Cavemen, pool sharks and green chemists

A work friend was in New York last week at PopTech, a conference of remarkable people working on innovative projects, which sounded super cool. I'm not sure why half of our department got to go and not the other half but there were a slew of interesting speakers and I just discovered - it's kind of like TED - that you can download their speeches online! (Oooh, I'm totally going to listen to these on the bus to work!)

Anyway, my colleague invited me for drinks to meet a bunch of cool people that she met there, all from San Francisco, at The 500 Club - a bar walking distance from my house that has a giant neon sign that makes it look like it's in Vegas. I think it's funny that "dive bar" has become an official classification but they had Guinness on tap so I have no complaints.


There was an old guy there with a really long white/grey beard and wearing an orange jumpsuit like he just got out of prison. He was clearing tables and playing pool with everyone - in a "you don't really have a choice" kind of way. One of the guys there said he's always there and he's a total shark. He'll let you just barely beat him on the first pool game and then ask you if you want to play again for a beer. All of a sudden he hands you a can of whoop-ass, knocking in all the balls in one or two turns. But all he gets is a beer! Not a very smart pool shark if you ask me.

I met a chemist who defected from Clorox to go to the green side and was now working with Method to make their products even more natural. I talked shop with a documentary filmmaker and met an engineer from a social networking site called High Five, which, he said, is very popular in Asia and is the most popular networking site in Kazakhstan, "the home of Borat!" When a group of us went to dinner at Luna Park after, he announced that was on the Paleo "eat like a caveman and lose weight" diet which he struggled to explain until he admitted that this was only his first day on the diet.

His roommate was a guy in business strategy (whatever the heck that is) and looked like he was about 14. He had an MBA and when I asked him why he went to business school he said he was burned out of the work he was doing and needed to regroup. I figure roughly half of MBA students are there because they can't think of anything better to do or are hoping it will somehow alleviate the malaise of working but I couldn't believe this kid had worked enough to be burned out of anything. He said the "burn out" was after working for four years at around 60 hours a week which sounds like what I was doing before I did something to shake things up - move to LA to pursue acting! I met the most interesting array of folks that night and it reminded me yet again, that San Francisco is way more stimulating than Los Angeles.