This edition of the Beach Bi-Weekly is a little shorter, with 5 mini ideas in lieu of a central topic. I scheduled this email ahead of time as I will be a married man on my honeymoon when this comes out. I look forward to hearing your feedback on the different format. If you know someone who may enjoy the newsletter, you can share it here.
Power of a name
There is a narrative that we should protect our children’s identity as much as possible. While safety is a good precaution, we don’t want people to be anonymous forever. If you have faith your kid will produce something good in the future, you should name them something googlable. I had a friend in college named Sam Smith and she always introduced herself by saying “My name is Sam Smith, good luck finding the correct me on the internet”.
Singers like John Legend, Jamie Foxx, and Miley Cyrus have all doctored their names to great personal benefit. My favorite name change is Peter Hernandez. Mike Rowe has a terrific 5-minute podcast episode on Peter Hernandez’s motivation and inspiration for changing his name to become one of the most iconic singers of the past decade. Email me back with your favorite Peter Hernandez song 🕺🏼.
Moneyball
Michael Lewis is one of the premier writers of the 21st century. Lewis’s genius is finding the right characters to tell a story of a big idea. On the podcast Smartless, Lewis recalled that back in 2001, he approached Billy Beane The GM of the Oakland Athletics, and asked how were the Oakland A’s competing against the New York Yankees? The A’s could only afford a quarter of what the Yankees spent.
Beane responded, “no one has asked me that question and It's what I spent my life thinking about it”. Michael Lewis knew right then he had a book. The idea—how the A’s outperform big market teams matched with a character, Billy Beane that would shape the narrative for the story. The book, Moneyball became an international bestseller and was eventually turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt. Plus, the concept of prioritizing data to discover underrated talent has changed all sports irrevocably.
Connecting dots
This graph of the sciences shows the fragmentation of academia, as measured by co-citations. A kingdom of epiphanies is waiting for people in the middle who can find new ways to connect the dots.
Hat tip to David Perell.
Land Value Tax
Land value tax has gained a lot of momentum in niche political circles in recent years. Land value tax (LVT) is touted as a more effective tax than property tax.
A property tax takes into account the assessed value of the building + land. A land value tax only taxes the value of the land and not the building. Our current system of property taxes discourages people to improve their property because their taxes will increase. An LVT incentivizes people to improve the value of the land because the tax will stay the same, but they could sell it for a higher price. Here is an illustration of two identical-sized lots and how they are taxed differently.
If a land value tax were implemented it would have a profound impact on the distribution of land.
Salt Lake City layout
Everything in Salt Lake City is designed to tell you where you are in relation to Temple Square. We stayed near the intersection of 1700 South and 300 West, which means we were 17 blocks south and 3 blocks west of Temple Square. Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Ladder Day Saints and the creator of Salt Lake City had a grand vision for the city. He laid everything symmetrically and orderly. The blocks are massive in part because Joseph Smith wanted each block to have its own utopian small farm on it.
This illustration shows the magnitude of Salt Lake City’s blocks.
The streets were designed so that a horse and buggy could easily turn around. These massive streets, makes driving easy but walking tough. When crossing the street, Jenny and I had to constantly lightly jog to make the walk light.
The city has grown and evolved, but the initial blueprint of a grid in relation to the temple square and massive blocks continues to shape the city.
Pic of the Week
In the past two weeks, Jenny, Chloe, and I traveled to Salt Lake > Mount Rushmore > Badlands > Kansas City > Tulsa > Greece. This picture was at a lake we stumbled across in Wyoming.