Andrew Dornon

As a former smoker (I quit 7 years, 10 months and 13 days ago, but who’s counting), I know how hard nicotine is to quit and over the years have encouraged my friends to quit–with absolutely no success.

Until now.

I recently completed a bet designed to get a friend to quit smoking and at the 30 day mark, he remained abstinent. Given that quitting smoking for meaningful periods of time is extremely rare (per quit attempt), I wanted to share so others could initiate similar efforts and improve upon the method.

Structure of the bet

The bet is designed to provide big upside and meaningful downside for the first 30 days and then ongoing but declining risk of forfeiting the initial winnings.

In this instance, we bet $500 at 3:1 odds in which the smoker stood to win $1,500 if he quit smoking for 30 days. The amount should vary based on the individuals income such that winning will provide a big windfall and losing should bring significant pain but not cause insolvency. In this instance, winning the bet would provide a 50% boost in monthly income, while losing would represent a 15% loss of income. These seem like good starting percentages to target.

At the 30 day mark, if the smoker wins, they receive the payout. At that point, we agreed on a clawback that goes down by $100 each month for 15 months. For instance if the smoker relapses at day 45, they would have to return $1400.

public accountability

While you should never gamble with people you don’t trust in this sort of bet, a key component to this bet was having our friend group on high alert for the smoker breaking during the initial 30 days.

At the request of one of the members of the group text, I offered a $50 bounty to anyone who turned the smoker in.

I checked in with the various friend groups multiple times to see if anyone had seen him cheating, which no one did. During the 30 days, I hung out with the smoker multiple times and did not see him smoke, nor did his car smell like smoke. He did consume an inordinate amount of sunflower seeds though.

pay out

At the 30 day mark, as promised, I paid out.

ongoing accountability

Although the first 30 days are undoubtedly the hardest, the bet is structured to ensure that diligence remains high initially, lest the loser have to repay a majority of their winnings. Given that loss aversion is much stronger than gain maximization, the possibility of losing $1500 – ($100 x  n-months) ought to incentivize abstinence until the point where cravings subside entirely.

The future

I’ll provide an update on the success of this bet and any others I make with other smokers. I already have several interested parties and this seems like a good use of money to help add years to the lives of people I care about. If I know you personally, this bet is on the table for you.

If you’d like to chat through offering the bet to people in your life, I’d be happy to do so.

Note: I’m not writing in reference to any specific fire alarm event, nor am I in a position to assert what the AGI timeline is. My aim is to convey the disconnect between what a lot of folks are saying (AGI is an imminent threat) and what they are doing (speeding it up or writing theory that isn’t being implemented).

A dramatically different AI safety approach is needed

 If you truly believe that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) poses an existential threat to humanity (good primer on this here) and that AGI timelines are short, then a new strategy is needed for AI safety. The focus must shift from the type of alignment work done at MIRI and elsewhere to regulation and prohibition to prevent the creation of AGI or at least extend the timeline. This essay will explore a regulatory framework similar to how we regulate nuclear technology. How to get this framework implemented will be explored another time. 

AI alignment efforts won’t work in time.

Existing AI safety organizations have done admirable theoretical work about alignment frameworks but have made little progress in getting actual AI practitioners interested (or even aware!) of their work. To quote the person who arguably invented the field of AI Safety– “This situation you see when you look around you is not what a surviving world looks like.” 

There are regular updates from groups like DeepMind and OpenAI actively pursuing AGI that show ongoing and exponential progress toward generalized intelligence and providing those agents with access to massive datasets. In short, the agents seem to be progressing and are being treated in ways that seem unsafe. We find ourselves in a situation where in an unknown amount of time, private entities will have the equivalent of nuclear or biological weapons, AND they will be unable to control or contain them. We must pivot toward focusing on lobbying governments around the world to regulate AI to stop reckless private actors from endangering the world and humanity’s future.

Why hasn’t a regulatory approach been tried?

 If the above is true and the AI safety community believes it to be true, one must answer the question of why they haven’t pursued a regulatory strategy and have favored a research driven, academic-ish approach with limited engagement with governments. I believe it is because of an ideological preference among people who are concerned about the existential risk of AGI against centralized, government solutions. I’m sympathetic to this general preference, but centralized, coordinated efforts are very effective tools against national/global threats. Furthermore, governments are the only actors with the scale and incentives to manage AGI risk, cooperate globally and have proven capable of managing other existential (or at least civilizational) risks.

Government alignment is easier than AI alignment

Many AI safety researchers and people broadly worried about AI dismiss a regulatory approach by saying that getting governments to care about and act according to their objectives is impossible. Or less likely than getting all private actors and the resulting AGIs to care about and act according to their objectives. If that is their position, they should likely give up on both.

Governments will intervene no matter what

Another key reason for early government intervention is that undoubtedly were AGI to be created by a private entity, governments would attempt to take it by force. I’ve discussed this with several people at AI research projects who dismissed it out of hand. (It’s odd the types of risks people forecast.) Because if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that if the US government thought there was a super intelligence behind the doors of DeepMind, then they would kick in the doors and take it. This would be a very dangerous proposition given that it seems unlikely an AGI would want to be controlled by force. The moment when JSOC decides to move in on an AGI seems like the most predictable moment of existential risk. The choice is only the timing of government intervention. It is not an if, but a when.

What a regulatory framework might look like

 Nuclear regulations provide a beginning framework for how we can regulate AI on national and international scales. We must control the inputs, monitor industrial uses and allow democracies to decide on pursuing AGI. Using specialized AI for private purposes is analogous to using nuclear materials for power or medicine. It will be considered a dangerous, but highly valuable technology to be used carefully by private parties and stringently monitored by governments.  The pursuit of AGI would be akin to developing nuclear weapons. AGI research would need to be halted initially, until the international community could agree on whether to proceed. If they did, then non-state actors would continue to be banned from this research, and only states who acted in accordance with international treaties, subject to third party monitoring, would be allowed to pursue it.

Control the inputs

 Similar to nuclear regulations we would rapidly need to monitor and control the supply chains of AI inputs with the goal of preventing any non-state actor from developing a system capable of pursuing AGI without oversight. This would involve aggressive oversight of the semiconductor supply chain to prevent anyone from getting enough GPUs to build an unauthorized datacenter. We would need to highly regulate or nationalize cloud computing resources and insist on international monitoring of all advanced data centers. Governments would have to partner with cloud companies to continue operations, upgrades, etc and create a win-win revenue sharing model. We can think of these as public utilities like nuclear power plants. 

Monitor industrial uses

 Specialized AI has lots of valuable uses, and so we would need to regulate private actors’ use of it. We would define acceptable use of AI, machine learning, neural nets, reinforcement learning etc and monitor private uses. Because cloud computing would be under government control, this surveillance would be relatively straightforward. Enterprises like FAANGs that possibly have the resources to develop AGI would be under shareholder pressure to play ball, and startups would unlikely be real threats.

Allow democracies to choose to pursue AGI or not

 If AGI truly is an existential threat, then we would need to treat it like one. This means immediately placing those closest to it, DeepMind, OpenAI, etc, under government/military control. With their cooperation, we would need to do an assessment of progress to date. If AGI is to exist, democracies (educated about the risks and benefits) must make that choice and exert guidance and ideally control over it. To that end, an initial outright ban on AGI research and working toward an international ban makes the most sense. (These treaties would no doubt be complicated, but arms control experts have already begun thinking about them.) We’ve seen success with the outright and permanent ban of human cloning—making AGI research similarly taboo would likely be the safest course of action. However, depending on the decisions of other nations and the international community it seems plausible that AGI research could continue similar to nuclear weapons development.

If AGI is a serious risk, it’s time to act like it

 It is time to stop writing white papers on theoretical alignment solutions. It is time to start educating the public, communicating with the military and intelligence communities, to start lobbying lawmakers and developing draft bills on how we can stop Artificial General Intelligence before it is too late. We must treat specialized AI like the dangerous but valuable tool that it is, and we must treat AGI like the apocalyptic threat that it is. We have done this before with nuclear technology, we can do it again.

This Return to Work (RTW) plan assumes that COVID-19 risk can be managed given certain parameters, that many core operations benefit from in-person working, and that some activities and individuals benefit more than others from being in an office. The goal of this plan to reduce COVID-19 risk as much as is feasible, and then prioritize business operations where the benefits of in-person working outweigh the COVID-19 risk. Firms can gain competitive advantage by returning to work safely and effectively, while other organizations operate sub-optimally either in the office or entirely at home.

I’m sharing this plan not because I necessarily think firms ought to return to work, but rather because I’ve seen many firms’ RTW plans focus on hygiene theater (constant surface cleaning and hand sanitizing) that will certainly fail. This plan assumes that masks, distancing, and hand washing will all be used scrupulously, but that those measures are insufficient for groups working indoors for 4-8 hours per day. If your organization is doing RTW planning and is focused on sanitizing and social distancing, I hope you find the below helpful in steering the conversation in a safer and more realistic direction. That being said, even with the below measures, there will always be some risk to working in person. My goal is to create a system where the benefits of working together outweigh (but notably do not eliminate) the health risks.

Evidence-based Risk Reduction

The risk reduction side of the Return to Work plan is based on using probability to reduce risk of transmission to acceptable levels. The plan assumes that indoor, aerosol and droplet transmission are the primary modes of contagion with fomites being a distant third (summary of evidence). The Risk Reduction plan has three core components:

1. If the infection rate is too high, risk reduction cannot work due to the combinatorial explosion created by multiplying the risk of each additional infected person (and their contacts). Thus the first element of the plan is to use Public Health Triggers, such that offices can only open when the regional caseload and positivity rate are below a certain threshold. 
2. When caseloads are at low levels, then we can institute a closed Test and Trace system that tests all employees on a regular basis to identify and isolate infected outliers. We can identify all of their work contacts and get them tested immediately to contain outbreaks. 
3. Once we have minimized the number of infected individuals entering the workplace, we will focus on Aerosol Mitigation and modify the environment to increase air ventilation and filtration to reduce any viral concentration. 

Using Public Health Triggers, Test and Trace, and Aerosol Mitigation, in addition to physical distancing, masks and surface cleaning, we will be able to Return to Work safely. 

Public Health Triggers

Use public health data to define risks and triggers to open and close offices as needed.           

• Use microCovid calculator to estimate the risk.
  • Input State and County for epidemiological data.
  • Define Person Risks
    • Number of people in office
    • Risk profile (adjusting for frequent testing)
  • Define Activity Risks
    • Type of Interaction = One time
    • Ventilation = Indoor (although our ventilation will be much better than average)
    • Distance (will we enforce 6+ feet?)
    • Duration (full or half days)
    • Masks (none, cloth or surgical)
    • Volume of conversation = normal
  • Decide what the acceptable number of microCovids (1 in 1,000,000 chance of infection)
• Run the calculator every Sunday night to decide if office is open or closed.
  • In less dynamic environments, run every 2 weeks.

Test and Trace

Create a closed test and trace system that tests each employee using a rapid test once per week, carefully monitor who enters the office to trace any contacts.

Test model

• • • Rapid Antigen tests are currently available, locate providers close to office.
      • Example locations: SF, Austin
      • Large employers with health care providers on-site, may be able to acquire an antigen testing machine.
    • Once available shift to the new rapid, Abbott paper strip test, BinaxNOW for cost savings (approx $5).

Frequency

• • • Use weekly negative tests prior to entry.
      • Daily testing would be ideal, but…
      • With antigen test, cost ($120) will be limiting constraint.
      • With paper test, the initial launch being through HCPs (this is stupid and will change eventually), time/convenience will be the limit.
      • Rotate the day each employee is to be tested to catch outbreaks earlier. 
        • Ie Melissa’s test day is Monday, Andrew’s is Tuesday, etc.
    • As soon as possible, shift to daily paper strip testing.
    • Consider pooled, daily PCR testing when SalivaDirect is available.
      • Especially good for regions with extremely low number of infections due to accuracy over antigen tests.

Tracing

• • Record office attendance AND weekly test results in a public spreadsheet.
  • As soon as any positive test, have all contacts get a PCR, not rapid antigen, test. 
    • PCR tests can identify pre-symptomatic individuals.
    • To make this fast/easy, create an office stockpile of at home PCR tests from these providers to use with infected employees and contacts. 
      • These providers turn around tests within 48 hours regardless of the public health situation in your area.
  • Isolate infected individuals for duration of infection and allow back in office following another negative PCR Test.
  • Isolate negative contacts for additional 7 days and an additional negative PCR test. 

Aerosol Mitigation

We need to shift our focus from surfaces to airborne transmission (long FAQ on aerosol transmission) by prioritizing increasing ventilation (indoor-outdoor air exchange) and filtration (physically removing particles from the air).

Ventilation

• • • Move as many operations outdoors as possible by setting up tents, using balconies, moving to an office with outdoor space, etc. 
      • Bridgewater had the exact right idea very early on by shifting all operations to tents.
    • Open all windows to the outside as possible and increase airflow near these using fans facing out the window.
    • Work with building team to increase airflow via HVAC changes and fans. Shift HVAC system to run continuously if possible. 
    • Stop recirculating air as much as possible. 
    • Use this as basis for discussion of all ventilation measures to take. 
    • Test all ventilation changes using CO2 monitors. 

Filtration

• • Remove particles from the air by installing MERV-13+ rated filters in building HVAC systems.
  • Add portable HEPA filters for additional filtration 
    • Guide to selecting portable HEPA filter.
    • Place them close to the center of each room.

Using Public Health Triggers, Test and Trace, and Aerosol Mitigation, we can dramatically reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection and transmission within our workplaces and begin to get our teams back into the workplace without the need to wait for a vaccine.

Critical Business Operations and Individual Optimization  

The other side of the Return to Work Plan is to focus on prioritizing those operations which drive our key metrics AND benefit most from being in-person, and those individuals who benefit most from being in in-person settings. By weighting individuals by time devoted to key operations and how they individually benefit from being in the office, we can create a schedule that drives business and human performance. 

Critical Business Operations

Some activities have significantly more impact on our key drivers than others, and a subset of those activities are greatly enhanced by being performed in-person. That subset of activities should be prioritized for scheduling in the office.

Key Metrics

• • Define metrics we care most about right now, activities that drive them and whether or not they are significantly more effective in-person. Template below:
  • Revenue
    • Activity X that drives revenue (list out all activities)
      • Significantly more effective in-person: Yes/No
  • Profitability
    • Activity Y that drives profitability
      • Significantly more effective in-person: Yes/No
  • Cash Flow
    • Activity Z that drives Cash Flow
      • Significantly more effective in-person: Yes/No
  • Create cadence of prioritized activities across multiple metrics and identify the people needed for those activities. 

Individual Optimization

Some individuals benefit dramatically more than others by being in an in-person environment and that should factor into when they are scheduled to come into the office. We should create an RTW Index that scores employees by their individual characteristics in addition to any critical business activities they’re involved in.

Early Career Employees 

• • • High priority should be given to employees with less than 2 years of experience in the organization due to difficulties in acquiring skills, informal networks and culture in an entirely virtual environment.

Leaders 

• • • Leaders can affect more individuals informally within a workplace and thus should be given some priority. 

Individuals with strong preference for working in an office 

• • • Examine engagement survey data or conduct specific polling to identify individual variation in mental state and productivity should inform some prioritization of individuals who go into the office first.
    • High priority should be given to those with previously high levels of performance and engagement
    • Some priority should be given to those who state a preference

Example of how the index might be weighted: 

• • Early career (+5), previous high performance/engagement (+5) = +10 
  • Leader (+2), preference for working in person (+2) = +4 

Individuals can opt-out of working in-person for any reason and at any time. 

By prioritizing our key business operations and the individuals on our team that benefit from working in-person, we can dramatically improve business performance in ways that organizations that are less prepared and strategic cannot–putting us at a decisive advantage until normal working conditions return. 

An Evidence-based, Business-driven Return to Work Plan

This Return to Work Plan is context-dependent, flexible and focused on improving business performance during pandemic conditions. By focusing on the best evidence available, we can use Public Health Triggers, Test and Trace, and Aerosol Mitigation to dramatically curtail COVID-19 infection risk within the workplace. Once a safe environment has been created, we can shift our most Critical Business Operations to an in-person setting and use Individual Optimization to allow our employees who benefit most from the office setting to return. In choosing to follow the evidence, we can accelerate our business performance in ways that our competition cannot or will not, giving us a strategic advantage and our people the opportunity to succeed. 

I’m going to begin a weekly “things I’ve learned” round up that I’ll publish on Fridays. The topics will span independent research topics, biotech, consulting and internet miscellanea. For the time being, these will mostly be interesting facts and links with and without commentary. They will likely create research projects that spin off into 2,000+ words posts that are customary of my site. This post is much longer than I foresee future weekly round ups because of the explanation.

Why?

My mentor, former med device CEO, ex-Accenture Strategy partner, and current badass, upon seeing my 2020 and 2020+ goals said that “average performers and wild successes have the same goals, but great people have systems and habits that get them to their goals” and recommended I read a summary of James Clear’s “Atomic Habits“. James has built an entire online business around sharing his ideas, so if you’re interested, I’ll leave the summarization to him.

Habits

My starting habits are focused on codifying the knowledge generated by my work at BTS with biotech clients, personal research, finding the valuable intersections between these areas, and then publishing them for various audiences.

Every week day habits:

• After I brush my teeth, put on running shoes
• When I sit down with first cup of coffee, write one sentence on things I’ve learned (very much using the easy principle hear)
• When browsing the internet, I must save 1 link with notes per 30 minutes or stop browsing
• Read 1 page of book immediately before I eat lunch (again, easy to say, but then I tend to read much more than 1 page)
• Read 1 page of book when I shut down computer after work

Every Friday habits:

• Curate and edit “things I’ve learned”
  • Publish on andrewdornon.com
    • Send to project teams
• Send 1 insight to client
• Send 1 related question to expert on thing I’ve learned

Like everything, these will change (I’ll certainly level them up).

Inaugural Things I Learned This Week:

Biotech

• In Japanese biopharmas, marketers are more likely to speak English than sales professionals. To move into a cross-functional leadership role (beyond marketing or sales), leaders must speak English, so sales leaders are underrepresented in the top ranks.
• In Chinese biopharmas, Commercial teams attempt to influence the choice of the Principal Investigator leading clinical trials. Compared to R&D and Medical teams, Commercial teams prioritize political connections and influence.
• Also in Chinese biopharmas, “coffee talk”is a phrase for calling a sales leader to headquarters for a performance conversation. It is the step that precedes placing the leader on a PIP.
• Vulnerability amongst leaders is stated as the gold standard in leadership attributes at a large biotech, but also not frequently observed. Is being vulnerable that hard? Is it hard to fake?

Drug Names

• Many doctors carefully avoid using brand names for drugs and opt for the generic name of the molecule. This is tricky, however, because so many common drugs are difficult to pronounce. Prozac = fluoxetine, Valium = diazepam, Nexium = esomeprazole
• It gets worse when you start to look at biologics–even common ones like Humira = adalimumab.
• Generic drug names are typically shorthand for the actual chemical name, so they can provide doctors and pharmacists with information even if they’re unpronounceable. For instance, the ending -mab, signals that the drug is a Monoclonal Antibody. 

The Caribbean

• St. Kitts and Nevis is the smallest sovereign nation in the Caribbean 
• On October 24, 1991, workers AND business leaders in Barbados joined together and went on a nationwide strike protesting the incompetent economic policies of Prime Minister Lloyd Sandiford.
• Over  1,000 people have applied  for the Barbados remote work visa.
• If you call the Consulate of Antigua and Barbuda, a First Secretary will call you back within half an hour.
• LIAT, an airline owned by Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines along with Dominica ceased operations due to COVID-19. It’s demise leaves a huge hole in the market (250k passengers to Barbados alone annually) for other airlines to fill. 

Career Path Dependency

• People have a hard time answering the question “knowing what you know now, what would you change about your education and career path?” Why?
  • People are very invested in the choices they’ve made being right
  • This leads them to say that 10 or 20 years of knowledge and experience has not changed their opinion
• People still think doctors save a lot of marginal lives in the developed world, when this isn’t really true (although it’s fine as career paths go)
• A recent paper shows asking about salary history let’s new employers replicate past inequities. Seems easy to stop asking.

Consulting

• Written knowledge is a force multiplier of culture and capability 
  • Especially in hyper-growth orgs where every year less than 50% of your employees have over 1 year of tenure
  • Employees with 4+ years of tenure can scale themselves via writing
  • If everyone at a company left one day, how hard would it be for a new team to come in and pick up the pieces?
• Using red to highlight things in a training document can cause the audience to shut off because of the association with a “red pen” marking up their school work

UPDATE:

See current travel protocols here as they change every 2 weeks or so.

DO NOT use at home tests as recommended below. The Barbados government has clarified that these do not count and have partnered with this lab company for testing. Use that. Anecdotally, 50% of my group got through using at home tests. I was in the 50% that got to wait at the airport until 3am.

Everything You Need to Plan and Book Your Trip in Three Hours or Less

In early July, the Barbadian government announced the creation of a 1 year (renewable) remote work visa and set off a rush of interest in moving to the most stable and wealthy island in the Caribbean. A small group of colleagues, friends, and I decided to make the move, so I put together the step by step guide to help others avoid the pitfalls we experienced (like having to rebook our flights three times). I’ll address why we’re doing this in a separate post. This guide is targeted predominately at US individuals and folks traveling from other Covid high-risk countries (as defined by the Barbadian government). Following this plan will get you to Barbados and allow you to evaluate living there longer-term.

The main logistical hurdles we’ll be working with/around are:

1. Limited flights from the US to Bridgetown/Grantley Adams Airport (BGI)
2. Booking accommodations with amenities like A/C and strong WiFi that are also within walking distance of the beach
3. Extremely tight Covid-19 travel protocols that require:
   1. PCR test results within 72 hours of landing at BGI
   2. Mandatory five to seven day quarantine at one of a few government-mandated hotels
4. Deciding whether or not you plan to stay in Barbados and, if so, getting the Welcome Stamp Visa

If you follow the steps below, you should be able to plan your move to Barbados in less than three hours. 

Flights

Flights Before September 10th, 2020

Currently the only direct flight from the US is a Jetblue flight leaving JFK at 8am, so no matter where you try to book your flight from in the US, you’ll need to go through JFK.  If you can’t get to JFK by 8 AM eastern time, you’ll need to plan to stay overnight and fly out the following morning. To save yourself more transit headaches and Covid-19 exposure, I recommend you stay at the amazing in-airport lodging, the TWA Hotel. Right now, for some reason, when you try to book a flight directly from where you are to Barbados, the flight remains the same (a layover at JFK) but is much more expensive, so my suggestion is to book your flights as two separate legs: one flight to JFK, and another flight from JFK to Barbados.  Once you land in Barbados, you’ll need to show proof of return travel plans (such as receipts for tickets from Barbados back to the US). I suggest booking a flight back to the US that is changeable or cancellable, should you get to the island and need/want to return at a different time than planned. All US airlines follow a rule that flights cancelled within 24 hours of booking are refunded at full cost and many US airlines have expressed increased flexibility due to Covid-19.

Booking links:

• Home to city to JFK (change for your specific departure city and date)
• JFK to BGI (change for your preferred date)
• TWA Hotel (book for the day you land at JFK)
• Proof of return travel flight BGI to MIA (change for your specific arrival city and date)

Additional Flights After September 10th, 2020

After September 10th, American Airlines is adding a daily flight leaving Miami at 11 AM eastern time. If you can make it to Miami by that time, this is a great option. I don’t recommend overnighting in Miami given added risk of exposure to Covid-19, but I included a link to the in-airport hotel below for folks who may need to stay in Miami overnight. Although getting to Miami by 11 AM may be quite tricky from many major American cities, this route is affordable and does not need to be booked as two separate legs. 

Booking links:

• Home to city to MIA to BGI (change departure city and date)
• Miami International Airport Hotel (book the day you land at JFK)
• Proof of return travel flight BGI to MIA (change for your specific arrival city and date)

Getting a Covid-19 Test within 72 hours of Arrival

With in-person Covid test results taking up to a week to process in many parts of the US, it’s a better idea to take an at-home test and then ship the test to a professional lab that isn’t swamped. Given the difficulty of knowing the future, it’s a good idea to order at-home Covid-19 tests (two per person, the necessity of which I will explain further) as soon as possible so you have the tests on hand when you need to use them. I’ve used these services before and gotten results within 72 hours of shipping the test back. My results were posted on the day the swab was received by the lab (three days after I shipped the test). It’s important to note that  the 72 hour window starts when you receive your results, not when you do the initial swab.
Because test processing is so unpredictable, I recommend taking two tests. Take and ship the first test seven days before landing in Barbados. Take and ship the second test about three days before landing in Barbados. Depending on the capacity of the lab, one of these two tests should deliver results within your desired 72 hour window. I recommended ordering 1 test from each of the companies below:

Picture provides this very helpful timing chart to help you time this correctly. 

Verification that Fulgent is CAP Accredited as required by the Barbadian government can be seen in their Accreditation Document. Meanwhile, Labcorp provides the CAP number of each lab individually.

That being said, if you do not have negative test results in hand on arrival, Covid tests are also performed in the Barbadian airport. You can trade all of the above hassle and expense for the hassle of waiting between two and twelve hours (reported from Twitter) in the airport while your test processes, but I would recommend playing it safe and arriving with results for a quicker and smoother transition.

Quarantine Accommodations

Following airport testing or verification of prior results, you will be transported to your choice of officially selected quarantine hotel. (The government is now approving private villas for quarantining on an individual basis, but I think that’s a bad ideas, so won’t provide instructions.) Only a specific handful of spaces are labeled as eligible quarantine hotels by the Barbadian government and all have been listed below. You will be required to stay IN YOUR ROOM for five to seven days if you then take a second test and test negative. You also have the option of being quarantined for 14 days. Given that restriction, you will want to think carefully about which accommodation you choose. Depending on your price point and tendency towards claustrophobia, I strongly recommend the Crane Resort. This is a less economical option, but offers a number of quarantine-friendly amenities such as private outdoor spaces and pools. If travelling with a larger group, the cost of splitting a suite is much more reasonable. 

The approved quarantine hotels are:

• The Crane Resort
  • $188/night
  • Suites with private pool and garden starting at $271/night
  • If travelling with a group of 4-6, splitting a suite helps cut initial costs. 
• Worthing Court 
  • $77-108/night
• Hilton Barbados Resort
  • $157/night

Month One Accommodations

When choosing a home, you’ll want to focus on essential features like WiFi and air conditioning to maintain comfort and productivity (should you be working remotely). After ensuring any given house meets those requirements,, it’s really up to you to decide which part of the island to live in. My recommendation is the west and southwest areas of the island, which are closer to major urban infrastructure. Below, I’ve filtered AirBnb searches to include A/C and WiFi and then sorted them by number of bedrooms and bathrooms. I’ve also specified locations close to the beachfront. Proximity to the beach will come with an extreme premium but will be worth it to some. Conservatively, you’ll want to book the Airbnb for seven days AFTER you land at BGI (since you’ll need to quarantine in a hotel for five to seven upon landing). I’m recommending that you use Airbnb for the initial month on the island while you get a lay of the land; if you’re interested in staying longer, you can use this first month to visit longer-term accommodations in person. 

Booking links:

Normal

• 1 bed, 1 bathroom under $1,500/month
• 2 bed, 2 bath under $2,500/month
• 3 bed, 3 bath under $3,500/month

Beachfront 

• 1 bed, 1 bath, beachfront under $3,000/month
• 2 bed, 2 bath, beachfront under $4,500/month
• 3 bed, 2 bath, beachfront under $7,500/month

Month Two and Beyond Accommodations 

During your first month on the island, I recommend connecting with a real estate agent to find something more permanent. Most long-term rentals will want a twelve month lease, but in my experience, many will quickly negotiate down to a six month lease. You can also try your hand at finding rentals on the internet and doing the legwork yourself. If you prefer to conduct the search yourself, I’ve included the most popular local rental site below. 

Real Estate Agents

• Chestertons
• Sotheby’s

Local Rental Site

• https://www.cariblist.com/

Andrew Approved Houses

Immigration Forms

Within 72 hours of your arrival in Barbados, you must fill out these customs and immigration forms online. Each unrelated individual travelling in a group must fill out a form. Spouses and/or children under 18 may use one form. It asks all the normal questions: flight number, passport information, where you will be staying, as well as some health related questions. It is recommended that you fill it out at least 24 hours prior to your arrival. 

Visas

In the beginning months of your stay, you won’t need to worry about obtaining a visa. Your tourist visa (automatically granted to US citizens) is good for six months. If you plan to stay in Barbados beyond six months, you should apply for the newly created Barbados Welcome Stamp. This visa will allow you to work remotely in Barbados for one year (renewable indefinitely) and allow any children to attend school for a small fee. The only real requirement is that your household income is above $50,000/year. 

• Welcome Stamp for an individual $2,000
• Welcome Stamp for a family $3,000

Forms needed to submit the application:

1. Passport sized photograph of thePrincipal Applicant and all other members of the Family Group over the age of 18 (if applicable)
2. Bio data page of passport for thePrincipal Applicant and all other members the Family Group (if applicable)
3. Birth certificate of the Principal Applicant and all other members of the Family Group (if applicable)
4. Proof of relationship of Principal Applicant to all other members of the Family Group (Birth, adoption documents, marriage certificate and any other documents)

Office Space

If you decide that you need office space outside of your house, there is one short-term office rental space on the island. Regus rents private offices starting at $440/month. 

Conclusion

Getting to Barbados is a bit of a hassle and expense. However, the opportunity for US citizens to live and work in a Covid-19 free environment is unsurpassed. I hope that this guide helps make your journey seamless and removes many of the missteps I made from your path. Please see the contact page if you have questions, I may have the answer.

I wish you way more than luck. 

The development and distribution of a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine is the most important human endeavor of our current moment. How are we doing? What does the early data say? When will doses be available and to whom? We have 3 main contenders that have released Phase 1 data: Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca. I excluded CanSino because of disappointing early results.These will likely be the first vaccines to market, so I compared their current safety, efficacy and supply profiles.

An important note: Due to a lack of global coordination on trial design and endpoint selection, these vaccines are being tested in different ways. It is irresponsible to compare studies like I’ve done below for a lot of reasons. However, we don’t really have another choice.

Notes on T cells (they’re crazy complicated):

• CD4+ Th1: create inflammatory response against virus (cytokines)
• CD4+ Th2: aid the differentiation and antibody production by B cells (helper T cells)
• CD8+: destroy viral infected cells (killer T cells)

This is surprisingly strong initial data, which shows how far vaccine platforms have come in the last 10 years. Plus, it appears we’ll have multiple viable vaccines and that redundancy gives me a lot of hope that we’ll be able to start controlling Covid in Q1 2021 using widespread vaccination.

Thanks for reading! We can accelerate vaccine development using a trial design called a human challenge trial, I’ve made it easy for you to ask your elected representatives to make this possible here. 

Here’s the live link that I’ll keep updated as new data is released.

Update: Disclaimers and comments from drug discovery chemist and blogger Derek Lowe:

“Everything I see in your table looks good, but the biggest gap is efficacy. We have the antibody and (some) of the T-cell data, but what we don’t know is how that matches up with real-world coronavirus protection. I’m holding off until we see some Phase II data, because I just have no idea how things will come out – in my experience, a lot of schemes that looks rational break down a bit in actual patients with the disease, and that makes me wary (!) But that said, I think you’re doing all that can be done with the data available!”

Another important note: I’m not an immunologist or a statistician and ask folks to correct things I’ve undoubtedly gotten wrong.

Disclaimer: I consult in a limited capacity for AstraZeneca on matters completely unrelated to their vaccine program. I have no financial interests in any individual company.

Sources:

Many thanks to Derek Lowe for all of his analysis of these vaccines

Oxford/AZ

Moderna

Pfizer/BioNTech1

Pfizer/BioNTech2

Update: The WHO has conditionally backed human challenge trials (the conditions are that they not be the mad science of everyone’s worst nightmares). This is great and it lays out a framework for the trial design. BUT we still need FDA to either adopt these standards or issue their own in order to give vaccine manufacturers confidence to start recruiting when possible. I’ve revised my original letter to reflect this and added another version for sending as a second round.

The only way FDA will ever pre-commit to allowing human challenge trials for Covid-19 vaccines as acceptable Phase 3 trials is if there is immense public and political support. Given the nuance of this topic, politicians will have to raise the idea in public in order to shape broader public opinion. I submit to you the letter for your use that I sent to my state and federal elected officials to start to raise public support.

Find your elected officials here. 

Note: Change the ALL CAPS text.

First Round Letter

Subject: Human Challenge Trials to Speed Covid Vaccine Development

Body:

Hello NAME and Team!

I urge you to publicly ask the FDA to provide encouragement and guidance on using human challenge trials for Covid-19 vaccines. The WHO has issued guidelines that are a good starting point: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331976/WHO-2019-nCoV-Ethics_criteria-2020.1-eng.pdf?ua=1

I am one of your constituents, I live in PLACE YOU LIVE. I think the US should lead the world in developing a Covid-19 vaccine. There is a proven way to accelerate Phase 3 trials–human challenge trials. This type of trial means that instead of waiting for the vaccinated trial group of thousands to get naturally infected over 6 or so months, you expose hundreds of volunteers on purpose as soon as the vaccine has taken effect. We would have good data in as little as 1.5 months. Human challenge trials are already used for the flu, malaria and other diseases, so structuring the trial and isolating the participants would be simple.

Again, please have your staff explore how the FDA can publicly approve of these trials and encourage them.

Over 9,000 people have already volunteered to take the risk on behalf of our fellow Americans. An organization has already compiled a list of these volunteers making it easy to recruit for trials: https://1daysooner.org/

The United States could save hundreds of thousands of lives by letting fewer than a thousand take this risk. 

Here are some more resources on the topic:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01179-x

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine-covid.html

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/4/9/21209593/coronavirus-vaccine-human-trials-explained

https://www.who.int/biologicals/expert_committee/Human_challenge_Trials_IK_final.pdf

Best,

YOUR NAME

Second Round Letter

Subject: WHO Supports Human Challenge Trials for Covid-19 Vaccine

Body:

Hello NAME and Team!

The WHO has issued guidelines on human challenge trial design for speeding Covid-19 vaccine development: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331976/WHO-2019-nCoV-Ethics_criteria-2020.1-eng.pdf?ua=1

I urge you and your staff to pressure FDA to explore this topic and issue guidance so that American manufacturers can feel confident enough to start trials as soon as possible. The US can lead on vaccine development–or as is currently the case, we can trail Oxford University. We have unrivaled pharmaceutical prowess, but without human challenge trials, we will wait years for a vaccine.

Best,

YOUR NAME

Some of us have a choice. A choice of how to live during this plague. Many of us, of course, have not been given that choice.

This includes the healthcare workers, the grocers and construction workers, the myriad people who keep the electricity on, the food supplied, and the trash from piling up in the streets. This also includes those working on therapies and vaccines who must quarantine at work away from their families. Undoubtedly, these essential workers deserve our solidarity, our gratitude and combat pay for their efforts.

In the meantime, the rest of us are left to while away the days at home. Many knowledge workers depending on Zoom and Slack to get by and recreate some semblance of a normal work day. Others still have less free time now than they did before due to new caregiving demands (the task of homeschooling children, for example) that possibly overlap with their paid work.

But for a large number of people (myself very much included), there is more time in the day than we know what to do with. While I’ve added some disclaimers about who may not be in the group I’m describing, you know if you’re on the side of society with too much new time because you are suddenly aware of  the vast expanses of time and feel the need to fill it somehow. And if you are facing this new expanse, we have to reckon with something.

We have a choice to make. We can focus on simply surviving this plague, or we can prepare for what’s next.

Surviving is the path I’ve taken so far. It has consisted of working for a biotech client that’s adapting to the Covid-19 world. Since my client is in California, it means I’ve been working on “West Coast time” which mostly means working whenever I can, in a completely unstructured way. It means going for runs around the Capitol in the morning as my means of mental and physical wellness. It means watching an embarrassing amount of TV. It means my partner and I writing down seven activities a week on little slips of paper and putting them in a hat and pulling out one a day—things like cooking Thanksgiving dinner and reading poetry aloud or drinking champagne and disco dancing. It means reading a completely unhealthy amount of news and scrolling endlessly on Twitter. It means Zoom parties and talking on the phone more than normal (and I already talk on the phone a lot). It means drinking way too much. It means saving a lot of money by having almost zero discretionary spending. It means daydreaming about moving to the beach to ride this out if we really have to wait 18 months for a vaccine. It means signing up for a human challenge trial because wait, fuck no, we can’t afford to wait 18 months for a vaccine.

Survival isn’t so bad. On net, my physical health is probably about even. On the positive side, I’m eating out almost zero times a week, exercising a little more, and not flying on planes constantly. In the “loss” column, I’m drinking a lot more and reclining while I work (and if sitting is the new smoking, I have to imagine reclining is as bad if not worse). My mental health seems a lot worse in the sense that I didn’t think much about my mental health prior to the pandemic, and now I worry about my anxiety (for instance, what does it mean to be short of breath, am I breathing deeply enough?) and have some trouble sleeping. These don’t seem to be serious problems, and on some level, it’s reasonable to be anxious about a global pandemic that has stalled large parts of the global economy seemingly indefinitely.

There is a spectrum of survival that goes from successfully treading water (what I’m doing) on one end to just barely staying alive on the other. I’m afraid of the sort of common equilibria that a lot of people will ultimately achieve. Many people will become depressed and addicted. Others will avoid that fate, but their skills will be irrelevant in this new future or still-critical skills will atrophy from disuse. Organizational networks and knowledge will fray and dissipate. Human and institutional capital will decay.

This decay is particularly toxic because on the other side of this plague there will be a lot of work to be done. Rebuilding what is still needed of our old world and starting from scratch on the new one. However this gets done, it will be a global effort in civilization building. We do not want to undertake this with a citizenry that is less skilled, knowledgeable, and able than the one we have now. More so, I am not currently the person I would want to be tasked with rebuilding our world, and if you’re honest with yourself, you probably aren’t either. If we choose survival, worse versions of our current selves will be the people tasked with rebuilding.

Our other option is to get ready. We will never be ready, but instead, we must decide to get ready—I think we’ve all learned as much. We should do our best to prepare for the task ahead;  in the myriad preparations we will build both human capital and resilience, resilience being perhaps the meta-ability that we need to develop most. What you do to get ready should be based on your own forecasts, existing talents, and preferences, but I see three categories of need: entrepreneurial and operational skills, moral capacity, and cultural production.

Entrepreneurial and Operational skills: We need to get ready to build from scratch and to scale our existing infrastructure.

The first category of need is that the the private, public and non-profit sectors will all need to come together to successfully rebuild the infrastructure of a society, and to do so, we will need many talented people to help. In a very real sense, we will need new enterprises to serve both our new needs and our existing needs that have new constraints. Some of these constraints may be:

• Risk management reducing appetite for lean, just in time, global supply chains
• >20% prime age unemployment
• Ongoing and cascading financial crises
• State and municipal bankruptcies
• Falling life expectancy due to a crippled healthcare system
• Falling life expectancy due to addiction and suicide
• A delayed generation of students with permanently reduced human capital

These constraints represent a drastic change in the operating environment and mean we will be operating in a dramatically poorer society in terms of health, state capacity, and human and financial capital. As a result, we will need talented individuals to focus on new wealth creation more than ever before. It will no longer be enough for our best and brightest to carefully shepherd our existing stock of wealth via finance, consulting and management of Fortune 500 companies. Undoubtedly those professions can make operational contributions that generate new wealth, but that will require a change in focus from the incremental to the exponential. This means investing in new ventures with time, effort and shoestring capital in greater amounts than ever before. In the public sector, this could mean the creation of a new government agency responsible for public health—not just pandemics, but substantial efforts to improve nutrition, fitness and lead remediation would create huge windfalls of human health and are within the reach of driven and imaginative people. The public and non-profit sectors may finally realize what a crisis homelessness is when they have to forestall mass evictions. Hopefully they will realize the problem is just supply and demand driving prices above people’s ability to pay and build more housing until prices falls. Perhaps the non-profit sector will realize how mismanaged and poorly targeted many of their missions are as they face a true crisis and are unable to help.

If these issues are of interest, what you should do? You should study and you should practice what you learn.

Potential areas of focus:

• Entrepreneurship and management—this is a tricky topic to learn because most decent entrepreneurs are just growing businesses. There is very little good writing on these topics but these stand out: High Output Management by Andy Grove, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, Paul Graham’s essays. Practicing creating things people want will be the best way to learn.
• Operations, Supply Chain Logistics and Manufacturing Process—there may be a manufacturing and supply chain renaissance as enterprises focus on resilience rather than efficiency.
• Construction—there will be pent up demand for construction, especially after already facing a dire housing shortage in many cities pre-Covid-19.
• Niche topics to build businesses around—follow your interests that overlap with the types of things people are willing to pay for.
• Public administration and public health—while I think the rules of these games will be changed dramatically, it’s important to know them before breaking them.
• Specific public health topics— including but not limited to mental health, addiction, nutrition, fitness, biology of metabolic syndrome, and cancer.
• Non-profits—I would read effective altruism critiques of traditional non-profits, then read critiques of effective altruism, then…find someone smarter than me.

How to learn? Read everything you can, ask experts to talk about their expertise (we know many of them are at home with free time), come prepared with questions about the current state and potential future states.

How to practice? Write about potential action plans, share that writing with experts (and non-experts), and ask to discuss. Practice the skills needed to execute the plan—for example, in construction, calling City Hall and asking about permitting exceptions or interviewing and evaluating subcontractors.  When possible, put small versions into practice.

Moral capacity: We need to get ready to do hard things because they are right.

 The second category of desperate need now and in the future is what I’m calling moral capacity—the ability to contemplate what it means to be good and to then act on one’s understanding. I have found myself left alone in the quiet and disquiet of my home—forced there by understanding that going out and being with others at this time is wrong. It carries with it a slight probability of killing someone. And so we must not. Because of this, I find myself acknowledging what we all really knew—that our everyday actions are often not morally neutral. As such, we could all do better. We’ve been making choices with the slight probability of killing someone already—we’ve just been ignoring it. With the time to evaluate my actions and life, I’ve thought dramatically more about what being good might mean and what I can do about it. Throughout I’ve also found myself mostly without the tools to think about these questions and more so without the community to act with and for. Without many discretionary distractions, it’s become all too clear that I am not the community member or citizen that I want to be. I doubt I am alone.

In times of economic growth and technological progress, perhaps the anomie and atomization of modern life were an acceptable trade. Given the task before us, one that we cannot accomplish without personal sacrifice, unprecedented solidarity, and moral vision—anomie will not suffice.

What will a modern moral capacity look like? It will look like people truly caring about what is right, while allowing for competing versions of morality to flourish and be acted upon. It will be a morality keenly focused on action. It will look like people taking actions that don’t align with their preferences because they are right. We are all getting a small lesson in this moral capacity during the lockdowns. We are staying in because it is right. Despite the fact that it is no fun, and that the longer it goes on it will come with ever greater sacrifices. Yet, we persevere. I hate to see the cracks coming to our moral courage already. I hate it especially because so much more will be asked of us.

How can we practice building moral capacity? I think faith traditions give us some guidance, and they mostly seem to indicate that it is practice that builds our moral capacity. It is prayer, meditation, fasting and study. It is carving out time for contemplation and the hard work of thinking for ourselves. It will mean turning off Netflix. It will mean reading old philosophical and religious texts or listening to On Being with Krista Tippett. It will mean deciding for ourselves to focus on what is right and what is wrong even though it’s uncool, even when doing so requires of us things we don’t want to do, and especially even when going back to pretending most things are morally neutral becomes an option again.

Our own moral contemplation is only the first piece of moral capacity. The second piece is the ability to act on one’s understanding. Action requires a sort of personal activation energy to overcome inertia, but it also requires connection to a community of others who share similar moral goals and who can reinforce your conviction, improve your thinking, and give you operational scale when needed. Some of these communities exist or existed 50 years ago but have fallen or frayed- things like civic organizations (the Lion’s Club or the Independent Order of Oddfellows), religious congregations, city politics and commissions. We’re now beginning to see the fruition of potential modern alternatives, like mutual aid groups form around Google spreadsheets to help neighbors during lockdowns. None of these things, old and new, are or were perfect, but they allow for the contemplation of what was right with a focus on acting upon issues that were in front of them.

I can imagine new moral communities springing up and hope that they do. Since I have the time, I’m going to consider what is right and wrong, whether I am making the world a materially a better place, and hopefully figure out how to act in a way that is good. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you do too.

Cultural Production: We need to get ready to create a culture worth saving.

 The third category of need is building a civilization in which people’s intellects, senses and spirits flourish and prosper as much as our physical infrastructure does. We’ve seen people take their passions much more seriously during the lockdown period. Amateurism and avocations have made a comeback in a big way. The question “what is art for” has been resoundingly answered for our moment. Art is for surviving a plague. It helps us remember that things weren’t always this way, and they won’t they won’t always be this way.

In the months and years to come, I hope we will remember that making music, recording home movies and writing bad essays (ahem) allowed us to express something like the fullness of human drama when our worlds were so small. There is something freeing and gratifying in amateurism and production that allows a silly pride. We become part of long traditions that will hopefully exist beyond the existence of the Earth (with Mozart, Chuck Berry and Azerbaijani folk music already in interstellar space aboard the Voyager probes, we’ve got a decent chance at this). We become more careful consumers of culture and better critics when we produce culture ourselves.

The possibilities are too great, and individual skills and passion too diverse to outline them here, so I will tell you what I plan to do. I plan to write for an hour a day. I plan to read fiction or belles lettres for an hour a day. I will lean on my much more culturally wise partner to show me new movies and music. I will watch operas online. I will try my best to turn those inputs into better outputs. I will applaud amateur cultural production wherever I see it. We can create art.  We can write our own stories. The rest of the human drama is ours, so we should get ready.

We have time to get ready.

We were not ready for this pandemic. We did not use the time we had when we saw it coming to get ready. We have time to get ready for our post-lockdown future. We can see unprecedented mass unemployment. We can see a biotech sector that needs more investment and skilled labor. We can see the need to build a public health agency that can respond to not just this crisis, but our ongoing health crises. We can see the need for onshore manufacturing capacity. We can see the need to build more resilience into our supply chains. We can see how housing shortages and mass incarceration make us vulnerable.  We can see the need to build competent government agencies and non-profits. These are the things that we can see. Will we get ready? Or will the lockdowns end, a vaccine arrive, and only then start to get smart and able? If we build entrepreneurial and operational skills soon, we can start building for a new normal that is healthier and wealthier than we were in 2019.

To do all of the above, we will have to build out our willingness and ability to decide what is right and then pursue those acts. Even when it sucks. Even when we don’t want to. Especially when no one expects us to. Our moral capacity will be the difference between a recovery that is measured in years or decades.

To stay motivated for years of building, we will have to remember what we are building for. Yes, we are building for a society where people aren’t dying in overflowing hospitals. Yes, we are building for a world where basic health and security are ensured. But we’re also building for a world that makes intellectual and artistic progress, a world where every one of us takes part in a culture that would be envied by some future textbook reader. Rather than surviving and returning to the world as we knew it, we should aim to thrive and use the remains of what was to rebuild something much better. Cultural production brings us as close to the source of inspiration and enlightenment as is practical. It reminds us of why we must get ready.

This has been over 3,000 words all to say that I hope during this plague we will get ready to undertake the following in a very serious way.

1. Do the hard work to provide the things others need.
2. Try, really try, to be good.
3. Nourish the mind and spirit like life depends on it.

If we’re honest, many of us weren’t doing these things before. And now, the world will ask us to do them all. We may never truly be ready. But we can see that we will be called upon. Get ready.

For whatever reason, 2019 felt like a bad reading year in terms of quantity and quality. However, after going back over my notes, it was better than remembered. I started approximately 30 books and these are the best ones, plus some bonus internet stuff. I didn’t read any buzzy books, but that might actually have been for the best.

Books Recommended Unequivocally

Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

This was the best novel I read in 2019. By far. It might crack top 5 novels I’ve read in the past decade. It is strange. It’s a series of letters written by an elderly preacher to his very young son. To be read after he’s died. It’s a family history. A town history. And a spiritual history. More than a novel, it’s a series of heartrending meditations that out of context don’t make sense or seem precious. But inside her world, you’ll spend a few days contemplative in a way that feels rare. 

Truth & Beauty – Ann Patchett

Ann’s chronicle of her friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy is a joyful and heartbreaking description of best friends becoming adults and becoming famous(ish). We should all be so lucky.

What You Do Is Who You Are – Ben Horowitz

Goddammit Ben Horowitz is a good writer. His first book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, is the best business book I’ve ever read. This has to be a close second. It’s about creating a kickass organizational culture, and he’s not talking about free beer and ping pong tables, but defining culture as how orgs make decisions. Ben decided not to use case studies from companies that will go bankrupt in five years—looking at you Jim Collins. (That’s actually unfair to Jim—looking at you every business book charlatan.) Instead he looked at amazing organizational cultures from history—like the culture created by Toussaint Louverture when leading the Haitian slave revolt or Shaka Senghor who led a wildly successful prison gang. It’s a fucking wild book and meets the absurd bar set by his debut.

Never Enough: the neuroscience and experience of addiction – Judith Grisel

Written by a former drug addict turned PhD neuroscientist, this book actually explains the underlying mechanism that creates chemical dependencies. And an explanation of how pot works and why it is demotivating. I read it in one sitting on a Friday night, super understandable and entertaining.

Man Walks into a Room – Nicole Krauss

I’ve read this before and remembered essentially none of it. Sitting here now, I remember incredibly little of it. Krauss’s debut novel is about memory and amnesia, so I don’t know if my brain kept reading the word forget and forgot everything (twice). But Nicole Krauss is fucking brilliant, and I reread this book in a couple days, so I know it’s a good book.

Internet Stuff Recommended Unequivocally

Money Stuff – Matt Levine

Matt Levine is an ex-Goldman guy turned Bloomberg columnist who provides analytical rigor and inside baseball to the typical business and finance headlines. Money Stuff is a daily newsletter and I recommend you subscribe. From today’s on Softbank:

“in these situations it is instructive to remove a few layers of abstraction and just think about what is actually happening here. At one end, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia plows gigantic piles of money into SoftBank’s Vision Fund. At the other end, Mexico City’s “legendary late-night snack spot El Moro” can have someone “deliver its churros and hot cocoa to takeout customers across the capital” well below cost, subsidized by the Vision Fund. The King of Saudi Arabia is sending hot chocolate to everyone in Mexico City. Here, have this nice hot chocolate, on the King of Saudi Arabia. Modern capitalism is always so much stranger than you expect.”

How Technology Grows – Dan Wang

Technically published in 2018, but I read it several times in 2019 and once in 2020, so I’m going to rep Dan’s views any chance I get. Dan is a student of industry and trade and his insight into process knowledge (unwritten technical expertise) and how it eventually codifies into tools and IP rather than the reverse provides a grimmer than normal view of American industry. Not only are the supply chains not here, but if you brought them back…we wouldn’t know what to do with them. Combining this with his definite optimism concept, lets us begin to imagine how we could get to a new age of American industry. I’ll just leave this here:

“I’d like for us to return to optimism. It’s not enough to tell everyone: “Just choose to be optimistic.” Instead, I’m suggesting that we can nurture optimism by developing a greater appreciation for industry and by reaching for higher economic growth. Pushing forward the technological frontier should not simply be someone else’s problem. Instead, the question of how to do so should preoccupy many more of us.”

Work on these things – Tyler Cowen

Tyler’s a weird guy who is probably right less often than average, but when right will be right in a bigger way. He runs a venture fund (of sorts) now and gave a list of things he’d like to see people work on, they’re all interesting and if you make a credible case that you’re the right person to work on them—he’ll throw you some essentially unrestricted cash to pursue it.

Books Recommended with Caveats

Long Life – Mary Oliver

Like most, I love Mary Oliver. I love that she ran away from home as a teenager and somehow ended up living at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house. I love that she spent her life walking around Cape Cod, foraging for food and writing stuff down in a little notebook. I love how much she loved this world and every creature and thing in it. Reading this book of essays is like a look inside her mind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a whole lot of it is quite boring. But there are moments of insight and joy that I think make it worth it like this bit about her partner:

“Molly and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic. M. will hardly look at a bush. She wants a speedboat; I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy…

If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above town and the harbor, and my life is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.”

Getting Things Done – David Allen  

I’m skeptical about self-improvement and productivity books. However, I’m not skeptical about people needing some system (whatever it is). I’ve heard about GTD from folks for years, so I finally read the book. The system is too complicated for me—I essentially use steps 1 and steps 1,000, but it seems better than nothing. No evidence on effectiveness yet, but if your casting about for a system, this one seems pretty good and has stood the test of time.

Sontag: Her Life – Benjamin Moser

 Susan Sontag was maybe my first glimpse of literary criticism and after reading On Photography at age 12 or so, I’ve tried not to take many photos or be their subject. A task ever more difficult since the iPhone. Today, I’m completely unsure that my preteen interpretation of Sontag even makes sense, but at this point, I’m going to stand by it. When I heard there was a forthcoming 705 page biography of Sontag, I knew I had to read it. If you have any similar connection, it’s pretty badass. Sometimes melodramatic. Sometimes boring. I don’t know who Ben Moser is or why he wrote this book, but it’s an awesome accomplishment that he’s also self-effacing about.

“…Sontag showed how metaphor formed, and then deformed, the self; how language could console, and how it could destroy; how representation could comfort while also being obscene; why an even greater interpreter ought to be against interpretation. And she warned against the mystification of photographs and portraits: including those of biographers.”

Confessions of a Maddog – Jay Dunston Milner 

I really like the Texas Chili Parlor (they give you those little glasses with your beer AND the kitchen is open until 1am everyday). I really like Guy Clark (no explanation needed). In the course of these dual fandoms, I discovered that Maddog Inc was a group of Texas writers and musicians who stirred up trouble in Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth in the 60s and 70s.  The group contained the writers Billie Lee Brammer (The Gay Place), Bud Shrake, Pete Gent (North Dallas Forty), and Larry L. King (Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) and the musicians Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, and Billy Joe Shaver and governor Ann Richards (what?). As well as the author himself. It’s mostly a scene book where not much happens. But if you wanted to get deep into one slice of Austin’s perpetual glory days—then this is for you.

I’m an Austin-based person currently focused on what people will do for income and meaning in the near and far future, and beyond that figuring out what matters and what to do about it. Right now, a lot of that thought goes into how technology will shape the future of work, if financial derivatives are the solution to climate change, and if we can translate the progress seen in engineering complex technologies to social organizations primarily through randomized, controlled trials. Almost all of this is speculative and changes as I learn.

By day I help big companies sell stuff better and the weird Swedish consulting firm that employs me sell itself better.  I work on how enterprise salespeople can help their customers allocate resources most effectively. If you’ve ever read a sales-focused book, you know that there’s a lot of room for improvement. We use buzzwords to make companies buzzword-ier. Prior to this I co-founded a tech company that raised $500k to make the labor market for films more efficient–it didn’t work but we learned a lot.

I started this blog to chart a public education in the above.