Teendrama Snippets

Two updates in 10 days! We’re back on it! Like I said last week, I’m working thru a backlog of notes I’ve been taking since December, and even with this newsletter I’m still just scratching the surface. Setting the time for ONE HOUR. Okay, 1.5 hours with editing.

• BeeBot – It told me about a fly-fishing event yesterday, and so I went. It told me about a History of PacMan exhibit (which I’ll hit before it goes away). It ALMOST told me about a Pokemon Block Party happening near the High Line today (“almost” = I saw it in the debug logs, but it didn’t flag it for me, so debugging that now). When I say “told me about”, I mean it interrupts your music/podcasts (via AirPods) and literally tells you. It has it’s moment where it feels like magic. Download for iOS (and use it with your AirPods around NYC).

  • Re: debugging. In case you were wondering what happened (aka: how the BeeBot sausage is made), see below (and thx Tiina!) BeeBot is an equal mix of Human Code + Claude Code, human UGC and newsletters/Substacks, math and art. IMHO, product design is art and we are artists. And this one is looking good, but not quite finished.

    

• Sammy Skiing – Samus (4yo) has been out on snow 20 days this season (!!). Someone said to me “the 3rd kid is always the best skier” and I’ve been thinking about that a bunch. She can’t ride a bike (yet)… which means her first experience of FREEDOM, AGENCY, SPEED has been on skis (and that’s why I think she’s taken to it so strongly). It is FUN to watch. ps: She’s gonna rip on the bike this summer. Can’t wait.

• Guys Retreat – Back in January we did a Guys Retreat in VT (in lieu of doing an expensive ski trip, flights, hotel, etc). There were 5 of us (and 2 buddies flew up from ATL). As part of it, I asked each person to put together a 10 minute slide deck on “how your life is going — the good, the bad, wins vs losses, hopes & dreams” (yes, like a Keynote deck w/ photos) and it was AWESOME. Most of “The Presentations” ended up going 30+ mins, with Q&A at the end, and everyone tilted towards “oversharing” (and emotionally vulnerability!) vs. undersharing / brushing off hardships, etc. We spread them out over a few days — usually 1-2 in the morning before going out to ski, and one at night/apres ski. I highly recommend this exercise for anyone reading (you could prob do as a one-day thing too). Btw, I got this idea from my buddy Rufus (whose been doing it with his buddies for 10+ years). Here’s the outline I shared w/ the guys ahead of time for guidance structure (even tho we all deviated from it … my deck was like 76 slides of photos. 76 slides in ~30 mins)

  

  10 slides total. One slide each on:

  FAMILY

  MARRIAGE

  SOCIAL LIFE

  WORK

  SIDE HUSTLES / HOBBIES / PROJECTS

  2025 WINS / WHAT I’M PSYCHED ABOUT

  2025 STRUGGLES / STRESSED ABOUT

  REGRETS

  2026 PLANS

  • If there was one “theme” that came out of this was the idea that “XYZ is the best thing I have going in my life right now” … for us that XYZ was “weekends in VT with the family / cousins / everyone skiing”. (see below). It felt like an EXCELLENT USE OF TIME to take stock of what you’re thankful for and lucky to have in your life.

  • Two of my slides…

    

    

  • … and this is the crew we did it with… (shoutout to the random Mount Snow employee who took this BANGER of a pic –– thank you whoever you are!)

  

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• Vestaboard – I bought of these click-clack-click-clack signs for our apt (think: old Penn Station). You may have seen them at stores / coffee shops / etc. I bought the mini one (“Vestaboard Note”) which has been super fun to have at home – I use it to “send a text message to the house” (btw, 2 of 3 kids can read now!) … DAD COMING HOME BY 6:30PM or HEY KIDS I LOVE YOU! or HEY YOU. GO BACK TO BED! (for when Via was getting up at 2am). Mars loves to “draw” on it (it has 9 colored “tiles” you can use like pixels). You can set it to auto-update with weather and (eventually) MTA train times etc. Fun toy for the apartment ($999 for the small one, big one is like $3000 — expensive!)

  

  ^^ Volume up for max effect! (Substack doesn’t allow captions on video? boo!)

• Spirituality – I wrote about this last week (“Mountain Church”) but totally forgot to mention that I am regularly going to chapel with Via. (her school has a weekly chapel service that parents are invited to attend and I try to go every week). It’s mostly non-denominational (some God here and here, zero Jesus, lots of exposure to other religions/spirituality, Native American, Lunar New Year, etc). Being with her, no siblings, no phones/screeens/siblings/distraction for 30 mins/week is wonderful.

• Family Values – Been working to be a bit more, er, intentional about What Does Our Family Believe in. Think: “Core Values” but for family (vs. company). Here’s our v1. We refer to this regularly when kids are acting up / complaining, etc.

  

• “Let’s make a Plan” – This is something we’ve been saying a lot with both Mars (8yo) and Samus (4.5yo) as they both have a hard time focusing / staying focused on something. “First I’’m going to pick out my clothes, then I am going to put on my shirt, then I am gong to put on my pants…” or “First I am going to clean up my room, and then I can eat my snack, and then I can watch TV”

  • … my 7yo nephew asked me to give him a snowboard lesson last weekend and I used the “Let’s make a plan” thing with him on the mountain and it worked great: “Let’s pick the spot we want to snowboard to, and then we’ll stand up, and then we’ll go flat for 2 seconds, and then we’ll get on our toe edge, and then we stop…” … but literally doing this every time we stopped and started, and being very vocal and transparent and intentional with what we were doing. It worked great! (he is a natural and very coachable)

• Sauna! We have a sauna in VT. I try to use it at least 1x/weekend. I’ve hit the sauna/bathhouses around NYC (Othership, Elani… been meaning to hit Lore and Bathhouse). THIS IS THE LAST WEEKEND of an epic Sauna Village pop-up in Williamsburg (near Domino Sugar Factory) - 15 diff saunas, diff sizes / shapes / temp / vibes (dry heat, steamy heat, fragerences/oils etc). It’s going thru Sunday 3/1 in NYC — me & C did a date night last week and it was A++++. Highly 10000x recommended.

  • NYMag wrote a piece on NYC’s sauna-hustle corporate vibe

    

• SkiJor — get on your skis/snowboard and get towed by a horse (!!) thru a slalom course with jumps! Um, THIS IS OUR DESTINY. And by “our” I mean, me + C … Chelsa is an accomplished rodeo rider (yes, you read that right — grew up riding/competing in FL, has mountains of trophies) and I am skilled-enough on a snowboard to make this work (um, no trophies tho). To be clear, we don’t want to go watch a race… we are going to COMPETE NEXT YEAR. I am not sure where yet. I am not sure what division. I am not sure where we are going to get a horse. But this is our destiny. And, mark my words, dear reader, we will WIN A BELT BUCKLE.

  • ps: working on getting a photo of Chelsa’s riding days / trophies. Stay tuned.

  

  • As a pro-rabbithole’er, I went DEEP on this in the first 24 hours. Two pods worth listening to if this is your thing (links below). First podcast is a woman in Montana who stumbled into the sport and fell in love with it. Second podcast is with the two founders of the PRO SKIJOR circuit out of Utah. It’s interesting to see their different ideas and visions for the sport – Chelsa picked up on this immediately in the way they talk about the type of horses needed for the races. The casual-competitor talking about quarterhorses for speed and agility, the Pro Tour organizers talking about thoroughbreds as they imagine longer / faster courses.
    

  • The secret to this seems to be “rope management” (their words). You don’t hold a handle (like a water ski), you hold a rope (like a cowboy!) and give yourself more or less slack (with your rodeo-gloved hand) depending on how fast the horse is moving vs. the turns vs. the jumps. I know ZERO about this at the moment, but stay tuned. Btw, I love how this is described as a team sport with 3 team members – the horse, the rider, the skier.

  • Most of the events are out west (Utah, Idaho, Montana – “intersection of ski culture and cowboy culture”) but there are events in NY (one next weekend! –March 7) and Maine and NH. We are sadly not going to make a competition this year (kids schedules, kids ski races, etc) but we will prioritize for next year.

  • The 2034 Winter Olympics are in Salt Lake City. There are nuggets of rumors that this would/could be an Olympic exhibition event? Let’s see… that’s in 8 years… I’ll be 58 (!!). Surely there have been OLDER Olympians, right? 🇺🇸🥇

• ”The internet trained us to treat every thought as a bid for attention. Your banger is my loss.”

  - Yancey from Kickstarter / Metalabel / Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. I have not yet heard a single term to describe the phenomenon of "I have an original thought / idea and the first thing I do is think about how to squeeze it into 140 characters” (y’all have felt this right?), but this sentence sums it up. His manifesto is worth a read btw.

  • Yancey is also working on creating a legal “A-Corp” status for artists (A is for Artist!) as an alternative to B-Corps (“Benefit” Corps), C-Corps, S-Corps. aka: Let artists sell equity stakes in their songs/movies/IP instead of having the sell the rights entirely.

• “’Just put the phone down’ is as practical as telling someone in 19th-century London to stop breathing coal smoke”

  and

  “Every generation faces its pollutants. When cholera spread through London’s water, the answer wasn’t telling people to drink less. It was building filtration. The same logic applies here”

  … via tweets from this guy named Bryan Johnson. In general, I am not a huge fan of the body-hacking genre (and the personalities behind it), but this framing of “addictive social media algorithms are like drinking tainted water” spoke to me. There’s a Business Insider article where he talks about how “AI will read the feeds so we don’t have to” which is something I believe in (and also something we’re currently exploring with with BeeBot — feedless social media, emceed by AI.

  • ^^^ you heard it here first!

• “Nintendo’s design philosophy of free experimentation, fun-first design, and clever use of existing technology” – I’m reading this History of Nintendo book (see below). This idea of “clever tech vs. breakthru tech” spoke to me … this is how I see BeeBot in today’s tech ecosystem too FWIW. We are not a “deep-tech AI company”… we are just working really hard to find clever uses of existing emerging technology.

  • There’s another quote in this book about Nintendo zigging when everyone else was zagging:

    • “When Microsoft’s Xbox was perfecting online play on a home console in 2006, Nintendo released the Wii and its novel motion-powered controller, designed to be played with actual human company..”

  • … and I feel like we’re doing this with social/audio first/ proactive AI (vs. everyone else building tools and enterprise SaaS). 🤷🏻‍♂️ Zig vs. Zag. IRL vs. endlessly scrolling feeds.

Haven’t done this in a minute, here’s what I’ve got going in:

• 📖 Super Nintendo – History of Nintendo. I picked this up at the Strand Bookstore last wkd and had a hard time putting it down… so I bought it on Kindle (does that make me a bad person?). Enjoying it so far! (I am a sucker for any book that has whole chapters titled ZELDA and METROID)

• 📖 Project Hail Mary - Haven’t started yet, but like 5 people in the last week recommended reading it before the movie comes out. From author of The Martian btw. My brother and I decided we’d read this together on our flight next week (🇨🇦 🚁 ⛷️, btw!)

• 📺 The Pitt – Still watching. I’m kind of over it tho.

• 🎥 One Battle After Another – Watched last night, Chelsa hadn’t seen it yet. Better the 2nd time around! LeoD should win Best Actor IMHO.

• 🎥 Train Dreams – Really enjoyed this. Slow and not really sure where it’s going, but a story I haden’t seen told before (logging in 1940s). Bonus: the vintage chainsaws they use in the film… I think the same ones are hanging on the wall of the Filson Store in NYC (north of Union Square)
  
  Re: Oscars & Best Picture. We try to work our way thru the list every year – we’re getting there!
  

  ✅ Bugonia
  ✅ F1
  ❌Frankenstein ← heard this was a snoozefest
  ❌Hamnet ← this seems like a snoozefest
  ✅ Marty Supreme
  ✅ One Battle After Another
  ❌The Secret Agent ← Portuguese subtitles, on deck!
  ❌Sentimental Value ← Norwegian subtitles, on deck!
  ✅ Sinners
  ✅ Train Dreams
  
  Also, ChatGPT says: (and you better do what the robot says!)

  If you want the shortlist cinephiles are prioritizing outside Best Picture:
  👉 Blue Moon
  👉 If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
  👉 It Was Just an Accident
  👉 Arco
  👉 Mr. Nobody Against Putin
  👉 The Alabama Solution

Boom! This felt… efficient. About an hour. But I still have a big backlog of stuff. (I need to tell you the story of tracking down the bike→ski guy from last year). Will try to bang out another one next week. ‘Till then, secret word is “smurf village”. Hit me if you find this fun / insightful / useful… or better yet, share with a friend!

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I miss writing these things. I’ve prob run into a half-dozen people in the last 10 days who have nudged me to get back on the horse (“I miss your newsletter!”). I know I set that goal for myself last year (“24 posts before end of year” or whatever), but I didn’t set the same goal for myself this year, and just got busy. That said, I have been collecting a bunch of notes “for my next Substack” but every week it gets more and more daunting to actually go thru them all and write something Anyway, hi, I’m back! Let’s shoot to do 1 per week until I’m caught up on all my notes!

• Weekends in Vermont. We are more than half-way thru ski season (whew!). We’re making the 4 hour trek up to VT and back from VT every weekend. It’s a lot, and we’re in that part of the mid-season where it’s really starting to feel like a grind. That said, we now have all 3 kids skiing (yes, SAMMY SKIS!). She is fast! And chatty! She’ll ski bumps and trees and jumps and whatever, But she really only has the stamina to do 3-4 runs before her little 4.5yo legs call it quits. I have something like 30 days on snow this year, and 20 uphill hikes (!!) …

• Skin’ing / Hiking . I bought that splitboard over Thanksgiving. It was a splurge (tho I got it at like 50% off!) and I told myself at the time, “if I’m gonna buy this, I’m gonna make myself hike the mountain at least 20 times this season”. Well, I hit my 20th trips up last weekend, including 5 nighttime hikes (10pm + headlamps… I met some folks on Ski Patrol who hike up every Friday night and they’ve let me tag along with them). My family is sick of hearing me talk about these hikes, but its like “Mountain Church” to me (more on this below). At night, it’s dead quiet and there are 100,000,000 stars in the sky. In the morning, it’s dead quiet and if you time it right, you reach the summit just as the sunrise is peeking out. It’s so quiet you can hear you heart doing 150bpm when you stop to take a breather. I look forward to Mountain Church all week long. I may head up the mountain at 11pm tonight if the conditions look good.

  

  

  

  

  … btw, y’all watching the Olympics? The Ski Mountaineering (SkiMo) stuff too?! It’s goooood!

• Kingston. We have this house in the Hudson Valley. It’s 200-something years old. Over the past two years, I switched the oil heat + radiators out for heat pumps powered by a electricity offset by a solar system (60 panels!). A few weeks ago, our neighborhood lost power, and when the power came back on, all 3 heat pumps came back online at the same time. This caused a power surge. The surge flipped the breaker. The heat pumps never came back online. The water in the radiators froze and two of the radiators exploded. It made a huge mess. It’s a shitshow. We have an amazing contractor who is helping us work thru it. That is all.
  

• BeeBot. We are cranking. Team is around 10 people. Product is turning into a mix of proactive audio + text chatbot (“multi-surface social AI”) with a North Star of “Waze meets Gossip Girl, powered by a social hive mind, emceed by AI radio DJ”. This is a fun project with a good team, and I feel like we’re close to something that’s new / novel / good / meaningful. This is also a hard project… there is no one to crib from. We are inventing stuff that hasn’t been done before. We are making lots of mistakes and a lot of our original assumptions have proven false. We’re gonna start beta testing some new stuff next week, I’ll share it here when ready. Btw, my buddy Scott once paid me this amazing compliment: “with Foursquare, you showed you are capable of creating Mass Cultural Change”… I think about that quote often, and it is the bar I am holding myself to with this project too (“create mass cultural change”). I expect BeeBot to become the North Star that other builders in this “proactive social AI” space aim to follow / are inspired to follow."

  “Don’t go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path…and leave a trail” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

  

• Stockade FC. We are like 70 days from the start of Stockade FC soccer season (our 10th year!).  We sold 300+ Season Tickets so far (smashing all previous season records). There are 1000 things to do before the season, and I am woefully behind due to VT, kids, BeeBot, etc. Dan, if you are reading this, appreciate all you do to get the club ready in the off-season / pre-season!

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Buckle up, I’m gonna go thru as many notes / quotes / half-baked thoughts as I can before I run out of my timebox’d time limit.

On “AI eating the world”…

• AI eating the world, AI eating your job, AI stealing your girlfriend… you’ve prob read all the same stuff I have. That said…

• Was listening to last week’s Hard Fork podcast and there was a conversation about the overhype vs. underhype’ing of AI/LLMs (“are they simply predicting the next token” vs. “omg they have achieved consciousness!”) and there was some flirting around the question of “what’s the first original idea that AI had before a human had it?” …. not a “problem that was solved by AI that hasn’t been solved by humans” per se (e.g protein folding) but an original concept that AI had which made humans think “huh, you know, we humans have NEVER thought of that”. Does anyone know? Share in comments?

  • btw, <this type of stuff> always makes me think of this scene: (3:35 in)

• “We are a society defined by two objects, phones and guns. With your phone, you can see exactly how well people are living who are not you. You are surrounded all day by people who have it better than you in imagery and in videos. And with guns, you could do something about it.” – chilling quote from the latest Plain English podcast on AI vs. jobs. (great listen btw)

• Speaking of AI taking jobs, I overheard someone say “… the ramp up time for the LLM… “ as if they were onboarding a new employee. They were referring to the fact that you can spin up an agent with a task/goal and then point it at the history of all the work that lead to this point in the project (Google Docs, Linear tasks, Asana/Figma/whatever) and then the agent instantly has all the context/history about the company/product/project/etc. Wild! (aka: AI isn’t just better / more efficient at the task, it’s more efficient at the onboarding / getting up to speed too)

• I spoke at an MBA class last week (entrepreneurship blah blah) and naturally a lot of the students’ questions were about jobs vs. AI. I told them that the smartest people are not longer focused on “hiring and managing teams of humans” and are instead focused on the idea of “creating and managing teams of agents”. That' was the simplest “advice” I could give.

  • … meanwhile, this browser’s spellcheck couldn’t figure out that I was actually trying to type “entrepreneurship”. So maybe the robots are still at least 90 days out from enslaving us?

• What’s the endgame here? In my cohort (which admittedly skews more towards #DefendIRL than Accelerationism) the vibe is that people will become so skeptical of AI (synthetic text, synthetic images, synthetic video, synthetic news, synthetic facts?) that'll retreat back to the analog / IRL. No zoom please, IRL meetings only. No phone calls please, let’s meet IRL. I don’t believe any of your photos/text/videos unless they are verified real and human-created. You ever watch/read Station Eleven? It’s like that post-apocalypic, solarpunk-esque “we need to focus on IRL to survive” vibe, but without the apocalypse / virus that wipes us all out / societal collapse … just a genuine distrust of anything digital (that could be compromised by AI / synthetic media).

On Algorithmic Consumption ….

• This quote from my buddy has been living rent free for like 2 months:

  

  … I think I could write a whole newsletter on this, but forget content from algo-feeds (Reels, Threads, etc) but think of the things like books / articles / TV shows that you LEARNED ABOUT from those algo feeds… what % of those things you consumed only got to you because of an algo? e.g. Would you have read that book if the algo didn’t show you the the tweet that referenced it?

  • btw, related to Zach’s question, I took a stab at what I think my % split of media consumption may be. Here’s where I landed:

    • Social media (IG/X/Threads) = 50% ← seems high!

    • Random websites = 15%

    • TV / movies / streaming = 10%

    • Podcasts = 10%

    • Music = 5%

    • "Digital print” (NYT.com / NyMag.com) = 5%

    • Print Magazine = 2%

    • Books = 2% ← hoping to improve this!

    • Print Newspaper = 1%

• Putting all my chip on “HDFasS” (Hot Dog Fingers as a Service). It’s a lot of work to make a hot dog swiping machine (, amiright?) Where’s the Amazon cloud version?

  • ugh, can’t embed the video.

• “Machine drift – the process where an algorithm kind of grabs ahold of you, and it leads you somewhere that you might never have wanted to go.” – heard this on that same episode of Hard Fork. While this was a new term for me, it’s something I’m consciously aware of (the algo over-optimizing / slowly changing to show me stuff I’m obsessing over in the moment).

On “Mountain Church”….

• Ha, you can not escape my hiking/skin’ing obsession! Even way down here in the “random thoughts” section!

• But seriously, there is a theme to this “X is my church” thing.

  • My buddy Jeff who takes his kids to the planetarium every Sunday calls it “space church”

  • My buddy Heif goes to this dance party thing called “dance church”

  • I refer to my morning hikes as “mountain church”

  • My buddy Rufus was telling me about a listening room in Tribeca and referred to it as “vinyl church”

    … I got no new giant conclusions here. People are seeking purpose and meaning, esp as the world seems to be falling apart and AI is gonna take all our jobs. Organized religion (at least what I was brought up on) often seems like a grift. I’ve met folks who are working on “AI church” (for serious! AI reflection / introspection / confession). It’s a thing.

  • I’ve also seen folks working on spinning up new organized religions – ones that can co-exist w/ the idea of AI, life on other planets, er, other religions, etc. Here’s one I came across a while ago: https://www.newwinecollective.org/

    Our world is hurting and broken. People are divided, disconnected, and lonely. It’s time for a fresh reimagining of what it means to be the Church in our day. To learn more about what we’re building, watch the videos below or start here!

Misc Quotes

• “We’re positioning it as a luxury AI product” — Overheard in a pitch. If ChatGPT and Claude are the Hondas and Toyotas, these guys are trying to make the Lexus of AI? Flagging as I had never heard the framing before.

• “I live in Upstate Manhattan and commute to Downstate Manhattan” – said a buddy. He lives in Washington Heights, and the “line” is apparently Central Park North. Loved this.

• “Be the poster you want to see…” — Kevin Roose on his Hard Fork podcast (from… Dec?). He mentioned something about “I didn’t like what I was seeing on social media, so instead of quitting, I decided to be the poster I wanted to see”. Love this too.

• “That’s what I love about reading. It’s like I’m in someone else’s brain right now. “ – Alexandra Alter, who was a guest on that episode of Hard Fork I referenced above. yeah, I listen to a lot of Hard Fork on my rides to VT :)

Whoa, we did it! Psyched to push another one of these out. Sorry this one leans a bit dystopian (AI taking the jobs)… I promise next week (yes, next week!) I have lots more positive stuff (tons of notes on ski season, inspiring stories of adventures-seekers, etc).

Last thing, quick reminder to myself (and you!) why I started this thing and why I still try to take the time to write it:

1. Hold Myself Accountable. I started this when I was in between jobs and I started writing to get myself back in “let me tell you what I’m working on” mode.

2. Train an LLM! Yes, I am trying to dump all the stuff in my head into text so I can train my own personal LLM on it (this is an ongoing project)

3. I have access to lots of stuff, and feel I should share. I have a pretty privileged existence. I live in NYC. I have built a bunch of stuff people like. And because of that I get invited to cool things, interesting conversations, and in general just get to sit in rooms where interesting things are happening. I feel like it’s my duty to share some of that back.

4. Writing is thinking. My brain is all over the place. I take a lot of notes in a lot of places. This helps me organize my brain, my thoughts, myself. Producing something that my Mom can read to know what I work on (Hi mom!) and I can re-read (and still get value out of) is a good use of time IMHO.

And with that, I’m out! Let me know what you think. Sorry for any typos (rushing!). Secret word is: “disintermediation” (a Silicon Alley @ 30 joke, RDRR!)

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Whoa whoa, has it really been a month since I posted one of these? This is #20 (and my goal for the year was 2x/month = 24), but if I can bang out this one (and get caught up!) and then ONE MORE before the end of the year that’ll feel like a win. (Spoiler: Next post = kickoff the ski season post (!!) as we’re headed to VT tonight!). I actually started THIS draft just before ThanksG, but ran out of time and never finished it/ sent it. Which is a bummer because I have so much stuff to share!

Quick reminder - Why do I write these? So I carry this notebook with me all the time, and I take notes constantly on what stuff that sparks my interest or some random thoughts. This past year I’ve kind of embraced this idea that I have some flavor of ADHD (just like my son), and I find writing things down in my notebook is a way for me to “quiet my brain” so I can get back to focusing in the current conversation or whatever task I was working on. (I use Field Notes brand notebooks, and their tagline is “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now”, which I really connect with.)

Anyway, my son’s goes to a school that focuses on giving kids “tools” to help with any speech/language/cognitive issues they have, and he’ll tell you all about the “tools” he has at school (whether it’s a fidget toy, or a chair that helps with The Wiggles, or the way he now says “Dad, can I have a thinking moment” if he needs more time etc). The notebook is my tool. And when the notebook fills up, the stuff has to go SOMEWHERE before I can start a new one. So I make myself sit down at a coffee shop and go thru page-by-page, making sure every idea gets captured and crossed off, every task gets completed and crossed off… and stuff that doesn’t really have a “home” (“done state”?) often ends up in here.

This newsletter is also kind of my version of that “writing is thinking” quote. At least half of the stuff you read in here was in my notebook at some point. These posts are a way of taking all the random thoughts/ideas I had over the last X days (or whatever) and putting them into prose so it makes sense to me (and you). For those of you who have used Foursquare or Swarm and have checked-in to places to create a “lifelog” (list of all the places you’ve been), I kind of think of my notebook (and thus this newsletter) as a “lifelog of my thinking”. I also kind of have this vision of some future Denny LLM ingesting and indexing whatever is here so I can query against it later. (if I just scanned the pages of my notebook and ran OCR over my handwriting it’d be useless without the structure / grouping / organization that comes from forcing myself to sit down to write these out).

So with that…

Updates since last episode:

• We launched BeeBot. (manifesto | download) We had a few thousand people download and try it out (a bunch who still use is daily). We got some great validation and great feedback on what’s good and not so good. Still lots of work to do, but the path forward is becoming clearer. If you’re interested, follow along with this thread of “list of the things BeeBot recommended to me this month” (there’s like 10+ posts for 10+ days so far) and you’ll get a sense of what I’m seeing hearing thru the lens of DJ BeeBot,.
  Twitter (Substack doesn’t auto-embed tweet)
  Threads (Substack doesn’t auto-embed post)
  Bluesky (ah ha! auto-embed below…)

• … maybe a spoiler, but we are starting to think of Beebot as “lifelog of things you do, things you found interesting, things you want to do” … which can then intersect and overlap with other people’s lifelogs (and then have THOSE OVERLAPS emceed by our little AI DJ). It’s a fun project / cool company to be working on, esp given all the stuff that’s happening in AI + hardware…

  • Sandbar’s “Stream” ring (very interested / curious about this project — a ring that double as a microphone w/ AI to “help you have better conversations with yourself”)

  • Google + Warby Parker – I’m hoping they make smart glasses without cameras

  • … for those following along, BeeBot is kind of a big bet on “people will be wearing headphones all day long… even if they don’t look like headphones (and look more like jewelry or eyeglasses)

• I’ve been trying to curate this list of “All the things in NYC to do with your kids before they’re 10yo”. It’s obvs endlessly incomplete, but I keep adding to it (and would love for y’all to add your recommendations to the thread on Bluesky)

  • Btw, I barely use Bluesky (I’m mostly on Threads and, regrettably, back on Twitter X, but that’s still where the kids go to hype their tech projects/startups 🤷🏻‍♂️)

  • … yes, this is also R&D for future BeeBot features :)

  • Random note (and I’ve said this before): Museum memberships that let you dip into museums for 10-20 mins at a time are awesome (and those mini-trips are some of the most fun mini-adventures I’ve have w/ our kids in the city)

• Hiked another 20mi of the Appalachian Trail. OMG, I can’t believe I didn’t recap this, but back in October (!!) my brother-in-law and I hiked another 20mi of the Appalachian Trail. We picked up the trail in southern Vermont (just outside Bennington) hiked 12mi to Kid Gore Shelter where we stayed over night (it was about 33º, yikes!) and then hiked another 9.5mi the next morning to the beginning of the Stratton Trailhead to make ~21mi total. This hike was amazing and beautiful, and so different from the hike me + V did (Harrington State Park) as it was much more remote (even tho we did have cell service most of the time). Some notes:

  • We again packed way too much food (and just enough water). Great rule = always max out on the amount of water you carry, esp late season when springs/creeks are dry. I carried 6L with me (3L camelback + 2 x 1.5L bottles)

  • We were *just barely* able to make a fire at Kid Gore Shelter. A lot of the wood on the ground was wet and we had the tiniest bit of lint as a fire starter. Uncle Brian did a brilliant job keeping us alive and warm (and under pressure!)

  • We set our tents up INSIDE the shelter for extra warmth (three-wall shelter btw). I upgraded to a 20º sleeping bag before the hike which helped. Brian swears by his silk sleeping bag liner for extra warmth.

  • We had cell service at camp and listened to Spotify and drank whiskey out of our flasks until we ran out of firewood and it got too cold to stay awake any longer. If this sounds awesome, it was actually 2x as awesome as it sounds :)

  • Kid Gore Shelter had an EPIC sunrise – the shelter itself looks directly to the east (and at the back side / “North Face” of Mount Snow). Making camp coffee at sunrise was one of my Top Highlights of the Year for me.

  • I hiked with poles on Day 2 — holy cow make a huge difference. We covered so much ground so quickly – felt like we were flying. (same thing applies to shoeshoe/skinning up the mountain in winter…. always take the poles)

  • Day 1 (Fri Oct 10): VT Rt. 9 → Melville Shelter → Goddard Shelter → Kid Gore Shelter (zzz)

  • Day 2 (Sat Oct 11): KidGore → Story Spring Shelter → Stratton Trailhead → my mom picked us up and we went straight to Mt. Snow’s Oktoberfest and crushed brat and beers. :)

^^^ I put this on the whiteboard in VT (where we normally track “days on snow”. Not bad for our first year of camping/hiking!

• Misc thoughts / quotes:

  • “AI has hyperfocus” – said CEO of Sunflower (app to help with addiction… we were on a “Consumer AI” panel together. No notes, just great observation.

  • Did you know if you go to Times Square just before midnight (11:55p), all the screens go dark and are then replaced with art? It’s a program called “Midnight Moment”. It happens every night, a different artist every month.

    • “Synchronized nightly from 11:57pm to 12am on over 92 digital displays spanning 41st to 49th Streets, this program brings public art on a monumental scale to New Yorkers and visitors from all across the globe, 364 nights a year.”

  • I picked up Mars from school one day because he was feeling sick. On the way out he asked the nurse if he could have a mask so he didn’t get people on the subway sick on his way home. Love this!

    • I went to a concert a few nights later (Digable Planets at Webster Hall, amazing btw) and I saw folks in the balcony wearing masks (presumably to keep others from getting sick too). I like that “wearing masks” has been normalized.

  • “Physical AI” — aka: robots, and other autonomous machines. I had not heard this term before. Realted: Mars still wants an X1 Neo for Xmas (ha!) – I love that NYMag put it in their Holiday Gift Guide. (Mars: “Dad! THIS IS WHAT I WANT FROM SANTA!”)

    • ps: Sammy asked Santa for a robot cat AND a robot owl. You can’t keep the kids away from the robots!

  

  • My daughter has a Campfire music player – in the absence of iPods, this is now the best we have (sigh … it’s an Android device w/ a Spotify app… feels “lazy” IMHO). I really wish there was. Yoto-esque device for teens that has some “physical” attributes to it … bump to share songs, put mix tapes playlists on USB sticks, etc

    • Y’all have seen the TinCan phone right? Old-school landline-style phone, but with VOIP (works over wifi)

    • Both Campfire and TinCan are SOLD OUT for Xmas time (!!)

  • MOMA had an amazing amazing amazing exhibit that ended a few weeks ago (sorry!) called…

    • “Pirouette: Turning Points in Design” features objects—from Post-Its to Spanx—that embodied experiments with new materials, technologies, and concepts; offered unconventional solutions to conventional problems; and had a deep impact both on design and the world at large.

      Drawn mostly from MoMA’s collection, some of the objects in this exhibition are readily recognizable—like the I ♥️ NY logo or the new Accessible Icon symbol—while others are known only to smaller audiences of fans and experts.

    • … the original Sony Walkman was there. It has TWO headphone jacks in it so two people could listen to the same thing at the same time, and a “Hotline” button that lowered the music (not mute, lowered) in case those people want to talk to each other. BRILLIANT! (I took Via and showed here all the stuff… she was *challenged* by the idea that M&MS were in the show as art / design :)

    • The original DoCoMo emoji were also featured (Via loved seeing this) … and I just learned these were acquired by MOMA and are now part of the permanent collection.

• A collection of misc tweets/posts I found either inspiring or soul-crushing…

Okay, that is the END of this special “I gotta catch up so I can write another one of these next week before Xmas” episode of Teendrama Snippets. I noticed that I’ve kind of gotten away from the “what I did this week” OG-snippet format a bit (conference/talk recaps), but mostly because I feel like I’ve been playing catchup.

While writing this I already laid out the outline for the NEXT EPISODE (and prob the final one of the year). Spoiler: a bunch of stuff about the start of ski season, mini-adventures, bike-to-ski, etc (did I tell you I found and got in touch with the guy I saw biking to Belleayre with skis last spring?! Crazy story… but for next time)

Love and appreciate y’all if you read this far. As always send me feedback on what you want to hear about / want me to write about. Secret word is “strategery”
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Hey hey, been a few weeks since I posted one of these. I had a draft going last week and was gettting clooooooose but didn’t have enough time to finish it as we were racing to PUSHING BEEBOT OUT THE DOOR.

Oh yes that’s right, we launched the thing! Is it ready? NO! Is it good enough to share? BARELY! But we DID have to kick it out of the nest because that’s the only way you learn and validate your assumptions. All that said, I wrote a big manifesto of a blog post about the product and the thinking behind it which I’d love for y’all to read (thank you!), especially if you like reading these Teendrama newsletters….

Blog post here: https://dens.medium.com/say-hello-to-dj-beebot-592cdc1f1704

And yes, the “big manifesto blog post” as a way of launching something feels dated (most startup kids use Loom videos or TikToks or whatever) but it’s what I’ve always done. I did it for the launch of Stockade FC, a bunch of FSQ Labs projects, Street FC, etc. My intent with writing these is to create an ARTIFACT – something that clearly articulates the “what we’re doing / why we’re doing it / why we think it’s important / why we think it’s interesting.” Something we (and others) can refer back… like a published “origin story” of the idea.

In this BeeBot post, I cover a lot of stuff: “AI for the streets”, “social software vs. social media”, “apps you don’t have to use”, “tech with soul”. In hindsight, this post is as much a “BeeBot product manifesto” as it is a “love letter about building the things you want to see in the world”. Anyway, give it a read and download BeeBot and try it out (I just assume most of you were beta testing anyway!)

Subscribe or share with a friend!

Here are a few of the parts that I find most interesting / are more passionate about.

Okay, so I don’t want to make this whole post about BeeBot launch (and I am still timebox’ing myself to 1 hour on these), so how about we move onto some other things, like …

You will never meet a little boy who wants something more than Mars (7yo) wants one of these (for Christmas!)

This is the 1X Neo Home Robot. It apparently can do simple tasks (vacuum, clean up, fold laundry) It’s a mix of autonomous and human-operated (think: call center where humans control the arms/hands with Playstation controllers). This podcast interview with the founder/CEO is fascinating, mostly for the conversation about “this is how you generate the training data needed to create an AI model that can power at-home robots”

This has been the winning strategy over the past decade, btw. “Make a thing that is used by humans, let the machines observe how the humans use it, and then use that training data to augment the work the humans were doing.”

• Foursquare → “you press the check in button” → FSQ learned about all the places in the world (and invented / enabled snap-to-place on mobile phones)

• Tesla → “you drive the car” → the car learns to drive itself

• Instagram / TikTok → “you seek out the posts you like” → IG learns to serve you posts/videos (and you no longer have to search/look for them)

• At-Home Robot → “remote operators navigate the home and do the tasks” → eventually robot learns do the tasks / navigate a home itself

  
  … and, of course, the granddaddy of all examples…

• ChatGPT → “humans write all the books and blogs and make all the movies and music and art and TV shows and YouTube videos” → ChatGPT consumes them all and learns how to have a conversation about <anything>

… obvious stuff, but I think this the first time I’ve really heard a founder/CEO of a product in an emerging category say “yeah, we’re just here for the training data”.

Because I haven’t written one of these newsletters in like a month, I have this huge backlot of notes and thoughts. Here are a bunch of quotes I wrote down to share with y’all…

• “These products for kids… they’re all ankle monitors!”
  – says a founder working on building a new type of phone for kids. The argument was: things like Bark / Gabb / Gizmo / Pinwheel start from the POV of “how do I know where my kid is” vs. “could a well-designed device help a kid understand the real world in new / different ways.”

  • ps: our kids have Gizmo watches. They’re… fine.

• ”Can I have a thinking moment?”
  - Mars (7yo) started saying this recently when he’s having a hard time keeping up w/ a conversation (he has some speech & language processing issues). His school has been great at giving him “tools” (like this) to help navigate fast moving conversation and noisy/chaotic environments.

• “… it was like the first time they realized they have lives outside the apt.”
  – Chelsa mentioned this to me after she saw Mars and V having a conversation about their different schools / life at school (“what is your lunch like?” “what is your playground like?”)

• “It is only by going through a volume of work will your work will be as good as your ambitions”
  – Ira Glass via (the argument being you need to make a lot of stuff before your stuff becomes good… also see: BeeBot public beta).
  

• “Working on a startup is rolling the dice at building the future”
  — says my buddy Scott H. We were talking about the grind that is trying to get a v1 of something out the door and whether the drama is worth the reward (vs. say, just having a Real Job). I have a lot of complicated thoughts about whether building Foursquare was worth what it took from me / gave to me.
  

• “Having goals is a privilege.”
  – says our wise friend Chef Sarah Simmons. aka: It’s hard to have goals if you are working paycheck to paycheck just trying to make ends meet on minimum wage, (or less). Sarah runs a bunch of restaurants – and a bunch of employees – and is very thoughtful about how she takes care of them.
  

• “One in five cars sold globally is now electric, one in two in China, one in four in Europe and one in ten in the US”.
  – Michael Liebreich. The US is so painfully behind. We have the worst leadership at the worst possible time.
  

• “But, like warming winters, recurring late-summer droughts are part of a larger climate change-driven pattern that has complicated the task of running a ski resort in the Northeast.”
  – from a piece on how climate change is specifically affecting skiing on the east coast. Again: worst leadership / worst possible time.

• “Every word you’ve even spoken in your entire life fits on a thumb-drive the size of a fingernail.”
  - JC at Betaworks (re: wearable AI / on-device LLMs). We’ve already normalized “talking to computers”. The next thing will be normalizing “recording everything you say, every monent of the day, and turning that into searchable / LLM’able text”).

• “Museums can be the R&D of society.”
  – a quote I found in an email from MOMA (they host these excellent “R&D Salons” which I just realize you can watch the archives of! The one on “Witches” was especially interesting).
  

• My daughter’s new school has a weekly chapel service – and parents get to go too! I’ve been going the last few weeks and it’s great - it’s meant for the kids, but it’s relatively non-denominational (mentions of God, Lord, readings… but not much else) and it’s just a beautiful, quiet space to be for 30-40 minutes. It’s given V a real interest in spirituality and a curiosity for all religions. They had a special service for Día de los Muertos and All Souls Day last week and had an Indigenous American woman come in and do a traditional dance (showing how diff cultures celebrate Halloween etc) and it was wonderful.

  • ChatGPT says: “… a dance symbolizing the cycle of life, death, and rebirth — old age giving way to vitality again…”

• I was on the subway platform the other day, waiting for the E train, and there was this woman who had her phone propped up on the subway stairs as she was filming herself doing a TikTok dance or whatever on the platform. She did it a few times, and I’m kind-of-looking-but-not-really and so I am thinking she’s doing 2-3 takes and then jumping on the train… but then the train comes whooooshing into the station and she throws off her jacket – revealing her lingerie-only outfit (!!) – and then she TikTok’s her heart out for 10 seconds, puts her jacket back on, and gets on the train.

  • I respect the hustle, but this just looks CRAZY when you’re there filming by yourself (in a way that having someone filming you doing it maybe does not?)

• In my last Substack I mentioned the Porsche-nerd email newsletter I subscribe to. Turns out like 5 of you signed up using for it using the referral link I shared… and I got a free sticker pack (ha!), so thanks! Now if one more person signs up I get a COFFEE MUG! DO IT!

  

Whew, the end? I got distracted with a lot of stuff in between this morning (8:35am) when I first stared writing this and now (1:45pm) when I have time to revisit / finish it. Thx for reading, secret word is DONKEYBIRD. Next issue = the recap of me and Uncle Brian’s epic hike thru the lower VT section of the Appalachian Trail! And probably some more bird stuff. And feedback from the first round of BeeBot testers! Btw, if you’re playing with the app, hit me up and tell me what you think!

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Hello! I got another draft full of notes, so let’s bang this out! I started with a outline of 3 things (Baseball, Birding, Hiking) and, well, we cover that AND MORE in this fantastic episode.

I watched Game 1 of the Red Sox vs Yankees wildcard playoff last week on TV (my first time sitting down to watch baseball on TV in 10 years?)

And then the next day I went to Game 2 IRL! (first time going to a baseball stadium in… 9 years says Swarm) One of my roommates from college (Adam!) pinged me (“I’m in NYC for work – let’s go to the game!”) and so we grabbed decent tix online just 3 hours before first pitch.

Some thoughts:

• The pitch clock is great! Makes the game totally watchable on TV!

  • (apparently MLB viewership is waaaaay up - 20% more than last year?)

• … and more watchable at the stadium too. Game was moving so quickly I was barely able to finish all the beers we bought!

• That said, the IRL experience at Yankee Stadium is waaaaayyyy too overstimulating – music and lights and sound effects. There is zero downtown from stimulation… after every pitch another 2 second clip of another random song plays. TBH, I am not sure I’d be able to take Mars to game (he’s 7yo and struggles in chaotic/over-stim environments)

  • Someone suggested going to a Minor League game instead?

  • Someone else suggested the special “Sensory Room” at Yankee Stadium, but that doesn’t seem like a great option.

  • How about a “Limited Stimulation Night” at the stadium or “80s Baseball Night?” … bring back the organ, get rid of the DJ, shut off the flashing lights.

  • … or am I just being Old Man Denny / get off my lawn?

• Speaking of Old Man Denny…. $16 beers are insane. Come’on people.

  

• What’s up with the Yankees / Sox players looking like AI-versions of classic 80s players? “oh there’s AI Don Mattingly”, "oh, that guy looks like AI Wade Boggs.” Maybe it’s just the mustaches.

  

• I didn’t need to eat 2 hot dogs. But I did.

• Yankee Stadium (and prob Fenway too TBH) is still filled w/ racist and homophobic fans, yelling the same old racist and homophobic shit they’ve been yelling for years. (sigh)

• Knowing I was going to try to go to the game, I left the house with my lucky Red Sox Headband (see below), which prompted Chelsa to called me a “fair weather fan” (the nerve!) … and I never got a chance to explain to her that “I EARNED THE RIGHT TO BE A FAIR WEATHER FAN FOREVER BY BEING RAISED A RED SOX FAN IN THE 80s” (ha!)

• … which kind of led me down this rabbit hole of digging up some old Red Sox memories (it’s not often that Red Sox / Yankees meet in the post-season — 4x in past 25 years – and it used to feel like the world would stop turning for a few days every time they did meet up)

  • Btw, the combo of (a) searching Google Photos for old ticket stubs and photos whose EXIF data suggest they were taken at Fenway and then (b) asking ChatGPT to give me a recap of what happened that game (win/loss/anything memorable?) is pretty magical.

  • I have MEMORIES of being at games that I am not actually sure I was physically at….

    • … when Clemens stuck out 20 batters vs. Seattle? (April 29, 1986). I remember being there… but was I? (maybe the ticket stub is back at my parents house?)

    • … or when Dave Stapleton, a random infielder, pitched the final inning of a 19-inning game vs. the Yankees (July 3, 1984). I remember being there… but was I? Or am I remembering the game, and just placing myself in the stadium?

    • Note to self: Track down old ticket stubs over Thanksgiving!

• Went Google’ing, er, ChatGPT’ing, for this idea of an “an artificial memory” and here’s what I found:

  • False memory - A memory that feels real but is actually inaccurate or fabricated — often formed through suggestion, imagination, or mixing up real experiences.

  • Confabulation – A more clinical term used in neurology and psychiatry. It’s when the brain fills in missing pieces of memory with plausible (but false) details — not lying, just trying to make sense of gaps.

  • Mandela Effect - When many people share the same false memory — like thinking the Berenstain Bears were spelled “Berenstein,” or that Nelson Mandela died in prison.

  • Cryptomnesia – When you “remember” something as your own idea or experience, but it’s actually something you read, heard, or saw before.

• Want to hear some legit BADASS RED SOX MEMORIES that are not Artificial or False or Confabulations? Of course you do!

  • First of all, my Dad had access to season tickets when we were growing up so I went to a LOT of games. I bet I’ve been to maybe… 30 games at Fenway? My dad would dismiss me early from school to go to playoffs games! (I remember getting dismissed early in 6th grade TO GO TO A BASEBALL GAME and that just being the most badass thing a 6th grader could do)

    • 1988 ALCS – Oakland A’s sweep Red Sox 4–0
      Key players: José Canseco, Mark McGwire, Dennis Eckersley for Oakland; Wade Boggs, Mike Greenwell for Boston.

  • I was at that game when Pedro dropped Zimmer (Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS — October 11, 2003). Got the Google Photos timestamp to prove it!

  • JJ & I were at that legendary Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS (October 17, 2004) when David Ortiz hit the 12th inning HR against the Yankees, which started the rally that led to the Sox winning 3 more against NYY and (and sweeping the World Series vs the Cardinals in 4 games).

    • … which somehow landed 3 generations of Crowleys (my brother + my dad + my grandmother!) on MSNBC to talk about the end of The Curse on behalf of every Red Sox fan on the planet (ha!)

  • I was lucky enough to be at Fenway on October 30, 2013 (Game 6 of the 2013 World Series vs Cardinals) – first time the Red Sox won the World Series at Fenway Park since 1918 (!!)

    • My dad always says this is one of his favorite memories ❤️
      (note: lucky headband)

      

  • And maybe one of my best memories at Fenway… I went to one of the first games back after 9/11 (remember they paused the season for a week?) We sat way out in the bleachers. Around the 4th inning they played Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” and the whole stadium sung along as a tribute to NYC (Sox were playing Tampa Bay btw). It was kind of beautiful. And then, just as the song ended, some dude in the bleachers yells YANKEES STILL SUCK! …. and the world felt normal again, if only for a few minutes.

Thx for reading! You should subscribe or forward to a friend! xo!

Next topic! Did you watch LISTERS yet? WHAT? Do it tonight. It’s very good, and funny, and inspiring! I learned a lot from the movie, esp about using The Apps (Merlin BirdID vs. eBird), the Top 100 Lists (!!), observing migratory patterns, setting up email notifications for “rare birds”…

… OH YOU HEARD THAT RIGHT! You can enter your city / state / county and get email alerts when RARE BIRDS swing by. Try it out! I got em set for Kingston and Vermont.

So I sign up and – as advertised! – I get an email a day. Day 1 = Bobolink & Ruby Throated Hummingbird … so I go check the data from my Magic Bird Machine to see if we got any of those birds floating around our house. (no Bobolink… it’s down the street… but we are swimming in those lil’ Hummingbirds)

… okay so let’s talk about this Top 100 Lists (um, a leaderboard for birds? Gotta collect them all? Yes please!). There’s leaderboards for counties, states, regions, etc. Here’s the Top 100 for Ulster County (where Kingston is)… and omg, I know one the folks in the Top 10 (shoutout to who has an awesome Substack btw).

NEW QUEST FOR 2026: Place in the Top 100 for Ulster County (!!) Looks like I’d need to spot maybe 80 species to get there (and my Magic Bird Machine says we’ve seen 84 species at our house since July… and 27 species in just the last 24 hours!) Um, I also need to figure out how to use eBird to log bird sighting/species (because Merlin app isn’t tied to these Top 100 lists… they make you earn it by manually ID’ing thru the eBird app). Anyway, WE GOT THIS. (and by “we”, I mean “me + Chelsa”… ride or die, birds forever, xo!)

Oh, because I am a super nerd I found this BIRD PODCAST, which to be honest is a bit dry, BUT they had the two guys from the LISTERS documentary on as guests and the juxtaposition between the pro-birders and the hipster-documentarian-birders makes for an A++ listen.

I’m skipping work on Friday to hike a 20mi section of the Appalachian Trail (AT) in lower VT. My brother-in-law in gonna join me (wassup Brian!), which is great as I was stressing a bit about doing it solo (especially as the weather will be below freezing at the summit shelter where we plan to stay Friday night).

• Our plan is 12mi first day (then sleep in AT shelter), then 8 mi the next day… and then roll straight into Mount Snow’s Oktoberfest (!!)

• Weather forecast = 30º on Friday night (and then minus 5º per 1000 feet of elevation x 2000 feet = 10º colder = 20º = yikes!)

• I have a 20º sleeping bag. A little worried about not being prepared for this level of cold. I have a fleece + puffer jacket + hat + gloves packed. Wish us luck! (leave any tips in comments plz)

• Elevation gain is considerably different than what me & V did a few weeks ago. Check the chart. It’s like a 10mi / 2500 foot climb that first day. (see below)

• “Dad, when they make ‘birds eye view’ maps…. how do they get the maps out of the bird’s brain?” – Mars. It’s a fair question.

• “…. But getting getting a blowjob in grade 6 is wild, bro…” - I overheard this on a podcast my 9yo daughter was listening to (!!). Turns out she thought she was listening to “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” when she was actually listening to “Diary of a Wimpy Kid FAN FICTION”. She has no idea what “Fan Fiction” is btw. Spotify has zero parental controls on Podcasts. Zero flagging of content. Zero AI monitoring. Shameful. (I reached out to some peeps who work at Spotify to try to flag/fix/address)

  ---

• 👓 “Zuckerberg notes how useful such capabilities are when meeting with people and not needing to take explicit notes for follow-up items. But how much of that is a regular person problem versus a Mark Zuckerberg problem?” – From a piece criticizing the usefulness of wearable-displays. Fair point (but I do think there will be a lot of crazy-good 3rd party use cases)

  ---

• 🚗 ”It didn’t matter that this 1991 911 Carrera 2 Targa 5-Speed was being sold north of the wall as Rubystone Red always brings the money”

• 🚗 ” I think this 2024 911 Turbo S Coupe is a great ‘not-a-Sport-Classic’ as it comes”
  
  ….  I subscribe to this nerdy Porsche email newsletter (1x/day). At the very least I always scan for the photos. A lot of times there’s good, car-nerd, one-lines in here too.

• Solo w/ Samus. Me & SS did a solo trip upstate this weekend. She’s 4yo and I think this is the FIRST time I’ve had her solo on an overnight (!!) We ate pam-cakes. We went for a 1mi hike. We ate more pam-cakes. And then we did a 15mi bike ride around Minnewaska State Park (while she rode in the babyseat). It was the best. She fell asleep in the seat btw… and while she was zzzz she dropped her owl. We backtracked some 6mi looking for it before we learned that some good samaritan found it and returned it to the Visitor’s Center. Whew! Fun weekend, and can’t wait to take her on more adventures! When all 3 of the kids can ski (this winter!) and hike (next summer!) this is gonna be awesome.

  

• Eater Magazine. They made a print mag out of Eater! This is so badass and I was so psyched to see it in my mailbox (bundled w/ NYMag). It must be so rad to part with your brand and still see it flourish (Vox bought Curbed in 2013 and then bought NYMag in 2019).

• Sora. Deepfakes are gonna tear the world apart, so we may as well monetize them as memes before all hell breaks loose! I hate hate hate this idea of endlessly scrolling feeds of AI generated shit. from HardFork said it best: “This stuff is like Cocomelon for adults.”

• Fake IDs. Someone pointed out that all their favorite entrepreneurs got their start making fake IDs in college. (I mean, that’s how I learned Photoshop + font management + color correction… )

• Scaffolding. It’s cheaper for buildings to keep paying for scaffolding permits than it is for them to do the actual work of repairing the building (or paying the lawsuits from stuff falling off the building). That’s why you see so much scaffolding that stays up forever . (I wonder what % of scaffolding has an ‘active project’ tied to it?)
  

Okay that’s the end… or at least the end of 90% of the notes I had! I will save the rest for next time! (providing we don’t freeze to death on this hike). Ping me if there’s stuff / topics / questions you want to see covered in a future episode. Btw, I spent a bit more than an hour writing this one (it was all the Red Sox stuff TBH), but still enjoy doing them. Carving out time to create “artifacts” like this (even if they’re digital artifacts) feels valuable and important (and reminds me a lot of the process of creating Teendrama blog recaps from like 20 years ago)

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Secret word = pam-cakes.

ps: Last call for BeeBot beta! Final group of beta testers goes out tomorrow.

Hey, V and I survived the hike … and it was *amazing*! Last Saturday at 10am, Chelsa dropped me & V (9yo) just off Rt 17 in NY (Elk Pen area of Harriman State Park) and we hiked a total of 16mi of the Appalachian Trail (AT) – 9.5mi the first day (7.5 hrs), 6.5 mi the second day (5.5 hours). Here are some notes!

• Pulling up to Rt 17 I was an equal mix excited & nervous. Excited = omg, we’re finally doing an overnight hike! Nervous = omg, I hope nothing goes wrong and I don’t “ruin backpacking” for her! The nervous/exciting feeling felt familiar… and it took me a few mins before being able to place it as the same feeling I had when we’d take the Jackson Hole tram up to scout Corbet’s Coulier (!!)

• Almost all the hiking I’ve done has been “drive to trail head, hike 3 hours up, look at the view, hike 2.5 hours down, drive home”. I have never done a meandering hike thru the woods (and an overnight!) like this… rolling hills and meadows, the occasional steep climb or rock scramble. I bet we climbed 3 peaks on Day 1 (like a rollercoaster ride up and down and up and down) and that was new to me (and awesome).

• My biggest challenge was managing Via’s mood and energy and excitement (and blood sugar?). When we started, I was leading and she was following about 10 steps behind me. This caused lots of angst as she would stop and I’d keep walking and my pace was (obvs) faster than hers. After lunch we switched it up and I let her lead while I walked right behind her – I kept feeding her trail mix, I talked her ear off, and she could take a “backpack off” break whenever she wanted. This strategy worked wonderfully and kept her spirits high.

  • She wanted to hear story after story after story about “embarrassing moments” for me, Chelsa, my brother, sister, mom, dad, etc.. next time we hang out as a family I need to source more content for future hikes 😂

• What did we bring?

  • I hiked in with about 40 lbs of gear on my back (including food & 5.5L of water). Via had about 8 lbs on her back (including 2L of water). I’m glad we took extra water as every spring / water source we passed was dry. I expected water would be plentiful (maybe even a spigot at a shelter?) but… nothing.

  • I had about 25 lbs “base weight” (backpack + tent + sleeping bag/mat). My friend Jen Funlap shared this super handy spreadsheet for tracking weight of all items carried, (feel free to “Make a Copy” and use yourself!) Food + water add a lot of weight. Misc items add even more (map, charger, first aid, knife, rope… it adds up).

• Where did we sleep?

  • The AT has shelters every 8 or so miles – and in Harriman State Park we passed two stone structures with built-in sleeping platforms. We hit Fingerboard Shelter at about 4.5mi in (clean! great view!) and then Brian Williem Shelter about 9.5mi in (filthy! raccoons!). We ended up pitching a tent outside the BW shelter, and shared a fire with two former thru-hikers (who hiked the whole AT a few years ago — they were a couple who met on-trail. They had great advice/stories, and great trailnames… Slap and Fuzz)

    • Trailnames are a thing! Me + V still working on ours. Flapjack and SchweepedyPeep were floated as v1s.

• What did we eat?

  • Day 1 Lunch = we packed sandwiches

  • Day 1 Dinner = ramen (and we added beef jerky!)

  • Day 2 Breakfast = instant oatmeal w/ a spoonful of peanut butter

  • Day 2 Lunch = dehydrated mac & cheese (which was delicious!)

  • Lots of trail mix. We also toasted marshmallows & ate a Hershey bar.

  • We brought too much food (lots of Clif Bars) and *just enough* water (esp seeing that we needed like 1L+ for cooking)

• On Day 2, Chelsa picked us up (in the minivan) at the foot of the Bear Mountain trailhead. I’m now thinking, “how do we get back to that *exact same spot* and do ANOTHER 2-day hike on the AT?” There’s this concept of “thru-hikers” (hike the AT from Georgia to Maine) and “section-hikers” (do different sections over many years?)… I’m thinking maybe we can chip away at the NY pieces over the next year (88 mi total)... and then do CT → MA → VT.. maybe NH and ME too?

• There were moments where the AT overlaps with The Long Path (which runs from NYC → Catskills)… and seeing the turquoise trail markers (which I’ve only read about before) was very cool.

  • Next summer, I plan on hiking a 2-3 day section of The Long Path thru the Catskills – I’m actually thinking of *these* hikes as training for *that* hike.

• Next up: I am still planning on hiking a ~20mi section of the AT in Vermont over Columbus Day / Indigenous People’s Day wkd (12 mi on Day 1 followed by 8 mi on Day 2) … and then stuff my face at Mount Snow’s Oktoberfest.

  • I am imagining that someday these NY → CT → MA → VT section hikes I am dreaming of will connect with this “20 mi of VT” section I am planning on doing next weekend. And maybe next summer, we can continue the VT hike further thru VT (starting wherever we end up next weekend… somewhere near Stratton Mtn)

• ps: We didn’t see any bears. But have been thinking about this quote from Bill Bryson’s “Walk in the Woods” book (which is about hiking the AT)

  • “(Black bears seem to have been notably more ferocious in former times <1800s>; nearly every journal has accounts of sudden, unprovoked attacks. It seems altogether likely that eastern bears have become more retiring because they have learned to associate humans with guns.)”

Thanks for reading – you should subscribe too! (And bonus points for fwd’ing to a friend!)

FACEBOOK GLASSES

• I watched this event last week with much excitement (gadget nerds unite!) and while their keynote/demo was kind of a disaster, some of the follow up videos explaining how they actually work were good, especially:

• Notable (IMHO) is this “what am I looking at” feature which you can see in a few different spots. Camera + computer vision = AI = lots of cool stuff will come from this. I like this stuff because it (has the potential to) AUGMENT the real world vs. distracting you from it (like phones currently do).

  

• … but there’s also the obvious use cases of "I am going to use my glasses to consume the internet while I am talking to someone else IRL… and they are not going to know that I am not paying full attention to them”. I don’t love this “we are further enabling (encouraging?) Continuous Partial Attention” use case.

  • It sounds like Facebook is intentionally building for this?

    • “this is the one thing that I think is basically better about Zoom than in person conversations is that you can sort of multitask a little bit, right?” - Zuck (32:04)

• There’s lots of “post smartphone” chatter with this launch… as in: are “displays in glasses” the successor to “displays you hold in your hand”? IMHO, the problem is not “do you want to the hold a display in your hand?” the problem is “the content on the display is designed to maximize the consumption of your attention and maximize the time you spend scrolling”.

  • Said another way: if we’re using glasses to just endlessly scroll Reels and TikTik just a little closer to our face… well, what a waste of cool tech.

  • Said ANOTHER way: “Having to use your phone to do a task” isn’t the problem… getting distracted from the task and being drawn into IG where you can easily spend 2-20 minutes scrolling is the problem.

• Also noteworthy is the “Apple vs. Facebook” angle here … while Apple is busy thinning down phones and re-skinning the UX (liquid glass!), Meta is taking BIG SWINGS that the future of computing (wearable displays, EMG input tools)

  • … but of course this is what Apple does tho, right? They don’t make the first TV box. Or smartphone. Or watch. But they do the “and now we do this too” really well when the time is right.

  • There’s also the Zuck vs. Jobs argument, which I don’t find super interesting.

• Also…

  • Meta will be opening retail stores to let people play with these.

  • I had a pair of the Meta RayBans two summers ago but returned them (eh, voice commands didn’t work well in a crowded environment / Stockade games). I am definitely curious about all these new upgrades to the hardware tho.

  • In an alternate universe, I work at Meta and I am actively working on this stuff. This opportunity certainly presented itself to me a few times (2015, 2018) and I never followed thru (as I was always too loyal to FSQ to leave)

    • Yes, I have some fomo about this… because I like this vision! (contextual aware computing!). Also, we talked about this stuff A LOT at Foursquare, and built A LOT of it at Foursquare, and I had always hoped that Foursquare would be a player in this space when this stuff started becoming mainstream.

    • I am an equal mix excited about what developers will build with the FB glasses (ambient computing!) + skeptical about what people will *actually* use them for (scrolling, distraction from IRL).

      • … um, Hopscotch / BeeBot is certainly taking swing at building / inventing some of this (context aware computing + cities + social) – and we are potentially one of those third-party developers that will build for this hardware. (FWIW, BeeBot 1.0 – which should be launching soon! – already works w/ Meta Glasses via Bluetooth audio)

        • Last call for BeeBot beta testers! (🇺🇸 US only, 📱 iPhone only)

    • Re: FSQ + loyalty (above). I have a big blog post in me about this… someday. I still carry a lot of regret about giving so much of my time to FSQ (“being in love with a company that doesn’t love you back”).

QUESTS ON DECK

Lots to do! Heres how I’m thinking of it. Could prob use some longer-term stuff in here too (6 months out? 1 year out?)

• 🟢 Backpacking the VT section of AT (next weekend!)

• 🟡 Mars hiking *something* (maybe this weekend?)

• 🟡 Sammy camping in the woods (maybe this weekend?)

• 🟡 Another bike race this season (Shawangunk Grit + Halloween ride at Roundtop?)

• 🔴 Sammy is gonna learn to love skiing! (see ya in December, baby!)

• 🔴 Via hiking Mt. Snow at sunrise (on pause till Dec)

CONSUMING

I skipped this section the last few newsletters, so let’s bring it back!

• 📖 “AWOL on the Applachain Trail” – AT book #1 (finished this, loved it … def helped me prepare for this hike with V and got me fired up to prioritize doing this with kids)

• 📖 “Walk in the Woods” - AT book #2 (30% thru… I can’t get enough, lolz)

• 📖 “Overstory” - on pause. Got distracted w/ the 2 books above

• 📖 Craig Mod’s “Things Become Other Things” – I started this over the summer too and stopped (got distracted w/ AT) but in my head this is kind of like “Japanese Appalachian Trail” (??) so I’m excited to revisit it.

• 🎥 <whatever the newest Jurassic Park is called> – Loved it. But me & C are always suckers for a new JP movie. Btw, I CAN NOT get the kids to be interested in Jurassic Park…. it’s driving me crazy!

• 🎥 F1 – re-watched as Chelsa hadn’t seen it. It’s sooo good. Maybe one of my fav films of last 5 years.

• 🎥 Mission Impossible 12 or whatever – Awful. Could barely follow it. Not worth your time.

• 🎥 Roadhouse (with Jake Gyllenhaal!) – I had COVID last week so I splurged on this (after watching a 60 second clip on IG Reels). The first half was awesome! The second half was awful!

• 🎵 Caamp – Me & C saw them live at Radio City a few weeks ago and it was amazing. Had never heard of them before our RV trip in August. We listened to them a lot. I bought tix on a whim back in August. We had no idea what to expect out of the concert (sold out!) and it totally blew me away. Lead singer closed with a really emotional talk about his troubles / struggles over past few years (this was their last show on this tour… which was a make-up tour for a tour they cancelled two years ago?). Anyway, it’s a gift to emotionally connect with someone else’s work.

RABBIT HOLES

List of stuff I spent more time Googling / ChatGPT’ing than I should have.

• Wild Saunas – Saunas that are in the middle of the woods (“off-grid, immersed in nature”). Apparently these are all over the place in UK (map) but nothing here in US?

  • … I was wondering if there as a hike in NY / VT somewhere that ended up near a lake with a wild sauna? No such luck.

  • … was thinking “what if we rented a sauna-on-a-trailer thing and parked it at a NYS Campground for a wkd?” (but NYS campground rules prohibit “structures” like this)

  • … was trying to convince my brother he needs a SAUNA BOAT at his lake house. (no luck so far)

    • … hold on, just found a floating sauna in Saratoga Springs! (3.5 hours north of NYC) –– @Kos.Sauna - “We are NY’s first public floating sauna”

  • … btw, if you ever see “sauna” stuff in this Substack it’s because I must have serendipitously ran into my buddy Robbie somewhere (ha!)

• AT shelters – random structures in the middle of the woods, what’s not to love?! I am jones’ing to get back upstate and check out our campsite in the woods (0.3mi back from our house … gonna try to get Mars & Sammy to sleep in the woods Saturday night).

  • … but also thinking, why not build a little bar out there? A little speakeasy? Why not build a few campgrounds and a few mini shelters? This could be a whole project!

• ANTIFA. How did this become such a bad word? It’s literally “anti-fascist” –  shouldn’t we ALL aspire to be anti-fascist? What am I missing? Who out there is yelling “FASCISM! FASCISM! FASCISM!”??? I fell down this rabbit hole the other night (thx insomnia!). Here’s a bunch of stuff copy-and-pasted from my intimate conversation with ChatGPT…

  • The term “Antifa” originally comes from the German Antifaschistische Aktion (“anti-fascist action”) movement of the 1930s, and it has historically just meant “anti-fascist.”

  • President Trump repeatedly described Antifa as a “terrorist organization” during 2020 protests, which helped cement the term as a political weapon.

  • “Very few people actually call themselves “Antifa” in the U.S., even among anti-fascist activists, which made it easier for opponents to define the term negatively, since there wasn’t a unified group to defend or explain it.”

  • In short, Antifa became a “bad word” not because anti-fascism is inherently controversial, but because it was successfully weaponized in political discourse.”

  • (not ChatGPT) –– Trump just signed an Executive Order labeling ANTIFA a domestic terrorist organization?

… also (and how this whole thing started for me)…. I saw a bunch of people on Threads tagged w/ this terrorist warning (see below), so I just copy and pasted it onto the most benign tweet I could think of and posted it. Since then, maybe two dozen people DM’ed me (etc) to tell me I’d been flagged! Ha, sorry for the confusion, but I appreciate your concern!

QUOTES

• “Limit your dwelling on shit to 10 minutes. Anything longer is just a film festival of your mistakes.” - via @kevinnealon. Good advice I should probably follow.

• “Blue-Anon” – what happens when left-leaning peeps start believing in Q-Anon-esque conspiracy theories. (guilty!)

RANDOM LEFTOVERS

Holy cow, this email got looooooong. I have like 10 more bullets points that I’m gonna have to punt on till next week. Whenever I write one of these, I never think I’ll have enough stuff for a full newsletter and then *every time* I get to the end I’m saying “I need to cut 30% of this and just save it for later”. Timeboxing still helps… this email prob took me 90 minutes to put together, btw.

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Secret word = FLAPJACKS

I’m three days away from this BIG HIKE with Via (we’re gonna try to do 15-20 miles of the Appalachian Trail that runs thru NY state), and so I was gonna save my next post as a recap of that trip, but I have *all these notes* laying around, just BEGGING for some Substack real estate, so let’s clear out that queue. But first…

WORK THOUGHTS

• BeeBot! (AirPods + always-on, audio-first, ambient social city guide)

  • Was hoping we could soft-launch this thing last week (sandwiched between Apple and Facebook keynotes) but we had some bugs we had to fix. We’re now thinking last week in Sept.

  • “Soft launch” = publish a loooooooong blog post on what we’re building and why (and why you should care), spread that post and the “download now” link far and wide, and get myself back on the podcast/speaking circuit to talk about the product and this general vibe of “software that connects people to IRL”.

  • If you want to test drive it, hit this and I’ll sneak you into beta this week.

• Meta Keynote, tonight (Wed 9/17) @ 8pm. Zuck is gonna show off the fancy new glasses with a heads-up display that apparently allows you to control cursor & text (typing!) with your brain (!!) — you gotta wear what looks like a bulky wrist band / wrist watch to make it work (it reads neural impluses your brain sends to your wrist?), but as a v1 of the future, will be fun to watch (livestream)

  

  • I used to be so so so so so so into this space — glasses! AR! – and now I am super “meh” on it. I want less tech, not more tech. Less screen time, not more screen time. I want less “continuous partial attention” both from me and the people I spend time with.

    • Also, as a buddy said… “If only a company I trusted - generally and with my data - made this shit…”

  • Back at FSQ I had a part of North Spectacles (early AR glasses with a display in the lower-right corner). They could show lines 2-3 lines of text and basic graphics (clip art) in 2-3 colors. They were super early (2019?) and worked fine, but not good enough to make it worth wearing glasses if you didn’t have to wear glasses. The WORST PART was that if you wearing them at night, the screen would project/reflect a spec of light onto your face the size of a dime… so if you were walking thru a crowd your face was creepily illuminated. I remember wearing these thru Union Square in NYC one night and everyone was starting at me because my face was lit up in a strange way. It was weird and uncomfortable, and I am curious if the fancy new Facebook glasses suffer from any of this “other people can see when it’s on” awkwardness (even if it’s not using “projector” tech)

Thanks for reading – you should subscribe too! (And bonus points for fwd’ing to a friend!)

PERSONAL / LIFE THOUGHTS

Btw, in last newsletter, when I wrote about ‘berging out and rabbithole’ing… wow that was very cathartic to write about! (and get feedback on, thx all!) I feel like at any given time I am carrying 3-4 “obsessions” in my head that my mind is just churning on 24/7. Here’s what’s rattling in there now.

• 3 Kids + 3 Schools

  • We’re now 3 week into school (that went fast). Three kids, three schools, three dropoffs (8:10, 8;15, 8:30). Logistically challenging, yes. But it’s also clear that all 3 kids are where they need to be (and that feels like a parenting win). This idea of “matching your kid to the right school” is real thing.

  • Mars gets to learn about Maps this semester. That gets me super excited because (a) I love maps and (b) I can find the overlap between <maps + camping/hiking> and <maps + subway> and <maps + skiing>. I am into creating concentric circles of the stuff the kids are interested in.

  • I’m really into the idea of the Alpha School in NYC (“AI-powered private school” — see NYT piece). We have a few friends who send their kids here (NYC and Miami) and love it. While I don’t think the school is a good fit for our kids right now, I do love their framing of “guides” over “teachers” (I sometimes think of my role as a parent as a “guide for the interests”)

    • ps: I signed up for a tour / info session 10 mins after publishing this post (!!)

  • Sidenote: I learned from Mars’ teacher that the colors from those Mood Meter posters align w/ the Inside Out characters. Huh!

  

  • Sammy (4yo) listens to Daniel Tiger stories on her Yoto while going to sleep. Sometimes she wakes up knowing the songs (“Dad, I learned it in my sleep!”)

    • “You can be mad at someone you love”
      ”When you are ready, give them a hug”

    
    … my favorite thing is freestyling new songs to annoy her (from this morning)

    • If you don’t eat your oatmeal, you don’t get a snack
      And if you don’t get a snack, you have an empty backpack!

    … I think I am hilarious. She does not.

• Camping

  • I did that whole newsletter on camping (RV → Car Camping → Backwoods camping → Backpacking…) and I didn’t give Mars a shoutout for starting the whole thing (!!) We were upstate this whole summer and he was sharing a room w/ his 4yo sister who can be a monster. After the first few days of her waking him up early and getting into all this stuff, he walked downstairs, asked me to set up a tent in a yard and he slept in the tent for like 20 DAYS! Like, he moved his stuffies and night light and cords and everything out there. It was awesome, and it was the catalyst for all a lot of the stuff we are super into now! (thx Marsy!)

    

    • Btw, Mars is NOT coming with me + V on Saturday, which he is bummed about (I don’t think he can handle the hike yet). But I am gonna take him backwoods camping next wkd.

  • That post generated a ton of emails + DMs… a lot of y’all love camping! But you either stop at car camping (because the next step – backpacking – requires lots of gear) or stop at one-night backpacking adventures (because 2-nights requires confidence in sourcing/filtering water). This overnight trip w/ V this weekend is my first time doing anything like this and if I can do it, you can do it… I’ll report back!

  • Btw, it’s kind of crazy that you need like $1000/gear to spend a night in the woods w/ your kid. I’m slightly exaggerating here, but tent + 2 sleeping bags (20º) + 2 sleeping pads + 2 backpacks + stove + filter + etc. It adds up quick.

    • Best kept secret in NYC camping = REI’s “Re-Supply” (used gear) section. (2nd floor of NYC store). There is SO MUCH good stuff down there — used once, 40% off.

    • I’ll publish a list of all my gear when we get back. I am not sure whether my pack is gonna be 30 lbs or 50 lbs. I’m hoping I can get V to carry… 7 lbs?? (pack + sleeping bag + some food / water)

      • Sidenote: By prepping for this trip, I now have everything needed for a proper go-bag.

  • My personal north star for all this camping/hiking stuff = “raising kids that feel just as comfortable in the woods as they do in the city”

• BIRDING!

  • Wait, y’all didn’t know me and C are aspiring pro birders? BUCKLE UP!

  • You probably know about Merlin BirdID app— Shazam for bird calls – but I recently bought this thing called the Birdweather PUC which is a piece of hardware (mic/wifi) that sits on our porch and listens to birds 24/7. There is a whole community of developers (!!) around this thing who are making tools that let you go thru all the data from your PUC, check this out… [zoom in!}

    

    … top row is hour (6am, 7am, 8am), numbers are “# of bird songs heard” (color intensity corresponds to number). We’ve detected 67 unique species of birds since I set this thing up in early August. Hit the link and use the arrows to flip back and forth days/week. Fascinating!

    • I am excited to see what happens in the winter and spring too!

  • If you are into this (even a tiny bit!) watch this documentary (mockumentary?). Hipsters living in a can trying to beat all the birding records. Hilarious but also a pretty good bird-spotting doc! (we’re 1/2 way thru it)

• Night Sky

  • Camping + clear sky + lots of stars. Y’all have this Sky Guide app right? Point it at the sky and it tells you stars/planets/constellations. I always assume everyone knows about this, but one of our Beebot interns had not (!!) and these apps are MUST HAVES for anyone with a view of the night sky.

  • One thing I’ve noticed is that there are a LOT more things moving thru the night sky these days. (I used to do a lot of stargazing stuff like 15 years ago when we did beach/summer shares, and recently got back into it w/ the kids.) Anyway, there is another app called Enigma which is meant for UFO Sightings (ha!) but it has a cool camera feature that allows you to point at any moving object and see if it’s satellite or a plane, and it’ll tell you “Starlink Satellite”, “Weather Satellite”, “Russian Space Station”, etc.

    • The satellite spotter can be tricky to find in the app. Tap: “Camera” tab (middle tab), then “Identify” and point at sky.

  

• List of Things You Want to Do / Quests on Deck

  • My writing on this last newsletter spurred a “mid-life crisis” conversation with some buddies. FWIW, I don’t feel those vibes right now, I feel like I’m just very mindful of my time and health at the moment and it feels efficient to make lists of things you want to do and then just do those things.

  • Speaking of things I want to do, after last newsletter, fellow reader Alban shared this idea of PackRafting (👋). Yes please!

    

    … In general, I have become a big fan of “strap something to your backpack and have an adventure”. Strap your skis to your backpack and ski something. Strap something to your bike and go somewhere. Or just throw ‘em both on a raft and have an adventure with that too. Maybe next summer!

  • Btw, waking up one morning in VT last winter to snowshoe up and ski down Mount Snow has totally changed my whole relationship with the outdoors. How random, and what a gift!

    • …inspiration for THAT came from my buddy Kyle Mum., so thanks pal!

MISC RANDOM STUFF FROM MY QUEUE

• I like cities and urban planning and reclaiming/reusing public space (er, and I don’t really care for golf), so I really loved this idea

• This “meat swiping machine” came up in a conversation about data mining from Instagram / TikTok… mostly as a joke. (aka: could you reclaim your “Memory Bank” data back from IG/TT by using computer vision on a meat-swiped version of your feed, or would that just bork the algo and make the data useless?)

QUOTES

• “I’d rather ride an acoustic bike than an e-bike” – says my buddy Neil. Love this “acoustic bike” term.

• “I had a hunch you’d be a Future Good Friend” – my buddy Rufus said this to me and I love it (and it meant a lot!) I have met parents at our kids’ schools (esp Mars’ new school) where I’m like “this may be a Future Good Friend”

• “NYC is the most diverse city in the world…” – I heard this at a kids’ school event and never really thought about it before. ChatGPT says it’s mostly true 🤷🏻‍♂️ (Top 5: Toronto, NYC, London, Dubai, Singapore). What a privilege to raise kids here!

• ”If you’re gonna fake your parents signature, at least make sure the D points in the right direction” – Administrator at Mars’ school joking about the challenges that dyslexic/dysgraphia kids also have at cheating :)

• “The Earth is alive. Just like a tree is alive” –  Paraphrased from the “Overstory”, which I was reading before I got obsessed with the Appalachian Trail. I’ll get back to it soon (maybe from VT’s Kid Gore Shelter in a few weeks!)

• “ ‘Vibe’ is the appraisal of a moment” - Got to hang with Adam Aleksic, TikTok celeb linguist (what a title!) a few weeks ago. He was full of great one-liners and this one stuck with me.

• “50% of people in the Main Cabin on a plane are on their only flight of the year, or even their life!” — Dunno where I heard this from, but I wrote it down.

• Lastly, I just finished that book (“AWOL on the Appalachian Trail”) about this one guy who quit his job to hike the Appalachian Trail. Took him 5 months… 5 months away from his wife and 3 kids (9yo, 8yo, 5yo). It’s a great book (and I feel more prepped for mini-adventures w/ the kids because of it … and no, I am not planning on ditching everyone for 5 months) but this paragraph at the very end stuck with me…

  • “It is important for parents to continue to live their own lives. We can’t sit by and say we’ve already made our decisions, done our striving, and dish out opinions on the doings of our children. Words alone lack authority, and we risk making them surrogates for the life we’d like to lead. We can better relate to the budding aspirations of our children if we follow dreams of our own.”
    

  … this felt wise (and relevant to where me & C are at w/ our lives & interests & kids) so figured I’d share. (aka: I’m gonna keep making list of Quests and keep trying to do them, either with the kids or without the kids, but always in hopes of inspiring the kids).

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secret word = PandaTime. (IYKYK)

Whoa I really fell off the wagon there. It’s been 87 days since I last sent one of these newsletter out (I basically took the summer off?) but, hey, let’s get back into it!

What was my goal again <checks notes> … 2x/month? This is #12 this year, so I’m 1/2 way to my goal while being 3/4 of the way thru the year? Hmm.. prob not gonna happen, so let’s shoot to send out Teendrama #20 by NYE. Sound good?

(shoutout to the handful of you who nudged me via text / DM / LinkedIn etc to get back at it! Appreciate you!)

Thanks for reading – you should subscribe too! (And bonus points for fwd’ing to a friend!)

WHAT I’M WORKING ON

• BeeBot. It’s been a summer! We’re now a team of 6 FT + 3 contractors + 3 interns from NYU. We’ve built a lot, and we’re gearing up to “soft launch” this thing in the next two weeks. (soft launch = I write a blog post, people can download the app, but we’re not trying to get crazy growth… we’re moving to a public “launch + learn” phase).

  • What is it? AI-powered DJ that tells you about the people/places/events that are near you wherever and whenever you have headphones on. It gets smarter the more you use it, the more places you take it. We use AI to read lots of email newsletters (etc) in an attempt to create a “neighborhood zeitgeist”, and it’s the DJ’s job to tell you about the vibe of neighborhoods / places as you move thru them.

  • Beta Testin’. We have a few hundred people testing it. It works, and it has its moments of brilliance. But it also has its moments of feeling, er, not so great. That said, we’ve have build enough infrastructure to launch it / to tweak it / to scale it / to fix it.

  • Just Do It™. At some point you just gotta push the thing out of the nest and see whether it can fly. So maybe next week? Look for my suuuuuppper loooong blog post soon (I’ll prob re-post it here).

    • To any repeat-entrepreneurs in the house, the “fear of launching a new project” thing is absolutely real. Never had it with Dodgeball, but we certainly felt it with Foursquare 1.0 (2009), and TBH weight of it is rather overwhelming with BeeBot 1.0. But hey it’s just a part of the ride.

    

PERSONAL / LIFE SNIPPETS

• The kids are back in school – 3 kids in 3 different schools. “Matching your kid to the right school” = great idea. “Running around town to drop ‘em all off every morning “ = eh, ask me how it’s going in a few weeks.

• I am SUPER INTO camping / hiking / backpacking right now. I’ve taken the kids on hikes thru the Catskills in the past (Mohonk, Minnewaska, Overlook). We did an RV trip this summer (amazing btw) and did overnights at NY State campgrounds along the way (which the kids looooved). I parlayed their love of the RV experience into two Catskills car-camping trips last month (Woodland Valley & North/South campgrounds) and added a hike onto both of them. And then parlayed THAT interest into making a campsite in our backwoods w/ my brother-in-law (1/3rd mile from our house) where we pitched two tents for the night for 4 kids (+ firepit and breakfast in the woods). Which I am NOW trying to parlay into a two-day/one-night backpacking trip with Via (my oldest, 9yo) somewhere along the Appalachian Trail in NY state (just to introduce her to the idea of “long journeys”, lean-to/shelters, hiking community). And my MASTERPLAN is to parlay that into a multi-day solo backcountry trip for me thru Vermont before end of October. (and then eventually do the multi-day trip w/ kids)

• I have absolutely ‘berged-out over this (Chelsa’s name for it btw – “‘berg” as in “Aspergers”) - books and podcasts and maps and apps and trips to REI and 1000 questions to my buddies w/ experience here (thx Mike, thx Ben!)

  • From Google AI: “In Asperger's hyperfixation is an intense, prolonged focus on a specific interest that can lead to deep expertise but also cause neglect of other responsibilities and social withdrawal.”

    • … I have absolutely self-diagnosed myself with this (and Stockade was born from it… prob Dodgeball and FSQ too, tbh)

• The spark (seed?) for all this started when I was stuck in traffic on our way to Vermont some Friday night last winter. We were driving 10mph on a stretch where we’re usually driving ~50 mph (Rt 9 just outside Bennington) and I noticed a sign pointing out the Appalachian Trail crossing ahead. I hadn’t even thought about the Appalachian Trail (or as we in the ‘berg industry call it, “The AT”) for 10+ years before that moment, but the sudden realization that it ran thru MA and into VT (and prob thru NY) dialed my interest up to 11.

  • … and then this summer (6-8 mos later) when we did the RV trip, I got a crash course in NY State Campground (and private vs. state campgrounds, and State vs. National campgrounds, and NY State vs. DEC/Catskills campgrounds, and the reservation system, and the 6 campsites in the Catskills, and how the NYS campsite infrastructure seems to be better than VT’s, but hold on, there’s also trails that connect all the campgrounds, and all the states, and the AT runs thru all of them??? (‘berg, ‘berg, ‘berg…)

• So long story short, we’re gonna hike some of the AT. A little of it. Someday. Not sure when. Maybe soon? The whole AT is a 2000mi / 5-6 month hike… so we’re not doing that (yet!)… but hold on, there are MINI QUESTS here and there like "The Long Trail” in VT (runs thru the entire state of VT, takes 1 month) or “The Long Path” through NY (1 month)… or even SMALLER SIDE QUESTS like “the section of the Long Trail/VT that connects the AT crossing I saw on Rt 9 to our place in VT” (2 day hike) or “the section of the Long Path/NY that starts 20 mins from our house in Kingston and winds thru a the Catskills to Phoenicia” (5 day hike). I am not qualified to do any of this right now… but I bet I can get there???

  • … and I think I’m gonna start by taking V on a TINY MINI QUEST that will get us to hike about 15 miles of the AT that runs thru Harriman State Park in NY (and doing an overnight at an AT shelter along the route).

  • … btw, we may take the Metro North to the trailhead (!!) with our packs on.

• Want to ‘berg out with me? Here’s some links:

  • I’m reading this now: AWOL on the Appalachian Trail Paperback – by David Mille

  • I’ll read this next: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail - by Bill Bryson

  • Listened this week:

  • Listened yesterday:

  • Listened today:

  • Listening now:

  • Maps and More Maps

    • For all hikers: Harriman-Bear Mountain Trails Map, 2023 ← these maps are A++

    • For AT hikers specifically: National Geographic – Appalachian Trail: Vermont, New Hampshire

  • My REI Wishlist - The stuff I still need to take V backpacking (Note: I may own ALL this stuff by the time I write another one of these newsletter, ha!)

  • This story about parents who hiked the AT w/ their 4yo (who turned 5yo on the trip) … which I just realized is being turned into a documentary? (I found this trailer when searching for the link in the last sentence!). This “backpacking with kids” stuff is WILDLY inspiring.

  Btw, if you have any experience with any of this (or you think I am batshit crazy for thinking I can do a solo hike 5 weeks from now just because I listed to 5 podcasts), please do ping me.

ADVENTURES / QUESTS

• I’ve written about this idea of “always having a quest on deck” before but have been thinking a lot about it recently. In my trusty notebook, I have a list of all the Big Ticket Adventures we did / I did last year & this year, and a list of Upcoming Quests (for both me & the kids). Here’s what it looks like (copied from current Field Notes #117)

  • 🟢 Mtn Bike Race ← I did my first last summer (and have another this Sunday!)

  • 🟢 Snowboard Race ← Me and V both raced Homesick @ Stratton slalom last two years

  • 🟢 Hike Mtn & Ski ← did 10 of these last season (6am hike up + ski down)

  • 🟢 Night Hike & Ski ← did it 2x at night last season (once in snowstorm = sketch!)

  • 🟢 Camp Outside w/ kids ← finally! (this has been on the list to do w/ kids forever)

  • 🔴 Hike a Catskills 3500 Peak ← not yet. was hoping for this fall.

  • 🔴 Bike to a Ski Day ← on my list! I prob need an e-Bike tho.

  • 🔴 Ski in South America + Europe + Japan ← been on my list forever

  • 🟡 Hike Mtn + Ski Down w/ Kids (maybe even at night)

  • 🟡 Overnight Backpacking Hike ← working on it!

  • 🟡 MultiDay Backpacking Hike ← working towards it!

… yellow are “Quests on Deck”. Red are on hold (for now). Green are done.

I don’t have a laundry list of “Quests on Deck” which feels fine – I feel like every month I add a new one.

Semi-related, I also set these numerical goals for myself (kind of like New Years Resolutions, but for “quests” I’ve already unlocked)

• Run 300 mi this year ← this one will be close (I’m at 120 now?)

• Hike up, ski down = 15x this season ← I should hit this no problem.

• Mountain Bike Race = 5x ← two summer races were cancelled, I’ve done zero so far (but shooting to race on Sunday)

• Read 10 books ← I’ll be lucky to hit 5

• Hike 3 x 3500 Peaks ← I don’t think I’ll get to this this year. (me & V almost did Panther Mountain from Giant Ledge, but she was tired and I didn’t want to push :)

.. I’ve got a bunch of other non-numerical goals (basically stuff I wanted to do w/ the kids / expose the kids too, but we’ll save that for another newsletter)

• ps: If 4yo Sammy can get her shit together (ha!) we can cross off “all 3 kids ski” + “all 3 kids ride a bike” 😂

Oh, last though! I’ve had this idea of “Core Values, but for our Family” for a bit (does anyone else do this?). We had Core Values at Foursquare … and tbh, I always thought this was corny until we actually did it, and the exercise of doing it really helped us articulate what the culture of the company/team/work was so we could properly indoctrinate (prob the wrong word, but feels apt) new hires into the company / culture of the company Anyway, I’ve been wanting to do for family stuff for a while (and, um, we have are NO “new hires” coming ❌👶🏼), and so (starting w/ RV trip) I’ve been telling the kids our values are:

• Family ← nod to Fast & the Furious (!!)

• Curiosity

• Adventurousness

• Kindness

  … I feel like it’s kind of sticking. And it feels like a good start, right? (If you do this / did this with your family/kids lemme know)

OTHER STUFF

• Gosh, I have a ton of other tidbits / notes, but I time-boxed myself to an hour (and I’m at two), so maybe we’ll just call it here? (I mean, it’s already kind of long!)

• If you made it to the end, password is “hyrule”. Sorry for the hiatus – feels good to bang one of these out in an attempt to get back into the rhythm of it. Will anyone even read this on Friday night? (I’m watching the US Open!)

  </end>

  

  

Gm! I promised myself I’d bang out another one of these before kids got out of school (um, end of this week!) and so I’m hanging at my local coffee shop (Think Coffee, 8th Ave) on a rainy Tuesday. Kind of wish I went for a run today, but the internets said it was raining out, and it is, but just baaaarely.

Speaking of running, someone asked so here you go – this my system for motivating myself to run. I have an Apple Watch, and the upper-left corner I have the date (June 10) and on the upper-right corner I have the # of miles run this month (via Tempo app). And so I try to keep the number on the right bigger (miles) than the number on the left (days). I’m shooting for 30 miles/month — with overall goal being to get to ~350 miles/year).

• … so every time I look at my watch it’s a subtle nod to whether I am ahead or behind on this monthly goal. Anyway, this system It works for me. Re: other stuff on my watch:

  • Top center = BeeBot for Apple Watch. Press the button to “check-in” to speak a status update (e.g. “at coffee shop, banging out a substack”). I use this all the time btw – think: “voice lifelogging”.

  • Bottom row = Temperature + Rain or not + Air Quality (via Paku app)

Btw, I dunno if I have a Big Thesis to share this week (maybe there’s one in here?) so here’s a bunch of notes from last two weeks, broken into PERSONAL vs. WORK buckets:

PERSONAL / LIFE SNIPPETS

• “Talk loudly and frequently and in detail about the future you want. You can’t manifest what you don’t share.” – Madeline Ashby

  • I saw this quote in a talk that Jay Springett gave. Great advice!

  • BTW, the talk was about Solarpunk (a rabbithole I fell down like 3 years ago) and it’s LONG (40 mins) but it’s 100% worth watching if you can find the time.

• My sister spotted a kid in a playground with this sticker on their shirt — as in “please don’t take photos of my kid”. Clever.

  • Btw, anyone have a good “why to keep your kids’ faces off the internet” article for me? I get it (kind of), but still post stuff of my kids.

    

• Chelsa and my sister took Via and her cousin to the American Girl store in NYC and Via picked out the Pizza Hut “Book It” accessory kit (!!) for her doll. I am equally surprised / non-surprised this exists.

  

• Saw a girl walking down the street with a jacket that said “Fast, but make it classy”. I had to Google it (it’s a Vespa-thing)

  • Chelsa used to have a yellow Vespa. It was soooo fun to drive it around NYC.

  • … it was featured on the wine we gifted to our guests at our wedding.

  • Yes, I used to ride the back (ha!)

    

• My buddy AJ was telling me how to Prospect Park Track Club offers a “seasons bib”, which is like a Ski Season Pass, except for running every race of the summer.

• My friend Meg commented in the comments last week about this idea of “genetic re-engineering of terroir” (as in wine). I rabbithole’d on this, and yes, this is a thing, and yes, Chat GPT has a hot take on it.

  • “You’re reverse-engineering not just the land — but a moment in time. It’s terroir as time capsule, not just geography.”

  • Not sure if anyone’s DONE this yet in a way you can drink (vs whether it’s just an idea). I found an MIT paper on it, but, I didn’t read it (or even ask ChatGPT to read it for me… someday!)

• Took the kids on a few Adventures™ over last two weeks. AMNH, NY Science Center (to see the CityWorks exhibit) Queens Museum (to see Panorama of the City, still awesome btw). Here’s some stuff I learned (alongside the kids!)

  • The Mars Rovers are bigger than you think. Mars loves Mars rovers btw.

    

  • Jupiter has rings. Even as a mini-astronomy nerd I didn’t know this. We have a telescope upstate. I can see 4 of Jupiter’s moons no problem. I can see the rings on Saturn with minimal effort. Jupiter’s rings = totally off my radar.

  • AMNH has rocks from Mars! This blew my mind. I told the kids that we (humans) didn’t have the tech to bring stuff back from Mars yet (which is true) but I didn’t realize Mars rocks were already here on Earth… and we found them! (they are located near the Gems room, like right before you hit that giant geode / rock w/ purple crystals)

    • “As of 2020, scientists have identified 277 meteorites on Earth that originated from Mars. These Martian meteorites are exceptionally rare, comprising less than 0.5% of the over 72,000 classified meteorites.”

    • Per my understanding, *bringing soil back* would be a big unlock vs. just finding meteorites on Mars.

      • “just finding meteorites” .. ha! What an insane thing to be bored by.

  • Dinosaurs have feathers. Yes, I already knew this (I’m not an idiot!) but I brought the kids to see the Dinosaur Movie at the Museum and it starts with this dinosaur with blue feathers and I thought “Would you look at that!”

    • Trailer below. It was in 3D, the kids loved it (me too! It’s like everything we learned about dinosaurs as kids has changed!)

• Speaking of Adventures™ … this is what I say to the kids, btw, “who wants to go on an ADVENTURE?!” which basically means go out for like 2-4 hours on the subway/walking around/etc trying to cram in as many awesome things as we can (museums, galleries, croissants, playground, street art, whatever). Sometimes they are psyched to go and fight over who gets to go and sometimes they are like “oh, HELL NO” … but anyway, here’s a list I started to make (and crowdsource!) of rad stuff to do in NYC w/ kids. (btw, it’s a whole thread with like 50+ things in it)
  

• I went to an event for my son’s school (a specialized school for kids with speech and language delays). The head of school speaks very eloquently about what the students needs to thrive and what the school does to help them get there. Two quotes from Dr. Gaynor:

  • “Kids that feel good about themselves takes risks in their learning”

  • ”We succeed when our students can articulate ‘this is who I am as a learner.’ (aka: self-advocacy)

    • Related, I heard Mars tell a kid at the playground the other day: “I go to a different school because I learn differently.” ❤️

  • … this school has done wonders for Mars this year (it’s his first year there) and we’re very thankful we found it / it found us.

    • This idea of “matching your kids to the right school” is new to us as of this year, but it’s a thing and it’s been working for us.

    • That said, next year we’ll have 3 kids in 3 different schools 😬

TECH / WORK SNIPPETS

• I hate that I am back to cross-posting on Bluesky/Threads/X in the same way we used to cross check-in to say, Foursquare/Twitter/Brightkite back in 2009. (with a lot of APIs now closed down, there’s no "cross post” tools). This feels so … primitive.

  • I use Bluesky because its feels like the not-evil path to the future. But with <3k followers, I get very little engagement on posts. Feels like posting into a black hole sometimes.

  • Still use Threads because I have an audience there (<10k)… which means I can post a question/etc and usually get an answer/reply.

  • I’m reluctantly still on X because that’s still where the conversation is, esp related to work stuff (see below). It’s worth noting that Twitter (pre-Trump, pre-Elon) was maybe my favorite product of all time. I had like 90k-something followers in the glory days, and using Twitter back then felt like a superpower.

    • Re: Twitter + tech / work + BeeeeeBoooooot, two tweetz below

    • PATRICK –  https://x.com/patrickc/status/1928509708190757294

      

    • DENS - https://x.com/dens/status/1929529354913996879

      

• Had a fun conversation about “living in the future” the other day. Like, is there anything YOU are doing today that makes you feel like YOU are living in the future (vs. everyone else who is stuck in the present like losers)

  • ChatGPT is the obvs things here, um, but everyone is using it. (also see: Sam Altman talking about how diff generations use the product – “Google Replacement” vs. “Life Advisor”)

  • …. so conversation steered more towards “well, what are the AI (blah blah blah) things you’re doing / tools you are using that no one else is onto?”

    • … btw, I have no magic AI hacks. Ha!

  • But then we talked about Dodgeball back in 2005 (!!) and checkins being able to summon friends to show up at a place IRL feeling like a superpower / living living in the future.

    • … and then how can we use this “how can we make you feel like you’re living in the future” framing to help narrow down sharpen what we’re building w/ BeeBot?

  • Related: I can remember the first time I ever IM’d someone who I was physically sitting next to (I was IM’ing w/ my co-worked Ariel at Vindigo back in 2000). There was this open question of “um, why would you send a digital message to someone you were sitting next to? Why not just turn towards them and talk to them?” And in hindsight the answer(s) were obvious… digital whispering, copy and pasting text, having an archive, etc. … but at the time, that felt new and like living in the future. (“oh, I can natively understand this behavior in a way that others can’t”)

    • Um, this is the AIM as Telepathy part references in the click-bait’y headline (ha!)

    • Speaking of “living in the future” remember SmarterChild? Like Poor Man’s ChatGPT! (my buddy was the CEO for a bit –– what an epic epic product/company, just *a taste* too early)

      

  • Also, remember back when we had flip phones – without keyboards! – and having to use T9 to type out text? And people would text *under the table* because of the stigma of “texting at the table” (ha!) My memories of this are from, like, The Magician (bar in LES, NYC) circa 2005… but what a difference 20 years makes. (20 years! we old!)

  • Also see: https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1924468459297009829?s=46

    • (gosh it sucks how the lack of an X/Twitter API’s prevents you from just pasting that link in… I had to take that a screenshot below and upload it. Feels like internet is going BACKWARDS in many ways… and it sucks)

      

    … btw this reminds me of this tweet (which I can’t find on X for whatever reason, search degradation?) but it goes something like this:

    • A: “So people use to drive their own cars? On the highway? At 70mph? While switching lanes?”

      B: “Yes!”
      A: ”And nobody died?”
      B: ”Oh, lots of people died!”

      • If anyone has the link to this tweet, please paste in the comments. xo

UPDATES ON PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON:

• Hopscotch / BeeBot (“Cityguide for Airpods”) – I am jones’ing to push this thing out into the wild and I know I promised a beta to a BUNCH of people, but… bugs, man, bugs. We’re working on them. We have a lot of stuff that “kind of works”, and a lot of stuff “inconsistently failing”. Frustrating, but we’re making progress.

  • Sign up for beta! Maybe you’ll get it someday (ha!)

• Stockade FC (D4 soccer club in Hudson Valley) – We won our last home game 10-0 (which is insane) in front of 900+ fans. Our supporters set off so many smoke bombs that the fire dept showed up (!!). We had over 1100 fans a few weeks ago. We’ve got another home game this Saturday, next Saturday, and the Saturday after that… if you can get up to Kingston to check out a match (2 hours north of NYC), do it!

• Foursquare – Got a Board Meeting tomorrow. Will check-in with a pic from the elevator (er, I do this every mtg). Anyone here still checkin on Swarm? If so, tell me about when and why and what you still get from it… do it in the comments! (I’m genuinely interested! …esp in the context of what we’re building w/ BeeBot.)

  • Oh! Went to a FSQ Reunion the other night. Peeps put these together maybe 1x year, organized on the ex-FSQ Slack and it draws a mix of folks from all parts of the company / all vintages. I love love love that a lot of people look back fondly on their time at FSQ and that lots of folks still refer to it as the best job they ever had / best people they ever worked with. (btw, there’s prob 20 people missing from this pic — it got taken later vs. earlier in the evening). For as much as FSQ drives me crazy, this part brings me joy.

    

Okay that’s it. This reads quick, but I spent about 2 hours on this one. I drafted an outline but keep adding and adding and adding to it. I gotta pair it down. Secret password is "Quijibo", hit me up and say hello!

</end>

I’m back! Wait, it wasn’t that long… two weeks? That’s not too bad. Setting the timer for an hour, LFG! Btw, there is a LOT of work / tech / industry stuff in here this week (been listening to pods! been going to conferences!) For those here for the parenting content, it’s still here!, just way at the bottom.

Let me kick it off with quick updates from my world:

• “Fast fast fast slow slow slow fast fast.” That’s how I summed up what we’re doing and how it’s going. We make a lot of product progress, and then we sloooow it down to work thru tech debt and random showstopper bugs we find, and then we make a bunch of product progress and then we sloooow it down… Btw, startups are a drag …. an exercise in patience and conviction. You want to go fast, but sometimes you just gotta go slow. We only have 6 people btw.

  • Btw, there are certainly days where I kick myself for walking away from running a company that had an army of engineers and a org/machine that was brilliant at making products. Oh, the things we could have made! [📙]

• Re: BeeBot. We’re working towards releasing a build that let’s people invite their friends to join (baby steps off TestFlight). If you’ve like to give DJ BeeBot a try in your headphones, hit this.

• We’re three weeks into our season. and 1-2-0 (1 Win, 2 Losses)

• We lost our last game 0-3, but we had 1127 people in the stands (our 4th largest crowd ever!). There’s kids racing to get autographs, smoke bombs, drumming, food trucks, crazy lines at the merch table, come up to Kingston (2 hours north of NYC) and catch a game sometime! [schedule / tickets] Next game is Sat June 7!

  

• Still doing its thing. I got a Board Meeting in mid-June. Two random things:

  • Went to a industry dinner (all AI founders, many of them doing well / well known), sat across from someone awesome (who I was psyched to sit across from) and he said “I don’t think you remember, but some 10 years ago I randomly emailed you and asked you out to coffee – and you had no reason to say yes, but you did! – and it was really meaningful, and …. ”

    • Btw, I did this a LOT in earlier days of FSQ (2010-2014). I always made time to go to coffee with people who asked. Sometimes 2-3x/week in my 9am slot at Think Coffee on Bowery/Bleecker. They were mostly startup kids, people trying to get their first thing off the ground, trying to figure out how to put a deck together / talk to investors. When we were doing Dodgeball way back in the day (2004) we had no one to ask Qs to, and so I always thought “if we ever make it, I’m gonna make time to talk to the folks who are trying to figure it out.” Anyway, that was a good use of time. I’ve probably had a dozen people come up to me with the “You may not remember…” bit, and yeah, I usually don’t remember, but they remembered. And that’s rad.

      • Sidenote: If you are reading this, and you are some notable founder / builder / do’er of stuff, do this…. make time for people you wouldn’t normally make time for.

    • Kind of the flip side, I was at at kids-school parent thing last night and I had someone nerd out over “meeting FSQ Founder” (cringe, yes, but I am telling a story!) These moments make me feel like…. the Gin Blossoms? Like, Foursquare (sans-exit) is my one-hit wonder from like 20 years ago? I don’t love this feeling, but I do appreciate that people love what we built and are often nostalgic for it.

      • Yes yes yes, Gin Blossoms have more than 1 hit song! Jeezlouse people! (I had to add this in post-publish, ha!)

Thanks for reading. You should subscribe. (and send to a friend who’d also like to read)

This section was a hit in the last newsletter (um, according to 6 pieces of feedback I got, ha!) so let’s run it back. I’m gonna focus on 5 things I read/listened to since the last newsletter (2 weeks ago)

1. “What Comes After Mobile” – a16z Podcast w/ Andrew Bosworth
   Really enjoyed this podcast w/ Boz (Meta CTO) about “wearable AI” enabled by the Meta RayBans. I had a pair of these last summer, but returned then because I didn’t love them (voice commands didn’t work in loud/crowded environments), but getting curious to try ‘em out again.

   • I think this was the first time I’ve heard the phrase “Wearable AI” (vs. “wearable computing”, etc). In the case of Meta RayBans it’s a mix of always-on camera, always-on headphones, always-on microphone. I liked how Boz talked about the battery limitations of having all this stuff “always-on”…

     • “So you can start a Live AI session with your RayBan Meta glasses. And for 30 minutes, until the battery runs out, it's seeing what you're seeing.” - Boz

   • … but even with the limitations, this is a way you (as a regular person / Muggle) can peek into the future of what-will-be 3-5 years from now.

   • I was talking with another AI / life-logging entrepreneur like 6 months ago and he said something about how LLMs have already ingested all the existing text in the world (the whole internet, books, magazines… movies and TV shows and music all transcribed turned into text, etc)… and that the only thing left was the stuff in our heads. It dawned on me recently that it’s also all the stuff happening IRL and in real time — conversations w/ friends, stuff overheard on the street, all that content (?) will eventually be sucked up by “Wearable AI” (“wearable lifelogging”, can I coin that?) and dumped into the LMMs for later querying.

     • “The stuff in your head + IRL conversations are the only things left to mine” — god is that a depressing/dystopian sentence

   • There’s also a great riff in the pod about “the myth of tech eventualism” — the idea that big breakthrus in tech will “just happen”, and that people ignore or overlook all the R&D and trial & error and te prob 100 failed startups that happens before something “works”.

     • “It doesn't eventually happen. There's a lot of people in tech who are like, yeah, AR will eventually happen. That's not how it fucking works…. You have to stop and put the money and the time and do it. Somebody has to stop and do it. And that is the difference.” - Boz

   • Boz also talks about this idea of a “Brand Tax” (the cognitive load associated with choosing between DoorDash vs Seamless or Uber vs. Lyft). In Meta’s grand vision, you’ll just say “deliver me tacos” or “book me an awesome place to stay” to your magic AI (I’m oversimplifying obvs) without having to actually work with / think about / say the name of the brand that provides those services (Doordash, AirB&B, Uber, etc.). Of course Meta would LOVE to just abstract all the brands away into oblivion…. because then it’s Meta that gets credit for solving your problems, and not AirB&B, etc.

     • I have some notes below on this… mainly WHY would these services ever let an AI agent abstract their brand away? Or if they do, how much will the service tax the AI for the privilege or doing so? (Sundar has thoughts.. below!)

   • Random note, but the podcast ends super abruptly, like some PR person was giving the “wrap it up, like now” gesture in the studio or something. I thought it was funny.
     

2. Decoder Podcast w/ Sundar Picahi

   Also loved this podcast with Sundar (Google CEO) talking about Google’s new AI products, AI eating Google Search metrics, AI agents. Two quotes that stood out:

   • “DoorDash should not be a dumb pipe for sandwiches” – Sundar (ha!)

   • “Agents will pay higher toll when they access services (Uber, AirB&B) because if the agent books it, the service is losing a customer, and the ability to upsell that customer" - Sundar

   • The whole podcast is worth a listen (obvs) and I really enjoyed Nilay needling Sundar on the obvious eventuality of Google’s Search traffic being eaten by ChatGPT (and all the clever language Sundar users to talk around this).

     • FWIW, my Google Search usage is prob down 60-70%. These days I’m using Google mostly to find specific things that I know already exist on the internet — a product, a place / address / map, a photo of something I’ve seen before, an article I’ve read or seen referenced, a YouTube video. IMHO, you’re kind of just wasting your time if you’re Googling for *answers* these days.

3. WSJ piece on OpenAI <> Jony Ive
   Paywalled, but I think that link will work for you. Four good quotes got stuck in my head, so here they are with some mini commentary. Also, um, great exit to have your 50 person startup acquired for $6.5bn (!!)

   • “The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk”

     • “surroundings and life” = always-on camera, microphone GPS + always-on access to email, calendar, group texts, DMs. That requires a lot of trust.

     • … just realizing as I’m writing this that it’s all like lifelogging 5.0, just really really souped up.

   • “… the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users off of screens….”

     • Device prob won’t be the antidote to short-form-video-addiction (🙋‍♂️) but it could intercept those “I started googling something then ended up mindlessly scrolling IG for 20 minutes” scenarios

   • “Building a device is the only way OpenAI and other artificial-intelligence companies will be able to interact with consumers directly.”

     • “Hey Siri” and “Hey Google” are the new walled gardens … devs have no access to/control over wake words. If you want to build a service that wakes up on a voice command, you gotta roll your own hardware (and I know a handful of companies doing just this)

     • FYI – BeeBot “pushed” audio at you for this reason. There’s no way I can build a “Hey BeeBot!” style app into Google or Apple ecosystem … we’d need to make our own hardware.

   • “We both got excited about the idea that, if you subscribed to ChatGPT, we should just mail you new computers, and you should use those,”

     • This is rad. Big vision. Love it.

4. Betaworks “AI Trends & Predictions" Lunch. I’ve been working out of Betaworks (Venture Fund / Studio in Meatpacking District) and there was a super casual lunch for folks working in AI to talk about what they’re seeing / building / experiencing / struggling with. A lot of stuff was over my head, but the “AI + Crypto” conversation really stuck with me (bear with me here!)

   • The internet is largely ad-supported. Meaning human eyeballs need to see ads in order for websites to make money.

   • But now, we’ve got AI / agents reading a lot of the content, and they’re not reading ads, so they’re basically getting the content for free.

   • The internet has long talked about micro-transactions (humans pay $0.01 to read an article w/ their human eyes) but the processing fees (credit cards) have always been too expensive to make it work

   • … but with crypto, agents can pay that tax (1/10 of a penny to read an article) and then pay 1/10th of that for the gas/transaction fee). Apparently gas fees on L2 chains are low enough to make this work now? (news to me!)

   • So AI paying tolls to consume content, and those tolls being paid by AI via crypto is gonna be a thing? Like a big thing? Makes senese!

     • aka: “maybe AI agents are the only thing that can figure out how to use Metamask?” - RDRR! (this is a real nerd joke)

5. Last one, but this “We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education” episode w/ Ezra Klein was also good. (sorry, it seems like you can’t listen to the archived episode unless you pay? I can’t even link to it, sorry)

   • “You’re got all these tech people sending their kids to private school to shield them from the products that they created!” - Ezra

I went to this wonderful conference a few weeks ago at Cornell Tech / Roosevelt Island called “Collective Future”. There were some 100-200 people from all over tech/media/edu/food/CPG/startup space, and ~40 of the attendees signed up to host one-hour sessions (I led one on “Future of Doomscrolling / Does the world still want social media?”). Here are some notes / quotes from the four sessions I attended… (forgive me, these notes are kind of rough, just trying to capture of essence of what inspired me.

… btw, when I first started this Substack two years ago (um, when I only did 3 posts in 2 years, oops) I did so partly because I was going to so many cool events / conferences and it just felt like a waste not to type up the notes and share them w/ people who didn’t have the same access as me. (hence, I am writing this all stuff up, even if it’s half-baked). Your milage may vary.

Zoe’s “Privacy & Trust Collapse” Session

• “I only trust serif fonts” – says a 20-something (ha!)

• "I trust print media more than digital media” – says another 20-something

• “How will we show ‘proof of humanity’ when it comes to content creation”

  • um, eyeball scans? Seriously, why even use social media when it feels like 50%+ the the posts / reactions are from bots?

  • Will we have ‘human only’ spaces? (aka: “no droids allowed!”) – both online and IRL?

  • If so, what is the thing I’ll do before I hit SEND to authenticate that “Hey I am a human and I wrote this with my human brand!” (again, eyeball scan?)

  • Will this extend to IRL?

    • “Hey kids, no AI agents or AI listening devices at the dinner table, PLEASE!”

    

• The “privacy is dead” argument vs “the ability to exist as an authentic human” … is there a way to live a normal life without fear of voice cloning / being the subject of deep fakes?

• So all this cloning voices / deep fakes, etc is only going to get worse (everyone agrees with that). How do I prevent / defend against fake versions of me online?

  • … followed by depressing discussion of ways your fake identity can be used against you to extract value / scam friends (e.g. a phone call … not a call, a conversation! … to my dad in my robot voice asking him to wire me money)

• This is me talking, but I kind of operate under the assumption that “human friends are better than digital friends”, esp for kids … but is this really true? How do we verify that is true? (I mean, human friends can be assholes too)

  • Context: I’ve seen lots of folks talk about AI friends for kids that grow w/ the kids over time – the can adapt to kids’ interests, get better at video games, have more and more mature conversations, etc.

Ricky’s “What’s Valuable when Nothing in Scarce” Session

• Defining “scarcity” as “anything that is not scaleable”

• “You want to own scarce assets… brownstones, bitcoins, sports teams” — says person in the room who prob owns 2 of 3

  • The idea of Bitcoin being “programmatically scarce”

  • vs. “manufactured/artificial scarcity” (1.2M Rolex watches made a year, but it’s still apparently really hard to get your hands one one — btw, I guessed 5000/year when I was asked to guess how many)

  • vs. “organically scarce” (scarce by default, not by design)

• “…yeah, but how many people REALLY have 1000 fans who will pay $5/month?”

Greg’s “Rebooting School for the Age of AI” Session

• “How do we train kids to be critical thinkers?” That’s the main skill they need to learn, right? The one thing that AI can’t replace?

• “ChatGPT doing your homework” is the new “outsourcing your homework to India”

• High praise for Alpha school (“my kids love school”, “school moves 2x as fast”) –first I’ve heard of it btw. It also gets a shoutout in the Ezra Klein podcast mentioned above.

• Teachers as a “guide” (ethos of Montessori schooling — our kids’ school (City & Country) excels at this, but I dunno if this method doesn’t work for all kids (e.g. my 9yo is craving lets child-led learning and more teacher-led learning)

• “Every kid is curious about something” ← love this (and more on it below)

• “AI will let us all focus on our art!”

  • … I hear this all the time and I think it’s bullshit. If (when!) AI takes all the jobs, people are still gonna need to get paid. And if people are not going to get some kind of UBI (Universal Basic Income), then people are just going to get stuck grinding away at shittier and shittier jobs.

  • IMHO, there’s no “golden age of AI enlightenment” without some kind of UBI to protect the folks who jobs will be eliminated.

  • I don’t see any other way around this. (please enlighten me in the comments)

• I’m paraphrasing someone else in the room, but a really dystopian way to look at the future is thru the “Half of the jobs go away.. and we don’t know what those people will do to survive” lens, but a kind of optimistic take on this is “Half of Americans are broke from healthcare… but maybe AI can make healthcare cheaper and more accessible to all, and therefore at least people won’t be saddled w/ as much healthcare debt” 🤷🏻‍♂️

My session (‘Doomscrolling vs. do we still want/need social media”)

• I don’t have a ton of notes here as I was talking a lot, but noted the general ambiguity between the terms “social media” (IG / Twitter) vs. “social network” (FB) vs. “social messaging” (WhatsApp) vs. “social feed” (some new stuff being build here… kind of like OG FriendFeed, pre-NewsFeed

• “I turn to my phone for a moment of rest” … “for a moment of numbing” — oh man, I feel this. When the kids are crazy, I often dip into my phone (NYT, BlueSky, IG, whatever… just to take a 30 second mental break). Addicting soothing, calming, brain-numbing… whatever it is, its not a great habit (for me or the kids)

  

… anyway, fun conference, glad (I went last year too!). Taking the tram back from Roosevelt Island is the way to go btw.

• I’ve been thinking about the “teachers as guides” thing a bunch (an “emcee for the way the kids experience the city?”), and with all of Via’s random (and sometimes short-lived) interests, I keep thinking my job is to help her experience venn diagrams of all the things she’s interested in. Here’s a few random examples…

  • Skateboarding <> street art <> people carving their names into rock <> hiking trails (“hey graffiti is art, street art is art, rock carving is art and graffiit”)

  • Titanic <> “let’s find rock carvings / rock graffiti dated before 1912!”

  • Henry Hudson <> Hudson River School <> Catskills paintings <> hike to find spots they were painted from <> rock carving graffiti

    
    … now that I’m typing these out, these are kind of dumb examples and probably make no sense, but maybe you get the idea?

  • ps: I bought a $15 rock chisel set for me & V off Amazon, stay tuned… (and more below)

    

• Speaking of which, V and I tried our best to chase down the spot that Kauterskill Clove painting (below) was painted from. We found an awesome hike (Kaaterskill Falls → Inspiration Point) but we didn’t find THE SPOT. Have no fear, I think I have a new plan to find it… though we may not be able to hit it up again for a few weeks. Stay tuned!

  

• “Dad, you have your PJs and you have your Breakfast Clothes!” – says 3.5yo Sammy, who doesn’t miss a thing.

  • PJs = I sleep in my underwears and a t-shirt

  • Breakfast Clothes = I put on shorts and slippers when I get out of bed

    • I love the idea of “breakfast clothes”. Clever!

• List of things to take on a hike (um, because we didn’t bring these things)

  • map (left on kitchen table) 🤦🏻‍♂️

  • film for her instant-camera 🤦🏻‍♂️

  • notebook / paper

  • crayons (for etchings, some trails have special etching/rubbing spots for kids)

  • sweatshirt 🤦🏻‍♂️

  • rain coat 🤦🏻‍♂️

  • long sleeve shirt 🤦🏻‍♂️

  • umbrella 🤦🏻‍♂️

  • snacks (we did bring these, and water!)

  • carving tools ← for our rock-graffiti adventures!

    • Tho my geologist buddy suggested this was a BAD IDEA. ("um, the ethos is Leave No Trace.. and craving your name into the rocks is DEFINITELY LEAVING A TRACE”)

    • ... fair point!

• Via was sooooo bummed that the instant camera she brought on the hike was OUT OF FILM when she went to use it. We hiked to the waterfall, she took out her camera, she carefully pointed it, and clicked, and NOTHING! You could feel the sense of defeat in the air. We took pics on my phone instead.

  • … and later that night, I secretly ordered this mini-printer (Fuji Mini 3, $99) that uses the SAME FILM as her Instant Camera and when it showed up, I printed out the same photos from my phone that she tried to take on her camera.

  • And the next day I snuck the printed out film photos into her locker at school and left a note that said “Pretty good magic trick, right?” and it was awesome.

    

• Solar! Not really a “parenting” thing, but hey Mars LOVES it. 60 panels went on the barn last week. They’ll get switched on in mid June (the power company has to come and do it). Giddy up! Here are the specs:

  • System size – 25.8 kW DC

  • Estimated first year production – 29,801 kWh

  • Panels – Q. TRON BLK M-G2+ 430 Watt (60x)

  • Array details – Inverters 1Q8A-72-2-US [240V] (60x)

  • Consumption offset – 86%

    

  
  … btw, I love love love the retro-futurism vibe of this. The barn is a Sears mail-order barn from 1918 (!!). What a difference 107 years makes!

• 📖 Overstory. It’s been on my Kindle forever, but when my neighbor Ben recommended it I was like “okay okay”. I’m only two chapters (two stories?) in, but from what I’ve read so far, it is beautifully written. I don’t think I’ve ever said that about a book before, but I guess you know it when you see it.

• 📺 Last of Us. We finished season two. We almost gave up on this a few times (er, not caring for remaining characters) but we got our second wind. Too bad it’ll prob be 2 years before s03 comes around (and we’ll forget everything from s02)

• 📺 Mountainhead – Tech bros on a mtn retreat (or “a delicious sature of the tech right” says NYT). From creator of Succession. We haven’t watched it yet, can’t wait to watch it. Maybe this wkd.
  

Holy cow, we made it to the end. This is a long one. It took more than an hour. I had lots of notes to transcribe! Maybe I should get back to 1x/week so they ain’t so long. Password is “kielbasa”, hit me up in the comments and say hi.

</end>

Whoa, it’s real easy to fall out of the habit of doing these. I think I let my timeboxing (max 1 hour) slip the last few times I wrote one – which means it takes longer to write / proof / read. Let’s try again! I like writing these!

OBVIOUS BUT NOT SEEN
There’s this cool overlap between this Isaac Asimov quote, "It is the obvious which is so difficult to see” and that classic William Gibson quote, “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed”. Like, what is right around the corner (already existing in R&D Labs) but will be totally unexpected when it arrives. Wanted to capture a few examples of this (and maybe I’ll come back to them later).

• “Silent-Speech-to-Text”. (aka: “subvocalization-to-text”) This is the thing where you can think a word in your brain and the word appears on a screen. (You have to wear some tech-wristband that translates brain impulses/twitches in wrist muscles to text to make this happen btw). CTRL Labs made this 100 years ago and told it to Facebook, and it was rumored to be baked into the FB Watch (which got shelved?) as a future input mechanism for Meta RayBan Glasses (this is me hypothesizing btw). I’ve seen this stuff work like 10 years ago and its probably very very very good now. It seems obvious this is what we’ll do instead of texting into a screen.

  • I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about Substack (how sad is that) and started writing a bit of this post in my head (also sad)… but how interesting would it be have been able to “save that” (?) as text and use it as draft when I woke up.

• Always-on Headphones. We are chasing this trend with BeeBot (want beta?). Yes, many people will have some kind of “whisper in you ear” device all in day long. Meta Glasses are also always-on headphones. People already do with with AirPods (leave one/both in, even if they’re not listening to something). AirPods (etc) will prob start looking more like jewelry (and less like headphones?) The Q is how weird is it when “continuous partial attention” extends to audio (and what services will we WANT chirping in our ears all day long)

• Always-on Recording. There’s a half dozen AI companies that do this now. They capture everything you speak, you hear, and can query/summarize it for you on demand. "What time did Chelsa say I needed to pick up the kids?”, “what was the name of the company that Jordan mentioned at lunch the other day?”. Querying *every bit* of info you take in is (recording devices, audio input, cameras on your face seeing everything) feels right around the corner. I wonder if the “a red light means we’re recording” thing has to come back into vogue somehow.

• Voice Cloning. A year ago I went to clone my voice and it took like 45 mins of work on my end, reading 100 sentences aloud into an app. And then I did it again the other day and it took ~10 seconds to get a pretty good clone I could prob have used to trick my own kids. It seems pretty obvious that this goes badly – voices getting clones and used in scams, used to trick “Hey Siri”, use to trick any voice ID systems, etc. I feel like The World is collectively not ready for the amount of fuckery that will come out of this (+ video fakes, etc etc)

• AI Crippling, um, Thinking? Waze/Google Maps have made it so we no longer need to do the work of navigating or routing anywhere (um, the map does it for you). That’s fine until the maps don’t work / network is down, and sometimes I feel dumber for this (“I’ve done this drive 1000x but I still don’t know the way?”) And the same thing is happening with reading / homework / research / rabbit hole’ing / right? The AI just does it all, no need to think or do the work. That NYMag story on kids vs. homework vs. AI is a solid glimpse into the future which seems more mainstream by the day.

… this is all super obvious right? (um, hit me back in the comments and lemme know) I mean, I feel kind of dumb just typing it out. But will keep this here anyway (and look for more examples to add later).

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RABBIT HOLES (er, speaking of navigating…)

• Henry Hudson. Like two weeks ago Via said: “Hey dad, can we watch a documentary on Henry Hudson?” ABSOLUTELY. They’re doing Lenape (Native Americans) meet the Europeans in school (3rd grade btw) and so we went scouring NYC for Henry Hudson stuff. There’s not much TBH, we missed the HH exhibition at the Museum of the City of NY by like 4 years. We were able to get a peek at the HH stained glass at the NY Historical Society. And we took a lap thru The Met’s American Art trying to find some art from that time (no luck, most is in DC, see below)

  

  • HOWEVER, in our research V, made a quip about how could they possibly get lost? And I explained to them that they were making the maps as they went, and they were EXPLORING!

    • She’s not doing much exploring / map making now (trapped in NYC!), so we gotta fix that this summer. Explore the woods behind our house! Explore the Kingdom of Hyrule! Make some maps!

    • As a side quest, I found this old map (1850s?) of The Ramble in Central Park, printed it and brought her to the top section and told her to pretend she was Henry Hudson with a crappy map and to navigate her way to the bridge near the fountain. I think this at least gave her a smidge of empathy for the plight of the explorer. (fun walk btw, lots of birders! 🐦👀)

ps: Henry Hudson’s crew ditched him in on his 4th voyage. Mutiny —> they kicked him off the boat —> his son went with them —> that’s the last anyone heard of them.

Btw, maps and drawings of early NYC are amazing. This history is all around us, but I never pay an attention to it.

… this 3D bronze sculpture is The Castillo Plan, early Dutch settlement plan (from when Manahatta was New Amsterdam). It’s in lower Manhattan near the South Ferry subway stop / Staten Island Ferry terminal. [Google map] I made a trip to see it w/ the kids last weekend. The painting above is of the town as seen in the map. I didn’t know this 3D Map even existed until I went to the “Group Night” at school where you get to see what the kids are doing / working on (thru photos/slideshow presented by her teacher)

ps: American Wing section of The Met is amazing. Go find the Hudson River School painters and paintings. It’s just brilliant, amazing work (and much of it is of/about the Catskills)

QUOTES

• “GLP-1s are gonna cure internet additions (not regulation) … It’s easier to hack our own brains than limit tech / regulate things.” – Sam Lessin at Slow Ventures.

  • aka: We’ll all be on “Ozempic for Social Media” because (a) we can’t quit it ourselves and (b) govt can’t / won’t regulate the companies that make addictive social media.

• “If you think you’re better than a hedge fund, then you should just be hedge fund” – Ben Horowitz as a FSQ Board Meeting back in 2015. FSQ was just putting it’s data to use in predicting retail / foot traffic / stock market trends (!!) and it was starting to work (see: iPhone 6 predictions, Chipotle vs. E-coli predictions).

  • Thought of this as we’re starting to do fun stuff with local / news / events data at BeeBot… but I don’t want us to be an news/events listing or aggregation biz. Btw, this was a FUN time to be at FSQ, just when we were starting to flex what we could do with all all the data.

  • Spoiler: We never became a hedge fund. And it was hard to sell data to hedge funds, because you can sell 1 category or 1 vertical to 1 fund before the advantage is a commodity. Plus, we were good at investigating trends *once we had an insight*… but we never got to build The Machine that could *predict the insights* (I wanted Labs to take a stab at this but we never got a chance to)

SNIPPETS / PARENTING

• Someone from NPR Boston emailed me like a month ago and asked if they could ask me some questions about Dodgeball. Who still asks about Dodgeball?! :) That turned into this podcast episode (also featuring Alex!) that talks about the origins of Find my Friends and SnapMaps, etc. It’s a fun listen!

  • Via asked me about Foursquare (specifically) last week and – with this pod fresh in my head – I told her we kind of invented the first version of “Find my Friends” (which she uses to watch me + C on our way home, etc). She thought that was cool.

• Speaking of V –– she had her 9th bday this week! I am starting to really empathize with the “they grow up so fast” and “it all goes by in a blink” stuff people have been telling me for years. Kissing your kid goodnight on the eve of their bday has been one of my fav parts of being a dad.

  • Kids bdays = they get to pick what they want for dinner and we take them somewhere awesome where they can get That Thing. Via wanted “oysters + rack of lamb” (ha!). We went Giorgio’s of Grammercy and it was delicious.

  • Meanwhile, Sammy yelled out YEAAAAHA BOOOYYYEEEEE this morning (unprompted!) and we were like “where did you hear that?” I showed her some Flavor Flav videos.

• Took the kids to the ITP Spring Show this week. Art, tech, music, robots, games VR. Regular and routine exposure to “let’s go see some kids/students who are making weird shit” is good, and I can see that ethos emerging in V and Mars’ DNA.

  • It’s over, you missed it. Sorry. But there’s on in December and one in May every year. (get on the list)

  • The ITP show is one of the coolest things you can go to in NYC, IMHO

CONSUMING

• 📖 Great Gatsby. I have read zero pages of this. Ha!

• 📺 Andor (Season 2). OMG, was this season sent from the future to help inspire us to revote against the Death Star that is the Trump Administration? Venn diagram of Andor <> Politics 2025 <> “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (the book) is a “TED Talk from the future” that I’d watch.

  • My buddy has a framework for imagining the future: “Try to imagine the future, after everything is all figured out, when we can sit back and say “whew, that almost happened”. And when we think about that, what is the ONE THING that happened that put us on the right track?” ←- I’d like to watch smart people talking about THIS.

  • Btw, there’s no way things DON’T get violent right? I think about Chapter 51 of Ministry of the Future like 1x/week. The inevitability of it (???) kind of haunts me.

• 🎵 Typing this out and Sophie B. Hawkins “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” just came on it and this song is a banger.

• 🎥 SpaceCamp! (yes from 1986!). Great movie night for kids (“MAX IN SPACE!”). Btw, “Max” is played by Joaquin Phoenix (WHAT!?) back when he went by Leaf Phoenix, and “Kathrine” is Lorraine from Back to the Future.

  • Next up: Gonna show Via “Titanic”. Mars still needs to see Goonies. The kids have zero interest in Star Wars. 🤷🏻‍♂️

    

UPCOMING (new section!)

• I’m speaking at Collective Future NYC 2025 tomorrow (Thu 5/14). I think my session is called “The End of Doomscrolling” where I am going to try to lead a discussion about whether social media deserves to exist and if so, how do we co-exist with it so it doesn’t melt our brains / poison our existence.

• I bought tix to this skateboard film at Tribeca Festival (“Empire Skate”) and this skateboard play in Union Square. Not taking Via (adult themes in both?) but we’re both still skating. We saw a 9yo RIP the bowls at Chelsea Piers this weekend and that was inspiring to us both.

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• Okay 1 hour. Much better. I banged out an outline (in Substack) while eating breakfast with the kids. That helped.

• Ping me if you made it this far. Password is “donkeybird”

</end>

Hey again! This one is longer than I expected(, again). Substack is barking at me to trim it! But I have so much to say!

RABBITHOLES

• Last week I wrote about this guy in Oregon (Stratton Matteson, that’s him in the pic) that did the bike-to-board thing for 5 YEARS (and also wrote about the blog post I found from some guy in Beacon NY who did a similar bike ride to Belleayre Mtn with his skis attached to his e-bike). Anyway, my buddy Jamie sent me this podcast with Stratton which is a great listen (~30 mins) and full of great quotes:

  • “We don’t always have to go to the edge of the map to find adventure” (11:10) –On how biking to local mtns can be just as big an adventure as jumping on a plane to ski somewhere exotic

  • “So much of the mainstream ski media is extractive — glorifying heavy machinery [helicopters, snowcats] – and puts the pinnacle of the sport on heli skiing.“ (24:05)

    • This resonated with me (as someone who has historically looked at heli as the Top Thing You Can Do Oo Snow… and someone who’s only recently had their eyes opened to the idea of hike-to-ski or backcountry trips in general).

    • TBH, those mornings I was hiking up Mount Snow in snowshoes were some of the best adventures I’ve had in a long time (and it’s just a 40 minute hike up a smaller resort!) Psyched to do that with V next season.

    • If you watched the Craig Kelly documentary / read his biography, he was onto this “backcountry hiking > everything” idea in like 1992. Burned out (?) on heli and wanting to connect w/ the mountains thru hiking/riding/guiding.

    • This quote from Reddit from when I was first researching splitboards has really stuck with me: “Splitboarding is vast, vast majority ascent and NOT riding sick lines. If you don't enjoy the ascent, splitboarding fucking sucks. If you do, splitboarding is awesome and a different way of experiencing the mtns”

    • … the “different way of experiencing the mountains” part is what stuck with me.

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MINI GOALS / QUESTS

Just started a new notebook, which means I have a new slate of Mini Goals / Quests (remember, I do this 1x/month.. trying to set goals that would take the duration of the notebook (4-6 weeks) to complete). Just started breaking out my “For the kids” section (aka: things to do w/ the kids) into sections for each kid, so I have a little mini to-do list of stuff I want to do with V + M (tho not a ton of Sammy stuff yet). Here’s a list of all the “quests” I am carrying around in my pocket right now:

• My personal “must be done by end of notebook” list (3 things)

• My work / BeeBot “must be done by end of notebook” list (3 things)

• Me + Chelsa ‘let’s do these things together” list (3 things)

• Via + Mars each have a “take them to see/do this” list (2-3 things)

WHAT I’M WORKING ON

• Hopscotch / BeeBot. We’ve been pretty good about adding more people to the beta weekly. Going to add another 30 or so after I sent this email. If you want in, sign up here (US only, iPhone only)

  • Launch? We’re working towards a version of the app that we can more easily share (aka: you don’t have to sign up on a Google Form). May have this ready to go by mid-May (!!) I’m planning on writing a big blog post / manifesto to go along with it — what we’re building, why we think it’s interesting, where we think the future is going, etc. Looking fwd to carving out some space to write it as I feel like we’re long overdue to have a well articulated and publicly available North Star (“writing is thinking!”, and it’s great to have an “artifact” to share w/ friends/investors/press). Btw, I always have this quote in the back of my mind. btw.

    

  • Office space. We’re outgrowing our space (we’re 6 people doing 3 days/week of IRL out of Betaworks near the High Line). We looked at a few WeWorks last week (!!) –– better vibe and nicer spaces than I expected. Was surprised to learn that as a WeWork tenant, you can “add-on” access to the card swipe data of your employees (so you can track which employees are coming and going and when). Apparently a lot of companies that use WeWork for remote/satellite employees use this.

  • Starting to get back on the speaking circuit. We got stuff to talk about so signing up for conf slots and started doing VC / startup breakfasts, etc (I feel like a musician working the small club venues before going on a world tour). One conference asked for a book recommendation on signup, and at the actual conference they have a bunch of copies of books that were recommended for attendees to take for free… it’s a cool system. Anyway, I added my kids’ favorite books to the list just to mix it up (Hike and Lenny the Lobster are two of Sammy’s current favs –– I think Hike is my fav kids book of all time… no words, so you gotta make up the story every time)

    

• Stockade FC — We’re about 10 days out from our first home game back at Dietz Stadium in Kingston. We have a pre-season / friendly match on May 3 which the City of Kingston is also using as the ribbon cutting ceremony at Dietz Stadium (which is finally open after a multi-year renovation project. We / Stockade played a role in helping the city raise the funds from Albany for the project, so the reopening is a big deal)

  • Btw, every year we sell a bunch of Season Tickets. I usually choose the design in early November so we can have the tickets ready for sale in time for the holidays. I was waffling over the design this year, trying to find the right image (return to Dietz stadium, etc) and *the day after* Trump won the election we made the call to go with this photo (that has some RESIST vibes to it):

    

    … as soon as these went on sale, I got a few emails from fans / customers asking if there were any alternative designs to choose from (“nope, sorry”) and TBH I was a bit concerned that making a statement would hurt overall sales / attendance, but we ended selling more Season Tickets this year than any other season (in our 8 year history). I actually think we sold like 30% more season tix (we’re well over 400 Season Tickets sold). Anyway, I am very happy / proud about this. (photo by Terri McAleer, our team photographer btw)

  • Stockade is a lot of work. And it’s often a huge pain in the ass. And it takes up a lot of time. But the moment the first whistle of the first game of the season blows – and you can take a moment to step back and appreciate the 1000 fans in the crowd cheering on the team and the army of volunteers who make it all happen – its a fucking amazing feeling. The energy at the home games is pretty epic (come up for a match!).
    
    Btw, my kids only have a vague idea what I do for work (Foursquare / Hopscotch / BeeBot), but they do know that “Dad runs the soccer team”. And when they come to games they get to see me be the “boss” and run around and do 1000 different things and try to orchestrate the madness. This is important to me because I grew up in family where my dad was an entrepreneur and I’d go to work with him and get to see him “be the boss”. Growing up seeing him be the boss was *absolutely something* that inspired / empowered me to think that I could be the boss of something too (aka: you gotta see it to be it). And it’s important to me that I can give my kids the same “see it to be it” experience that my dad gave me. It doesn’t matter if they see me running a lower level soccer team vs. running some NYC tech startup… as long as they can get that sense of “hey, you can be a leader that makes and builds things”. One of my favorite favorite favorite parts of Stockade these days is seeing Via (8yo) wanting to work at the merch table, work at the box office, hand out flyers, etc. And I think we’re gonna get Mars working with us this summer too. I can often see the little Entrepreneur DNA in her getting lit up, and I want to do whatever I can to stoke the flame.

  • Btw, if you read this far about Stockade and you have NOT been to a game yet, get up to Kingston this summer. It’s a really magical thing we’ve built. You should come and see it.

    

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

“That color is called Slush” — Sammy now calls grey “slush” after living thru a snowy winter in NYC/VT

PERSONAL STUFF / PARENTING

• You know that NYC meme about the false seasons?

  

  … realized that our family kind of has our own version of this:

  • SKI SEASON (jan feb mar apr)

    2 WEEK SPRING BREAK (apr)

    STOCKADE PREP (may) <— We are here.

    SPRING WKDS UPSTATE (may june)
    SUMMER UPSTATE (june july aug)

    BACK TO SCHOOL (sept)

    FALL WKDS UPSTATE (oct nov)

    HOLIDAYS (TG XMAS) (nov dec)

    SKI SEASON (dec… jan feb mar apr)

• Lots of feedback/advice about Sammy waking up early – “put her to bed earlier”, “put her to bed later”, “she’ll grow out of it” (thank you all!). I dunno what the answer is but when we figure it out I’ll let you know. (I think she’ll grow out of it over the summer / running around upstate / camp / swimming / etc)

• Via super into soccer and skateboarding at the moment. We’re kicking a ball around a lot (super fun, tho she has ZERO interest in playing on a team) and we did a bike-to-skate field trip to Chelsa Piers skate park yesterday (giant CA style-bowls). She’s learning how to skate transition (drop in, pumping, riding switch) … we’re not doing any tricks/ollies yet. Meanwhile, *I* am learning how to skate bowls (which I have ALWAYS wanted to do). I can (poorly) ride a mini ramp, but I can’t FLOW thru a bowl park. But I now feeeeeeeeel like I could do it, so both me & V are on this quest to do it, together. LOVE THIS.

  • I was telling her about this and explaining about how I always wanted to skate bowls and how SHE IS INSPIRING ME to do it.

  • And she asked me what else I am inspired to do…. and so I grabbed that issue of Backcountry mag and showed her the bike-to-ski pic from the magazine (the same picture from the top of the newsletter …. I have the physical print issue at home) and ripped it out and hung it on my bulletin board. “I want to do this someday, and I’m not sure how or where or when, but I am going to hang this up to remind me to do it”. She was kind of in-awe of how I ripped a page out of a magazine (ha!) and then hung it up as inspiration.

  • … and then I told her the story of how I did the same thing like 20 years ago (2006) with a photo of Corbet’s Coulier @ Jackson Hole that I found in some random issue of Forbes Magazine (Feb 2007). I saw this picture (the one below), ripped it out and hung it on the fridge in my East Village apt – “Someday we’re gonna ski that.” “We” = me and my brother & WillMcD and Uffa and Xtian. ‘Someday” = we first tried in 2008, and then a few times after that (no luck, it’s often closed), and then FINALLY ended up skiing it in 2023 (15 years later – story for another time)

    

    • btw, I just bought that old Forbes issue off eBay ($6!) so I can show her the original photo, and then (if she wants / if she is so inspired…) have HER rip it out, and hang it on HER wall :)

      

  • ANYWAY, I am trying to teach her the whole “See it to be it” thing. aka: See something / watch someone, get inspired, take the photo or the magazine page or whatever and hang it on your wall to inspire you until you get it done.

    • Note to self: I need to grab Julian Bleecker’s AMAZING photo book about female skateboarders (“Hello Skater Girl”) from my bookshelf in Kingston. I may bring back the framed photo I have too… gonna bring it back and hang in Via’s room (!!). See it to be it!

      

CONSUMING

• 🎭 “The Picture of Dorian Gray” on Broadway – Saw this last week while Chelsa’s mom was in town. Stars Shiv from Succession (Sarah Snook) and it is sooo goood mindblowingly awesome (it’s a one-woman play where she plays 26 something characters … I went into it knowing nothing and am hesitant to spoil it for anyone)

  • EVERY TIME we see a Broadway play I think “this is great, why don’t we do this more often?” I maybe see 1 play/year and, we live like a 10 min subway ride from Broadway we should be doing it more often (it *is* expensive tho)

  • Before the Oscars, we go out of our way to watch as many of the Best Picture (movie) nominees as possible. I think we saw them ALL this year (so many of them are streaming or otherwise online, so it’s relatively easy but it’s a commitment)

  • We should be doing the same for all the TONY nominees, right? (award ceremony is in June btw), but when I go look at the nominees from 2024 [ Best Play | Best Musical ], I haven’t even HEARD of any of these. Anyway, if you have any advice on how to see more (or how to choose what to see, besides just zeitgeist / word of mouth), hit me up.

  • 🥃 “The View” - the revolving bar in the Marriot in Times Square is a great spot to grab a cocktail before/after any of these shows. We’ve been 2x in like 3 weeks. They re-did it, so its fancy and the cocktails are delicious (and high viscosity!)

• 📻 “Next Big Idea” Podcast — this episode w/ Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair) is great, esp talking about the glory days of magazines as the cultural zeitgeist before the internet. At the end, my buddy Rufus (and founder of Next Big Idea) comes on and talks about his own magazine experience (Nerve Magazine, late 90s) which is also a great listen.

• 📺 Black Mirror s07 (Netflix) – We’ve watched 3 of them so far. They’re all so good and their own little fucked up way. Loved the “Hotel Reverie" episode so much.

• 📺 Andor s02 (Disney) – I love this show, but s02 has been tricky so far (mostly because s01 was so long ago? And I don’t have time for a re-watch).

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• Probably 2 hours over 2 days. Substack is chirping at me again about this being too long. TBH, I dunno how to make it any shorter! If anything, I only got to write about 2/3 of the stuff I had planned to write about!

  

• This week’s secret word is “papa smurf”. Hit me up in the comments if you made it this far. Feedback & suggestions (requests!) on what to write about always appreciated!

  • Andrew.Y, I didn’t get to your “reader question”! Next week buddy!

• Anyone remember Teendrama Best Friends Index™? I want to bring that back somehow. Here’s a list of people I hung out with IRL since last newsletter:

  • Chelsa, Rufus, BeeBot team, Kyle/Mike/Kyle from kids school, M.Salvaris, C&C crew, Ryan Sarver! Did I miss anyone?

</end>

Hey, I missed a week. Sorry about that. Being away from NYC (and from work, the cadence of work, structure etc. ) due to kids’ spring break was a lot. One thing I noticed after being back was how much I am definitely still inspired-by and energized-by simply just being in the city.

Anyway, switching the format up a bit. It seemed … self-serving?…. to lead with the “What I’m Working On” stuff so gonna lead with this stuff that is STUCK IN MY HEAD from this week (aka: stuff I saw and rabbithole’d on).

RABBITHOLES

• Bike-to-Ski! Went upstate this weekend for the first time months. And we’re driving down this country road at dusk and I pass this dude on a bike with his skis strapped to the side (!!). I pull up next to him (5mph) roll down my window and I’m like “WHERE ARE YOU GOING??” (btw, zero snow on the ground). He tells me he’s riding to Belleayre, local ski mountain but still 25+mi away! I have no idea who he is, where he started from, but I def want to be this guy when I grow up. FWIW, I wasn’t totally lost on the bike-to-ski thing because it was in this month’s issue of Backcountry mag (um, which I now subscribe to because I am so hardcore… I hiked Mount Snow 10x yo!)… anyway, this photo + blurb is from the magazine story,

  According to environmental activist Robin Greenfield, “We need extreme people because, it’s just a simple fact, if nobody takes it to the extreme, then we never see that we can go to a further possibility.” In the ski world, no one better embodies that than Stratton Matteson, a professional splitboarder who spent five years forsaking gas-guzzling vehicles for a bike and pedaling upwards of 40 miles a day to trailheads around his Oregon home.

  

  … I tried to find the guy w/ the yellow bike online (surely he must have an IG?) but not luck. I *did* however find another random guy’s super detailed blog post about his ride from Beacon → Belleayre back in January 2023 (182mi and thru the night!):

  

  Thanks for reading! Subscribe here – it’s free!

• GI Joe fan fiction? Was hanging with my buddy Tate the other day who was telling me about this whole underworld of GI Joe fans that create their own characters, 3D print (or sending them to China to be made!), then create box art, etc. WHAT? His words, “yeah imagine that in 1986 Hasbro made five GI Joes you have never heard of before… that’s what these guys do”. Whoa. Some IG’s if you want to rabbithole too:

  • Also, a good reminder to watch (re-watch?) the Toys that Made Us episode on GI Joes (Netflix). And remind me to tell you the story of how I hired an artist to make custom Tomax/Xamot box art for my brother for his bday.

• CitiBike Boys. These dudes borrow / steal (?) CitiBikes and take them to bike parks / skate parks. I saw an IG reel of these guys doing flairs off quarter pipes but I can’t find it (ugh), but will share this:

• I now think I’ve consumed most of the Craig Kelly content that’s out there. Finally found “Let it Ride” (Craig Kelly documentary) online and it’s an awesome watch — not just about Craig and his life/death but the history of snowboarding, history of freestyle, backcountry etc. Sometimes its easy to forget that so much of what exists today had to be invented by *someone*… and as far as snowboarding as sport / art / culture goes, you get to see some of the moments that stuff was invented. I could consume an endless amount of this (see: Short Circuit / Johnny #5 below!)

OKAY, NOW…. WHAT I’M WORKING ON

• Okay we’ll keep this section a bit shorter

• Hopscotch / BeeBot. (“Marauders Map for Airpods”)

  • We added another 100 people to the beta. Most people don’t LOVE it (yet), but most people don’t hate it yet either. If you have an iPhone + Airpods and want to test drive… sign up here.

  • “We have no business making that….” — We had this moment at FSQ back in the day when we were a “checkin game w/ badges” and we really wanted to be “city guide that learns from where you’ve been”. We needed certain tech (stop detection, snap-to-place) to do it, the tech didn’t exist yet, and we were convinced that we had no business making that type of tech ("we’re just a small team, Google or Apple will solve this problem, and we’ll use their tech”). Long story short – Google and Apple never solved it (or whatever tech they made in 2011 to solve it sucked) so we made it ourselves…. and that’s the moment FSQ (the company) went from “social software” → “tech/data company”. Anyway, we had one of those “we have no business making that… but what if we did???” moments last week at BeeBot mtg (but with the hindsight that it worked for FSQ, so we’re gonna try to run that same playbook).

  • "Will people use BeeBot to document the world? Or will they use it to experience an annotated version of the world?” – this is one of the core product things we are thinking about (another weay of asking this — “what is the job of a social app in 2025”)

    • Or: “What does non-feed-based social media look like?”

  • We’re building in a space (cities + AirPods + context aware AI) that does not have a lot of prior art to crib off (which is makes this project fun, but also makes some of the product/UX problems so challenging / interesting)

• Stockade FC

  • Season kicks off soon. Tickets on sale now. This is our 9th year as a club, and we’ve 400+ season tickets (waaay more than we’ve ever sold before) This should be a great season.

  • New jerseys drop today — we did a fancy launch video for it. They look nice (and for the first time, we have a ton of them to to sell to fans at game day and in our online shop). I LOVE this video – cameos from people all over Kingston (including the mayor). Jersey design by my buddy JP Hamilton and video by Derek White of Good Time film studio in Poughkeepsie, NY.

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

• “Always have another quest on deck” – I wrote this in my notebook and I can’t remember who said it (maybe it was me?), but I like this a lot. “Quests” as in the “what are the 3 things I want to Have Done before the end of the month” (or in my case, the end of my notebook), not “Quests” in the “Search for the Magic Sword in the Lost Woods” style. I wrote about this in a past newsletter (I give myself 3 goals per FieldNotes notebook & a notebook lasts me about a month), but I’m starting to make these lists for the kids too (aka: lists of things I want to expose the kids to in next 30 days)

• “You've got a generation of entrepreneurs who grew up with a vision of the future that was shaped by science fiction.” – I saw this quote in my buddy Julian Bleecker’s newsletter … made me think of a conversation I had w/ John Gaeta about the generation of kids that were raised on The Matrix (or other dystopian sci-fi) and how there’s a whole generation of builders who are chasing the stuff that looked cool in films (Metaverse, AI digital friends, etc), but may actually quite awful for humanity / human connection.

  • That said, I’m guilty of being inspired by Harry Potter (Marauder’s Map, Weasley Clock, etc etc), but that feels a lot less dystopian than, say, Matrix or Her….

  • … THAT said, I am kind of “inspired” (not sure thats the right word?), “curious”… about this scene in Her (“Are you talking to anyone else? Are you in love with anyone else?”). Specifically the idea of the AI talking to thousands of people at once, and (sometimes) being transparent about it (um, Hello DJ BeeBot! pssst, gett the beta.)

• “I want my friends woven into my days instead of my calendar.” - quote from Casper ter Kuile. but I picked it off my buddy Scott’s Bluesky. (btw read Casper’s blog post as it’s a good one)

• “You can reclaim your attention from the doomscroll feeds and pour it like water onto the seedlings of a better future.” - from some random person’s Substack. Love this! Put it on a t-shirt and sell it to me at an AOC in 2028 rally!

  • • (btw “random person’s subtack” = co-founder of Substack, ha!)

• “Is MAGA wanting to go back to the 1950s that much different than us wanting to go back to the internet of 2010s?” — Can’t remember who said this, and obvs it’s NOT the same (racism, sexism, LGBTQ), but this idea of “every generation just wants things to go back to the way they were” does resonate (aka: just give me my OG Twitter and OG Tumblr back!)

• “Every generation thinks they’re the best generation” – … okay I think this was from coffee w/ Robbie… and obvious *we’re* the Best Generation™(, right?) Born before the internet! Raised with a healthy mix of digital and IRL! Meanwhile, maybe <this generation> has it THE WORST? They were online early, and before we all knew social media was bad.

  • Related: Remember that time when we thought early cell phones would cause brain cancer / radiation? Like the hardware would cause your brain to melt? When really it was social media that caused our brains to melt.

  • Reminds me of that quote: “Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us." ...btw, no one knows who said this first (it wasn’t Stephen King)

    

    

• “History is fascinating to study, but very difficult to live through.” - Zach Klein via Bluesky.

  • Recommended reading for these idiotic times: A Child's First Book of Trump

    

• “I need to make money and go home” – another quote in notebook that’s not attributed to someone (ugh!), but I was talking to someone who was weighing the “do a new startup” vs. “just go get a job somewhere” and they said this line (“make money and go home”) and it was the first time I was like “hmmm, maybe I should try to get one of those jobs someday!” (the last “real job” I had was with Google back in 2005-2007… ~20 years ago, WTF!)

  • Startup stuff = there is no going home. I feel like I am thinking about the stuff I am working on 24/7, it’s always just simmering in the back of my head, and it’s been that way for.. as long as I can remember? I honestly don’t know if that is normal (and everyone lives like this) or if it’s some flavor of OCD/neurodiversity. (I should write more on this btw, because I can SEE that me + Mars have the same brain sometimes. He has some of what I have and I have some of what he has, whatever that is)

SNIPPETS

• Mini Quests. Oh, we covered this above. Next episode I’ll be back with a new notebook (only 1 page left), so I’ll laid out the updated Family Quests.

• Living Cities. Before Hopscotch/BeeBot, I was working on a “turn your IRL space into a playable game space” project called “Living Cities”. We were exploring the intersection of the Metaverse and IRL. I was a part of the founding team (doing product) but was not the CEO. We raised money, hired a bunch of people, made a prototype. It ended a bit too early (long story), but my buddy Luke wrote a great postmortem on what we were doing why it was interesting.

  • Read here: https://medium.com/@luke0ritchie/20602fc7672a

  • I uploaded some YouTube videos too:

    • Living Cities v1 – Outdoor public spaces (Washington Square Park)

    • Living Cities v2 – Indoor private spaces (my apt)

      

  • This project helped me realize that I hate most things “Metaverse” (ha!) and it kickstarted my interest in doing another “cities + IRL” project, which turned into BeeBot

• My parking lot is closing for 3 months. I can either (a) pay $1000 (cash) to park in another lot for 6 weeks (until we head upstate) or (b) roll the dice w/ street parking and parking tickets. Advice?

• A cannabis dispensary opened in Kingston (Domes Dispensary). It’s built into an old geodesic dome, hence the name (the design is awesome btw). They specialize in local, farm-to-dispensary style products, even from growers down the street from us! (hello neighbors!). What a time to be alive!

• Loved this blurb in the FeedMe newsletter about the “Rate my Popularity” app that showed up at Yale (using ELO style ranking algo… which we wanted to use for Street FC at one point)

PERSONAL STUFF / PARENTING

• Sammy is still waking me up at like 5:30-6am every morning. I feel like a zombie most days, especially today. She goes to bed at 7pm. I don’t think we can push her bedtime any later (she doesn’t nap, er, try not to let her nap).

• Smurfs – Sammy got really into Smurfs recently. I bought a bunch of 1” figurines on eBay for like $20 and hid one/day around the house in places only she would find them. Mars then took them all and made a Smurf Village in one of our potted plants.

• Short Circuit – Kids loved this, even though it’s a bit scary at times (robot with red eyes and lasers). Mars wants #5 to live with us forever.

• Sammy’s baby voice — She’s 3.75 now and her baby voice is slowly fading away and it makes me sad. She’s got a few nuggets left:

  • “em-an-ade!” (lemonade)

  • “baby pa-chino!” (baby’chino) … tho in her world, it’s any drink meant just for kids

• Via is skateboarding now – She can skate her way thru a crowd in Washington Square Park and down sidewalks & crosswalks. No ollies yet, but we’re working on it (hard thing to teach!) I take her to WSP a few nights a week and we skate under the arch and hang in the fountain with all the other skaters and their crew. It can be, er, a bit rough-and-tumble in the fountain – language, music, weed –  and I’m definitely the only parent in there with their 8yo (we’re not skating, just watching) but I’m also trying to normalize the “hey, people in NYC are all different and it’s cool to hang out with people who are different than the people we usually hang out with” 🤷🏻‍♂️

  • I bought a skateboard too. 54MM wheels, 90-95 DU is where it’s at.

  • Yes, I can still ollie.

  • I can no longer kickflip… for now!

  

CONSUMING

• 📺 White Lotus – We blasted our way thru s03 and caught up to watch the finale live.

• 📺 Last of Us – Started s02 on Sunday night. Never played the video game, btw.

• 🎥 Transformers One – Tate recommended, but too violent for the kids IMHO.

  • This would be a cool project if anyone wants to build it:

• 📖 Great Gatsby — You know, I’ve never read this, but it’s all over NYC right now (100th anniversary) so I borrowed the e-book from the library (Libby.app → Kindle = A+). I’ve read zero pages so far.

• 🎲 Scrabble – I think I prefer Bananagrams (its faster and skewered to 2 letter words), but Via and Chelsa like it.

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• I lost track of time. Did this on/off over 2 days. Prob 1.5 hours, but I didn’t have great notes this time.

  • FWIW, when I used to make old school Teendrama photo blog posts, they’d prob take me 2 hours/post? (photo dump, photo cropping/editing, layout, writing)

  • Um, Substack is telling me “Post too long for email” 🤦🏻‍♂️ Okay okay, I get it!!

• I’m at the end of my notebook (no pages left) and my world feels like chaos. I gotta spend an hour kicking off a new notebook to get my sanity/rhythm/clean slate back.

• Took me at least 5 tries to spell “rhythm” right. I ended up just typing it into Google.

• Secret word is “jigglypuff”, hit me up if you made it this far. 🤫
  (or have ideas/suggestions on bigger topics I could/should write about!)

</end>

Hey hey! I am back from two weeks of kids’ spring break (yes, you heard that right–our kids have two weeks off, back-to-back, which is kind of an insane logistical nightmare). Anyway, we spent a week in VT (spring skiing!) and a week at the beach (Turks) and it was great. But I am psyched to be back (and back to work!) and so let’s bang one out of these out (so I don’t fall out of the habit)

My pal Sarah pinged me I sent the last one of these and said (paraphrased). “Love this, but how about a deeper dive on one topic per newsletter?” Not a bad idea, but isn’t that what every other Substack does, no? I kind of like the stream-of-consciousness vibe I have going on here TBH. Anyway, that said, I’m down to try it… if you got suggestion (requests!) for deep-dive topics, drop ‘em in the comments and I’ll do it!

• Hopscotch Labs / BeeBot (“Marauders Map for Airpods”) – New startup + 2 weeks kids’ spring break = not an ideal combo. Slack and Zoom helped, but now spending this week getting caught up (was feeling woefully behind yesterday but better today). Thankfully, team has been CRANKING and we had two major breakthrus yesterday (amen! “server-driven pings”… er, which means nothing to you, but will make BeeBot more fun & interesting). Btw, we haven’t invited a new crop of testers in like 3 weeks (sorry, we had lots and lots of nasty bugs!) but looks like we’re good to go for NEXT week. (Sign up for beta link here)

  • I have a lot of other thoughts about “I haven’t worked on a pre-launch product in a long time” (and how it’s driving me crazy to be in this endless pre-launch mode) … but we’ll save that for next newsletter?

• Stockade FC (Semi-pro soccer team based in Kingston, NY / Hudson Valley) – Omg, we got our schedule. Home games in white, in Kingston. Come out to a home game and say hello!

• The League for Clubs (TLfC) (league Stockade plays in, ~50 teams, D4 US Soccer Pyramid) – Since last time I wrote one of these, TLfC has finally kicked a ball! (meaning, “the teams in the west have played their first games"). “Never kicked a ball before” is kind-of a derogatory soccer slang for an entity that’s never actually played before. “Love your club’s jerseys, but you’ve still never kicked a ball before” … “Love what you guys are doing w/ TLfC, but you’ve never kicked a ball before”. Not anymore, suckas!

• Street FC (“building the biggest football club on the planet) – No updates this week!

• Foursquare – FSQ finally launched the update to Swarm. It’s fine… mostly a visual update/cleanup with some OG cityguide/search merged back into the app (try it & lemme know your thoughts). I shared my feedback w/ the team internally. I’m *hoping* this is the beginning of a bunch of updates they’ll continue to make to the product (btw, I think this is the first time in some 5 years there’s been an update to Swarm’s UX/design/features - !!!)

  • Read this thread for some more context…

    

  • FWIW, I do hate the MAU jokes, but they’re kind of true so whatevs. Really want this company to have an legit exit (aka: “some money goes to common shareholders”) so ex-FSQ peeps (aka: the people who actually built all the infra the modern version “FSQ the Company” is built upon) are rewarded for their work. IMHO, there is nothing worse than feeling like you wasted your time working on something, and I HATE the idea of people feeling that way about the time they spent at the company I started / ran for many years. (I have *much* more to say about this, but for another time)

    • Related (and IYKYK … from my “Leaving FSQ” blog post btw)

      • “PEOPLE OF FOURSQUARE! I want you to know that the most important thing to me as we’ve built this company over the years has been that we do so in such a way that lets each and every one of you someday look back on your time here at Foursquare and think, ‘You know what? That was the best job I ever had.’ And I want you to feel this way not because the job was easy, and because the job was fun, but because Foursquare has *always* been full of genuinely good people who cared about the work they were doing because they believed in the vision behind it.”

      • Advice to future builders: Be weary of falling in love with the companies you build. If I ever write a book, this will be the subject/theme.

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• “Dad, it’s like a stair robot!” – Sammy on airport escalators 😂

• “I’ll be the chocolate pieces, you be the vanilla pieces” – Sammy on chess.

• @CobraCommander continues to be the best social media follow of all time. (sadly only on Twitter/X tho)

  

• I’m combining all these section this week due to spring break with kids (um, I’m channeling that quote that goes “vacation with kids is basically just parenting in a different location” 😂)

  • Related, from my friend Jill: “There’s a difference between ‘Family Trip’ and ‘Vacation’ ” ← this feels wise to me

  • Related to that, this is the FIRST TIME we’ve ever done a Family Trip like this… in the past we’ve paired up with other parents from school and their kids which has been fun (our friends are there! kids have built-in friends!) but at the same time it can be cliquey for the kids (meaning sometimes Mars and Sammy get left without a BFF). This time our three kids played with each other for five days straight and it was *wonderful*. Yes, there was drama, fights and tears, but also just a lot of good sibling x sibling x sibling time for them. We will 100% do this again next year (… maybe surfing???)

• Homesick @ Stratton Mtn. Via and I entered a snowboard race together (!!) — she raced in the U16s and I raced in the 40-50s. We both came in LAST in our age groups (ha!). To be fair, she was the youngest female in the WHOLE THING (badass!) and I was the old dude riding a snowskate. This was super fun, she loved it (even tho she was super stressed / anxious right before the race) but she did it and we’ll do it again (together!) next year.

  • I got 40 days on snow this season. Back when I was single (!!) I’d shoot to get 30. Getting 40 days (with a family/squad of 5!) makes me feel like “man, we are doing it right!” Btw, Mars and V and Chelsa all scored ~35 days each. Sammy got 8-10? I snowshoe’d up the mountain 10x too ← which was my goal for the season!

    • Oh shit, I totally forgot to include a section on “mini goals” in this newsletter. Running out of time this week, will do next week.

    • How badass is she!?! I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE this. She wore her bib to bed that night. (swooooooon)

📖 FINALLY finished “Darkest White” (Craig Kelly biography, OG backcountry snowboarder dies in avalanche in 2003). The last 25% of this book is INTENSE (um, the avalanche)… which turns out happened <20mi from where we went heli-skiing a few weeks back (!!), which def makes things feel more real / sobering (that AND a buddy told me he was caught/buried in a slide last week and it was his Avi AirBag that saved him, jesus)

🎥 “Anytime” - On the plane ride back from beach watched “Anytime” which is a 60 min RedBull film about “freeride mountain bking” –  think: backcountry snowboarders on heli-accessible terrain, only on mountain bikes (!!!). I had no idea this even existed and this movie blew my mind. (You can prob watch this on Red Bull TV via Apple TV app?). Watch the trailer… the mountains, the forest, the city. The cinematography is both brilliant and intoxicating (more on this below).

There’s a quote in here by one of the riders.. “we all have a vision for what we want this sport to look like” (aka: what is the future of mountain biking)…. which kind of directly overlaps with the Craig Kelly story and his role in *inventing* free-riding, backcountry snowboarding, splitboards, etc. back in the 1990s.

🎥 “Yeah Right” -  My 8yo is suddenly super into skateboarding (love it!), so I showed her what (IMHO) is the best skateboard video of all time, Spike Jonez’ “Yeah Right” (2003). This is the first skate film I remember seeing that felt like art (Spike Jonez!), esp with the super sloooooow-mo intro and the green screen scene, etc. So I showed her this before vacation, but then I’m on the flight watching “Anytime” (above!) – while thinking of all the Craig Kelly / OG freeriding overlaps) – and also realizing that there’s simply no way you can watch “Anytime” without seeing the influence that “Yeah Right” (and Spike Jonez) must have had on the Anytime filmmakers… super zooms, super slow mo, super sound effects. Watch both and you’ll see.

… did you watch it? At least the intro? Dude, come’ on. Okay, at the very least watch this segment with Owen Wilson (!!) which I still find hilarious some 20 years later (“front salad, back salad…”). Randy you reading this? (if so, wassup!)

(Sidenote: Yeah Right = 2003. Craig Kelly dies in avalanche = 2003)

📺 White Lotus s03 – We’re about half way thru (no spoilers plz) and loving it. Love love love the Duke character (who I only JUST learned is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son). Chels and I are racing to get caught up before someone inevitably spoils the finale (which is on Sunday?). Wish us luck!

🎥 “Civil War” – I saw this film in the theaters back in Spring 2024 (which was waaay before election) and it blew me away. I watched it again on the plane (thru the recent lens of Trump fucking everything up / “is destruction the point?” etc.) and it rings louder and truer than it did back then. Watch it if you haven’t seen it.  

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• Timeboxing still working. But it’s more 20 mins here, 20 mins there, 20 mins after that. But it works.

• “Pre-writing” works. Reminds me of this old Kottke post on subway pre-walking…. I’m basically just working on an outline all week long that I then copy and paste into here and expand upon. Spring break / two week hiatus was tricky… and I kind of have two outlines going right now (this newsletter, next newsletter), but it works.

• If you made it this far, shoot me a note. The secrete word is “pancakes”.

• Gotta go… BeeBot team lunch. We’re getting tacos. I am excited!

</end>

Hello friends. Trying to get on an "every Monday” schedule. I even blocked off time in my calendar!

UPDATES AND THOUGHTS FROM WHAT I’M WORKING ON

• Hopscotch Labs / BeeBot (“Marauders Map for Airpods”)

  • Struggling with some nasty audio bugs (AJ is ON IT!) so we haven’t sent out a new build in over a week. Stay tuned. (or get on the beta list!)

  • Was it last week I was writing about the “omg this is awesome” vs “omg this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever worked on” nostalgia? Ha! Had another version of that this week… remembering from early-FSQ days this feeling of “omg everyone is working to solve <Deep Tech Problem> and here were are dicking around with Badges for Nightlife” and comparing it to today’s pressure of “omg everyone is <Inventing the Future with AI> while meanwhile we’re working on this little AI DJ for your City in Your AirPods”. Anyway, my point being that *I think* that “being thoughtful and clever” can sometimes be as good (if not better) than chasing some “major tech breakthru”. Remind me to talk about this again in the future.

    • aka: Don’t get bogged down with thoughts of “this idea isn’t big enough / important enough”

      • … btw, I write this stuff down as like “notes to self”, but also put them in here because I think “hey if this is my my head, it’s prob is someone else’s head too”

    • aka: Having empathy/nostalgia from last gig still feels like a superpower (did I already write that?). This is a real thing.

      • BTW, when I talk about “wanting to build in public”, it’s not just the big product updates and metrics, it’s the managing your own psychology part of it too. ← IMHO, this is hall of fame worthy blog post from 2011 Ben H.

    • We toured some office space. Holy cow that that a throwback to 2010 (and the dream of having a huge HQ with a keg and foosball table). We now work out of Betaworks HQ (👋) and maybe someday we’ll get our own space, but not yet. I like working here!

      • … man, I’d love to share some photos here (like old school teendrama blog!) but it’s SO CUMBERSOME. All this stuff is in my IG stories, but they don’t live for more than 24 hours, so how I link to them here? If anyone knows a way to make it easy (btw, moving pics from camera roll to Substack Draft is not easy) let me know.

        • (oh wait, that WAS kind of easy —drag and drop from Mac Photos.app – wish I could crop it tho! Or line up 3 photos in a row, etc.

          

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  Stockade FC (Semi-pro soccer team based in Kingston, NY / Hudson Valley)

  • Schedule coming soon, I swear! We also may have TWO back-of-jersey sponsors this year (a huge help in breaking even).

  • Our keeper from the last few seasons (Dylan McDermott) JUST signed a pro deal with MLS Next (D2) club NYCFC II . This is on the heels of one of our defenders from a few seasons ago (Prince Amponsah) signing a deal w/ MLS club NYCFC (!!) two months ago. I’ll sing this song 1000x, but “building a club” also means (a) “creating soccer fans from scratch”, (b) “inspiring youth players to stick with soccer” and (c) “creating opportunities for players”. And Stockade just keeps proving this over and over again.

    

• The League for Clubs (league Stockade plays in, ~50 teams, D4 US Soccer Pyramid)

  • <no updates>

• Street FC (“building the biggest football club on the planet”)

  • Caught up w/ Stephen (CEO) who pitched me on slight refocus from Street FC as “Street Football Club’ to “Street Football Company” which I love. It’s a natural progression from “we host tens of thousands of games” to “we can now flex our ‘always-on-pickup soccer’ product to do much more”

  • FWIW, one of company’s Big Ideas is this concept of “billboards you can play on” (aka: the games are played on billboards painted w/ RedBull, EA Sports, Bundesliga logos). There’s always been a big opportunity to do “more than just games” — aka: community events, city vs. city tournaments, STFC branded gear (shoes! balls!) … and this reframing hits at it. I still believe “owning” the concept of street soccer in US is a massive opportunity.

  • Company may raise additional $$$ if you know of folks who may be interested.

• Foursquare

  • Got a Board Meeting later this week. Still waiting for TestFlight of New Swarm™ (that supposedly has FSQCG features build in)

  • The more I talk to people about Hopscotch masterplan (“build a bunch of stuff”) the more nostalgia I hear about old FSQ. My last gig at FSQ – running the FSQ Labs R&D group – was by far best job I ever had, and I feel like my work now is trying to reproduce that environment (and maybe even the stuff we made within it)

  • SXSW! Was thinking about this over the weekend…. 16 years (!!) since FSQ @ SXSW 2009. While folks are (re)launching their Web2 dreams in Austin this weekend, I was was watching my kids crush it on the ski race course in Vermont :)

  • Throwback to this “collect all the FSQ employee business cards to unlock a special badge” thing we made in… 2011? (see pic below… I found it in my Dropbox when searching for something else). I think we had 15 employees at the time (?) and there were 6 diff logos to collect on the back of business cards. The BIG IDEA was people at SXSW would seek out FSQ employees, meet them, say hi, get their business card, and then use the image on the back of the biz card to unlock the special badge. What happened instead was that we threw a HUGE party that had a line 1000 people long trying to get in, and when people got stuck at the door, they took out the FSQ biz cards we were handing out like candy and starting calling/texting all our employees asking them to help them sneak in / cut the line (ha!). So, what started as a really clever idea turned into a nightmare/shitshow.

    • If I remember correctly, this party (um, hop hop dance party in the pouring rain!) was immortalized at the end of the Page One (🎥) documentary about the NYT (and reporter David Carr).

      

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

• “Workers Love AirPods Because Employers Stole Their Walls. – This is from an Atlantic article in 2019. Also in the piece…

  “In the open-plan office, wireless headphones are the new cubicles.”

  "AirPods are a survival tool for open offices"

  … shoutout to an old deck from Nate Pappag for resurfacing this for me!

• “The entrepreneurs midlife crisis is doing same startup again” - Ha! I think my buddy Scott H. said this like two years ago when we were talking about wanting to re-build… and then someone pinged me after my last Substack post (“hey it’s called teendrama now”) and said…

  • “The blogger’s midlife crisis is resurrecting your blog as a Substack” – Lolz and ouch and lolz.

• Speaking of which, my daughter said “You dress like you’re in college” to me the other day when I was walking her to school (to be fair, I did have this Adidas/Gonz collab shirt on). I told her that one of my proudest achievements is that I’ve made it this far without ever having to wear a suit to work.

• Oh, that FSQ Quoteboard I mentioned last week… I dig a deep dive thru it and it’s 47 PAGES LONG. Oh man, there is GOLD in there. Will pull from it sparingly :)
  

SNIPPETS (THE “RANDOM-STUFF” SECTION)

• Someone told me “World Cup in USA” tickets are going to be close to $3000/seat? This can’t be true… right? If so, shame on you US Soccer / FIFA.

• Btw, I fell down a huge Substack rabbit hole (um, which is how I started writing here again TBH). Was doing some R&D for BeeBot (which can now read email newsletters so it can tell you about what’s happening in the city!) and started looking at diff Substacks to see who was writing what about NYC...

  • Not to fanboy out, but I’m a fan of this / FeedMe newsletter, mostly because it feels like old-school (aka: pre-mean) Gawker…. except all the “news” (and all the comments) are in one place (instead of having to jump in/out of 20 diff blog posts). And you read it 1x/day (instead of wanting to check the Gawker website every 30 mins)

  • Related: I found myself in the FeedMe comments last week talking about Mobile Social stuff (ahem, Dodgeball Crush List!) and 288 and TJs and old school LES, etc.

    • For a trip down crazy nostalgic lane, read this NYMag piece from TWENTY YEASR AGO (wtf!)

      

• Had lunch w/ my old buddy Nick Bilton last week who is writing the screenplay for a new Martin Scorsese film (!!) He says hi.

  • ps: Pastis’ + splitty-split (steak + trout!)

    • … or in Dodgeball lingo (ha!): “@Pastis ! Splitty-split with Bilton” (IYKYK)

    • Speaking of splitty-split, my kids love it. Sammy (3yo) esp loves “mixy-mix” (which is when you mix diff types of cereals together). She asked for “mixy-mix-mix” the other day :)

      • .. that’s THREE CEREALS! (try to keep up!)

• I use Facebook *all the time* now. I prob use Facebook more now than I’ve have in past 10 years. Mostly because of GROUPS (“Splitboard Northeast”, “Mount Snow Season Passholders”… which is full of gossip and drama btw!) and MARKETPLACE (like a lowbrow eBay, but good for old ski gear).

• Vermont!

  • I am jonesing to do the hike that connects Mount Snow and Hermitage Mountain. Snoozed on the chance to do it on Sat afternoon (after Mt Snow shut down all the lifts due to wind) and I’m still kicking myself. Only 3mi, but its supposedly sketchy and overgrown(… and it was windy out)

    • I bought a pair of these to replace my snowshoes. 7 day trial!

  • This Friday is a full moon and I have this masterplan to do a night hike up Mount Snow w/ C (Fri 9pm?) and ride down. (headlamps, but no blizzard)

  • We had Parent vs. Kid races this weekend (our kids are in Mount Snow’s ski development program). Chelsa vs. Mars, me vs. Via … they don’t share the race times ‘till the end of season wrap party next weekend (stay tuned!)

    • Mars has been a finicky skier all season. He did a race a few weeks ago and really phoned-it-in (super slow… maybe he didn’t know he was supposed to go fast?). HOWEVER, on Saturday – racing against Chelsa – he took off like a ROCKET. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a little kid ski that fast. It was awesome. (he beat Chels by like 4-5 gates!)

      • Substack won’t let me embed, but watch here (sound up!)

        📹 GO MARS GO! ⛷️🏁
        https://share.icloud.com/photos/00a6urLnxKHFBKbPLgOyHYWQw

    • I clocked my 6yo nephew doing 50mph (!!) down Mineshaft on Sunday. (Was using Slopes app, skiing alongside him)

PERSONAL STUFF / PARENTING

• Two quotes in my head:

  • “Not all screentime is bad” – e.g FaceTime with grandma is good!

  • “Be mindful of time spent CONSUMING vs. CREATING” – I wish I remember who said this (I THINK it was my pal Swissmiss?)
    
    … anyway, V (8yo) is super into using a laptop to take notes, make to-do lists, create multiplication tables (!!) and also uses Keynote as a canvas to create art (she makes these beautiful sunsets/sunrise scenes using the “shapes” feature in Keynote)

  • And while I hate seeing her on the laptop some nights (instead of reading or playing board games or whatever), I mean, she *is* “creating” and that seems fine.

    

• Our fish died. RIP Rainbow. Sammy (3yo) had a REALLY hard time with it (esp after seeing Rainbow dead on the counter / out of water). We told her Rainbow will be composted and will turn into a sunflower. She woke me up at 5am the next morning looking for the sunflower.” (Both 😂 and 😢)

CONSUMING

• 📺 Severance Season 2 – We are like 3 episodes into Season 2 and it’s feeling a bit like … Lost? Not in a good way. In a “wait, did you just get greenlit for 3 more seasons and now you’re just going to take us on a random journey that may or may not have a logical end?” type of way. Will finish s02 and report back.

  • Love seeing so much of Kingston area (Minnewaska!) in s02. Never done a winter hike there.

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• Okay, so my outline works (it’s really more of a running list of notes and stuff I could/should include here)…. BUT, the trick seems to be editing the outline before starting to write. I didn’t timebox today (instead been chipping away at this all morning, 5 mins at a time).

• I have enough in my notes/outline to prob do 3-4 more newsletters right now, but doing this any more than 1x week seems insane (even this seems like a lot TBH)

• Hey Katie (my sister!) if you made it this far 👋 and ❤️⛽️🍹

• If anyone else made it this far, give me a shout in the chat/comments.

  • Are these too long? That was the feedback from the last round of peeps who read it. If you have suggestions / feedback please do send em.

Hey hey. Okay, back for episode 7 of this (4th of 2025)… I’m actually really looking fwd to writing these now (I skipped going for a run today to camp out a coffee shop and bang this out!). Mostly because I’m excited about the idea of resurrecting this as kind of a text-first version of Teendrama, which was my old blog from 1994 → 2008. I know most of you prob have no idea what that means, but for like 15 years I was documenting my life with my digcam (Canon Elph 110!) and posting the pics + commentary online. The posts were like 10-20 photos + captions long, recapping everything from weekends in college, ski trips, Opening Days at Fenway Park, my move to NYC (and weekends/nights out here with new friends from my first few jobs @ Jupiter, Vindigo), dot com layoffs, summer of unemployment, 9/11, my move out of the city (and winter as Man of Leisure / ski instructor in NH!) and then back to NYC thru NYU, ITP, Dodgeball, Google. Holy cow, even just writing that out makes me nostalgic for it. I wrote some 600 entries (!!) over those 15 years (“including such favorites as…”)

Teendrama (the blog) was like Instagram Stories, only with more text/narrative, and composed on a laptop (er, smartphones didn’t exist yet) and only after digital photos were downloaded from an SD card and cropped/edited in Photoshop, and then posted online 10-30 days later (un, instead of in real time). I took the whole thing offline in like 2007 (?), because so much of it was rowdy and drunken, and a whole crew of us would probably Never Work Again in this Town if it was still online (ha!). But it was rad and fun and for those who were featured in the “Teendrama recaps” or “Cast of Characters” or “Best Friends Index™” or the “weekly episodics” (mini-blog posts we pushed to Palm Pilots via AvantGo so you could read them on the subway, omg). Teendrama was a major character in our version of downtown NYC back in the day.

Anyway, the suggestion to “rename this Substack to Teendrama” (thx Hunter / Alex) has really turned into a question of “how can I resurrect Teendrama as a substack”… and I don’t really have a good answer to that (yet) but I am very excited about the idea of trying. Ideally it’s a mix of “OG Teendrama” and “CEO of FSQ Snippets” (this mix in itself is interesting to me), but for now, let’s get into it w/ the old format…

ps: that “header image” at the top? yellow lined notebook? In … 1993 (???) I was down in the computer lab at Syracuse, wrote that on a piece of paper, ripped it out and scanned it on a flatbed scanner to make it the header of my blog. I found it after (lots of) digging thru my Dropbox archives.

ps2: Um, “teen drama” like the film genre. Required watching: “She’s All That” (🎥) and “The OC” (📺). There will be a quiz next week. Yes, you will have to know dates.

ps3: I registered the domain name when I was like… 22? The joke was if I hold onto it long enough, maybe I’ll have my own teen drama (kids!). T-Minus 4 years till the prophecy comes true!

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UPDATES ON WHAT I’M WORKING ON

• Hopscotch Labs / BeeBot (“Marauders Map for Airpods”) - The team is 6 people strong, we’ve got a few hundred people beta testing, and we’re scheming up a way to get this thing into the app store before the end of Q1 (which is like 25 days away). If you want to take it for a test drive, hit me up. My goal from my last notebook was to “have a North Star that I believed in” and we’re there (actually long past it… I can see a way to work on this project for years). For those who are playing with it, imagine if DJ BeeBot has a squad of co-hosts (that you, the user, get to hire/fire) that are all helping you navigate the city (not in a “map” way, but in a “hey check out this thing!” way)

  • Btw, this post is already getting looong, but I really want to do the same “build in public” things with BeeBot that we did w/ Stockade (see blog posts). I have a HUGE folder of quotes from the early days of FSQ (mostly from Fred/Albert at USV or Ben/Marc at A16Z) or Bijan at Spark or Barry @ DFJ that I’m finding to be newly-relevant as we start building again. Two basic ones:

    • “All meetings need an agenda” — obvious right, but not so obvious when it’s only 4, 5, 6 of you (and 1 or 2 are remote).

    • “If you as CEO ever find yourself with Nothing To Do, that’s okay, and prob a sign that you’re Doing it Right”  – aka: the job is to set the vision/roadmap/tasks and kind of get out of the way (I mean, I’m also PM and UX and PR and BD so I have plenty to do, but not always as CEO and that’s okay).

      • Btw, as CEO of this little 6 person team my #1 job is setting agenda / making sure we’re talking about the right things / staying focused on the right things.

    • Related: I used to keep this screenshot on my desktop during the FSQ heydays

      

• Stockade FC (Semi-pro soccer team in Hudson Valley) – Still trying to get schedule, sponsors, sideline banners, food vendors locked down. Season will kick off in late April (w/ friendly matches). This starts turning into a 1hr/day project for me around… now. (I was on the phone yesterday trying to close another jersey sponsorship and hitting the WhatsApp trying to lock down schedule)  

  • Btw, someone bought 20 Season Tickets to be donated to local youth orgs around Kingston (!!) We’ve always offered this option, but no one has ever used it to buy 20 tickets. This made my day.

  • Oh, in case you wanted Season Tickets :)

    

• The League for Clubs (league Stockade plays in, ~50 teams, D4 US Soccer Pyramid) – A bunch of us got kicked out of the soccer league we were playing in (long story, bad leadership, toxic culture) and so we started our own league. To our knowledge, launching a new league with close to 50 teams in year 1 has never been done before in US Soccer (it’s usually 8-12 teams). There’s a strong mgmt team behind this, so it’s prob 1-2 hours/week or me.

• Foursquare – No updates. I don’t work here, though I’m Co-Chair of the BoD. I see my job on the BoD to be the “champion of the common shareholder”. My strategic advice and/or product opinions are rarely called upon. Not bitter, but it is frustrating.

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

• “Parenting is only hard if you are a good parent” – I dunno where I heard this quote, but I think of it often (and it’s been on my mind a lot this week). I wrote in the past about our 3yo being challenging, the challenges of tech vs. kids, and the emotional rollercoaster of kids’ switching schools / actively trying to find schools that are a good match for your kid. When I wrote about these things, people wrote me / DM’ed me with advice and words of support and holy cow that was great, so thanks. (btw, feel free to do that in the chat so others can benefit too?)

• “Your job isn’t to be there for your kids, your job is to make sure your kids are there for each other.” — My buddy KenM. said this to me when I was telling him about the struggle of our 3 young kids battling each other (he has 3 older kids who are past this stage). Anyway, this felt WISE to me.

• 7yo: “Dad, what’s the worst word in the world?”
  Me: “I can’t tell you that.”
  7yo: “But Dad, what letter does it begin with?”
  Me: “Okay, I’ll tell you…. Q.”
  7yo: “WHAT! You have to tell me! You have to tell me!”
  Me: <whispers to him> Quijibo
  
  <shit, only JUST realized this is spelled w/ a K not a Q, ugh! This is my “Berenstein Bears.”>

• “There hasn’t been a true ‘mass extinction event’ of late stage factory farmed unicorns …. but the inventory of companies ‘waiting for godot’ (waiting to go out) is massive … and in the majority of cases the cuts they did to survive have killed growth… and it just isn’t clear that the public market will care about any of these companies in a world where AI exposure can be had by buying the hyperscalers. “ – This is from an investor newsletter for a fund that I am in LP in (I edited the quote a little). “Factory farmed unicorns” is not a term I’ve heard before (startups that raised a lot of capital + reached a $1B+ valuation), nor is “godot” (waiting to IPO), but as someone that watches this space this is as good as a summary as I’ve seen of what’s left of the pre-AI, web2, still-private internet companies.

SNIPPETS

• This is getting long, so gonna punt on this for this week.

• BUT, I have this whole thing about “mini goals” and “mini wins” that is loosely based off this “misogi” thing I saw some Instagram Influencer post about.

• Real quick, when I start a new Field Notes Notebook (usually every 4-6 weeks) I write down 3 goals that have to be done by the end of the book (aka: 4-6 weeks from now), and I do this across work + personal + kids. For this Notebook (#113, which I just started on Monday) here’s what I put down:

  • WORK (BeeBot)

    • Get the thing in app store

    • 1000+ users

    • Start talking publicly about it (aka: not here, like, press)

  • PERSONAL

    • Do day-dates w/ C (aka: coffee/breakfasts instead of dinner/drinks)

    • Hike the DeerValley Trail at Mt Snow (which connects to Haystack).

      • I may try w/ snowshoe it this wkd. I may get a splitboard to make it easier (3mi rolling hills). I am OBSESSED over this.

    • Night hike up/ski down Mount Snow (shooting for Fri 3/14 with full moon).

      • I tried this a few weeks ago –– 8pm hike in the dark in a windy snowstorm in the pitch black with a headlamp that didn’t work in the snow (think: highway headlights in blizzard) and it was a stupid idea and I felt scared and over my head. Let’s try again tho, this time with less wind and more moonlight.

  • KIDS

    • Bring back chores/allowance!

    • Core Values for our family / for the kids.

    • Hike up/ski down with V (8yo).

      • I bought her snowshoes (22”) and she has a kids backpack she can strap her snowboard to. I don’t expect her to make it up the whole mtn, but would love to introduce her to the “morning hike/ride” idea even if it’s just “hike 100 yards up the bunny hill before dawn”

• Like carrying a little notebook everywhere, this system (3 goals x 3 areas x 1 month) works for me. Your mileage may vary.

PERSONAL STUFF / PARENTING

• 3yo is super into Sonic the Hedgehog. From the movie. She has NO IDEA that it’s a game (“you can control Sonic!”) and that the game is awesome. This is gonna blow her mind at some point.

• 8yo is super into Zelda, not the game, but the canon … as she’s learned from the Zelda Encyclopedia books (also see). I’ve intro’d her to the OG Zelda via a crappy GameBoy (minimal backlight) but it didn’t go well (she got super obsessed, we had to intervene). I’m gonna try again this summer.

• “Everyday we’re doing Paw Patrol Fan Fiction in here” – one of our 3yo’s teachers during our parent<>teacher conference (ha!). SS *loves* Paw Patrol (but not Rubble, she doesn’t like him)

CONSUMING

• 📻 This podcast with Jamie Kennard who hiked and skied the 35 Catskills peaks over 3500 feet (and the 46 major Adirondack Peaks. This guy is a legend (also a really nice guy, met him in Kingston a few times). He made a documentary about his adventures and has been screening it all over East Coast. (go watch the trailer!)

  • Catskills 3500 is another thing I am obsessed over. Gonna try to get at least 1-2 hikes this year. I have ZERO right now, ha. It’s prob a 10 year project. Gonna get the kids on board too. (buckle up, kids!)

• 🎥 Brutalist. Enjoyed it, was long. I had to ask ChatGPT WTF happened at the end (and even it didn’t know)

• 🎥 Compete Unknown. Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. I watched like 1/2 of it and loved it (and then I went out to ski a few runs). Will catch up on the rest later.

  • The word “Folk music” comes from “Volk” (German for people) as in “music for the people.”

  • Um, everything is kind of folk music? Taylor Swift? Tracy Chapman? Guster? (apparently there’s a whole podcast about this)

• 📺 Severance. OMG Chelsa and I finished s01 after binging like crazy on Monday night (3 episodes in one night). I *can not believe* we gave up on this show before… I was GLUED to the last 2 episodes of s01.

  • Was telling the BeeBot crew about this and the sentiment was “omg, I am so jealous you get to jump from s01 to s02 with NO WAIT… the rest of us had to wait like 2.5 years for the second season!”

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• I took notes on what I wanted to write about all week long (new! I use “Tot” quick notes app on Mac btw) and I thought it would make writing this super fast (it did not). But the notes were helpful for structuring it.

• I tried timebox’ing again. I’m at 1 hour and 20 mins.

• My mind is now thinking/cataloging the things I want to include here (hence I was able to chip away at a structured outline during the week on my Mac). I am taking notes on future topics in my Field Notes.

• …so I basically just wrote another newsletter? Thinking more about how to weave OG Teendrama energy into it. Stay tuned. (and if you’re an OG with ideas, hit me up)

• If you made it this far, say hi! (or drop a note in the chat!)

  
  ps: I missed <something like this> as a creative outlet and I am psyched to have it back.

Hey again! This is it! Post #3 of 2025, fulfilling my goal of “3 posts per Field Notes notebook” (notebook #112 is prob gonna get retired later today btw). I’m gonna try to keep this habit up as it’s fun for me and helpful for organizing my thoughts/thinking on a bunch of stuff. TBH, I’m at the point now where I’m actively starting to flag things in my head and should go into these newsletters. (you ever get to that point with Twitter where you see things and compose tweets in your head about them, instead of, um, having regular thoughts?… god that sounded awful). Anyway, I have that for this, and I like that.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe here, it’s free!

UPDATES ON WHAT I’M WORKING ON

• Hopscotch Labs / BeeBot – “Marauders Map for Airpods”. We pushed a build out to another 60 beta testers yesterday so looking fwd to wading thru feedback later today. (want in on the beta?) I was telling Chelsa the other day about how this early startup stage (building product, testing what works, experimenting w/ storytelling) is super stressful… you have these moments of “um, is anyone even going to want this thing? is this a waste of time?” followed 3 hours later with thoughts of “omg this is kind of amazing. this actually may be pretty big”…. it’s the standard up/down/up/down emotional rollercoaster stuff you hear in every startup talk (blah blah blah), but going thru it now (again) is making me REMEMBER the same feeling of anxiety/doubt from the early FSQ days (“is anyone going to want this? use this? is everyone going to laugh at us when we show it at SXSW?”). TBH, it feels almost *comforting* to have those feelings now, because (I think) I have enough experience to know that this healthy and consistent mix of “omg this sucks” vs. “omg this is going to be epic” is (I think) what eventually makes great products.

  • TL;DR: it feels like a superpower to be able to channel the anxiety that I felt in, say, February 2009 about pre-launch FSQ and use it as a filter to stay focused on the BeeBot stuff were working on / problems we’re working thru.

• Stockade FC – Still don’t have a schedule, working on it! Sidenote: US Soccer is such a beautiful little shitshow. There so much jockeying for position *everywhere*, from D4 (League of Clubs vs. NPSL) to D1 (MLS vs. USL). If that’s your jam…

• Foursquare - The company wound down the “City Guide” app back in Dec (?) and they’re due to roll some of the old cityguide features into Swarm. I am anxiously awaiting the beta / TestFlight.

  • I was on a trip to Calgary/BC/Canada this week (more below) and I no longer have a go-to city guide app that replaces what FSQ was able to do. I hate that.

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

• “…a bittersweet memory of a simpler time when social media felt new enough to be a really good thing for humanity.” - I appreciated this quote from my friend Bethany’s post on “Long Term Narrowcasting” (er, which is about Swarm, etc)

• “Me: Do the kids at school talk about Marvel and Spiderman?”
  “Via: NO DAD, they talk about YouTube!” – I was already having an argument with my daughter about how she’s not allowed to use social media / YouTube (she has a laptop and an iPad but I have them pretty locked down)… but there’s so much “cultural literacy” (and peer pressure) attached to both YouTube and Spotify that’s making it increasingly difficult for me & C to keep them off these platforms.

  • Sidenote: Anyone have a recommendation on how to let an 8yo use a web browser without giving them all-in access to internet? Do I need to download a special kids browser, etc? (hit me up in the comments/chat)

• <I had a bunch of other quotes I wanted to include here but I can’t find them and it’s driving me crazy>

SNIPPETS WEEK OF FEB 27

• Heli Trip! I went on an EPIC heli skiing trip with some dad-from-school buddies of mine last week. (see: IG story) Three days in the heli (about 12 laps / 20k vertical feet per day). It snowed. It was deep. I’ve done heli before, but it was a one-day thing like 18 years ago with some intermediate skiers (so terrain wasn’t super nasty). This time we were with expert skiers on nasty terrain with a guide that was happy to push us.

  • Rode a Burton Fish 156 (2022) which has been on my “must ride this board” wishlist for a while. It was sooooo good in deep stuff. Skiing east coast in mostly a packed/ice/sometimes-a-powder-day type of game… so a lot of the skiing is 2D (left/right/slow/fast)… this trip really opened my eyes to this idea of “3D skiing” (my term, not a real term) where you are doing the up/down/slow/fast but you also have the ability to rise/sink in the snow, and thus you can use that to speed yourself up and slow yourself down. It was magical. I’ve gotten a taste of this before (powder runs at Mt Snow / Jackson Hole) but to have THREE DAYS of it is a whole different game.

  • Before hitting heli lodge we did a day at Kicking Horse (it was 1/2 way between our drive from Calgary → Golden in BC). Mountain is nasty, but conditions were crappy (no new snow). I rented a Burton Hometown Hero (157cm, 2025! brand new – which was also on my “must ride this board” list) and hated it. Too stiff. FWIW, I’m riding a Burton Deep Thinker now (157W) and loving it.

• Solar! I’m about to pull the trigger on a solar project for our place upstate (near Kingston) – 26 kW @ 60 panels (QTron 435 watt). It will offset about 85% of our power usage (house runs on 3 heat pumps for heating/cooling which has spiked electric costs for us). I’ve had my eye on this project for a long time and I feel like “now or never” with Trump rolling back all the good stuff that’s happened w IRA/EVs. Mentioning this in case anyone wants to chat about it / ask Qs in the comments or Substack chat.

• Congestion Pricing in NYC. It works. It saves us like 15-20 mins every time we need to drive in/out of the city and head to VT. I am gonna be pissed if Trump rolls it back. Found this nugget somewhere online (I lost the URL sorry):

  

PERSONAL STUFF / PARENTING

• Via and Mars were in a mogul race past weekend as part of their ski program at Mount Snow. They both won against the kids they were racing against (go kids!) but Via *stands out* for having this style and swagger (see last IG story here) that the other kids don’t have. I love it.

• One of our kids may switch schools and that is super stressful. I have been thinking a lot about “matching the kid to the right school” (which is a thing here in NYC where there are lots of schools to choose from) and this idea of “your kid is not you” (obvious, right?) and just because I think a school is lovely and great and wish I could have gone there as a kid, doesn’t mean its the right fit for my kid who’s an entirely different person.

  • I feel kind of stupid typing that out, because it seems so obvious, but it really isn’t (and it’s hard to deal with) so I’m gonna leave it here/not delete it.

• Sammy (3yo) now knows how to play CandyLand which is super fun. But man, that is a cruel cruel game. Has anyone EVER won after being sent back to the candy cane salt mines?

CONSUMING

• 📺 Severance. We finally jumped back into this (we started + gave up on it like 2 years ago?) …starting again with s01e01 and it is GOOD. Really digging it. I think we’re on e05 now.

• 🎮 Sno. Some indie devs made a rather sick game about big mountain skiing / freeriding. It’s on Steam, so I’ve been playing on my Mac w/ a PS5 controller. Download for $10. (free demo too)

• 🐯 Daniel Tiger. Sammy is listening to Daniel Tiger audio books (character from the Mr. Rogers Universe) on her Yoto like 24/7. They are rubbing off on her in a good way and I am INTO IT. (btw, if you have little kids and don’t have a Yoto, check it out)

• 📻 Bluegrass / “The Wildwoods” - One of the guys that was on the ski trip with us shared his ski playlist with us and it’s great. Lots of bluegrass which I haven’t listened to in a bit, but this band stuck out… I think he said they’re like a Christian Bluegrass Band (did I get that right?). I’ve been digging it all week (I play it at breakfast time for the kids)

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• Still timeboxing to 1 hour. This is the ticket to making this work IMHO (tho I’d like to get on a “do it every Monday morning 10-11am cadence), FWIW, I started at 9:43am ended at…11:05am. (shit, more than an hour!)

• I posted about this Substack on LinkedIn (, like a fucking loser, ha!) and my buddy Hunter suggested renaming it to “teendrama” which was my old blog from…. 1994-2007 (!!) and I think that is a rather excellent idea. I told myself if I can hit my “3x / notebook” goal I’d do it, so maybe I’ll flip the branding around for the next one. Btw, I still have the teendrama.com domain (and email) tho I took the blog and archives down a looooong time ago when Google first came out (!!) and my first round of friends were applying to grad schools ( my Jupiter-buddy Lucas G. was the OG, “dude you gotta take this stuff off the internet” whisperer.)

• Btw, in my notebook I write down a couple of goals for each book. I had 3 personal goals for this month’s book –– (1) come up w/ Core Values for the family, (2) start the Will/Estate Planning process (long overdue for this and meant to get this done before heli trip TBH !!), and (3) hit the Substack 3x. I got 2 out of 3 done.

• Feels good to about to hit send on this, but I feel like 90% of the stuff I had planned to put into this didn’t make it in (I can’t remember it / find it in my notes). Still feels like a decent update. Send me a note if you made it this far. ✌🏼

Hey again! I think I mentioned last time my goal for Project Substack Resurrection™ is 2x month (and more specifically, I said 3x before I finish Notebook #112 which is in my pocket right now… and only has 11 pages left!), so let’s gooooooo.

Sidenote: I make mini OKRs for myself with each notebook –– one of them in this notebook is “substack 3x”)

ps: This format is based off the weekly “snippets” I used to do as CEO in the early days of Foursquare (backstory here)

Hopscotch Labs / BeeBot –“Marauders Map for AirPods, emcee'd by an AI DJ whenever you're wearing headphones”. We pushed our beta (TestFlight) out to another ~100 people the other day so it’s been fun to see signups/usage (want in?). When you put your headphones in, the first thing you hear is “BeeBot Activated! 36 other people online!” (which means 36 people have recently put their headphone in… and this number is up from “10, 11, 12 people online” a few days ago). There’s a lot of fun themes we are exploring with this project, but two that are in my head right now are:

• Theme #1: Apps you don’t have to use — there’s no feed to scroll, or posts to like. You just put your headphones in and walk around and “stuff happens”. This is a continuation of some of the work we did with FSQ/Swarm checkins (“it should take you <5 seconds to take you phone, open app, check-in, put phone away… and then stuff happens”). I despise the idea of measuring success by “minutes spent in app”. If anything, success IMHO is “can people experience the benefits of the product without having to consume/touch the screen”

• Theme #2: "What happens when people have always-on headphones?” This is a little weird, and maybe a little dystopian (??) but I am curious about exploring what’s possible when, say, you have one AirPods in, all day long (even if you’re not listening to anything!). This is a bit of the “audio as poor-mans Augmented Reality” stuff we talked about in the Marsbot days, but with the added foresight that, for example, Meta Glasses are basically “always-on headphones” (aka: Bluetooth speakers you may wear all day long). People who forget to take their Airpods out (or who leave them in *even if they’re not listening to anything* as a way of signaling “leave me alone”), well, those are always-on headphones too. I can’t help but to think the world/culture is kind of moving in this direction, and I like the idea of playing in this space.

• FYI — just realized today marks 100 days since we closed our Seed Round. (Nov 4)

Stockade FC – Still working on finalizing our 2025 schedule. I co-hosted a “Build & Grow” session about “getting sponsorships” (zoom call, ~40 attendees), which is a thing that we’re starting to do with this new league we started. I mean, what’s the point of being in a league with 50-100 other teams, if you’re not all working together to help each other get bigger and better? This is one of the primary “cultural” things we’re working to build into The League for Clubs, and it was fun to kick it off.

Street FC — Just passed 11k total games played (!!)

Foursquare – There’s always something that punts FSQ back into my headspace. (aka: no closure). Here’s what it was this week: (1000 stories to tell, though probably best to wait till the whole story wraps up to tell them — aka: closure!))

Last week I went to two different “how AI is changing the world” things, run by two different venture teams (USV & Betaworks), with totally different vibes… basically “AI for the enterprise” vs. “AI as artificial life”. Here’s a bunch of random quotes from my notebook: (I didn’t attribute these to people as I didn’t really have the opportunity to ask for permission… hope that’s okay to anyone reading who was quoted!)

• “I see a future where tiny teams empowered by AI can take on giants and win” — says a guy who spun up a team/crew of AI lawyer-agents (specifically “multi-agent systems w/ non-linear prompt chaining with smart-chunking", his words) to fight a legal battle against a big corp. I am not super technical here, but to see under the hood where some of these systems looked like 6-8 instances of ChatGPT running in parallel, each of which had a role/goal/backstory/chain of command, and they’re all chatting with each other like little AI employees… that really kind of blew my mind in how much it was less about “writing code” and more about “writing instructions in natural language to *teach* a team of bots how to act/behave like a team of humans including managing each other / reporting to each other”)

• “You’ll start to see tech margins on service businesses” [as teams of humans are replaced by teams of agents/bots] - okay, yeah, I get it.

• “Our team is moving too fast for a human designer. Why would I wait a week to get designs back from a freelancer, when AI can do something ‘good enough'‘ in 3 minutes?” - again, I get it.

• “We’re about to go from ‘prompts’ being mainstream [aka: everyone knows what ChatGPT is] to ‘agents’ being mainstream” - … agents being the “non-linear prompt chaining with smart-chunking" that can do and do stuff / take action on your behalf (book flights, make reservations, etc). You can start to see this mainstream’ification with OpenAI’s Operator.

• “LLMs have already sucked up all the publicly available written text and transcribed text (video/movies/music) … all that’s left is the data in your head!” – I heard someone say this maybe 10 months ago (in the context of building apps that can talk to you in an effort to extract the data / thoughts / memories that are trapped in your tiny little human brain)…

  • … and then I heard someone say another version of this …. “LLMs have already sucked up all the publicly all available written text and transcribed text (video/movies/music) … all that’s left is the data in your private stashes!” — aka: my noteboook! And all the other places I stash half baked ideas (Google Docs, NotePad, Evernote, Note.app etc).

• “The ‘AI space’ is like early Twitter… if you’re ‘in it’, you feel it. But if you’re outside of it, its hard to ‘get it’.” – I can empathize with this, esp as an early Twitter user + superfan who spent a lot of time in the early days explaining to people why I thought it was interesting/important.

• “Um, I understand these things to be human…” - there was a conversation about bot/agents/AI being on Twitter/Threads/Bluesky and masquerading as humans. Some of them may be totally autonomous, some of them may be taking cues from humans (“talk about this, but not that”). The point being it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell what’s what (even for the people “in” the AI space!) and we’re kind of at this point (already!) where it may be impossible to actually know for sure.

• Here was a great exchange:

  • Person 1: “Is digital life artificial life?”
    Person 2: … who are YOU to say it’s artificial?”
    Person 3: “… how dare you even call it a LIFE!”

    … this was not an antagonistic conversation (rather, smart people playfully debating) but it kind of underlines just how WEIRD shit is about to get, and in ways that I don’t think we fully understand (… in the same way that none of us who were using Twitter in 2009 really understood what Twitter was going to turn into 5, 10, 15 years later. <— I like this analogy btw. )

    • Also see: “Xenocogs” – Primordial forms of digital / artificial life. In SAT terms: “single-cell organisms : organic life :: xenocogs : digital life:” (??)

• “Maybe the definition of ‘alive’ is whether you’d be sad when it died?” – possible to poke holes in this, but was fun conversation

• “My whole life is group chat.” - I feel seen! Honestly, how much of my time spent on phone is in some kind of group chat. Texts, WhatsApp, IG DM, Slack, etc.

… whoa just re-read this and there is a lot of super-nerd stuff in here. Let’s end with:

Going to punt on this again, since most of the good stuff was in the AI Showdown above. BUT, can’t wait till *next time* when I can tell you about this “New Topologists” thing I went to last night where the instructions were to meet on a subway platform in Brooklyn “below the numbers, above the letters” (ha!)

• Two days in Vermont this weekend and I hiked both mornings (5:30am wake up, hiking in snowshoes by 6am, back at house by 7:15am). Saturday was a total bluebird day up the east-facing slope during sunrise. Sunday was a trek up in 10” of fresh snow and then first-ish tracks down (2-3 people got to the top before me!).

  • Speaking of themes I am into right now… “spirituality without religion”. And not to be to all Denny Hippy but this “hike up ride down” is exactly that. The hikes up are mostly silence, the ride down is stunning… it’s emotionally moving (and it’s been like that each time!). I am trying to get Chelsa / my brother / my sister / Via (!) / anyone (!!) to do this hike with me so I have someone to share it with in the moment. (that’s not as sad as it sounds, btw!)

• There was a charity auction at the mountain (for the Adaptive Snow program which helps people with physical / emotional / learning differences get to ski. My son gets paired with an Adaptive Coach btw). Anyway, my dad + I bought a GIANT old trail map sign and we’re gonna hang it on the wall (with some sheet metal behind it) and let the kids use magnets to mark up the trail map (aka: best tree spot, Mars’ special jump, spot where someone took a huge digger, etc). Very excited for this project.

• It snowed. A lot. So much that on Sunday I left the skate behind and rode my snowboard for the 2nd time this season. After riding the skate (no bindings!) for 20+ days down the steeps and thru the trees, strapping a board to my feet gave me superpowers. Back in the day (before kids!) when I’d ride my bike around NYC and duck and weave thru NYC traffic, I could tell that “summer traffic riding” made me a better “winter tree skier” (on the bike in city traffic, you get good at judging the width of open spaces at speed). Same thing with the skate – being able to navigate trees skiing on the skate really levels-up your ability to ride trees aggressively on a snowboard. You know that scene in Spiderman where everything sloooooowwwsss dooowwwwnnnn in the school cafeteria, that’s what it felt like jumping back on the snowboard.

• I got a big trip next week (🇨🇦 + 🚁) and feeling good about it. Legs/cardio feel good from the snowskate and snowshoe (despite the fact that I haven’t gone running since Dec)

  ---

• This stage of “8yo now has my old laptop and has iMessage to she can text her parents, but we’re NOT allowing her to text her friends yet” is hard. It’s being made harder by the fact that she is the oldest of our kids (aka: no phones till 13yo!), yet her friends are sometimes the youngest and the oldest kids in those families already have phones, etc. and so they’re a bit looser about things. It’s creating drama. The flipside: V uses Keynote and Freeform to make slideshows and greeting cards and collages and its rad to see her creating stuff w/ tech.

• Apple’s screen time controls (for iOS, iPads, laptops) are an embarrassment. I had to go to the Genius Bar (!!) 2x to confirm “so you really don’t support this?” The “this” being…

  • There’s no way to say “only allow my kids to download Apple Arcade games” (which don’t have ads), even if you are paying for Apple Arcade! This seems INSANE.

  • The only way to prevent “Ads” in games seems to be to set “Content & Privacy → Store Restrictions” to under 9yo… but if I do that, then she loses the ability to use Spotify. (and Spotify Kids.app does not have song lyrics, and V loves the lyrics)

  • If she wants to use the browser I have to manually approve every page, every URL, every cookie. How is there no AI Kids Browser? Let them browse the internet, throw up a roadblock when there’s weird / inappropriate content for <insert age here>".

  • … I am Johnny Tech Guy and I had to go the Genius Bar 2x (after asking every LLM on the planet to help me solve these problems). If I can’t figure this out, and Claude and Friends™ can’t figure it out, then WTF Apple get your shit together.

• 🎥 Anora – I love watching movies where I have ZERO idea what the movie is about. Still not sure if it’s supposed to kind of be a comedy?

• 🎥 Emilia Pérez – Loved this. I almost gave up on it 10 mins in (“ugh, I am not in the mood for a Musical”) but glad I stuck with it. The gala scene is amazing (I watched it 2x)

• 📺 Severance — We gave up on it a while ago. The gravitational pull is strong tho (peer pressure). We’ll prob dive back in.

• This took more than an hour. But mostly because I had to go thru my notebook and unload all the stuff from those 2 AI talks + all the BeeBot product ideas + notes to self, etc. So I’ve been here crossing off notes, sending emails, adding to product docs, drafting this, etc.

• At the USV thing, Matt C. from USV was talking about private-use LLMs (aka: take everything you’ve ever written and being able to query against it). I’m messing with a version of this that has my old Tweets, old FSQ checkins, old Tumblr posts, old FSQ tips, Medium posts, etc… and probably these Substack posts too. So… worthy to create artifacts of what’s in your head I suppose?

• ps: Traveling next week, so don’t expect an email… but I will bang out that 3rd one before the end of notebook #112!

</end>

ps: feedback appreciate! or just give me a shout if you made it this far!

Okay! It’s been exactly 67 weeks since I sent one of these out, so this project is going great! 🤦🏻‍♂️ But we are going to resurrect it! I’m gonna shoot to do this 2x/month (!!) which is ambitious, but I wrote it down as a goal in that little notebook I carry around (Field Notes, bro) so I trust I can make it happen. (my trick this time around is gonna be “timebox it to no more than 1 hour”)

Why resurrect? I’m working on some cool stuff! And I like the “build in public” stuff!

Hopscotch Labs (my new full-time job, Co-Founder/CEO) – Started a new company. Raised some money. Hired some people. We have a team of 5.5 people working on an app called BeeBot which we pitch as a “Marauders Map for AirPods, emcee'd by an AI Dj whenever you're wearing headphones”. If you want to take it for a test drive, sign up for the VIP Beta (if you read this substack, you’re VIP IMHO) and join the Discord. (there’s <150 people testing it right now).

Stockade FC (Hudson Valley D4 semi-pro soccer team) – Our 9th season kicks off in May, and we’re (finally) gonna be back in Kingston this year after playing two seasons in Poughkeepsie while our stadium was being renovated. We switched leagues… actually we helped to start a new league (!!) called The League for Clubs. Long story (old league was toxic with bad management/leadership). I’ll write a blog post on it sometime soon. Oh, one of our guys got drafted to play in MLS for NYCFC (that’s a big f’ing deal for a small club!)

Street FC (“building the biggest football club on the planet) – Street FC is still grinding away. I’m not involved day-to-day any more, but am Co-Chair of BoD and working with CEO (Stephen Francis) regularly (Stephen is A++ btw). We’ve played more than 10,000 games across 12 cities and I think we’ve done $1M+ in just *gameplay* revenue at this point. This is def a fun biz / cool asset to be involved in as we get closer to World Cup in USA in 2026,

Foursquare –  Foursquare is still doing its thing. I haven’t been involved day-to-day since June 2021 (3.5 years! I stepped away a month before Sammy was born) but I’m still co-chair of the BoD. Someday I will write a book (ha!) or at least a lengthy blog post about how hard it is to watch the company do it’s thing from the outside. TBH, one of the reasons I wanted to resurrect this Substack is because my buddy Robbie fwd’ed me something *I wrote* back in 2023 and I found it valuable (cathartic?) when he re-shared it with me (so thx Robbie!)

“When a founder leaves company, it’s like someone’s soul leaving their body” — overhead in a conversation w/ another founder

btw, I can’t tell you how much I struggle daily with that fact that Foursquare is still “Foursquare being Foursquare” (ambiguity is intentional). At ~15 years it’s like 32% of my life, which has been an equal share of blessing vs. curse on my mental well being. IMHO, it’s very challenging to be a founder of something and lack closure.

<btw, I’m at 27 minutes already… and I told myself I’d cap it at 60>

“We need internet-free communal spaces” - Anne Lembke on a NYT podcast on “digital drugs” (aka: phones, social media) and how do we actually disconnect from these things. “When the ability to choose is removed [er, to choose whether to look at your phone vs engage IRL], it changes the state of craving”. I keep seeing this theme come up over and over and over again –– whether it’s Zach Klein musing on Bluesky (whoa, really cool that I just copy and pasted this link in)…

… or Robbie (same buddy I quoted above btw) talking about Bathhouses (sauna / cold plunge) being a place where people can find something spiritual (outside of religion) in an environment that is non-alcohol / non-digital. FWIW, Robbie ran an amazing “Culture of Bathing” event a few weeks ago in NYC which brought me and Chelsa to the Othership bathhouse in NYC and their 75-person dance-party sauna with a DJ (!!). Sidenote: I’m really into sauna right now.

“New ideas need old buildings” – This is an old Jane Jacobs quote I heard on this fantastic fantastic fantastic podcast called “The War on Cars” and specifically the episode about Cities + Fashion. (ps: I listened to this episode 2x it was so good/rich) There’s a whole section in this podcast about how when small shops (watch makers, shoe repair places, bodegas) move out, the spaces often get consolidated/combined into bigger spaces that only bigger businesses (banks, Target, H&M, etc) can afford. Same for when new construction goes up – when a big new apt building goes up, there’s not 6 new storefronts built on street level, there’s one (and one that’s so big, in terms of sqft, that it can only be filled by a big tenent, like a bank, Target, H&M etc)

<in the interest of time… I only have 14 mins left! … I’m gonna skip this part>

• We have 3 kids. Our youngest is 3.5 and she is knee deep in the “terrible 3s” or “threenager” stage or whatever you want to call it and it is HARD. Not just dealing with her, but dealing with how her tiny little brand of CRAZY affects our 7yo and our 8yo. It’s a lot for us, and them, and the whole household.

• On the other hand she said this at breakfast and it made me smile all morning…

• It is January, and that means we are knee deep in ski season. We go to Mount Snow, VT *every weekend* as both our 7yo ad 8yo are in the Ski Development Program (aka: “Devo”). Via (8yo) has turned into a SICK skier – she skis with confidence and style and swagger and it makes me so proud. Mars (7yo) went from “never wanting to ski” to skiing like 15 days so far this season. His turns look good, he can ski in control. I grew up skiing every weekend w/ my parents and my brother and sister (Black Mountain, New Hampshire). It bring me so much joy to do the same with my kids (and we all stay in a family house w/ my sister and her kids, and my brother and his kids). It’s a grind (commuting the 4 hours to VT and back every wkd) but it’s awesome.

• Inspired by a dad-buddy of mine, I hiked up the mountain (Mount Snow, VT) this weekend at dawn (6am!) and rode down. It was a 45 minute hike up (in the dark, with a headlamp) and a 5 minute ride down (on the smoothest just-groomed corduroy I’ve ever seen in VT) and I am now a convert of this “skin up, ski down”, even tho I was snowshoe’ing up and snowskate’ing down. (btw, I have 20 days on the snowskate this year vs. 1 day on my snowboard — will write more about this sometime)

  • Will definitely be hiking up this weekend too. Gonna try to bring Chelsa too. Stay tuned. (I’d love to get Via to hike w/ her snowboard before the end of the season too!)

• 📺 Silo. Me & C went from hating this show to not being able to consume enough of it. We’re all caught up.

• 🎥 Conclave. Watched it because my mom loves “pope stuff”, but loved it.

• 🎥 Substance. Demi Moore should win the Oscar, but this shit gets weird once her character disappears.

• 🎥 Babygirl. So cringe we could barely watch.

• 🎥 A Real Pain. It was hard to watch as Kieran Culkin’s character was such a dick, but he was great.

• 📻 This Doechii song is a banger. She won a Grammy last night. I only first heard this song in… November? Reminded me of mid-90s hip hop (like Tribe, DeLa style banter). Speaking of which…

• 📻 De La Soul. All of it. Mars got a record player for Xmas and I gave him a copy of Three Feet High and Rising on vinyl and just hearing it again made me realize how much I loved De La Soul. Bulhoone Mindstate is one of my fav albums of all time.

• 📖 Darkest White (51% thru) — Story of Craig Kelly (GOAT backcountry snowboarder who died in avalanche). I’ve had this on my bookshelf for like 6 months — trying to finish this before I go on a backcountry ski trip in late Feb (!!). Grew up with photos of this guy on my wall, and I have one of his boards hanging in VT. Got to visit his memorial deep in Canada a bunch of years ago (click to read caption):

  Since my last update, um, 67 weeks ago!)

• 📖 Ministry of Future — finally finished this!

• 📖 How to Blow up a Pipeline — didn’t finish it, but I get the point.

  
  … not to get to all dark / dystopian, but the USA is such a shitshow right now (Trump) that after reading these it is hard NOT to see how we avoid the style of violence / terrorism that pops up in these books.

• Okay, I kept this to just about 60 minutes. Feels good to bang one out. Cathartic to share things I’ve been thinking about (and to create a digital artifact – this newsletter! – about it)

• Btw, realized recently* that I probably have some form of ADHD, and my notebook has been a stable/reliable way for me to “quiet my head” when it’s racing (aka: I write things down so I can deal with them later). I think the need/desire to write this newsletter is another form of that “quieting my head” so, hey, thx for being along for the ride on my crazy train.

  • * “realized recently” = We got Mars a neuropsych when he was struggling in school and it really opened my eyes to how his brain <> my brain are prob similar. Neurodiversity FTW!

• Hey if you have feedback on this – format, content, whatever… send me a note! @dens.nyc on Bluesky.

• … actually if you made it this far, send me a note. Wondering if anyone even reads these! ✌🏼

  • ps: it feels good to write something again!

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Been a few weeks since I banged out of these out, but let’s get back on the wagon! Removing some to the “structure” this week to make it easier on myself.

• Did you know MOMA has an R&D Lab that holds semi-regular salons? Me neither, but I went to one on “Team Sports”. A few notes:

  • The very first “sports merchandise” is traced back to the days of Roman gladiators when you could buy carved wooden / bronze statues of your favorite gladiators (think: action figures — you could tell them apart by the symbols/design of their armor)

  • Quote: “As adults sometimes we forget what it’s like to play”

    • Btw, I started reading this book by Frank Lantz (former professor of mine) called “The Beauty of Games (Playful Thinking)” which talks a bunch about play vs. games and games vs. digital games, etc (I’m only like 3 chapters in, but Frank is brilliant)

  • Gabriel Fontana showed off an game (art project?) he created called Multiform, which is designed to challenge the binary nature of most sports/games (2 teams, 1 winner)

  • Simon Critchley was another speaker — just added his book What We Think About When We Think About Football to my Kindle as I’m typing this. I don’t remember much of what he said, but I remember feeling “oh man I need to read this guys book” as he was talking.

    • “People will forget what you said, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

• Betaworks held an “AI and Longevity” event (aka: “how can AI help us live forever, or at least until 120yo”)

  • Met a cool startup called Memory-Lane.ai that will basically ask you questions about yourself, your loved ones, etc – sometimes using Google Photos as prompts, sometimes using previous answers as prompts – in an effort to create a digital version of your own memories, but told from your POV. (aka: one of those “how do I re-create my dead grandma” startups)

  • … as we see more stuff like this, at what point is software more of a “relationship you have” vs. a “tool you use” (applies to Siri, Alexa, Her, etc)

  • … and what is going to happen when you can “clone” enough of your own memory so that you can have a realistic conversation (argument?) with, er, yourself. How weird is that gonna be if that is something that people do? Will your friends be able to tell the difference between “biological me” and “digital me”? This sounds dumb to type in 2023, but this feels really possible in like 2 years TBH.

  • Quote: “The sun kills your cells, in the same way that the sun kills your patio furniture.” (yikes!)

  • Quote: “The process of fasting causes your body to tell newer cells to cannibalize the older, damaged cells. (see: “autophagy”)

    • I’ve never fasted on purpose before.

    • I’ve never spelt “cannibalize” right on the first try

  • Quote: “Problem w/ American health care system is that we TREAT instead of PREVENT.” and “The secret to longevity is prevention”

  • There was a good discussion at the end about “what is it like to live in a world where there is a pill for everything?” – a pill to help you lose weight, a pill to help you grow muscle… will people even WANT to exercise? Or is this idea of “you exercise to stay healthy, and some people enjoy the pain/tired/soreness that comes with/after exercise” just an outdated idea?

• Union Square Ventures held an “Applied AI” summit a week ago – portfolio companies showing off what they’re doing to “make the human experience better using AI” (Hillary’s phrasing btw). A few thoughts:

  • Quote: “In 2023, is it better to be building picks and shovels or digging for gold?” — aka: is it more lucrative to build AI tools for fellow builders, or trying to swing for the fences and build the AI “thing” that 100M+ people will use?

  • “We’ll just clone their voice…” – a phrase I hear people throw around like it’s not big deal (technically, ethically). Back before the pandemic I remember playing w/ this tech and it was very flaky (4 years ago!) and I haven’t played with it since. I know of companies like Eleven Labs are doing great work here to push it forward. Old Man Denny tends to that this is gonna be a shitshow once it goes more mainstream (cloning peoples voices without their permissions and leaving fake voice mails etc, will prob be on the benign end of it)

  • Quote: “Every professional will have an AI assistant … it’ll be another tool, like email or a smartphone”

  • Quote: "The best AI’s will feel like you’re delegating work to a colleague”

  • … related, instead of the “pay per query” or “yearly subscription for AI agent” being used in pricing, I’ve heard people use the term “AI on salary” — with the expectation being that these tools are almost built into headcount budgets (and yes, as replacement for human headcount)

• Betaworks held an “AI Agent Demo Day”, people showing off examples of “software that does things on your behalf.” (Neel C’s phrasing, btw)

  • A lot of examples I’ve seen are “co-pilots” for coding, or writing, or even negotiating. Fun stuff.

  • Prob not a huge surprise that I am obsessed with an idea of a “co-pilot for walking thru the city” (ahem, isn’t that just Foursquare’s Clippy-esque vision all over again?)

    • From a Foursquare “vision” deck in 2009: “Someday we’re going to make a hipster version of Clippy. One that knows about all the places you go, one that knows about all the places your friends have been, one that’s read every issue of Time Out NY & New York Magazine, one that’s always on the lookout to help you find the next best thing, and one that proactively points you towards those things.”

  • Btw, I demo’ed a version of “BeeBot for AirPods” at Demo Day (!!) Coming to a TestFlight near you if you want to sign up to beta test. Think of it as a “sequel” to Marsbot for Airpods (in the same way that Foursquare was a sequel to Dodgeball? We’ll see.)

    • Think of it as “a version of Waze, but for people in walkable cities”

    • Think of it as “an app you never have to use” (aka: zero UX), the only “move” is to walk around

    • I have it working on my phone/AirPods, and it still feels magical to me (even tho we launched something like this in 2019 at FSQ)

      • WILDCARD THEORY: Back in 2019 (pre-pandemic) there was a lot of “hmm, there’s no new great toys to build with … all the phones are the same, all the great apps have already been made”. Meanwhile, we always thought that the “contextual-aware computing” revolution was JUST ABOUT TO HAPPEN…. tho it really never did…

      • … instead we got COVID and crypto and blockchain and Web3 and metaverse… all of which is largely thought to be a bust …. and now, of course, we’ve all moved on to AI. (btw, I do still think the Web3 ethos of “you can now own stuff on the internet” is super interesting)

      • … but I still think that the world just kind of “skipped over” all the “contextual aware computing” stuff, which we were pushing on HARD in the glory days of Foursquare (back when we built Pilgrim SDK) and then when we actually starting to putting that tech to work w/ things like Marsbot SMS / Marsbot AirPods and HyperTrending (all projects out of Foursquare Labs R&D Lab, btw) . Anyway, I think the time is *super ripe* to revisit this part of “the evolution of internet tech” that seemed to have gotten lost between the “boring tail end of 2019” and the “shitshow of COVID 2020”

      • BTW, if you liked this crackpot theory, remind me to tell you about my theory that the internet went sideways in 2013… back when we (FSQ) were planning for some version of a “put the phone away and let context-aware computing highlight awesome stuff IRL” future, but instead we got the “how about we all just endlessly scroll thru algorithmic feeds” future (which then got perfected by IG and Snap).

• Deep Thoughts™…

  • Quote: “When a founder leaves company, it’s like someone’s soul leaving their body” (overhead in a conversation w/ another founder)

    • btw, I can’t tell you how much I struggle daily with that fact that Foursquare is still “Foursquare being Foursquare” (ambiguity is intentional). At ~15 years it’s like 32% of my life, which has been an equal share of blessing vs. curse on my mental well being. IMHO, it’s very challenging to be a founder of something and lack closure.

Went to a “Partners for Climate Action, Hudson Valley” event — held at a barn at someone’s house, people talking about climate change coming to Hudson Valley and what to do about it

• Quote: “It’s not about ‘this county vs. that county’… it’s about protecting the entire Hudson Valley BIOREGION”

• “64% of homes in Ulster County are within a ‘risk of wildfire’ zone”

• “We find that creating a ‘pollinator habit’ at home can be a gateway-drug to someone becoming more active in climate issues'“

• There’s a huge deer problem in Ulster county — when deer eat all the “good stuff” all that’s left is the invasive shrubbery. Hunters are needed / helpful to control the deer population but because hunters are not allowed to sell local meat (?? – first I’ve heard of this btw) there’s little financial incentive to hunters.

• Been enjoying the part of parenting where I teach the kids about what humans can do vs. what humans have not figured out how to do yet.

  • We can go to the moon, but not Mars.

  • Unmanned spaceships have been to Saturn, but no other galaxies.

  • We can fix some diseases, but not cancer.

  • We can get energy from the sun, but we our batteries aren’t good enough to store it all yet.

• I took our 7yo daughter on a 2mi hike up Overlook Mountain in Woodstock. She got to the top, looked out over the Catskills and said “oh wow, this is so much more beautiful than I even imagined!” A few days later, I took her to a “Astronomy on the High Line” event (every Tues, last one of the season is next week!), she looked thru a telescope, saw the rings of Saturn and said “dad thank you so much for bringing me here” 🥰

• Mars had an accident at gymnastics class and got a bunch of stitches. 🤦🏻‍♂️

• Me + C celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary last week! We celebrated by going to a event for parents at our kids’ school 😂

• I’m training for my hometown’s Turkey Trot. I gotta do a 5k @ 6:30/mi to medal in my age group. I may have to pick up a pair of “mechanical doping” sneakers before the race. 🏅

• Halloween! Mars is gonna be a cat. Via’s gonna be a ghost. Sammy’s gonna be Baby Owl, and I’m gonna be Dada Owl 🎃 (curious to see what Chelsa pulls together!)

• 📺 “Beckham” documentary (Netflix) – so good! 💯

• 📺 s03 of “For All Mankind” (Apple)

• 📺 s02 of “Yellowstone” (?? above to give up on this TBH)

• 🎮 Super Mario Wonder (hoping to get kids playing this wkd – 4-players at once!)

• 📖 The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America (5% thru)

• 📖 The Beauty of Games (Playful Thinking) (20% thru)

• 📖 Ministry of Future (51% thru)

• 📖 How to Blow up a Pipeline (40% thru)

• This took me maybe 1.5 hours to write up? Still think it’s a good use of time.

• I basically go thru my Field Notes™ notebook and type up my notes and use my Google Calendar entires to nudge my memory into who I was was with/coffee shop/dinner/meetups when I made certain notes.

• I always think of the Field Notes tagline of “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now” plus that classic line about “Writing is Thinking” … putting these thoughts down in this Substack is definitely helpful.

• Btw, was at a coffee meetup this morning, someone mentioned something that I happened to write about in one of these snippet-updates like a month ago, and my ability to think more clearly about the topic in the moment was definitely enhanced by the fact that I wrote about it a month ago. So yeah, still a good use of time.

• Hey if you have feedback on this – format, content, whatever… send me a note! @dens on Threads.

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