It's The IFOD's birthday and today's IFOD is about why I started writing The IFOD. But first, Happy Groundhog Day! I love Groundhog’s Day. Not because I actually believe that Punxsutawney Phil can predict winter’s duration but because I receive merriment from the...

Apple released the McIntosh computer 40 years ago this week. It cost $2,495 (about $7,500 in today's dollars), had 128k of memory (or 0.000131 Gigabytes), and no hard drive (you stored files on a floppy drive). Yet, even with these modest specs, the computer and the...

Happy birthday to the SPDR® S&P 500® ETF Trust (SPY), which started trading 31 years ago today (1/21/93). It's the original Exchange Traded Fund or "ETF" and is a single stock that tracks all 500 stocks in the S&P 500. What are ETFs? ETFs are baskets of stocks...

The book that probably has had the biggest impact on my thinking is The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb (I've read it 3x). The main theme of the book is that important events that have the biggest impact on our lives, so-called "black swans," are unpredictable—things like...

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. -Segal's Law I think Segal's Law is brilliant as it gets to the heart of the difficulty of having multiple sources of information. It's easy to believe a thing if you have just one...

Since it first entered production in 1958, an astounding 110 million Honda Super Cubs have been sold, making it the #1 selling motor vehicle in history. And it's competition for the best-selling honor isn't even close. The best-selling car, the Toyota Corolla, has...

In 2023 I read 66 books, 35 non-fiction and 31 works of fiction. Here's the full list: Books I Read in 2023. Here are my seven favorites in no particular order: Whiskey When We’re Dry: A Novel, by John Larison. In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney...

"Dry January" is a public health initiative launched by Alcohol Change UK in 2013 that challenges people to give up alcohol for 31 days. It's been a successful campaign as Dry January is now a household term across the globe, and in 2023, 15 percent of U.S. adults...

Being a parent is rewarding, but it's also tough. And, not surprisingly, the rewards and frustrations of parenthood fall differently on fathers than on mothers, according to a 2019 research study. Gender Differences in the Parental Experience The researchers compared...

Absolute vs. Relative Value We value things both absolutely (does this thing work or not?) and relatively (is this thing better than other things?). For example, you value your car based on whether it gets you reliably from point A to point B (absolute) but also as...

Our Overflowing Closets Do you have clothes in your closet that you never wear? That old college hoodie, the dress bought on sale that isn't quite your style, those jeans that are just a size too small? Even though we never wear these unused and unloved items, it's...