The Time Capsule Podcast

Dear Friends, Every four years we are gifted an extra day, the 29th of February , allowing our unique little planet an additional 24 hours to complete its orbit around the sun. Isn't it comforting to know that we (and our planet) get an extra day to catch up? Anyhow, just how unique is our little planet and its 365.25-day orbit around the sun? One of my favorite pieces of online writing is Tim Urb...

Dear Friends, I’m in Estonia this week for the Open Government Partnership Summit and I’m tripping out over how much the world has changed since I first attended the event in Brazil in 2012. Dilma Rousseff had just been elected president and celebrated budget transparency in her welcoming address while Hilary Clinton followed with remarks about the importance of earning the trust of citizens. In m...

Dear Friends, (With an audio version read by a real human, me, above.) I’m indulging in an intermission this week from the Millennial midlife series because, as of yesterday’s Apple event, I am convinced that we’ll look back at 2023 as the year that changed everything. My prediction is that we’ll look back at the 2020-2022 pandemic with faint memories of baking sourdough and a mere prologue to the...

Dear Friends, It feels damn good to be home. After two weeks of work in Kenya followed by a week of winter flu and then two weeks of adventure in Japan, I arrived home a deflated, disoriented mess. I returned two weeks ago, but only now does my second cup of coffee fill me with my usual morning optimism. The worst of the blustery wet winter storms is behind us and warmer weather is tantalizingly c...

Dear Friends, By the time we’re in our forties, we’ve made enough personal finance decisions to know that some were lucky, some were unlucky, and that our financial situation today could have been entirely different. I try not to think about the stocks that I sold too early (Tesla, Apple) or too late (Moderna). I try not to think about the more than $350,000 that we have handed over to our landlor...

🎵 What was 2003? The soundtrack of 23 years old. Full of confidence and dreams and naïveté. For me, it was 2003. That summer I learned how to design websites and started a blog. That fall I graduated from college and bought my first iPod. I spent countless nights meticulously transferring my CD collection to my iTunes library and iPod. In December, I quit my barista job at the best coffeehouse ev...

It took me a long time to feel truly comfortable in my own skin. And I never would have gotten here were it not for therapy. There’s a lot of talk about mental health these days, and I frequently question where perhaps we’re now too eager to share our trauma and pursue our personal wellness above our obligations to others . As I wrote in a blog post earlier this year: Popular culture today has, in...

Dear Friends, Growing up, I associated Thanksgiving with stress and conflict. And so now, even as a card-carrying adult, I struggle to associate it with gratitude and good vibes. Fortunately, one of the great perks of traveling is to return to the little things that I too often take for granted: my favorite coffee mug, looking up from the newspaper at my wife’s loving eyes, snuggling with my dog,...

🗣️ Newsletter feedback My friend Jamie Knowlton was one of the sources of inspiration when I first tried this whole weekly newsletter business on Substack back in June. A couple of weeks ago, as we rode our bikes through the misty redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains , we offered each other feedback about our respective newsletters. Jamie pointed out that my Substack started out as a newsletter, b...

I subscribe to Yuval Harari’s theory of social progress: society improves when we replace a bad story (slavery is okay, women shouldn’t vote, governments should run businesses) with better stories. So that’s what I’m trying to do with this essay; I’m trying to replace a bad story (“you can save the life of a child by subscribing to a box of granola bars”) with a better story (“we can absolutely pr...

I just dropped off my ballot at the drop box. The total cost of this year’s state and federal elections is a record-breaking $16.7 billion . (Whereas Mexico’s publicly funded elections cost less than 2% of that amount.) $16.7 billion. And yet I struggled to find clear information about the ballot and the actual implications of my decisions. Regardless of the relative strengths of each candidate, w...