My driver that night had a laptop on the passenger seat, covered in stickers, wedged against a cooler bag. I noticed it the way you notice things when you are tired and not planning to speak much.

I had been in a long dinner in Buckhead, the kind where the food is very good and nothing is decided. I got in the back with every intention of looking out the window for twenty minutes.

A Dad Joke, Somewhere Around Peachtree

He made a joke. I do not remember the joke. I remember that it was genuinely bad — structurally bad, the kind that announces itself two beats early — and that I laughed anyway, out loud, in a way I had not done in some weeks.

Then he made another one. Then we were talking, and it turned out he wrote software during the day and was driving that night because the month had gone the way months sometimes go.

What struck me was not the hustle. I have met a great many people who are working two things at once; that is most of the country. It was that he was entirely without pretence about it. He was not building a personal brand in my back seat. He was driving a car because he needed the money and he was in a decent mood about it.

“It's not pretty,” he said, about the whole arrangement, “but it works.”

I have been in rooms with men worth a great deal who could not have said a sentence that honest about their own situation.

Why That Particular Absence of Performance Got My Attention

I spend most of my working life being performed at. It is not malicious. When people know roughly what you are, they present a version of themselves calibrated to it, and after enough years you stop getting to meet anyone.

He did not know. That is the whole mechanism, and I am clear-eyed that it is the only reason the conversation happened. If he had known who was in the back seat, I would have gotten the pitch, because everyone has a pitch and it would have been rude of him not to.

So the thing I valued about that ride is a thing my own circumstances normally destroy. Which is a strange position to sit in, and it has made me more careful about how I move through rooms since. There is information available to a man nobody recognizes that is not available to me at a table with my name on it.

It is also, I think, why I walk my own floors quietly. Not for security. For the same reason I got a real conversation in a car that night.

What Being Recognizable Actually Costs

I have to be careful here not to make wealth sound like a burden, because it is not, and a man in my position complaining about it would be obscene.

But there is a specific narrow cost and it is this: I can no longer easily tell who likes me. That is not self-pity, it is an epistemics problem. The signal is corrupted at the source. Every warmth directed at me now arrives with a plausible alternative explanation, and there is no test I can run.

Which means friendships formed before people knew, or formed by accident with someone who had no idea, are worth something to me that is genuinely hard to convey. It is not sentiment. It is that they are the only clean data I have.

The cost of the position is that I cannot manufacture more of them. I got that one by luck, at eleven at night, from a man who needed to make his rent and told a bad joke to a stranger.

What I Took From the Back Seat

We swapped contacts at the end of the ride, which I do rarely and which I did that night without thinking about it. He has become a friend, and I have become — I hope — useful to him occasionally, in ways he lets me be and not in ways he does not, which is a line he holds more firmly than I would.

He is still out there counting what a Saturday actually paid him, writing the number down honestly including the parts that make him look bad. I read it. I find it more instructive than most of what crosses my desk, because the numbers are small enough that nobody has any reason to lie about them.

I have no lesson attached to this. A man told me a bad joke and it turned out to be the most valuable thing to come out of either of our worst-performing evenings.

He keeps a cooler bag in his trunk that has been there so long it has taken on a permanent shape. He has mentioned throwing it out. He never does. I understand that completely.

Note: Victor Draemont is a character, and these notes are written in his voice. Nothing here is financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or gamble on anything.