Hey Seth - In an attempt to spend less time on Facebook (myself) and to hopefully help others do the same, I've decided to take all of the stuff I'd usually post there and put it in a newsletter. Have questions about something? Get at me!

Notes: (1) This is my first time using sender.net, so bear with me. I wanted to try other solutions besides Mailchimp, so I'm starting here. (2) I will still post these to Facebook, but it's unlikely that you will see it because of the algorithms disdain for outside links.

Thinking

Doing 

I've been lucky to get to sit in on a few panels with some amazing marketers, authors, philosophers, and media geniuses over the last few months thanks to Joe Jaffe's CoronaTV. It usually airs at 1pm ET each day, but occasionally has happy hour shows as well. Ironically, we rarely talk about marketing, and focus more on big picture topics like empathy, leadership, honesty, credibility, trust, and hope. It's good times.

Watching

I happened across it on Hulu one night browsing and as I do with most things pro-wrestling related I checked to see if it had any mentions of Bret Hart. Dark Side of the Ring did, and so I took the bait. And wow, was I hooked. I burned through both seasons pretty quickly, over a few days maybe? I especially recommended this to all of my high school buddies in the Fantasy Wrestling Coalition.



Most people aren't Bret obsessed like I am though, so for other fans of wrestling from the late 80s, 90s, and early 2000s there are some amazing stories here. So many of these characters and stories remind me of being in elementary school and spending Sunday nights at Joe Cloyd's house watching pay-per-view events with him and his dad Ron. I swear that I only know most of these old wrestlers names and stories because of Ron. 



(Side note: Ron gave me my first ever nickname, Homer. Not because of the Simpsons of anything like that, but because I hit a home run my last at-bat of little league baseball. I still run into him at my home town's fall festival, and he still calls me Homer, and few things in the world still feel as good as that.)

Anyway, here are the standout episodes:

• The Killing of Bruiser Brody - I had no idea the circumstances around his death, a case of wrestling story-lines being taken too seriously...
• The Last of the Von Erichs - This is just a terribly sad story and reminder of their downfall.
• The Match Made in Heaven - The story of Macho Man and Elizabeth... where wrestling storyline becomes reality.
• The Fabulous Moolah - Most people my age know Moolah as a crazy old lady still doing weird stuff in the ring in the 90s, but there are some pretty unsettling accusations here from her past.
• The Life and Crimes of New Jack - This one is funny, and absolutely not funny as the lines between real and fake again blend a little too much here. 
• The Herb Abrams and UHF Story - Herb tried to take on the WWF, and... it didn't go well.

A recurring theme throughout the series is that when you live in a world of gas-lighting, reality distortions permeate everywhere. Fitting for the modern age really...



Oh, a final thought... Jim Cornett and Vince Russo still really really REALLY hate each other. Never thought I'd say this, but I'm with Jim Cornett.

The series is an extension of the original Karate Kid trilogy. It does a great job delivering nostalgia, and building up characters that you genuinely care about. It's one of those shows where every episode you are rooting for someone different. That's good writing. Add it to your queue here.

Everything I said about the dangers of social media for kids, for us as people, about polarization, about misinformation is covered in this hour and half documentary. It's worth watching with your kids (PG-13), but mostly it's just worth watching. Please, please, please watch. Add it to your queue here.

Reading

I am continually fascinated by Godin's ability to distill down lakes of information into slammable shots of insight. 



The lessons in book are dispensed in short chunks, which makes for easy reflection. The core argument here is that anyone trying to change something/someone is a marketer. An as a marketer there are things you HAVE to know about humans, about organization, about systems, about everything... to be successful. And all of those foundational principles are explained so perfectly in This is Marketing. If you interact with other humans in any way, this book will make you think important thoughts.



I'm just getting started on this text, but it's making a big impact. At it essence, this is a book about the things we design that neglect to consider their impacts on us as people. It's sort of like Jurassic Park, when Dr. Ian Malcolm says, "Your scientists were so busy trying to figure out if they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should." 



A favorite quote so far is "For years, the libertarian con artists of Silicon Valley have been telling us they want to change the world, it's generally because they've figured out how to profit even more from those below them." Too often that profit is derived from creating obsequious users through dark patterns and addictive hooking loops. It's time for either the people that code these systems to stand up against it, or users to learn how to fight back.



Years ago Douglas Rushkoff wrote "Program or be Programmed", and its in the same vein I say "design or be designed".

There's been one consistent source of truth throughout this pandemic and that's Christopher Penn's Lunchtime Pandemic Reading. It's been an incredibly valuable on a daily and weekly basis to see verified research about how the virus behaves, how developing treatments works and tips for how to best protect yourself. Though sometimes the shares are over my head, Chris always includes a "commentary" section that simplifies it down to where anyone can understand. View and subscribe to it here.

Ultra Nerdy - Okay to Skip

You know how computers can sort of talk like humans in Facebook chats and other places? Well, that doesn't just happen. In order for AI systems to do that sort of thing, they first have to input tons of already existing conversations to understand "us". Through something called Natural Language Processing, a machine can determine the appropriate answers to questions, or what follow-up questions are needed to help the user (that's the AI part). But getting those "tons of conversations" for a variety of different use-cases is cumbersome. Usually it involves paying people to have the conversations, but Facebook created a little text-based game and got 13,000+ people to do it for free. But in doing this, we should ask a few questions, both about Facebook and about the application of the learnings in general.

• Did the users understand the implications of the decisions to be testers? 
• Were the users representative of all audiences? If they are using the conversations to program new chat-based systems, what happens when an under or unrepresented individual tries to interact?
• Is there an overarching concern with creating computers that can perfectly impersonate people? Should it be required that those instances are disclosed to the human on the other side of the conversation?

One of the cool things about this though, is that as the game progressed, it learned how to rebuild itself into new versions for future users/rounds. Often a game's design can be referenced as having designed itself, but games creating and modifying themselves on-the-fly is an exciting proposition... at least until it breaks something or makes the game too hard to win, haha.

Home/Family Stuff

Boating with the neighbors a few weekends ago, I dove from the boat to the dock in an attempt to help secure the port tie-down, and landed on my left index finger. Ok, I didn't dive, it was more of a trip I guess. Alas, the official diagnosis was "There is a nondisplaced volar plate avulsion fracture involving the base of the middle phalanx of the second finger." So that's fun. It's made typing this newsletter, work emails, and my masters homework a little cumbersome.

Since my wife is an actual teacher, doing full online schooling this fall, I get the distinct pleasure of educating my kids from home 2 or 3 days a week. And really, my daughter doesn't need much help. Being 12, she can access her assignments, work with friends to complete them, and rarely has a question on how to do something.



The boy one though... oof. I don't remember being a third-grader. In fact, I really only have one memory from third-grade and it's a traumatic one. I have no idea if my mind was a chaotic as my sons or not. But man, getting him to focus on a single math problem, let alone an entire page of them is something else. It's not that he doesn't know how to do them... it's that, for him, literally everything else in his view is more interesting than that sheet of paper or computer screen. 

His brain seems to works like this: Wearing a lanyard? Turn the clip into a finger skateboard. Got a pencil in your hand? Nope, it's a drumstick. You know what's fun? Making a clicking noise song with your tongue. Anything... ANYTHING... to not do the maths. :) You know, as many times as I gotten distracted writing this, I should assume that I was probably just like him.



But after two weeks, were getting better. Hopefully that continues. 



Also, shout out to all of my teachers through the years for their patience. If I was anything like my boy, and he's so very much like me, you earned more than your paycheck.