If the Romans knew one thing, they knew numerals.

Greetings, Cortado drinkers and readers.

I met up with a friend for “coffee” recently. After receiving our drinks, as we walked back to sit at the windows in the front of the shop, he told me, “I thought you only drank cortados.” Was it disappointment or accusation I detected in his voice? I smiled at him.

“A man cannot live…” here I paused for effect and a massive sip of hot chocolate, “…on cortados alone.”

This month’s letter will look a little different. It will be a collection of the best things I’ve written down in various little notebooks over the course of the month. Most are indulgent flights of fancy — that part won’t be so different. Also, because it will be a list of disjointed ideas without any kind of brain-friendly organizing logic like narrative or hierarchy, all of it will be much harder for you to remember.

You’re welcome.

Short-form

Speaking of short-attention span reading and writing (a phrase I’ve lifted from a Bay Area sportswriter whose name escapes me, who once a week would write blurbs of one or two sentences long in a column I looked forward to all week, no doubt in part for its rapid-fire dopaminergic properties), might we have predicted the rise of short-form video? America’s Funniest Home Videos, SportsCenter’s Top 10 Plays of the Night, the ascendance of the GIF in the 2010’s, the vignette form of Sunday morning’s cartoons: have we been trained for TikTok since we were children?

Everything is predictable in hindsight, so let’s not be too hard on ourselves.

The way of the warrior-poet

The “warrior poet” archetype throughout history (Miaymoto Musashi, Saladin, Alexander(?)) and fiction (Aragorn, Paul Atreides, Achilles, The Mandalorian(?)) is so compelling because, for society and civilization to endure, we hope that those capable of violence are also capable of discretion in its use.

If war is the pursuit of political ends through violent means, and poetry the imbuing with meaning both means and ends, who better to communicate that meaning (or sometimes lack thereof) than the poet who experienced and enacted the violence?

Poetry is (or begets) a judiciousness of words and of mind, a judiciousness we hope to find in those with power over life and death.

Millions of years of brain evolution have won us… the pause

I recently finished The Distracted Mind, a book I started reading closer to 2016 when it first came out, but I didn’t finish it because I was too distracted.

One fascinating insight that I keep thinking about is that most living beings live in a continuous perception-action loop. They use their senses to perceive their environment, then, based on what they’ve seen, touched, tasted, they act on their environment in a way that changes it, starting the process again. This is not to say that animals do not express preferences or display individual differences, but most perceive and act reflexively. Humans have the ability to do this too, as in fight or flight situations or after touching a hot stove. But humans, and a few other of the higher mammals, also have the ability to pause. In this pause happens all thought and all (illusions of) “free will.”

See below for a hand-drawn diagram 🙂 

Using this framing, my advice to you, dear reader, is to beware of situations in which someone or something is trying to put you into the reflexive mode, especially when they stand to profit. Opponents and advertisers like it better when you are predictable. A high compliment paid to the best soccer, basketball, or hockey players is that, “They play at their own pace.” They retain their ability to make the right decision, even as opponents seek to “speed them up.” Even if your future on the rink or the court is behind you, do not fool yourself into thinking that you no longer compete.

Do not so easily surrender your cognitive birthright. It was hard-won.

Marketing math (that isn’t math)

I have been told this section is the driest. Feel free to skip ahead to Things of the Month if you aren’t excited by pseudo-marketing pseudo-math.

At the end of a recent interview, the interviewer told me: “I like that you have a lot of frameworks.” I started to laugh, thinking this was a compliment of the backhand variety, but realized after a couple guffaws that it was full-fronthand.

Anyway, here’s another framework for marketing dollars:

1. Arithmetic marketing - lights on

   1. We used to call this “keeping the lights on”: SEO, some steady-state SEM, some display ads. Some people call this “Demand Gen” or “demandgen” but never Demand Jen. As we increased the budget YoY, there would be some modest arithmetic increase in leads.

2. Geometric marketing - light show

   1. Geometric growth, similar to the compounding growth that your hypothetical retirement savings will hypothetically enjoy, is borne of consistency and reinforcement across channels. If the brand message or brand feeling is different on TV vs. in-store vs. online, those “touches” will not reinforce one another. When one touch “activates” another or continues the story that another began, growth in the marketing metrics can graduate from line to curve. This is why brand people are obsessed with brand templates and standards — to forgo discipline here is to forgo the power of compounding.

3. Exponential marketing - fireworks —> chain reaction

   1. In order to better advise consumer businesses, I spoke with a dear friend who has been an investor in consumer technology for most of his career. He said that the most important type of marketing work that early consumer startups should be doing is trying to go viral. Submitting or seeding content into platforms that propagate information algorithmically represents a chance to experience exponential growth in awareness, interest, revenue, etc. Because of the inherent unpredictability in what will go viral, some compare posting on the algorithmically-driven platforms to buying a lottery ticket. This is a bad analogy, because an expected value approach would tell you not to play the lottery, but it would tell you to play the algorithm.

Things of the Month

Book of the Month

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik

I picked this up at a garage sale. I whirred by on my electronic bicycle and doubled-back via a U-turn both illegal and dangerous. The homeowners were moving to Santa Cruz (I forget why). Their matching bedside tables tempted me, but I managed to cycle away with two books only, this one and one called On Not Being Able to Paint (which I have not yet read).

Paris to the Moon is delicious, and I’m sure I’ve used that word before to describe Books of the Month, but by now, most of you will be aware of my literary limitations. Beware of reading this book near people because you’ll be tempted to read passages aloud to them, and they may not appreciate that. They may, but they may not.

Here’s one of those passages, in which the author is trying to figure out why a once-fashionable cafe has fallen out of fashion, and a formerly unfashionable cafe (across the street) is en vogue.

Imagining of the Month

Song(s) of the Month

The generational wheel turns. The San Francisco summer turns to fall. Life changes.

Looking back, we can always weave the events into narrative, but we do not live a story. The present moment is the only one that has any chance of being real.

This song captures the august (October) honor of being The Cortado Song of the Month because my parents are now grandparents (not by my hand… nor any other body part), and because I saw Thomas Rhett LIVE last month, and he was great.

Welcome, LLR.

Thank you for reading.

Until next month,
Ethan