The Hippie Viking Blog

Steve Jobs was able to control Apple in such a way that his vision of how things need to work actually made it into the products. As a consumer, I felt that he was emotionally connected to the way that the things that Apple produced worked, and that emotional commitment transferred to me. I do not feel that anyone is committed that way to Apple any more. Here are some examples of things that just don't work the right way, but someone had to make a conscious choice to make them not work the right way. Playlists: If I add a song to a playlist on my phone, sync it to my Mac, I now get "Playlist 1". What?! That is just terrible. Who decided that this is the way that I want playlists to work? There is a "sync" button that is short for "synchronize" which is a misnomer, because that's not what it's doing. Please. Synchronize my playlists.  "Relocated Items" folder on the desktop. Please. No. Stop. Don't do that. Why are you placi...

I am constantly reminded of how the right environment well change my behavior. When sitting outside in a park allowing the sun to hit my skin and feel the breeze, I begin to relax. My thoughts slow and my breathing deepens. When I am in a crowded store and I have to keep fighting for position to get where I need to go, I have the opposite reaction. External space creates inner stillness and external chaos creates internal stress. Although it is possible to train yourself to manage chaotic external environments and remain relatively calm, it requires energy sometimes in the form of willpower in order to accomplish that. The default behavior that requires the least amount of energy is dependent upon the environment. The healthiest environment is an environment where the lowest energy choice is the highest quality choice. You are in control of the environments that you exist in. When you create an environment for yourself that makes the default option the healthy option you maximize your ...

If you have never experienced the Phil Hendrie show , I invite you to be severely entertained. Sometimes there is a person so talented, so unique, and just enjoyable on so many levels that you just have to divert your attention to them. My favorite shows are the ones where ostensibly a listener flipping through the radio hears the show, not knowing that all of the voices are one person, and calls the show irate and highly opinionated in opposition to one of the personalities. Then the other "people" start piling on, and a giant verbal brawl ignites. So many levels of funny. So much wit. You just have to experience his show.

This is a list of books that have impacted me. I annotated each so that hopefully that can help you (me?) know the "why" behind this book's relevance. Criteria for making the list: - Clear, readable prose (no Academese ) - Contains profound ideas that have improved my daily life after integrating them - Inclusive: Implementing the ideas does not require specialized pre-requisite skill - Passes the "lots of underlining" test. If the book is full of ink, it's made an impact on me My humble request of you: Please assign more weight to my annotations than the title of the book, or any pre-conceptions (if any) you have about the author. The Organized Mind Relevance: Reduces stress and "anxiety loops" by providing specific techniques for leveraging an "externalized attentional filter" so that you can remove things from your list of concerns with confidence. Who Referred it to me? Justin Bergh via the Julie Foucher "Pursuing H...

A "complaint" in the professional sense, due to dissatisfaction with a service or product is sometimes necessary in order to protect what we value. However, the complaining that I am referring to is when adults decide to hold a negative viewpoint of a given person, place, thing or idea and decide to tell us alllll about it. For example: "I can't believe he did that. He is such a jerk, and I have no idea how anybody even likes him. He has no consideration for others, and I just think that..." on...and on..... That kind of complaining is actually a form of arrogance. Because effectively what the person is saying is "My viewpoint is superior to their viewpoint, and I KNOW every detail of the situation, and would make a better choice in that situation than them." Complaining is a way to strengthen our own precarious, fearful and fragile egos at the expense of someone else. Often someone who is not within earshot, so that they don't even have the opport...

I did not take any photos with my dad when I was visiting him. The initial reason was that I have an old phone with a broken camera. That constraint made me think a lot about how I wanted to preserve these moments. But is a photo the optimal way? A photo captures and transmits only a small amount of information. The photographer is responsible for capturing the right data to convey the right information. But I am not a photographer. There are skills for accomplishing this that I don't have, and I really want to remember the experiences, not one instant in time within those experiences. So what other tools do I have at my disposal to process, distill and express my memories of those experiences? Language. Art. Poetry. Music. But am I relaying these experiences to others, or am I documenting them for myself so that I can recall them later? Ideally both. I guess great art is marked by it's ability to convey the emotional impact of an experience for those who did not have the oppor...

Oakmont Of Montecito  is where my Dad is living now, and I have been very impressed with the level of care. I needed to give a shout out to the saint-like work that is being done there by all the caregivers top to bottom. As I was sitting with Dad watching a bit of the "greatest speeches" activity, I will never forget when The President Obama election night speech came on (16:20). As dad and I listened to the soaring oration, I looked over and noticed a tear streaming down his face. My dad is deeply moved by powerful moments like this, and I was so grateful to be there with him while we shared this experience. This got me thinking about how conscientious my dad is. He is respectful of authority to a fault. He honors the majority, and does not rock the boat himself, but when he sees others breaking down barriers, he is deeply moved by it. I will never forget this moment with my Dad.

The excellent book "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown describes what an essentialist is. I would like to personalize it in one pithy example. Coffee. I love coffee. Not mocha frappaccinos. Not sweet cream cold brews...coffee. You know? Hot Water over ground up roasted coffee berries?. And I have only too recently discovered how remarkably bad most coffee is, once my taste buds had been exposed to carefully prepared...coffee. The essence of coffee is the flavor that emerges from a long series of successful preparations. Once you experience the essence of coffee - not the sugar added to it, not the hazelnut creamer...but the coffee itself, you may appreciate it the way I do. It starts with coffee that is grown in a particular region of the world. I know very little about is part. Then, there is a process of making sure that the berries are properly roasted (probably a bunch of important stuff in here, I am ignorant to). The roasted beans then need to be ground using a burr grinder,...

Flow is an optimal experience that is characterized by high levels of engagement & challenge. The writer who sits for hours engaged in the creative process, the jazz musician improvising, the painter immersed in a work, the computer programmer designing & writing code. These experiences have very stringent requirements. Here are some things that can kill flow: Programming: - Slow builds - Ambiguous error messages - Too much or not enough feedback - Timeouts set too lax - The wrong font - brittle or fragile interfaces with external dependencies - incorrect color coding - inconsistent formatting - excessive typing required to say a simple thing The real world is very engaging for us because it gives us immediate and clear feedback. Most things in the digital world do not live up to this, and we are left anxiously waiting. Imagine if every time a saxaphone player blew a note, it would arrive at some random time in the future between 1 and 5 seconds. That's the cra...

I was recently working in the free version of the unity gaming environment, and in this case, I most definitely got what I paid for. Regardless of the successes that might come after submitting to it's will, the environment itself dictates my level of motivation to interact with it, which diminishes with every defect and design flaw I encounter. In order to enjoy the process of something, you have to first have the right environment. The context you are in either sets you up for success or failure. If you are fighting your environment like a rough neighborhood, it is less likely that you will have the ability to enjoy the process of learning and growing up. Making strides to improve the environment I operate in will pay huge dividends, because it will incentivize me to want to operate in that environment. Once I enjoy the environment, then I can enjoy the process of creating things within that environment. When people talk about "look and feel" of a thing, I believe they ...

Elon Musk made an astute point about the ridiculousness of connecting our intelligence to the global internet through our thumbs on a smartphone. He is creating a better interface to that world through NeuralLink. Steve Jobs was floored by the graphical user interface, which used the desktop metaphor to extend something familiar from the physical world into the virtual world. But I have had the opportunity to be near the elderly for the past few days and there is a certain intensity to the real connections that they have with the physical world around them. They know something that I think we are going to feel silly about once we realize it's truth: Being in the physical presence of another human being is still the optimal user interface for a human being. There is no more efficient way to move forward with any particular shared goal than to have willing participants coming together in the flesh. I have a difficult time feeling comfortable with this truth, but it is undeniably the ...

There is nothing that can replace experience. Nothing. Why is that? Why is it that in order to be able to "know" what it is like to walk down the street at PatPong market in Thailand at night, you have to actually DO that? To smell the food in the air. To hear the conversations. To feel the sweltering night air. To see how the people interact. And...alternatively, how is it that we think we know what a thing really is without having experienced it? To the first point, the act of experiencing something immerses you in that experience. You interact with the person, place or thing. You form a relationship with it. You become emotionally invested in it. There is another factor involved as well - You have opened yourself up to that experience and that opening up is a sunk cost which biases you to generate a deeper emotional connection to the experience. If you have to take a week off work, and pay a large sum of money to travel somewhere, you are much more likely to want to get so...

We live in the age of amplification. Egos, Opinions and Reactions (EOR) are louder than they have ever been, because they have been given a megaphone through social media where once those shrill voices would have been largely ignored. It is true that healthy and positive information has also been amplified, but I will leave that aside for now. This amplification of EOR serves to increase the labeling of people in a group, especially when a small segment of bad apples in that group are being reacted to. For example, if someone posts a disparaging comment about someone in the LBGTQ+ community, citing their Christianity as the reason for their comment, and this creates a loud reactionary movement, it is much more likely that all Christians will be grouped together by those reactionaries as holding the same viewpoint as that Christian who made the comment. This grouping is entirely due to the reader's decision to engage in  categorical thinking . It also means that Christians who hold ...

I think it was the book "The Organized Mind" that coined the phrase that the brain is an exquisite change detector. I witnessed this today. I was going to come back home on foot from dropping off a car at the mechanic's shop about 3 miles from home. The thought of walking that distance seemed boring and "long". I decided that since I was not going to CrossFit, and instead getting my exercise this way that I should add some intensity. So I did 1 minute sprints with a 5 minute walk (1:5 work/rest ratio). The interesting side effect is that while I was recovering, I was covering a lot of distance while observing the changes that my body was experiencing...breathing slowing, heartrate coming back under control, muscles feeling ready to work again, etc. I was really enjoying the experience of my body's changes happening, before I stressed it again. My brain seemed to enjoy the variance of intensity & recovery *more* than it would have if I would have just don...

"Repetition is the mother of pedagogy" says Dennis Prager. So I have a barbell with about 50% of my 1 repetition max on it that I am teaching myself to be able to elevate off the ground when I am cold. The reasoning is that if I really am "generally physically prepared" as is my primary intent of doing CrossFit, I should be able to deadlift a heavy motorcycle off of someone who just crashed, for example. They don't have time for me to do a dynamic warm-up while their leg is being burned by a hot exhaust pipe...but my real point is about repetition as a diagnostic tool. Each time I lift that weight, my perception of the "heaviness" varies wildly. This stimulates learning because I now have a new goal which is to figure out where that inconsistency comes from. I do not have a way to predict how that weight will feel yet. It is only through repeating the lift throughout the day, every day that I can create a predictive model for how "heavy" the ...

I heard this years ago on RadioLab, and remembered it. Completely facinates me.  https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91584-time  - If you listen to the "It's All Relative" show from 10:00-15:49, you will hear two remarkable case studies of Myron and Hester. Questions and Thoughts: What mechanism could cause someone to engage in an activity believing they were operating at a "normal" speed, but really were not? What constitutes "normal" speed in the first place? Maybe if we use some kind of rhythmic anchor like "Sunrise", we could say that Myron could wipe his nose only 12 times per sunrise moving at his perceived "normal" pace, but everyone else could wipe their nose thousands of times per sunrise using their normal pace. When in the state of flow, I "lose track of time" in that I don't actually focus my attention on the passage of time. Hours can go by while I am engaged in the right activity...maybe there is so...

I watched the movie "The Great Hack" and aside from the expected response of incredulity, I also thought more about what data really is - a series of snapshots over time of where we were focusing our attention. Billboards want our attention. The traveling salesman at the circus wanted our attention. The cereal boxes at the grocery store want our attention. But this is more insidious, more invasive, because it is not just that they want our attention at this moment. They have surveilled every available moment that we have focused our attention online, and they then use this profile of attention points to maximize their opportunity to persuade you to buy their snake oil. Make no mistake. The intent of collecting our attention points and then to analyze them is to "qualify" us for the sale attempt, then sell to you.  Questions and thoughts: If a snake oil salesman spent a year watching what you did, where you went, where you shopped, what time you left the house...

We are novelty seeking beings that are also in need of enduring truths. This paradox means that we must make a distinction between "new" and "wise". Just because something is new does not mean it does or does not have wisdom. Ironically, you need wisdom in order to be able to engage in this discernment...so how do we square that? I think it takes wisdom to infuse something new with a message that is valuable. The three little pigs is a biblical teaching. (Matthew 7:24) Old wisdom repackaged constantly into skins that feel “fresh” is a good thing. I think this helps me reconcile the use of pop and rock to enable people to connect to Christ. Thoughts and questions: When is it not ok to re-package ancient wisdom in a new "product"? Why?

Because we can build new software that is increasingly more powerful at continually diminishing durations, we do. When you live at the pointy end of the spear, there is no “normal”. Change is constant, so you have to adjust your expectations that the ecosystem you are working in today may be  totally different tomorrow. The closer you live to things constrained by the natural systems of the world, the more “traction” you have to construct long term optimizations for. The speed that a blueberry becomes a blueberry is likely to stay pretty constant. On the flip side, the closer you are to living in a world constructed by human minds, like software, the more you are subjected to the insanity of egoic desire and fear which constantly pushes things in unknowable directions.

I have no idea how the economy works. I have no idea what the definition of "the economy" is. I have no idea what causes gas prices to go up and down. Could I learn these things? If they are in fact definable and learnable, then of course. But instead, I choose to trust experts to predict whether or not the economy will be good or bad in 6 months or a year from now. The criteria that I use to determine whether or not an expert is trustworthy is probably flawed. I can either spend time to determine effective criteria for distributing trust, or I can dig into the topic myself and learn about it more deeply. Any alternative to those two things is laziness, and if I feel that something is important enough to pay attention to, I have no option but to either have a framework for evaluating experts, or a lot of coffee and time to start learning about yield curves.

My tribe of introverts are actually getting a bit tiresome to listen to. I do not need the universe to bend to my need for recharging, and in fact if everyone did, it would unfairly delete a unique problem that the universe created just for me. I am capable of wearing headphones in an open plan office. I am capable of taking my own car to a party so I can leave when I have had enough. I am capable of deferring a decision when I am put on the spot to make one now. And so are you. My introvert friends, people like us are capable and empowered. If you ever feel compelled to complain about how you are misrepresented and misunderstood, I challenge you to re-empower yourself. Now go grab your book and find a quiet corner to recharge in :)

I have three calendars on my wall. One labeled Sleep, another labeled Nutrition and a third labeled CrossFit. These three domains connect to the behaviors that protect the critical systems of my physical self. If I meet the minimum requirements for a given calendar on a given day, I get a check in the box. The overriding theme is “don’t break the chain.” The minimum requirements for each are well defined. I have found this approach effective for forming the habits I want to have and it resonates well with my natural compulsion to feel good when checking things off of a list.

Our natural compulsion to protect abundance has a weaker emotional connection than our natural compulsion to get out of a deficit. If we are gambling, and started with $100, and are up to $150, the emotional excitement of that condition is not nearly as strong as the emotional pain of being down to $50. I think this is a well known field of study in psychology. I will apply this to nutrition. If we have been eating nutritious food for a solid week, there is an emotional joy of that abundance of health. If we then eat garbage for 2 days straight, the emotional sting of that deficit of health is much stronger than the emotion during abundance. questions and thoughts: What can we do to emotionally connect to the abundance we have created for ourselves so that we are able to emotionally engage in protecting that abundance?

Consider two scenarios: 1. You are stranded on a tropical island with abundant fish, vegetables, nuts and fruit 2. You have been given an unlimited budget in Las Vegas In the first scenario, you are gonna eat "Paleo" whether you like it or not. In the second scenario, your default option is the buffet where you are exposed to all kinds of decadence beyond healthy choices. These extreme examples are designed to underscore that the environment that we are in determines what our default options are; but...key here is that BOTH environments have default options - an option that consumes the smallest amount of willpower energy. Construct the right environment for yourself and you no longer have to expend energy to choose the healthy option.

We now have access to near immediate feedback from whoever we want to get feedback from. A repetitive theme wafts through tech product circles that we should focus on the "minimum viable product" (MVP) so that we can be re-informed about whether we need to make more choices about whether to adjust our trajectory. A concept that was used in the U.S. Air Force called the OODA loop has gained popularity due to the conceptual parallels even though it's original usage has been re-contextualized. Some thoughts and questions: Is "MVP" now and forevermore the best way to do all things?   What about for building a nuclear reactor?  Before MVP was en vogue, the term was "prototyping". So, we have always done this, but I guess now the cycles are shorter because the data to make the cycles shorter exists.  Defining "viable" is central to the decision making process. If "viable" means "highly unlikely it will break ...