The Three Buckets of Life: How to Spend Your Time and Money

You want to live the happiest life you possibly can. I do too.

But how do we do that? Most things, like where we were born or who our parents are, aren’t under our control, but we can focus on the things that we can control, like making better decisions. That’s easier said than done, since the future is uncertain and it’s hard to know what the best move is in any given situation.

And how do we determine what “the best possible life” even is? What should we be aiming for?

I spend a lot of time thinking about these kinds of questions. I’ve read countless books and blog posts, watched YouTube videos, and listened to podcasts, and I’ve developed a model I think is useful. Everything we spend time and money on falls into three buckets. When I finally understood the three buckets, the fog around making decisions melted away. Suddenly questions like this were much easier to answer:

  • Should I take that singing course or learn Spanish?
  • Should I save my tax return or splurge on a new TV?
  • What kind of future is best?

What are these three buckets and how exactly will they help me? Keep reading and find out!

The Three Buckets Model: How to Make Better Decisions about your Time and Money

I’d been reading a bunch of personal finance advice and noticed that a lot of it advocated for similar things:

“Cut out unnecessary expenses, save money whenever possible, never go into debt, obsess over your monthly cash flow, and you’ll eventually be rich! It’s hard but it only takes discipline. But don’t worry, it’ll all be worth it — you’ll feel so superior when you get to retire earlier than the guy next to you!”

Something about this analysis never sat right with me. Imagine if you applied this same mindset to food.

“Cut out unnecessary calories, go to the gym whenever possible, never eat ice cream, obsess over calories burned versus calories eaten, and you’ll eventually be thin! It’s hard but it only takes discipline. But don’t worry, it’ll all be worth it — you’ll feel so superior when you are more attractive than the guy next to you!”

If you thought about food this way, you would probably have an eating disorder. You would be losing out on all the joys of food — tastes, sharing meals, trying new things — never thinking about it as anything more than calories to be minimized. You would be impaired from hunger and malnutrition, not to mention causing permanent damage to your body. (If you do think about food this way, please get help! I think it’s really helpful to learn about intrusive thoughts and OCD and how we all have these to some degree. I don’t know if I “endorse” this post but it’s a good starting point to thinking about intrusive thoughts and food/body stuff: https://tabithafarrar.com/2017/04/anorexia/)

But if you apply the same obsessive framework to money, suddenly we as a society think that’s a good thing. You’re wise, you’re disciplined, you’re “good with money”.

America does have an obesity problem1 and a credit card debt problem. One could argue that more people should be concerned about calories and/or debt, but I think this is a case of the pendulum effect, where society reacts to a problem with a completely overboard solution that causes harm on the same order of magnitude as the original problem.

Just like an eating disorder makes you only think of food in terms of calories and weight, typical personal finance makes you only think of money in terms of dollars. How many dollars are coming in, how many dollars are going out? I call this “financial anorexia”.

“But John!” you say. “The system works! I am richer than the other guy from all of my constant coupon-clipping, stock-buying, and following deontological rules about never going into debt, never making luxury purchases, and never renting instead of buying!”

I think the problem with these frameworks is that they have no higher purpose. The only goal is “be rich” or “be skinny”, and you try to achieve that goal by any means necessary, even if those means are harmful or not even contributing to the goal.

So what is the purpose of money? You would think that would be obvious, but a lot of the discussion around money seems to be clouded in confusion about what it’s for. People spend money on so many different things:

  • Food
  • Clothes
  • Rent
  • Mortgage
  • Utilities
  • Car payments
  • Gas
  • Airplane tickets
  • Insurance
  • Vacation
  • Savings
  • Tickets for concerts, museums, movies, etc.
  • Education

As I thought of more things, it seemed that anything you spend money on can be placed into three main categories, or “buckets”. Money is for either:

  1. Enjoyment
  2. Increasing future enjoyment
  3. Protecting future enjoyment

Let’s say you have $10,000. You could spend it on:

Bucket 1: Enjoyment

  • A nice vacation to Tokyo
  • A donation to a charity
  • A schweet entertainment system to watch movies in 4K and play video games
  • A new instrument
  • A nice gift for your mom
  • The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection (Just kidding. Better find it on sale.)

These are things from which you directly derive pleasure, enjoyment, and/or utility.

Bucket 2: Increasing future enjoyment

  • Investing in the stock market, Bitcoin, gold, or (if you’re an empiricist) Vanguard mutual funds
  • A sales course to try to increase the sales you make and in turn, your income
  • Starting a business or “side hustle”
  • Therapy to make me deal with stress and anxiety better and in turn be more productive and happy
  • Better software: Notion, Evernote Premium, Photoshop, etc.

All of these things are investments in a sense: they increase future money.

Bucket 3: Protecting future enjoyment

  • Stockpiling emergency supplies
  • An emergency cash fund
  • Signing up for cryonics
  • Earthquake safety improvements for your house, if you live in earthquake country
  • Brazilian jiu-jitsu or Muay Thai classes, to decrease the risk of being seriously injured in a fight

All of these reduce the risk of losing out on future enjoyment (whether it’s by death, injury, or losing resources).

Bucket 2 and Bucket 3 eventually plug into Bucket 1. Either I’m trying to ensure I can keep on experiencing enjoyment or I’m trying to increase the amount of enjoyment I have in the future.

For those who are thinking, “Hey, John! Life isn’t only about hedonism, okay? We need real meaning and fulfillment in life!” I would say this is a matter of semantics. If you are doing things that give you “meaning” or “fulfillment”, those are still part of Bucket 1, whether that’s eating ice cream or having a partner who loves you.

Sometimes, a purchase can fall into more than one bucket.

  • Buying a house can give you direct utility from shelter, comfort, social status, etc. (Bucket 1). If you bought it in a good area that is likely to increase in value, it is also an investment (Bucket 2).
  • An ergonomic work setup like a standing desk and a good office chair increases my productivity (Bucket 2) and may decrease future health problems (Bucket 3).
  • If you take a very practical martial arts class, you can reduce the risk of being injured in a fight (Bucket 3). But if you also enjoy doing it, it gives you direct utility as well (Bucket 1).2

But the point isn’t to get into a legalistic discussion of what belongs in which bucket. The point is to use this framework as a tool for decision-making.

Let’s say your daughter has just turned 16 (the legal driving age in the US) and you want to get her a nice present. You have some choices:

  • An elaborate European vacation (Bucket 1)
  • A summer boot camp on programming (Bucket 2)
  • The safest car on the market (Bucket 3)

There are good reasons to do each of these.

  • International trips are enriching. She can get some life experience getting to know other cultures and brag to her friends about it.
  • She’s not sure what she wants to do career-wise but you know programming is a great profession and she’s open to testing her aptitude at it. This could help her make the decision about what to major in in college.
  • You know that car crashes are the leading cause of death among teens in the US. Getting her one of the safest cars and taking a safety course would greatly reduce her risk of injury or death in a car accident (assuming that having her own car doesn’t increase her base rate of getting into cars with teenage drivers in the first place).

You could also decide to split it up. Instead of seeing Europe, she could go to Southeast Asia. Instead of doing a whole boot camp, she could do a course on Udemy. And the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety puts out a list of pretty safe cars that won’t require your entire life savings: https://www.iihs.org/ratings/safe-vehicles-for-teens.

So how do you decide? Is it better to drop it into one bucket or split it up? That depends on the weights you put on your values. She’s quite young and has so much of her life left so Buckets 2 and 3 should have more weight to them. I personally would consider getting a very safe car and forgoing everything else because of how high a risk car accidents represent.3

The younger you are, the more resources you should devote to Buckets 2 and 3, because you have longer to reap the benefits. Conversely, the older you are, the more resources you should put into Bucket 1. Say you’re 80 years old and currently have $100,000 in savings, and you have no heirs. You’re probably going to want to put that money into Bucket 1 (or sign up for cryonics). This is part of the reason old people go on so many vacations.

If you take this a step further, you can apply this same framework to how you spend your time. Everything we do is for either:

  1. Enjoyment
  2. Increasing future enjoyment
  3. Reducing future risk

Let’s say you have six weeks to spend however you want. You could spend your time on:

Bucket 1: Enjoyment

  • Reading War and Peace
  • Binge-watching The Sopranos
  • Bonding with your friends
  • Going to a different brewery every night
  • Going on a road trip

Bucket 2: Increasing future enjoyment

  • Studying for a test
  • Practicing Spanish
  • Doing some journaling and working out some of your issues
  • Work. This is probably how you spend most of your non-sleep time. Why? Because if you don’t, you’re not going to be enjoying life starving.

Bucket 3: Protecting future enjoyment

  • Taking CERT classes
  • Installing anti-slip mats and other safety equipment you ordered but were too lazy to set up
  • Backing up your files

Once you start thinking about your time this way, it becomes much clearer how you are spending your time and where you should adjust to spend it better. Maybe you spend too much time working and not enough time reaping the benefits of that work (too much Bucket 2 versus Bucket 1). Or maybe you’ve rebelled against seriously investing yourself in work because you thought you were “working just to die” (too much Bucket 1 versus Bucket 2), but now you realize that even if you want better Bucket 1 activities, you should invest in Bucket 2. Or maybe you’ve poured a lot of time and money into preparing for an apocalypse, but realize you’re at a much higher risk of dying in a car accident (shifting around Bucket 3 priorities).

The important thing about Bucket 1 versus Bucket 2 activities is that Bucket 1 activities tend to give you only what you put into them, while Bucket 2 activities can often multiply over time. So if you spent $10,000 and 12 weeks on a coding boot camp, but at the end of it you got a $50,000 increase in salary that compounded for the rest of your life, you get way more out of that than if you spent the same 12 weeks going to bars with your friends.

It doesn’t make sense to put all your resources into Bucket 1. You might have a great time spending all your money on entertainment systems, fine dining, and vacations, but you will be missing out on a lot of future utility, not to mention the higher likelihood of death or injury or huge medical bills from not investing anything into risk reduction.

This insight explains some of our societal bias against people who “waste time” playing video games or watching Netflix. A lot of Bucket 1 activities can be somewhat addictive (since by being in Bucket 1, they are giving you enjoyment or some utility), so it leads people to spend time in Bucket 1 that they should be spending in Bucket 2.

(Another more questionable criticism is that playing video games and watching Netflix isn’t “fulfilling”. I would say that depends. Is it better to read a book than watch a movie? I think they are both art to be experienced.)

At the same time, it doesn’t make sense to only put resources into Bucket 2 or Bucket 3. (And you literally can’t do that because you would die of starvation, but say you were living off the bare minimum food- and shelter-wise.) Buckets 2 and 3 are totally meaningless unless they eventually feed back into Bucket 1. Money has no inherent value. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Say you only put your money into Bucket 2. That means you would just be investing your money all the time but never spending it or gaining any sort of utility from it. So you invest your money in the stock market. Then you grow your money 10x — congratulations! But what do you do with it? Say you made a brilliant move and grew your money 1000x. What now? You can’t spend it because you’re only putting it into Bucket 2. You can’t even tell anyone about it because the respect and admiration of your peers falls into Bucket 1. It might be fun to play around with the stock market, but you’re not owning stocks for the sake of owning stocks.

This is why it’s important to discover your terminal values:

A terminal value (also known as an intrinsic value) is an ultimate goal, an end-in-itself.

Terminal values stand in contrast to instrumental values (also known as extrinsic values), which are means-to-an-end, mere tools in achieving terminal values. For example, if a given university student studies merely as a professional qualification, his terminal value is getting a job, while getting good grades is an instrument to that end. If a (simple) chess program tries to maximize piece value three turns into the future, that is an instrumental value to its implicit terminal value of winning the game.4

Instrumental values are a means to an end. Terminal values are the end.

Let’s say you’re in high school and you want to go on a nice backpacking trip before you start college. You’ve planned out everything and come up with a budget. You’ll need $3000 for the trip. Time to get a job! You see a “Help Wanted” sign for servers at the local artisanal pizza place. So you get hired but you need to get ServSafe certified.

In this example, let’s break down what is an instrumental value and what is a terminal value:

  • The ServSafe certification is an instrumental value
  • The job is an instrumental value
  • The money is an instrumental value
  • The vacation is a terminal value

The astute and detail-oriented will note that the trip may not be a truly terminal value. What is the most terminal value then? Identifying our most terminal values is a bit trickier. Maybe it’s the feeling you get walking around in a new place or meeting new people or biting into a food you’ve never tried before. We could further reduce that down into “exploration” and “novelty” being a terminal value. When we have a more complete model of qualia we could have better terms for it. Maybe “positive qualia” is our real terminal value.

We may not be able to easily figure out our final terminal values. But roughly figuring out our more terminal values can help us make better decisions.

For example, say I want to make an elaborate meal for my friends. I choose the coq au vin recipe from The 4-Hour Chef. I picked that one because it’s a fancy seeming meal I can make to show off to my friends and look like a good cook. But what if my friends just read Peter Singer and became vegan? Well, my terminal values here might have been to feel loved and respected and competent. Once I know that that’s my goal, I can see if there’s a better way to achieve it than cooking coq au vin.

Or, let’s say I had a dream to become an actor. Then I spent some time thinking about it and realized that the only reason I wanted to become an actor was to feel recognition. I realize that there are lots of other ways to get recognition and the other ways are easier and fulfill other terminal values of mine. Maybe I like economics and I’m a good programmer. I could build something a lot of people want to use and get recognition and money that way, so trying to do a startup might be a better fit for me than being an actor.

Here are some tools for finding your terminal values: https://programs.clearerthinking.org/intrinsic_values_graphic/graphic.html

Determining our terminal values can be quite complicated.5 But we don’t need to have a perfectly worked out theory in order to make progress. There is plenty of low-hanging fruit:

  • Would you rather be in good shape or poor shape?
  • Would you rather have more money or less money?
  • Would you rather have a good circle of friends or a toxic one (or none at all)?

We don’t need to have worked everything out to know that us and our loved ones being alive and healthy is better than not.

Now that we have the framework in place for evaluating how to spend our time and money, this brings us to the question: “What should my current goal be?”

If our ultimate goal is to enjoy our existence as much as possible — whether that means by exploring as much of the world as possible, having as much sex as possible, or seeing your children and grandchildren grow up and thrive — than the base requirement for that is that we are alive to do it. Dying is terrible. It isn’t the worst thing in the world because it at least means there is no more suffering. But there is also no more enjoyment. So if your life was a net positive, you should want to not die, or at least be able to choose when you die.

My mission is to maximize long-term utility for me and my loved ones. Because of this, my number one ultimate goal is to do what I can to get humanity the ability to achieve longevity escape velocity.

Longevity escape what? Longevity escape velocity or LEV is where: “life expectancy is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which longevity escape velocity would be maintained, technological advances would increase life expectancy more than the year that just went by.”6

“Yeah, sure, John,” you say. “That’s some sci-fi shit.”

Yes, just like submarines and going to the moon.

“But John!” you say, “I don’t think it’s natural to live more than 78.69 years: the average life expectancy in the United States in 2016!”

I bet someone born in the Victorian Era thought living to the age of 45 was “natural” too. Back in the day, people used to regularly die under the age of 5. Smallpox existed, childbirth was dangerous, and an allergic reaction meant certain death. Now those things aren’t even in our minds. We’re going to look back on the time before we developed rejuvenation technology the same way we look at the plague: a tragic time when people had to suffer and die. We’re going to have eternal gratitude that we live now and not in 2000. It will be considered a huge tragedy if someone dies at the age of 100, or dies at all.

New technologies, trends and developments can often feel weird. I’m sure CPR was weird when it first came out. Or blood transfusions. “You’re taking blood out of someone else’s body and sticking it in me?” Or organ donations. How is that not weird??? But when your kid needs a kidney, you’re not turning it away when their name finally comes up on the list. You’re ecstatic! You’re hoping and praying it takes and they live! The technology that needs to be developed is no different from that.

Even if you don’t want to live forever, if we have rejuvenation technology, you have the option to live as long as you want to.

Being alive is a basic requirement of experiencing enjoyment. Lack of rejuvenation technology is the current biggest hurdle to ensuring future enjoyment. Therefore this is my highest priority.

I love this quote from Nate Soares:

So I’m really not recommending that you try this mindhack. But if you already have spikes of guilt after bouts of escapism, or if you house an arrogant disdain for wasting your time on TV shows, here are a few mantras you can latch on to to help yourself develop a solid hatred of fun (I warn you that these are calibrated for a 14 year old mind and may be somewhat stale):

When skiing, partying, or generally having a good time, try remembering that this is exactly the type of thing people should have an opportunity to do after we stop everyone from dying.

When doing something transient like watching TV or playing video games, reflect upon how it’s not building any skills that are going to make the world a better place, nor really having a lasting impact on the world.

Notice that if the world is to be saved then it really does need to be you who saves it, because everybody else is busy skiing, partying, reading fantasy, or dying in third world countries.

It also helps if you’re extraordinarily arrogant and you house a deep-seated belief in civilizational inadequacy.7

The second article in this series covers more on why I’m against aging:

https://www.johncgreer.com/fighting-aging/

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  1. I know some of my readers might think this could be “fatphobic” or not “body-positive”. When I say “obesity problem”, I’m referring to the people for whom obesity isn’t ideal for their happiness no matter if society glorifies all body types or not. [↩]
  2. As far as choosing your hobbies, all things being equal, you might as well do the thing that gives you more benefits. For example, if I enjoy gardening as much as Brazilian jiu-jitsu, why not do the one that teaches me how to fight and get in some exercise? [↩]
  3. Why not max out her chances of living? Protect her at any cost. Make her live in a bubble. There’s a surprisingly deep scene in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

    Kevin: I had a nice pair of rollerblades. I was afraid to wreck them, so I kept them in a box. Do you know what happened? I outgrew them. I never wore them outside. Only in my room a few times.

    If you keep your daughter in a bubble to keep her from dying, then you’d have to think about what the point of her being alive in the first place is. (I’m not saying it’d never be worth it to sacrifice enjoyment for longevity. If you knew that immortality technology would come in ten years, then there is an argument to greatly sacrifice enjoyment because the expected value is so high.) [↩]

  4. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Terminal_value [↩]
  5. This is one of the very hard problems in developing a safe artificial intelligence:

    The utility function may not be perfectly aligned with the values of the human race, which are (at best) very difficult to pin down. [↩]

  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_escape_velocity [↩]
  7. http://mindingourway.com/habitual-productivity/ [↩]

The Irishman

(Content Warning: Watching awkward sex scenes with my mom and mild spoilers of Martin Scorsese movies.)

Thirteen years. Thirteen long fucking years is how long I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out.

I love movies, LOVE THEM. Like many kids, and especially kids in shitty households, the TV was an escape for me. I would jump around, punching the air while Bruce Lee was kicking ass. I’d put on all my Power Ranger rings during the final fight scene in Robocop 3. My friends and I would motion like we were spinning the shotgun like Arnold did in Terminator 2. Sitting down to watch a movie is still one of my absolute favorite activities. When I develop a really close relationship with someone, I have to start showing them all the movies and TV shows that are important to me. It’s like learning some of my language since I make references to them so often. All my girlfriends have had to suffer from me quoting Terminator 2 literally every day ever. “2:14 am Eastuhn time, August 29th.”

I “critically” discovered film in 2005 when I was 15. This was around the time my grandfather got me a subscription to the New York Times and I started reading the film reviews by critics like Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, and Stephen Holden. Amazon had “Listmanias” where people would curate a list of products and write about them. There were some great lists of film on there. That’s where I discovered Requiem for a Dream and Akira (“The Citizen Kane of anime” as one reviewer put it). I soon had the insight that directors were a thing, and that if you liked a movie a lot it was probably worth exploring that director’s other work. (Profound, I know.)

I would stay with my grandparents in Berkeley where there were some great movie and record stores with huge collections of DVDs for me to choose from. My friend Charles also loved film and would make recommendations and wax about them. Locally, the best place to shop for DVDs of more artsy films was Borders. Walmart was cheaper, but they mostly had normie movies and trash.

I don’t remember how I first came across Goodfellas. My earliest memory of it is stumbling upon my mom watching it late at night, only to be shooed out during an illicit scene, which I now recognize as the coke scene with Henry and his sidepiece towards the end of the movie. I remember having to special order it and being so excited when it finally arrived. I put it on my little TV in my room and was absolutely blown away. 

Marty did many movies with Robert de Niro. (I watched Taxi Driver in my room with my mom, and boy was that an awkward mistake. Not fun to watch scenes with child sex workers and Marty himself talking about what a .44 magnum would do to a woman’s pussy.) He did three movies with Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci: Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino. Raging Bull is such a deep, beautiful movie that really spoke to me, showing how a man’s internal conflict can manifest as external violence. Now Casino…you could write a whole essay on every minute in Casino and someday I hope to snag a good editor and make a video review of it. Casino is my favorite movie of all time and that’s saying something. I’m not one of those people who hem and haw when you ask them their favorite movie and then struggle to name one. I have tiered, annotated lists of my favorite movies. My second favorite movie of all time is Goodfellas, and I get why people like Goodfellas more. Goodfellas is probably the best overall movie ever made EVER as far as the combination of “art” and entertainment.

When I was sixteen, I moved out of my house and moved in with my best friend John Brasher and his family. John and I had been friends since freshman year and I was very close with his mom, dad, and sister. They were kind enough to take me in. John and his mom and I would talk about movies a lot. I introduced John to Goodfellas and we became Marty super fans together.

One of the reasons I loved movies like these so much was the violence. Inheriting the alleles I did, growing up in a chaotic environment, and dealing with traumatic things as a young teen, I had so much anger and hatred as a kid. Anyone who knew me and my stabbing pen “Felipe” in high school can attest to this. Seeing violent scenes in movies was cathartic. I must have watched the Billy Batts scene over 300 times.

I became known for loving these types of movies. John’s mom got me the Godfather I and II on DVD the Christmas they took me in to live with them. I had my own personal backpack Blockbuster where I’d bring friends mafia and gang movies for them to take home and watch. I still remember Jose Mendez’s reaction to A Clockwork Orange and how we used to call each other “Little Puppet” from American Me.

The Departed came out in 2006 (saw it twice in the theaters) and this was around when we first learned that The Irishman might be in the making.

By now you can see why I wanted this movie so bad. I love mafia movies. I love Martin Scorsese movies. I love Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci. Now combine all these and I’m OBSESSED. All three of the movies they’ve done together are masterpieces and two of them are my favorite favorite movies of all time. And they hadn’t made one since Casino in 1995, 24 years ago.

I would religiously check IMDB to see if there were any updates. “He’s making a Frank Sinatra biopic?! WTF? You and the boys aren’t getting any younger, Marty!” (This was later scrapped due to Sinatra’s estate not agreeing. Actually, now that I’m reading about here, it sounds like it would have been pretty cool…)

Finally it seemed like he was going to do it next and then he did Silence instead…

Thoughts would pop into my head about how if something happened to me like I died or lost my vision and hearing, I would never experience it. (Coincidentally, Goodfellas is one of the blind movie reviewer Tommy Edison’s fav movies.) Or Marty or Bob or Joe would die before actually making it.

Finally, FINALLY, it was in production. They were actually making it, hallelujah!

I really wanted to see it in the theater. I like watching movies at home but it felt wrong for this one. Because Netflix was the only studio who would pony up the huge budget, it complicated the theater screening plan. The big chains refused to show it because they wanted a longer exclusive window where it would only be shown in theaters and not streamed, but they couldn’t settle it with Netflix. I kept checking over and over seeing if they had released the list of theaters that were showing it. 

John and I had a “friend break-up” about two years ago and haven’t talked since February 2017. I thought about the logistics of going back to the Central Valley and offering a special “one time only” experience reuniting with John and seeing it together. I didn’t end up going through with it, but he has a movie review channel now with a friend of his and I’ve kept checking it to hear what his thoughts were but he hasn’t made a review yet.

I even considered whether I could afford to blow a bunch of money getting plane tickets and lodging in NYC, where the Belasco Theatre on Broadway would be screening a movie “for the first time in its 112-year history” *just* for The Irishman.

Luckily, the local artsy theater we love in Ann Arbor was playing it, but it looked like they only had showtimes before Thanksgiving. I wanted to see it with Adri but she was on a rough rotation. 

Adri had heard me talking about this movie the whole duration of our eight year relationship. Kelsey was in town. My new special lady friend (The Big Lebowski reference) Laura was still here before she left to go to New Zealand. The stars were aligning and it all started coming together. Finally, Wednesday, November 27th, 2019, “8:15 pm Eastuhn time”, after thirteen years of waiting, I saw it.

There are certain moments that “should” be profound but we don’t really feel it in the moment. Let’s say I’m graduating and walking the stage but I really need to pee or the wind is in my face or I’m self-conscious about if I have pit stains or not. Or I’m staring at the Mona Lisa, one of the most famous images of all time, and I’m able to see something that’s hundreds and hundreds of years old created by one of the most interesting people of all time, but I’m distracted about the huge crowd I’m in and everyone clamoring around. Or I’m sitting in the theater, watching a movie I’ve been waiting for for thirteen years, but I’m wondering if the people behind us in the theater are going to keep talking after the trailers end. The point is, these moments can still be important and we can still feel the profoundness in reflection, but we don’t always have the luxury of feeling it in the moment. Thankfully, this wasn’t one of those moments (even though there were people behind us making dumb jokes about every trailer).

Sitting in the living room sized theater, with my hands being held on either side of me, surrounded by loved ones, I felt it. The weight of everything that had happened in those thirteen years. The trauma, the anger and hate, the catharsis of violence, my long friendship with John and its end, all my relationships, loving and being loved. With the opening dolly shot moving forward into the nursing home, with the realization that it was finally here and I was seeing it, I started to cry.

Mafia movies always show a rise and an inevitable downfall. A typical mafia movie starts out with a kid who sees mobsters making money and getting respect. Then the kid starts making money, he acquires wealth and respect, he gets a status symbol like a Cadillac or a fur coat for his woman. And then there’s the downfall: the cops bust him or he gets killed or something. Yes, mafia movies always show a downfall, but the downfall is not usually given the same length as the rise up, and I don’t think anyone walks away from a mafia movie without feeling intoxicated by the glamor and power of the world the first three hours of the movie worked so hard to create. The Irishman is different in that respect. It’s about the less glamorous and less sexy saga that comes after all the romanticized epic things depicted in Goodfellas and Casino. It’s like if you took the end of Casino where the bosses are in wheelchairs breathing through oxygen masks, and Robert de Niro has his giant glasses and is reading some newspaper, and you showed the whole journey in between that they skipped over.

My one cool professor in college didn’t have word count requirements for his essays. He thought the argument should be as long as it needs. If that’s a paragraph, so be it. If it’s 300 pages, then bully for you. I think the same thing about the length of a movie. There’s no such thing as a movie that’s too long, if it doesn’t drag. Some movies are only 90 minutes but drag. Some movies are three hours and, while it feels like I’ve been on a long, epic journey, I enjoyed every minute of it and it didn’t end too late. I think there’s no maximum length that a movie should be under. Some movies, you think: “How much is left?” The best ones are: “I hope it’s not anywhere close to being over.”

One measure for how truly entertaining a movie is, is how entertaining the “downtime” scenes are where crazy, iconic things aren’t happening.  Some movies are just vehicles for certain scenes like epic fights or car chases or “T&A” (tits and ass, kids), and the rest is just filler to get to those. The best movies aren’t like that. There is literally no scene that drags in Goodfellas. Every scene is like pure entertainment concentrate.

Goodfellas starts in the middle of the story. In the commentary, Marty talks about how he started Goodfellas in medias res to get people hooked right away. (And this is in the most entertaining movie of all time. It’d be like if you were about to go to an Oscars party at Studio 54 and they were like, “We want the guests to have some Quaaludes and a blowjob right from the start, that way they aren’t bored…”)

The Irishman isn’t quite like this, though I’m not sure what I would cut or what I would have done differently. I don’t think I’d go so far as to say anything *drags*, but some of it is less entertaining than other parts.

Rewatchability is a big factor for me in ranking and critiquing movies. Sure, a movie can be fine to watch once, but if you never want to see it again, how good can it be? The Irishman isn’t a movie that I’ll want to rewatch over and over the way Marty’s best movies are.

Another point is that some things that seemed like they would be important or turn into something didn’t, such as the relationship between de Niro’s daughter and Joe Pesci. Joe Pesci is very affectionate with and aware of de Niro’s daughter Peggy, from the time she is a young teenager, but nothing comes of it. I get that it might have stoked tension between him and Pacino’s Hoffa — that she liked Hoffa and not him — but still, they seemed to linger on it without it developing into something more. This reminds me of Chekhov’s gun, where you don’t put a gun in the story if it’s not going to go off.

The cast is great, even though some of the roles are quite subtle and seem like an excuse to fill the cast with common Scorsese collaborators like Harvey Keitel (I like callbacks, though, and don’t mind). Joe Pesci had famously retired and had to be constantly pestered by Bob and Marty before he would do the role. I’m glad they got him, but he isn’t the distinctive, hyper-violent hothead he classically plays in Scorsese’s earlier films. On the other hand, Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa is the most memorable character in the movie and I love a lot of his quirks, like being incensed when people are late. The other players like Ray Romano did a fine job. I appreciated the scene Action Bronson was in and thought he did great. 

The CGI didn’t bother me. Adri and Kelsey didn’t like it. Film history wise, it’s good to be one of the first critically acclaimed films to utilize it so heavily. It’s definitely in that cusp where it gets away with it but isn’t seamless the way movies in the future will be (when they can just generate the actor and don’t even need them alive anymore — they are making a whole movie with a CGI James Dean).

Overall, The Irishman is extremely poignant, especially for someone so against the deterioration that comes with aging. The depiction of the inevitable decay and disintegration reminded me of the poem Ozymandias:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Have you waited for a movie or TV show, video game, or album in a similar way? What did it mean to you and how did it feel when you finally experienced it?

If you liked this story, you should definitely check out these:

Bully For You

The Greatest Film Career of All-Time

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Notes from Vinay Gupta Talk

Intro

Recently went to a talk from Vinay Gupta. Slides are here. I usually find most speakers disappointing in that their ideas aren’t really crisp, and/or too virtue-signally or hand-wavy. I was pleasantly surprised. It reminded me how much I respect how engineers think — first principles, clean slate, “how do we build this efficiently?” and seeing what comes out when you apply different constraints. 

Foundation/Refugee Problem

He did a good job giving some foundation for the talk:

  • We’re going to have a continued refugee crisis because of climate change. 
  • Old refugee system came out of specific circumstances from WWII. The military surplus became the standard, so that’s why we have things like tents. 
  • People were expected to eventually go back to Vienna or wherever they came from.
  • This outdated system doesn’t work. Refugees/IDP often can’t go back “home”.
  • Refugee camps don’t allow any growth or moving up and out. 
  • Incentives of funding for non-profits means it’s harder to take risks and innovation grinds to a halt, which is why the UN has stuck with the tent camp model for so long.
  • “It’s a political will problem but these are often the most difficult problems we have.”

What are alternatives? 

Vinay suggests establishing new cities. Integrating into old cities would be better but it’s harder to do because current residents mostly don’t want them. (I can’t blame them.) He mentioned Germany successfully integrated large numbers of immigrants from Syria as far as he knew. I’m skeptical but don’t know enough about it.

Poor

As somebody who spent a lot of time growing up poor, it gets really annoying listening to bleeding hearts who have no clue what they’re talking about. I was surprised at his insight. You know when you hear people talking and find yourself nodding along, seeing them get it right?

He made a good breakdown of the problem. The rural poor are worse off because they lack connection. This was certainly my experience being destitute in remote areas of the Central Valley of California. You can’t afford to fix a car that has constant problems. You’re constantly worrying if you have enough gas to get places. Are we going to make it to the closest food pantry? It’s harder to find work. Compare that to a city like San Francisco which is overflowing with services. (It’s a different question of whether that’s good/sustainable and incentivizes homeless people to come there.)

One big problem with being poor is the volatility. It’s incredibly stressful to not be stable. You unexpectedly have to go the hospital. Your car breaks down. You get laid off. 

He’s saying that microinsurance could fix this. I don’t know enough about the actual benefits of insurance to form an opinion but his point was that we could smooth this over with basically no increase in cost to the welfare state.

Hexayurt

A funny series of circumstances in which he randomly met hippies led to him being interested in the puzzle of efficiently building a geodesic dome that can be put into the back of a truck. This led him down a rabbit hole to broader problems. “Watch out for the hippies, they’re dangerous.” aka they can set you off on a completely different life course.

He talked about the cool history of how the hexayurt took off and how Burning Man has become the testing ground for them with people innovating, sharing ideas. It reminded me of the DIY Soylent crowd on Reddit.

I had seen he had defended Richard Stallman on Twitter, but I was slightly surprised he had the balls to do it in The People’s Republic of Ann Arbor. He was saying that he made his hexayurt open source and that a lot of good came from that decision, and then talked about the importance of the open-source movement and people like Richard Stallman even if he “puts his foot in his mouth.”

I’m still agnostic on the open-source system vs for-profit system. I wonder what ancaps think.

He got in some nice digs on non-engineers. “The building industry is basically a rip-off.” “Have engineers build houses rather than architects.”

He talked about the importance of modular design and that firms like IKEA could switch over to making emergency supplies and back to tables and desks quite easily.

Political Science

He had an interesting definition of a nation-state. I majored in political science in college (you won’t find a bigger critic of poli sci than me!) so it was interesting to hear his definition of a nation-state. Compared to the Weber‘s famous “monopoly on violence“, he stated the defining feature was the ability to pardon crimes, a “state of exemption” in which you can okay people killing, etc. It’s similar but an interesting distinction. I wonder if others have written about this but couldn’t find good links with lazy Googling. Please send me some if you know of any!

I wonder which US democratic candidate he would support. Yang?

He applied that sexy, first principles, clean slate, “How do we build this efficiently?” and “What comes out when you apply different constraints?” to building a city with some very impressive slides.

In many instances, Vinay seemed to basically be advocating properly eliminating the negative externalities and having firms be properly charged for their environmental impact. His startup Mattereum seems to be trying to do that. He had a quick comment about working with William Shatner on Star Trek merch being an interesting place to start. When I was in the incubator for my blockchain startup, we met a lot of people trying to work on blockchain and supply chain stuff. Seems like a good use case for it. I think a lot of people in the audience wouldn’t have supported his point if they understood it, given they just want to burn down capitalism and install a red state.

Q&A

We went to a smaller room for the Q&A. It reminded me of film class, and by that I mean it was mostly annoying. Film class is listening to maybe one or two people discuss things in a way that makes you see something in a new way, and twenty-five people who are grating to listen to with how stupid their thinking is.

Update: I wrote a whole article on this phenomenon:

The Greatest Film Career of All-Time

One girl who was obviously worked up emotionally about the environment pressed him on if this was another “quick fix” solution. He brought up the recycling rate of steel and how high it was and if it could be brought higher and other things like plastic that would be good. She responded: Don’t you need to heat it up to melt it, and doesn’t that energy have to come from somewhere? I felt like saying “What do you want him to do? Defeat entropy? TANSTAAFL, girl!” It’s common for people to get really worked up about things without accepting hard truths about reality or expect people to magically change and just “be good people” without changing the incentives.

There were some good questions, or at least questions that ended up bringing up good answers. 

Who employs the refugee workers? He said they would be set up as special economic zones and foreign direct investment would come in. I don’t know enough about this either. Again, what do the ancaps think?

How do you stop people shipping contraband in shipping containers? 

There will always be fraud but you have to keep trying to tilt the board in your favor. He didn’t use the word but he was saying it’s a Red Queen problem. 

Object-level solutions: sophisticated barcodes, locks, tracking the officers who inspected it and others who had access.

Things I wasn’t convinced of or impressed by

Now, almost all of these things weren’t the main discussion so he could have nuanced points that may clear some of it up.

He made a comment critical of Boris Johnson suspending Parliament. 

Important things to note:

I know very little about foreign politics.

I don’t know whether Brexit is a net good or net bad.

But I value consistency in evaluating the ethics of things. Hold both sides to the same standard. You can argue that suspending Parliament is immoral, which he was, but it doesn’t seem to be placing any consideration to the fact that the majority of the people voted Leave. Don’t only find fault in tactics used by those supporting Leave and not in tactics supporting Stay. I also don’t fault people for playing by the rules of a system. Change the rules or play them better. 

Some of this reminds me of people criticizing Russian bots. Where is the criticism of people being stupid enough to be convinced by silly Facebook posts?!

World on Fire

He was saying something about the younger generation born after 9/11 coming into a world on fire or something like that, and that they aren’t going to take it anymore. I think he mentioned Greta Thunberg as well. World on fire? This reminds me of Scott Adams’ two different movies playing. 

I understand x-risk and that some risks are increasing over time but still. I’m sympathetic to the Pinker “Better Angels” and Rosling” Factfulness” or the article by Luke Muehlhauser on how shit got way better after the industrial revolution. The “recognition that things are better than ever” movie.

I think that abstract pandering about the world being on fire is rather silly. Yes, you can watch a montage of all the horrible things going on in the world and link to fifty news articles. But that doesn’t change the fact that the average life is vastly better than it was before.

AI

I asked him what he thought about Bostrom, the alignment problem, and AI, and he said he didn’t believe in strong AI basically because only one species evolved verbal intelligence. There were more questions and little time so he didn’t have time to elaborate, but still.

Closing

I liked his epistemic awareness. He pointed out that he doesn’t know what the best solution is and there are other people in a better position to know.

He was warm and had a good handshake. I mentioned first knowing him from the SSC thing and he responded “Oh, that clusterfuck!” He seemed happy to chat more, but in the moment I was too distracted and couldn’t think of the things I wanted to discuss. Alas, that’s what Twitter is for, and a lunch invitation. I love the feeling of having so much to unpack, so much to explore. Most people you meet, it just deadens out. Everyone’s got stories, sure, but not everyone is connected to a valuable web of ideas to explore. That was Vinay.

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9/11

My dad woke me up and had me come downstairs. I was sleepy but it seemed important. The TV was on and it showed flames coming from some buildings. I don’t remember if it was before the plane hit the South Tower or not. I don’t remember my parents’ or sister’s reactions.

I got dropped off at school. I don’t remember if they thought about keeping me home or not. I’m not sure what I would do as a parent. I don’t mean fear of a terrorist attack happening in Hickman, CA, population 500, but just staying home because it was a BIG DEAL. Either way, I’m glad they took me because I think there’s something about processing everything in public, communally.

I remember sitting down in my social studies class and our teacher Mr. Vanden Bosch had the news playing. What he said stuck with me.

“What you’re watching is going to affect us all for years to come. Kids like you will be reading about it in their history books.”

He was right.

In the months after, we used to play parody videos and look up pictures making fun of Bin Laden. Juvenile stuff like Osama with a literal butthead. We played this in class:

I remember seeing police cars at the local Sikh temple presumably to stop them from people harassing or vandalizing them.

Some things were to become household names. The Twin Towers? I had no idea what they were but if I would have thought clearly, I would have realized I knew them from Home Alone 2 where Macaulay Culkin is amazed by them.

Afghanistan. I had no idea where it was before and doubt most people did. The Taliban. Al-Qaeda. Were they different? They were both terrorist groups? Later: Iraq. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Michael Moore.

9/11 was such a massive event that there are so many facets to it. You could focus on the history preceding it. The flying lessons. The fatwa against the US by bin Laden. The WTC bombing in 1993. How far back do you go? The Soviets invading Afghanistan? How about the destruction of the region by Genghis Khan and the Mongols in 1219?

What about the effects? The people in the planes. The people in the towers. The Falling Man. The first responders. The health effects from the dust and even the people who died from car crashes because they were afraid of flying.

Bush, Cheney, the War on Terror, Mission Accomplished. The hunt for bin Laden and his eventual assassination nearly ten years later.

The Arab Spring. ISIS.

The conspiracies. Loose Change. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams. 9/11 was an inside job. Mossad did it. Thermite.

The debates. Is it Islam? Some of Islam? A few bad apples? Socioeconomic and cultural problems with the people separate from their religion?

Liberals vs conservatives. Was it because of the US meddling in foreign affairs? “9/11 is just retaliation! Look at how many people the US has bombed!”

There are so many interesting facets to the case.

We’ve all had to check our bags at the airport, frustrated knowing there was a chance they could be delayed or misplaced. That’s what actually led to the “Rosetta Stone” of the 9/11 investigation. The leader of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, was forced to check his bags late, so they never made it onto the plane and were later discovered at the airport. Those bags, it turned out, had a treasure trove for the FBI — documents full of details about the hijackers and their connections. This is how the FBI was able to release photos and details about the hijackers only hours after the attacks. Imagine being the first person to open those up and see what was inside. My hands wouldn’t have been able to stop shaking.

The Queen allowed the tributes to play the Star Spangled Banner on September 12 (h/t Reddit):

Visiting the 9/11 Museum in New York last year was an experience. It’s a lot. There’s one thing after another in there. All the stories. Each person had a story. Each one connected to someone else. And all the stories that ended.

Generally, the further you go back in time, the less information we have about it until you reach “pre-history” before there’s any written historical record. Conversely, the closer you get to modern day, the more we have until we’re saturated with them. Documents, photos, video, etc.

Even an event as recent as Kennedy’s assassination only has the one clear video: the Zapruder film, which has been endlessly studied and analyzed. If there was a president assassinated now we’d have fifty high-definition cell phone videos uploaded to Youtube in minutes not to mention the live news cameras filming.

Look at how many pictures and videos we have from 9/11. Watching videos of anchors first breaking the news, it feels so surreal knowing that they have no idea all that will unfold from what they’re seeing.

You can see how quickly people realized that it was purposeful after the second plane hit:

“This seems to be on purpose.”

“Now it’s obvious. …I think we have a terrorist act.”

This video shot by NYU students showed the attitude change (h/t Reddit). (Disturbing video obviously):

It’s been eighteen years. Someone pointed out that for the first time, we’re going to have people voting in the presidential election who weren’t alive when it happened.

I’m not sure how to sign off this post. I feel like having some lesson or poignant but upbeat point would be good but I don’t know what.

Where were you? What was your experience like after and what is it like now?

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Caffeine, Gas, and Plywood Frenzies: How to Prepare for a Hurricane

The alarm goes off. It’s 4:30am. Time to go to Home Depot for plywood. If they took your pulse on the drive there, it would be 120. At least it felt like that. When you arrive, there’s already a line stretching out the door.

The manager is going up and down the line telling people they only have plywood and no other supplies. Everyone is mostly calm, to your surprise. Waiting, waiting, waiting. You’ve made it inside the actual store now. More waiting. Shuffling. Moving forward. Lines start getting reorganized and the order and calm you were so surprised to see when you got there are disappearing by the minute. Frenzy infects the mob. Places in line are lost.

People are angry. A position is secured and you’re happy. Phew. Some of your line-neighbors are giving out advice. Some of it is good, some shoddy. Despite the chaos, most of your fellow shufflers are courteous, nice. Aisle by aisle, the final destination draws closer: the plywood stack, in all it’s promising-safety-from-the-storm glory. An employee starts to count people. A bad sign. There are hundreds of people behind you. They’ve been waiting for hours and most of them will leave empty-handed. You’re glad you got here as early as you did. You later hear some people had been waiting outside the store since 2am. They put the plywood on your cart and you make it out! Success. You’re in your house getting things ready and shoveling food in your mouth since you didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast. You’re tired but somehow energized and eager to get the boards up. You go to the hurricane shutter storage room, only to find some of your boards missing. Pieces aren’t there. They’re gone. Has someone taken them? It must be someone in the building. Suddenly, you’re enraged. The hunt for your stolen plywood is afoot, and you won’t relax until you have it back. Not even then, you still have to put them up and try to drive out of here…

Hurricane Lesson #1 People can be horrible. Our friends actually did have their plywood stolen. It was disturbing to watch unfold, especially getting up before the sun and waiting in line for hours to get it in the first place.

They later found out it was taken by another neighbor. Right next door! The person who stole it actually covered up the number on the plywood with spray paint! People can suck. But people can also be really great. Our friends/neighbors helped us out tremendously. They provided guidance on the plywood and help putting them up and taking them down. They sheltered us in their refrigerated paradise when our A/C was out and it was 95 degrees in the apartment. It feels so much safer/it’s more comforting when you’re “in it” with someone else. Adri’s classmates who live nearby came over to check on us to see if we needed anything and let us borrow tools. Another friend checked in to see if we needed anything, and sent us pictures of our place after the storm to show us what kind of damage (or lack thereof) took place. We got to stay with Kelsey in SF and see people when Adri wasn’t studying. Numerous other people checked in with us and offered help. So there are some people who will steal your supplies in times of need, and it’s okay to be aware of that. But don’t assume that’s everyone. This reminds me of a Mr. Rogers quote about children and what to say when they see scary things on the news. He says, “There was something else my mother did that I’ve always remembered. ‘Always look for the helpers,’ she’d tell me. ‘There’s always someone who is trying to help.’ I did look out for helpers, and I came to see that the world is full of doctors and nurses, police and firemen, volunteers, neighbors and friends who are ready to jump in to help when things go wrong.”

Hurricane lesson #2. People can also be really awesome.

After living in Florida for a little more than two years now, these are some of my thoughts on hurricane preparedness. There’s a lot more to preparedness in general but that’s for a later time. We already had a decent cache of survival supplies since I’m into this stuff. Being from California, we’ve got a strong handle on earthquake preparedness. Hurricanes are a different beast. By the time we started paying attention to the hurricane, it seemed like we were three days behind everyone else. Grocery stores started running out of water and non-perishables, Best Buy ran out of external battery packs, and hardware stores were out of plywood and other prep gear. Luckily, we didn’t need to scramble for most of the things people were scrambling for. Here are a few short things I observed/learned.

1. Buy easy things first. Like go do it now, in the off-season. Here are the items I have found to be most important, both from researching and from my personal experience so far. Next time you’re shopping just get extra non-perishable food (make sure you have a can opener) and a couple packages of water bottles. I advocate getting bottled water first and then bigger water storage containers later as you can share the bottled water more easily. Get more items as you can in order of importance and expense. I’d recommend agas can next. Wirecutter has good a recommendation. Some other items that aren’t commonly on some lists but are helpful: contractor black garbage bags (extra thick and perfect for wrapping stuff and storing it in safer places like windowless, center bathrooms), caffeine pills (for staying awake while trying to drive after no sleep from working all day, or some similar situation). General life tip (not only for emergencies): take L-theanine with the caffeine. From the nootropics subreddit: “L-Theanine is one of the main psychoactive compounds found in tea. L-theanine is extremely safe and has been shown to mitigate the negative aspects of caffeine, such as anxiety, increased blood pressure and diminished sleep quality, while possibly improving upon the positive aspects.” Okay, back to emergencies. Have some extension cords (for power tools that don’t have batteries), power tools (especially a drill/impact driver), good work gloves (for moving plywood and other crap around), fans (airing the place out and providing some cooling if the power is back but your A/C is not), Also a pry bar/axe/hatchet-fire extinguisher combo. If you’ve covered the windows and a fire breaks out you may have a tough time escaping. And a fire extinguisher, obviously, for fire suppression along with the tools to try to escape the barriers you’ve created.

2. Backup your stuff. My backup process is to scan or take pictures of items. Put files on an external hard drive. Backup that external drive to another external hard drive. Then I backup up everything to the cloud through Backblaze. That way you have the physical items themselves, the items on hard drive1 that you take with you, the items on hard drive2 that you store somewhere, AND everything is on the cloud. It may seem excessive but it’s easy once you have everything set up and really solid. If it doesn’t seem worth it just imagine your computer or hard drives being destroyed by a fire or flood. Then you won’t be as upset when you accidentally delete something on your computer, or your hard drive crashes, or flooding ruins your mementos.

3. Get to know your neighbors. It makes things easier when you’re all scrambling outside your place or need to borrow things from each other. Easy way to do it: say hi when you see them outside. This is often enough to let them know that you exist and are probably decent enough not to steal their plywood when the storm craze sets in. And you never know, you might make some friends in the process!

4. Don’t put tape on your windows. This is not empirically supported. As an aside, neither is standing under doorframes during earthquakes (pro-tip for West-coasters). Put flammable things away and be especially careful with candles/open flames. You really don’t want a fire to break out when you’ve just spent a bunch of time barricading yourself in.

5. Keep copies of your house keys around. Leaving keys with trusted friends and neighbors allows them to check on your place if you’re still hiding abroad. It’s best not to wait until there’s a hurricane watch to copy your keys. You start running out of time quickly in the days before a hurricane, so you want to reduce the number of errands you have to run and the amount of gas you have to use. Do this the next time you’re near a Home Depot or any place that has a key-copier.

6. Park in a parking garage on an above-ground floor (but not the uncovered top floor), if you can. I don’t think most people’s cars are too damaged by the wind itself, but sheltering the car can limit the chances of flooding and getting hit by flying tree branches and other debris.

7. Keep your gas tank full pretty much always. By the time you hear about the hurricane, there will more-than-likely be a line of 30 cars outside every gas station within reasonable distance. Get a gas can before and keep that full. If you need to evacuate you may be caught in traffic for longer than you think and you don’t want to run out of gas and be stuck on the highway.

The Greatest Film Career of All-Time

Other actors have accomplished more in terms of number of Great Movies and doing both acting and directing or film and television and theatre but I’m not sure anyone has come close to the film career that Harrison Ford has. He has the perfect combination of critically acclaimed darlings and box office franchise smashes (usually both at the same time). (I’m sure this isn’t an original thought.) He starred in great thrillers, dramas, and comedies like The Fugitive, Witness, Presumed Innocent, and American Graffiti. He worked with Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation and Apocalypse Now and Mike Nichols in Working Girl. He was an action hero as the POTUS in Air Force One and Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. He was Deckard in now two Blade Runners. He was BOTH Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Unbeatable.

Harrison Ford Raising Glass

John’s Favorite Relationship Resources

If you were to ask me “What are you most proud of?” I would answer “My relationships.” Here are some of my favorite resources on the topic.

I don’t endorse all the things here but this is a good assortment to get an idea of what’s out there. (These are mostly from the male-side of things.)

Relationship Health and Communication Skills

John Gottman’s books on relationships

The classic best resource for having healthy relationships. The marriage ones are fine for the not married/people in less committed relationships as well.

Here’s a short article describing bids: https://www.gottman.com/blog/turn-toward-instead-of-away/

And one describing the Four Horsemen: https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-four-horsemen-recognizing-criticism-contempt-defensiveness-and-stonewalling/

Those are the 80/20 most important concepts in my opinion. Still, his books are definitely must reads! I would start with The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and the Relationship Cure. 

How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

You may have already read this. It’s the classic.

Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton

Great intro article by AJ Jacobs on Radical Honesty (who is interesting in his own way for all the experiments he does): https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a26792/honesty0707/

I want to add Sam Harris’ Lying here as well. I don’t fully practice radical honesty but it’s something I think about.

Tim Ferriss Experiment episode on dating:

This is good to watch just to see the different methods of “hacking” dating.

Compatibility/Learning about Yourself
The Big Five is the best personality model and way better than Myers-Briggs. Recognizing where you are at on the Big Five and what your ideal traits are in a partner is really helpful. It also let’s you see and predict why others are doing things the way they are. 
I haven’t gotten around to reading the book but knowing what your love languages are and your partners can clear up a lot of things.

Evolutionary Arguments/Dark Triad stuff

The Game by Neil Strauss

The original primer and bible of pickup artists. Pickup artists and game is very controversial but it’s worth at least knowing what’s out there even if you think some of it is immoral.

Red Pill stuff: https://web.archive.org/web/20170302213843/https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/2q582c/a_comprehensive_guide_to_the_red_pill/
I feel like you should also at least be familiar with the red pill stuff even if a lot of it is distasteful/exaggerated/or most encountered with demographics of people you should avoid anyway. Still, reading it will let you know what people mean if you come across this type of stuff: 

More seduction/PUA: https://www.reddit.com/r/seduction/top/?t=all

The Red Pill (2016) documentary by Cassie Jaye

A feminist filmmaker dives into the men’s rights movement and does a very rare thing: has her mind changed. Helps give a more balanced perspective on gender issues.

Sexuality

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan

Some controversial claims and there have been some empirical criticisms but still very much worth reading.

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley

I never got around to reading it but it’s always recommended for an evolutionary understanding of sexuality.

Ethical Non-Monogamy/Alternative Relationships

Polyamory isn’t for everyone and high-level relationships take exceptional people. I agree that monagamish (as popularized by Dan Savage) is probably the best form of relationship for most people. Certainly being realistic and aware of evolutionary history with mating and relationships is vital. 

Poly: https://www.reddit.com/r/polyamory/wiki/faq
https://www.morethantwo.com/polyamory.html

Poly Writing from the Rationality Community

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/06/polyamory-is-boring/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/79x/polyhacking/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/17/polyamory-is-not-polygyny/

This interview with Professors Geoffrey Miller and Diana Fleischman is one of the most cogent on polyamory and relationships I’ve seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRC6JYSbgsE

Aella: https://aella.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-from-my-date-me-experiment

(I didn’t read all this but wanted to link to something she wrote about being poly/dating without linking random tweets.)

Putanumonit’s blog: https://putanumonit.com/category/love/

Dynamics

Can polyamorous hierarchies be ethical? Part 1: The tower and the village

Relationship Anarchy: http://log.andie.se/

The ideas here aren’t really useful to me but they’re worth knowing about.

The Ethical Slut by Dossie Eaton

Classic book on non-monogamy

Stranger in a Strange Land

Great book by the badass sci-fi author Robert Heinlein which is worth reading on its own and it has interesting stuff on relationships in it.

 

Her Birthday Dress: A Zombie Flash Fiction

This was originally published in 2013 in “Zombies?! Zombies!! An Anthology”.

He didn’t want to do this. He couldn’t do this.  

“I can’t. I can’t.”

He was sobbing now. The tears were streaming down his face.

“Please no. I can’t! Please!”

No one else could do anything.

“GOD HELP ME!” he shrilled.

“Is this what we’ve come to? Has it really come to this?”

“Don’t hurt me.” the child said. It was his child. It was his son.

“Don’t hurt me, Papa. I love you, Papa.”

“Shut up. Don’t call me Papa! Shut up!”

He had his little girl to consider. She wasn’t infected. He couldn’t let that happen to her. He’d been careless. He could taste the salt from the snot and tears running down his face. His body was soaked with sweat. Red spots on his head were showing from where he had pulled his own hair out. He would have killed himself already if it weren‘t for Emily still being alive. It would have been a lot easier if she were dead. Their mother was.

“Don’t hurt me, Papa.”

“Shut up.” he said, tears streaming down his face. “You’re not my son anymore. Shut up. Get out. Get the fuck out of here.” his voice was a high shrill.

The boy was crying. He was only eleven years old.  He didn’t understand. He was hungry and tired. It was cold.

“Emily, go upstairs.”

“Don’t hurt him Daddy.” she was crying too. It would have been easier if she was dead.

“Emily go upstairs.” He was starting to lose his hold.

“Emily go upstairs.” She wasn’t moving. She just lay there in her dirty pink dress crying on the floor in the corner. He had bought her that dress for her birthday. It was her birthday dress. He was losing it.

“Emily! Get the fuck upstairs!”

She wasn’t going to go. He couldn’t do it. He had lost.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His bottom lip quivered. He wasn’t crying anymore. He held her tightly to him. The room was dark and wet. There were rain tracks on the floor.

“I’m so sorry, honey.”

He pulled back the hammer of the revolver.

“We’re going to be with Mama.”

Two shots rang out. His body slumped to the ground next to hers.  

His son lay writhing on the ground. Blood was already starting to squirt out of his mouth. Thirty minutes later he had turned into one of them.