Resetting

Ted Gioia wrote this week about how we are in the midst of a great cultural reset. And he may be onto something there. Politics is raw and unsettled. The tech industry is undergoing a massive transformation. And tech is eating every other industry and impinging on every piece of culture.

I find myself returning to first principles, and thinking from the start about why I write, and what the important things are to write and think about.

Creating and communicating

I love The Oatmeal.   Matthew Inman, the person behind it, is wonderfully creative.  This is his great, down-to-earth advice on creativity.  I particularly liked the “Your Ears Are Plugged” section, a great reminder that you have to dig into the details and break through your preconceptions:

Depressurization is tough. It means reading more books. Watching more tutorials. Finding a new teacher. It means writing in a genre you don't normally write in. Or drawing with a new type of pen. Or playing a new instrument.
It means doing the work.
It means unwinding all your hard-earned muscle memory and blowing up your assembly line.
I know it's a pain in the ass.
Do it anyway.

Go read the whole thing. It is all very good (and a little irreverent).

Switching to an entirely different source of inspiration, I had missed this quote from Reagan: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing” — Ronald Reagan.  Regardless of how you feel about his policies, he was a great communicator.  And this quote really resonates.   It is relevant in product strategy, in marketing, in relationships, everywhere.  When I find myself having to explain my views over and over again, that is a strong signal to me that I haven’t really figured out what I am trying to say.

Energy

This note from The Electrotech Revolution is a great framing of the energy market. There are a couple of things I’ve read in the past 10 years that have helped me think about energy, and this is one of them.  Many discussions are very simplistic and unsophisticated — this article does a much better job of framing what is going on, with a particular focus on the importance of electrification (bold for emphasis is mine):

Amid all the noise, one thing is clear: new energy tech is growing consistently, and with increasing impact. Today, the world invests twice as much in new energy technologies as it does in fossil fuels.

To make sense of what’s happening in energy today, we need a new lens. We propose a third way: the electrotech revolution. This sees the transition not as swapping dirty fuels for cleaner ones, but as building a fundamentally better and more efficient energy system organized around electricity. This is being realized through the deployment of electrotech—a new wave of electricity-based technologies including solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, smart grids, and digital controls. On the supply side, solar and wind are replacing fossil generation. On the demand side, transport, buildings, and industry are electrifying. And in between, batteries and digital systems tie it all together, enabling real-time coordination, flexibility, and control.
This change is unfolding in a cascade of classic technology disruptions, of the kind we’ve seen play out many times before. Like past shifts in computing, telecoms, and transport, change is being driven not by top-down mandates or incumbents, but by bottom-up innovation, market momentum, and prescient governments investing in the next generation of technologies. This view foresees rapid, disruptive change ahead as electrotech adoption is driven by forces far deeper than just climate action.

Another good read, though a few years old now, is The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. We have nearly infinite energy pouring onto the world every day; we just need to figure out the best ways of processing it into the forms we need.

Both of these readings support the idea that fossil fuels vs renewables is fundamentally the wrong framing and wrong fight.   We need to produce 1000x more usable energy at a fraction of today’s costs — squabbling about today's pie is just a waste of time.

Space

I watched some of Acquired’s interview with Steve Ballmer, it was great to hear Steve talk about the early days of Microsoft.  Microsoft was a great example of a mission-driven organization in those days; it was an exciting place to work, and it was relatively easy to collaborate inside the company because the mission was paramount for everyone.  The interview was also a little bittersweet, because as the company turned its entire focus to the enterprise (which may have been a really smart financial move), it lost some of its mission focus.

I also read this short piece from the founders on why they started Stoke. A great and clear story about the motivations for complete vehicle reuse and rapid reuse, both of which can drive delivery costs to levels that were unimaginable a decade ago.   The company has such a clear and valuable mission.  I’m heading to Stoke tomorrow to visit some friends; I am excited to see the place again.  

Stoke is exactly the kind of company we need to foster.  We don’t need to bring every bit of manufacturing back to the US, nor could we.  We must focus on the high-growth, high-value industries like aerospace — we still have a leadership opportunity there — The FT on China's manufacturing dominance (chart)

Governance

As Ramez Naam says, there are only three levers to attack the deficit — slow the growth of entitlement spending, raise taxes, or promote pro-growth policies.   And as I have argued many times, the only viable political path is promoting pro-growth policies.   This is the real failure of DOGE - we wasted Elon’s time on immaterial cost-cutting and didn’t utilize his skills for economic growth.

I feel like no one remembers Kent State — to this day, that song hits me hard.  Deploying young nervous National Guard troops to tense civilian areas seems like a bad idea.  More talking is needed, fewer weapons.

Products

It's always good to look at the Apple Design Awards — there are a lot of apps in here that I should try.  Balatro, iaWriter, and Ground News are the only ones I was previously familiar with.

And regarding Apple, I installed the macOS Tahoe beta overnight.  Probably just the old man in me talking, but my primary reaction is “why did they dial down the contrast on everything?  It is so hard to see things now.” We have these amazing displays on our computers, and it feels like Tahoe is jamming all information into a very small range of contrast and color.

Also on the "man am I old" front, someone asked on Threads this week “What was your first IDE?”   And any IDE would have been nice; I started out handwriting code on forms like these: