The Jungle of My Mind
My readers have often heard me harp about my distaste for the tropics. I lived six of my first seven years in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica and it has left an indelible mark. There are few places I would rather not find myself stranded in than a dense dark jungle. I think its a combination of the humidity-driven discomfort and the truly creepy crawly things that thrive in that dank environment. It is the stuff of nightmares for me. Give me a frozen arctic tundra, devoid of life, any day. And yet here I am, thriving in what is called a sub-tropical environment labeled by the USDA as zone 10a (I had always been told I was in Zone 9, but the USDA interactive map tells me differently). That is not quite a jungle environment, but given that the other areas that get that zone rating are Hawaii and southern Florida, I think this is pretty damn tropical by United States standards.
We all tend to think of jungles as very powerful places because they are so extreme in plant and animal life, but the truth is that jungles are far more delicate than you might think. To begin with, the warmth and humidity make it very verdant without too much effort. Soil depth and quality for example are very shallow and sparse. That makes sense when you think in terms of the huge depletion it must take to grow a jungle environment and keep it maintained. It surely must drain every bit of nutrition from the ground with somewhat reckless abandon since nature probably figures it will all come back easily and quickly enough. That may be a decent assumption if the jungle was left alone, but as we know from watching the National Geographic Channel, the world’s jungles and rainforests are being depleted through clearcutting more and more every day. No place is more the culprit of this than Brazil, especially now under the nationalist, short-term-thinking leadership of Jair Bolsonaro.
When I think of a jungle, I think of a fetid and fertile place where things of any sort grow without effort and occasionally grow either too quickly or too rampantly for their own good. This understanding is probably why I think about my own mind as a bit of a jungle for thoughts. I find the analogy very apt given that thoughts grow from seemingly nowhere and yet their root systems are sometimes woefully underdeveloped. They spring up anywhere and at any time and then, in the blink of an eye, develop into overgrown ideas that either need to be grappled with or disposed of for the safety of the host and the protection of the other thoughts trying to survive in the jungle. I guess that makes my random thoughts sort of fast-growing and parasitical vines of some sort that attach themselves wherever they can and try desperately to grow to the sky.
Strangely enough, the sub-tropical environment of my hilltop is far less jungle-like than its USDA growing zone designation would imply. The main reason for that is that water is in limited supply and irrigation must be applied to most plantings for them to thrive. This reality makes my hilltop far less jungle-like than high desert-like. I like to call it high chaparral, probably because I remember a TV show with that name when I was a kid and it always screamed cowboy to me. In fact, I would argue that in this growing zone, I am far less likely to have a rogue vine take over and kill off some important specimen planting than might occur back on my property in Ithaca. In fact, my coniferous trees there need to be regularly cleared of their encroaching vines to keep them healthy. The analogy to my hilltop as a place for my retirement frame of mind is quite appropriate. Just as most anything can and will grow well out here in zone 10a, compared to zone 5b where Ithaca lives, this is a friendly environment for random thoughts. Zone 5b is like everything on the East Coast, it is, even in an enlightened community like Ithaca, very competitive. Everything has to struggle to survive, whereas out here in zone 10a, everything grows in very friendly manner and most plants and ideas are somewhat drought-tolerant and don’t have excess expectations for themselves. They are content just to be allowed to grow in peace. I find I like this ideation analogy more and more as I think about it (you see, everything out here is given space to self-realize, even rogue ideas). I feel like my mind is flourishing and more productive than ever. I still think of things in the business context at times through my teaching and my expert witness work, but those thoughts and ideas are better spaced and under less pressure to produce in this time and place.
I have been thinking about the Elon Musk Twitter acquisition situation and I almost feel that I can see all sides of it more clearly from out here than I might have in New York City. It has nothing to do with this being a Silicon Valley play and everything to do with the portfolio of other thoughts I am currently cultivating. Like any good garden, if all you plant is one type of plant, you are bound to deplete the soil the way the jungle strips its soil bare. But when you combine plants or ideas and consider things more holistically, I feel you can get a better sense of things. In this case, the combination of my Advanced Corporate Finance teaching, where activist investing is already on the agenda for next semester, and the ethics of business that I am currently teaching, there is great cross-pollination of ideas underway. We spent an entire class discussing the ethics of behavioral algorithms and the balancing act of free speech and misinformation and truth. What could be more central to the Twitter acquisition proposal being taunted by Musk. By the way, I can’t help mentioning that Musk seems to like spreading musk in the business world the way a male mule deer does in the wilderness to mark his territory and establish he bona fides. I find the whole thing best represented by one pundit’s description of him as a bored multi-billionaire. He is nothing if not unconventional, but with a $1 billion EDITDA, valuing Twitter as a company that has already had most of its growth spurt over the last fifteen years of its existence, at $46.5 billion or 46.5X its EBITDA is far from an obvious or brilliant financial maneuver. Sometimes even multi-billionaires get it wrong and make one leap too many into the ozone.
If I ever get to feeling like I am letting my ideas grow wild in the jungle of my mind, I need only imagine what it must look like inside Elon Musk’s mind. I wonder if there is a term to describe something 46.5X as dark, dank and dense as the deepest jungle Jair Bolsonaro can destroy. That is what it would take to grow a fresh new idea in Elon’s brain.