Ok, What Happened
Things are crazy but I swear 2020 was about more than COVID-19
The Teardown
Friday :: January 29th, 2021
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I last wrote in mid-2020 about finding balance. But, balance? Lol.
2020 ended rather unceremoniously, putting aside the election. We heard some news about vaccines, but regular family holiday visits were scratched off most folks' calendars. We stayed home and celebrated with people in our immediate proximity - our own houses or apartments. Or, some of us, anyways. The TV spectacle that is New Year's Eve with Ryan Seacrest was less spectacle and a more sober reminder that we remained deep in the clutches of COVID-19.
2021 arrived like a brakeless freight train packed with explosives. I mean, really, what the hell happened? I mean that mostly rhetorically, since, you know what happened. The fun continues. Did you know that GameStop closed up 134% on January 27th after just eight hours of trading? Oh, and Bitcoin is back, sort of. Bitcoin's price crossed through $40,000 two weeks ago after its previous high-teens bubble in 2017. Twitter banned Trump - something I didn't believe they would do and remain convinced they will unwind at some point. Parlar was wiped from the internet altogether and remains offline at the moment.
That said, 2020 spawned lots of interesting bits. I narrowed my focus to the stuff below for this newsletter.
Dave Grohl Is The Man
Dave Grohl and Nandi Bushell's internet comradeship isn't about technology per se, but it happened because of technology. Video creation and editing is nearly a commodity. Most of us use high-powered video devices every day on our phones. Lots of us also use YouTube.
A quick step back: Dave Grohl is the front-man of The Foo Fighters and founding member and drummer of Nirvana, among his many notable projects (also: Queens The Stone Age). He seems to be the perfect rock-star: mega-talented, down-to-earth and articulate, and not profoundly attached to drugs like his prior band-mate. Nandi Bushell is a six-year-old girl from the U.K. that posts high-quality drumming videos on Youtube. Musicians regularly post videos on Youtube - that part of the story isn't new. Justin Bieber was discovered on Youtube in 2007. Nandi Bushell did two things that are key to the story:
She posted a video of her covering Everlong by The Foot Fighters on drums. Please go listen now if you haven’t previously heard it. But more importantly, it’s a hard song to play. I’m a drummer too! I’ve tried covering Everlong too. It’s f-king hard to play.
She challenged Dave Grohl to a drum battle just before she covered Everlong.
The New York Times article says Dave Grohl isn't a social media user. But so much discovery these days is through group and direct messaging. That's how Dave Grohl found out that he was challenged to a drum-off. And then he responded with his own challenge. The rock-star and rock-star-in-training cemented a friendship by meeting virtually and likely continue to trade the occasional message and video back and forth. It's so amazing. In fact, I nearly cry every time I read the NYT piece. I can't wait to have drum-offs with my daughter.
Conference Calls Are Sexy, Again?
Those of us helping kids through school and working somewhere other than the office are by now extraordinarily familiar with Zoom, Skype, Teams, and every other variant of conference calls. We've also watched the reemergence of HouseParty from near-death. But if I asked you six months ago whether you'd pay more than, let's say $0, to sit on more conference calls, you'd probably say no. You might even laugh a lot! And maybe avoid me altogether as a friend.
Then again, you're not Marc Andreessen - who fought and won a battle to invest $10M into Clubhouse - the future of conference calls? Actually, he and his venture firm doubled down on their initial investment as Clubhouse reportedly raised money again at a $1B valuation. The company has no revenue.
But of course, those investments aren't bets on conference calls in their normal dreary corporate state. They're bets on an app that seems to be blending components of conference calls with elements of podcasts. The latter medium is now a media darling, having been an offshoot of blogs and stuck circling around in Apple's podcast directory.
The story now and for future growth seems to be this: people like to hear each other talk, especially when sharing expertise. We travel to conferences to converse with peers and, hopefully, experts. Similarly, podcasts expose interesting discussions in pre-recorded form, and you can save them, index them, go back and forward, etc. But there aren't great ways to discover content from either format. Clubhouse tries to solve this problem by layering discovery and social on top of both formats' best components. Exclusive podcasts and conversations will live inside the app. Users will see what their friends and followers are consuming and hop into those "rooms."
California Feels The Heat | The Climate Is Coming
Literally. 2020 saw wildfires burn more acres than any prior year. Lots of blame goes to a barrage of lightning strikes that torched the state. Also, maybe you're the kid that in middle school and high school can be teased because your parents caused a wildfire in 2020, setting off fireworks to reveal your gender. Regardless, California's wildfire risk is real and growing. But it's a multi-pronged problem that won't get solved soon. Two examples to spark your thinking:
More lightning and drier and disorganized fuel (i.e. trees, brush) sets the stage for an explosive year of fires
Also, building houses near this plentiful fuel sets the stage for significant loss of property, lives, and catalyzes financial stress like few other events.
Yes, Miley Cyrus lost her house (in 2018), which was objectively tragic, but she can probably afford to buy another or rebuild. Folks that live in the less-wealthy areas or on the outskirts of cities and towns aren't so fortunate.
I work in the insurance industry and spend a significant portion of my day thinking about this topic and the many related tangents. Low-lying coastal areas are inevitably going to experience more flooding - not less. Californian's will likely see the manifestations of climate extremes through regular events like wildfires and droughts. Also, let's not forget about water in the West - it is a currently quiet (relatively speaking) but significant problem. This book about Israel's water management and this book about one of the Colorado River's major tributaries helped me learn a lot more about that problem.
But maybe the biggest issue is this: what to do with all the people that call these problem areas home. Let's just say that time is up and they need to move. Where should they go? Should we expect them to pick up and adjust? Who will help them with this life-altering situation? And will they move unknowingly into another problem area? The problem space is enormous. The solution will require cooperation that doesn't feel likely anymore. And, money, lots of money. This New York Times piece discusses lots of details.
Everyone Else Discovers Discord
Make no mistake, Discord was alive and well quite a long time before the pandemic. The app is popular among gamers and a younger demographic. It mastered voice chat before most folks cared about voice chat that was, um, conference calls. Then, from Protocol:
In early 2020, as Discord was embarking on a big redesign and rebranding exercise designed to help it appeal more broadly, COVID happened. Suddenly, stuck at home, everyone's social life turned to the internet. Discord's user numbers increased by 47% from February to July, and all those newbies discovered what millions of gamers already knew: that having a place to hang out with their friends is a powerful thing, and that Discord did it better than anyone. Study groups started using Discord; teachers used it for class; friends used it to hang the way they normally would after school or on the weekend.
My guess is Discord's userbase is overwhelmingly dominated by the original demographics I mentioned. But Wall Street Bets is there. And so are many others that aren't specifically about gaming, or teens, or anything ordinarily associated with totally lame adults that use terms like "woke" and "bruh" as if they know what they mean.
Is Discord the next mass communication network? Maybe. But if I ask you to join my server so we can voice and video chat, post memes, and generally keep in touch, will you join or find another friend?
Robinhood Is A Scourge
By now, you know about Robinhood. Free trading is awesome, right? Democracy for all! Under all that democracy confetti is a trading platform lauded for gamifying the interface used to execute investment strategies and/or conspiracies.
The company is most recently in the news for enabling a significant surge in retail trading because, well, it doesn’t cost anything to sign up and trade. It’s also very recently in the news for suspending trading of GameStop and other Reddit-pressured stocks and giving the edge back to the warlords of finance rather than the average trader. I’m sure we know won’t know exactly what happened, but this New York Times article describes the situation as an entirely normal fix to an extremely abnormal problem.
Have you ever used Robinhood? No? Ok, good. Perhaps it is best to stay away. I once traded here and there on Robinhood. The interface pleased me relative to other platforms such as ETrade and Vanguard.
But the fun ended there. Over time, I somehow opened two accounts at Robinhood using the same email address. There were active positions in both accounts. Logging into the website was a trial-and-mostly-error process as I wasn't sure which account I would see. I explained this problem to Robinhood while rolling all over my funds over to another brokerage, and that's when things really went south. Robinhood customer support was, at best, not responsive. Their answers were, at best, not helpful. I needed something simple: a phone call with a human to sort out the mess. Repeated asks met with repeated silence. Repeated asks met with repeated silence. Finally, after months of back and forth nonsense, my situation evolved:
Robinhood told me that I wasn't allowed to possess two accounts and suspended them both.
I managed to get my hands on the right documentation and used ACATS to pull out my cash and invested positions
I'm still locked in Robinhood account jail. And I don't have an answer on how to properly sign into both accounts. What a mess. Never again.