Go Flip Yourself.

This summer, I went to a nice space in SF named Founders, Inc. -in a quite amazing spot in the city by the way: Fort Mason; with a very 'San-Franciscan' view- listen to a live discussion between Ryan Hoover and Furqan.

Something Ryan said stuck with me since then: 'adjacent 2nd order impact'. As a non-human bot gently detailed it for us: "Second-order effects, also known as second-order consequences, refer to the indirect or ripple effects that occur as a result of an action or decision, which may not be immediately apparent. While first-order effects are the direct outcomes of an action, second-order effects are the subsequent changes that result from those initial outcomes.".

My mind started to wonder constantly about possible second-order effects around us. Two topics close to hearts -for obvious reasons- are: kids [I'm a father after all] and urbanism [I've lived all my life in urban areas and I'm a skateboarder, so my natural 'playground' are the streets]. Meanwhile, I was living this summer a kinda perfect suburban life in Berkeley, CA. Here are some behind-the-scenes pics and details by Mathilde if curious.

So when Steyn published his view on screen time limit -tl;dr: they've never enforced screen time limits on their kids [now 5 and 3 yo]- and then shared it on the #parent-lounge channel from the Sublime slack [oof] it occurred to me: kids screen time might just be an urbanism problem.

Yesterday I saw a post popped up in the Acquired slack's #parents channel. Marc basically asked: "has anyone started a vc-backed company while having very young kids or planning to? [...] how did timing it with a young family impact it [your company] longer term?".

This was my answer:

one thing i didn’t expect when starting something new while becoming a parent [and i can speak on behalf of my wife too who’s launched something new too while pregnant]: having young kids at home makes you so much more efficient. and i’m talking like 1,000x more efficient. period. both in terms of: (a) prioritizing what to work on [answering the simple question: what would seriously move the needle?] and (b) decreasing time between starting to work and being 100% focus/ deep in flow mode (procrastination just completely disappeared)

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I've heard 'virtue signalling' a few times in the past few years - mostly on twitter actually - and while I understood the concept and critics pointed out behind it I also felt pretty distant. Like a 'oh here's something between some activists and companies'. And then recently I realised (a) that behavior is present all around me way more than anticipated/ thought at first (b) it affects me and my mood pretty often. Let's unpack this.

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I've contemplated all the recent frenzy around the vaccines. Well, I should say the 2020-all-year-round frenzy in almost every thing, area and topic but let's breathe & stay calm for the moment. My birth country - France - was proudly last in the 'intent to get a COVID-19 vaccine' rankings. What a vote of confidence.

Meanwhile I was reading a good book - which was first a documentary - called: The Media The World And Me. A common theme was: how to (re)build trust?

I feel 'trust' might be the most & biggest missing component in today's society. Who to trust? Why? What to trust? How to learn to trust? How to regularly check where our trust is going?

I came across Arnold Schwarzenegger's comment when he got his vaccine.

I said this to someone in the comments, but I think a lot of you need to hear this.
I always say you should know your strengths and listen to the experts. If you want to learn about building biceps, listen to me, because I've spent my life studying how to get the perfect peak and I have been called the greatest bodybuilder of all time. We all have different specialties.

Dr. Fauci and all of the virologists and epidemiologists and doctors have studied diseases and vaccines for their entire lives, so I listen to them and I urge you to do the same. None of us are going to learn more than them by watching a few hours of videos. It's simple: if your house is on fire, you don't go on Youtube, you call the damn fire department. If you have a heart attack, you don't check your Facebook group, you call an ambulance. If 9 doctors tell you you have cancer and need to treat it or you will die, and 1 doctor says the cancer will disappear, you should always side with the 9. In this case, virtually all of the real experts around the world are telling us the vaccine is safe and some people on Facebook are saying it isn't.

In general, I think if the circle of people you trust gets smaller and smaller and you find yourself more and more isolated, it should be a warning sign that you're going down a rabbit hole of misinformation. Some people say it is weak to listen to the experts. That's bogus. It takes strength to admit you don't know everything. Weakness is thinking you don't need expert advice and only listening to sources that confirm what you want to believe.

This is beautifully written. I agree. My only concern goes towards people, institutions, systems that have a big audience and don't care about lying. They don't care about trust. They don't care about their impact long-term on other people's minds. They are dangerous. I don't think it's a good tactic to fight them directly. Our best option is to educate each others, giving our trust sparingly and staying alert. Utilmately, not being afraid of a 'I don't know' or another 'I changed my mind'.

Few recent examples that made me laugh [kinda].

My wife is pregnant. She needed a drug for something specific. I went to the pharmacy, explained what she was going through, told them she was pregnant and they gave me drug X. Few days later, she was still suffering. We called the doctor and told her everything, she recommended drug Y. I went to the pharmacy again and got it. We read on the package later that day that this drug wasn't recommended for pregnant women. We called the doctor again: "yeah but no worries the drug company just has to put this on the package for the insurance company, but of course in your case, this is harmless and exactly what you need". Hmmm. Interesting. Great way to build trust for sure [towards the pharmacy, the doctor herself, the drug company & the insurance company].

Politicians are the best at this. Sorry the one below is in french only. But @ 1min04, french minister literally declared "risk of importation - of coronavirus - from Wuhan is close to 0" & it goes on like this. Even worse @ 3min54: "the blue mask protects from nothing". Well it didn't age well [original footage was from late January 2020].

So, I'm all in to listen to the experts but honestly, it's getting harder & harder to know who's one.

I started last summer to count my stuff. As beautifully written by Mathilde here "[...] knowing I have too much is something, knowing what is too much is something else". At that point, I was able to put an exact number: I had 187 books. It felt too much.

Right away I decided to tidy this up and started to screen them all. Few questions were in my head to help me pick up which ones to discard: (a) do I think there is a 90%+ chance I'll re-read it again in the future? (b) am I even able right now to 'sell' that book to anyone? [i.e I remember enough what this is about and/or the emotion it created in me] (c) if one of my best friend were to visit me today and ask for a book to read, would I be proud enough to recommend that one? If the answer was anything else than an easy 'yes' [to all 3 of these questions], I'd discard the book.

Result's below. I today own 86.5 books [.5 because I co-own some of them with my other half]. And yep, I also love magazines and I do plan to sort them out next [even though I bought a new one 2 days ago].

To get rid of them in an easy & efficient way, I chose to give all of them away for free. I put few pictures on our local Buy Nothing group and few days later, 3/4 of them were out of the house.

The smiles and happy faces I got from people who came to our flat to pick up the books and the few minutes discussions downstairs to share few anecdotes [if any] made the whole experience very meaningful. Overall, I felt great. Almost 3 months later, I still feel great about this but I also don't really know how I should buy and deal with books in the future.

Donated a bunch of books tonight. So much feelings at the same time inside myself right now. Overall, I feel happy, lighter, proud & freer. First day of the rest of my life.

— Kevin Straszburger (@k7vin) August 3, 2020

When people are putting a photo on Twitter or Instagram of ‘look at my pile of books that I’m reading’, it’s a show-off thing, it’s a signalling thing. The reality is I’d rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read all the books.

For a bit of context, I'll start with a historical fact: I'm a meat lover. I don't really know when & how it started but as far as I can remember, meat - and especially red meat; cooked rare obviously - has always been my ultimate favorite meal. I mean it. Even as a kid, if I had a choice between candies / ice creams / cakes / chocolate mousse [you name it] and a plate with a piece of beef cooked rare and some pasta.. phew! the choice was very easy: gimme the damn plate! And still today, if I'm in a restaurant with a great 'steak tartare' [raw meat] it's really hard for me not to order it right away.

Photo by Liuda Brogiene

I remember few times in some restaurants well-known for serving big portion of meat, I was only 7 or 8 y/o and I always asked what was the record of the biggest piece of beef eaten by someone - few kg always - and asked to be served this exact portion. Now that I think about this, I don't even know where that comes from. Sure, my grand-ma loved red meat as well and was always stoked to cook some but I don't have the feeling she ate more of this than anyone else in France actually. My mum then wasn't a big meat eater. There is something in our french culture though. I mean, a good meal - in the traditional sense; when you're invited somewhere or in the restaurant - implies some meat most of the time. I tried few times in the past, go serve something to people with no meat at all in the plate, most of them would look at you in surprise and asked if you haven't forgotten anything.

Then, growing up, there has been a first shift: I wanted to eat 'very good' meat only. Like the one you'd find only in the local butcher shop and not the one you could buy at the supermarket. Sure it cost way more but I told myself the story that I loved meat so much I didn't care about the price and I was consequently totally ready to decrease my consumption of other stuff [I didn't smoke, I'd buy some glasses of Pastis in the bar - pretty cheap alcohol usually in local french bars - instead of fancy cocktails etc.].

Then 2 things happened: I moved to Singapore when I was still in my early twenties and I started to watch few documentaries about the whole meat industry. The latter made me deeply uncomfortable & questionned my own impact in that supply chain. The former changed my meat consumption entirely. While I still consider Singapore as one of the best place in the world for me in terms of cuisine, I don't remember it as especially good in terms of red meat. It was more about chicken, pork, fish, seafood etc.

Ultimately I read the book Eating Animals from Jonathan Safran Foer and this has been the 'coup de grace'. From then on, I committed to become a vegetarian. I don't remember which year it was exactly but I'd say sometime around 2012 / 2013. Since then... arrrrgh such an up & down journey. I experienced some periods of few months without eating meat at all [record was probably while in Berlin; something like 8 or 9 months total], and then, I landed in France for few days or weeks visiting family, ate a good tartare and - even though I tried intentionnally to keep my consumption as low as possible - went on eating meat for another 6 months. One thing I found hard back then was the very low choice of vegeterian options in french restaurants for instance [on the opposite side, being a vegeterian in Berlin was easy, so much yummy choices everywhere - even in a burger restaurant]. Like you get the menu and the only option is some type of salad while you could order a cheeseburger... for someone like me, it was literally impossible to pick up the salad [oh, yep, one thing to consider: the salad costs the same price!]. Obviously it has changed a bit.

I don't try to find me any excuse actually. Now that I write this, I think I just approached the whole thing the wrong way. I didn't want to be seen as a 'troublemaker' as well when I was invited somewhere. My mum always taught us that, as guests, you just eat politely everything you got served. Period. So I felt uncomfortable telling people, friends, even my family 'hey I changed my diet, no more meat for me, oh you cooked too much beef, well, too bad, I won't eat any of it anyway'. In retrospect, maybe I should have. I don't know. I think I have a deep problem with orthodoxy in general. Life should be flexible and I feel that the more orthodox you'd be, the more judgmental you might become and at the end, others would reject even more your beliefs. It's weird when I think more about it. Years later, I know some people still felt angry that no meat has been served at a specific family dinner because of us [my other half shared the experiment]. Or some stories I got from people who offered a vegetarian meal during their own wedding and people were mad it wasn't a 'proper special-meal'... hmmm at what point everyone just loves to fight and becomes so close-minded anyway? I digress.

I'm a bit older now [yep, harsh reality]. I might be a bit wiser too [I hope]. Ultimately I know myself more. I know how I react to challenges, new habits, change in general; I know how finding my own pace is the most important thing; I understood how discipline and rountine / rituals are keys [and not bad words to avoid only]. So when I started to try the app No Meat Today - and got lucky enough to talk to the founder & discovered his own story - it became a no-brainer. The goal of the app is dead simple: track your meat consumption. I set up a daily reminder at 9pm to input if yes or no I ate meat this day.

Few months later. Here's my status.

And since the beginning of this year, I tend to eat meat once a week only. So if we take the month of June as an example [like on the screenshot above], 3 meals a day x 30 days = 90 meals. 4 meals with meat out of 90 meals means a bit less than 5%. So I started to say 'yep I'm 95% vegetarian'.
In july so far, I've eaten meat only twice so I might be on track to almost 98% hehe.

And you know what - yep you can guess - I feel freaking good. I found out that being 95% [or 98% sometimes] vegetarian was my perfect equilibrium. I know that I can go the long way at this pace. It resonates deep down. I feel complete, in harmony with who I am and what I believe in. I even went hunting a year ago to see for myself what it meant to kill an animal to eat. That experience has been very interesting, in a lot of different ways - that's worth another post by itself.

Anyway, I know some hardcore vegan would hate me; some radicals would make fun of me or just debate if the formula itself 'XX% vegetarian' would mean anything at all. The thing is: I don't care. I know that I succeeded to decrease my meat consumption dramatically. After all, if the whole world turns 90%+ vegetarian tomorrow, the impact would be pretty huge right away. And guess what: if more people would introduce the change this way, it would sound way easier, almost sexier right away for more people. More importantly in my case, I found a pace I'm able to follow & commit in the very long-term. And that's where the biggest impact lies at the end.

95 / 98% vegetarian over the next 60 years will be so much more impactful, powerful and meaningful for me than a short period of 6 / 9 months as a vegan and then... nothing.

I'm enraged by the current situation. I'm deeply sad that we are still guilty of such injustice. I'm concerned by the lack of empathy. I sometimes wonder wether we're truly able to be humanist - as a society.

Now I'm obsessed with one thing everyday when I look at my 1 year-old son: what can I do exactly / what should I show him / how to make sure he's actively & fully part of something much better. I believe my wife and I are capable of such a thing. Actually, we have to succeed. 

Below are first thoughts we had, we'll go through some iterations for sure, we'll need to confront this against reality, to adapt and progress. I read a lot of good intentions these past few weeks but haven't gone through much things towards babies, kids & education as a whole. How school should start tomorrow to teach differently for instance? I haven't read anything impactful on the topic so far; which saddens me. How everyone at home should start right now to raise awareness among the whole family? The list goes on.

I do think that education is key here. After all, as parents [but not only, as grand-parents as well, as godfathers, friends, brothers & sisters, aunts & uncles, teachers, etc.] we do set up examples & give some backgrounds & context for generations to come. My son isn't born racist. I see him today treat 100% equally his black & white friends at kindergarten. If we're not active & intentional though, I'm afraid he might become at some point. Because it's sneaky, it's part of our culture. Let's pause. Writing this hurts me. I want us to change. Then, I want his generation to finally experience a real humanist & peaceful world.

I'd love to know your thoughts on the topic, your realisations too, your own blindspots, your actions. It'll obviously be a continuous work-in-progress on our end.

In no particular order:

• we want our son to develop strong ties with some black kids; since I don't believe we could force any specific friendship or love; we could influence his environment though; and that's where it becomes a number game at the end. Few areas we're thinking about: geography [which type of neighborhood, city, country are we living in], school, social activities [like personally I met most of my black friends through boxing].
• this applies to ourselves as well; today our son is playing with a black friend because we met her parents and became friends with them. Though we realised we don't have a lot. Let's be more intentional with this.
• speak out against anything racist we will hear - always; coming from anyone; 'jokes' included; no matter the context: family, professional, etc. And let's be radical about it.
• get deeply involved in the historical lessons our kids will get along the way; and always provide few other angles. I remember how enlightening it was for me during my years in Singapore to read & learn about World War II through a South-East Asian angle, it felt like a totally different event [and it was a humbling experience].
• be extra-careful with the set of aspirational examples he'll get growing up [like these athletes, artists, leaders, entrepreneurs, etc.] - this one looks challenging and will also depend on the geography I think but this is very impactful. Growing up in France in the 90's I realise: highest politicians = all white; leaders in biggest corporations = all white; black people? hmmm... few in the soccer team, few artists here & there - this is bad because it doesn't reflect the reality of the french society.

Photo by Kadir Celep - we used to live in this neighborhood in Berlin

"You ready?
Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh, oh no no"
- Beyonce, "Crazy in Love"

I love writing. The thing is: I'm bad at it. Disclosure: the feeling to love something and at the same time be bad at it is weird. Interesting tho but still, it's weird. Anyway, back to our subject. I'm pretty proud of one thing actually, back in the super early days of 2013 (it was around the same period I remember, i.e Xmas, back then I was based in Singapore) I succeed to write and even publish a blog post everyday during something like 1.5 months (maybe two but I'm not really sure exactly). And you know what; it made me feel good. So good that I promised myself to start again this experience one day.

Here we are. I think it's a good period. We say that we need to make the same thing during 30 days to start to make it a habit frankly I don't know but in my own experience: it's wrong. Well even brushing my teeth isn't a habit for me although my mum forced me to do it few times a day non-stop for many many years. Anyway, writing makes me feel good (maybe great) and I hope that I could succeed to dedicate some time everyday to practice (I still hope to become good at it one day). And I know something else: you can be good at anything by practicing.

So, 2015. I won't try to publish everyday; once every two days will be good enough. I know it'll force me to write everyday and I'm already happy. And this time I target way more than 2 months. I'd like to write all along the year. This type of resolution or experience or test (whatever you call it) makes me think about the ones Emi makes for a while. I'm impressed so I give it a try right away.

Enjoy!