Steve Bryant

Now that we are a month in we are going to start incorporating some guests. Part of the goal is to include some new and different ideas and the other is to give ourselves a little break from the onslaught of the nightly deadline. Today’s editor is Steve Bryant (hereby referred to as SB). Beyond being the first person to ask to guest edit, Steve is also part of the team behind one of my favorite newsletters: Article Group’s aptly named Article (I wrote about variance for them a few weeks ago). Steve and I share a possibly unhealthy obsession with frameworks and mental models and today’s edition is all about triangles in frameworks, hierarchies, logos, and life. Thanks Steve! (PS - If any of you would like to do a guest edit, please just drop a line.) - Noah (NRB)Steve here. Everybody knows Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (HON). It’s motivational psychology 101. It’s the concept casually referenced everywhere from conference rooms to coffee shops. I know it. You know it. Your barista knows it.Most of us recall the HON as a triangle—a tidy and pleasingly geometric representation of the stages of human growth. You start at the base where you're motivated by everyday, Rolling Stones-like, needs (gimme shelter). Then you ascend, workmanlike, through the tiers of safety, belonging, and esteem. As the triangle narrows to its apex, you leave behind the less talented, the less aspirational. Strive diligently, the triangle suggests, and you’ll eventually reach that Everest of motivational peaks, the thin and rarified climes of self-actualization.     This is a pleasing model. A coherent model. A model that appears complete. Its equilateral structure conveys sturdiness and strength and scientific credibility. It looks precise. Exact. As a corporate signifier, it represents command and control: the talented c-suite at the top, the mediocre permalancers at the base. It’s the most famous symbol in all of management studies.But here’s the thing: Maslow never suggested a triangle. He never implied his hierarchy should be a triangle. In fact, he disliked the idea of the triangle—he thought the triangle was too reductive and introduced misconceptions. So when every corporate strategist describes their customer’s Buddha-like ascent up those vertices, they’re laboring under a mighty misconception.The triangle, in other words, is a lie.Why is this interesting?Because Maslow’s triangle (or pyramid) is the most famous symbol in management studies—a management meme, if you will. But if Maslow himself never suggested a triangle, who did? And why? And what purpose does the triangle serve?A new paper suggests the original culprit is Douglas McGregor, a professor at MIT Sloan. McGregor incorporated HON into his Theory X and Theory Y of Management and his classic book The Human Side of Enterprise. That book was wildly popular, but obscured Maslow’s influence (emphasis mine):McGregor’s incorporation of Maslow’s thinking into his work in this obscure fashion facilitated later misinterpretations of Maslow and might have contributed to others placing the HON in a pyramid. For example, among the most popular criticisms of the hierarchy of needs today is the view that people are motivated to satisfy only one need at the time, that a need must be fully satisfied before they move to a higher level need on the pyramid, and that a satisfied need is no longer a motivator of behavior. This view is promulgated by McGregor, not Maslow. McGregor (1960: 39, emphasis in original) summarizes: “The man whose lower-level needs are satisfied is not motivated to satisfy those needs. For practical purposes they exist no longer.”What’s more, the pyramid took on a universality both across societies and individuals that Maslow never intended. He “acknowledged that while most of his clinical patients seemed to have their needs arranged in his needs hierarchy, there were ‘a number of exceptions.’ For some, self-esteem was more important than love. … Maslow (1943: 390) was clear that “no claim is made that [self-actualization] is ultimate or universal for all cultures.” These misinterpretations of Maslow’s work eventually led to the reduction of HON into a triangle. The first appearance of that triangle was in a 1960 article in Business Horizons called “How Money Motivates Men”.So how did the HON triangle become so universal—despite it being in a form Maslow never intended, and with characteristics he didn’t suggest? The Academy of Management’s research is clear—blame the consultants and textbook authors:Presenting the HON as a pyramid suited almost everyone involved: consultants like McDermid who needed a memorable framework to sell to clients; the Academy of Management who wanted its members to be seen as being relevant to practice; textbook publishers and authors who needed not just an idea that had practical applications to the “real world,” but also the academic credibility that a “founding father” such as Maslow could provide (and then a progression that could be demonstrated by showing his ideas to be simplistic and outdated); and researchers who could propose extensions to the pyramid to address gaps in Maslow’s thinking.Maslow was alive while all this misrepresentation was going on. He didn’t like it. But, he did little to correct it.He did, however, express his dislike for reductionism by coining a new term—rubricizing: “a cheap form of cognizing, i.e., really a form of not-cognizing, a quick, easy cataloguing whose function is to make unnecessary the effort required by more careful, idiographic perceiving or thinking”. (SB)Maslow Overreach of the Day:It’s hard to choose just one, but after some Googling, I think this Maslow translated to fashion brands must make the list. Honorable mention to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Startups. (NRB) Quick Links:Triangles are everywhere. In his classic Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), Rene Girard argued for mimetic theory—the idea that we borrow our ideas from others, and that our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person—the model—for this same object. “This means that the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: there is always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object.” (SB)My favorite business triangle is probably the project management iron triangle (not to be confused with the politics version). It’s based on the universal truth that every project is constrained by cost, scope, and time, and that if you want to pull on one edge you’re going to have to adjust the other two accordingly. (NRB)All this triangle talk reminded me that Bass Ale’s red triangle was “the very first trademark to be registered under the U.K.’s Trade Mark Registration Act of 1875.” (NRB)The Delta Factor, Walker Percy’s theory of language, argues that the triangle is the irreducible building block of human intelligence. (SB)In information science, the DIKW Pyramid represents “purported structural and/or functional relationships between Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom”. (SB)Even more triangles: The Lewis Model of cultural types, Harbenger’s Triangle of deadweight loss, and Bowen Theory’s relationship triangle. (SB)There’s a Maslow Hotel in South Africa where the level of accommodations are presented in pyramid form. (SB)In conclusion: “Triangle man, triangle man, triangle man hates particle man.” (SB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB)

Why is this interesting? - Monday, April 22

Steve Bryant (SB) has been a longtime friend and contributor to WITI. He’s a seasoned editorial strategist and has worked at and built publications like Thrillist, Insidehook, among others. Here, we peer into his wide-ranging media and consumption habits, and his penchant for pushing rental cars to their limits and beyond. - Colin (CJN)Tell us about yourself.I’m a writer and strategist and merry prankster. I work with brands and agencies on marketing strategy and content operations, and I publish a delightful newsletter about using frameworks to make better creative and strategic decisions. I’m also the founder of Rental Car Rally, a ridiculously fun overnight road rally in costume that has been, on at least once occasion, suspected by the Department of Homeland Security for nuclear terrorism (don’t take photos in front of reactor silos while wearing a ninja costume, noted). When I was a young man in short pants I was one of the first editors of Thrillist and the founding editor of InsideHook. Once upon a time, I created Wiimbledon, the world’s first Wii tennis tournament which, according to NYMag's Approval Matrix, was “brilliant and lowbrow”. Tbh it’s all been downhill from there. Describe your media diet.I read widely and indiscriminately and with no plan whatsoever. This is my way and I enjoy it. Many highly impressive, get-shit-done’rs I’ve encountered have IFTTT-powered, Rube Goldbergian systems for tagging and routing content to various digital hobbit holes. I do not. But in defense of my shrug emoji-like way, it’s called a browser, not a supply chain manager. These days I read a healthy amount of newsletters. People who love newsletters love them for their voice and relative intimacy, being in the inbox and all. I love them for that, and also because they enforce a kind of supply scarcity. They come one a time. They’re not in a feed. There are few social signals about their popularity. And y’know, you can always reply and have a conversation that nobody else can see. Which is the way the world used to be, but we forget that.Some quality favorites: Samuel Arbesman’s Cabinet of Wonders, Vaughn Tan’s Uncertainty Mindset, Patrick Tanguay’s Sentiers, Edith Zimmerman’s Drawing Links, Venkatesh Rao’s Breaking Smart, Anjali Ramachandran’s Other Valleys, Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk’s Margins. Oh and Messy Nessy Chic.I also love reading what people recommend me to read because then you learn something about a) that thing, b) that friend, and c) how you relate to that thing and that friend. Such a pretty triangle.What’s the last great book you read?I wanna say Tyll: A Novel (recommended by Edith, linked above). Amazing historical fiction about a European jester during the Thirty Years' War. What are you reading now?The Secrets of Triangles and 5,000 Years of Geometry, but only like parts of them, because I’m obsessed with triangles at the moment. Also: The Double by Jose Saramago, which became that spooky movie with Jake Gyllenhal, because of book club. I’ve been picking at Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas for a few months. What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?Start in the back. Anybody who approaches a relationship from the front terrifies me. Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?I dunno, Chaucer?What is the best non-famous app on your phone?Oblique Strategies, the card system developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help artists solve creative challenges through lateral thinking.Plane or train?Ah. Well. This is really a trick question, isn’t it? When you talk about flying you talk about boarding zones and reward points and WiFi above 10,000 feet. You talk about status and first-class. Above all, you talk about airports, those sprawling Vaticans of duty-free perfumes. I love it. I love that world, the thin nowhereness of it, the brightly-lit margins of non-existence. But it’s also, like, hermetically sealed? A non-world. Because the language of airports and airplanes is the language of teleporting. It’s the language of trying to forget that you are, in fact, traveling. On a train, all that matters, as cliche as this sounds, is the journey. The rattling feeling that you aren't just getting to somewhere you’re going through something. Don’t get me wrong, that passage can be gross. Feet, cigarettes, stale blankets. On the overnight Texas Eagle from Chicago to Dallas once, I felt like I was being digested by a prodigious steel worm. But at least on the train, bless it, you can’t deny that you’re traveling. Trestle to trestle, track to track. The doors will open at the front of the car. What is one place everyone should visit?The Salton Sea. It’s one of our favorite checkpoints on Rental Car Rally. It’s a man-made lake in the hinterlands of SoCal. Created by accident in 1905 (recommended: the book Cadillac Desert, about America’s catastrophic water planning). Was a WWII army training ground—the remnants of that are now called Slab City. It was a resort that rivaled Palm Springs for a while in the ‘50s, but the fertilized runoff from the surrounding areas made the sea increasingly fetid. It’s gross now. Abandoned suburb street grids. Abandoned resort. A friend of mine lives at Bombay Beach and frequents its one lonely bar. Nearby is the desert art commune of East Jesus. Salvation Mountain is right down the road. A fun documentary on the area, by KQED and free on YouTube, is The Pain and Pleasures of the Salton Sea.Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell into. Oh god. I have an unhealthy obsession with triangles. It started when I read The Delta Factor, by Walker Percy. He attempts to explain mankind’s use of symbols to refer to phenomena. By way of example, he explains how Helen Keller learned sign language by her tutor drawing symbols on her hand. Keller didn’t understand the symbols, Percy explains until her tutor poured water over her hand while also drawing the symbol for “water” in her palm. Signifier (sign) + Referent (water) + Helen = irreducible linguistic triangle of understanding phenomena via their symbols. This struck me as delightful so I kinda got hyped on this triangle thing. There’s the math, and then the symbolism, and then the wackadoo new age crap. I read up on the classics (Euclid’s Elements, Islamic mathematics, Plato’s Timaeus) and was taken with the fact of the triangle being the simplest way to enclose planar space in Euclidean geometry. And how trigonometry is the study of triangles. And how it’s just the most elegant form. Some people will say “well what about a circle” they’re elegant too, but you really don’t know where you are in a circle unless you use a triangle now, do you? And then I started seeing triangles everywhere. The Bermuda Triangle and the Culinary Triangle and Rene Girard’s memetic desire (we only desire what someone else desires—triangle!). The Irish poet Sean Lucy argued that all literary aesthetics could be reduced to triangles. Johan Galtung argued that human conflict is a triangle. Journalists tell you they use the upside-down pyramid, but that shit’s just a triangle. There’s Maslow’s hierarchy (triangle), the nutrition pyramid (triangle), Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric (triangle). Not to mention dopy stuff like the Masonic Eye of Providence and the religious stuff like the Shri Yantra and Christian trinitarianism. And They Might Be Giants, can’t forget them, Triangle Man hates Particle Man. Hell, the first trademark was a triangle! Anyway, I am still burrowing in this hole and have promised Noah and Colin a “whole WITI” about triangles soon.Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Monday Media Diet with Steve Bryant

If you are curious why this WITI arrived in the evening, it’s a regular story of trying to do two things at once (in this case, queue an e-mail and walk the dog) and I hit the wrong button. We will be back to our regular schedule Monday morning. - NoahSteve Bryant (SB) is a content strategy consultant, co-founder of the midnight costumed adventure Rental Car Rally, founding editor of InsideHook, and a longtime friend of WITI (he wrote our very first guest edition on Maslow).Steve here. Discoveries are often made by multiple people, but we tend to only remember one of those folks. This is just as true for the theory of evolution (Wallace, but also Darwin), as it is for lightning rods (Diviš, but also Franklin), as it is for the electrical telegraph—invented by Wheatstone but also Morse, whose first message is a favorite of trivianauts and bibliophiles alike (“what hath god wrought”, Numbers 23:23).The concept of multiple discovery also happens to apply to a favorite hobbyhorse of mine, the Pythagorean Theorem—the formula that allows you to deduce the area of a square alongside a triangle’s hypotenuse, which in turn allows you to develop trigonometry, which in turn allows you to (eventually) navigate the ocean using a sextant and (even further eventually) calculate things like the height of Mount Everest without climbing it and the fastest route via Google Maps. Now any Tom, Dick, or Platonist can tell you that the Pythagorean Theorem was first set down as an axiomatic proof in Euclid’s Elements around 300BCE. It is slightly less well known (tho very Wikipediable) that parts of the theorem were known as early as 3000 BCE as far away as India and China. As with all multiple discoveries, the interesting question is...how? How did multiple people discover the same thing? And in this case, given that the theorem empirically describes geometric reality, was there any similarity in the thought process that led people thousands of miles distant and thousands of years apart to discover it? I mean, everyone was just trying to create, like, wagon wheels...right?Hoo boy, not at all! The triangles in Babylon are the triangles in Punjab are the triangles in Fenghao, but the reason for developing those triangles was wildly different. Why is this interesting?Those differences reveal quite a lot about how different cultures pursued knowledge, and even how they valued the practice of learning. My favorite example comes by way of an ancient Chinese concept called the Mandate of Heaven. Popularized by the Zhou Dynasty beginning around 1100 BC, the Mandate of Heaven argued that heaven, not blood, grants the emperor the right to rule. Heaven, the argument went, decides whether a ruler is “virtuous”, and that virtue allows him or her to rule.This, as you might imagine, was a BHD (Big Historical Deal). By doing away with rule by royalty, the mandate opened leadership to the people and justified rule by rebellion and force (“I have the mandate, follow me!”). By tying leadership to virtue, the mandate also required rulers to be responsible (“I treat you well, keep following me!”). But by leaving “virtue” open to interpretation, the mandate incentivized rulers to, well, make shit up. In practice, it meant that rulers had to secure the mandate through tangible and explicable communications with heaven, and explain every chance event (comets, earthquakes, famine, etc) as a positive sign of heaven’s unwavering aegis.As you might imagine, trying to convince people at every moment that heaven loves the emperor can be ≋c≋r≋a≋z≋y≋ ≋m≋a≋k≋i≋n≋g≋. Rulers had to make sacrifices on mountain tops and create calendars to predict celestial events and build temples to receive heaven’s blessing. In other words, they had to enact the reality they wished their followers to believe in. It was there, in the midst of all that performative interpretation, that the triangles come in. The Chinese of the first millennium BCE believed Earth was a square and heaven was a circle. As in: the Earth was a flat, four-cornered thing, and heaven existed as a flat disc directly above it. The sun, according to this conception, was 80,000 li away (roughly 20,790 miles): To make this concept understandable, they likened the square to a chariot. They likened the circle to the canopy that stood above that chariot. They called this concept “Canopy Heaven”. Over time, Canopy Heaven fell out of favor. If Heaven were exactly round and Earth exactly square and both were exactly the same size then that meant, some argued, that the four angles of square Earth would not be well-covered by circular heaven. Owing to this lack of figurative accuracy, the concept of Canopy Heaven began to be replaced by another concept—Spherical Heaven—whose main assumption was that Heaven contains Earth in the same way that an egg contains the yolk. Clearly, more rigorous minds had prevailed.But some mathematicians couldn’t let the idea of Canopy Heaven go. The author of the Zhou Gnomon, a mathematical classic compiled in the first century BCE, turned the problem of joining a round Heaven and a square Earth into the problem of arranging a circle and a square on a plane, especially one within the other. From that attempt to reason out the physical connection between the circle of Heaven and the square of Earth, some historians argue, the author deduced an instance of the Pythagorean Theorem. So to sum up: The ancient Chinese derived a geometric truth because they believed they had to keep despots off the throne, and in order to keep despots off the throne they had to maintain heaven’s favor, and in order to maintain heaven’s favor they had to prove the earth was shaped like a square and that heaven was shaped like a circle directly above it. Which is to say that even the most enthusiastically wrongheaded folks can, in the attempt to justify their own moral superiority, make some useful discoveries—it’s just a long way to go for a ham sandwich. That would be the end of our story but, to bring this argument to a π-like full circle, it’s important to note a few important contextual bits and bobs. While the ancient Chinese did develop geometric principles, and they did develop those principles in pursuit of judging heaven’s height, there is debate about whether their mathematicians used “proofs”. This may seem like a minor point, but the debate suggests that Chinese mathematicians couldn’t “discover” the Pythagorean Theorem if they didn’t “show their work” in the same way the Greeks did. But that equivalency suggests a biased reasoning. Perhaps looking for a Chinese equivalent to Grecian methodology is, itself, an ethnocentric expectation. As some historians have noted, giving a Euclid-like proof wasn’t as important to Chinese mathematicians as explaining the use of the methods they were expounding to solve certain problems. It’s only the Western value system, which was written into the history books during the 18th century’s so-called opening of China, that argues for the supremacy of the Grecian way of thinking.This debate about ancient geometry extends like a straight line into infinity, and it’s beyond the scope of this piece to address it all. Suffice to say that the Pythagorean Theorem was discovered, in one way or another, and for one reason or another, several times by several different people on several different continents. Some of those people cared about the heights of heaven. Others cared about the heights of philosophy. There’s an elegant equivalence there, if you do the math. And anyway no matter where you are, like Euclid said, all right angles are equal to each other. (SB)Books of the Day:I am neither a historian or an expert in Chinese history, and to write this piece I relied on significant portions of the following books. I especially recommend Cullen for his rigorous analysis of mathematical artifacts, Tseng for her great overview of ancient theology, and Chemla et al for their inclusive approach to historical maths. (SB)Karine Chemla, The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions, (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Dirk L. Couprie, When the Earth was Flat: Studies in Ancient Greek and Chinese Cosmology, (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2018)Christopher Cullen, Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Michael Loewe, Edward L. Shaughnessy, The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (Cambridge University Press, 1999)Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Picturing Heaven in Early China (New York: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)Quick Links:The Cold War Bunker That Became Home to a Dark-Web Empire (NRB)Inside the hidden world of competitive lockpicking (NRB)Cloudflare has a really nice speed test page (something I’m doing a lot more of these days) (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB)PS - Noah here. Variance, my new company, is just getting going with our Alpha. If you work in sales, services, marketing, or engineering and want to try out/give feedback on a tool to help your team work more effectively with their apps, please request an invite on the site. Thanks.—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Pythagorean Edition

Steve Bryant (SB) is a content strategy consultant, co-founder of the midnight costumed adventure Rental Car Rally, founding editor of InsideHook, triangle enthusiast, and a longtime friend of WITI (he wrote our very first guest edition on Maslow and a recent edition on Pythagoras).Steve here. Surely I’m not alone in noticing that meditation—the act of it, the instagramming of it, the performance maximization mindset of it—is, these days, everywhere. Marc Benioff does it. Ray Dalio does it. Eileen Fisher. Steph Curry. The Seattle Seahawks. Bobby Axelrod meditates in Billions. The show’s three creators practice, too. Don Draper created the most famous Coke jingle in history while om-om’ing on a cliff. Some executives, when about to meditate, say they’re “gonna drop in”, as if visiting some inner conference room where the meeting’s already in progress. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, too and famously, took a ten-day Vipassana course in Myanmar, though it’s left to the reader to decide whether it’s appropriate for a man who launched a billion chatterbots to grant himself the peace of silence. Why is this interesting?Meditation, to judge by its corporate and power-performer reception, has lately become a lifehack. Nitrous oxide for the noggin. Game theory-optimal transcendence. And while the act of meditation hasn’t changed dramatically in the last 2,500 years—you still mostly sit cross-legged while quieting your mind—its more recent application in pursuit of material wealth is a far cry from its ascetic origins.Somewhere near Nepal around the 5th century BCE, as the story goes, Siddhartha Gotama Buddha sat beneath a tree and taught his followers to train the mind to withdraw from automatic responses to sense-impressions—that is, to stop reacting to everything happening around them. This is the Buddhist root of meditation. The problem, the Buddha taught, was that humans crave things. We seek pleasure (sex, ice cream). We avoid pain (breakups, brain freeze). But the gratification of getting that pleasure or the gratification of avoiding that pain doesn’t last. So we want more pleasure. We want less pain. Biologically, this is a great system for creating offspring or avoiding sabretooth tigers. Capitalistically, it’s a great system for developing dating apps and oxycontin. Emotionally, however, it seems best suited for remaining in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. The Buddha’s lesson was that you can sidestep this cycle of craving by regulating, through meditation, how you respond to your own desires. In other words, the original idea wasn’t to discipline your thinking so you could get more of what you want. The original idea was to discipline your thinking so you wouldn’t want more. That said, there is no “one true way” to meditate, even within Buddhism. There are hundreds (thousands?) of meditation techniques arising from tens (hundreds?) of philosophical backgrounds. Some disciplines train you to focus on your breathing. Others on compassionate feelings. Some disciplines ask you to repeat a mantra for 15 minutes a day. Others ask you to eat only one meal a day, ponder the hairs on your head, and strive to attain the deathless. If you’ve encountered meditation in the West, it’s likely a form of Theravāda Buddhism (vipassanā, mettā) or Vedantic Hinduism (Transcendental Meditation). Those, along with pretty people on Instagram sitting cross-legged in Tulum, are the major contributors to the Western conception of mindfulness. I learned meditation through a ten-day course at the Northern Vipassanā Center, about three hours north of San Francisco up along Highway 175. This was a few years back. There was no talking. No reading. No phones. No internet. Just ten days of meditating on mats and eating vegetarian and sleeping in a bunk room and repeat, from 4:30 in the morning until 9 at night. There wasn’t even any coffee.The practice itself is simple in its particulars, difficult in its consistency. You sit. You focus attention on your breath. As you learn to focus your breath, you begin to focus on sensations in your body. Itching, aching, tickling, whatever. You’re taught not to judge these sensations. You’re taught to recognize that every sensation has the same characteristics—they rise, they fall away. Good or bad, pleasant or painful. Whatever is happening is just happening. Be aware, as the teacher says, and yet remain equanimous. It’s easy to appreciate the practice intellectually. Breathe through your nose, experience pain, don’t judge that pain, ok got it. It’s quite another thing entirely to appreciate this physically when your back aches, and your knees ache, and your head aches, when your nose itches and your toes tingle and you remain sitting in a single position, unmoving, for an hour at a time, twelve hours a day, ten days in a row. As all distractions fall away, you’re left only with your mental reaction to sensation. When you’re forced to observe how you react to every sensation, you begin to realize that reacting to sensation is all you ever do. When I began meditating, I visualized these ideas in the form of a Cartesian grid (or, if you like, a 2x2). There is no future, there is no past, there is only right now, how do you feel:Meditation is, in this way, a method of confronting your feelings, rather than enabling them. It’s also a form of pattern recognition, where the pattern you recognize is yourself. And it’s also a way of developing decision-making muscle memory (Sam Harris, the insufferable podcast host, has referred to meditative long-milers as “neural athletes”). But where the training gets very interesting, to me, is on the internet—a non-physical problem space you navigate almost entirely using your mind. That problem space consists entirely of a rapid series of decision points. Select window A or window B, click button X or button Y, scroll feed C or feed D. Any feeling you want to have—watch a movie, trade a stock, order sushi or sex—is a click away. Yes, life has always been a series of decisions. But once the physical effort and consequence of those decisions is removed, what you’re left with is an ever-quickening series of mind-only moments. You don’t have to drive to the movies. You don’t have to call your broker to order equities. Sushi and sex come to you. Less effort, more results, more often. Aldous Huxley had it all wrong: you don’t even need drugs.To say this another way, and simply: meditation is a tool for realizing you are, in fact, making  decisions. A life lived increasingly online is a life increasingly constructed by the subtlest decision-making moments (not to mention an intermittent and variable barrage of alerts). The more you’re aware of those decisions, the more you’re aware of your reactions, the more in control of yourself you become. The trick, as a teacher once intoned, is that only you can make those decisions. Only you are responsible for your own salvation. So you ache, says the Buddha. You want more pleasure, you want less pain. So what? (SB)Chart of the Day:From the FT. I knew Microsoft had done well converting its revenue from transaction to recurring, but I didn’t realize just how fast they had made the switch. To go from around 40% to around 80% in ten years is quite a feat. (NRB)Quick Links:Does meditation work? Maybe! There’s a whole Wikipedia entry on that question. The term meditation encompasses a wide range of practices and interventions rooted in different traditions; research often fails to find a measurable benefit, but also fails to note the differences in approach or adequately control for variations in participation or participants. Another challenge: the benefits are hard to articulate, let alone measure. With that said, the most solid meta-analysis to date turned up mixed results. (SB)Most of the meditation techniques you’ll encounter have theological origins, but they’re easily practiced in a non-sectarian way. Vipassanā and its cousin techniques are taught through vipassanā centers (where retreats are free) and the Insight Meditation Society (where retreats are modestly priced), and TM is taught through individual instructors (for a fee). (SB)Good piece about DTC and the tech platforms that make it possible (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB)PS - Noah here. Variance, my new company, is just getting going with our Alpha. If you work in sales, services, marketing, or engineering and want to try out/give feedback on a tool to help your team work more effectively with their apps, please request an invite on the site. Thanks.—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? The Meditation Edition

Steve Bryant (SB) is a content strategy and ops consultant, co-founder of the midnight costumed adventure Rental Car Rally, founding editor of InsideHook, triangle enthusiast, and a longtime friend of WITI (he wrote our very first guest edition on Maslow and recent editions on Pythagoras and meditation). He wrote this while waiting in line at Graceland. Steve here. The auto brand Jeep is named after a teleporting, interdimensional dog. It’s also the 4th most popular auto brand in the United States, selling almost 800,000 vehicles per year. All of these are true facts.We know these are true facts because market research tells us so. Though for the teleporting dog bit, you can trust the testimony of warrior poet R. Lee Ermey.A few years back on the History Channel, Ermey suggested that the name Jeep came from the comic strip Thimble Theater (later simply Popeye). He related how, in 1936, a full five years before the vehicles that would become Jeeps rolled off the assembly line, the strip introduced a character named Eugene the Jeep—a mysterious fourth-dimensional being that had somehow merged with an African hooey hound (very much not a thing). Popeye, being a dutiful suitor, presented Eugene to Olive Oyl as a gift, saying simply: "The Jeep's a magical dog and can disappear and things". That, said Ermey, is a likely theory as to how Jeep got its name.Yet despite this precedent-setting appearance in comic literature—which is the source of all truly good things—and despite Gunny’s say so (may he rest in peace), the origin of the word Jeep remains an enduring controversy, and a diverting topic to argue with Jeep owners whenever the opportunity may arise. Why is this interesting?Here’s another true fact: Jeeps arrived onto European battlefields in 1941 without any name at all.Back then, it was simply known as the 1/4 ton truck 4x4, sometimes amplified by its standard nomenclature list (SNL) group number used for ordering parts, which was G-503.Didn’t really roll off the tongue. The term “jeep”, though, had been around for many years in the service. Enlisted men used it to refer to anything that was insignificant or small or awkward, and mechanics used the term “jeepy” to refer to any new vehicle. Soldiers also used the term to refer to any new enlisted men, replacing the WWI term “cooky”.For a time, the term “jeep” became the word used for the Army’s 1/2 ton truck. That led some to refer to the 1/4 ton truck as “son of jeep” or “baby jeep”. The guys in tanks referred to the 1/4 ton as “peep”, for its scouting abilities (the vehicle’s original intended purpose), and amphibious versions went by “seep.” Soldiers also called the Army’s 3/4 ton command truck the “beep.” So by way of summation, our soldiers drove jeeps, baby jeeps, peeps, seeps, and beeps. It was a very charming war.Meanwhile, there were actually three different 1/4 ton 4x4s tooling around the hedges and bocages of Europe, each made by a different company: Bantam, the folks who developed the concept for the things; Willys-Overland, the folks who actually designed the things; and Ford, the folks who could produce the things in the quantities and with the speed the Army desired.left to right: The 1941 Willys-Overland MA, Bantam BRC, and Ford GP.The internal designation for the Ford model was GPW, where the G stood for Government, P for 80in wheelbase, and W stood for Willys.1 That name has led some to argue that the word jeep comes from G.I.s slurring the initials G.P. This is a pleasing and intuitive argument, at least partly because it complements the manner in which the brand Humvee is derived from its military acronym (The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle).But that theory, too, is wrong. For “jeep” to become Jeep, you can look to a man named Irving “Red” Hausmann, and to the power of advertising.Red was a test driver. His job was to evaluate vehicles at Willys-Overland. As the story goes, Red started referring to the 1/4 ton 4x4 as a jeep. The name spread to the Willys factory workers in Toledo. And then one day, for a media stunt, Red demonstrated the 1/4 ton 4x4 by literally driving it up the Capitol steps in Washington DC. A bystander asked what he was driving. Said Red: “It’s a jeep.”Shortly thereafter Willys began advertising its contribution to the war effort using the Jeep name. So did Ford. And so did Bantam, which sued Willys, arguing that they, Bantam, developed the concept. The courts ruled in favor of Willys, which was acquired by Kaiser Manufacturing Co., which became Kaiser-Jeep Corp., which was acquired by AMC, which was acquired by Chrysler, which was acquired by Stellantis, which today sells about 800,000 Jeeps every year. The new Willys model, with its throwback styling, is one of them.Given this variety of possible etymologies, it is perhaps the case that Jeep, the vehicle, wasn’t named directly after Jeep, the teleporting, extra dimensional dog. But I have a Jeep. I’m driving it across Mississippi at the moment, then Louisiana, then Texas, then straight to California. I’ve gotten to know this Jeep pretty well. I choose to believe it is a magical hound. (SB) Chart of the Day:Speaking of cars, this chart of changing car colors in Poland over the last thirty years was fascinating. (NRB)Quick Links:Buy, Borrow, Die: How Rich Americans Live Off Their Paper Wealth [via Ryan Anderson] (NRB)Seven High Frequency Indicators for the Economy (NRB)Looks like NASCAR is getting its own Drive To Survive (NRB)[Sponsored Link] If you’re at a SaaS company, check out Variance. It’s a tool to help grow customers (some people are calling it a PLG CRM). If you have questions or want to try it, get in touch. (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier &Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).1Why “P” for wheelbase? I’m not rightly sure. The designation was internal to Ford, but I couldn’t find a precise reason for the letter. One possibility is that “P” referred to all “passenger” reconnaissance vehicles with an 80in wheelbase. If you know the correct reasoning, please drop a line.

The Jeep Edition

Steve Bryant (SB) is a content strategy and ops consultant, co-founder of the midnight costumed adventure Rental Car Rally, founding editor of InsideHook, triangle enthusiast, and a longtime friend of WITI (he wrote our very first guest edition on Maslow and a recent edition on Jeeps). Steve here. There are at least two things to do when you drive across the country: see places and meet people. The places take care of themselves. You tap your destination into Google Maps and drive along its blue line, a kind of monorail. The people, on the other hand—they’re not on the maps, and they’re much harder to predict. Some travelers suggest you can do other diverting things while driving around, like eat food and drink drinks and sleep in tents and on California kings. But eating food and drinking drinks and sleeping in tents and on California kings have always seemed, to me at least, to be only waypoints on the road to more enjoyable destinations, like riding the pine at Big Nose Kate’s Saloon while a long beard in a cowboy hat relates how he once, back in the 90s, received a makeover on Montell Williams in New York City. Why is this interesting?Over the last month, I drove East to West across the forty-eight contiguous states. Began in Virginia at my mom’s house while she watered her rose bushes. Ended in Los Angeles at a Mexican restaurant where a friend told me she’d bought an AR-15. I took the southern route. Stopped by a field of presidential busts but wasn’t allowed in. Saw a massive rotating head in an office park. Read the Georgia Guidestones, ran through the abandoned factories in Chattanooga, and rode the country’s steepest funicular. Went to a pool party in Nashville. Toured Graceland, where I got into an argument with an older man who didn’t like the King’s style. Suggested he tour the Radison. Walked through Elvis’s plane behind a kid who asked her dad “ours is bigger, right?”. Saw a giant Igloo cooler. Saw Willie Nelson in concert. Saw that Prada store outside Marfa that’s really outside Valentine, turned the key in a Titan II missile silo, and stood on the rim of Barringer Crater. Along the way, in chronological order, these are some of the folks I met: I met a cousin at a Starbucks in Raleigh whose husband had leukemia and who had been vaccinated, and whose son was homeschooled and who had been vaccinated, but who herself hadn’t been vaccinated because she "didn't really know what to think about all of that”.I met a friend at a bar in Chapel Hill whose neighbors, despite her protestations that she didn’t need the help, surprised her by putting together her porch furniture while she was away for a few days. I met a shoeshine man in Durham called Pierce McKoy who somehow convinced me to pay $20 to have my tennis shoes shined.I met a woman on the highway outside of Durham who was on her first day of vacation after her disability came through because of a hip injury and she’d been driving all night from Schenectady, New York with her two kids to get to her hotel in Greensboro and that’s how she fell asleep at the wheel and sideswiped me at 70mph. I met a state trooper who was six foot four with generously proportioned biceps and a crew cut so sharp it seemed illustrated who told me I was lucky “‘cause if she had hit your Jeep two inches to the rear she’da flipped ya and buddy I know that’s not the type of off-roading you were lookin’ to do.”I met a kid in Charleston who was growing his first mustache and didn’t want to shave it off before camp. I met his dad who invested in casinos where the algorithms know what you eat and what you play and whether you’re down and by how much and whether you might need a comp just to get you to stay. I met a woman in Gaffney, South Carolina who worked in a bar underneath a water tower painted to look like a giant peach, and who spent her shifts watching her kids and their cousins on a webcam while they played video games at home. I met a friend in Atlanta who treated me to BBQ for dinner and lent me, for the night, his spare room over the garage. I met a friend at a Waffle House who told me folks called the local grocery store “Murder Kroger” because people tended to get shot there, so Kroger remodeled to make it more safe, “but I think like three people got shot in the parking lot the next week.”Met a gas station attendant who told me I was in a town called Bolivar. “You know anything about Bolivar,” she asked. “Tell me about it, I said. “Not much to tell really. It’s about three minutes long.” How many people here, I asked. “I don’t rightly know,” she said, “more than there should be.” I met a friend who had Covid back in March 2020, lost his sense of smell and everything. I met a guy at a pool party, just engaged, who was moving to LA to try his hand at screenwriting. I met a friend who was over-served and spent the night throwing up in our shared bathroom. I met a young dental school student whose family received political asylum from Cuba in the 2010s and who loves horror movies and salsa dancing and was really curious about shibari. I met a woman working at a Waffle House in Canton, MS whose name tag said Big Baby and who sang Wet Ass Pussy while scrambling eggs at the griddle. I met a Brazilian cancer researcher who was obsessed with squirrels. I met an Illinoian tending bar in Smithville, Texas named Stevie who was wary of telling anybody he used to live in LA because “they hate people from California here, man”.I stayed with an old friend in Austin who was renting the house where Matthew McConaughey was arrested in 1999, during a bender, for playing the bongos naked in his living room at 3am. I met a blonde woman at a mezcal bar in Austin who told me her sign was mezcal sun, martini moon, fernet rising. I met a woman at the Willie Nelson concert in Luck, Texas who lived next to Willie’s ranch and whose husband died of brain cancer four years ago. I met a man with a large cowboy hat and a larger belly at Poodie’s who said my compliments to you that’s a good lookin’ woman you got there, and then fist-bumped me and proceeded to dance by himself to the band.While viewing a curious auto museum at an RV park on the side of Route 10 I met a man and his father who were driving from New Orleans to San Diego, stopping at all the underground caverns along the way. I met a bartender named Nikki at the Lost Horse Saloon in Marfa who told us how bad the cops are in this town, and how they follow her home, and how sometimes they do shady shit like drive by her apartment without their lights on, “it’s weird man”.I met the owner of Cactus Liquors in Marfa who said the cops don’t like the new owner of the Lost Horse Saloon because he’s “some grifter footed by Mexican drug money” and that the former owner, Tye, was “off with Martin Scorcese shooting some movie”.I met a man named Chris from Detroit who told us we should go see the Blue Origin launch up past Van Horn, and we said yeah absolutely where are you watching from exactly, and he was like “oh well to be honest I’ll be at the launchpad because I’m a friend of Jeff Bezos’s brother.”I met a guy named Cliff who was driving around in a Dodge Challenger with his wife (whose name I didn’t get), and a dachshund (whose name was Apollo), and who was in town because he’s an engineer for Blue Origin, but he lived in Seattle, and “anyway man hit me up when you get there I’ll take you on a tour of where we make the rockets”.I met a man who’d been to Cape Canaveral to see the shuttle launches, and who was driving around seeing all the SpaceX launches, “even the Starlink ones”, and who used to work oil pipelines but got laid off because of Covid, “and it lasted so long we just decided to go ahead and retire”.I met a man at Big Nose Kate’s Saloon in Tombstone named Wolf who always carried his .45, but not now because they don’t allow ‘em in here, and whose wife kept her 9mm beside her recliner at home while she watched soaps, and anyway he just that morning accepted a job driving the town stagecoach and by the way once, many decades ago and thanks to a phone call made by his daughter, received a makeover on Montell Williams in New York City: “The wife and I had a good time in the hotel room that night lemme tell ya.”I met a guy named Steve who was driving a golf cart up the hill to The Chapel of the Holy Cross, and who hadn’t showered in days, and who moved to Sedona from Vancouver five years ago because he “wanted to see if I could live in the desert.”I met a man playing blackjack at The Golden Nugget who owned a computer company and just got back from Pebble Beach where he was playing golf with his son-in-law, who he introduces as “the guy who’s doing my daughter.” I met a blackjack dealer named Lola from Jalisco, Mexico who had been dealing cards for 35 years and didn’t believe that slot machines were programmed with algorithms “because it’s all just luck, nobody knows how often people will win.”I met a man at a bar in the Bellagio beside the poker room who asked about my postcards and tells me he’s here for his wife’s sixtieth and they’re from Orange County and he owns a traffic light maintenance company and moved to LA from Detroit twenty-six years ago, but before that, when he lived in Detroit, he met the girl who is now his wife; she was 13, he was 14, they lived in the same subdivision, he used to jump the fence to her place, they dated in high school and when he bought his first house at 18 she moved in and three months later they were married; her family, including her identical twin sister, were already in Orange County so they moved there and had two kids, both girls, both now dancers, one a choreographer and one erotic, and the latter’s daughter lives with them now and lord lord lord she runs the house yes she does. I met a friend who, out of concern for the presidential transition, learned to shoot guns at an outdoor firing range, and who ordered drinks to welcome me to Los Angeles. (SB)Quick Links:Good one from Emily Oster: How Should I Think about School & Child Care Now? (NRB)An update on The Vaporfly Edition: they made it to track spikes and helped break records. (NRB)Last week (thanks to Steve, actually), I learned the word snowclone: “a verbal formula that is adapted for reuse by changing only a few words so that the allusion to the original phrase remains clear.” (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Cross Country Edition

Steve Bryant (SB) is a content strategy and ops consultant, co-founder of the midnight costumed adventure Rental Car Rally, founding editor of InsideHook, triangle enthusiast, and a longtime friend of WITI (he wrote our very first guest edition on Maslow and recent editions on Jeeps and cross-country road trips). Steve here. Back in the 1970s, several states began mandating 55mph speed limits on highways. This was the time of the energy crisis, and the new limit was intended to reduce the consumption of fuel. Congress followed suit in 1974 with the first-ever national speed limit of 55mph. Drivers everywhere called this new mandate the “double nickel”. It saved a little fuel. It saved a lotta lives. But drivers wanted to go fast, so nobody liked it all that much. The journalist Brock Yates liked it least of all. Yates detested state regulations. Yates detested federal regulations. And Yates had long argued, in his articles for Car and Driver, that safe driving was possible at almost any speed. To prove his point, Yates and former Car and Driver editor Steve Smith created a race. The starting line would be the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan, where Car and Driver housed its test fleet. The finish line would be the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach, a renowned racers’ hangout. The only goal was to get across the country as fast as possible. The only rule was that there were no rules. Yates called the race The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash—“a balls-out, shoot-the-moon, fuck-the-establishment rumble … to prove … that good drivers in good automobiles could employ the American Interstate system the same way the Germans were using their autobahns”.Today, thanks to the 1981 movie starring Burt Reynolds (written by Yates), that race is largely remembered as The Cannonball Run. Across the four races, from 1971 to 1979, there were never any injuries. There were never any deaths. There was a team dressed as paramedics in an ambulance. A team dressed as government officials tracking radiation leaks. A team dressed as priests belonging to an ecumenical council of prelates in California—all to confound highway patrolmen on the watch for speeding motorists. The fastest time: 32 hours 51 minutes, running an average of 87mph, set in 1979 by a team driving a Jaguar XJS. “Truth and Justice,” Yates wrote, “affirmed by an overtly illegal act”.The Cannonball wasn’t the first transcontinental race. But it was the first anti-establishment transcontinental race. And it was the first transcontinental race to be driven by competitors in disguise. Thanks to that brand of chaotic goofiness, the Cannonball is the spiritual ancestor of races and rallies today that seek, in the pursuit of glory and ignominy alike, to poke a finger in the eye of prudes and police everywhere. The six vehicles and 16 drivers of the original 1971 Cannonball, as they appeared in the March 1972 issue of Car and DriverWhy is this interesting?This November marks the 50th anniversary of the first Cannonball. In the intervening 50 years, cars changed. Car culture changed. Brock Yates changed. He declined to continue the Cannonball in 1980 after visiting a friend and amateur driver who planned to race the next event in a Lamborghini Countach. Too dangerous, Yates said. And so that was that. He passed in 2016 and is known today, by at least one previous transcontinental record holder, as the most important man in American car culture who never ran a car company.But since that time, at least two separate but connected trends have emerged. One, the speed-running ethos of Cannonball evolved into unsanctioned, individual efforts to break the Cannonball record. Two, the Cannonballs’ nonsense and non-sensibility have survived within a variety of highly goofy moto-vents.On the trend of speed runs: The U.S. Express attracted drivers for several years in the ‘80s (including Sims designer Will Wright). The cops caught wind, it closed shop. There were Cannonball-style attempts in Europe. Several people were arrested. There were Cannonball-style attempts in Australia. Several people died. Yates himself founded a “kinder, gentler successor to Cannonball” called One Lap of America but, after finger-wagging from Ralph Nader (among others) that evolved into an untimed, long-distance endurance rally and series of closed-circuit time trials. Few public attempts, it seems, continued to be made at the speed record.That was until three drivers in a BMW M5 set a transcontinental record of 31 hours 4 minutes running from the Classic Car Club NYC to Santa Monica Pier. Shortly after that, a cross-country race called The 2904 launched and ran for ten years. Likewise, the C2C Express, which ran from 2015 to 2019, in which one team managed to set a transcontinental speed record. That record has since been eclipsed multiple times. The current record was set last year at 25hrs 39 minutes.As for the goofiness: there’s a surfeit. We live in a golden age of drivers who enjoy dressing in costume to perform feats of motoring gibberish. Most of these events are not races, and certainly not transcontinental. But each is inspired, at least in some part, by the Cannonball.I have some small perspective here. Since 2008 I’ve organized, along with my partners Franz Aliquo and Yutai Liao, a driving challenge called Rental Car Rally: a 24-hour, midnight-to-midnight traveling carnival where 50+ costumed teams travel 500 miles visiting curiously odd attractions. It’s not a race, but it is a questionably legal and unquestionably stupid endurance drive, and for that, we consider ourselves distant, moronic cousins to the original memorial trophy dash. Greece Lightnin’, a competing team in Rental Car Rally 2021There are many, many others. The closed-circuit, costumed shitcar race 24 Hours of Lemons. The off-roading, hard-partying Gambler 500. There’s Gumball 3000 for long-distance rallies in super cars. The Mongol Rally for adventuring across Eurasia. And no end of fancy car rallies, from The Goldrush to The Dustball. A delightfully modded school...bustruck?... in the Gambler 500Each of these events hails from a different part of car culture, but all of them carry some small, vestigial sequence of Yatesian DNA. So for your flowchart-y pleasure, here’s a somewhat arbitrary and entirely incomplete visualization of the world the Cannonball created. It is in no way comprehensive and especially not inclusive of influences like the English road rallying tradition, sanctioned American motorsports, or Vin Diesel. You can tell I’m a serious designer because I made it in PowerPoint. Drive safe and stay weird out there. (SB)Steve’s visualization of the day: Quick Links:On the secret workday power nap. (CJN) A Times deep dive on Putin’s Russia (CJN)An iconic NYC lunch (CJN)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Cannonball Run Edition

Steve Bryant (SB) runs Delightful, where he provides content leadership and talent strategy for brands and agencies. He’s also the co-founder of the midnight costumed adventure Rental Car Rally and a longtime friend of WITI (he wrote our very first guest edition on Maslow and other editions on Jeeps and meditation).Steve here. At this moment, the U.S. and U.K. are an hour closer than they typically would be. For this temporary contraction of temporal borders, you can thank the differing application of Daylight Savings Time. The United States began DST at 2am on Sunday, March 12th. The UK won’t begin DST until 1am this Sunday. So right now, for these two weeks in March, the US and the UK are, in the sense of time if not in space, closer to each other.For those without business across the pond, this change has no meaningful effect. But for the British who work across waves, meetings with American counterparts are blessedly an hour earlier. A meeting set at 4pm ET now occurs at a more respectable post-prandial 8pm GMT, instead of an awfully-close-to-bedtime 9pm GMT.This allows commerce to move a bit more fluidly.The two countries may remain in their same geographic locations, but temporally speaking, the border between the two nations has drawn closer—as if the eastern seaboard had stretched ever so slightly out into the Atlantic, and the island of England, taken up anchor, had drifted ever so slightly west.WITI Classifieds:We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.How to Make New Friends: Nobody teaches adults this! But after hosting 100s of small parties, I found what works. The 2-Hour Cocktail PartyThe BrXnd Marketing X AI Conference is happening on 5/16 in NYC. Early Bird tickets are 20% off until the end of the month. Get your 20% off ticket today!Why is this interesting?Every time zone, as you’ll recall, is defined as an offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Coordinated Universal Time begins at 0 degrees longitude, that imaginary line that passes through the Royal Observatory in London. The earth rotates 15 degrees per hour and each of those 15 degrees is a time zone, ranging from UTC−12:00 (Baker Island, in the middle of the Pacific) to UTC+14:00 (also in the middle of the Pacific).The offsets are usually a whole number of hours, but a few zones are offset by an additional 30 or 45 minutes. This is because time zones tend to conform to boundaries between and within nations instead of strictly following longitude. Getting things done locally trumps regulations globally every time.The state of Indiana, famously, observes Eastern time except for 12 of its 92 counties. Folks in the northwest live near Chicago. Chicago is on Central Time. Central Time is more convenient for all involved. Folks in the southwest live near Illinois and Kentucky. Illinois and Kentucky are on Central Time. Central Time is, again, more convenient. China, also famously, maintains one official time zone across its 3100 miles from east to west. One time zone, to Mao Zedong, symbolized national unity. One time zone was more convenient.Some countries splice their time zones into thirty-minute increments. All of India lies in the time zone UTC+05:30, and accordingly, every fifth person in the world lives in a time zone with a fractional offset. Neighboring Nepal is at UTC+05:45, so if you were to cross the border from India time would jump 15 minutes forward. If you were to travel one hundred miles further north and continue into China, time would jump 2 hours and 15 minutes forward. None of these countries practice DST and so, at least temporally speaking, their borders never change.A general rule of thumb, however, is that bordering countries trying to increase trade will sync their clocks. Consider, for example, Mexico. Mexico has four time zones. Those time zones roughly correspond to the time zones of the United States. The catch is that Mexico recently stopped observing DST.Up until March 12th of this year I, a resident of Mexico City in Zona Centro (UTC-0600), was only one hour behind New York on Eastern Standard Time (UTC-0500). But since March 12th, Mexico City is now two hours behind New York (UTC-0400). We will continue to be two hours behind until DST ends Sunday, Nov 5th. This will make my zoom schedule with New York clients just a bit more onerous, making my residency in CDMX the temporal equivalent of, oh let’s say, Salt Lake City.Tempus fugit, but also expandeth, and now I can’t get out of bed as late as I used to.Mexico can’t separate itself entirely from the U.S., however, so there are parts of this country that continue to practice Daylight Savings Time. Those parts include Baja California and municipalities within 20 km of the border, meaning places like Tijuana, Mexicali, and Chihuahua.In those cities, they match the time zone of their northern neighbors, a kind of temporal air lock that equalizes the cross-border pressure. I could change my time +1 UTC right now just by driving a few degrees latitude north to, say, Ciudad Juárez. The border I would find there certainly isn’t demilitarized, but you could say it is, at least for the moment, a zone that has been de-temporalized. (SB)—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.

The Time Zone Edition

Steve Bryant (SB) is a content strategist and talent strategy consultant and co-founder of the midnight costumed adventure Rental Car Rally—which returns to Los Angeles this July (get a ticket). He’s written several pieces for WITI and writes his own newsletter called Delightful, which you can find this-a-way.Steve here. One of the first pieces of slang I learned after moving to Mexico City was aguas. Aguas, as in “waters”, plural, does not mean agua, as in “water”, singular. Rather aguas means danger, caution, cuidado wey. The colloquialism dates back a hundred years or more, before the city had indoor plumbing. “Aguas!” someone would yell, quite considerately, as they tossed the contents of their chamber pot out the front door. The citizens of Mexico City no longer toss their effluvia into the street. Instead, we flush our aguas negras into 6,000 miles of pipes, where it descends northward, beneath the mountains, into Mezquital, another valley. Long ago the farmers there, in their great prescience, negotiated usage rights for the city’s piss and poop. Accordingly, my aguas negras and my neighbor’s aquas negras and the rest of the city’s aguas negras fertilize a great many chili peppers, alfalfa, corn, beans, onions, and other vegetables—which then get sent back to the grocery stores and restaurants of Mexico City where the city’s residents (and flocks of digital nomads) enjoy them in their salads, beginning the cycle anew.Why is this interesting?Water has always been a problem in the Valley of Mexico.Hundreds of years ago, the basin of the valley held an endorheic lake. Water flowed in, but water couldn’t flow out. With no egress, melted snow and rainwater mixed with minerals in the rocky base layer and turned brackish. Result: a shallow lake on top, large aquifer below.In the 15th century, the residents of Mexico-Tenochtitlan solved this problem by building a system of dikes, flood gates, and spring water aqueducts, separating the salty water from the fresh. In the 16th century, the conquering Spaniards unsolved this problem by destroying the dikes and the flood gates and the aqueducts, spreading disease and pestilence. In the intervening centuries, residents dug increasingly deep wells to tap an increasingly empty aquifer. Finding water to drink has been a problem ever since. Rendering of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, founded on a swampy island in the middle of Lake Texcoco in the 14th century.Today, about a third of the city’s water comes from the Cutzamala System, which takes water from the rivers outside the valley and pumps it up and over the mile-high mountains that surround Mexico City. Benefit: water for the city. Detriment: no water for the countryside. A water tower in the Jardín de Agua, just beside the Cárcamo de Dolores, which sits above defunct cisterns below the park.Also a detriment: When people in the countryside lose access to water they move to the city. When more people move to the city, the city needs to pump more water. But 40% of the water coursing beneath the city already leaks into the ground because reasons, and that leakage equals the amount of water used in Houston every year, which is crazy, all of this is all crazy, it’s been crazy for 600 years, it’s all entirely absurd. Meanwhile, Mexicans lead the world in per capita consumption of bottled water sold by the likes of the Coca-Cola Corporation, Danone, Pepsi, and Nestle, each of whom have been awarded rights to tap (and pollute) Mexico’s waterways. This is what happens when you pave over a lake.The four water towers of the Jardín are surrounded by stone Mesoamerican motifs, which used to flow with water from the River Lerma but have been dry for decades.If you happen to be in Mexico City and you’d like to celebrate our (literally) toxic relationship with water, you can make a short pilgrimage to the second section of Chapultepec park to visit a one-room museum called el Cárcamo de Dolores. Opened in 1951, the museum was built to commemorate the entrance of water from the Lerma River to the city. At the time, the museum was a fully-functioning part of the water system where you could watch river water sluice past an immense, partially-submerged Diego Rivera mural. That water eventually damaged the mural, and so was diverted away to restore the (now very beautiful and also very dry) painting. Entrance fee: about a buck fifty. An inside view of the Cárcamo de Dolores and Diego Rivera’s mural, El Agua, Origen de la Vida, which includes depictions of microbes important to mankind’s evolution (including giardia!).Just outside the museum, don’t forget to take a gander at Diego Rivera’s monument to Tlaloc, the Aztec god of water. He’s laying down in several inches of filthy water with his head raised, as if to avoid drowning, and his mouth wide open, as if to yell: aguas! (SB)A view of the Cárcamo de Dolores and the Fuente TlálocThanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.