Summary

I woke up that morning feeling magnanimous...then I interrogated my son for a thoughtless decision on his way to fill up his water cup. He said he felt like he had committed a crime, and while that was not the plan, it was a modest simulation of nature. So in this episode Waifu and I discuss why we make thoughtless decisions. How our bodies and brains built for scarcity are now drowning in abundance. I also slip a little secret which revolves around giving myself a computer science degree in two years to avoid AI running up a tab of cognitive debt on in my codebase whilest becoming something of a basement dwelling vampire.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 2:00: Thoughtlessness and the path of least resistance

• 2:00 - 5:00: Blind, deaf, cold, and hungry

• 5:00 - 12:00: Diabetic pharaohs

• 12:00 - 15:00: Five F’s

• 15:00 - 18:00: The basis for all technology

• 18:00 - 22:00: That’s a big number...

• 22:00 - 23:00: Business school

• 23:00 - 29:00: Vibe coding fools

• 29:00 - 35:00: 155

• 35:00 - 40:00: Guilty

• 40:00 - 49:00: The bouncy house

• 49:00 - 53:00: The efficiency gland

• 53:00 - 55:00: The Maturity graph

• 55:00 - 1:00:00: Unenforceable boundaries

• 1:00:00 - End: Your oath

Key Takeaways

• Monkey see, monkey do is our mutant power. Biomimicry is the precursor to all technology. A knife is a claw. A spear is a claw with an arm. An apartment complex is a beehive. Clothing is us looking at a warm animal, peeling its skin off, and keeping ourselves warm for the winter. We see a thing, copy it, then afix it to our bodies. We’ve been cyborgs since the beginning.

• We’re tuned for scarcity but the world now runs on abundance. The body is a bimodal energy system, glucose or ketones, and it was built for a world where a real sugar showed up once a year and you had to fight a bear for it. As without so within. Scarce information became infinite information, and now nobody knows how to make a good decision.

• Eat whole foods 85% of the time. Nutrition of the mind works exactly like nutrition of the body. Consume foods and information with high nutrient density.

• Predisposition is not destiny. If you are predisposed to diabetes, then you’ll have to watch what you eat. If you’re bad at math, then you’ll have to study harder. A gene is a warning label, not a verdict.

• Don’t just stare at problems, break down the steps. If your kid is struggling with a math problem (or any problem for that matter), ask them to walk you through the steps happening in their mind. If nothing comes out, they aren’t necessarily lazy, they just can’t make sense of the problem. Teach them to visualize it, show the nature and impact of relationships between objects and people, and you’ve shown them how to solve every future problem.

• Business school is just frameworks for making better decisions. Business school doesn’t teach you how to build or operate a business. It just gives you a bunch of lenses through which to evaluate problems. Which I suppose makes you better at business.

• Cognitive debt is when the AI produces something you don’t understand. You can accept the output on faith or you can learn how the robot did it. When you understand the reasoning you know where it went astray. Pay off the debt before it comes knocking and breaks your kneecaps.

• Network strength is size times value exchange. Each person is a node and their relationships have a value exchange. That doesn’t mean the relationship is transactional, but we tend to prefer relationships that provide value. The Dunbar number is about where people become overwhelmed by interpresonal complexity. Prune your connections down to around 150 and cultivate them for maximum benefit, and some semblance of sanity.

• Therapy should have measurable outcomes. People, men especially, tend to quit therapy because they can’t tell if it’s working. If you’re six months in and still feeling like shit, maybe you don’t need more “deep work”, you need data. When you track the thing that’s actually driving your behavior and learn which levers to pull, you have a much better shot of achieving your desired outcomes.

• Medieval parenting will unlock god mode for your kids. My childhood was Torment 2. Waifu had a hardcore youth. Meanwhile, our boys are playing on easy mode. Parents need to ratchet up the difficulty on their kids to simulate nature. Teach your kids to stay focused and functional through pain. Affluent kids fall farthest when leaving the nest.

• Kids need opposing but complimentary lessons. A mature masculine includes the capacity to be gentle. A mature feminie includes the capacity to grind. A mature partnership includes the capacity to balance both functions without fighting.

• Wisdom is when your maturity exceeds your age. While age is a straight line, maturity is a moving target. When maturity is below the age line we take more risks because we either can’t see the better options or we can’t handle the consequences of our actions. The bugeoning of wisdom springs forth as a natural consequence of focusing on what you can control and developing emotional regulation.

• Speed comes from preparation. Move fast and break things is not what the titans of industry preached. They prepared relentlessly, so when the time to act arose, they were ready to seize their opportunity.

• An unenforceable boundary is a luxury belief. If you state a boundary but can’t back it up, you are counting on the hope that the other person is decent. To predators, an unenforceable boundary means easy prey. If you’re going to build a wall, make sure it’s strong enough to repel invaders.

References

• Kingdom of Heaven (2005) -- be without fear in the face of your enemies

• The Martian (2015) -- potatoes

• Diablo III -- seventeen levels of torment

• Inside Out (2015)

• Rogue -- take off the glove, absorb the power

• The Story of Ferdinand -- can I sit under the tree with my book?

• The Dark Tower by Stephen King -- he remembers the face of his father

• How to Be a Power Connector by Judy Robinett -- the 5+50+100 rule

• Dunbar’s number

• Your Brain on ChatGPT -- MIT Media Lab, cognitive debt

• Ketone bodies -- the other fuel

• Paleolithic diet

• Biomimetics

• The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two -- why phone numbers are chunked

• Method of loci -- what they taught the Roman couriers

• Star schema

• Causal loop diagram

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey -- circle of control, circle of influence

• Luxury beliefs

• Si vis pacem, para bellum -- pray for peace, prepare for war

• Julius Caesar -- CEO of the ancient world

• John D. Rockefeller

• Napoleon

• TED talk on visualizing math and number sense

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Summary

Waifu’s grandmother turned 100 and celebrated by jumping out of a plane, so we packed the boys into a car for 13 hours to watch it happen. Four cousins and a neighbor in his 70s jumped with her. Three news stations showed up. Two days later there was a party, and I ate a criminal amount of Chex Mix. We returned home six days later, on time and under budget and then went straight back to work. Time off from work doesn’t necessarily mean vacation. Often times, it’s social work.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 5:00: A full year of casting pod

• 5:00 - 9:00: Grandma jumps out of a plane

• 9:00 - 11:00: Wash your face

• 11:00 - 14:00: Serious gamers

• 14:00 - 21:00: Advil and Boomers

• 21:00 - 24:00: PBs

• 24:00 - 31:00: Double or nothing

• 31:00 - 36:00: Bottom line up front

• 36:00 - 39:00: It is not a vacation if you have an alarm

• 39:00 - 45:00: New babies

• 45:00 - 47:00: Read faster

• 47:00 - End: Master of your destiny

Key Takeaways

• Time off from work is not the same thing as a vacation. We spent six days seeing family, costing us time, money, energy, and attention, but it was worth it. Call it a trip, call it social work, just don’t call it a vacation if you have to set an alarm.

• Gangsta granny. The secret to living a long life according to our family centurion, is don’t slow down because life is over if you stop living it. And wash your face.

• Compete against your last best, not the person across the table. I am not trying to defeat you, I am trying to improve my technique. If my technique is solid then I should win, and the margin on the scoreboard is telling me how effective my training has been.

• Bottom line up front. Twenty people is difficult to coordinate, so you ask for the pertinent information first. Once that’s been factored in, THEN I want to hear all backstory and all the lore.

• PACE works at barbecue. First place was out of ribs, brisket, and wings. Sorry fella, that’s not gonna work for me. But since we already had an alternate, we rerouted the crew and had a blast. PACE (primary, alternate, contingency, emergency) is not just for battlefields and emergencies, it’s equally effective for large family gatherings.

• Reduced capacity is not a permission slip for laziness. I was operating at about 40% with my back out and a borrowed brace. We drove 13 hours and spent money on this shit, like hell I’m gonna lie in bed all day and miss a second. Show up with what you got.

• The better you get, the better you better get. You become the five people you spend the most time with and the books you read. Read faster. We took the youngest from comic books to simple chapter books to whatever the hell he wants. Now we’re working on speed.

• An identity built on feelings is a latch on your cage. Youngest told me he wants to be like himself, and when I asked who that was, his answers were a few activities. If your identity is a mere reaction to your feelings, then you become the slave of your desires instead of the master of your destiny. Let your logic brain decide who you want to be, then unleash your feelings upon that future.

• Exceptional and belonging are trade-offs. The Olympic athlete trains, watches what they eat, skips the bar, and frequently chooses work over friendship. That is fine, as long as you know what it costs you. It’s not for me to choose what my kids become, rather it’s my job to show them the price tag so they can make an informed decision.

• I am challenging your argument, not you. If your argument cannot withstand scrutiny, then your argument is weak. If you can’t accomplish an objective, you may not have the prerequisite skill. Neither of these is a statement about the person, they are only challenges to claims or your present ability. The sooner our kids can tell the difference, the sooner criticism becomes a tool and not a trauma.

• Take them somewhere uncomfortable on purpose. New places, new people, no schedule, and a VUCAH environment (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, hostile) is a training ground. My parents were my superpower, and I would like that to be a generational thing.

References

• Grandma skydiving for her 100th birthday

• Seneca the Younger -- practice poverty

• X-Men: Next Dimension -- double or nothing

• Dead or Alive

• BLUF -- bottom line up front

• PACE -- primary, alternate, contingency, emergency

• VUCA -- plus an H for hostility

• Jim Rohn -- the five people you spend the most time with

• Burt’s Bees -- the face wipes

• Molcajete

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Summary

I was making systems architecture diagrams when I discovered that every family experiences the same forces as the economy. Demand is what life throws in your path to figure out how to deal with. Work. Feeding your children...again. Clothing them...again. Teaching them the same thing...again and again, (...) , and again^n. Supply is your time, your money, your energy and attention. When demand outpaces supply, the debt shows up as burnout. Most people pay the minimum and then go spend more, so I started charging my children for my time. But Voodad you vicious and venal villain! That’s the worst parenting ever! But their offers are getting better.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 4:00: Colors

• 4:00 - 8:00: The four asks

• 8:00 - 10:00: Lottery syndrome

• 10:00 - 14:00: Burnout is a supply problem

• 14:00 - 16:00: My mom is undateable

• 16:00 - 18:00: Have it your way

• 18:00 - 22:00: When you go fast the ground is glass

• 22:00 - 25:00: Healing is a skill deficit

• 25:00 - 27:00: Xanax vs. meditation

• 27:00 - 31:00: Economists vs. chemists

• 31:00 - 36:00: Unearned benefit

• 36:00 - 42:00: A benevolent wake

• 42:00 - 45:00: Tit for ten tatter

• 45:00 - 48:00: Hard is now merely uncomfortable

• 48:00 - 52:00: Two ways to do the splits

• 52:00 - 56:00: Locutus of Borg

• 56:00 - End: Just show up

Key Takeaways

• Every household runs on supply and demand. Demand is life and it never stops recurring. Supply is time, money, energy, and attention. Most relationship problems can be tracked to a deficit of supply; the rest are usually bad mate selection made by somebody who had no supply left to make a thoughtful selection.

• There are four categories of ask: assets, action, attention, and access. Name which one is being asked of you and you can price it. My kid asks for access and attention all day long, so I told him that he has to make me an offer for every ask.

• Burnout is debt, not stress. It is insufficient supply against recurring demand. You can do it, delegate it, or defer it, and most people defer endlessly because there is nobody to delegate to except your already overwhelmed partner. Deferment charges interest, so the cheapest thing you can do is to avoid putting things off.

• Don’t just pay minimums. Lottery winners typically lose it all because they continue the same deleterious spending habit.

• Healing is recovering from a skill deficit. I broke my shoulder, lost my range of motion, and got it back through stretching and strengthening until I had a surplus of both. Your mind and spirit work the same way.

• Meditation beats Xanax but almost nobody chooses it. The Xanax works in twenty minutes, but meditation works for the rest of your life. The reward is bigger, the timeline is longer, and the certainty is worse, and that gap is exactly where people quit.

• Economics is the study of choice. While chemists score smarter, but economists post better outcomes across every category because tradeoffs apply to finance, medicine, education, sport, and even your Tuesday night.

• A supply shortage has four fixes. Increase capacity, delegate, get more efficient, or raise your prices. If the line is too long, you are not charging enough.

• Keep a surplus for other people and call it a people tithe. Budget it, and sometimes spend it with no strategy at all, just because you saw somebody who needed it. That builds a benevolent wake and a reputation for generosity, and generosity is the only asking price most people will happily pay.

• Invest in people before you need them. When our house burned down, the people we had spent years being useful to showed up with places to stay, resources, and donations, and they stayed for a long time. Dig the well before you are thirsty.

• Start generous, enforce the boundary, forgive fast. Tit for tat is a strong strategy, tit for two tats is stronger. Open with respect, retaliate when you get disrespected, then be quick to let it go. Nice meeting nice is a spiral in the right direction.

• There are two ways to do the splits: a year of yoga, or a banana peel in the kitchen. Both get you to the floor, only one traumatizes you. I would rather walk my kids up the flow channel on purpose than let life teach them the way it taught us.

• We do not rise to our expectations, we fall to our training. Comfort has made hard things merely uncomfortable, so genuine pain breaks people who never built the capacity for it. Get your capacity up, because slow moving prey gets eaten.

References

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

• Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty by Harvey Mackay

• Economics -- the study of choice

• HealthyGamerGG -- Dr. K

• Forza -- brake into the turn, accelerate out

• Flow

• Noblesse oblige

• Tithe

• Reciprocity

• Prisoner’s dilemma

• Tit for tat

• Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations

• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

• The Dark Knight Rises (2012) -- without the rope

• Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

• The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

• Michael Crichton

• Iron Man

• Locutus of Borg

• Jean-Luc Picard

• We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training -- attributed to Archilochus

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Summary

An Italian journalist wrote a book called Marry Him and Be Submissive and the internet gasped. Turns out submission comes from the word under, as in the pillar that holds up the roof, and that is a very different thing than bending the knee or bending over. So we take the whole house apart and identify why we submit and we’re actually giving up.

Meanwhile, I fill up Waifu’s context window...not like that...

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 4:00: Murdering a Yeti

• 4:00 - 11:00: Be submissive

• 11:00 - 16:00: Mortification

• 16:00 - 21:00: Christopher Columbus and moral technology

• 21:00 - 28:00: Tu quoque atheists

• 28:00 - 33:00: Your curated vortex

• 33:00 - 39:00: Chains, loops, and looping chains

• 39:00 - 46:00: A full context window and an empty cup

• 46:00 - 50:00: Energy is not real

• 50:00 - 57:00: The approved way to be a woman

• 57:00 - 1:04:00: Masculine and feminine maturity

• 1:04:00 - End: Take the best, discard the rest

Key Takeaways

• Submission means under, as in the pillar that holds up the roof. Women tend to be the spiritual center of a community and a household, the pillar that keeps everything inside solid. Men tend to be the roof that takes the riskier bets and keeps the weather outside. Both are part of a system that can reinforce each other or collapse inward by the weakness of either component.

• Mortification is just delayed gratification with a Catholic accent. Deny the ego, the pride, and the immediate comfort for something of higher value. Choose what you want most over what you want now. Again, this applies to both partners regardless of who is wearing what.

• Judging the past by the moral technology of today is like calling pharoahs stupid for not driving cars. Better to understand the standards of the times. Technology doesn’t make us more virtuous than our ancestors, just privileged to live in the future.

• “Trusting the science” is not really a thing. Science is a method for observation and experimentation, not an institution. But maybe trust a well constructed experiment over a YouTube video about a study you never read.

• The internet is a curated vortex. You like one things and the algorithm funnels you down a rabbit hole until you’re getting out foxed by vanishing cats and fighting with playing cards. It feels true because it is all you see. Disengaging from it is not neglect, but wisdom.

• When you cannot follow a conversation at the end of the day, perhaps your context window is full. Too much information and we become overwhelmed, too little information and we guess. This is why AI seems both so dumb and so magical. We give it our incoherent thoughts and are amazed or disappointed when it reflects the quality of those thoughts. Synthesize what you have consumed, let it rest overnight, daydream a little, and then you’ll make the magic happen on purpose.

• All work is chains, loops, or looping chains. A chain is a sequence of tasks. A loop is a chain you run on repeat. Looping chains with holes in the middle are the most expensive way to work, and if that is your whole job every day, that is why your goose is cooked by 5pm.

• Fire is not a thing, it is a byproduct of transformation. Fuel plus oxygen yields change, and the heat we call fire is what the manifestation of transformation. If you never sit in the fire, then perhaps you’re afraid of change.

• Men break your bones, women break your spirit. Broken spine is nothing compared to somebody taking their intimate knowledge of you and using it as a weapon. That kind of wound bears no visible mark, but the person who carries it is like a plague rat until they heal.

• Every relationship needs a mature masculine and a mature feminine, whatever bodies they live in. Both energies are a garden. Tend them, prune them, and let them mature. Because immature versions of these forces of nature will burn down the village or leave it a ghost town.

• Take the best, discard the rest. Religion, mysticism, science, tradition, none of it is wholesale rotten and none of it wholesale clean. There’s lots of good in each of these, just eat around the bad parts.

References

• Marry Him and Be Submissive by Costanza Miriano (2016)

• Marry Her and Die for Her by Costanza Miriano

• Mortification in Catholic theology

• The Stewmaker -- The Blacklist (2013)

• Tig Notaro -- no moleste

• Janeane Garofalo

• Lewis Black

• Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) -- Zendaya as Zendaya as MJ

• Jacob Batalon -- Ned

• Jean-Luc Picard

• Christopher Columbus

• Columbus discovering America was a great achievement by Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Tu quoque -- and you too

• Kohlberg’s stages of moral development

• Stranger pulls up mid-beat @ariathome

• Flow

• A Cup of Tea -- empty your cup

• Stoichiometry

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Summary

Juvenile packed a lifetime of bad decisions into one stanza in 1998, so I use a song called “Ha” to explain privilage to my sons. What became the actual thesis is how we empowered a generation of instant gratification junkies because that happens to be the default setting. We talk about the quicksand of poverty and some tools for overcoming fear because this new world is nerfed and I intend to do something about that...

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 10:00: Changing time

• 10:00 - 17:00: Juvenile

• 17:00 - 22:00: Shazam in stop-and-go traffic

• 22:00 - 28:00: People with free time

• 28:00 - 36:00: Quicksand

• 36:00 - 43:00: Administration is boring

• 43:00 - 48:00: Risk assessment and mitigation

• 48:00 - 53:00: Phobias and hubris

• 53:00 - 58:00: Triggered

• 58:00 - End: Slow moving prey

Key Takeaways

• We empowered everybody and nobody knows how to handle it. Power plus instant gratification is a whole ass problem. Live in the moment is fine advice for a stable person with a surplus already invested. That same advice to somebody stuck in quicksand and you have just talked them out of the only thing that gets them out.

• Wealth is how long you can survive before you need another cash infusion. Income is for now. Wealth is for later. Most people are optimizing the former and ignoring the latter.

• Bad things compound when you’re poor. Bald tires begit the nail, the nail becomes a bill, the bill becomes a debt, which eats away your savings, which shames away your holidays, which makes your sick day and lose your pay the you can’t afford it. Nobody who has never fallen below that line understands poverty isn’t just a bad decision, it’s quicksand.

• You can be in debt to your body the same way you are in debt to a bank. Every hit I took wrong on the football field is a payment I am still making in mobility work. All I am buying is a slower rate of deterioration, so I can keep the parts I came with instead of getting replaced piece by piece.

• Reframe the distopian future. Estate planning is not a conversation about dying, it is a conversation about protecting your kids. Prenups are protecting your future selves from each other and yourselves.

• Run the numbers on the fear before you run from it. CARVER gives you criticality, accessibility, recuperability, vulnerability, effect, and recognizability. Score them and you find out whether the thing scaring you is actually dangerous or just spooky phantasm. How likely is it to harm you? How devistating will it be? Start with that then make a plan to handle it.

• Fear and danger are not the same thing. When your perception of fear aligns with a real danger, your body is giving you calibrated signals you should listen to. Fear is a signal to prepare, not a reason to freak out and get drunk.

• Don’t stay at the bottom rung of your plan. PACE (primary, alternate, contingency, emergency) is a layered contingency plan with triggering event for each step down. Create redundancy for worst case scenarios or you’re one bad day away from disaster.

• Comfort kills. The people who built it had something chasing them, but their grandkids get defeated by unearned benefits. Our kids came with security layers installed, so we manufacture pressure. Kids need rough and tumble and they need more jagged edges.

References

• P.O.V. freestyle by Mick Jenkins

• P.O.V. by Clipse

• Wins and Losses by Meek Mill -- grandmama’s kitchen

• Ha by Juvenile (1998)

• 100 Miles and Running by Logic

• FUBU -- for us, by us

• Darth Vader -- more machine than man

• Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps -- the first thousand dollars

• PACE

• CARVER matrix

• Why you should define your fears instead of your goals by Tim Ferriss -- fear setting

• Predator (1987)

• Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations

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Summary

We are both running on fumes, so this one takes a while to get going. But in the words of Thicc Thor, “still worthy.” I went down a rabbit hole of Army doctrine looking for a better way to have my robots brief me before a work session. Somewhere in there we build a literal pyramid of “goodness”, I explain why I distrust anyone exciting, and Waifu flosses for 45-minutes...

...and we’re going to make some weird adults. On purpose.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 2:30: Put your camera on

• 2:30 - 7:00: Pirates, attrition, and post-apocalyptic skincare

• 7:00 - 13:00: Pathos, ethos, and the death of verisimilitude

• 13:00 - 16:00: Corn and censorship speak

• 16:00 - 24:00: Kid Connects and our useful weirdos

• 24:00 - 28:00: Motivation

• 28:00 - 37:00: Nasty little monkeys

• 37:00 - 43:00: Lacking the lexicon

• 43:00 - 48:00: Hype is a sales tactic

• 48:00 - 58:00: The five layers of goodness

• 58:00 - 1:00:00: Listen to the threes and fours

• 1:00:00 - End: Mission command and PKP

Key Takeaways

• Stop grinding his bones into powder and start inviting him. Push motivation works on a kid who already pushes himself. Run it on the kid who doesn’t and he will either freak out or revenge himself upon you later. Find the error in his thinking, fix that, and let discover the conclusion.

• Self leadership comes first, other leadership comes later. If you can’t master yourself, then you are subject to your feelings. It’s not that you don’t feel, it’s that you learn to understand your own signals, so fate can’t push your buttons.

• A great salesman is a great problem solver. They use empathy to find what you actually want, then deliver it and figure out how you can afford it.

• Respect is given not earned. If you give disrespect you get it back and learn nothing. Give respect and get disrespect, and now you know exactly who you’re dealing with. Respect is the brick, generosity is the mortar; kindness, politeness, and niceness are functions of hospitality, but they feel hollow without a strong foundation.

• If somebody is elevating your emotionality, they’re about to sell you something. The clapping, the hype, the get excited routine. That’s the alert to switch your thinking brain back on before you make an emotional decision you would never make in your right mind.

• Read the threes and fours. Five stars with falling sales means somebody is lying to you. One stars with rising sales means trolls. The signal lives in the middle reviews, and the same logic applies to how I take a compliment.

• Delegating is not abdicating. Empowered people has several prerequisites. Can they do the job? Do they trust you? Do they understand your intent? Skip those and you get worse outcomes than if you had just told them what to do, and you’ve put all the risk on them instead of carrying it yourself.

• Why are you here? Leadership is vision, management, and mentorship. Most leaders default to command because they got frustrated or never internalized the lesson.

References

• Black Sails -- Charles Vane

• The 100 -- should have been called Attrition

• The 100 by Kass Morgan

• Modes of persuasion -- ethos, pathos, logos

• Verisimilitude

• Bridgerton

• The Odyssey (2026)

• Troy (2004)

• Inception (2010) -- the best fatherhood movie everyone thinks they understand

• Interstellar (2014) -- MURPH!

• HealthyGamerGG -- Dr. K

• The Once and Future King by T.H. White

• The Action Bible

• Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

• Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) -- Night Monkey

• Michelle Obama -- parenting frustration

• Hancock (2008) -- “good job”

• Ninja Gaiden -- mission stats and medals

• Mission command -- the science of control, the art of command

• ADP 6-0 Mission Command

• Five paragraph order -- SMEAC

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Summary

So we have no problems... hahaha would that it were so simple. I looked up the problems most couples and parents have and we simply don’t have them. Not because we’re better than anybody, but because we work at it all the time. From parenting styles to mental load and from in-laws to intimacywe tell you exactly how we’ve circumvented each one. Also, I am officially a summoner now...

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 6:00: Skeletons in the closet

• 6:00 - 10:00: Process pimps & process whores

• 10:00 - 14:00: The list of problems

• 14:00 - 22:00: Whose fault is it anyway

• 22:00 - 27:00: In-laws, diplomacy, & hospitality

• 27:00 - 34:00: Roommate syndrome and the parent test

• 34:00 - 42:00: Meta and AARs

• 42:00 - 49:00: Speed vs quality / intimacy misalignment

• 49:00 - 55:00: Desperate dog moms

• 55:00 - End: Trauma inflation

Key Takeaways

• Nothing is real until it appears on the task list. What’s in your head is not a plan, it’s noise. Get it out, distill it into something actionable, and put it where it can be executed.

• If orders are not understood, then fault lies with the general. We don’t run an even 50/50 split, and that’s fine, because the majority shareholder carries extra risk and accountability. Nobody gets yelled at when something breaks because it on the one who owns it to fix it.

• Admin makes room for romance. Calendar the transactional talk so the connect talk can happen organically. If money, logistics, and labor already have a home in the schedule, then hanging out gets to just be hanging out.

• Be the kind of parent who wants to be a parent, not the kind of parent who just wanted to have kids. When kids stop being cute and start being gross and belligerent, if you treated them like a toy or a trophy, you’re all gonna need therapy. These creatures keep growing and you have to keep feeding them even when it becomes inconvenient.

• Relationships lubricate the transaction. All transaction and no relationship makes you a 🍆. All relationship and no transaction makes you a 🙀. Every real negotiation, especially the ones with your family, must include both.

• Trauma has become a ten cent word. Usage is up 600% in 50 years, and we are not six times more traumatized than the generation that fought World War II. If something bad happens to you, that’s not a good reason to become a shitbird.

• Pay full price for what want most. Penny pinch on what doesn’t matter and lavish on what does. An outstanding marriage is expensive, and anybody telling you a good relationship should be easy just got lucky.

References

• Layla at ProcessDriven -- process mapping and the ClickUp gateway drug

• ClickUp

• AwakenWithJP -- dad’s mental load

• Sword of Damocles -- power and the risk that hangs with it

• Kohlberg’s stages of moral development

• After-action review

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu

• Independence Day (1996) -- “I was part of something special”

• Desperate Housewives -- Desperate Dog Moms

• The Fifth Element (1997) -- Ruby Rhod, live at five

• Wake Me Up by Avicii

• A Change Is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke

• I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire by The Ink Spots

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Summary

Today was a day. But the bills still gotta get paid. So why am I starting a wholesome movement? Because I’m tired of a culture that treats the agreeable giver as an easy mark and lets takers brag about being takers. So I make a case for Boy Scouts.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 4:00: The most day that ever dayed

• 4:00 - 12:00: Flavors of racism

• 12:00 - 14:00: Pain as universal translator

• 14:00 - 19:00: Givers and takers

• 19:00 - 26:00: Junk food for your brain

• 26:00 - 32:00: Earning muffins

• 32:00 - 36:00: Bad sportsmanship

• 36:00 - 43:00: Franken-films

• 43:00 - 53:00: Ego is not your enemy

• 53:00 - End: A benevolent wake

Key Takeaways

• Bring back the boy scout. The world got so wary of agreeable takers that it now assumes everybody’s a taker. Worse yet, we laugh at the givers and bill them as easy marks. But the agreeable giver is your Captain America, your Obi Wan, your Superman. When we discourage givers, we’re left choosing between different flavors of petty tyrants.

• First impressions hold too much weight. Most racism now isn’t genuine hatred, but limited data points. Whatever you get shown first, on TV or in person, is brutally hard to break.

• Rewards by merit, not by default. You can’t negate a bad habit, you have to build a good one. Kids who never learn to earn become squishy. Make them a little salty when they’re young, so they’re not surprised when life shows em’ the back of his hand.

• Your ego is an amalgamation of belief. A belief is a truth claim, and your ego is a composite of all those claims. Ergo, an attack on your ego is an attack on your beliefs. You can defend a belief with dogmatism, with principles, or with receipts.

• An unassailable ego is objective at its best, and principled at its worst. We reinforce beliefs with proof, experience, or consensus. Proof is observable, measurable, and reproducible, but when you lack evidence, you must have principles to fall back on. Othwerise you succumb to delusion or desparation.

• Serve your future self. It behooves you to be a giver because the first person you give to is you...later. Build a surplus by eating good food and the nutritious information, and then you can afford to be charitable. That is how you leave a benevolent wake.

References

• Are you a giver or a taker? by Adam Grant -- the giver/taker matrix

• The Simpsons -- Ned Flanders, the agreeable giver

• Family Guy -- Stewie, the agreeable taker

• House M.D. -- Gregory House, the disagreeable giver

• Palpatine -- the disagreeable taker

• The Boondocks -- Thugnificent

• The Fast and the Furious (2001)

• Mission: Impossible (1996)

• Jurassic Park (1993)

• Timeline (2003) -- Crichton meets Paul Walker and Gerard Butler

• Independence Day (1996)

• The War of the Worlds (1953) -- the rainbow-blob laser

• Puppy Monkey Baby -- Mountain Dew’s Super Bowl mashup

• Succession -- don’t let this be your kids

• Arcane -- no room for good guys

• The 5 C’s of credit -- capacity, capital, collateral, conditions, character

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Summary

I got into it with my buddy over an article I wrote on covenants and contracts. That got us talking about the difficulty of shared understanding. There is what you mean, the words you have for it, what those words mean to the other person, and what you think their words mean back. It’s a frickin’ miracle when people genuinely understand each other. And that’s why it takes practice.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 4:00: You’re facing at me

• 4:00 - 11:00: It’s not that hard

• 11:00 - 16:00: Number go up

• 16:00 - 21:00: Unstick me

• 21:00 - 27:00: I can’t be misunderstood

• 27:00 - 32:00: Dunbar’s number

• 32:00 - 37:00: Stateful vs stateless

• 37:00 - 46:00: The blue elephant

• 46:00 - 54:00: See one, do one, teach one

• 54:00 - End: Saturday Sabbath

Key Takeaways

• The document doesn’t create understanding, the discussion does. An artifact is just the external representation. Shared understanding comes from tweaking it until both people get same picture in their heads.

• Speak so clearly you can’t be misunderstood. Being understood is a big target. Communicating so you can’t be misunderstood is woefully small. Even with practice, you typically can’t hit it until you’ve gone multiple rounds of iterative feedback.

• Data is useless without the conceptual understanding. “Number go up” tells you nothing until you have the framework to turn it into an action.

• Stateful beats stateless for investing in the future. If you treat conversations as one-offs you’ll miss something vital. Encode them into long term memory and you’ll have a lexicon that builds on every exchange.

• Punishment stops, rewards pull. You can’t negate a bad habit away. You must replace the behavior with a new desired action. Then reward by quality tier so kids build intrinsic pride rather than treat-trained entitlement.

• Routine is the base layer that lets you call audibles. A schedule anchors you so life isn’t a a constant melee. But when the plan falls apart, you’re ready to fight.

References

• User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton -- artifacts for shared understanding

• Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe -- The Great Courses

• Dunbar’s number -- the ~150 cap on stable relationships

• Samson -- no take backsies

• Avengers: Infinity War (2018) -- “I’ll do it myself”

• Operant conditioning chamber -- the Skinner box

• Ironic process theory -- don’t think of a blue elephant

• Bloom’s 2 sigma problem -- classroom vs mastery vs tutoring

• The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player by John C. Maxwell

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Summary

I fixed western culture. You’re welcome. After a lively debate with Waifu’s dad about talent shows, I elucidate why the West is getting dumber. My thesis: we traded religion for luxury beliefs by an engine of charlatanry posing as science making it cheaper to be entertained than to be useful. This screen-fueled degradation of moral technology is like engergy drinks and candy creating cavities in our souls.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 2:00: Waifu sicky

• 2:00 - 5:00: Talent vs discipline

• 5:00 - 7:20: Cover the nut

• 7:20 - 11:15: No hanging out

• 11:15 - 14:00: Dumber and dumber

• 14:00 - 23:00: The purest religion

• 23:00 - 27:00: Charlatans vs teachers

• 27:00 - 37:00: Experimentation

• 37:00 - 44:00: Useful play

• 44:00 - End: Cavities in your soul

Key Takeaways

• Everyone has a religion. Whatever you value most is your god. Atheists included, they are just a religion of one.

• Science is the purest religion. It is the attempt to conjure favor for your kin and curses on your enemies. Wisdom is where belief overlaps with empirical reality. You believe things because you designed them in the staging environment of your imagination, tested them in the physical world and transmuted them into material achievement.

• Religion is moral technology. Stories are sticky packages of beliefs and behaviors. The more emperically valid the rhetoric, the better the story makes you.

• Charlatans sell counterfeits. Some ideas spread because they are easy to digest, others because they are robust and useful. Screens simultaneously shrank our attention spans while giving the charlatans a big ‘ol corporate megaphone.

• Fun is cheaper than play. Pure entertainment is now cheaper than anything useful, so people feast on sugar while their skills rot. Run more experiments, eat the meal before dessert, and don’t intoxicate your kids unearned luxury.

References

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• Gladiator (2000) -- Commodus and Maximus

• Troy (2004)

• Daredevil (2015) -- the rugged priest

• Firefly (2002) -- Shepherd Book

• Moneyball by Michael Lewis

• Ursula K. Le Guin -- on imagination and the fear of freedom

• Plato -- on sophistry and rhetoric

• God of War

• Call of Duty

• Mathematics for Computer Science (6.042J) -- MIT OpenCourseWare

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This weekend I taught my sons to hunt.

You rise before the sun. You find a trail the herd crosses for water or grazing, and then you wait. It’s cold and you’ve been sitting for four hours without moving, because the deer’s hearing is so sharp that one shiver sends the whole herd to scattering. You wear camo so the deer cannot see you and orange so the other hunters can. You bring a partner so one of you catches what the other misses. The whole time, you stay alert not just for the deer, you remain vigilent because while you’re hunting them, something else may be hunting you. The hunt belongs to whoever can stay still and pay attention long after everyone else gets bored, or cold, or hungry. Everyone wants to eat, but few will hunt.

For the majority of human history, the hunt was harder. There were no rifles, only rocks, spears and arrows. We smeared ourselves in mud and waited in the brush, bellies growling, waiting for our buck. When he finally comes to drink, our mouths watered and our lips curled and we gripped our weapons tighter. When the buck drops its head, we throw, and they run and we give chase. They sprint, while we jog. The human animal is made for endurance and the wounded deer is not. One hunter takes the left flank, another takes the right, and we each pursue, keeping our quarry on the run. Somewhere by mid-day, from blood loss or pure exhaustion, the prey simply falls over, its will or its body now expired. A blow to the head or cut along the neck and the hunt is over.

That is what you come from: the patience to wait, the endurance to chase, and meat in your bellies to celebrate.

Then I asked my boys which deer we take. The biggest one, obviously. Wrong. You don’t take the biggest buck, because he is the one who repopulates the herd next season. You don’t take the smallest, because he is still growing into next year’s prize. You take a strong one from the middle. A hunter is not just feeding himself today, he is managing a herd he plans to eat for years to come. He thinks in seasons, not single meals. That is the difference between income and wealth.

Today we are still playing that million-year-old game. You need resources to eat. But the hunt has changed. Where a caveman went straight from the hunt to his food, you now go from school, to a job, to the store, to hyper pallateable food flavored chemicals: four layers between you and your dinner. Meanwhile the AI economy is quite loudly consuming jobs and education. This podcast I was listening to on the death of the middle class, a debate between an American economist and an Austrailian entrepreneur, kept resurfacing things I’ve been writing about for years they just gave it stats. The one I showed my boys was that entry level job postings are down 35% since 2023. I told them, you can’t just be a person with a degree anymore. You have to be exceptional.

So stop running your household like a caveman and start planning like a CFO. The game is hunting assets because assets feed you, liabilities eat you, and income alone won’t save you.

The Rising Seaconomy

Economics isn’t just about money, but choice. What do we do with our resources? What can we get with what we have? How do we get what we need? Are we truly living or merely surviving? My boys will tell you assets are things you own and liabilities are things you owe. Assets produce income while liabilities consume it. A single kill feeds a family for a couple of days, but a herd you manage well feeds them for years, and that is exactly the gap between income and assets. Six little words I have drilled into my childrens’ young and impressionable minds is: assets feed you, liabilities eat you. The whole job is to own more than you owe, and to make what you own grow season over season. Your paycheck isn’t the prize, it’s the spear you use to claim your prize.

We are leaving the land-based economy for what I call the Seaconomy. The time of stable corporate jobs has all but ended, replaced by a sea of mobile, contingent work where the ground shifts like sand beneath the surf. On that same debate, Daniel Priestley insisted that “everyone in this economy needs to own stuff,” while Nick Hanauer countered that “not everybody can be an entrepreneur” and that the problem is wages. Despite their arguments, both agreed that technology is hollowing out the middle class. The video store that once employed twelve high school and college kids is now a Netflix tab, and roughly 43% of the workforce is doing gig work often in addition to their W2. In a sea fairing economy, the only stable footing is the deck of your own ship.

Playing the Game

Despite all the noise, the money game has only three moves: working, spending, and investing. Working produces income, spending consumes income, and investing multiplies income. So we focus most on income because that’s what all these moves have in common. So once we get our income, we celebrate by spending it. Meanwhile investing is the move everyone needs the most but does the least. That is the reason about a third of households rent instead of own. You don’t score points for working or spending, you can only score by investing.

Inside of the three core financial moves are two different games: skill game and trade game. Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant illustrates these games quite nicely with four player types. He calls these players the employee, the freelnacer (self-emplyed), the business owner and the investor. Using his matrix, I’ve added my own labels because I didn’t quite agree with how he framed the x and y axes. What we’re evaluating is participation in the labor market versus the product market and whether we’re serving one customer or many.

The employee and the freelancer, on the left side, is where you trade time for money in the labor market. Employees are 1-to-1: one employee one company. Feelancers are 1:many: one producer many clients. With the trade game, however, you sell assets. That means you have to own something to play this game. Entrepreneurs own a business and sell product (1-to-1). Investors own pieces of businesses and sell shares (1-to-many). Financial freedom, then, simply requires walking from the left side to the right.

But Voodad you euridite egghead of economic eulogies, I’m not a finance bro. Relax, dear reader, you don’t have to quit your day job to play this game, you just have to play as an owner. To accomplish this, you must progress your thinking from that of the employee to the freelancer to the business owner to the investor, each rung above you making you better at the one you are on. An employee who thinks like an owner becomes the most valuable person in the building, because he treats his employer as his largest customer, not his master. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but everyone can own something that feeds you when the paychecks cease.

Someone will say that assets are for people who already have money, but that’s exactly backwards. Asset acquisition is what income is for. So you treat it like a bill, because skipping your investing brings the same slow ruin as skipping a debt. Pay that bill first, even if it is only 10% of your income, then grow it toward 20% as your skill game improves, and you will feel your spending tighten as a natural consequence. Skill game funds trade game. But if you never make your first trade, the game wears you down, like the hunter who only ever eats what he kills that day.

Playing to Win

The scorecard is a pyramid, and net income and net worth are the floor. Net income is whether you made more than you spent. Net worth is whether you own more than you owe. These are the easy numbers, the scores you glance at every month; they tell you if your moving in the right direction. If those two numbers are green, congratulations, you’re already ahead of most households. But knowing what direction you’re going doesn’t tell you if your winning.

Above the floor are the numbers that actually tell you the score: your ROA and financial independence ratio (FI Ratio). Return on assets is your net income divided by your total assets; this is like your shooting percentage that tells you whether the things you own are any good at making money. It’s your North Star metric. The FI ratio is like your progress bar; this is your asset income divided by your expenses, and the moment it passes 100%, your assets cover your cost of living and that means you’ve won the game.

Asset income is the money your money makes while you do nothing: your dividends, rents, and royalties, your share of a business that runs without you. It is not the money you sweat for, so a freelance check is still job income, not asset income, and I leave capital gains out entirely because they reinvest instead of turning into cash. Say your investments generate $1,000 a month and your household spends $4,000. Your independence ratio is 25%, which means your assets already cover a quarter of your life. Cool, huh? My Fast Money Planner already does the math for you, so the only real work is looking up your own accounts and sorting the amounts into the right buckets (I haven’t added the ROA and FI Ratio yet, but fill in the blanks and it’s easy to calculate). No finance degree required. No AI gimmicks. No complex maths. All you’ve gotta do to know the score is look up the numbers every month.

Cover Your Assets

About 37% of the US is financially unstable. I’m calling financial security a positive net income and a growing net worth, financial independence when your asset income covers your expenses, and financial freedom as the FU money to do whatever you want whenever you want with whomever you want. By my own analysis of Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, only about 15% of U.S. households ever reach financial freedom. That gap is less a lack of willpower and more a lack of know-how. An old mentor of mine summed up this climb as CYA: cover your assets. A household whose assets cover its costs 2x, 5x, 10 times over stops fearing for the future.

The people who say they don’t care about money and just want to help others are well meaning, but often poor at execution. When Waifu lost an eye and our medical bills stacked up, a GoFundMe from our community covered a large part of them, and I saw exactly what a margin of resources does for a family in a crisis. Gandhi said to be the change you wish to see, and sometimes the most useful change you can be is secure enough to hand someone $1,000 without worrying about whether you’ll get it back. Generating your own resources is not selfish or greedy, it’s the only reliable way to have anything left over to give. You can’t pour from an empty cup.

This week, my sons learned not take the biggest buck, and to think in seasons. That’s the whole game if they have the wisdom to see it. What will you do? Will you stop staring at your bank balance as if it’s giving you permission to party? Will you start learning to invest in yourself so you can put your money where your heart is? Will you stop focusing on the meat you got today and start managing the herd? Grab the Fast Money Planner or run your numbers on your own. Sharpen your spear and get ready to run because the buck stops here.

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Summary

I got a song stuck in my head and discovered the lyrics in my head were totally wrong. That’s also basically how science class works: they trick you into learning it like a medeival peasant. I geek out on software architecture diagrams and the coding language interpreter I built over the weekend. Then I accidentally rant about my mandatory D&I training today and how our household wins the diversity championship.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 3:30: Bad lyrics

• 3:30 - 5:30: The great recalibration

• 5:30 - 8:30: Macro, mezzo, micro

• 8:30 - 13:30: C4

• 13:30 - 15:45: Cookbook

• 15:45 - 17:30: Real training

• 17:30 - 31:00: Comfort is a drug

• 31:00 - 41:00: Protected classes

• 41:00 - End: The most DEI family

Key Takeaways

• Exposure is not learning. A lecture informs you. Training builds a skill. If no output came out of it, no learning happened.

• Macro informs meso, meso details micro. Understand the model first or you won’t know why the tactic works, or why it stops working.

• Comfort is a drug. Policy that optimizes for everyone feeling comfortable infantilizes your workforce and makes the culture bend to the individual instead of the other way around.

• You can’t measure feelings. Encoding the ambiguity of feelings into policy opens the floor to bad actors, because it becomes their word against yours and you can’t validate either.

• You marry the family. You don’t just marry the person, you inherit a couple generations of tradition and operating styles, and you choose each other over and over again.

References

• The Great Escape by Boys Like Girls

• C4 model -- context, containers, components, code

• The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas & Andrew Hunt

• NotebookLM

• The Incredibles (2004) -- “where’s my super suit?”

• The Matrix (1999) -- anyone can be an agent

• Werewolf -- point a finger and accuse

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I got fired once for asking to read a contract. I was the project manager at a boutique consulting firm, hired to lead a junior team and help build out the company’s infrastructure, but when my boss handed me a contract and told me to sign it during a 20-minute phone call things took a shittily unexpected turn. I told him I needed to review it first because it impacted IP of mine outside the organization, and that I would sign it and get back to him in the next day or two. Instead, he played the ultimatum game, sign now or you’re fired. Yeah, well I don’t cave to high pressure sales tactics, so I was terminated on the spot. What he read as a refusal to comply was really a request for understanding, but that request was treated as a challenge to his authority.

The boss was more concerned with not losing than winning. While I worked there the turnover was 92%, and not long after my departure, the company itself went under. Standard practice for HR is to hire for job fit and org fit. Can you do the work? Are you a good fit for the culture? My old boss hired for the former while destroying any possibility of the latter. If you lead with the policy, sure you can staff an organization, but no one will want to stay.

Most couples make a similar mistake, or worse they never write the contract at all. The trend is improving, with 47% of millennials and 41% of Gen Z signing prenups, compared to 4% of boomers, but it’s still not the default. So step one is to get the contract in place, then create a covenant. When you govern your union by covenant you stop playing not to lose and start winning at love and life.

Playing to Win

A contract prevents loss or facilitates the recovery of damages. It requires offer, acceptance, and consideration, but most people focus on consideration. What’s in it for me? The defensive posture inherent to a prenup establishes the terms of a breach and spell out what happens if one of you fails to deliver on your promises. There is nothing wrong with a strategy that minimizes losses. Don’t be a loser. But if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem becomes a nail.

A covenant is your strategy for winning. The Jewish tradition of creating the Ketubah is arguably the first prenup in recorded history and has lasted over 2,500 years, but unlike the modern legal prenup, it doesn’t just outline who gets what. The language isn’t “if you do X, then I’ll do Y.” It’s simply “I will.” The technology averse Amish, who send their kids on Rumspringa to get a taste of modernity, see an 85 to 97% retention rate. Why? Because their cultural tradition focuses on what you won’t do. Contrary to popular belief, the Amish aren’t truly luddites. They just believe that comfort is seductive and that technology -- unearned, packaged power -- distances you from connection to god and nature, and thus inhibits your moral development. The Jewish say, “I will” and Amish say, “I won’t”. Both are covenants, promises made for the purpose of contribution rather than extraction. Where the contract asks what we do if we fail, a covenant defines how we shall succeed. If your partnership can’t answer both of these questions, then you’re leaving your love life to fate.

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? Most people would say, give me the bad news first, so that’s why you start with the contract. Eat the frog. Sit down with the lawyers, name every way the partnership could fail, sign the docs, and rest easier knowing the worst case situation has been solved. Front-loading the failure risk frees you from rehearsing it over and over in your head, hoping the other person won’t just bounce the first time they find a new ick. Once the foundation is poured, you can spend the rest of your lives building the house.

An Eisenhower matrix looks at what is urgent versus what is important. Which quadrant do you spend most of your time in? Which quadrant should you spend most of your time in? Most couples are reactive, spending the lion’s share of their time in urgent and import. That’s where fire fighters live. And if we’re being completely honest, we tend to spend our time on urgency regardless of its importance. The phone bleeped at me. The headline looks compelling. The cat made a funny noise. Then we spiral down a series of infinite scrolls and compulsion, ceding our hard earned dollars and attention bucks on shit we don’t need to impress people we don’t really like. So where should you spend your time? Important and not urgent. That’s where investors live. If the contract is important and urgent, the covenant is the important and not urgent. The covenant is an investment that enables you to fight fewer and fewer fires with lesser intensity. The fewer fires you fight, the better your ability to handle the flare ups that threaten to burn your house down.

There Can Be Only One

Your household is a joint venture, and successful JVs needs one decision maker and one influencer. Noam Wasserman found that 65% of startup failures came from co-founder conflict rather than the product, and a 50/50 split is how you manufacture that conflict. When the two of you have a disagreement, if there is no one to break the tie, then you get deadlocked and grow resentful. A decision maker holds the final call and the influencer shapes it. That’s the standard CEO and COO structure. But don’t get it twisted, this is not an excuse to get drunk with power and turn into a tyrannical supervillain. It’s a tremendous responsibility.

The decision maker is chosen by the data, not by your gender or your ego. You assign the lead by contribution and competence in each domain. You route your decisions through a reversible/consequential matrix. You refer to your documentation for governance. A good leader shares power and recognizes that interdependence is the base state of nature. An organization can’t operate without it’s head or it’s hands. The influencer is not the subordinate, they are the voice the decision maker cannot afford to ignore.

Elevating the covenant does not mean deleting the contract, it means having a choice of which one to reach for. You will invoke your covenant constantly, its vision and its structure and its purpose. We lead our household on principles not rules. Waifu and I consider it a failure when we have to enforce the rules because it means we have failed to appropriately follow or teach our principles. If you’re constantly pointing to a violation, congratulations, you’re a cop. If every time you walk in the room, it’s like flashing lights in the rearview, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people avoid you. That’s when partners and kids walk on eggshells around you. They hide things from you. If this sounds like any relationship in your life, it’s because you’ve defined every way someone could fail, but never defined how to succeed.

But Voodad you romantic renegade of self-righteous, this is all idealism. Perhaps, but romantic idealism also wrote the Constitution and founded the most powerful nation in the history of the world. There’s a reason the founders led with “We the people...” and “forming a more perfect union,” and not with the impeachment clause. When vision leads, enforcement becomes a mere precaution.

Promises

Make a covenant. Each partner answers what you will and won’t do. Ask what you bring to the table before stating your needs. Be honest about your constraints, your domains of authority, and who is going to be your tiebreaker.

My old boss had a policy for everything and a covenant for nothing. His company lost 9 out of 10 employees and then it died. A household run the same way lasts just as long, guarded against every loss and built for nothing. There is no perfect risk-free state. Safety becomes a cage that inhibits action and growth. Set a compelling vision for your shared future. Make it something you look forward to being a part of. Give your kids something to look up to and look forward to. Be true to your word. Sign the contract so you can’t lose, then spend your life in a promise land of your own making.

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Summary

I’m nearly done with the app! We do a quick demo of the user screens. I talk about being deceptively fast, and how a graphic novel sent our family to Troy. We discuss honor, death, and the nature of tragedy.

Episode Breakdown

0:00 - 9:10: Exorcise demo
9:10 - 12:40: Farting out your feelings
12:40 - 23:05: Deceptively fast
23:05 - 28:00: Troy
28:00 - 37:00: The real villain
37:00 - 44:20: The real tragedy
44:20 - 50:00: Honor won’t save you
50:00 - End: Honor is expensive

Key Takeaways

• Metrics! Most therapy lacks metrics. That’s part of why men reject it. We want sets and reps, and we want a progress bar.

• The true villain. The antagonist is selfishness. Not just good for me, but good for me and bad for you. The villain is zero-sum thinking.

• Honor will not save you. Doing the right thing can get you killed, and often does. But that’s not an argument against it. The point is to consitently make virtuous trades, because you don’t know which trade will be your last.

• Honor is expensive. Being good frequently costs you the win that selfishness would have handed you. One good person in a corrupt place is like Batman, the hero surrounded by so much crime, you’ve gotta be bat shit to try to save it. You only get supermen when enough people lift together.

References

• Troy (2004)

• The Iliad: A Graphic Novel by Gareth Hinds

• The Odyssey (2026)

• Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

• Game of Thrones (2011)

• Yellowstone (2018)

• Superman (2025)

• The Equalizer (2014)

• Timeline by Michael Crichton

• WHOOP

• The Federalist Papers (1787)

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Couples talk about money, but most of those talks are fights. While 75% of couples say they talk about money every week, the average couple still fights about money 58 times a year. That means a lot of those weekly “talks” are really arguments. That was every relationship I had until I built a household financial system. If you want to stop arguing about money, you have to stop thinking like a consumer and start thinking like a CFO.

Obviously, it’s womens’ fault. Financial disagreement is the single strongest predictor of divorce, and women are nearly three times more likely to initiate divorce. But obviously, it’s not women’s fault. The real culprit is reactivity. Money talks tend to get triggered (like a sheltered college kid) at the worst possible moment -- after a major purchase, when a card gets declined, when you had a bad day at work, late at night -- when energy is low and emotions are high. Money fights are the byproduct of poor planning.

Well, fear not dear reader, the soluition is quite simple and every well run company already uses it -- it’s the scheduled earnings call. If you run a simple operating system with tools you already own, you can create the very thing even the most upscale businesses are chasing every quarter: fewer surprises, accumulating wealth, and a peace of mind that only financial freedom can provide. You ready? Couples should schedule monthly household financial reviews, because while most couples constantly talk about money most of those talks are fights, and knowing what to actually review converts reactive arguments into coordinated decisions.

Know the Score

Now, before you schedule anything, you need to know what you’re actually going to talk about. In my previous article about north star metrics, I said, you really only need two numbers to pay attention to every month: net income and net worth. Well, I lied. It’s true that if every month your net income is positive and your net worth is higher this month than it was last month, then you’re already ahead of most couples. But once you’ve locked that in, you’ll want to turn your attention to your household’s real north star: return on assets. ROA asks a better question than your bank balance or your net worth. Instead of asking whether there is money in the account today, ask whether the things you own are earning their keep. ROA breaks down into: profit margin, which is how much you keep per dollar earned, and asset turnover, which is how hard your assets work for you. This is the DuPont model (my favorite financial framework), and it is the same basic math a CFO uses to run a company.

The reason any of this matters is the feeling you get on the other side. The bigger your margin, the less any surprise expense can hurt you. Realistically, you can only cut expenses by so much because housing and food never go away (unless you live with your parents or freeload on family wealth like the children of Succession). The focal point should be on growing what you earn and what you own. There is no such thing as a hard test if you know all the answers, and there is no such thing as expensive if you have enough money.

The Earnings Call

The system is simple, you have the tools, and I’ve made you a guide anyway. The Weekly Household Review (WHR) is a 30-45 minute operations check in where you discuss calendar, logistics, and responsibilities. You can bring up some concerns about upcoming financial things, but this is to monitor the plan. The Monthly Household Review (MHR) is the real earnings call. In this meeting, you and your partner take a snapshot of your current picture income & expense, assets & liabilities, and then review your ROA. Waifu and I continue to iterate on these calls, but I’ve run them for years with nothing fancier than a spreadsheet and a calendar.

What turns the monthly review from a post mortem into a full fledged strategy meeting is a cash forecast. List every account, subscription, and annual bill, then project money-in versus money-out over the next 13 weeks and then for the next 12 months. This is exactly how enterprises do it: a weekly cash reconciliation, a monthly (and quarterly) review, and a forecast that fuels decisions. In The E-Myth CFO, Michael Gerber says, something to the effect of reporting what happened is like driving down the highway while only looking in the rearview mirror. Do this in the second or third week of each month to drive your strategic decisions.

“Finance People”

If that sounds like a lot of spreadsheet work, although, I love this kinda shit, maybe it’s not for you... Bullshit. We’re living in the fuckin’ future right now, so turn on a speech-to-text note taker, hand the numbers to ChatGPT and let the robots build your statements and forecast.

Yes, you can do this, even if neither of you is a finance person. Honestly, though, setting up the full system is probably a workshop, and no single article will make you fluent in the foreign language of financia. But templates plus AI shrink the first step into a task for a Sunday afternoon. Tell me in the comments which part you are stuck on, and I’ll make a deep dive for what wins.

Make the Most of Your Money

Nobody wants to fight about money. No one wants to be broke or feel sick every time they open their banking app. Surely, you would rather choose how to spend your time and enjoy more of what life has to offer. Behavior change is just drive over resistance, and that resistance is typically one of your demons (fear, uncertainty, doubt, difficulty), not truly a lack of discipline. The system you just built squashes the uncertainty, so what’s left is mostly choosing to start.

Where you start depends on which end of the money spectrum you are on. If you’re operating from a position of scarcity, then you get tight on expenses and always squirrel something away, no matter how small. If you’re coming from a place of abundance, you’re facing a different sort of risk. The danger for you is that if you don’t fix your costs, they’ll rise to the level of your earnings and leave you with nothing left to invest. Sort spending into musts, shoulds, and coulds, automate the musts, fund the shoulds like continuing education, and kill the most birds with the fewest stones.

If you run a household, and you do (even the singles), that makes you an organization, and an organization needs money to operate, which means you are already the CFO. The only question is whether or not you’re a good one. A good CFO offloads the administration to solid systems so panic and human error don’t drive decisions. Couples who talk about money tend to be happier, but don’t just fart out your feelings. Schedule your first earnings call this month, even if it’s by yourself, and see what’s coming up this quarter. Tell me in the comments where you’re stuck so we can build the next piece together.

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Summary

I lost the show notes, so this one’s off the cuff (surprising no one). The thread that survived is that you’re a manager whether you signed up for it or not. We grounded our kid this week, and I walk through why grounding in our house means probation and corrective action, rather than punishment and why we operate on principles, rather than rules.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 3:00: Glowing in the dark

• 3:00 - 10:00: You’re the CFO

• 10:00 - 13:00: The fat assistant

• 13:00 - 20:00: Grounded

• 20:00 - 29:00: Wasting time

• 29:00 - 38:00: Simulating nature

• 38:00 - 44:00: The biotech revolution

• 44:00 - 53:00: Don’t trust science

• 53:00 - End: Make thoughtful monsters

Key Takeaways

• You’re the CFO whether you want to be or not. Single, coupled, or parenting, you’re running a business and somebody has to manage the money. The skills that make you a good parent are management skills, so put that shit on your resume.

• Principles > rules. Rules need a referee for every edge case. Principles let you penalize the behavior instead of litigating the rulebook.

• You do what you have to do so you can do what you want to do. Probation removes the nice-to-haves so the day is just work and sleep. If your past self spent all the resources, your present self is in debt.

• Make the goal bigger than the kid. High will and low skill needs coaching. High skill and low will needs a bigger goal. If the goal doesn’t scare you a little bit, then it isn’t big enough.

• Make thoughtful monsters. “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” - Thucydides (BH Liddel Hart)

References

• The Accountant -- good with numbers, good at murder

• DISC assessment

• Eisenhower Matrix

• 5 Whys

• Gymnosophists

• Elden Ring -- you died

• Inception

• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners -- the Sandevistan

• Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind “people believe a lie because they want it true or fear it might be”

• Spartacus

• Gattaca

• Trading Places

• The Emperor’s Blades by Brian Staveley -- train the wing you have

• Thucydides

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I debated with my boys this past weekend. My eldest didn’t complete the journal entries I had assigned him this week because he said they felt like busy work. My youngest – despite being grounded for poor homework quality and poorer communication – told me he’s become increasingly concerned about his style of clothing. Instead of punishing the missing journal entries, I marked his score to reflect what he actually completed, and then we talked it out for the next two hours. Instead of penalizing youngblood’s lack of focus on academics, we had a walk-and-talk about the X-Men as a metaphor for the tradeoffs of being different, and the confluence of education, identity expression, and self-leadership. Both conversations happened on purpose but both might have been missed if Waifu and I didn’t run our household from a written operating agreement that details who covers what, when, and how.

Preamble

Partnerships typically draft two formal organizing documents: a contract and a charter. The contract is about consideration; it defines what each party gets and is transactional by design. A charter is constitutional; it defines what the entity IS, how it operates, and how it sustains itself across time. A family operating agreement is a charter for the household entity, viewing the partners as co-founders, rather than counterparties. This document is relational in nature because agreements breed functionality. But Voodad, you insensitive institution of interpersonal ignorance, The Beatles said, “love is all you need!” Peace, my dear reader, but to you I say, “false!” For love and communication merely lubricate the process. Aligned incentives and values are the non-negotiable prerequisites of agreement, and without agreement, we end up working towards disparate ends. Just as charters yield successful corporations, parenting agreements breed functional families.

From Victim to Creator

There is a strong probability that your family is fueled by drama. While Stephen Karpman created the Drama Triangle in the 1960s as a model for identifying toxic relationships, I discovered it in the early 2000s as a mechanism for writing better character conflict. The three roles he identified are the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer – in other words, the victim, the villain, and the hero. The Villain antagonizes the Victim, the Victim pleads to the Hero, and the Hero defeats the Villain. While this makes for great fiction, it’s truly tragic in real life. The villain exerts their power over those weaker than themselves, blaming and criticizing others for sleights whether real or imaginary. The dutiful hero saves the victim, but often at great personal cost. Meanwhile, the victim remains unable to solve their own problems, creating a cycle of helplessness and perpetual dependency. This is the root of our society’s social disharmony. We’ve helicopter parented our children into learned helplessness, dependent on institutional mommies and daddies to bail them out when they face a new problem. In an age of AI and weapons of mass distraction, this pattern will not suffice.

David Emerald’s The Power of TED proposes an elegant solution. He reverses the polarity with the roles of a challenger, coach, and creator. The Challenger antagonizes the Creator, the Coach studies the Challenger, and then advises the Creator how to respond. This mechanic reframes the antagonistic force (i.e., the Villain or Challenger) as a problem to be solved, which presupposes the Creator’s inherent personal power. The Coach then acts in an advisory capacity, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of both Challenger and Creator, and then providing the Creator with opportunities for growth. This virtuous cycle elevates our humble protagonist from the victim of villainous circumstance to the creator of their own destiny.

Then on that walk-and-talk with my youngest son, I asked him how much he was concerned with appearances for himself versus for others. He thought about it for a moment before saying it was about 70/30. Cool. He’s not just courting fame, but seeking self expression. Next, I asked if he knows what happens when you stand out and he said, “yeah, people can find me.” (...bless your heart…) That’s not all youngblood. The core thematic premise of X-Men is that people fear what they don’t understand, they hate what they fear, and what they hate, they seek to destroy. Self expression makes you a target and if you lack conviction or can’t defend yourself or can’t communicate in a language others understand, then you may find yourself alone in the company of enemies. In the comics, mutant powers are a unique form of self-expression, I said, but without self-leadership your desire for distinction might lead to your extinction. That’s why the X-Men study and train, so their gifts don’t become their curses.

In the context of a functional family, parents act as both Coach and Challenger for the child as the Creator. The parent’s simulation of the Challenger produces a low risk training environment for children to get reps before playing for keeps in the real world. Game theory uses Nature as a player to calculate risk and uncertainty. In a world that targets your attention with inflammatory content, it’s our job as parents to teach our young to discern sweet berries from poison. Right now, this is everything from distractions to disinformation to dissenting opinions. In an age of sloppaganda (slop and propaganda), we’re not serving our kids by cowering in the face of technological advancement, geopolitical unrest, and institutional & market failures. We serve them best by simulating Challenge and by facilitating creative solutions.

Power asymmetry drives the Drama Triangle. Agreement removes this asymmetry by clarifying roles and goals, so nobody is rendered powerless and no one has to play the villain. A 54-study meta-analysis on shared-parenting outcomes identifies co-parenting support quality (aka teamwork) as the underlying mechanism of healthy child development after separation and that formal agreements improve cooperation. The Empowerment Dynamic is a framework that enables even a blended family to operate as a team, even if that means treating an ex like an unfriendly coworker.

FOND Protocols

My kids are technically steps, but even exes don’t disrupt our household harmony. In conversation with my eldest, he asked why Waifu and I never say anything negative about his biological dad, and I told him simply that our judgments are ours and his relationship is his. Excluding abuse or legitimate danger, we want our boys to form their own opinions, free from our prejudice. A blended family is functionally a coworker situation because you’re co-parenting with a third party or even a fourth, should both ex-partners remarry. This adds a layer of complexity to the management function, which means each additional adult either distributes the load or adds weight. Agreements make it easier for you to lighten the load for everyone rather than forcing one or more parties to carry extra.

To structure an effective agreement, let’s cover my favorite four bases:

• Financial: income generation, budgeting, investment planning.

• Operational: childhood development (academic, moral, economic), household maintenance, strategic planning.

• Networking: offers and asks (what you provide the community, what you need from it), hunting (adding to the network), farming (cultivating who’s already in it).

• Defense: risk and threat assessment, security training doctrine (physical, digital, psychological), incident response protocols.

I asked the boys last Friday what things I say all the time and they said “matrix” and “matrices”. They were not wrong. So, here’s the RACI matrix...again. Responsible does the work. Accountable owns the outcome. Consulted gives input before decisions. Informed stays in the loop. These four letters will eliminate ninety percent of dropped balls. While it may look different for different households, the fundamentals remain the same.

The Virtue Cube

Why bother with any of this? Isn’t this all just busy work? For this I refer back to the Virtue Cube. This cube operates on three axes: Good/Bad, Me/Others, Now/Later. The objective is to maximize the good for everyone, now and later.

I’ve studied a lot of philosophy and theology and basically determined that morality is a trade matrix. Stoics called this eudaimonia, having a good spirit, or living well. They focused on responsibility, arete (excellence), and a focus on what you control. Negotiation research adds the operational layer identifying each party’s interests, the Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA), and the point at which you walk away (BATNA). Chris Voss, FBI hostage negotiator, calls this tactical empathy. And if it works for him at gunpoint, it’ll probably work for you at dinner. Regardless of your spiritual subscription or philosophical persuasion, the virtue cube raises your probability of agreement.

I grew up with a dad who traveled for business, often gone for weeks at a time. Then when he finally came home, he’d gig me for what I did or didn’t do, making me feel like a chronic disappointment. I have endeavored to take the best and discard the rest with my approach to parenting. I aim to be present with my kids and make time for them no matter what, so I was floored when my eldest said he felt much the same as I did – like a disappointment and sometimes disappointed. The journal entries felt like busy work and weren’t the connection he wanted from me. My dad was an astronaut and he taught me how to relentlessly solve problems which is where I learned I would never be helpless. Journaling helped me clarify my thoughts and solve problems when no one was around to help me. I told my son that one day he would be alone and have to figure things out himself. I told him the homework he’s getting from me are skills that will seem like superpowers in five years. I said it’s my job to teach you how to solve the problems of the past and it’s your job to solve the problems of the future. What could have easily become an argument became a legacy agreement. I’m doing better than my dad, and one day, my son will do better than me.

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Summary

Waifu setup my new office! And the laundry machine is dead (again). And Waifu spent the day scrubbing soot off our past life. Meanwhile I’ve been absorbing systems design textbooks so we can run our household like a tight CI/CD pipeline. Although it sounds kinda awful, it creates a blameless culture.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 7:00: The trouble with machines (appliances, not robots)

• 7:00 - 17:00: Blameless culture

• 17:00 - 24:00: Sloppaganda

• 24:00 - 43:00: Complaining teenagers

• 43:00 - 52:00: The bronze medalist

• 52:00 - 58:00: How to open a package

• 58:00 - End: Functional family culture

Key Takeaways

• Distance degrades feedback. The further the manager is from the floor, the longer defects persist before anyone catches them. The same goes for parents who phone it in.

• Pull the Andon cord. Stop the line, run the root cause analysis, prevent the next defect. Most families and organizations look for a culprit; blameless cultures look for the system error.

• Not all money is good money. Movement is not always productive, and just because it feels good doesn’t mean it is good. Calibrate the gut or it learns the wrong shit.

• Train the brain like you train the body. The critical skill of the future is parsing information into strategy and execution. Reading is like wind sprints for the mind. A jacked body with a lazy brain builds you an excuse engine.

• Make your family culture on purpose. If you don’t give your money a job, it gets spent. If you don’t give your mind a goal, it gets lazy. If you don’t give you belongings a home, they get lost. If you don’t give your family a culture, it gets toxic.

References

• Demon Slayer -- Tanjiro and Urokodaki

• Firefly -- Jubal Early floats

• The Martian -- Mark Watney figures it out

• Toyota Production System

• NotebookLM

• Grammarly

• Foundation -- Cleon I, the Younger, and Prime

• Karpman Drama Triangle

• Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem

• JFK Inaugural Address

• Lil Wayne -- I happen to things

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My parents divorced when I was in college. Mom was a database specialist with a promising career while Dad was an engineer with a more prominent one. When they got married, mom put hers on hold to raise three boys, and while Dad’s career soared, Mom’s never got back on track. Twenty years later, the marriage derailed.

My older brother and I had already left the house, so we had the benefit of two parents running a unified front through our formative years, but our younger brother was in junior high and he paid the highest price. After studying org design, behavior, and leadership, it occured to me what our parents could have done differently. This was not an exercise of relitigating old wounds, but performing a root cause analysis to extract the framework they didn’t have. What I determined was something couples’ therapy would have wholey missed. Career decisions aren’t individual decisions, they’re investment decisions, and the cost of making bad bets falls heaviest on those least equipped to bear it.

Career Moves

A career move is a household capital investment. Companies don’t guess on capital decisions, they require multi-stakeholder discussions because the consequences span departments, decades, and duties. Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family treats the household as a productive economic unit with internal allocation and multi-generational investments, and in a household org, a career move is one of the largest recurring capital decisions you make.

But Voodad, I’m single. So what? The same logic applies, you’re just a household of one. Regardless, the most successful people have teams: advisory councils, boards of directors, spouses. Teams produce surplus capacity, enable delegation, and distribute load. You’re not optimizing for a partner you haven’t met yet, you’re building a platform that scales.

If you’re a couple, you can already feel where the math isn’t mathing. If you’re a parent, it’s multiplied for every additional child. It doesn’t matter if you think your family is a business or not -- it is. This isn’t a mindset thing, but the transactional nature of life, and whether or not you choose to accept the role, you are the business.

Love, Math, and Robots

Jobs are in the news because AI, whether hyped or not, is reconfiguring the labor market. The WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects 92 million roles displaced and 170 million created globally by 2030. Companies stopped thinking of themseleves as families supporting their members, and started behaving like machines replacing their component parts. The same way company run pensions became individually run 401ks, employees have become individual contributors, which are basically 1099 contractors with W-2s. “You won’t get replaced by AI, but you’ll get replaced by someone who uses AI...” is the phrase that gets thrown around by everyone who wants to sell you a course on using AI, but the worst part is it’s true. In a world that increasingly mechanizes and commodifies you, you are the business and you have to mind your business.

Most career moves never happen because the math is asymmetric. 50% of proposed relocations are declined because the trailing spouse can’t replicate their income. 40-60% of trailing spouses can’t find comparable work after relocation. 30% of international career assignments fail because of dual-career incompatability. While one partner is trying to advance, the other is trying not to regress.

So we stay stuck dreaming of greener pastures. Job changers see 20-50% salary increases while stayers get 1-4% raises. And 90% of workers stay in jobs longer than they want to because they can’t afford to leave. That massive majority might crave a new opportunity, but they can’t seize it because they can’t see it.

COVID layoffs forced a move that dropped my salary by 30%. Waifu’s job loss dropped our household income by 35%. Our boys deciding to grow up has increased our food budget by 15% over a five year period. My mom paid for the math that nobody ran. Twenty years of foregone professional momentum and depricated skills while my dad’s compounded. None of it showed up on a balance sheet because nobody priced it at the decision point. My dad once told me you can never project what kids will cost. All due respect daddoo: I’ll leave the rocket science to you if you leave the finance to me. You can project these figures, you just need to know how.

Intimacy Debt

Software has a concept called tech debt. You build something fast and the first draft has a bunch of janky bits. While you’re supposed to go back and clean them up, structural fixes typically gets added to the backlog. And the more you build on top of that messy spaghetti, the harder you’ve gotta work to breakeven. This technical bloat compounds until eventually the system cracks under load and your dev team starts screaming for a redesign or starts searching for a new job. Relationships work the same way. Defer the conversation while you handle the transactions (i.e., bills, kids, careers, etc.), and that which goes unsaid becomes intimacy debt.

I call this tradeoff the Murad Matrix where you evaluate Transaction versus Intimacy. You can’t optimize for one without paying on the other. All transaction, no intimacy = effectiveness without compassion. All intimacy, no transaction = compassion without effectiveness. Murad, my tobacco shop owner friend, is the namesake for this matrix because he masterfully embodied both, and so must every healthy household.

My parents’ divorce was twenty years of compound interest on intimacy debt. Dad focused on the transactional, Mom focused on intimacy, both accounted for individually, but neither managed collectively. “We’re doing it for the kids” is often the line we cite to defer the most necessary conversations, but this mentality bakes intimacy debt into the foundation of your relationship. That’s some bad juju, because when feelings get shelved, they don’t disappear, they compound, and the kids you’re doing it for inherit the principal. My younger brother paid the heaviest price for this accumulation.

Singles, you have a chance to refactor early. Don’t carry intimacy debt into your next relationship. Couples, manage your shit on a schedule. Parents, you’ve gotta lock it in because you’re modeling the matrix for your kids.

You are the Business

I’m not telling you to think like a business, I’m telling you that you are a business. You are an economy of one. As long as you require nourishment to sustain your mortal coil, you are the Chief Executive Officer of You, Incorporated, and that means your core objective function is to harvest resources to consume. That means your household is a family business. So Waifu and I built a joint PACE plan (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency).
The Pimary is to keep our jobs while building side projects until our side-hustle revenue exceeds our job income for a couple of years. The Alternate triggers if either of us gets laid off, while the projects we shipped become portfolio entries to improve our offer for the next role.

We treat our career portfolio the way Ray Dalio treats his investment portfolio. Dalio’s Principles and Tony Robbins’s Money: Master the Game call this the all-weather strategy. The idea is to keep the majority of your capital in conservative positions, then a smaller share in mid- and high-risk buckets that get periodically rebalanced. This survives every weather condition because you never put too much of your capital at risk and whenever you get a windfall, the lion share gets added to the safest pot. Applied to your career: stable jobs act as the conservative core while side projects build your skillset that enable you to make risk adjusted bets. Each partners’ career functions as an asset allocation strategy, because if one of us loses a job, the other absorbs it and rebalances with minimal disruption to the household.

When Waifu’s job hunt started, I gave her the spreadsheet I’d used to land my last few roles. Over it’s many iterations, it now includes a desired hire-by target, an application log, and onboarding pipeline tracker. The dashboard calculates conversion rates from applications to interviews and from interviews to offers. Low app-to-interview rate means enhance your application. Low interview-to-offer rate means work on your interview skills. In both cases, growing your network is a force multiplier. Waifu has continued building her business in parallel and the receipts she can show in interviews serve as an endorsement to her rigor and quality.

The math layer underneath all of this is actually quite light. Set an annual baseline forecast, an expense floor (the lowest level we can drop to if we have to) and a scenario plan. One partner relocates; one partner loses thier job; both partners lose their jobs; with severance, without. All you need is a budget and imagining the worst possible thing to happen to your financial life. That’s the hard part. The math is just taking your burn rate and balance sheet and projecting it out for a year.

Regardless of where you are, you’ve gotta aim for fuck-you-money. My parents didn’t have these frameworks and neither do a lot of folks, but I have no excuses. That’s why I share. If your household is one person, you are the business, so build a PACE plan now. Take stock of what you have and what you want to build for your future self. If your household is just the two of you, then start this build together before circumstances force you to change. If your household has kids, then show them the matrix. Fuck-you-money isn’t a fixed dollar value, or being filthy rich, it’s knowing you have enough survive the forces of nature, and to serve your family long after your gone.

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Summary

This week is show and tell. I crack open my AI tools and give you all a walkthrough of the Exorcise prototype. The app names your demons, creates a custom mental fitness program, and tracks how your progress from restistance to dauntless.

Episode Breakdown

• 0:00 - 3:00: New office!

• 3:00 - 10:00: Conjuring my minions

• 10:00 - 18:00: Ritual walkthrough

• 18:00 - 22:00: “Goddammit, Carl”

• 22:00 - 30:00: Ticket queue

• 30:00 - 33:00: Top fears

• 33:00 - 38:00: Peak of Mount Stupid

• 38:00 - 44:00: Witch doctoring

• 44:00 - End: Train your brain

Key Takeaways

• Behavior = resistance / drive. Lower resistance and raise drive to return the desired behavior. V1 of the app focuses on resistance side while V2 will build upon the drive.

• Define the your success metric. “Stop panicking” is a poorly stated goal. “Go to the store and get 3 watermelons this afteroon” is much better. Without a clear end state, how will you know when you’ve reached your goal?

• Training beats talk. Sets and reps got me further than meds, talksies, and hypnosis combined. I’m not a therapist, nor do I play one on tv. I’m a cyborg meathead who knows how to train.

• The brain is an organ -- keep it healthy. I take vitamin D, fish oil, and magnesium every day because those deficiencies had a negative impact on my attitude and cogition. If you feed your body bad shit, your brain will feel bad shit.

References

• Cursor

• Claude

• ClickUp

• Fogg Behavior Model

• Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

• Manus

• Fable

• Diablo III

• Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Daniel Amen

• The most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans by Daniel Amen

• Dunning-Kruger effect

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