[AKN #65] The fat guy with bare foot shoes
LAUGH: Hannibal Burress on jaywalking and TSA, LOVE: Understanding the supply chain issues
Sup homies?
Mark Twain once said:
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Twain is alluding to the problem of “groupthink.”
Groups of humans have an innate desire to reach consensus.
We like to agree with one another and feel the camaraderie of a shared opinion.
While this generally works well, sometimes our desire for consensus leads us astray as it overwhelms our ability to critically reason, critique a position or express an unpopular opinion.
A good example of this is the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.
Retrospectively, given all of the reservations from experts in rocket science, it is INSANE that NO ONE stopped the shuttle from taking off and exploding on national television.
Which brings me to another nationally televised disaster: Ted Lasso Season 2.
Listen. I get it.
Season 1 was great. We laughed. We cried. We had a GREAT time.
But the fact that we are going to sit here and pretend like Season 2 was passable television is the type of injustice I will not let stand.
Again, I get it.
You want a fun series that rises above this divisive world.
You want to live in a fantasy world where an affable, jolly coach with questionable decision making and dubious leadership skills is successful.
I am OK with that.
I am all for suspension of disbelief in the name of a fantasy television series.
But if you dare tell me Season 2 is good, I need you to go home and take a long look at yourself in the mirror.
You are better than that.
You can’t unsee the Beard episode which is — to put it mildly — the worst episode of any television series I have ever seen.
You can’t unsee the shear volume of filler episodes used to meet the contract requirements for 12 episodes.
You can’t unsee the inability to advance the plot in any meaningful way.
DO NOT be complicit in the propagation of the myth that “you NEED to watch Season 2.”
Season 2 was awful.
I would call Season 2 dog shit, but that would be offensive to dog shit.
At the bare minimum, dog shit could be repurposed for fertilizer.
Ted Lasso Season 2 can only be flushed down the toilet.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: The fat guy with bare foot shoes
I go to this gym which is outfitted like a Crossfit gym.
No cables. No leg extension machines. No frills.
Just you and some free weights working against gravity.
It is the type of gym that attracts people who completely identify themselves with the gym.
The guys who think working out EXTREMELY hard makes them an athlete.
The guys obsessed with working on their balance and mobility.
The guys who would literally rather pay for a personal trainer to listen to them talk about their shitty home lives than go to therapy.
But the one group I find the most interesting is one that hardly gets noticed.
They linger almost unseen next to the Incredible Hulk doing kipping pull ups and Elastagirl working on her thoracic spine extension.
They are…the fat guys with bare foot shoes (FGWBFS).
This is a group near and dear to my heart as I used to be one of them.
I was a fat guy who completely immersed himself in the delusion that my problem was not my inability to count calories, but rather my poor gait.
That was my problem.
Fix my gait, fix my life.
Of course that is nonsense.
The real problem is psychologically deeper.
In reality, what was going on is I — someone who is so smart because I keep up on the esoteric, non peer reviewed research published by unverified social media accounts — was trying to skip a few steps and get my desired result of being fit faster.
This is magic bullet thinking.
You don’t need good foundations of nutrition and sleep, you have just been exercising incorrectly.
That was your problem!
Delusional people always think they can skip the hard work.
Now mobility is important. Being able to get into a full squat position is important, but what I am talking about here is how sequencing is more important.
I thought about this as I watched an interaction with a FGWBFS and a personal trainer at my gym.
You see, in order to have a magic bullet, you need a magic bullet salesman.
And this personal trainer was all about the magic bullys.
The salesman set this guy up on a cushion, handed him a kettlebell, and instructed his client to pass this kettlebell all the way around his body, hand to hand behind his back.
I watched this process go on for about ten minutes as the personal trainer looked on going “YES that is how you DO it!”
All the while, I sat there thinking “what if we started with this guy eating a salad and worked our way up to this bizarre mating ritual?”
If I were to write a children’s novel, it would be called “don’t be the fat guy with barefoot shoes.”
The moral of the story would be your problem isn’t that your footwear has given you bad ankle mobility, your problem is you ate a pint of Ben and Jerry’s four of the last five nights.
Start with Step 1 before proceeding to Step 9.
LAUGH: Hannibal Burress on jaywalking
I love Hannibal Buress and this bit is particularly great.
Some highlights:
His jaywalking in Montreal story is phenomenal. I got a strong chuckle out of him referring to jaywalking as a fantasy crime and his impression of the French police officer talking.
His airport security bit is so good. So many strong lines in here. Bomb juice, getting cocaine on a plane vs. getting bottled water on a plane, Snicker bar terrorist plot and the subsequent fall out. Great time overall.
LOVE: What is the deal with the supply chain?
A few weeks ago, I went to Trader Joes and I noticed they were out of Cauliflower Gnocchi.
Being a conscientious white devoted to limiting carbs, I found myself asking the store manager if they had any in the back.
He went to check, but soon came back deeply saddened.
He looked me square in the eyes and said “they are stuck on the ships off Los Angeles. They say it might be a few more weeks before they get here.”
I don’t know what I expected him to say, but I definitely did not expect him to provide me with a “check back again maybe”.
Like did the ship get attacked by pirates?
Shipping isn’t this mysterious thing with an indefinite timeline, you should have a more precise estimate.
Or so I thought…
This was my introduction to the ever increasingly bad supply chain issue.
While I heard about it in the news, it did not feel like a real problem because it had not affected ME.
But now, I could no longer stick my head in the sand.
The cauliflower gnocchi was the last low carb straw that broke the proverbial grass fed camel’s back.
I decided I need to understand what is happening to the supply chain…
Thankfully, I found a Twitter Thread which breaks it down well:
Here is my summary of this thread:
The problem is a traffic jam at the terminals.
It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land.
Without yard space, new ships cannot unload their cargo.
So the logical question here would be: well why are we not clearing out the yard?
Because we have no trucks to pick up the containers at the terminals.
But how you say? How do we suddenly have no trucks? I see like 1,000 trucks every day and there was no mass extinction event for trucks.
Here is where it gets a little tricky.
Right now if you have a semi truck, you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. Only condition is that when you bring that semi truck, it cannot have an empty container on it.
This is how it usually works though.
If I were driving a truck, I could take it to the terminal unhitch my empty container and hitch on a new full container. Leaving the empty container behind. But now the yard doesn’t have space to keep the empty containers so they can’t allow that to happen!
So you need to come to the yard with just a truck. No empty container on it.
If you can’t get the empty off the truck, you don’t have a truck to go pick up the next container.
And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed.
So why don’t we just store the empty containers somewhere else?
Enter regulation.
This one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now (as of 10/21) at his yards.
He can’t take the containers off the chassis because he’s not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than 2 high in his truck yard. If he violates this code they’ll shut down his yard altogether.
And of course only certain areas are zoned to store these containers…
The worst part? This is only going to get worse without intervention.
With all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can’t unload the ships. And so the queue grows longer, with now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers are waiting off shore. This line is going to get longer not shorter.
The thread goes further to exploring solutions into solving this problem so feel free to give that a read!
But in my opinion, the lowest hanging fruit is the following:
Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days.
This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers
The other ones he lists are great too, but this one seems to be doable immediately.
One thing is clear though, we should act fast because as the author says:
This is a negative feedback loop that is rapidly cycling out of control that if it continues unabated will destroy the global economy.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Thoughts? Comments? Concerns?
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Yours sincerely, wasting away
Mahalo,
Kevin
As a fellow former FGWBFS I would add only that I was also likely wearing at least two pieces of compression clothing, blue-light-blockers, and I had a change of oly-lifting shoes in my bag because simply eating and working out consistently for a long period of time cannot be worn to the gym and how else am I going to let everyone know how committed I am to integrating fitness into my life and no longer being the FGWBFS, but instead the somewhat athletic looking guy with really thick ankles (SALGWRTA)?