Andy Kessler

WSJ: Where in the World Is Larry Page?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-in-the-world-is-larry-page-11546199677

Has anyone seen Google founder Larry Page? Me neither. He’s in the witness protection program of his own doing. Brilliant.

As you chill the champagne ending 2018, the only thing worse this year than owning bitcoin was being the visible face of corporate America, especially technology. It’s the year of the beleaguered CEO, with Facebook ’s Mark Zuckerberg being the poster child under the caption “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be CEOs.”

Whenever I meet chief executives, whether they’re fresh-faced startup founders or grizzled managers of public companies, I remind them there are only two rules for being successful. The first is pretty easy: Don’t run out of money. Ever. Former General Electric CEO John Flannery now knows this. Elon Musk might be whistling past this graveyard again as Tesla’s batteries run low.

And the often neglected second rule of CEO success? Hire a solid No. 2—but not for the reason you think. Sure, a competent operating person would be nice, to offload some of the drudge work. But the real purpose is to serve as a heat shield—someone to roll out front when the villagers with torches and pitchforks show up at your door. Bluntly, someone to take the blame when things go sideways, or even fire so your board doesn’t fire you. What could be more important?

In October 2015, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google. But really, he is CEO in name only. Mr. Pichai runs a division of Alphabet, a holding company that contains Google (which accounts for 99.6% of Alphabet’s revenue) and a bunch of hemorrhaging “Other Bets.” Mr. Page is CEO of Alphabet, a heat shield between himself and trouble.

It was Mr. Pichai who fired James Damore in 2017 for writing the “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” memo.

WSJ: Inner Peace Is a Booming Business

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inner-peace-is-a-booming-business-11544991939

California is weird—and full of contradictions. On the one hand, California as a country would have the world’s fifth-largest economy. On the other hand, state Senate leader Toni G. Atkins is doing her best to diminish that wealth by pushing a campaign to ban fossil fuels. Despite the drama, a 2017 WalletHub survey concludes that 12 of the 20 happiest American cities are in California. Hmmm. Maybe it’s because California is home to an endless expanse of spiritual retreats—a booming enlightenment industry.

You may know of such places, promoting harmony among mind, spirit, body and earth. They have rooms filled with crystals to tune your vibrational frequency, Himalayan-salt therapies high in negatively charged ions, and meditation mazes with a speaker blasting “Ommmm” from its center. On your way to happiness are large doses of xylophonic-oboe-harpy new-age music, root-vegetable dining, cozy chakra chambers and, of course, handwritten signs with Eckhart Tolle-like spiritualist scribblings everywhere. “You have only one life to live, but if you do it right, you’ll only need one.” Insightful! And “Let go of your material possessions.” Conveniently, the Ranch at Live Oak Malibu takes care of that for you. One week starts at $7,800 a person—I hope that includes bottomless cups of bearberry herbal tea.

The famous Esalen Institute, left over from the culty ’70s, offers more than 400 workshops on topics from cosmology to other shams—er, I mean “shamanic rituals.” In 2013 Esalen brought in almost $18 million in revenue with margins rivaling some software companies.

Follow the money. According to Marketdata Enterprises, meditation is a more than billion-dollar business. Deepak Chopra is the meditation master and mogul, offering books, seminars, videos and several California-based “Perfect Health Retreats” where you can get instruction in primordial-sound meditation.

I heard Mr. Chopra pitch one of his more than 100 books at a conference I attended. His spiel was something about “your cosmic self.” He went on about the vastness of time and space and then stopped and asked attendees, “Shall I teach you how to meditate?” “Yes!” they roared. “OK, close your eyes, relax,” he said—then launched into a bunch of stuff about rotating galaxies and interstellar motion and karma. I started chuckling, because all I could think about was my favorite bathroom-stall graffito, “My karma ran over your dogma.” I opened my eyes and saw a room in a trance. Then Mr. Chopra caught my eye and I thought I saw him crack a tiny smirk. Maybe that’s how he achieves his own moments of zen.

WSJ: Life as We Know It Turns 50

https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-as-we-know-it-turns-50-1543786471

San Francisco in 1968 was littered with flower children, free love and dreams of utopia encapsulated in Timothy Leary’s exhortation: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” How wrong that was! But out of this purple haze rose that year’s Joint Computer Conference, where an assembly of geniuses wearing white short-sleeved shirts and pocket protectors convened 50 years ago this week. The event shined a guiding light on the path to personal computing and set the modern world in motion.

On Dec. 9, 1968, Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute presented what’s now known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Using a homemade modem, a video feed from Menlo Park, and a quirky hand-operated device, Engelbart gave a 90-minute demonstration of hypertext, videoconferencing, teleconferencing and a networked operating system. Oh, and graphical user interface, display editing, multiple windows, shared documents, context-sensitive help and a digital library. Mother of all demos is right. That quirky device later became known as the computer mouse. The audience felt as if it had stepped into Oz, watching the world transform from black-and-white to color. But it was no hallucination.

At the time, the data line Engelbart used for the demo probably cost more than 10 grand a month. And he needed an amazing amount of not-yet-invented science to back up his vision: The first internet transmission wasn’t sent until the next year, when a message was sent from a UCLA lab to a terminal at the Stanford Research Institute. The integrated circuit was invented 10 years earlier, but Engelbart would be considered a false prophet today if the microprocessor hadn’t come along a few years later. He saw where the technology was headed and helped to hurry it up.

The coolest thing about this story is that, starting 20 years ago, Doug Engelbart was my next-door neighbor. We would invite him to our parties and get invited to his. At his place I got to meet the tech hall of fame: In the living room I met Ted Nelson, who conceptualized hypertext, and I met the inventor of the disk drive in his kitchen.

One of Engelbart’s biggest influences was Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” which envisioned a “memex” machine—a portmanteau of “memory” and “index”—that would enhance human cognition. While I chased my kids’ errant basketballs in his backyard, Doug would tell me about this sort of “human augmentation,” arguing that computer science was developing in ways that would aid humans, not replace them. Networks of humans and computers would create a “collective IQ.” He would interlock his fingers to make sure I got the point.

So what have we learned in 50 years?