The flowers in the parks are especially bloom-y this year. The tulips are fantastic. So I dubbed the ‘Groove in honor of the flowers and the beautiful relief they bring. I started out by toasting my friend Olan Montgomery who died of COVID about a year before, and marveled at the year it has been. Then we talked about how our vaccines are going, more about Moderna and Pfizer differences, about vitamins, our preferences for gummies as an excuse to feel righteous about eating candy, when to take them, how we make our coffee, with our moka pots, pour overs and French presses and we shared our favorites with links on Amazon, and the price of a latte. We talked about Jamie Dimon and how he doesn’t think we’ll go hybrid at work but actually return to our offices, and how we think they will return. We discussed how someone on the Zoom had a book club and because of Zoom they were able to entertain the author during their session. We talked about corporate cultures and how so many start-ups had bring-your-dog cultures and we asked ourselves whether that would continue, and how it was likely it would as those with dogs had become accustomed to being close to their dogs as their dogs have become accustomed to being close to them.
We talked about the awkwardness of Zoom singing, and someone recommended the show Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist where people sing their thoughts. We asked whether the pandemic is over or close to over and we agreed it might be 46% over. We talked about dressing for Zoom and about working from home, and how working from home protects us from abusive bosses to some extent, at least a bit from their yelling. We then talked about Scott Rudin and how it has come up in several recent articles that he is very abusive to his employees, mostly young people starting out, but also that he has been very valuable to the industry and so he was protected though everyone knew the stories about his abuse. We talked about junk bonds from the 1980s and Boesky and Millikan and commercial real estate. We noted this year that the wealthy got wealthier and the less wealthy not so much and we worried about the national debt.
Then one of us shared how he has been experimenting with the “hyperloop” means of transport, sort of like Disney’s old monorail but better. He said that to keep himself busy he has been working on the drawing and engineering of it all, and sharing it on open source. , and how fusion energy and quantum mechanics would be used to power it. It was all a bit above my understanding but some people on the call followed along. Then we talked about the legalization of marijuana and asked whether it would cut into the sale and use of alcohol. I posited that it would not, however, someone on the call who lives in Seattle said that it sure would. She mentioned how in Seattle where pot is closer to legal the sale of alcohol dropped and issues like driving while high have arisen, especially designating and measuring the level of high-ness that might prove a problem. We talked about how home growers of the stuff use so much energy to shine lights on it when grown inside, sort of like mining blockchain codes burn through electricity. And we ended there for the night.
