Journal

Notes, essays and field reports on building businesses, brands and a life in Cambodia and Southeast Asia.

  • The share moved, the pie shrank - Everyone is quoting the boycott numbers. The one in the same reporting that nobody repeats is that Cambodian industrial output has fallen two years running.
  • We will just turn up the cows - A minister asked us for more milk. Two hundred cows from Vietnam then stood at the border for a week while somebody waited to be paid.
  • How do you know the fish are happy - Two philosophers on a bridge. One of them wins the argument by cheating, beautifully.
  • Looking for the key where the light is - Nasruddin is on his knees under a streetlamp, and the key is not there, and he knows it.
  • He was smuggling donkeys - Every week the border guard searches the straw. Every week the straw is clean. Years later he finally asks.
  • The cup was already full - A professor comes to ask about Zen. The tea goes over the rim and keeps going.
  • Not the wind, not the flag - Two monks argue about a banner. A stranger settles it in one line and gets the abbot's job.
  • Who is dreaming the butterfly - Zhuangzi wakes up from being a butterfly and does not rush to sort out which one he is.
  • Put the suitcase down - A man on a moving train keeps his luggage on his head. The train is carrying both of you either way.
  • You were never born - A visitor asks a cigarette seller in Bombay what happens after death, and gets the question moved.
  • Tea with the demon - Milarepa comes home to a cave full of demons and tries everything, in the wrong order.
  • Why were you not Zusya - A rabbi on his deathbed is afraid of the wrong question, then of the right one.
  • Go and sit in your room - A desert father is asked for a word. He gives the shortest possible instruction and no explanation.
  • If you meet the Buddha - The most violent line in Zen is a warning about souvenirs.
  • The proof Tesla never sent - In 1896 a monk went to dinner in New York and came away expecting mathematics. What is actually on file is a letter, a promise, and some Sanskrit in a newspaper thirty four years later.
  • Spinoza's God, in twenty five words - A rabbi prepaid fifty words for the answer. Einstein used half of them, and pointed at a lens grinder who had been expelled from his synagogue at twenty three.
  • The tenth man - Ten men cross a river, count themselves, and find nine. The Upanishad takes five layers away from you and then says the layers were never separate.
  • The definition of God - Every definition I was handed turned out to be a bigger version of a person. The one that finally worked does not add anything to the room.
  • The eye of the hurricane - Asked for a first step for someone in real distress, the swami gave four, in order, and none of them was a belief.
  • The brass labels on the pavement - A teenage girl argued that if you do not complain about the good parts of life you should not complain about the bad. Her father could not answer her. The swami could.
  • A screen that plays no movie - If the absolute is already complete, why did it bother to become a world? The swami's answer is that a blank screen would be a boring and useless thing to be.
  • The word and - Krishna told Arjuna to be centred in the absolute and fight. Jesus named the greatest commandment and then added a second. The swami says the small word is the whole teaching.
  • My God the wicked - Vivekananda's answer to people who could not believe in a God in heaven was to point at the street. You are looking at it.
  • I can't believe all that stuff - A French philosopher wrote that if he could choose a worldview to be true he would choose Christianity. Then he wrote the sentence that most of my friends would sign.
  • The dip in the Ganges - Other Hindu schools accused the Advaitins of being Buddhists in disguise. The yogis accused them of talking too much. Both charges had a point.
  • Worship through one window - If you stay as the patch of sky in your own window and pray to the great sky through all the others, that is religion. Advaita says it is not wrong.
  • The face in the canal, the sky through the window - Two old models for how one consciousness appears as many people. One needs a mirror. The other only needs a window.
  • All that is Maya is not an answer - A physicist approached a traditional teacher. The teacher told him his whole field was appearance and he should come and learn the truth. The swami calls this unhelpful.
  • Know it or believe it - A monk put the whole of Advaita into three words of Hindi. Jano ya mano. Either you know it, or you believe it.
  • The second arrow - A monk asked the Buddha why, if the teaching ends suffering, everyone following it still gets old and sick. The answer was about archery.
  • The rascal has found me out - A man dying of throat cancer in 1886 was told by a young disciple that he seemed to be in great bliss. He laughed.
  • Who is this Nagarjuna? - Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit to read the Gita. A quantum physicist was told his ideas sounded like a second century monk and went to find out.
  • Three questions, one answer - Philosophy has three oldest questions. Vedanta gives the same one word answer to all of them, which is either very bold or a trick.
  • Where is the screen? - A father takes his son to the cinema for the first time. Everywhere the father points, the boy sees a picture.
  • An MBA on the way to becoming a monk - He did not do the degree and then renounce it. He did the degree in order to renounce it faster.
  • The swami who teaches in stories - Swami Sarvapriyananda runs the Vedanta Society of New York and teaches Advaita by argument and by anecdote. Eighteen of the anecdotes, one at a time, in order.
  • Four Rumi poems, in a translation from 1903 - William Hastie rendered the Divan into Victorian English. The strangeness of the diction is part of why these still land.
  • Crossing the border during Covid - Aranyaprathet to Poipet, and back.
  • Eckhart asks God to rid him of God - A medieval Dominican, preaching in German to ordinary people, tried for heresy, and still the strangest thing I have read.
  • Five businesses, one calendar - How I actually work across dairy, rice, spirits, media and software without any of it collapsing.
  • Wu wei is not doing nothing - The Taoist term gets read as passivity, which is almost the opposite of what the stories describe.
  • Cold chain is a promise, not a truck - Fresh is a claim you make every single morning, and it is easy to quietly stop keeping.
  • What a bottle has to survive - Between the design file and the shelf, everything you decided gets tested.
  • Anatta, or the self that never arrived - Buddhism takes the person apart and does not put anyone back together.
  • Khmer script breaks your design tools - A practical account of setting Cambodian type in software that was never built for it.
  • Notes before Paris - What a first international trade fair looks like from six weeks out.
  • The swamis who argue you out of yourself - Advaita Vedanta does not ask you to believe anything. It asks you to keep looking and report back.
  • Twenty-five pounds of jasmine, and the fine print that ships with it - The rice is the easy part. The label is where export actually happens.
  • You cannot fix what you refuse to count - The first real inventory count is never a number. It is an argument.
  • Rumi and the reed - The Masnavi opens with a cut reed complaining, and does not resolve it.
  • We wrote our own software for a dairy farm - Buying the system was the easy option. It was also the wrong one.
  • The mystics were describing the same room - Different centuries, different languages, and an unnervingly similar report.
  • You've already known. You just didn't have the word for it. - A quiet corner of the blog for the thing that keeps happening, and the old, sharp minds who already had a word for it.
  • The Rosewood grid - Why a hotel's print magazine taught us more about social than any social tool did.
  • Filming with a princess - How the TV5 Monde documentary France-Cambodge, Je t'aime, moi aussi came together.
  • Drinks for the next Cambodian - Seekers, Jason Kong, Wild Bong, Chanthy. Not for tourists. For the regional class that is arriving.
  • King White Elephant - Why navy and gold, not red and gold. Why the elephant, not the dragon.
  • One hundred underfed cows - What we inherited at Moo Moo Farms in 2024, and what 600 cows looks like in 2025.
  • GPS on a Kampong Thom paddy - How we monitor AWD and No Burn compliance for BRM farmers without turning them into a spreadsheet.
  • A label is not a brand - Working on the 110ml Moo Moo carton taught me to design for the hand, not the shelf.
  • The American supermarket test - Weekly sell-through at one Atlanta store is the only number that matters right now for Golden BRM Rice.
  • What Phnom Penh teaches you in the first year - Power cuts, banking lines, and the weight of relationships before transactions.
  • On not taking yourself seriously - The quietest discipline in business is forgetting your own importance for an hour.
  • Sailing at Varuna - You cannot argue with wind, which took me an embarrassing number of weekends to accept.
  • Fifteen seconds in Bangkok - Making short video taught me that attention is not the same thing as interest.
  • Selling software nobody asked for - The product was better than the spreadsheet. That turned out to be almost irrelevant.
  • The four o'clock table - An empty restaurant at four in the afternoon is worth less than a discounted one, and almost nobody prices it that way.