September 2017 – My Mental Model

Win the Next Presidential Election With This One Weird Trick

I was tempted to throw in the /s but it’s true. Seriously.

It wasn’t the republican right that elected Trump. It wasn’t the democratic left that let Hillary down either. It was the American people who made themselves heard. Trump was elected as a giant fuck-you to how America governs – justifiably so.

It was a fuck-you to career politicians with fake smiles and fake laughs.

It was a fuck-you to wall street influencing monetary policy.

It was a fuck-you to the oversensitive and irrational alt-left.

It was a fuck-you to partisan politics and the inability of politicians to get anything done.

It was a fuck-you to the wealthy elite.

And perhaps most importantly, it was a fuck you to a lack of honesty and transparency between a government and the people it serves.

Trump may just be the best thing to happen to American politics in generations, in the same way that a bull is great for a china shop. Bull wrecks china shop, owner realizes nobody buys china anymore and uses the insurance money to open a dispensary. I think a lot of the people who voted for him already knew this, but if there was any doubt… he’s worse than a career politician, he’s the wealthy elite’s racist grandpa. One of the first things he did was cozy up to wall street. He’s just as irrational and oversensitive as the alt-left. With republican control over the senate and house, he still can’t get anything passed. Bipartisanship is worse than ever. Finally, and most importantly, Trump has probably solidified himself as the most dishonest politician in American history. For anybody looking at this objectively, he’s the one you send in to undermine any remaining confidence in the American establishment.

So by the time the American people are ready to elect their next president, what are they going to be looking for? The same thing we’ve always wanted…

Honesty and Transparency.

Seriously. That’s it. We’re just going to want it that much more after all this nonsense. Run a campaign under the premise of releasing every confidential government file ever held. Moon landing? Release it all. JFK? Release it all. 9/11? Release it all. Area 51? Release it all. Every god damn piece of information that the government has – make it readily available to the public. Maybe it all amounts to very little, but at least the public would regain their confidence in their government. Or maybe we find out that the government hasn’t been as honest with us as we would’ve liked and we have an opportunity to rebuild that trust with a proper foundation.

Electing someone we don’t know to run a system we don’t understand isn’t exactly the best example of democracy but it does remind us how important honesty and transparency is between a government and its people. Without good information, we can’t make good decisions and if we aren’t equipped with the information necessary to elect good leaders, where exactly does that leave us? And yet honesty seems more scarce in politics than in any other profession. Maybe this is what happens to lawyers when they don’t have to worry about perjury anymore.

We need to move beyond this idea that being uninformed makes us safer. We need to move beyond this notion of the government taking measures to make us ‘feel’ safer at the expense of being less informed. We need the government to stop treating us like kids and start treating us like equals and that starts with telling us WTF is actually going on.

I’m putting some brain power towards figuring out how to build an honest democracy that just doesn’t just hold itself accountable to the public, but also engages the collective thoughts and wisdom of its people on a regular basis. I’m making progress.. might be ready in time for Mars.

A Quick Fix to Wealth Inequality?

I was having a chat with a friend yesterday about the incoming Canadian tax reform and he managed to inspire what I think is a rather interesting idea.

When it comes to modern finance, it’s a mess. For the last few years, I’ve been trying to figure out a system of finance to account for the deflationary nature of technology and best practices while increasing productivity. I think I’m close but it requires a complete overhaul of the system, and well as a cultural paradigm shift. I’ll be patient. Until then, I thought I’d mention an idea which works within the current system: Adjusting the local minimum wage to reflect the local cost of living.

If you’re working 40 hours a week, you should be able to earn a living. That’s not to say that we should all be making the same, that’s to say that the floor should be set at what it costs to lead of modest lifestyle in that area.

Consider this, if someone is working 40 hours a week and living in poverty, they’re likely relying on social assistance programs. Those social assistance programs are ultimately tax-payer funded. That tax burden falls primarily on those who aren’t in poverty. When someone grows up in a low-income neighborhood, falls in with the wrong crowd and ends up in prison, it’s the tax payers who pay for that too. No matter how we look at it, we’re all in this together. We either keep picking up the tab, or make an investment in the future.

For starters, imagine the impact this would have on the country’s collective anxiety – Knowing that if you work full time, you’ll be alright. Now imagine the positive cultural impact of an entire generation of kids growing up with parents who aren’t barely getting by. Now think about the reduction of people needing social assistance programs and the reduced government spending. Now think about the reduced taxes for all tax brackets. I guess we would call that trickle-up economics? Just like trickle-down economics except rather than starting with helping those with the most and letting the residual benefits trickle down to those with the least, we start by helping those who need it the most and letting those residual benefits trickle up to those who need it the least.

The definitive test that trickle-up is better than trickle-down? Trickle-up helps more people.

That all sounds pretty fantastic for people who are struggling to get by but that’s a rather large stone to toss in the water and it’s important to understand how this will affect everyone else in the pond, especially employers.

First off, businesses that haven’t embraced automation but probably should will likely need to. The jobs which require the least amount of skill are often the ones which are easiest to automate so businesses will no longer need to rely on cheap labor to sustain their operations. Fast food is already testing out automated ordering systems and burger flipping robots.

As the automation sector booms, the robotics and AI industries will boom and while not on a 1:1 basis, low-skill jobs will be replaced with high-skill jobs.

While measures like these will dramatically reduce low-skill jobs, I think they’ll also have the opportunity to redefine what we think of as an entry-level job. If the objective is to have people perform at the best of their abilities, it’s about time we stopped putting young people in roles where they’re underutilized and calling it paying your dues.

The real victim in all of these is the entrepreneur who has to pay those increased wages though right? Well if your business model relies on paying people a wage below what it costs for them to sustain, then yes – expect to be steamrolled. If you can’t run a profitable business without the use of government subsidized labor, there’s a good chance you’re not fit to be running a business.

What about the businesses who do adapt, but still have to pay higher personnel costs because the average wage is now higher? Because that’s real. Well, it’s going to raise the bar for what we consider to be a well-run business. Ultimately though, it means more money in the hands of the workers and less money in the hands of the owners. Considering how the best entrepreneurs are motivated by the opportunity to create change, I don’t see the smaller paycheck making a difference – especially when you know that you’re putting extra food on the table of the team you built.

From an economic standpoint, if you systematically shift income from the wealthy to the working class then you’re looking at a far more robust economy. More money in more hands makes for a much freer market as more people are inclined to make more decisions with their money. Culturally, fewer wealthy people will mean mean a smaller market for luxury items and materialism may take on a more utilitarian feel. From a philosophical standpoint, this is about equality in how we distribute the value we collectively create.

So set the local minimum income to be equal to the local cost of a minimum standard of living – seems reasonable. Now set the minimum standard of living at a point which allows for a focus on personal development, providing them with the opportunity to become the most productive version of themselves. Also seems reasonable.

I Think I Just Figured Out Flat Earth

So a good friend of mine, who most would assume is an otherwise intelligent individual, brought up the flat earth thing to me a few weeks ago. It’s not that I was unaware of it, it’s just that I didn’t expect it coming from a friend. After a bit of teasing, I humored him and asked him why he thinks the world is flat.

As it turns out, he didn’t necessarily think that the world was flat, it was simply a fun exercise in challenging the widely held belief that the world is round.

He asked me how I knew the world is round. I told him that nobody falling off the edge was a good start. He said that if they had fallen off, they weren’t exactly in a position to tell everyone about it. Then I suggested using spatial reasoning to understand how someone could travel due east in a plane and end up at where they started. So he asked how I knew a compass would take me due east. I said by tracking the magnetic poles and letting you know where due north is. He suggested that with a flat earth, the north pole would be a center point and where we think we would be moving in a 3 dimension circle around the planet’s equator, we would be moving in a 2 dimensional circle around the north pole. Ok, but that would mean that someone couldn’t circle the globe by flying due south. Has anyone?

I don’t know any off the top of my head but that seems like something that someone would’ve done. He said that from what he’s read, apparently nobody does. Huh.

I was tempted to start digging for sources to see if that was true but we were at a dinner with others so I tried a different angle. What about satellites? He said he didn’t know enough about satellites to know either way. What about pictures from space? You can CGI just about anything these days. Huh.

So l asked us both to try and wrap our heads around how many people from all around the world would have to be in on this for evidence to have not leaked. Astronauts, government officials, physicists, pilots, military, Redbull, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking… and the list goes on. Now consider how the scientific community has laughed this off while the flat earth community is absent of anyone with a PhD in physics. I told him that it all seemed very unlikely. He replied, “But it’s possible”. I agreed, and then asked, “have you ever thought that we might be in the matrix?”

I think poker should be taught in school simply for the purpose of teaching probability.

I had to concede that we might actually be on a flat earth, not because I thought we were, but because I didn’t have all the necessary information to confirm otherwise. What I did have though, was a strong enough understanding of other related factors which created a very strong case for a round earth. The probability of a flat earth being kept secret from the general public for decades, if not centuries, is an extremely unlikely scenario. If we hold the flat earth to be true, it literally undoes the laws of physics that we’ve come to understand.

I suppose that’s the beauty of it all though, it doesn’t matter how much you know, you can never truly confirm or deny anything. Even if you have all the evidence you think is necessary, you still have to concede that none of this may be real. Huh.

So if you can’t confirm or deny anything, if nothing is concrete, if everything is on a spectrum and nothing is entirely real, how do you proceed? Probability. Is the world round? Probably. Take one step forward.

What that conversation also highlighted for me was that most people probably believe the earth is round for the same reason that people used to believe the world was flat – because that’s what they were told and they assumed it to be true. If it’s in our nature to challenge our beliefs, why are we so surprised that we’re challenging the belief of a round earth?

From my research on the flat earth theory, there seem to be two camps. There’s the camp of people who genuinely believe that the earth is flat and aren’t interested in seeing evidence to the contrary. Then there’s the camp who are saying that things don’t add up, and are looking for alternative explanations. That’s legit. There are plenty of things that don’t add up in this world and history would suggest that governments aren’t always the most accurate sources of information. Alternative theories to explain events like 9/11, JFK or the moon landing are a healthy measure to keep people accountable to what they tell us. If we just blindly accepted what people told us, we’d all still believe the world was flat, or round, or in a VR simulation operated by advanced aliens.

I just wish that for the sake of conversation, we could reach a point where we could speak a little more honestly about this stuff. Is the earth flat? Probably not, but did you know that Antarctica is bigger than Canada and barely anyone flies over it? I wonder what kinda cool stuff has yet to be discovered there… wouldn’t that be the perfect location for a secret Hydra base?!

Let me try something..

Anyone remember that scene from Old School where Will Ferrell steps up to debate ‘The Ragin’ Cajun”, James Carville?

Curious enough, something similar happens to me from time to time. Some people say that I’m articulate and well spoken but I may just be well rehearsed. When I’m discussing something that I’ve given a lot of thought to, I’ve already had those conversations numerous times in my own head. Perhaps that’s why my mind wanders when I’m giving speeches. Perhaps even more curious, it’s often this state of mind which tends earn me that ‘mic drop’ moment.

Anyways, I had one of those moments in the shower earlier and I thought it might be worth writing down. The debate question is:

What’s the real issue in American politics today?

Going into blackout mode…

This isn’t a black versus white thing, this isn’t a rich versus poor thing, and this isn’t a left versus right thing. This is what happens when politics becomes more important than governance. This is what happens when a duopoly of power prioritizes the short-term success of their party over the greater good of the people they’re supposed to serve.

The American people have democracy, but in a democracy where you’re asked to elect someone you don’t know to run a system you don’t understand, what exactly are you asking of your people? In an election process that requires billion dollar campaigns, who do you expect to be influencing those candidates? In a system with such obvious fundamental flaws, why do we keep expecting different outcomes?

When we start to notice what’s happening though, rather that acknowledge our mistakes and work to solve our problems, we’re given someone to blame. If you’re rich, blame the tax raising democrats. If you’re poor, blame the heartless republicans. If you’re middle America, blame the coastal elites. If you’ve lost your job, blame the immigrants. If you’re a liberal millennial, blame the white man. It’s all utterly ridiculous because when someone understands how interconnected we all are, it’s very easy to see that we’re all in this together.

The American people want freedom. That’s the freedom to be whoever we want to be and love whoever we want to love. That’s also the freedom for businesses to compete without unnecessary regulations. The American people want lower taxes, but don’t mind paying them as long as they’re spent well. The American people want someone working 40 hours a week to earn a livable wage. The American people want to stop invading other countries. The American people want affordable access to health care. The American people agree on almost all major issues, but through the spin cycle of politics and media, everyone’s divided without even really understanding why.

The universe always finds it’s equilibrium. Just after Trump was elected, I said this may be a good thing. Not because he’ll be any good at his job, but because he might just be catastrophically bad at it. Just maybe he’ll lie more than any politician ever has. Maybe he’ll flip flop all of his policies. Maybe he’l have temper tantrums so frequently that people question if he’s mentally fit enough for office. Maybe he’ll let his racist undertones influence policy. Maybe all the shady stuff that he’s done in the past will come to boil over during his presidency and we can finally have a complete meltdown of the confidence in our government.

Maybe that’s when we stop paying attention to them, and start paying attention to each other. Maybe that’s when we start to drive our own rhetoric around the values that got us here in the first place. Maybe that’s when we’ll finally open our minds to what government could be.

Honest Modesty

There’s a fantastic quote from Bruce Lee, “If I tell you I am good, probably you will say I am boasting. But if I tell you I’m not good, you’ll know I’m lying.”

By most people’s standards, Bruce Lee wasn’t just good, he was one of the best to ever do what he did. But if he were to say that, then he risks being labelled as boastful. Why?

The Rick side of me wants to say that those with insecurities about their own abilities would prefer that high achievers understate their skills and accomplishments to minimize feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. They key word there being feel.

The more patient side of me thinks there’s another level to this. Honesty is communication in it’s most accurate form. When you’re being honest with others, you’re giving them the most accurate version of the information you have. When you’re being honest with yourself, you’re looking at the most accurate version of yourself. As working with accurate information is always more efficient than working with inaccurate information, honesty is key to an efficient life.

I also value modesty. For me, modesty is a perpetual state of mind in which I remind myself that there’s always more room to grow and that what I’ve accomplished isn’t nearly as important as what I’m working towards. Google’s definition of modesty is an unassuming or moderate estimation of one’s abilities. I can work with that.

Unassuming and moderate are worth exploring here. For me, unassuming means knowing your value, but also leaving your mind open for the things you don’t know. For example, an unassuming fighter would know the techniques they’re best at, but wouldn’t assume to know how successful they would be against a hypothetical opponent.

In a universe with nearly infinite variables – most of which are unknown to us – any prediction of the future is an assumption. Being unassuming is simply a more honest and accurate understanding of yourself and the universe you exist within. Being moderate, in this case, could probably be defined as without bias. Without a desire to understate or overstate one’s abilities, the middle ground would be a moderate estimation – again, the most honest and accurate understanding.

Perhaps there will always be people who would prefer that high achievers keep their achievements to themselves to minimize feelings of insecurity. For the rest of us however, I think it’s important to understand that modesty isn’t a function of class, or making others feel better about themselves, it’s a function of honesty and accuracy.

If you’re great, be great, do great.