Heart Felt

Perhaps due to my hacker roots, for more than a decade I’ve organized my life in a collection of text files. But when it comes to actually executing, I’ve discovered I’m far more productive working off a printed-out version of my Today.txt to-do list than I am with the same list on-screen.

For notes in meetings, too, I find paper and pen works better for me than an iPad or laptop. Much as for solo business strategy and planning sessions, where I tend to do my best work when I’m scrawling page after semi-legible page of ideas, mind-maps, outlines and diagrams. (Jess refers to this as my *Beautiful Mind* mode).

For years, I did my scribbling with blue Pilot G2 pens. Then about twelve months back, I switched abruptly to black Sharpie markers, usually writing on blank pieces of printer paper rather than yellow pad.

About three months ago, I ended up purchasing a variety pack of [Papermate Flair Felt-Tip Pens](http://www.amazon.com/Paper-Mate-Point-Guard-Assorted-8404452Pp/dp/B002R5AEIY/ref=sr_1_12?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1335062836&sr=1-12) to correct a document using the red pen. Though that pen was fine, and though the collection also included perfectly nice black and blue pens, I quickly found myself using only the green pen. I carried it in my pocket all day, using it at work, at home, to sign bills in restaurants.

A few times, I popped into Staples I happened to be passing by, hoping to find more green pens. But, in each case, the green was only available bundled in four-color packs. So, by now, a pile of unused black, blue and red Flairs sit unhappily in my desk, as I run through the ink in the couple of greens I own.

I don’t have a good explanation for why I like the green pen so much. It stands out? It’s easier on the eyes somehow than blue or back? It’s the color of money? It’s the logo color of Jess’ newly launched [Dobbin Clothing](http://www.dobbinclothing.com). (See what I did there, Jess?) But I do know that, soon, I need to start actually ordering these pens in twelve-packs online, because amassing unused other-colored felt-tips doesn’t seem like a particularly good long-term plan.

Kermit was right.

Brother Strength

A few months back, my brother and I ended up staying at the same hotel in Orlando while attending a good friend’s wedding for the weekend. While we were there, we agreed to meet at the hotel’s gym one morning to work out together.

Or, at least, that was the ostensible plan. But, really, both of us knew we weren’t there for a workout. We were there for a Grand Competition of Manliness and Strength. Somehow, that’s what our workouts always become.

Of course, a little competition shouldn’t hurt. But, in our case, it does. Because, while both of us are fairly conservative in our exercise in general, putting safety and effectiveness first, and while both of us will gladly admit in the abstract that we have differing physical strengths and weaknesses as compared to the other, if you actually put us into a gym together, all of that goes right out the window, and we instead each become monomaniacally focused on totally crushing the other.

In that situation, we’re even further set back by a phenomenon that I will here call ‘brother strength’ – essentially, a less benign relative of the sort of ‘mother strength’ that allows slightly built women to lift cars off of their children in emergency situations. Here, instead, it’s channeled towards, say, allowing a brother to bench press more than his sibling, even if his doing so flies in the face of all recorded exercise physiology and science.

I, for example, almost never train the bench press, whereas my brother does frequently, and has since his ice hockey days. Also, he outweighs me by about twenty-five pounds. But if you make him go first, and I get to go second, I can always, always bench at least five pounds more than he can.

And then, say, if we get on the pullup bar, and I go first, David can hop on and do at least one more rep than I did, even if that entails knocking out more in a single set than he’s performed in total over the past year.

Driven by a strange cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline, and long-submerged childhood rivalries, we can go back and forth like this, the second brother to try a given feat invariably besting the first, for literally hours on end. Eventually, we leave, laughing, perhaps part with an overly firm, hand-crush-attempting handshake.

And then, a few hours later, the high passes, and the hangover sets in. Down in Florida, the next morning, I woke up sore not just in my muscles, not even just in my tendons, but down in my very bones. My only solace, later that evening at the wedding reception, was noting that my brother looked equally rough.

But somehow, still, we both managed to pull ourselves out onto the dance floor. And we both did our damndest to out-boogie the other, excruciatingly painful as it may have been. Or, maybe, it didn’t hurt at all. Once the brother strength kicked back in, I don’t remember feeling a thing.

10

On September 11, 2001, I came into my office early, to follow the market, to watch the tech bubble slowly implode on the monitors in our bullpen that perpetually played CNBC and CNNfn.

I can picture our small company that morning, gathered in twos and threes around those monitors, as video played and replayed the first plane crashing into the North Tower.

We were still gathered around those monitors when the second plane hit, as we slowly realized that neither strike had been a mistake.

We were still gathered around those monitors, an hour later, when the South Tower collapsed.

##

Shortly after the second plane hit, I called my parents’ house in California. My father picked up. “I’m okay,” I told him. “I just called to let you know I’m okay.”

“That’s great,” my father said, still asleep, not understanding why I was calling. “I’m okay, too,” he said, before hanging up.

##

We were evacuated from the office before the second tower came down. We were a half block from Grand Central Station, and police feared an attack on that similarly iconic target.

Still, after I made it downstairs, I stood on the street corner by our office for at least fifteen minutes, looking downtown, watching smoke billow. Gusts of wind brought an acrid smell, a fine coating of ash.

I worked the game theory in my head: my apartment, nearby, was across the street from the United Nations, clearly unsafe. Some of my office-mates were headed to an evacuation center the city had set up at a West Side high school. But any terrorist group sophisticated enough to mastermind this complex an attack would have also known where large groups of evacuees would be directed by city plan, where they would gather as sitting ducks.

I stayed away from my home and from the evacuation centers. I stayed away from crowds, from city landmarks. I headed west, then north. I stayed away from the tall buildings of Midtown, from the crowds of Times Square, from picturesque Columbus Circle and Central Park.

By quiet side streets, I headed up to Harlem. There, I wandered, dazed, from one block to the next, listening to the news with groups gathered around radios on old buildings’ front stoops.

##

Late in the evening, I headed back towards my apartment, showing my ID to dozens of policemen as I inched closer to the UN.

Along the way, I reached my parents again briefly. Now, understanding, they were effusive in their relief.

Once home, I fell asleep nearly before my head hit my pillow. I slept badly, fitfully. And briefly: we were evacuated from the building early the next morning.

I headed to work, but after an hour, we were evacuated from there, too.

For days in a row, I was evacuated from one, and then the other. Unsure of what to do, I wandered the streets, still dazed. I considered heading out to relatives in New Jersey or on Long Island, but transportation was a mess. Besides, though I had only been here for three months, I already knew that New York was my city. I couldn’t simply leave it behind.

##

Months later, I was asked to contribute photos for a gallery showing of young New York photographers reflecting on the city in the wake of 9/11.

I thought about that week wandering, about how little I remembered of it. Where had I gone all day? What had I thought about?

I made two images for the show.

##

I visited my brother, a freshman at the University of Denver.

A woman who checked my ID there saw I was from New York and asked if I had been in the city during the attacks. I had, I told her.

“Even if we weren’t there, all of us were New Yorkers that day,” she said.

##

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I headed to the roof with my trumpet and played Taps facing downtown. I read the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of remembrance.

I did that each year, until the fifth anniversary.

On the sixth, I didn’t.

##

In the wake of 9/11, we came together in a way that still awes me: with heroism, generosity, and community. We love our country. And, even if we don’t always show it, we love each other.

Yet much of what has come after 9/11, of what has been done in its name, has troubled me deeply: from the security theater of the TSA and the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, to the serious violation of citizens’ civil rights by programs like the CIA’s warrantless wiretapping and the even more serious violation of others’ human rights at Guantanamo and through programs like extraordinary rendition.

We’ve slid slowly towards a security state, yet we remain ultimately insecure. We’ve run afoul of framer Benjamin Franklin’s cutting remark: that “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

We’re now permanently at war. We piss away lives and hundreds of billions of dollars yearly, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere. We have no clear objectives there. We have no clear exit criteria.

Like Britain during the Boer War a century before, we’ve spread ourselves too thin, have begun to underfund crucial long-term investments at home, like education, infrastructure, and scientific research, in favor of fleeting yet ever-expanding pursuits abroad.

Historians often argue it was the Boer War that ultimately ended the British Empire; I wonder if, a hundred years from now, historians will reflect similarly on our War on Terror.

##

A few weeks ago, Air Force pilot Chris Pace contacted me about a 9/11 fundraiser bike/run he was doing to benefit the Disposable Heroes Project, a nonprofit that supports wounded veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, where he had done four tours of duty.

His plan was simple, albeit vaguely insane: leave Arlington Cemetery by bike on the evening of Friday, September 9th, bike 150 miles, then dismount in New Jersey and run 100 miles, all without stopping to eat or sleep, to arrive in New York City on the morning of September 11th.

He had been training for this simply by doing CrossFit workouts. So, he wanted to know, would it be okay if he used my gym, CrossFit NYC, as the endpoint of his run?

Obviously, I said yes. But I also thought about the patriotism and generosity and welcoming sense of community, that feeling of being in it together, that had made me proudest in the wake of September 11th.

So, this morning, I woke up at 4:30am, and met Chris (and his support crew) as he crossed the Verrazano Bridge into Brooklyn, to welcome him to New York, and to show him our support, by running with him for the final 12 miles.

##

After we made it to the gym, after we hooked Chris into an IV to rehydrate him, then packed him into a car to his hotel so that he and his crew could get some much-needed sleep, I hailed a cab home.

The driver asked what I had done that morning, so I told him. I told him about Chris’ 250 mile, about my joining him for the last New York stretch.

“Your friend,” said the driver admiringly. “He is very strong.”

Yes, I agreed.

“Not just body strong,” said the driver. “Strong in heart.”

The driver told me he was from Mauritania. And that, back there, ten years ago, his brother had similarly biked a 150 mile round trip, to and back from the capital. But there, he said, nobody had been proud; instead, they had been angry.

“We thought it was embarrassment!” he laughed. “We say, who bike 150 miles? Only poor people who have no car!”

But now, this driver told me, he thought about that differently. He thought about a lot differently. For ten years in the US, he had been able to consider his country from a distance. And he’d been able to consider this one with an outsider’s eye. He told me that each had good and bad. And that, for those ten years, he had thought carefully about where there was more bad, where there was more good. And, earlier this year, he had become a citizen of the United States.

3

Three years ago, on a Sunday afternoon, I said yes to the best decision I’ve ever made.

So, today, on my third anniversary, I just wanted to quickly post about how wonderful Jess is. (Which, frankly, I should probably do more.) (And which, actually, Jess tells me to do: “what should I blog about?” I’ll ask her. “Me,” she invariably replies.)

Blog instruction notwithstanding, Jess is the yin to my yang, not overly boastful, rarely looking to be the center of attention. So far too many people – including my friends and family – have never discovered that she’s much funnier than I am, and smarter, and wiser and kinder and more insightful, too.

Which is why, even when she yells at me for not cleaning correctly (and mind you, I’m fairly OCD – just apparently not OCD enough), even when she tells me ‘you’re not my boss’ any time I tell her to do anything at all, even if we sometimes want to kill each other (“We’re best frenemies,” she recently proclaimed), I couldn’t be happier or more in love, I still can’t spend enough time with her after even days and days together in a row, and I wouldn’t want to be married to anyone else.

Happy anniversary Jess. I love you with all my heart.

Dinosaurs

For the past few years, at least once a month I’ve received an email with the subject “CYBORG DINOSAURS”, which always begins like this:

I am a science fiction writer & I wrote four science fiction stories about dinosaurs. And I do need you to makes movies from my stories?? My first story is Prehistoric park. And my second story is Pterodactyloid man’s flight to Paris. And my third story is Pterodactyloid man gose around the world in 76 days. And my fourth story is Alien Dinosaur Planet………

With this e-mail I do have four drawing of the logo’s of my stories. But I do have allots more drawing of my stories then just the logo’s……………….

As promised, four drawings come attached to each email, all along the lines of this one, for the aforementioned Pterodactyloid man’s flight to Paris:

A cyborg dinosaur.

Amazing! For years, I’ve been laughing about these emails, talking about them with colleagues, and even forwarding them along to friends.

Last week, one of those friends Googled up the author and subject line, and sent back this video:

I am, indeed, going to hell.

Know Your Audience

Over the past two decades, I’ve largely stuck with Old Spice deodorant, though I’ve been less loyal to specific scents:

 

  • Old Spice Original: I started with this one, which seems to have been designed and branded to impress old men, especially sea captains.
  • Pure Sport:Switched to this about ten years back, when Old Spice first expanded its line. Sporty! Though apparently meant to help guys impress other young, athletic men.
  • Swagger:A more recent addition to the Old Spice lineup. Perhaps their response to the rise of the Axe brand? Either way, as the first designed to attract women instead of other dudes, a reasonable switch.
  • Denali:Picked this up on Friday, as it was all my neighborhood Rite Aid had left in stock. Looking at the packaging post-shower, I am now concerned this means I’ve stopped trying to impress the ladies, and am instead working to impress wild animals.[Nota bene: According to the cap, Denali “smells like wilderness, open air & freedom.” According to Jess, it smells more like a teenage girl wearing CK One.]

Filmmaker == Hacker

Having split my professional life between the tech and movie worlds, I’ve always been struck by how similar filmmakers and hackers are. For example, both groups:

  • Think about the world as a collection of fascinating material to be mined / problems to be solved;
  • Disdain things that are boring and have already been done;
  • Distrust tradition/authority as a sufficient rationale in and of itself;
  • Respect competence and support meritocratic structure;
  • Work collaboratively and share ideas and solutions (even with ‘competitors’);
  • Are willing to put in huge amounts of work, even when unpaid, just for the love of the game.
  • And, most importantly, want to share the things they pour their hearts and souls into making with as many people as they possibly can.

In the tech world, that’s easy for hackers to do: they start startups, build stuff on their own terms, and then share their stuff with users by building direct customer relationships.

In the movie world, however, filmmakers haven’t had such a direct route; instead, they’ve traditionally had to rely on studios and distributors to build those relationships for them.

Now, sites like YouTube allow filmmakers to share directly. But those sites also don’t generate real filmmaker revenue. And while filmmakers (like hackers) don’t actually care all that much about getting rich, they do at least want to make enough money making their stuff that they can live comfortably, and show their investors strong enough returns to play again as soon as they come up with their next big idea.

With more and more films being made each year, it seems almost inevitable to me that new solutions will emerge somewhere between the studio and YouTube models – solutions that help filmmakers build broad audiences, profitably, and in ways they directly control.

I’ve been giving that a lot of thought of late. Because it seems like that’s a big problem waiting for a solution – and an equally big business waiting to be built.

Obesity Explained

Over the past fifty years, Americans have gotten fatter and fatter. By now, some 63% of American adults are overweight, and 26.5% are obese.

Over the time we’ve fattened up, we’ve also been arguing about the cause. It’s dietary fat. It’s dietary carbohydrates. Etc., etc. By now, the story has changed so many times that most people have entirely given up on trying to follow along, retiring to a sort of nutritional relativism: it doesn’t matter what we do today, as, in ten years, we’ll probably be advised to do the exact opposite.

That’s not an unfair position, given that most of the research on both sides of any nutrition issue has tended to be pretty terrible. Our best young minds, and the lion’s share of our grant dollars, have gone to solving cancer and AIDS, not to resolving whether egg yolks are healthful or not. But, in the past five years or so, things have started to change. For whatever reason, the amount and quality of nutrition science research has gone up exponentially. Now, though public knowledge and opinion hasn’t caught up, we’re coming to a scientific picture of obesity as clear as that of any other well-studied biological process.

The rough shape of that consensus points to three main causes of the American (and global) obesity epidemic:

1. Toxic foods like wheat, fructose, and omega-6 fats. In excess, these make us fat and sick, yet they represent an increasing majority of our diet.

2. Deficiency of important micronutrients like choline and iodine. As more of our calories come from those nutritionally empty toxic foods, we end up micronutient deficient (several of which deficiencies lead to obesity directly), while also instinctively eating more to shore up those micronutrient levels (with such overeating leading to obesity, too).

3. Viruses like Adenovirus 36. While you can get fat pretty effectively with just the two steps above, you can do so even more quickly when infected with an obesity-causing virus; AD-36, for example, is found in obese children at rates four to five times children of healthy weight. Here, too, it’s a vicious cycle: toxic foods lead to gut permeability, and micronutrient deficiencies lead to a compromised immune system, both of which leave your body less able to fight off such an obesity infection.

And that’s it. Certainly, a slew of other factors play in, too (things like non-exercise activity thermogenesis). But those three factors explain the majority of the obesity problem. And, increasingly, it looks like they’re implicated in pretty much every other terrible thing that happens to us, from Alzheimers to acne, from cancer to cellulite.

Of course, agreeing on the problem and implementing a solution are completely different issues. Consider the AIDS epidemic, where, despite our strong understanding that sexually transmitted HIV infection is the primary cause of the spread of the disease, the global number of HIV cases continues to steadily climb. With obesity, too, I fear that even agreement among the science, nutrition, healthcare, and public policy crowds may nonetheless leave us far from effectively addressing the problem in the real world.

Still, it’s worth noting that we’re closing in on such consensus, even if a read through Shape or Men’s Fitness would give you no indication of that. As I said, I think we’re simply five to ten years off from popular opinion catching up to the emerging science.

But catch up it will. You heard it here first.

Brain Drained

A few years back, Google introduced an experimental Google Labs feature for Gmail, called Mail Goggles. The idea was simple: at certain hours of the day (or, more likely, night), a Gmail user with Mail Goggles turned on would need to answer a series of easy math problems before sending an outgoing message. Back when I was in college, the drunk dial still outweighed the drunk email in overall popularity. But, even then, I’m sure there were enough embarrassing late-night proclamations of love, enough angry breakups entirely forgotten by the following morning, and enough incoherently rambling drunken messages in general to have made Mail Goggles a reasonable idea. In today’s digital world, those Mail Goggles seem like more than reasonable idea, and nearly collegiate necessity.

In my own life, however, well post-college, I’m rarely up and emailing at 3:00am regardless of sobriety. Still, on occasion, I do end up having a drink (or, god forbid, two) at a business lunch. After which, I would usually come back to the office, plunk down at the keyboard, and launch into a burst of unrivaled productivity. Only later on those afternoons, once I’d sobered back up, would I re-read those ‘productive’ emails, and begin to worry that Yale might be calling shortly to request my degree back. I think of myself as someone who can hold his liquor. But, really, even a glass of lunchtime Riesling is apparently enough to knock me down to a roughly fourth grade writing level.

Fortunately, with age comes at least a little wisdom, and, by now, if I’m foolish enough to have a lunchtime drink, I generally manage to stay off email completely for an hour or two after, averting potential disaster.

But, it turns out, it’s not just liquor than can addle my email brain. Two nights back, I came down with a pretty spectacular stomach flu, and proceded to toss my cookies nonstop for 24 hours. Well enough, in fact, that I actually lost about seven pounds in a single day. (Bulimia: it works!) Of course, rapid weight loss is usually just dehydration. And since more of the water in your body is in your brain than anywhere else (your brain being made up primarily of water), it turns out that quickly losing 5-8% of the water in your body (as I just did) probably isn’t a great booster of mental function.

All of which is to say, if you got an email from me yesterday or this morning, and it makes absolutely no sense at all, please disregard. I’ve been easing my way back to solid food, and getting as much fluid as my stomach can currently handle. And I think, by now, I’ve edged up to largely coherent. But, really, I’m in no position to self-judge. So if this post is also a total mess, give me another 24 hours grace period, and accept my advance apologies for anything wildly offensive I manage to pull off before then.

Pendulum Swings

Jess and I went to dinner on Friday with one of her friends – the beauty editor at a major women’s magazine – and her friend’s husband.

Somehow, the Paleo diet came up in conversation, which led Jess’ friend to exclaim how ‘hot’ Paleo is right now – several editors at the magazine had recently started following the diet.

And, indeed, she’s right. Paleo is blowing up. Earlier on Friday, I had lunch with two authors of new bestselling Paleo diet books, as well as the author of an upcoming (likely to also be a bestseller, I suspect) Paleo book, on camera for a Nightline piece about the Paleo life that should air in the next couple of weeks.

Seven years ago, when I started preaching the idea of eating and exercising in an evolution-inspired way, Paleo wasn’t big at all. In fact, it wasn’t just below the radar, it ran directly counter to mainstream nutrition advice: fat was the enemy, carbs the solution, end of story.

But now, it seems, the tide is turning. Dr. Walter Willett, for example, the Harvard Med School and Harvard School of Public Health nutrition guru, previously published books supporting the less fat, more carbs theory. Yet in an LA Times piece last month, he 180’s to say “fat is not the problem. If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases.”

I say: not so fast.

In his excellent In Defense of Food, journalist Michael Pollan coins the term ‘nutritionism’, for the common misconception that food is essentially a delivery system for specific nutrients, rather than something valuable as a whole. In the nutritionism approach, to which we collectively seem to subscribe here in the US, we pick out a few nutrients as good (omega 3’s), others as evil (trans-fats), and then build dietary recommendations – and food products – based on those nutrients.

Problem is, even simple foods are far more complex than we boil them down to be. Sure, there are the much-discussed macronutrients (fat, carbohydrates, and protein). And then there are the micronutrients we know about (vitamins, minerals). And then there are other micronutrients, which it seems we clearly don’t.

Pollan cites, for example, the problems with baby formula: children fed formula thrive far less than children fed breast milk. For the past five decades, major corporations have spent millions upon millions of dollars trying to figure out why, to better understand the nutritional breakdown of real breast milk, to isolate those missing micronutrients causing formula to fall short. Yet despite those efforts, the milk versus formula gap remains. Despite our best science, we still have no idea how to define – much less replicate – some of the crucial, health-promoting stuff in milk, much less in every other food that naturally exists.

Which is why I’m so concerned that the early mainstream embrace of Paleo thinking seems equally driven by such nutritionism.

First, that approach makes it too easy for the pendulum to over-swing in the new direction. The anti-carb lynch-mob mentality, for example, has led many people to conflate Paleo with Atkins. Yet the two approaches diverge substantially, especially when it comes to the Paleo diet’s focus on eating lots of fruits and vegetables, which I suspect drives many of the excellent health benefits that research on the diet has begun to highlight.

Similarly, I worry the nutritionism approach will also fail to exclude some of the most problematic foods. Recent research on Paleo eating, for example, has begun to show that the diet is hugely impactful in halting the progression of terrible autoimmune diseases like Parkinson’s and MS. A lot of that, I believe, stems from the reduced inflammatory load and substantially less gut-irritating (and therefore gut-permeability-causing) aspects of the diet, because excluding grains and legumes also excludes anti-nutrients like phytates and lectins. Yet most of the coverage I’ve seen of Paleo eating glosses over that point entirely. I’m sure it’s only a short matter of time until we see new and improved ‘Paleo friendly’ Snackwell cookies: now made with agave nectar and omega-3’s! They’ll taste like cardboard, and they’ll sell like wildfire, but they won’t pack any of the benefits of real Paleo food.

And, finally, I worry that the sudden popularization of Paleo eating will make the approach too much a ‘diet’ (something you do in a faddish way to lose some weight) and less an ongoing shift in lifestyle. The beauty of eating Paleo – or even just eating largely Paleo (for, perhaps, 80% of your meals) – is that it’s not overly restrictive, it’s not socially awkward, and it’s something that you can do indefinitely. More to the point, it’s something you need to do indefinitely, if you’d like to have a long and healthy and disease-free life. Much like, say, brushing your teeth, which you need to do for at least as long as you’d like to still have teeth.

Frankly, I hate the name Paleo diet. It’s a branding nightmare. It suggests crazy people who want to do weird re-enactments in loin cloths. It sounds like austere deprivation, and literally chest-banging machismo.

Instead, I think the Paleo crowd will fare better, will have a higher likelihood of getting the actually important ideas across to people in a real and sustainable way as the trend continues to grow, if we can boil it down in ways like John Durant does:

“Despite everything you’ve been taught,” he explains, “you are a wild animal. And you will be healthier when you start acting like one. Replicate the most beneficial aspects of living in the wild. Eat the foods humans have been eating for millions of years, move in the ways we are adapted to move, get some sun.”

I don’t think that sounds too crazy. But then again, I’ve long since drank the Kool-Aid. Or, rather, whatever equivalent beverage it was that cultish cavemen drank.