Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 31

The joy of vaccination, Clubhouse, fake commutes, Elon Musk, working at Trump's hotel steakhouse, Moron of the Week, and more.

Mar 01, 2021

Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.

Reggie Miller memory: 25 years ago, he scored 8 points in 8.9 seconds

This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.

Check out the introduction post here and the entire archive of previous newsletters here.

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People are getting vaccinated, and it’s glorious

There’s legitimately good news on the COVID front.

Last week on Mind of Micah, we explored the reasons why COVID cases are dropping. Four reasons: social distancing, seasonality, seroprevalence, and shots.

The increasing vaccination rate is the best. It seems to me that we’re actually making some progress and that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. There’s statistical evidence supporting that belief, but there’s also the personal stories like this one:

The joy of vax: The people giving the shots are seeing hope, and it’s contagious

The happiest place in medicine right now is a basketball arena in New Mexico. Or maybe it’s the parking lot of a baseball stadium in Los Angeles, or a Six Flags in Maryland, or a shopping mall in South Dakota.
The happiest place in medicine is anywhere there is vaccine, and the happiest people in medicine are the ones plunging it into the arms of strangers.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience in my career that has felt so promising and so fulfilling,” says Christina O’Connell, a clinic director at the University of New Mexico.
“There’s so many tears” — of joy, not sadness — “that it’s almost normal at this point,” says Justin Ellis, CVS pharmacist in Laveen, Ariz.
“I will never forget the face of the first person I vaccinated,” says Ebram Botros, a CVS pharmacy manager in Whitehall, Ohio. It was an 80-year-old man who said that he hadn’t seen his children or grandchildren since March.

The simple act of visiting a venue to get the shot gives people joy:

At the University of New Mexico’s basketball arena, O’Connell, clinic director at University of New Mexico Health, has been sinking shots — into muscle tissue. Sometimes there’s entertainment for the patients: The team practices while people get vaccinated on the concourse level. Check-in attendants greet people arriving at the arena (known affectionately as “The Pit”) for appointments with pompoms and cheers.
“Patients just love it,” O’Connell says. “I mean, people miss coming here. This is a big deal in Albuquerque.”

You love to see it.

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What’s Clubhouse?

If you haven’t yet heard about Clubhouse, you will. It’s the newest social media app to blow up, and it’s basically an audio group chat. It’s also sort of a live podcast platform. It’s kind of its own thing. It’s hard to explain because it’s different than anything we’ve ever seen.

This piece from tech writer Ben Thompson traces the evolution of the internet from blogs to Clubhouse. It’s a really good read.

Step 1: Democratization
The grandaddy of independent publishing on the Internet was the blog: suddenly anyone could publish their thoughts to the entire world! This was representative of the Internet’s most obvious impact on media of all types: democratization.
Distributing text no longer required a printing press, but simply blogging software
Distributing video no longer required a broadcast license, but simply a server
Distributing text no longer required a printing press, but simply blogging software
Step 2: Aggregation
Making anyone into a publisher resulted in an explosion of content; this shifted value to entities able to help consumers find what they were interested in. In text the big winner was Google, which indexed pre-existing publications, independent blogs, and everything in-between. The big winner in photos, meanwhile, ended up being Instagram: users “came for the tool and stayed for the network”.
Step 3: Transformation
Still, even with the explosion of content resulting from democratizing publishing, what was actually published was roughly analogous to what might have been published in the pre-Internet world. A blog post was just an article; an Instagram post was just a photo; a YouTube video was just a TV episode; a podcast was just radio show. The final step was transformation: creating something entirely new that was simply not possible previously.
The most obvious difference between Clubhouse and podcasts is how much dramatically easier it is to both create a conversation and to listen to one. This step change is very much inline with the shift from blogging to Twitter, from website publishing to Instagram, or from YouTube to TikTok.

Follow me on clubhouse @micahwiener.

Why a fake commute could pave the way to work-from-home balance

It’s March. That means we’ve been living with this virus for a year now (or something like that). Habits have changed. A huge number of people are still working from home, and many of them may never go back to an office. There are certainly advantages to rolling out of bed and being at the home office. But what about the downsides?

Of all the things work-from-home employees might miss about pre-pandemic life, commuting wouldn’t seem to register high on the attention meter. But nearly a year after being sent home from the office, some employees have realized that losing that time in the car — or on the bus, train or street — has had some drawbacks.
Jon Jachimowicz, an assistant professor of business administration in the organizational behavior unit at Harvard Business School, says commuting provides “a temporal and spatial separation between all the different roles we play.” It’s a buffer that eases the transition from one identity to the next, a consistent dose of in-between time to reflect and reset.
Before the pandemic, the average commute was 38 minutes each way, Jachimowicz’s research indicates. Not only have employees lost that buffer, but they have also taken on more work: about 48 extra minutes per day. They are also dealing with more meetings and more communication that spills into off hours, according to findings published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July.

So how do you do a “fake commute”?

Find the ritual that’s right for you. There are many ways to reap the benefits of a fake commute. Like so much else, the important thing is choosing the method you’ll stick to.
Be strategic about timing — and strive for consistency. It’s best to engage in your chosen ritual when you’re easing into and out of the workday, Jachimowicz says. He suggests workers establish fake commutes that last at least five to 10 minutes each way and are repeated as many days of the workweek as possible.
Leave home if you can.
Consider including your family. Kids who are learning virtually are missing out on their own commute time, Plotnick says. That means they’ve lost opportunities to socialize while walking, riding the school bus or having one-on-one conversations with the parent dropping them off.
Practice role-clarifying prospection. Commuting is an opportunity to think about and plan for the role we’re transitioning into, such as shifting from supervisor to parent, Jachimowicz says. Let work go at the end of the day by spending part of your fake commute reflecting on your upcoming role: what you want to make for dinner, which chores need to be done, what you’ll watch on TV.
Get serious about disconnecting. Fake commutes can help us transition between our roles — but the onus is on us to actually stay in them, rather than letting our minds drift back to other parts of the day. He suggests turning off your phone or silencing notifications in the name of better physical, mental and emotional health.

Elon Musk is full of shit

This isn’t a newsflash to anyone who’s been paying attention. This WaPo piece about the Richest Man in the World focuses on his move to Austin and his possible exit from Tesla. There’s a lot to take in.

If you’ve held Tesla stock, first of all, congratulations. But the following might send a chill down your spine:

In interviews with a dozen current and former Tesla employees, investors and analysts, critics pointed to a slate of questionable business moves, and even outright missteps by Tesla, as a potential symptom of the outside demands on Musk. They described a company where Musk is less present and increasingly isolated, where subordinates are reluctant to question the CEO’s vision, and where the de facto position entails eschewing market research. It’s a top-down, shoot-by-the-hip ethos directed by Musk.

How did he respond to this heavily-sourced story? Like an asshole, of course:

Tesla did not respond to repeated requests for comment. In response to emails seeking comment, Musk replied only:“Give my regards to your puppet master.”

Everyone knows the Tesla narrative at this point. And who am I to question the Richest Man in the World? But, please don’t tell me Musk is an infallible business god.

Musk’s impulsive leadership has worked to Tesla’s benefit so far. His bets have resulted in huge successes, vaulting Tesla from an upstart electric vehicle pioneer to the world’s most valuable automaker.
“There isn’t a culture at Tesla really other than ‘Let’s do what Elon wants to do,’” said Ed Niedermeyer, who wrote the book “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.” He said the eyebrow-raising Cybertruck debut — in which a supposedly unbreakable window shattered onstage — showed the state of play better than any other recent company event.
“It clearly reflected Elon’s increasing isolation inside the company,” he said. “He becomes more powerful and that power sort of isolates him more and more.”

Musk is an asshole. But we already knew that. And that doesn’t make him any different than many other uber-successful people. Don't tell me Nick Saban or Bill Belichick are well-adjusted humans and they’ve done pretty well. So has Musk, obviously. But Musk really is on another level:

As the coronavirus took hold, Musk started tweeting that the panic over it was “dumb.” And he wrote that there would be “close to zero new cases” by the end of April a year ago. He was on a call with Trump where he pushed reopening and praised the president. He had a public meltdown during an earnings call in late April, raging against California officials’ shutdown orders in an expletive-laden rant.

He also seems to do things to jeopardize the value of his company. I don’t get it.

In May, Musk sent his company’s stock plunging with an eyebrow-raising tweet questioning its value.
Just this month, Tesla said in a business filing that it had invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin and would begin accepting the cryptocurrency as a payment. While it’s a potentially savvy move to benefit from the volatile cryptocurrency, analysts also said it entails serious financial risk that could wipe out the company’s profits.
Musk over the weekend opined on Twitter that the value of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin seemed too high. Bitcoin values have subsequently fallen by around $10,000 and price variations have plunged the cryptocurrency into uncertainty. Tesla stock dipped sharply Tuesday morning, trading down nearly 4 percent at $688 per share.
“We’re seeing this with Elon Musk: a lack of impulse control,” said Chatman, the UC-Berkeley professor.

Elon recently made headlines for saying that Austin will be the biggest boomtown the US has seen in 50 years.

What he hasn’t personally been in the news for is helping any of the millions of Texans without power or water last week. Sorry to be the cranky old-Austin guy, but a little community outreach from the Richest Man in the World might have been nice last week (although Tesla, the most valuable car company in the world did put out a press release about donations).

Before you DM me to complain that I’m too hard on Musk, just remember that I write a newsletter, he’s the Richest Man in the World. He’ll be ok.

Podcast Promotion of the Week

This week on Mind of Micah, we take a look into what it was like working at the steakhouse inside of the former President’s D.C. hotel. Four years' worth of stories about VIP visits and grooming protocols, palm-greasing, rotten vegetables, and that time they lost Steve Mnuchin’s coat.

There are a ton of juicy details about the standard operating procedures for serving 45. My favorite? The snacks:

A tray of junk food needed to be available for every Trump visit: Lay’s potato chips (specifically, sour cream and onion), Milky Way, Snickers, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Tic Tacs, gummy bears, Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Nutter Butters, Tootsie Rolls, chocolate-covered raisins, and Pop-Secret.

Imagine sitting down at your own steakhouse, inside of your own hotel. Now imagine the staff presenting you with Tic Tacs and gummy bears. Just in case you needed a reminder, the last four years were really weird.

Anyway, back to the podcast. Subscribe now and you’ll get all four parts as soon as they are released.

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Moron of the Week

The headline says it all: A Capitol rioter texted his ex during the insurrection to call her a ‘moron,’ feds say. She turned him in.

Standing on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, Richard Michetti allegedly took a break from the rioting to argue with his ex-girlfriend over text message. After sending photos and videos of the mob and boasting how he had avoided tear gas, Michetti parroted Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
“If you can’t see the election was stolen you’re a moron,” Michetti wrote in a text to the woman, according to court documents.
The next day, the woman he had insulted promptlytold the FBI that her ex was at the Capitol, handing over to law enforcement the string of texts, photos and videos he had sent to her.
If convicted, Michetti, who was arraigned Tuesday in federal court in Philadelphia, faces up to 20 years in prison.

Who’s the moron now?

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