not making it useful?

Most of us use it to "text the group" and "scroll."

Durability

We all kind of feel like every major appliance or product we buy is undergoing some kind of planned obsolescence. If your gut reaction to this is some internal agreement like, "Yeah, probably", then you cannot be blamed. Things like this make sense on the surface. 

But, even if Apple is doing to us -- says the shaking-fists-man behind the Mac keyboard -- we're still coming out ahead on durability. 

screens

It's quite possible they continue getting better. They're now ceramic-shielded and seem to withstand drops better (up to several meters). If you want to get into screens, check out this Reddit thread; spoiler, there's Newtonian physics involved.

battery

For a thing that can navigate you, organize your life through all your Notion-like apps, FaceTime your grandparents 3,000 miles away, give you access (for $11/mo....) to all of the world's songs/podcasts, and help you capture beautiful things and then remake them, lasting 2.5 years on average is a pretty good deal. 

Remember, that only costs you about $1,000 brand new.

Or, about $0.00895 per time you use your phone. 

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You've got more in your pocket than the most intelligent people in the world thought you'd ever need (h/t, Bill Gates).

And that's cool. 

If you can figure out how to make it useful.

For $16.99/month, I can listen to not just any song I want, but the exact songs I want. 

I can also keep a record of what I've been listening to. 

I can turn that record into a mix. 

And I have been doing that. Since Summer 2019. 

That's 19 seasons of music. Imagine how much this would've cost in the $.99 cents-a-song iTunes era.... 

Actually, I can tell you. 844 songs x $.99 = $835.56

One of my most prized possessions, I think. 

Naming them, surprisingly, is one of the most fun parts and that's often been inspiring from the first song that goes on the playlist. My bias says they've gotten better over time.

Anyways, here they are :)

• Summer 2019
• Winter '19/20
• Spring 2020 (pandemic!)
• Summer 2020 (first kid born!)
• Fall 2020
• Winter '20/21
• Spring 2021
• Summer 2021
• Fall 2021
• Winter '21/22
• Spring 2022 (second kid born!)
• Summer 2022
• Fall 2022 (first big career change!)
• Winter '22/23
• Spring 2023
• Summer 2023
• Fall 2023
• Winter '23/24
• Spring 2024

This will be a short post.

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I've been thinking a lot about originality and individualism in the last few weeks. 

It's not the first time I've spent a while thinking about it. An episode Lex Fridman's podcast from back in 2020 with Yaron Brook may be the cause of this time's resurgence. Brook is an Ayn Rand scholar and seems to say that individualism, through reason, is the gift that made Rand unique; and is what's behind the philosophy of Objectivism. That challenged my assumptions and surface level thoughts around individualism.

Most likely though, this Spike Jonze-directed music video with the rapper Fatlip is the heavy of the source. I'm drawn to it for the reason I can't really put my finger on it: Fatlip let's the camera in and shows himself, fully.

Seeing others be deeply themselves is beautiful. 

It's why I love the Grateful Dead.

It's why I want to hold on to my own sense of fashion and get lazy. 

It's why I'm getting more comfortable not pinning myself down on politics, decision matrices, and so forth.  

It's why I took a risk and quit my job to freelance for a year and spend as much time in proximity to my wife and kids as I could. 

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Maybe conformity is natural, understandable. Until recently, we've needed to conform in order to eat and not be burned at the stake. Neither of those are much of an issue any more. 

In fact, the opposite seems to be happening: complete subscription to individualism through "identity"

Individualism is special, though. We have infrastructure and nice things because someone understood something about the way the world works, and what they want, shared that with others who wanted more of the same. 

It's been dangerous to be that person -- the individual a thing starts with -- for a while because that means change, and we don't always do well with change. That may be because we're not great judges of what we need.

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I think being "yourself" is something we're told a lot as a kid, and when you're a kid a lot of things sound kind of easier; or, they at least don't seem hard. Kids haven't really grown into the "proper" and conformed world. They dance in public still. They ask questions they have no clue about. They don't care if they have peanut butter on the corner of their mouths. 

99% of us care about all those things and exhaust ourselves checking boxes to save face in public. 

For this reason, my admiration for the Derrick Stewarts of the world, being an individual and finding creative ways to share that, has no end.

Being a C-B student takes pretty little effort. 

One needs just enough concern to figure out the hacks for studying and passing tests, while never getting interested enough to learn how to learn and form ideas. That energy should be reserved for video games, goofing off with your friends, and learning how to make people laugh.

I chose the C-B route. Although it was stressful the day or two leading up to a test and during final exams, the route as a whole allowed for mostly stress-free time. I did indeed cash that in on video games, goofing off with my friends, and learning how to make people laugh. 

Humans are quite good at optimizing for the day they have, not the theoretical future they want. 

I optimized for the easiest path in school so that I could maximize for things that were objectively more fun than Chemistry: like watch sneaking off to Step Brothers. 

Aside from outlier periods where that made Algebra II a nightmare, that optimization for the short term worked. I had the best friendships, played a ton of soccer, and thought about school exactly this much over the summer: 0. 

I was solid at the short term. But, I think I optimized so well for the short term that I never learned how to learn. 

Seven and a half hours inside under the glow of LEDs was never going to make me fall in love with school or learning, but it also had its opportunities that I never searched for either. I loved all of my history classes. It came the most naturally to me, which helped. 

Still, those classes were always personified by reading Chapter 4-8 in an American History textbook which is where they lost me. It was school and not the story. I didn't know George Catlin. Didn't know about the Commanches. Didn't read Slaughterhouse-Five to learn or learn how it deeply troubled Churchill.

Can you imagine instead "homework" being listening to Dwarkesh Patel interview Sarah C. Paine on world history? I think it would've moved my needle. 

And stack enough of that kind of content and I can see a world where I'm forming mental models and learning how to learn, instead of optimizing for passing tests.

First instance of a new model

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I started ultramarathon running. The YouTube algorithm smiled on me and started recommending these beautiful films about ultra-trail running, so I watched dozens. It got ideas in my head that I'd like doing that and made me believe I could do my own version. It was exciting because it was much bigger than I was used to running being: 5k/10k/half-marathon races with thousands of people in big cities where everyone wears the finest athletic materials and goes for a PR. 

The films showed people running in forests and mountains (I happened to live in those) while eating food like snickers and burritos and pushing the edges of what their bodies and minds were willing to do. That was way more interesting to me than 6am starting guns, waiting in a "corral" while listening to Celebration by Kook and the Gang on repeat. 

I'd run cross country, ran hundreds of miles playing soccer all those years, and had even raced a marathon in my adult life, but ultramarathoning gave me a new model that worked for me. I'm now beginning to see that there's a new model for learning that works for me, too. And it's quite different from 

Learning how to learn

Shaving seconds vs. giant leaps

Directness

Scott H. Young's books Ultralearning speaks well about how to learn in a system that's fine playing with all of the knick-knacks surrounding learning. This particular quote is one I'm thinking about right now. I'm making my way through the book and considering what subject or object I want to learn and go very direct at, like I have with ultramarathoning. 

"... many of us are building the wrong portfolio of skills for the kinds of career and personal achievements we want to create. We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to work on collaborative, professional programs, but mostly code scripts in isolation. We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting. In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing." 

This is, to use a loaded religious term, convicting me right now. I have vague senses of things I'd like to do, professionally and otherwise, but rather than spending some concentrated hours thinking about it, so as to articulate them and then be obligated to either choose to pursue them or not, I'm finding lots of knick-knacks to play with. 

To be clear. The portfolio of skills I'd like to build, and the interests I have are:

Technology, optimism, working on great things, forming first-principles/operating philosophy, garden-farming, running, being a good father, and following an interesting path with my family. 

The difficult and uncomfortable work is to create repeatable practices and skills around these things are directly impact how I spend my time in a day so that in one year, a decade, and a lifetime, I am aware that I am doing it. 

Here are a few recent xTwitter posts I've made that I've liked and thought brought out some good thinking. 

• On "visiting": https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1788726341241606640
• On using Grimoire, a custom GPT for "prompt-gramming": https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1788582599192940860
• Deep quotes on this one about our land: https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1787842471814185243
• GPT-5 escaping the lab: https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1783582784969191514
• More about a garden: https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1783480656346890636
• On caring about a problem: https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1782554432883831101
• On journaling during the pandemic: https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1780945374762418591
• "In my view, it (cynicism) is the most common and easy of evils." https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1778528614679716223
• An unreal thread about English hedges: https://x.com/pizzamiheart/status/1775887446179262487

Alright, that should do for now. 

The hardest place to be is in the middle. It lacks clarity that either pole, either end of the spectrum, definitely has. 

Hard, however, does not mean 'bad'. Hard just means hard. 

A lot of us are in the middle on a lot of stuff. We used to not be all the much. And by we, I mean everyone in the world. But here I'm specifically talking about anyone who lives close to a city that has restaurant options or niche coffee shops, and works on a laptop for their job. 

When we lived in small groups and tribes, with specific orders and limited options, there wasn't really a middle. Life was closer to either pole -- safety on one side, death by bigger animals on the other side (h/t Tim Urban's Social Survival Mammoth). This may have been true even up to pre-WW2 and suburbanizing.

Those concerns, for significant part of the developed world, are no longer concerns. Going to the grocery store is an experience, not a means of survival. Aside from social dismemberment or isolation, if we experience it, we're not really on the extreme end of any major concerns for our daily, basic well-being.

Now, we do have a Middle. It's quite large and touches most things. If the poles were characterized by extremities -- emotionally and physically -- the middle is characterized by something like not knowing which show to start after you stream Game of Thrones for the third time. My friend Daniel calls this a "showpocalypse."

Materially, we're managing a lot of what we want, or think we want, rather than what we need. Now, if you're raising kids, raising a farm, trying to cultivate something bigger than yourself, or care-taking for someone or some delicate thing, then yes, you are managing needs. And good for you! That's real human work. It's tough to come by and even when we have it, we're still in the Middle of many other things.

Two pieces of difficult news

Because we drive instead of sail, eat oranges in the winter instead of hunt, and labor over how to email our bosses back instead of speak to a warring tribe next door, our vehicles for growth come through softer realities than our ancestors. 

Meaning, if you want to build a muscle for sticking up for yourself or your boundaries, odds are the opportunity is in something like not answering that work email on Saturday. If I want to be more self-assure, that'll happen as I stop apologizing for little everything that's not in my control.

One final thought

This post is a thought, a model, in progress. Paul Graham wrote an essay called "The Best Essay" and in part of it says that the best essay would involve thinking about a question and exploring it: 

"An essay should ordinarily start with what I'm going to call a question, though I mean this in a very general sense: it doesn't have to be a question grammatically, just something that acts like one in the sense that it spurs some response.... You don't need to have a complete thesis; you just need some kind of gap you can explore."

This, to me, is the fun in writing. 

April 2023, Mac Demarco dropped a 199-song record that's "about" 9.5 hours, according to Spotify. I've been making my way through it the last three days and have very much enjoyed it. It's a bit extra on top of his already weird and groovy tracks, and a lot of the songs don't have lyrics. 

Making the journey to song 199 even slower, most songs are in a date format without delimiters -- or, ISO 8601 standard -- so if you switch to listening to something else and come back, you don't have "Stairway to Heaven" to look for and remind you where you were. 

Few people I've paid attention to seem to have as much unique style that looks this effortlessly lived out. There may be a certain luxury (generally) to do so when you're in a position like his -- making a living on your music -- but I'm not sure he gives much thought to it. I think he's just living as who he is, and he calls that good. That's why I'm so attracted to his music. 

In my young 20s, I had more of this offbeat individualism that I got wrapped up in in the best way. As in, I loved who I was expressing I was through how I dressed and what I did with my life -- or, what I didn't do. Straight from college I lived and worked on a fruit and vegetable farm because I was curious and it seemed like exactly what everyone else wasn't doing. That desire -- and certainly willingness -- can get lost rather quickly. Maybe often for good reason, too. E.g., I attend less to my clothes because I'm attending more to my kid's.

I'm not sure the World has any particular agenda, but people just might, and conforming the individual to the group's safest expression of what's useful or necessary is a product of that. 

Glad for good examples of being fully who you are.