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.

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September 5, 2011

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.]
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June 5, 2011

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.

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May 31, 2011

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.

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April 21, 2011

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.

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February 3, 2011

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.

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January 16, 2011

Peak to Peak

There’s a lot of research behind the idea that we measure how well we’re doing in life not by absolute measures, but by relative ones.

Most people would (perhaps obviously) choose to earn $75,000 over $50,000, all else being equal.

Yet change that choice to be between earning $50,000 while your friends and colleagues earn $40,000, or earning $75,000 while your friends and family earn $100,000, and the popular option flips. Most people choose to earn less overall, rather than to earn more overall while still earning less than those around them.

Evolutionarily, we’re wired to look for our standing within a group. We determine how we’re doing by checking how well we compare.

And that, I think, is the danger of Twitter.

Most people’s average days are, well, pretty average. Yet within any given day, at least one relatively interesting thing is likely to happen. That’s the part people tweet about:

“I’m at [fill in the blank interesting place]!”

“Just ran into [fill in the blank important person]!”

“OMG! I love [trendy thing]!”

Basically, you get the highlight reel of all your acquaintances’ lives, 140 characters at a time. All of whom, extrapolating from there, seem to spend their entire lives attending parties, being fabulous, and generally living very well.

But, like in reality TV, the trick is in the editing. You live the entirety of your life (the highs, middles, and lows), and only read about their lives’ peaks.

So, rather than let Twitter depress you with comparison-driven angst, consider a thought experiment I personally enjoy: Tweets that your friends should publish if they were trying to reflect the full balance of their lives, but probably never will:

“Still working on [busywork related to current mind-numbing project]!”

“Eating a tub of Haagen Dazs alone on the couch while watching TV again!”

“Holy crap, I just had really explosive diarrhea, and boy did it burn!”

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November 18, 2010

Sushi 2010

Six years back, I wrote a run-down of NYC sushi that inexplicably made the rounds of New York blogs, food blogs, etc., and for years floated atop Google’s results for ‘new york sushi’ and ‘sushi nyc’.

By now, that post is far out of date, but more than a handful of friends and colleagues still ask where to find excellent sushi.

So, to help them and you out, allow me to share the complete list:

1. Sushi Yasuda

That’s it. Seriously. I admit to a bit of paternal pride, having pronounced Sushi Yasuda as the future king of New York a few weeks after it first opened eight years ago. But, really, by now, everything else is varying degrees of crap.

I’m not sure what accounts for the decline, exactly. Perhaps fewer diners in a poor economy yields less fish turnover, and therefore older fish. Perhaps restaurants are just scrimping on quality to save. Or, perhaps, as my father (whose foundation focuses on island healthcare) contends, the problem is at the supply, rather than demand, end of the chain: small island countries have been hit particularly hard by the economic downtown, leading to fewer people working fishing boats, less frequent flights to ship fish back to the mainland, etc.

Whatever the reason, despite the reputation, despite the price point, by now, most of the city’s high-end sushi just isn’t that good. Sushi Yasuda’s is.

And, of course, there’s the great story behind the place:

Chef Yasuda was a young hot-shot chef in Japan in the ’80’s, inventing a style of eel preparation that spread nationally in the same way as Nobu’s miso black cod has here in the US. (As an aside, there is no such thing as black cod – it’s really just sable. Nobu took a cheap and widely available cut of fish, covered it with an equally cheap glaze, then re-branded it to sound exotic, and has been rolling in the dollars ever since).

Anyway, Yasuda comes to New York, and takes a job at Hatsuhana, the priciest, most venerable sushi stop at that time. Quickly, he rises up to star status.

And then, one day, like many days before, somebody comes in and orders a spicy tuna roll.

This time, however, Yasuda refuses. He can’t take it. Never again, he says, will he serve spicy mayo sauce.

He and the owners fight it out. The Hatsuhana side contends that, while spicy mayo is indeed a completely inauthentic way to destroy excellent fish, we Americans are too stupid, too unsophisticated to appreciate the real deal.

Yasuda, instead, argues that we’ve simply never been given the chance.

Hence Sushi Yasuda. Exceedingly good, exceedingly traditional sushi.

Try it out. Or better yet, don’t. Because, honestly, after you do, you’re going to have a hell of a time appreciating the sushi that’s served these days anywhere else.

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November 17, 2010

When in Rome

I grew up in Silicon Valley, at the very beginning of the personal computer revolution and its attendant startup boom. So perhaps it was inevitable that I’d start some tech companies, or spend my life in various entrepreneurial pursuits.

But I grew up in Silicon Valley also largely by chance. My parents, born and bred New Yorkers, headed out West only after my father matched post-med-school at Stanford’s residency program. Just as easily, he could have ended up at a hospital here in New York, or in Boston, or down in DC. And I always wonder, had I been born in any of those places, might I have been more likely to follow a different path?

Would a childhood in DC have pulled me into politics? Would Boston have kept me in the world of medicine? Here in New York, would I have leaned towards banking and the public markets?

My best guess: definitely.

As Malcom Gladwell points out in his (admittedly less than stellar) Outliers, it’s all too easy to overlook the power of place. Which is something I’ve been thinking about of late, as Jess and I still, slowly, mull over where we’d like to live, in both the short and long term.

In theory, with technology of all kinds flattening distances, physical location should matter less and less. But, in practice, that hardly seems to be the case. In just the past few days, I’ve met a dozen or so people at events around the city, all of whom intersect in some interesting way with my work at Cyan, or Jess’ work in the fashion world, or with CrossFit NYC, or with something else somehow relevant to our life. And, indeed, those serendipitous meetings, the building of new weak ties, is exactly what you lose in absenting yourself from a physical community.

The problem is, those communities are also quite specific. So far as I can see, the only place where substantial pockets of fashion, film, and finance people intersect is right here in New York City. So, toy as we might with fantasies of complete escape, Portland, Maine becomes practical only if I’m ready to switch careers to lobstering.

Still, there’s an upside to this line of thought. After a decade of life in Manhattan, and as a relative newlywed, it’s all too easy to lapse into eating lunch in the office, into spending the evening at home with Jess on the couch. So it’s good to be occasionally reminded that the only way we can justify the crazy rents, small footprints, and booming street noise of our New York offices and apartment is to get out of them, and to meet the slew of smart, interesting people all around this city.

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November 2, 2010

Mobile Chicken Sex

All chicks, male and female baby chickens, look more or less precisely the same. Yet the females grow into hens – able to lay eggs – while the males grow into roosters – no eggs, just lots of noise.

The brutal reality, then, is that breeders want to kill the roosters as young as possible, before wasting months of feed, space, and care on those unwanted birds.

Hence the chicken sexer: a professional able to divine the chicks’ genders at just a day old.

Apparently, however, chicken sexers can’t, by and large, explain how they know the gender. Instead, new chicken sexers learn their craft sitting at the side of an experienced sexer, watching the pro sort male and female, male and female, for months at a clip, until they, too, can reliably spot male or female themselves.

By now, after six years of owning CrossFit NYC, after having watched literally thousands of people learn perfect form on movements like the squat, pullup, and deadlift, I’ve begun to feel a bit like a chicken sexer of human movement.

I see someone come in the door of the gym, and even before they start working out, I can already tell that they have low back pain or shoulder pain, that they have tight hip flexors or calves, that they’re unable to squat to full depth or lock a weight out overhead.

And, of course, I notice it outside the gym, too. The difference is, if I tell one of our members at CrossFit NYC that they might want to stretch their external hip rotators, they’re usually grateful for the insight. Whereas, if I inadvertently blurt out as much to someone in my apartment building’s elevator, I get looks that put me on par with Silence of the Lambs‘ Buffalo Bill.

Still, I can’t help it. The vast majority of rotator cuff tears, blown ACLs, replaced hips – the movement injuries of modern life – could be easily avoided, with just a little time and attention spent on fixing imbalances and dysfuction before they spiral all the way to breakdown.

If any of you want to dork out, I’m happy to recommend a dozen great books on the topic. But, for most people, I now have a far simpler, faster recommendation:

The Mobility Workout of the Day.

The site’s about two months old, started when Kelly Starrett, a doctor of physical therapy in San Francisco (as well as an owner of San Francisco Crossfit, a national champion whitewater rafter and kayaker, and a generally smart and excellent guy) started shooting short videos of himself with his new iPhone.

The premise is simple: prescribing ten minutes or less of guided, high-impact stretching each day.

Whether you’re an athlete looking to maximize performance, or just a desk jockey looking to make it through the work day without your back freezing up, the Mobility WOD is a great place to start.

Besides, it’s only ten minutes. Certainly, not permanently jacking yourself up should be worth that kind of investment, no?

If you’re feeling saucy, I’d recommend starting from the beginning, with the first post, as you’ll learn a huge amount from each one, though you can also safely jump in at pretty much any point.

Stretch it out! Or don’t. But then don’t complain to me when everything hurts.

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October 21, 2010