Author Archives: Steve Mays

Interviews

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This is a little housekeeping post. A list of people with whom I have done interviews. A search by name should take you to these. This link will pull them all up.

Allen Hammock Interview

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In 1995 CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy started providing dial-up Internet access and people started getting online. In April some tech folks from the University of Missouri came to our offices in Jefferson City and gave us a demo of the “World Wide Web” and our first look at Netscape Navigator. I can’t speak for the others in the meeting but I was mightily impressed.

I knew a bit about the Internet but nothing about how to create a website or register a domain, so I contacted Mike McKean, a professor at the J-School at the University of Missouri, and asked if he could put me in touch with a student who knew how to do this stuff. He introduced me to Dan Arnall, a senior journalism major. Dan was technically adept but he brought along Allen Hammock who was majoring in computer science. Dan and Allen were high school classmates in Springfield, Missouri, and were in members of a student leadership organization at Mizzou.

In this 12 minute interview, Allen shares some of his recollections of the exciting three years that followed.

The “useless class” and a new quest for purpose

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I was so impressed by Yuval Harari’s latest book it took me three blog posts to event touch on a few of his big ideas. In an article in The Guardian, he expands on a couple of (related) ideas: Basic Income and religion-as-virtual reality. He wrote at length about both of these in Homo Deus but I think the Guardian piece is new (not excerpts from his book).

I agree with Professor Harari that some kind of Basic Income is inevitable. It’ll happen because the wealthy will see it as the best (only?) way to protect all their shit. And what will we all do when we don’t have to have a job? One possibility is virtual reality.

For thousands of years, billions of people have found meaning in playing virtual reality games. In the past, we have called these virtual reality games “religions.” […] What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions such as Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat the same prayers a set number of times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody from your own gender” and so forth. These laws exist only in the human imagination. No natural law requires the repetition of magical formulas, and no natural law forbids homosexuality or eating pork. Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain points in their favorite virtual reality game. If you pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray, you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game (aka heaven).

I really can’t see a flaw in that comparison. Unless you count, “Yeah, but Heaven and Hell are real and Grand Theft Auto Six is not.”

When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings. There is no holiness anywhere. But when you look through the medium of smartbooks (such as the Bible and the Qur’an), you see holy places and angels everywhere.

Whoa. The two big holy books as VR devices. And how about a game we all play?

Consumerism too is a virtual reality game. You gain points by acquiring new cars, buying expensive brands and taking vacations abroad, and if you have more points than everybody else, you tell yourself you won the game. You might object that people really enjoy their cars and vacations. That’s certainly true. But the religious really enjoy praying and performing ceremonies, and my nephew really enjoys hunting Pokémon. In the end, the real action always takes place inside the human brain.

What does it all mean?

The end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working. Work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles.

As one who has not worked for the the last four-and-a-half years, I’m here to tell you it is not necessary to give your life meaning.

“We just imagine what we want next and we build it”

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That is how Ricardo Pessoa — the founder of Cool & Vintage — decides which cars to restore. I found several interviews and articles about Ricardo and his company.

“We are a couple of creative guys that have marketing/photography/fashion/filmmaking backgrounds and this is our take on cars. We were already dealing with restorations since we were driving mainly classic cars in our everyday life. We try to create the environment that will inspire people to use the cars, whether you buy it from us or not. The concept behind the company is to enjoy life through experiences and cars do that for us because we love to travel by car.”

That works for me. As does this:

“The new generation doesn’t want to buy from big, mainstream companies — they’re selective and look for small businesses who really care about their product and have a brand they can connect with”, comments Founder Ricardo Pessoa.

I’ve found lots of photos of the cars and the workshop but none of Ricardo yet. I’ll see if I can get one of him and the boys with “my” Land Rover.

Land Rover D90

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UPDATE: (May 17, 2017) After two weeks of struggling to get email and phone calls returned, I’ve decided to look elsewhere for my Land Rover D90. The folks at Cool & Vintage are talented marketers and they’re probably pretty good at restoring Land Rovers, but I found their communication skills wanting.

Regardless of how it ends, I’ll probably mark today as the beginning of my Land Rover D90 adventure. It really started last week when spotted a nifty looking vehicle on one of the websites I frequent. They had linked to www.CoolVintage.com’s photo spread of a restored vintage Land Rover (D90). I’ve always liked the looks of these but never gave a thought to owning one but that day I filled out the webform (“Will I have to rob a liquor store to purchase one of these?”)I promptly received an email from Francisca, the Product Manager at Cool Vintage.com.

Turns out the Land Rover with the hot model is not available for export to US but they were restoring a few D90’s that would be ready in September. I fell in love with the 1993 D90 in Nardo Grey with Rugged Interior Trim. I finally got the company founder, Ricardo, on the phone today and while “my” car is still being restored, he promised to send me some photos next week. (This is where you take a few minutes to limber up your eyeballs because you’re gonna want to roll ‘em in a few seconds.)

According to Francisca, I send them 60% of the money up front and the remainder when the car arrives. If this goes down it will probably be my largest online purchase for a while. I’ve already answered a few questions from friends: Can’t you get one of these in the US? Can’t you get one cheaper? Are you out of your fucking mind? Have you thought this through?

No to that last question. Total impulse buy. I fell in love with the look of this car and the idea of some some guys/girls in a garage in Lisbon, Portugal, restoring a vintage Land Rover from the ground up. (“Everything either restored or new down to the last bolt. Probably better than new.” Says Francisca.)

I’ll chronicle this adventure here if you want to following along. Photos next week. And I’ll try to find out a bit more about Francisca and Ricard and CoolVintage.com

UPDATE: I’ve never tried so hard to send a bunch of money to strangers in a foreign country. It is not certain I will be able to purchase one of these. A very “tough ticket.”

Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

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When I share something here, I try to include a paragraph or two to give the reader a sense of what the piece is about and some feel for what I thought was interesting/important. It’s difficult to know what to excerpt with this… I don’t even know what to call it… “explainer” by Tim Urban. At 38,000 words it is the longest thing I’ve ever read on the Internet (not counting books). He explains the brain. Where it’s been and where it might be going. That I was able to read such a long piece is a testament to a) the subject matter and b) his writing style. I said I wasn’t going to include any excerpts but here’s a couple:

“Die Progress Unit (DPU) – How many years one would need to go into the future that the ensuing shock from the level of progress would kill you.”

“Putting our technology into our brains isn’t about whether it’s good or bad to become cyborgs. It’s that we are cyborgs and we will continue to be cyborgs—so it probably makes sense to upgrade ourselves from primitive, low-bandwidth cyborgs to modern, high-bandwidth cyborgs.”

The people who make the streaming playlists

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Good piece from last year on the people who curate playlists for streaming music services:

“As streaming has gone mainstream, these curators, many of whom began their professional lives as bloggers and DJs, have amassed unusual influence. Their work, as a rule, is uncredited — the better for services designed to feel like magic — but their reach is increasingly unavoidable. Spotify says 50% of its more than 100 million users globally are listening to its human-curated playlists (not counting those in the popular, algorithmically personalized “Discover Weekly”), which cumulatively generate more than a billion plays per week. According to an industry estimate, 1 out of every 5 plays across all streaming services today happens inside of a playlist. And that number, fueled by prolific experts, is growing steadily.”

“All the signs point to playlists being the dominant mode of discovery in the near future,” says Jay Frank, senior vice president of global streaming marketing for Universal Music Group, the largest of the major label conglomerates. “When it comes to trying to find something exciting and new, more people are going to want to go to trusted playlists.”

I hope these folks always have a job and I sort of think they will. Not convinced an algorithm can do the voodoo they do.

How self-driving cars could change real estate

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Driverless cars could become a reality in five years, and will profoundly affect real estate within eight or nine years. A few possibilities:

  • Roughly 15 to 20% of your living space constructed in the average home is devoted to the garage
  • Each urban area will have a hub, but it won’t be in the expensive part of town — it will be in the cheaper part of town, right off the freeway
  • Fewer parking lots. In 2016, in the D.C. area, commercial underground parking garages added 10-12% to the cost of office construction. In residences, each additional parking space increased the cost of development per unit by 25%. Driverless cars could make these parking lots a relic of the past
  • There are 125,000 gas stations in the United States in prime real estate, you won’t need those anymore