M&Ms: Politics & Products

Two lessons I learned on politics.

I got two valuable lessons on politics in my life.

First, when I was a kid in The Bronx, I got invited to go to a pool in this rich neighborhood. As a kid, if your building had a pool with a lifeguard, you lived in a rich neighborhood. The neighborhood where I grew up had roaches, section 8, and food stamps.

But yes, even The Bronx, NYC, has rich neighborhoods. In a lot of ways, it's a microcosm of the rest of America and probably the rest of the world, both in wealth and politics.

Anyway, I went to this pool with my cousin. We were 11 and 12 years old. And these old ladies who were enjoying sunbathing overheard us making some political jokes. It was fun banter at first. They were teasing us a little bit. 

But then we really got into politics with them, and we said some things regarding their politics, as young wiseass kids like us did back then, and they got offended. 

But not offended in a small way, but so offended they felt compelled to tell our older relative, who was the superintendent of the building and our sponsor for that day of leisure. They told him, "Make sure their parents know. They aren't going to get very far in life talking like that." And they made it a point to complain to the board of the building about us, so we aren’t invited back.

Later that day, our older relative sat us down and, with his thick immigrant accent, said something to us that's stuck with me to this day.

He said: "You gomar! (which roughly translates to donkeys or dummies in English) 

You come here for one nice summer day. You come to enjoy this beautiful weather in this awesome Olympic-sized pool. And you can't help but bring up politics? You can't help but ruin this whole thing for yourselves for the whole summer?

Don't you think I have my politics, too? How come they all like me? Why they don't ever go to the board & complain about me? It's because I never talk politics. Ever.

They have their politics & I have mine. And we vote, and it's how we stay friends and get along."

There is a great English proverb that says, "Politics is the art of marshaling hatred." Henry Adams observed the same in America in the late 1800s: "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

So, the first lesson I learned early as a kid was that talking politics is not how you make friends with strangers. It is, in fact, how you ruin your fun.

Then, the second lesson came a few years later in life. I worked as a bartender in a fantastic Italian restaurant. We used to get all types of customers who used to tip very generously. 

But then, one night, I had two outstanding patrons who tipped heavily start arguing with each other over politics at my bar. It was an election year. Of course, I knew better than to take sides. 

But it didn't matter. When people are enraged like that, they want to force you to take a side. Their side.

So, long story short, I had to break them up and send them home. Neither left a tip, and neither came back. I got an average of $25 bucks from each one in tips each time they came in, and they came in at least twice a week. So that's 50 dollars a week, times 52 weeks, that's $2,600 a year from each, so I lost over $5k a year in tips from their stupid fight.

So, from that, I learned heated political debates are unprofitable. 

It makes sense. If you take a side, you’re alienating 50% of the other side who don't think like you. But even if you don't take sides and happen to be in between a heated argument, you risk alienating 100% because you didn't take their side. It's lose, lose. It is best not to let them talk heated politics in front of you at all. That’s why rules like “No politics at the bar” exist. Alcohol and politics don’t mix well, trust me. Or if you can’t set the rules, walk away.

Now, here is Google and some of Big Tech today, who have very obviously decided to take sides and bake their political biases into their products. Just this week, Google's AI, Gemini, has been showing strong political leanings. Now, this is prompting all sorts of questions about where else they may have baked these biases into.

What do you think is going to happen next with Google?

And by the way some people think all this is normal. Carl Schmidt, a famous German philosopher with a sort of checkered history, said something along the lines of "It is part of the human condition to be divided by such political questions and to be forced to take sides. Politics is the field of battle in which that division takes place. In which humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies." 

But who wants to live their life viewing 50% of the population as their enemy? Not me.

Even Peter Thiel, who has taken very public political stands, admits that: "There is something about politics that is irreducibly adversarial. The applause lines are always on how 'we are going to fight the other side.' How 'we're going to stop them.' How 'we are going to unite against them.' and so on."

As an immigrant born in communism, I can tell you it’s great to have political freedom. But do we have to bake our current opinions into everything? Do we have to keep arguing with each other at all times? And, importantly, do we have to keep amping up the stakes each round?

People used to like Big Tech companies more when they didn't bake politics into their products. When they kept their politics to themselves.

As my immigrant older cousin reminded me when I was young, “We all get to vote for a reason here.”

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*A caveat: there may be times when you have to take sides on an issue. I have done it myself when I believed in something and could not stay quiet. And I’d do it again.

But there is a difference between being vocal on an issue you care about and joining a tribe permanently to go to war for all its beliefs & flaws.

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Three Things: Communicating, Better Ways, Argentina

Being able to communicate well is an asset in almost every single environment where modern humans make a living. e.g., working in a startup or in a big company, starting your own thing, and on and on.

My only regret about improving my writing, storytelling, and communication skills is that I didn’t start putting in the reps sooner.

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The unfortunate truth is that a lot of people are making a living this way.

Many don’t even realize there are other ways to make a living in the modern era. They may not pay as much at first, they may not be as cleanly defined, but they exist.

The advice I would give this person is not to double down with their employer, put more hours in, and assume they’ll take care of them next time. But to diversify out of needing the employer at all. To create some income streams outside of work. To find ways to survive without them.

This is, in fact, what the vast majority of the education inside of the Small Bets community is about.

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#10 - Buenos Aires, The Halo Effect & Going a Little Too Far

I enjoyed this newsletter edition by Prince, not just because he mentioned me at the bottom.

But because I learned some interesting things about Argentina & Buenos Aires that I didn’t know.

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Three Laughs: Small Time Devs, Potential Health Feature, Cup of Coffee

This is interesting because Pieter Levels approach to building software offends some software engineers. And yet, he’s making millions. And Tony is right behind him, too.

But you have to understand that the world of building software as a one- or two-person team is very different from the world of a large team. So, nothing they do in building software offends me; instead, I learn from them.

And I would wager more software will be built this way, in smaller teams, going forward, not less.

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This hypothetical feature would be good. It would remind everyone:

We’ve all got such limited time on this earth, so why spend it arguing with people on the internet over politics?

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The perks of working from home.

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Thanks for reading, and as my youngest daughter would say, “peace out” until the next issue.