The Old Lone Ranger

Kindness and Other Fables

By Rich Marin | August 20, 2026 by Rich Marin

Most people are kind, right? Depends on how you measure it, but the evidence suggests that’s a true statement…but with caveats. Behavioral economics experiments (like dictator games and public goods games) consistently show most people share resources, cooperate, and punish unfairness even at personal cost, more than pure self-interest would predict. Lost-wallet studies (a famous one across 40 countries) found most people actually try to return wallets with cash in them, and surprisingly, more cash…

Memoir

Gettin’ It Done

By Rich Marin | August 19, 2026August 18, 2026 by Rich Marin

Today I finally got serious about this water leak that’s been jabbing at me regularly over the last year. At first I thought it was the spa overflow valve so I kept trying to no avail to get the spa guy and the spa plumbing guy to address it. Then I got an hour-by-hour water usage run over a few weeks and noticed that this time the water loss was not when the spa was…

Business Advice Memoir

The Agony and the Ecstasy of AI

By Rich Marin | August 18, 2026 by Rich Marin

In the 1965 movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, staring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s regular and frequent answer to the Pope’s question of “When will you make and end?” (painting the Sistine Chapel), is, “When I am finished.” Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling from 1508 to 1512, a span of about four years, which was actually fast for the scale of the work. A few reasons…

Memoir

Pages on the Calendar

By Rich Marin | August 17, 2026 by Rich Marin

An expression I have always enjoyed using in general conversation is about the passage of time. We’ve all seen movies they’re they use the visual trick of having pages of a calendar fly off or seasons pass through seasons from spring to summer to fall to winter and we are all made to feel that there are times in storytelling where one needs to show that time marches on and indeed time either changes nothing…

Memoir

Fiesta Mechanix

By Rich Marin | August 16, 2026 by Rich Marin

We are in the countdown week before our summer fiesta. I’m not sure why we have never done this before. We live in fiesta territory and we are surrounded by Hispanic culture so it seems like something we should have done before this. I carry an Hispanic surname and am regularly asked if I identify as Hispanic, which I don’t. I spent six of my first seven years living in Latin America, first in Venezuela…

Business Advice Memoir

Depo Man

By Rich Marin | August 15, 2026 by Rich Marin

Repo Man ia a 1984 cult classic sci-fi comedy starring Emilio Estevez as Otto, a disaffected LA punk who falls in with a crew of repossession agents led by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Otto gets pulled into the repo business and ends up chasing a mysterious Chevy Malibu with a bounty on it. The trunk supposedly contains something otherworldly (aliens, or their remains) that melts anyone who looks inside. It’s all deadpan, anarchic, and satirical…

Memoir

Summer Comfort

By Rich Marin | August 14, 2026 by Rich Marin

For almost six weeks now my weight has hovered at 260. I noted this morning that I was at my absolute lowest point on the scale, but I just haven’t made that downward move into the 250s, which I very much have wanted to see happen in August. I still have a few weeks left, so I’m hoping that can still happen before I fly off to Amsterdam for our river cruise and mountain climb…

Memoir

So Much For Not Traveling

By Rich Marin | August 13, 2026 by Rich Marin

A funny thing happened on my way to our fiesta yesterday…I got a message from my old business school friend John, telling me that he had cleared his decks and was prepared to host us in Mexico City (or slightly outside in the town of Malinalco) during the middle of November. Naturally, I had assumed that did not work for him, so I had booked us a five day excursion to Oahu in the second…

Memoir

Our Destiny Chooses Us

By Rich Marin | August 12, 2026 by Rich Marin

One of favorite, lesser-known movies is a small 1998 film starring Matt Damon, Edward Norton and John Malkovitch. It’s called Rounders and its about the underground poker scene in NYC. It does a better job of explaining the allure of poker and specifically the culture of Texas Hold’em than any other movie I know. What 21, the MIT card-counting team movie with Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess, did for Blackjack, Rounders did for Hold’em. There…

Memoir

On Fire

By Rich Marin | August 11, 2026 by Rich Marin

Long before we moved out here to this hilltop, we recognized that wildfires were a way of life out in this area and that we would have to do everything we could to be vigilant and aware of how to protect ourseelves and our hilltop from them. We had our two and half acres largely cleared of non-succulent brush and while I have allowed portions of the property to revegetate, its been mostly with succulents,…

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