MMRadio Michael Kaeding - The Monday Morning Memo

Michael Kaeding had no idea how to run his family business when his father unexpectedly passed away.
“I had no preconceived notion of the way things were supposed to be done,” Michael recalls. “We just started to naively solve problems, and that was the magic.” Today Michael is the CEO of a company that designs, builds, and rents apartments. His naivety allowed him to perfect a process that saves 50% of what other residential developers spend. Listen and be amazed as Michael tells roving reporter Rotbart how he plans to solve America’s housing shortage and affordability crisis.

“Insofar as the dry valleys of Victoria Land are known to the rest of the world, they are known for their similarity, it is believed, to the rainless deserts of Mars (the Viking Lander would have found no life on this ground either); and for a scattering of mummified creatures on the valley floors, mostly young crabeater seals and, rarely, a penguin or skua.

No one is certain why the seals come up here. A good guess is that they are inexperienced. They wander up from the coast, sometimes traveling as far as forty miles inland, hunching their way over the gravel fields with — to judge from the few, fresh trails that have been found — intractable determination. But it is travel utterly in the wrong direction.

They succumb eventually to starvation on these errant journeys, but an animal dead for a decade may be so well preserved that it looks, as one approaches, as if it might move off.

The taught skin of these dessicated animals feels smooth under the hand and hard, like water-polished stone. The wind freeze-dries their flesh. No predator bothers them. The faces, if they can be said to have an expression, are distraught, catatonic with a sudden, horrible misunderstanding of geography.

Whenever I encounter one of these animals I found it difficult to leave them. And when I left them, often as not, I turned back. They were inconsolable. They had made an error. Their lips parted in some final, incoherent noise. They had, most of them, died alone. Some lay with the clouded eyes of the blind, preserved for years in abject disbelief.”

- Barry Lopez, "Informed by Indifference," Ch. 4 in About This Life

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