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Hermit Crabs & Kidney Donations

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A spoken-and-transcribed guest-post courtesy of Partner, who caught upwards of seven hermit crabs today: 

Hermit Crab Homes

Hermit crabs grow, but their shells don’t, because hermit crabs don’t grow their shells but find them. When a hermit crab grows too big for a shell, it will find a bigger one. If the bigger one is too big for that hermit crab, it will just hang out near the shell, in the hope that some other hermit crab will come take that bigger shell and leave behind its shell. Because of this, you can get a whole line of hermit crabs: several smaller hermit crabs are waiting to size up their shell. As soon as a bigger hermit crab comes and takes that too-big shell, it will free up a slightly smaller shell, and then another hermit crab could take that slightly smaller shell, etc., trickling down. 

It’s like the kidney donation chain. 

The Kidney Donation Chain

If I wanted to give you my kidney, but you and I are not a match, we’d be out of luck unless there were two other people, one of whom wanted to donate and the other to receive, and we were a reciprocal match so could swap. But generally, there are so many factors required for a kidney to fit that a direct swap is improbable. And they only let something like two or three people form a loop because they want to operate all at once. They’re afraid that, if they do them sequentially, the buddy of the first person to get a kidney will renege on his donation at the end of the loop because his incentive to give is gone. 

Because of this structure, someone donating the kidney without needing a kidney for a friend or family member can change that loop from a loop into a line, which is really mathematically beneficial. And the altruistic donor is just giving away the kidney, no one’s on the hook for getting a kidney back to them, so there’s no risk of someone chickening out. If you choose to donate your kidney, you can kick off a chain that doesn’t just help the one person you are donating your kidney to, but can actually help all the people who exist in that chain, which can be a dozen people or more. 

BBC Earth video on hermit crab shell swaps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dnocPQXDQ

Info on starting a kidney donation chain, including a way to get 5 loved ones to the top of the donation line if they ever need a kidney but you already gave yours away: https://www.kidneyregistry.com/for-donors/start-a-chain/

Costa Rica Conversations

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Today, I am at a resort in Costa Rica. I swam in the ocean. Partner caught a lizard, a crab, and a pufferfish. I ate tasty food. I helped a friend with a Big Life Project. 

At breakfast, I ordered a matcha latte. Five minutes later, the waiter returned to say: “We’re out of matcha so I brought you a latte and a shot of Bailey’s.” Ah yes, the classic recipe: one unwanted cafe latte plus one 10am shot of liquor equals one cup of Japanese tea. 

Yesterday, when my parents and Partner were in the shuttle en route to the hotel, I called to give them advice. I told them how to check in and which receptionist was particularly competent. I finished by saying, “And Costa Rica is a very safe place, but part of that safety comes from the fact that they have a community warning system: everyone claps when there’s danger.” Little did they know: whenever a new guest arrives to this hotel, the staff claps. Upon hearing of this tale, my sister commented to my Partner about me: “There is nothing worse than when he’s not trolling”. Because apparently, while these trolls can be tough, the spots where she incorrectly thinks that I’m trolling are even worse 🤡

At dinner: 

Waiter: “This menu, are you finished with it?” 

Me: “You can leave it.” 

Waiter: “Can I take it?” 

Me: “You can leave it.” 

Watier: <Moves to take menu>

Me: “You can leave it.” 

Maybe this guy needs to spend more time with my toddler nephew to learn that “Can I?” can sometimes be met with the response “no”. 

The Coupon Book

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The goal of the game is to make money. You make more money by giving some away, then charging for what stays scarce.

I’m at the second all-inclusive resort of my life. So why do I feel nickel-and-dimed?

(My family comes together for one of these every summer now, which is a lovely experience. I’m having a great time with great people. This feeling is not a particularly negative impact on my experience; I’m simply enjoying the process of analyzing it.) 

It started at check-in, when the concierge handed me a coupon book. He flagged one asterisk: the $50-off coupon for the resort store needs a purchase of at least $100. I laughed and noted I wouldn’t wouldn’t be using that one.

A coupon book. At an all-inclusive. The whole premise of the place is that I already paid, so nothing else carries a price. A coupon is a price dressed up in a faux discount. The coupon book is a store smuggled into a building labeled “no stores allowed”. 

* * *

Once I noticed the first coupon, I couldn’t stop. $50 off a single spa treatment, which made me wonder what a spa treatment costs. I found the menu advertised in the bar and scoffed: treatments start at $229. I can get an excellent massage in the US for half that, and that’s paying US labor prices, not whatever a masseuse earns in central america. 

This is couponing the Bed Bath & Beyond way: float the sticker high, then hand back a slice, so the discount feels like a gift instead of a markup you sidestepped. It’s comparison control, the price game I keep coming back to. Anchor the number at $229 and $50 off reads as generous. Nobody mentions the seller number that should orient their side of the price: their marginal cost of providing the service. 

And the asterisk gives that number away. The same way Chipotle running a 2-for-1 tells you a burrito nets more than 50%, this resort’s $50 off of $100 in the gift shop tells me the same. They’re not discounting into a loss on purpose. If they can afford to give it back, they were charging too much to begin with.

* * *

The second move is the paid upgrade, and it bothers me more, because it breaks the frame on purpose. (At this resort, that’s the “Star Class” upgrade: your room and food become slightly nicer, and you can book Star Class-exclusive dinner tables.) The whole reason to buy an all-inclusive is to delete the transaction. No prices on the menu, no small voice doing math at dinner. If I wanted the experience of paying for something nice, I would have booked a place where I pay for something nice. The upgrade sells me back the exact friction I paid to be rid of.

* * *

So why build it this way? Why sell “everything included,” then spend the week selling more?

My best guess: once everyone holds the same all-inclusive wristband, everyone wants the same scarce things. The 7pm table at the good restaurant. The shaded poolside chairs. Put a few hundred people on identical footing and they start competing, and anywhere people compete over something scarce, there’s money in tilting the field.

So the resort sells you a basic entry ticket. Then it sells weapons to both sides: the upgrade that jumps the dinner queue, the tier that reserves your chair before dawn. What you’re buying, on top of the vacation, is a position in a contest they built.

* * *

I don’t write any of this with a clenched jaw. I came here to stop running the numbers, and on a vacation the only points worth counting are relaxation, enjoyment, and connection. I’m racking those up, surrounded by people I love. I just can’t switch off the part of me that wants to see the machine.

And the machine is simpler than it looks. If something is free, someone finds the version of it that isn’t, and sells you that. If free, then freemium. Even here? Especially here.

You’re Excellent at Friendship

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To learn what you’re good at, ask other people. Even better, see what people pay you for.

Earlier today, I told a friend he’s excellent at friendship. He was surprised. He’d never thought of himself that way. He asked how I knew.

Here’s how: we’d just been talking about his bachelor party, a roomful of strong, eccentric personalities, every one a distinct weirdo, many of whom would never otherwise share a room. He gets along beautifully with all of them. Holding that many particular people close at once takes real skill. That skill is friendship. He has it without knowing.

This not-knowing is common. The people who are good at a thing are often the last to know it, because unmeasured skills are tough to compare. We can check the scored ones, though even there the ego cooks the books: somehow every poker player says they’re at the 75th percentile. The scoreless skills, friendship among them, keep no count we can read. So we stay blind to our placing within them.

Take the word “driven.” I have found the people who call themselves driven to be, more often than not, the lazy ones, using the word as a permit: “I’m usually such a hard worker, so I’ve earned a little time off.” The genuinely hard worker, meanwhile, tends to grind precisely because they’re convinced they’re too lazy. Their self-image points the opposite way from the truth. The person who repeatedly calls themselves happy is trying to convince someone, either themselves or others.

So most of us don’t know what we’re good at. We learn from outside, from what others reflect back, because the trait is relative and others judge it better than we do. The blindness runs deeper than skill: we can’t see our own traits, and those same traits decide both what we’re good at and what’s good for us.

This distinction gets even tougher when adding internal emotions: I’ve been turning this over today because two companies interviewed me. One piqued my interest immediately. The other, once I learned the details, is the better fit. It’s almost exactly what I’ve already done, less of a stretch. (“I’ve done all these pieces, just not in this precise combination”, I told them.) Being more drawn to the first isn’t evidence that it’s the better place for me. Being drawn to something is how marketing wins. My interest is one ingredient. When running the ikigai exercise, “what do I love?” is one question out of four. Love is helpful. It isn’t the whole answer. Yes, everyone needs passion. But passion can’t buy food. 

Here, what I’m good at aligns with what’s good for me, but they’re disconnected from what I’m drawn to. 

The thing you’re drawn to and the label you claim are stories about who you are, and the story is selling something. Identity has a downside we rarely count.

When choosing between passion and survival; when choosing between love or life, it is the martyr who chooses love. We reward the martyr with fame and acclaim. Pity they cannot spend it.

A Sales Problem, Not a Marketing Problem

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The goal of the game is to make money. You make money by selling. You sell with a playbook, not a bigger funnel.

A person I met yesterday is looking for marketing help. I think he’s wrong. 

He’d paid someone $25,000 to post constantly and drive traffic to his site. He was dissatisfied, given the large outlay (his whole company only makes a few hundred thousand dollars a year). I looked at his website. He doesn’t have a marketing problem. He has a sales problem.

What is marketing, and what is sales?

Marketing is not an intrinsic good.

To a company, money is an intrinsic good. One could reasonably argue that revenue and costs are therefore intrinsic. Even culture – which is incredibly impactful – is only instrumental, since for this particular game, the goal is money. Marketing is also instrumental: what you actually want is to sell.

Take sales and marketing to their logical extreme: 

  • A pure salesperson with no marketing is a traveling salesman knocking on doors. It’s slow and expensive, but it works. 
  • All marketing and no sales is the reverse: every eyeball on earth is on your company, but you have no way to take their money.

So what does a good salesperson actually do? Not just put the product in front of people. For something complex, like a SaaS tool, they’re handling objections, talking through integrations, working out which pain points it solves. They’re getting to the right person: is it the college IT guy, the professor, or the dean? The fundraiser, or the head of the university? Sometimes that means bouncing through a few people to get there.

Sales is also theatrical: taking someone on a journey that ends at the solution to their problems.

Sales is the funnel: wide at the top, narrowing as people move down, with customers at the bottom. People drop out at any stage; the good fits make it down, the bad fits fall away.

Marketing is different. Marketing sits above the funnel and feeds it: catching attention, nudging people toward interest.

And marketing is often much more wishy-washy (I say this as someone who’s worked in it most of my life). It’s about how we want to be perceived, how we want to relate. 

Removing people from the equation: 

  • Marketing is the ads you see on another site.
  • Sales is the checkout flow on the site. 

A sales process is a repeatable playbook for getting someone to buy. It covers:

  • Which personas actually buy
  • What they find convincing
  • What they fear, and how you assuage it
  • The pricing

A salesperson also runs field research: selling in the wild, then coming back with data.

Back to my guy

Let’s say he sells IT software to universities, through what look like channel partners, and that has gotten him to reliable revenue. If you’re a go-getter CEO who was active at your own school, with a big-enough family wired into a few other alumni networks, you can probably close three or four deals on warm intros alone.

So you think: I just need more people in the funnel, then I’ll close them. But if your process is a handful of local channel partners (one runs hackathons, another chess clubs, another debate), more volume does nothing when your hackathon guy doesn’t know how to sell. He can’t expand his close past the set of folks who he understands. Enthusiasm can take you from 0 to 1, but you need a reliable process to go from 1 to N. 

An ideal playbook, once you’ve stood up the sales team, looks like:

  • How to filter for the people worth talking to
  • Which stakeholders to reach
  • The objections you’ll hit
  • How to overcome them
  • Then the soft stuff: rapport, persuasion, all the convincing

So now, my question: 

  • What happens when I tell this guy that he doesn’t need a marketer; he needs a salesperson? 
  • Will he hire me to stand up his sales team? 
  • I bet I could do it. I’m hungry for exactly this sort of role with exactly this sort of impact. The product is one I’m interested in. I’ve done all the pieces that this role has (sales, travel, small-team hustle, bushwhacking in a novel area, coaching); this role is just combining them in a new way. 

I’ve already marketed to him. The question: Can I close the sale? 

Games Played

I saw a play today about the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of Hollywood. I did not expect the play to increase my sympathy toward the investigator’s position. But it did. 

Before the play, my perception of the investigation can be summed up as “it was a witch-hunt”. 

After the play, my new conclusion: Yes, it was a witch hunt. But – as made clear by the Korean War – there actually was witchcraft (Communism), and there actually were witches (people who wanted to replace the US constitutional government with communism). But these people (the Hollywood actors) were not the witches. 

Finding My People

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Most of success is just showing up. But showing up to the right place… 

Before I moved to New York, I told my Partner that merely by living here, I’d find work. There’s so much economic opportunity in this city that I’d harness some.

One month in, I met a former founder who hired me to ghostwrite a blog post.

Three months later (two weeks ago), a random VC firm pinged me on LinkedIn about a private-markets mixer. I signed up. Yesterday, the organizer texted to make sure I was actually coming.

En route to the club, I noticed that I smelled. So I ducked into a CVS for deodorant. Not a good start.

I entered the club at 3:51pm. The doorman made me take off my hat. Getting worse.

At 4pm, the hosts arrived. They’d expected a room more suited to their needs: an open room, not a big table ringed with chairs. Rough continuation.

Upstairs, another host told me to take off my hat again. Ugh, come on. 

For the next 90 minutes, I met mostly people in wealth management and late-stage investing. Not my areas.

But then! Someone walked in with a pep in his step, someone I immediately pegged as Interesting. I snuck my way over. He grows hydroponic ginseng for a healthy soda company. He sold his last startup, a guitar-amplifier company. Now he wants to bring this healthy soda to the world.

And another! A guy doing video-based sabermetrics for sports other than baseball. And he’s complaining about marketing. These are my people. The ones I can help.

We exchanged emails. I’ll message them about coffee.

All in all, a very successful meeting.

If you show up as your specific self, you’ll meet the people you can actually help. 

Also, I ate 4 lamb lollipops, 2 falafel balls, and 1 small slice of fig pizza. I count that as a win.

Games Played

Me at the bathroom supply store: “Are you salaried or paid on commission?” 

Salesperson: “I’m not going to share that information.” 

Me in my mind: <Commission it is.> 

Keep Your Joy Closed?

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Oh, Julian! 

After seeing my favorite Broadway show I have ever seen (Oh, Mary!, starring Maya Rudolph), I was unusually open to the world. Filled with joy and sharing it with the world.

Walking toward the subway, a man in Times Square hands me a flier for his music. I take it and keep walking. He catches up and says, “you won’t shake a black man’s hand?” I shake his hand and keep going. He says, “what’s the hurry?” I say, “I gotta catch the train.” He says, “wait, I gotta sign it.”

Another guy says, “keep walking, it’s a scam.”

The flier-hander retorts: “what’s a scam? A scam is my dick in your mouth!”

I give back the flier and keep walking. I ask the guy who warned me, “what’s the scam?”

“He asks you for money and acts intimidating.”

This wasn’t a random encounter. It’s a scripted hustle running a reciprocity ladder: 

  • The “free” flier creates obligation. 
  • The handshake escalates it. 
  • “I gotta sign it” – him writing my name – makes it mine. 
  • Then the ask plus some menace closes it. 

I don’t think the lesson is to keep my joy closed. What a sad, sad world that would be. 

The last time I had my joy open in Midtown Manhattan, someone punched me in the chest. 

I think the lesson is something closer to: be fast, funny, or fight. I shook his hand; we would have escalated further. I’m pretty speedy: would simply sprinting have been my move? 

The scam and the sadness: that’s the toll for living in the greatest city in the world. 

Oh, New York!

Loops That Contain Loops

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Loops within loops, which naturally grab me. 

A friend came over for board games. We played no board game. Instead, I convinced him to attend clown school and I mentioned the video game I’ve been playing. This game prompted him to ask curious questions. I offered to show him. He delightedly agreed! We played together for about 3 hours. Now he’s going to buy a copy so we can play multiplayer together on Tuesday. 

My description of the game’s structure intrigued him. I told him: “I like games with loops that contain other loops”. This game has many loops, each subsetting and supersetting in intriguing ways.

The Game (“Slay the Spire 2”) contains 17 Tiers, which contain 3 Levels, which each contain 18 Rooms, which could each be one of 5 Types, in which you add and subtract Cards from your Deck, which contains further-modifiable Cards. And you can traverse the whole Game as 5 different characters.

Its structure reminds me of a game I play with my Partner. When she does something well, I assign her some number of points – e.g.  “Two points for [Partner]!” When she accumulates 10 points, she can exchange the points for a ticket. When she collects 10 tickets, she can exchange them for a token. When she collects 10 tokens, she can exchange them for a point. (The score works because it’s arbitrary and pointless. If it were serious, I think it would be bad.) 

My highschool computer science teacher commented that I naturally think recursively. This interest may just touch a natural predilection. 

Partner has thusfar accumulated just over 45 points. I’m not sure she understands the rules. 

I like games like that, but bigger and grander and everywhere. 

A Conservatory-Trained Beggar

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The goal of the game is to survive. You survive by earning a living. You earn a living by choosing the corner, not perfecting the song.

His sign reads “food for my baby and / my family can you help / me with a job / God bless you”, and hot damn can this guy play violin.

The last time I saw a violinist of such emotional expression, I located her on instagram, spotted she was recently married, and messaged her anyway to ask her out. She did not respond. 

This guy stations on Broadway between 88th st and 89th st, outside the shuttered retail store beside the Wells Fargo. He plucks. He strums. He fingers. He twangs. He draws a crowd.

The crowd contains a woman sitting on her walker, her caretaker, a woman of about 60 who offers me a tissue when she hears me sniffle, and Yours Truly. Not a bad crowd for a horrendous location.

Five children pass with their two adults. They stop. The male adult says “this is Mozart”.

When passing through Lisbon, I met a local trumpeter. He asked where I live. I told him New York. He loves New York. He can earn $800 or $900 per day in 3 or 4 hours of play, he told me. He played on the east side of Central Park, by the fountain where the summer sailboats swim.

This violinist, in 15 minutes, made maybe $5. $20 per hour is not the rate you’re looking for, my guy. You want a spot with greater throughput.

Just as musical skill does not determine a musician’s popularity, musicality does not determine a busker’s success.

A busker sells music. And like any retail in New York, location matters. But his store is even more tailored.

His sign asks for a job. He doesn’t need a job. He needs to make this one work.

He plays a few classical pieces, then a jewish one. He might know he’s on the Upper West Side (a Jewish hub). I wonder if he knows something I don’t know. I don’t think he does. But how would I know? 

I thanked him for decorating my space via a $3 venmo donation. I had just spent $3 on 18 ounces of blackberries. The least I can do is contribute an equivalent amount of thanks to him.

Hold up: he’s now looping. I’ve heard this song before. From him, like 10 minutes ago.

Are these his only songs? His only moneymakers? Does he loop the same 10-minute concert? That would be very New York of him. My first time living in New York, I donated to a guitarist in Central Park when he played a song of emotional resonance to me. I only realized when I returned the following day that he plays that same set on loop because my song has emotional resonance for everyone.

Most of the donations come from passers-by, not from the crowd. The crowd helps: without us, fewer would stop and listen. But this guy is good enough that he would grab attention even if I weren’t here.

Around 15 minutes in, the battery on his backing track died.

Location and preparation: not his strengths. Violin: absolutely.

I once spitballed with a friend the idea of A/B testing homeless beggar signs. What works, where, for whom.

The problem with that business, aside from the ethical qualms: an unreliable workforce. Data collection and reliable money collection: not good.

I wonder how much I could make as a beggar in NYC. If I cosplayed and A/B tested. What is a beggar but an emotional street performer? This violinist creates beauty. The beggar creates pity. A clown creates joy. French beggars prostrate themselves. American ones open doors to Dunkin Donuts in hopes of capitalizing on the reciprocity. 

I bet I’d enjoy A/B testing different begging in NYC. And by “begging”, I include street performing in general. Be a psychic one day, a debater another, a jokester a third.

The performer’s baby watches videos on a cell phone. Its mother (presumably his wife) swipes. The king’s kids just call him dad.

After the performance, the audience member with the tissue introduces herself as Vicky. Vicky tells me if she were eating the blackberries I was eating, she would have spilled them all over herself. I offer her a clamshell of blackberries. She declines. I tell her about my favorite fruit vendor, where they’re only $1 per 6oz clamshell. Vicky tells me the performer is conservatory-trained, from Venezuela. Everyone around her becomes successful, she says. She tells me the violinist used to play a block south. Now he’s here. Vicky asks for my information and I tell her about my trumpeter friend. I approach the performer to scan his Venmo. Vicky tells the violinist I have something to say. I ask him, through a translator: how did he choose this place? He tells me he lives in the Bronx. I say this street: how did you choose this street? He says by walking (which I interpret as arbitrary). I tell him that my buddy the trumpeter used to play at that location in Central Park and made $800 in 3-4 hours. Vicky says she’ll miss him.

I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. I’d like to. But if I don’t, is that better?

Flogging & Flourishing

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A beautiful experience and the shame that exiles it.

At Burning Man about 10 years ago, two friends asked if I wanted to join them for an intro-to-flogging workshop. I accepted. We trudged across the dusty playa to a tent filled with straps, crosses, benches, and massage tables: the sort of image you’d expect in a BDSM dungeon on TV, except all these were dusty and out in the open, not locked in some basement.

The leader started his talk. He’s a massage therapist, he said, and he thinks of flogging (and BDSM in general) not as an activity about pain, but as a massage with tools. Just as you can create physical experiences of excitement or relaxation or healing in someone’s body using your hands, so too can you create those experiences using tools.

Fair enough.

He asked for a volunteer, asked the volunteer if they had any sensitive areas or pain, and began to demonstrate. His demonstration started slowly: gently bringing blood to the surface, arousing some awareness of the area without any pain. It accelerated: increasing the intensity or the vigor or the speed (sometimes all three at once). He took the volunteer over her edge. She winced. He eased up, comforted her, ensured she felt safe, and continued. The key, he said, was that people have the capacity to go much farther than they believe. Sometimes, we just require a little help.

After the demonstration, an assistant asked us to pair up. The attendees were an odd number, so my group was a group of three: me and my two friends (a man and a woman who were romantically dating and would go on to marry around five years later). First, the man flogged the woman. Then the woman flogged the man. Then I asked the woman if she would like to be my recipient. She agreed. The man interrupted by telling me, “Actually, you’re going to be flogging me.” I did, then we switched, and he flogged me.

I loved it. Adored it. The experience of relaxed sublimity equates only to the perfect calm felt under a heavy blanket or, I presume, a cattle squeeze chute. If you’ve ever loved a hot sauna or a vigorous workout or the endorphins of a long run, you’ll probably like an expert flogging.

Most people don’t talk about this experience. When a BDSM-inspired scene comes on the TV, they avert their eyes or switch channels. We shame kink and the people who like it. No one who has ever been flogged could get elected president.

That makes me sad. Very sad. It was a beautiful experience with wonderful people, the sort of deep and connective touch we share too infrequently.

Thinking about that experience prompts a sad longing in me: the sort one feels when recalling a long-forgotten friend: our life paths diverged and a decade passed, but I would like to snuggle up with them again.