My Life in Electronic Communications

I am a newsletter writer, so I send a lot of email and I get a lot of email. From a business standpoint, I want people to be enthusiastic and engaged with what I write, but it can be a bit exhausting.

Some people don’t have an off switch. They think and talk about markets 24/7. That used to be me, in my Lehman days, and in the early days of the newsletter, but now, I decidedly have an off switch. After dinner, when I am sitting on the couch, I do not want to think about tariffs, or private equity, or anything else. I’m not one of these psychos who is plugged into The Matrix 24/7. I believe that there is such a thing as work/life balance. Nonetheless, people send me emails about tariffs and private equity at all hours of the day and night. I have a guy who sends me multiple 200-page research pieces a day. Like, five. Just as a general rule, there is a pretty high bar for emailing me more than once a day. I do not want to get five emails from one person in a single day. Also, I do not want to get emails with five questions in them—you can send an email with one question. Do not send me a laundry list of questions. I will answer one of the questions and leave you hanging on the balance. I get 100-200 non-spam emails a day—if I spent more than 20 seconds on each one, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. And yes, TLDR is a real thing. I am not reading 1,000-word emails. One sentence, two sentences, fine. I will respond to your Infinite Jest email with “Great!” or “Awesome!” and then you will be wondering why you spent an hour writing an email.

The emails I can deal with. The texts are a different story. I was on the radio this morning at 720am, like, actually talking on the radio, looking at the notes on my phone, when someone sent me a text about private equity. At 720am, when I was actually talking on the radio. I got one when I was in Philadelphia, just when I was turning in for the night. Getting under the covers, bloop! Tariffs. I have gotten market texts at 5:30am on Sunday and 1am on Monday and pretty much any time of the day or night. The all-time undisputed heavyweight champion of unwanted texts? I got one wanting to talk about variance swaps during Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago. Now, if it is Thanksgiving, and you’re thinking about variance swaps instead of cranberry sauce, you are beyond help. But like I said, this puts me in a tough spot, because my business depends on people being enthusiastic and engaged, but as of the present moment, there are no boundaries. And it’s hard to set boundaries without people getting their feelings hurt.

First of all, let me say that I fucking hate texting more than anything in the world. The text itself is an intrusion—answer me now! Even if you don’t answer the text now, it breaks your train of thought. And it is a lot easier to ignore an email than to ignore a text. There are two types of people in this world: people who ignore texts, and people who answer them. Knowing how anxiety-inducing it can be to have a text ignored, I try to respond to all of them. Maybe later in the day when I’m not on the radio. I hate texting for a bunch of reasons, and the first is “Lost in Translation”—you’re missing the tone and inflection of a phone call and things get misunderstood. Just talk on the phone. I have a late Millennial/early Xer friend who likes to text rather than talk. He’ll even say, I’m not in the mood to talk right now, let’s text. And of course, being a millennial, the guy is a million times faster than me on the stupid little keyboard. After about five minutes of this, I give up. He won’t call, and I won’t text, so we never talk. The kids these days only text. They never answer the phone, because they think the phone call is an intrusion. The young kids, the Alphas, don’t even text. They just do voice-to-text and then send the text. They’re basically illiterate. Even in my texts, I have to have correct grammar and spelling. Emojis? Forget about it. Emojis are for kids. If someone sends me a bunch of emojis, I have no idea what it means. I know the thumbs up emoji and the eggplant emoji and that’s about it. Even if I wanted to use emojis, I wouldn’t know where to find them on the phone. It’s more work to find an emoji than it is to just type out the fucking word. Matt Walsh has a routine on emojis—he says they’re basically for the stupid, and I agree. Speak the English language, people.

Also, as I said, I can’t type on the fucking phone. I would give anything for the Blackberry to come back. Here’s a statistic for you: 35,000 people are killed in car accidents every year. 6,000 of them are from texting while driving. There is no chance that I am going to send you a text while I am in the car. At most, I’ll look down at the phone (which I shouldn’t do) and use the voice recognition to call you. Then they’re like, why are you calling me? Just text me back? And I’m like, dude, I’m in the fucking car. I’m kind of under the impression that a lot of people text while they drive. You ever been at a stop light and look around at the cars next to you? Everyone’s on their phone. Self-driving cars can’t come soon enough.

I get it. I’m old. I would rather talk on the phone. I will say this—I have become a lot more judicious about who I give my phone number to. Like, nobody. In the past, if I was meeting someone somewhere, I’d trade phone numbers in case we got crossed up. Then a week later, I’d be getting texts about variance swaps. I’ve actually thought about getting a second phone, one that I only use for close friends and family. My main phone is too clogged up with variance swaps. One thing I will say is that living in the Apple ecosystem makes it a lot easier to text, at least when I am at my desk. iMessage! I get a text, and I can respond with the keyboard. There are a lot of times when I get a text and I just wait until I get on my laptop or desktop to respond. I can type on a keyboard, but not on a phone. I type about 80-90 words a minute on the keyboard. I type about 10 words a minute on the phone. I don’t even bother responding to emails on the phone; I just wait until I get back to the computer. By the way, the kids today are phone ninjas. My wife was at school last year and saw a girl sitting in the hall, tapping away furiously on her phone. My wife asks her what she was doing, and she said, “I’m writing a paper!” On the phone. I gotta get in front of the grandpa box computer to type any more than three words. And the way things are going, everyone is just going to be dictating things all the time. It’s bad enough nobody knows how to write, because of AI.

I am going on a writing retreat to Mississippi in a few weeks. I’m warning everyone to not email or text, because I can’t have any distractions while I’m writing. Most writing retreats cut you off from cell service and wifi for just that reason, but I’m still going to need the ability to trade. It will be interesting to see who doesn’t listen. The older I get, the more I just want to be left alone. But again: I don’t mind phone calls! Phone calls are nice! Since we are talking about phone calls, we should talk about voicemail, which is the most inefficient form of communication known to mankind. Someone calls, leaves a voicemail, I don’t listen to it, I call back, and they’re like, did you listen to my voicemail? No, I say, because it is a huge waste of time. Nowadays there is the voice-to-text feature on the voicemails, which is great. I can read the voice mail in half a second, instead of listening to the whole damn thing for a minute. Really it all comes down to the fact that I’m one of the biggest introverts of all time, and it is fashionable these days to call yourself an introvert, but no, I really am an introvert. On the Myers-Briggs, I am all the way over on the spectrum to “I.” My idea of heaven is being left alone to think and work for an entire afternoon, with no interruptions. Joyce Carol Oates talks about how interruptions are the enemy of creativity. And it’s true—I’ll be in the middle of writing something, and bloop! Train of thought splatters against the wall. Like, it’s a quiet afternoon and I’ve been able to write this piece without any distractions. Heaven.