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Here are the slides for my presentation Bitcoin Addresses, given at Bitcoin Manchester November 2013.
A few people recently have asked me questions about my diet, mainly because I refuse things like cakes, sandwiches and pies when offered them. The diet I eat is most commonly known as a paleo diet, but also goes by its full name, Paleolithic diet, and also Stone Age, caveman or hunter-gatherer diet.
Wikipedia has a page on the subject called Paleolithic diet, but I wanted to summarise things from my perspective. I've been eating this way with fairly strict adherence for 7, nearly 8 years, so I've got quite a bit of "practical experience", and I've done enough research in that time to satisfy myself that my choices makes sense.
I'm not going to be especially detailed here, I'm not going to be comprehensive (I don't say much about mental illness or cancer), and I'm certainly not going to reference every claim I make. I'm no biologist, and everything I know about nutrition is from casual part-time research. Treat this entirely as my opinion, as I will state as fact things that many people contest. Assume confirmation bias by default, but read with on open mind.
Why should you care?
I believe that the vast majority of disease we consider mysterious and incurable is caused by a mismatch between the environment we evolved to live in, and the one we have created for ourselves, and that the biggest (although by no means the only) difference is the food we eat. I count among these: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, scizophrenia, Alzheimer's, even short-sightedness. But this post is an attempt to explain what a paleo diet is, not why I believe it causes all these things, and many more. I will not justify everything here, as that would turn a blog post into a book, and there are already many better ones on the subject.
Other reasons you may care include: you met me in real life and repeatedly tried to offer me pie so I directed you here, or you stumbled across my blog/Twitter bio, saw "paleo" and thought I might be some sort of crazy hippy.
What is a paleo diet?
The principle behind the paleo diet is fundamentally that all biological life thrives best in the environment it evolved in. This is the environment it is best adapted to cope with, even if it could survive in others. For this reason, polar bears survive best in the arctic, camels in the desert, and an exchange of the two will see neither animal survive for long. As well as climate and physical terrain, the kinds of food available to an animal is a major part of what it is adapted to. Again, this is is why rabbits do well eating leaves, lions do well eating meat, and an exchange would be equally disastrous for both.
However, as a civilisation, as a species that has effectively domesticated itself, we humans are remarkably blind to the idea that we evolved to eat certain foods. While I'm fairly sure nobody I've ever met would be surprised if a monkey fed on cornflakes, beans on toast, lasagne and ice cream would get sick, my experience is that the thought this could apply to us is met with anything from disbelief to outright hostility.
What food did humans evolve to eat?
Humans are primates, and are omnivorous like many (or most) other primates. As far as I'm aware, we eat comparatively more meat than other primates. We are evolved to eat a wide range of foods, including meat, vegetables, fruits and nuts. The usual paleo rule of thumb is if you could you eat it "naked and armed only with a sharp stick", although we should probably add "and a big heavy stone" to that, since that helps with eating nuts. Fire has been around long enough that has probably had an influence on our dietary evolution: I consider the ritual of the barbecue fairly strong evidence of that. So my broad definition of paleo is:
Paleo foods are ones you could eat if you were in the wild, naked and armed only with a sharp stick and a big stone, ideally enhanced by cooking
It rolls slightly less easily off the tongue than the original, but it's more complete.
What foods did humans not evolve to eat?
This part is much more complex, as to understand what we didn't eat, you have to understand how the foods available to us have changed during the agricultural revolution. What we did not evolve to eat is the foods introduced into our diets in the last 10,000 years, which require agriculture and machinery to process. The main groups here are grains, dairy products (anything derived from milk), legumes (pulses), refined sugars and vegetable oils.
Grains in their natural state are inedible to humans, as they are to most animals. They are physically inedible, being encased in a hard protective husk. They contain many toxins and anti-nutrients, which make eating any quantity of them dangerous. The effect of grains to leech calcium from bones is why they are used by biologists to induce rickets in rats when they wish to study the disease – why it has never occurred to these same scientists that they are staring at the cause of the problem exasperates me.
The proteins in grains, especially gluten, are dangerous to humans, and to people with high sensitivity to them can be fatal.
The other main problem with grains is the high starch (carbohydrate) content. Now, listen very carefully, for I shall say this next bit only once: eating fat does not make you fat, high insulin levels make you fat, and high insulin levels are caused by eating excess carbohydrate, not eating fat. The idea that we need to balance our calories in and calories out to avoid becoming overweight is complete nonsense. The human body is not a combustion engine, and does not work on such a primitive mechanism. All animals are programmed to overeat, to feast in times of plenty to compensate for times of famine. If the calorie theory of weight gain was correct, we would all be morbidly obese, every single one of us, except for the few too poor to afford even an excessive amount of bread.
Dairy products
Dairy products are also a recent introduction to the diet. Most mammals stop producing the lactase enzyme necessary to digest milk around the time their adult teeth have grown; humans are the only one to continue drinking milk into adulthood. And even then, humans don't drink the milk of their own species into adulthood, they drink the milk of other species. It should come as no great surprise that human milk is best suited to the needs of baby humans, and cow's milk to the needs of baby cows. Indeed, the protein and fat content of each is considerably different. (Human milk is higher in fat, for a start.)
It is actually cow's milk that got me on to studying about paleo nutrition, as I have a strong milk intolerance that left me with crippling fatigue until the age of about 22. I gave up milk first, and within 3 days I felt like I'd slept for the first time in over a decade. Sadly neither doctors nor certain family members wanted to believe the connection, but I've learnt to ignore people who put their own agendas over the actual real life experience of people affected by degenerative disease. Or as I usually put it: "People who believe something impossible should not interrupt those who are doing it".
Most of the world's population is actually lactose-intolerant, and westerners are the exception here. I'm constantly bemused by lactose-free milk and similar products – surely it should be apparent that if so many people can't digest milk, then it can't be an essential part of the human diet. I've had no milk since I switched to eating paleo, and my bones have yet to start crumbling. (If we needed to drink milk for calcium, the human species would have been wiped out from bone disease literally ages ago. We would simply not be here.) There's more than enough calcium in vegetables and nuts, and (of course), bones: sardines are an excellent source of calcium as the small soft bones are easily digested. But you can give a lamb chop or chicken leg to a small child and get very little back except a bit of gristle.
Cheese on toast
The combination of grain and dairy is so common that I've come to call some places "cheese on toast restaurants", for aside from the shape of the food, that's all they serve. Pizza, lasagne, cheese sandwiches, quiche and cheesecake are all fundamentally the same food. Since starting to eat paleo, I've introduced many new things into my diet I didn't eat before, for example: spinach, olives, sardines, avocado, pecan nuts and redcurrants. These are all different foods, and so it's ironic that since apparently restricting the foods I eat (by about 5 things), I eat a much greater variety than I used to.
Legumes range from soy beans, castor beans and kidney beans to lentils, chickpeas, peas and runner beans, but the group also include peanuts (a fact not as widely known as it should be).
Castor beans are the source of ricin: a handful of raw beans will kill a human.
Soy beans are also toxic raw, which is why I find it somewhat ironic that the Wikipedia page for the subject has a section titled "Health benefits". Soy has an oestrogen-mimicking effect: drinking soy "milk" is like drinking contraceptive pills, a fact apparently lost on the stream of health-conscious women I see ordering soy lattes in Starbucks. Mercifully, I haven't yet heard of any parents feeding a soy "milk" to an infant, but I daren't Google anything along those lines. Phyto-oestrogens (plant oestrogens) are also harmful to males, as they disrupt the normal hormone balance even more.
I'm very fond of Chinese food (which is very easily adapted to paleo eating), and many dishes are made with soy sauce. However, it's in small enough quantities that I make an exception here. Beancurd (aka tofu), is something I steer wide clear of. This has been one of my guiding principles to make eating paleo practical, I'll eat "contaminated" food (eg a sauce thickened with a small amount of flour), but not a food made substantially from a non-paleo food, eg bread. How far you can get away with this depends on your tolerance to certain foods.
The prevalence of peanut allergy compared to other "nut" allergies is entirely in line with what the paleo theory predicts.
I don't have a strong opinion on potatoes compared to some paleo eaters. They're the root of a nightshade plant, and related to tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, chillis (and tobacco). Some hardcore paleo eaters avoid all these as they fail the "New World" test: they were imported from the Americas a few hundred years ago, and are therefore technically more recent introductions to the western diet than grains and milk.
Nightshade plants, include potatoes, include toxins called glycoalkaloids. Wild potatoes are dangerous to humans, but they've been bred to be safer. On this basis, and the observation that they are not as widely allergenic as many other non-paleo foods (although by no means not a health risk), I tend to consider them a low-quality food rather than something to strictly avoid. The mistake I see with potatoes is that people treat them as a staple rather than as any other vegetable: I've never seen anyone eat, say, turnips in the same dietary proportion as most people eat potato.
Hunter-gatherer diets often include poor-quality or even poisonous plants if they can be prepared to be safe enough to eat, but these are foods of a last resort. The anomaly in the west is that we've taken starvation foods and made them 75% of our diet.
Vegetable oils
This is something off most people's radars, yet it's actually an important topic. Over the last few decades there has been a shift from cooking with natural animal fats to mechanically and chemically processed vegetable oils. These are no more a part of the human diet than grains or cow's milk.
There's a misconception that saturated animal fats are bad for you (they "clog your arteries", allegedly), and unsaturated vegetable oils are good for you (they "lower your colesterol", if you believe the Flora marketing spiel). This is a huge topic, and possibly the most contested point in medicine today. If you want an authoritative opinion, see the work of the medical professionals who joined The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics. Don't think of animal fats as thick, artery-clogging materials: at body temperature they are liquid. But do think what happens to vegetable oil around the neck of a bottle: as it oxidises, it goes hard and rigid (which is why linseed oil makes good varnish).
The fat/cholesterol-heart-diseases hypothesis makes no sense according to paleo theory. Meat is a natural part of the human diet, and fat is the predominant source of energy in meat. The clearest counterexample is the Inuit people of the arctic circle, who were discovered in the 19th and early 20th century to be completely absent of heart disease and cancer, despite living on a diet of almost pure meat. The most famous explorer to study them was Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who subsequently ate a diet of pure meat for a whole year under medical supervision, to prove that it is possible.
I can corroborate Vilhjalmur Stefansson's experience. In August 2010, as an experiment, I ate nothing but meat for the whole month. It is perfectly sustainable, and the only downside is it can get boring after a while (in part due to the lack of sudden, spectacular death or other side-effects that most people predict). On the plus side, after a couple of weeks to adjust, I had by far the best digestion I've ever had – my stomach has never been happier. Nowadays I rarely eat a diet of pure meat for prolonged periods, but I happily go several days in a row eating only meat when I'm travelling, as I find it convenient. I don't actively recommend this to others, but it suits me fine.
Fat and carbohydrate
Many people, when I tell them that I don't eat grains and potatoes, draw the false conclusion that paleo is a "low carb" diet. The naked-with-a-sharp-stick-and-a-big-stone(-and-maybe-a-fire) test says nothing about the carbohydrate content, fat content, or even the shape or colour of the food. But paleo diets tend to be relatively lower-carb than western diets simply because of the physical impracticality of eating typical western carb-levels on a diet of meat, fruit and veg.
This incidental reduction in carbohydrate leads, however, to a very important fact: it is vital on a paleo diet to eat enough fat. The human body can only extract so much energy from protein; we're not designed to live off lean meat. Attempting to do so leads to what the american colonialists named "rabbit starvation": death from starvation even despite eating huge quantities of lean meat. Unfortunately, the fat aversion we've been indoctrinated with makes it psychologically difficult for many people to go from a diet of trimmed steak and skinless chicken breast to untrimmed belly pork and duck.
The other important point to remember when reducing carbohydrate intake is that if you've lived your entire life predominantly off carbohydrate, your fat metabolism will be lazy. The first time involves a few unpleasant days of headaches at best, and it can take many weeks for some people to acclimatise to living off fat. After that, it's easy to switch from burning fat to carbohydrate. Humans run much smoothly off fat, as we carry a plentiful supply. We store relatively little carbohydrate, and our bodies prefer to conserve it for intense exercise.
I remember quite early on being faced with the contradiction that logically, it must have been safe for the Inuit to survive off a diet of animal fat, yet I'd been scared into believing that animal fat was bad for me. Eventually I chose the logical consistency and documented evidence of the former over the contested commercial interests of the latter, and have never once since been concerned about the consequences of the amount of animal fat I eat.
Life expectancy
A common question I hear goes something like "didn't cavemen lead short, brutish lives?". There are two separate concepts here: quantity of life, and quality of life. All domesticated animals have longer life expectancies than wild ones, simply being safer from injury and death from predators, accidents, competition and starvation. Also, life expectancy figures include infant deaths, the most common age of death in the wild (and in civilisation, until recently).
The concern of a paleo diet is not life expectancy, but quality. In fact, the effect of civilisation to increase life expectancy has only exaggerated the detrimental effects of an agricultural diet. People weakened from diabetes, cancer, heart disease, dementia, and uncountable other diseases of civilisation, suffer far longer than anyone in a hunter-gatherer society would have, from disease that did not used to exist, and not merely because they "didn't live long enough".
There is no reason to believe someone living on a paleolithic diet today would not achieve the same or longer life expectancy than someone on a western diet, but they would do so with a far better quality of life. A good example is in Michael Eade's comparison of Jack LaLanne vs Ancel Keys. Jack LaLanne was warning about the dangers of sugar, and our population of Sugarholics back in the 1950s; Ancel Keys was the original vocal proponent of the idea that animal fat and cholesterol causes heart disease. Look how they both ended up.
What does a paleo diet look like?
Basically, take everything you see in a western diet, subtract the things I've listed above as being non-paleo, and you have a paleo diet. Paleo is exclusionary, not inclusionary. There are no "paleo supplements", no foods that weren't otherwise eaten.
My own diet is basically meat and vegetables. I eat some fruit, but not a lot, and some nuts, but again, not a lot. I go for fatty meat over lean meat, for reasons explained above, and I'm especially fond of belly pork. Most of my meals look like a Sunday roast dinner. It's generally only when I refuse something such as cake or ice cream than anyone asks me any questions.
I eat less frequently than most people, generally only eating in the evening, with a light snack (eg a piece of fruit) at most during the day. To some, this is a form of intermittent fasting, a subject I've largely glossed over here. I've found my appetite sufficiently reduced eating a paleo diet that I don't need to eat more often. Initially I suffered from the indoctrinated fear that if I didn't eat three times a day, and certainly, if I didn't eat every day, I'd drop dead from weakness. Fortunately, common paleo sense is in line with reality here, and there are no such deadly consequences.
Most of the exercise I've done has been weightlifting for strength training. I eat relatively little carbohydrate, sometimes none, which has baffled people I've trained with in the gym, as they assume I should have no energy. I never eat before training, which led one person to wonder why I don't just collapse during a workout.
I've also trained on a more extensive intermittent fasting schedule, eating only in an 8 hour window every two days (ie, 40 hours fasting, 8 hours eating). I've regularly trained twice in one of these cycles period, ie at some point lifting weighs after over 24 hours of not eating. And I've done all this while gaining around 1kg of muscle per month. All of this should put to rest any nonsense about needing to "carb up" for anything but the most extreme endurance exercise. I have no interest in being an Ironman contestant.
As with the times I eat zero carbohydrate (when I'm eating only meat), intermittent fasting is not something I active recommend to people. But it's possible, and it completely disproves many of the false claims about what a "healthy" diet must look like.
Further reading
There are some excellent books on paleo and some not so. These are the ones I recommend. The only one I don't recommend is Loren Cordain's The Paleo Diet, solely on the basis of the absurd recommendation to eat lean meat. This is something I know from personal experience to be wrong, and it's such a fundamental mistake I refer people to more consistent authors. This is not to dismiss Cordain's otherwise extensive knowledge of the subject, but I can't recommend this one book.
The simplest introduction is Ray Audette's Neanderthin. It's very much a layman's book, which is why I like it. It also contains a lot of recipes, if you like that sort of thing. It's an excellent starting point.
An excellent hidden treasure is Richard Mackarnass's Not All in the Mind, written by a doctor practising mainly in the 1970s. I first found a copy of this for 60p in a second-hand bookshop on the Isle of Wight. It's a more technical, but still accessible book, nominally about "food allergy and mental health". The diet he prescribes is almost entirely paleo. The story I find most memorable was a woman who's schizophrenia was cured, and, through excruciatingly stringent blind trials, demonstrated to be caused by food (including potatoes in this case).
The most thorough book I've read, and it's almost encyclopaedic in nature, is Barry Groves' Trick and Treat. This book is the result of some twenty years of painstaking research into "healthy eating", and is meticulously well-referenced. It's hard work to read cover-to-cover, simply due to its length, but it's worth having a copy just to be able to look up specific topics.
I'll end with a mention of Gary Taubes' The Diet Delusion. I own a copy of this, but due to its size have not got round to reading it. It's highly regarded in paleo circles though, so I've listed it to avoid looking like I was avoiding it like Cordain's The Paleo Diet. It's certainly one I'm keeping on my shelf.
I've eaten a paleo diet happily for nearly 8 years now, starting in early 2004. I haven't fully recovered from the effects of the milk intolerance I suffered, but my health is in a different league now to what it used to be. I'm almost completely withdrawn from the addictive, harmful foods that make up the majority of most western diets. I have absolutely no desire to eat cakes, biscuits, cheese, pasta, pies or anything else of the sort.
I'm doing what many dieters believe impossible, so please be considerate enough to not interrupt me while I'm at it.
But if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them in the comments.
This is a review of The Law (by Frédéric Bastiat), Economics in One Lesson (by Henry Hazlitt), What Has Government Done to Our Money? (by Murray Rothbard), The Road to Serfdom (by Friedrich August Hayek), and Economics for Real People (by Gene Callahan).
Note: This article is quite long, being as it is a review of five books, along with its context, conclusion and other notes. You may wish to skip ahead to the sections Which to read? and Conclusion after reading the introduction, as this may help you select parts to look at first.
Why did I read these books?
Recently I picked up a copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (links follow after each book's subheading). The first page inside the cover, under the title Praise for Economics in One Lesson, contains the following testimonial from US Congressman Ron Paul:
I strongly recommend that every American acquire some basic knowledge of economics, monetary policy and the intersection of politics with the economy. No formal classroom is required; a desire to read and learn will suffice. There are countless important books to consider, but the following are an excellent starting point: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat; Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard; The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, and Economics for Real People by Gene Callahan.
If you simply read and comprehend these relatively short texts, you will know far more than most educated people about economics and government. … If you care about the future of this country, arm yourself with knowledge and fight back against economic ignorance.
Well I'm not American (I'm British), but since the UK is in much the same financial state as the US (and the rest of the western world) I'm no less concerned about our economic, financial and political future. Ron Paul speaks a lot of sense about economics, so I set myself the task of reading the full list of books he recommends. What follows is a summary of each book, and a selection of my opinions.
The Law – Frédéric Bastiat
Links: Goodreads, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Terra Libertas, Full text – HTML
The Law is a very short text (my edition is formatted to 86 pages) first published in 1850. It asks the question: what is law? To Bastiat, it is the "collective organization of the individual right to lawful defence". Bastiat's foundation is that life, liberty and property are enduring human concepts that pre-date law, and that every individual has a right to defend them, by force if necessary. From this it follows that a group of people has the right to organise a common force to protect these rights. Because no individual may use force to deprive anyone else of life, liberty or property, and the law is merely the organisation of the individual rights, it also follows that the law may not by right be used to deprive and individual of these things either.
The current situation, where the law is used to for "lawful plunder" (think of most forms and uses of taxation, eg protective tariffs, and industry protection laws, eg copyright), Bastiat blames on a combination of "stupid greed" and "false philanthropy".
It has been long seen that many people will choose to acquire wealth by plunder rather than labour as long as the former is easier. The law is intended to protect citizens from others who would choose this route. But if the same citizens who would plunder rather than labour are allowed to make the law, they now have an officially sanctioned route to plunder: to pervert the law for their own gain under the guise of "justice". Bastiat neatly sums up the inevitable result:
As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose – that it may violate property rather than protecting it – then everyone will want to participate in making the law.
The behaviour we see today, of course, is that every big business will want to participate in making the law.
The other source of perverted law – false philanthropy – is more complex, and Bastiat's description overlaps with the other texts in this set. He criticises the socialists for acting as if they "have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind". That is, if you accept all involuntary redistributions of wealth as forms of plunder, the best hope you have of it being done right is that it is planned by a superior intellect. The explanation for why this will fail is economic in nature, so I'll defer it to the summary of the other books.
Bastiat gives a rule that can easily be applied to any law, existing or proposed, and determine whether it is in the spirit of the "Rule of Law", or is actually just disguised plunder. That this distinction is so often muddied or not made made at all is the compelling reason to read this book. The Law is so short and makes its point so clearly, I can hardly not recommend it. And given that its full text is available free, there's no excuse not to, unless you believe perversion of the law does not affect you.
Economics in One Lesson – Henry Hazlitt
Links: Goodreads, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Terra Libertas, Full text – HTML, Full text – PDF
Economics in One Lesson is a book with a very simple premise. It's divided mainly into three parts – Part 1: The Lesson, Part 2: The Lesson Applied and Part 3: The Lesson After 30 Years (the last of which I will skip). Part 1: The Lesson consists of just one chapter, The Lesson, which is only five pages long, and explains that the lesson itself can be reduced to a single lone sentence:
The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
While he never refers to it as such (in general, the Austrian economists don't), Hazlitt is effectively describing economics as a systems thinking problem.
Hazlitt argues that "nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson", and goes on to demonstrate the effects in Part 2: The Lesson Applied, with 24 chapters each exposing a form of incorrect economic reasoning. I'll pick three as examples, based purely on ones I notice myself most often. These summaries are not complete, so if you suspect they are incorrect I recommend reading the original chapters first (they are all quite short).
The Broken Window fallacy is the belief that if, say, a vandal throws a brick through a shop window, the work generated for the glazier to replace it is an economic stimulus. The logic is that by the shopkeeper giving the glazier, say, $250 for the window, the glazier has extra money to spend with merchants of his choosing, who will in turn spend that money with others. The reasoning is flawed because what is ignored is that the shopkeeper wanted, say, to spend that $250 on a suit, which he must now forgo. So rather than having a window and a suit, the shopkeeper now has only a window, and the world is a poorer place. The tailor is overlooked in the original analysis simply because he never enters the scene. While this is a simple example, the same argument applies to damage from civil unrest (I saw it myself on Twitter regarding the UK riots in August 2011), revolutions, and even world wars. There is no net economic benefit in rebuilding what was prematurely destroyed during a war.
The desire to Save the X Industry arises when members of industry X lobby the government to protect it, by tariffs, subsidies, price guarantees or similar. It's argued that without saving the X industry (we've seen it happen in agriculture, manufacturing, banking and others), that industry will provide jobs, and the money it generates will be spent elsewhere, on the machinery it needs, and by its employees with butchers, bakers and other consumer merchants. To take the most direct solution as an example – subsidy – it could be argued that taxation used to subsidise this essential industry will redirect money for greater overall benefit. But every consumer taxed to pay for this now has less money to spend in other elsewhere, in industries that lose out. And, as demonstrated by the fact that industry X needs support, money is being diverted from more efficient businesses to prop up the failing ones. This means the productivity of the society is now lower, and overall everyone has lost out.
As a final example, Minimum Wage Laws initially appear to benefit workers, who will now receive a higher wage and be able to increase their standard of living. Hazlitt argues that wages are prices no different than any other (like the prices of oil, wheat or gold), but that our thinking about them have become emotionally clouded. Making it illegal for someone to charge less that a certain amount for their time does not automatically make them worth more. Businesses affected by minimum wage have to either charge more or reduce their margins. If they charge more, customers may buy less of the product, or switch to alternatives. By reducing the profit on products, marginal producers in the industry will be thrown out of business, which deprives consumers of the products they previously enjoyed. There is no guarantee that workers made unemployed by minimum wage laws will be sufficiently productive in other industries to justify paying them the minimum legal amount. All roads lead to lower productivity and higher unemployment overall.
Economics in One Lesson explains many more points, and does so in a very concise, readable way. While the topics are connected, each chapter is a short, largely self-contained application of "the lesson". It's very straightforward to read, and gives you powerful toolset to analyse the changes in government policy discussed in the news. I highly recommend it if you're skeptical of the consistency of economic arguments put forward by politicians in the news.
What Has Government Done to Our Money? – Murray Rothbard
Links: Goodreads, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Terra Libertas, Full text – HTML, Full text – PDF
Murry Rothbard's short text is a three-part book that explains first, what money is; second, how governments have meddled with it; and third, the history of the breakdown of money.
Money is introduced as coming naturally from exchange.
Clearly Robinson Crusoe had no need for money. He could not have eaten gold coins. Neither would Crusoe and Friday, perhaps exchanging fish for lumber, need to bother about money.
Initially people traded with barter, but this is hampered by finding people willing to exchange at the right time. Eventually someone will realise they can trade their own goods for something more desirable to the person owning what they want, and complete a trade by indirect exchange. Over time, some goods become more useful than others for indirect exchange, and eventually one a society will settle on one or two most exchangeable goods as money. People "buy" money when they exchange their goods for money, and "sell" their money when they exchange it for goods. Rothbard's explanation of this and a few other related ideas is piercingly clear and concise.
The story of how Governments have meddled with money is equally intriguing and shocking (even if you are not new to the story). Rothbard starts with the nature of governments:
Governments, in contrast to all other organisations, do not obtain their revenue as payment for their services. … In a barter economy, government officials can only expropriate resources in one way: by seizing goods in kind. In a monetary economy, they will find it easier to seize monetary assets, and then use the money to acquire goods and services for the government. Taxation, however, is often unpopular. … The emergence of money, while a boon to the human race, also opened a more subtle route for governmental expropriation of resources … counterfeiting.
We now imagine that an economy has 10,000 gold coins, and that a counterfeiter can introduce 2,000 more, undetected. The early holders of this new money will be at an advantage: they can buy goods at the old prices. But this spending bids prices up, and people last to receive the new money will find that prices have been going up long before their income. "Whenever the newly issued money is used as loans to business, inflation causes the dread 'business cycle'". (This asymmetry of the effects of inflation is also discussed in Economics in One Lesson and Economics for Real People.)
Initially, governments monopolised the minting process, taking the right to produce coins from the previously free economy. Governments chose the denominations, not the people, and they named them so as to disassociate them from the underlying weight of metal: marks, francs, dollars etc, instead of grams or grains. This paved the way for debasement. The Saracens of Spain had a coin, the dinar, the which in the mid-twelfth century contained 65 gold grains. The Christian kings conquered Spain, and by the early thirteenth century the coin, now called the maravedi, had only 14 grains. Soon it was too light to circulate, and was replaced by a coin containing 26 silver grains. This was in turn debased, and by the mid-fifteenth century contained only 1.5 silver grains, again too small to circulate.
Governments learnt another trick: legal tender. By defining what money could be, rather than leaving it open to the market, governments gave themselves the power to define the poorest form of money as legal tender. For example, worn coins can be defined as good as new ones. The real power of this came with the introduction of paper money, when the metal backing each unit of currency could be gradually decreased. People redeeming gold still threatened the extent of this inflation, because banks that over-printed paper money would eventually lose their gold as suspicious depositors withdrew it. This inconvenience was resolved with central banking. Giving a false confidence in the backing of the banking system and centralising (co-ordinating) control of the money supply allows the banking system to almost inflate at will.
What Has Government Done To Our Money? is the shortest of the economics books in this list. It's focused more on money that general economics, but the stories it tells should encourage you to pick up some of the longer ones if you want more details. If you think you may have an interest in the broader economic issues but want a short taster, this is a good place to start. If you're relatively new to concepts such as fractional reserve banking (the current situation, where the banking system is inherently insolvent) and fiat currency (as opposed to a free money market), this book is an essential read. I especially recommend it if you're angered by the constant banking bailouts: the act debasing our money by turning on the printing press and throwing the inflated supply at what Hazlitt shows is inevitably the least efficient businesses.
The Road to Serfdom – Friedrich August Hayek
Links: Goodreads, Amazon US, Amazon UK
If you'd like an even quicker introduction to this, the Ludwig von Mises Institute publishes an excellent illustrated version, The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons.
Friedrich Hayek (an Austro-Hungarian) wrote this book in the early 1940s in Great Britain, as a warning to a country he thought was unwittingly walking the same path that Germany took decades before. It is a description of how even the most well-intentioned socialist ideals will eventually lead to totalitarianism. In contrast to Bastiat's The Law, which is focused on one point (justice), The Road to Serfdom traces a complex story at the boundary of politics and economics, and shows how and why justice and freedom are ultimately sacrificed on the path to collectivism.
According to Hayek, when "we find ourselves threatened by the evils associated by the past ages of barbarism, we blame naturally anything but ourselves." So naturally, the unexpected situation that "the relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa" was not considered inherent in socialism itself.
Collectivism involves orienting a society around a "social goal" such as "general welfare", but this "presupposes … a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place". But "no such complete ethical code exists" because "people will have either no definite views or conflicting views on such questions". As well as the conflict inherent in trying to co-ordinate a diverse society, trying to scientifically organise a society towards some end runs into the economic inconvenience that "far from being appropriate only to comparatively simple conditions, it is the very complexity of the division of labour under modern conditions which makes competition the only means by which such co-ordination can be adequately brought about". Both Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson and Callahan's Economics for Real People show that trying to make centrally co-ordinated economic decisions inevitably lead to failure and waste, as no central planner can have access to, or process, enough information to make an informed choice.
Hayek emphasises the distinction between the Rule of Law (in Bastiat's sense of "law" – justice) and arbitrary law. In the former, "the government confines itself to fixing rules determining the conditions under which the available resources may be used"; in the latter "the government directs the use of the means of production to particular ends". While it might be done in the name of "fairness", "one could write a history of the decline of the Rule of Law … in terms of the progressive introduction of vague formulae into legislation". Outright economic arbitrariness appears to have fallen out of favour, structural manipulation (eg central banks setting interest rates and buying government bonds) having taken its place; although we do still have redistributive policies via the EU. The most popular form of arbitrary law at the moment is probably anti-terror legislation.
That anti-terrorism is the fracture being used to wedge in arbitrary law today is not surprising according to Hayek. "It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task". Collectivism tends towards nationalism (to gain support) and to support a particular group (conflict would destroy it otherwise). To these ends, it must exclude or suppress intelligent opposition, and use the principle of negativity to rally the rest around its cause. No complex society can agree on all the issues towards one common goal, so large-scale central planning must be done by force. Hayek uses this explains the inevitability that "the worst get on top", despite even the best intentions of the initial idealistic socialists.
In the UK today, we don't see such a strong trend towards socialism that Hayek saw in the middle of the last century. But The Road to Serfdom is valuable even without imminent totalitarianism, as he explains step-by-step the various economic and political decisions, and the corresponding political and economic consequences. Maybe we won't see National-Socialism again in its archetypal form. If not, I suspect it may be even more important to read this book sooner rather than later, as we may see the world play out in a more subtly oppressive way: most of the causality Hayek describes is quite timeless.
Economics for Real People – Gene Callahan
Links: Goodreads, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Terra Libertas, Full text – PDF
Economics for Real People is the densest and most detailed of the economics books here. But like What Has Government Done to Our Money? it's written with such clarity that it's accessible to anyone with the patience to read it.
Rather than derive economics from a Robinson Crusoe environment, Callahan uses a more contemporary metaphor:
In our alternative universe, Rich is still the winner [of the first series of Survivor], but as the film crew packs up, they decide that they are fed up with his antics. Instead of transporting him home, they quietly slip off while Rich is getting in a last session of nude sunbathing.
Rich arises to find that he is alone. He is now facing the most elementary human problem, how to survive, in the most basic of settings. What can economics say about his situation?
Callahan takes his definition of economics from Ludwig von Mises: "Economics … is the theory of human action. Human action is purposeful behaviour. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals". Where the Austrian school's definition of economics differs from the popular conception is that it has no basis in money (money is explained as emerging at a later point). If you have a sense of dissatisfaction, say you are "disturbed by a buzzing sound", and you can determine a cause in your control, say "you look around … and see a mosquito". You now "have to make a choice. Being rid of the mosquito would be grand, sure – but you'll have to get up. And that's a bummer. The benefit you expect to receive from being rid of the mosquito comes at the cost of getting up". Human preference is subjective. "We take the thoughts and plans of humans as an ultimate given, and begin our investigation there."
An astonishing number of concepts are introduced before even a second person appears on the island: economisation of means, preference, utility, marginal units (one extra bucket of water), the law of diminishing marginal utility, error and regret, consumer goods, capital goods, capital stock, complementary goods, time preference. All of which might sound overwhelming, but is actually told effortlessly in the story of Rich choosing to invest his time in making barrels (to collect water) and traps (to trap rats, which is the primary local food supply), all while deciding at which point he'd like to go back and sit in his hammock.
An economic community forms when Callahan introduces a second person to the island: Helena Bonham-Carter.
What does Rich decide to do? One possibility is that Rich might react like a bear does, [and] try to drive the intruder away. Now, he might refrain from doing so due to moral constraints or benevolent feelings. But there is another reason for him not to drive Helena off – as long as there are sufficient unused resources on the island, it will materially benefit both of them to co-operate rather than fight. They can initiate the vastly enriching process of the division of labour and voluntary exchange.
In Callahan's version of this post-Survivor scenario, "Rich, the more dexterous of the two, will make traps, while Helena, the more cunning, will do the hunting". From here we are taught the way direct exchange plays out, in terms of each of their subjective preferences for rats and traps. As more people join the island, we see goats and corn introduced, and a market start to form. But, notably, there is still no money on the island.
As the economy in "Richland" grows more complex we see the difficulty in economic calculation, and finally money emerge, but as the most marketable medium of exchange. No special status is granted to money, it's merely an economic good that meets certain criteria, and is subject to the same supply and demand rules as any other.
It's in this careful, step-by-step way that Gene Callahan works through a broad range of other economic topics, including: fluctuations in money supply, socialism, government interference, business cycles, externalities (for example pollution, which is connected to tragedy-of-the-commons situations), and a brief summary of political economics. With a couple of minor exceptions, everything is as clear and grounded as the foundations in chapter 1.
This was by far the most enlightening book in the list to me, although it took correspondingly the most investment in time.
Which to read?
If your interest is mainly politics, the choice is easy: either read The Law if you want something quick, or The Road to Serfdom if you're prepared to invest more time. The Road to Serfdom glosses over the economic principles behind its arguments though, so I'd still recommend picking up one of the other books on the list.
If your interest is more in economics there is more choice. If you would prefer a quick read, or are mainly interested in the history of how we ended up with such a disastrous monetary system, start with What Has Government Done to Our Money?. If you suspect that most of what you read in the mainstream media is based on faulty or even absent reasoning, start with Economics in One Lesson, it's also a quick read, and to an extent you can even pick and choose the topics that interest you. If you're prepared to invest more time (although at under 350 pages it's hardly immense), or want a more thorough grounding, choose Economics for Real People. This last book is my favourite by some distance, and whichever of the others you choose, I highly recommend picking this up after.
Note that all but one of these books is available to download free (see the "Full text" links) – even Economics for Real People, which was only published in 2004. So you don't even have to pay to read the full texts, never mind get a taster.
Ultimately, the purpose of my experiment in reading these books was to see if I'd achieve the claimed goal of "know[ing] far more than most educated people about economics and government". It's a little premature to judge if that's true, I'll need to read many more news articles and have many more conversations. But there are already many, many things I see in the papers whose fallacious logic is directly identified in one of the books here, so it has certainly got off to a good start.
What did you think? Were you persuaded to read any of these? Have you already read them and agree/disagree on my summaries? I don't claim to be an expert on this subject matter (far from it), so I welcome other perspectives.
Thanks to Martin Rue for proofreading this and picking up many typos and unclear sentences. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.
At BarCamp Nottingham on Sat 23-Jul-2011 I ran an introduction to Bitcoin. Slots were only 20 minutes so I had to fire through the slides like a machine gun, and we filled the 10 minute changeover with questions.
My goal for was to stir some interest in Bitcoin and hopefully have people research it in their own time after. I don't know yet if that has been achieved.
The session fitted in well with the unexpected (to me) emergent economic/sustainability theme. Among others, @RichardSmedley ran a great session Inventing Money on the history of money and banking (seriously, it's amazing how much that guy knows), and @squiggle ran We're Screwed (he occasionally used alternative words in the actual session).
Please note: I'm not an expert on the Bitcoin protocol, so among the deliberate simplifications, I may have made factual errors. I'd be very grateful for any corrections, so please feel free to comment.
Many thanks to @martinrue for letting me test-drive the presentation on him. Without his input (especially regarding the mechanics of a transaction), this would be in no way coherent. The remaining errors are mine.
References / Further Reading
- Bitcoin.org
- Bitcoin Wiki
- Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System - the original Bitcoin paper is really accessible, and I recommend reading it if you want to understand how the network works
- Money Supply (Wikipedia) - source of the UK money supply graph
- Block Explorer - which lets you browse & search transactions, blocks, addresses etc
- Bitcoin Charts: Markets - excellent way to monitor Bitcoin exchange activity
- Britcoin (Intersango Ltd) - the exchange I use personally
- MJB Monetary Metals - a small precious metal dealer I've traded with (anyone who remembers the Canadian Silver Maple coin I passed round, it came from here - I paid 2.9BTC for it)
- Money as Debt - I didn't actually mention this video during the presentation, but I highly, highly recommend watching it. It's Economics 101, and if I had my way, it'd be shown in schools. (That will never happen, though.)
Neuromarketing is a book about marketing built on the premise that customers make decisions in the old, reptilian brain, and therefore marketing tactics must be aligned with the way the old brain works. I reviewed it on Goodreads here. These are the mindmap notes I made, which I'm posting in case they help anyone make a buying decision (or just pick up a few ideas).
[I used to write a lot of book reviews, but I stopped mid last year. I don't intend to re-start on a regular basis, but The Choice was so good I felt compelled to make an exception. I also posted this to my Goodreads account, the review is here - the only difference is that this blog post contains the mindmap notes I made.]
The Goal introduces the concept of the Theory of Constraints by starting in a factory and identifying a manufacturing bottleneck. Towards the end, it talks about the idea that the thing constraining a business may not be physical, but mental - an idea or policy. The Goal's key idea is a process of ongoing improvement, targeted at whatever the current constraint is.
The sequel to The Goal, It's Not Luck, takes this further, and shows (among other things) how to use logic maps to break down complex problems to find the root cause of the constraint. I've used this process several times, although I learnt the detailed mechanics from The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving, and it's the most effective problem-solving tool I've found, by an order of magnitude.
The Choice adds a whole new dimension by taking the essence of The Goal (focussing on the constraint) and It's Not Luck (thinking in cause-and-effect) and explains in simple terms how to apply it to, no less, the problem of having a "full, meaningful life". To do this, Goldratt claims - we must have enough successes, which depend on our stamina to overcome setbacks, our ability to create opportunities, and our ability to collaborate with people.
Goldratt's argument is that to achieve these steps to a full life, we must be able to think clearly. But, we are blocked from thinking clearly by four obstacles:
- We see reality as complex, rather than (as Newton showed) a thing of Inherent Simplicity
- We accept conflicts as a given, rather than seeking to remove them
- We blame, rather than assuming goodness and looking for explanations of other people's behaviour
- We think "we know", rather than challenging our assumptions and looking for breakthrough ways to change a situation
I've used Theory of Constraints tools to tackle big- and medium-sized problems before. But I've come away from The Choice enthused to practise day by day, hour by hour. It's an enlightening and inspirational guide to "thinking clearly".


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President Trump and the Paris Accord
I watched Trump's inauguration with a mixture of disbelief and dismay. It was a strange event and occasionally even a little alarming.
At one stage a TV evangelist (Cate Blanchett will play her in the movie) recited a prayer that wove biblical verse and US Manifest Destiny into a heady brew of Blessed Exceptionalism. I briefly toyed with the image of her stepping back from the podium as two flunkies wheeled the Ark of The Covenant on stage… retrieved from that big warehouse at the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark. She defied my expectations on that, but she was immediately followed by a choir that appeared to be deliberately alluding to The Omen movies.
OK, so I enjoy hyperbole as a rhetorical device perhaps a little too much for my own good, but in reality I tend to be a good deal less alarmist than the stuff on this blog might suggest. I see our civilisation as ultimately doomed of course. So there's that. But I also see it for the leviathan it is. We're like a supertanker, and our colossal momentum propels us forward even though the engines have been on fire for a few years. I kind of expected it to continue that way for a bit longer.
The Irish banking fiasco, Brexit, the Syrian crisis… some of these events may be symptoms of an ongoing collapse, others just episodes in history's unfolding tapestry whose origins will be argued and speculated though perhaps never understood. But none of them are going to usher in the end times, right?
Which brings us back to President Trump. This is — to use the parlance of our times — not a good guy. He's a bad guy. A Real Bad Guy. The worst. THE worst. Sad.
I promise that'll be the last time I lampoon Trump's oration in this post. It's a little too easy. I confess, I've never read "Art of The Deal" (note to self: I really should). But I feel certain there's a chapter in there discussing public speaking and it includes nuggets of wisdom like "Use short, simple words" and "Repetition can be effective".
Anyway, here's the thing. I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this, but I think we're past the point where Trump is a weird joke, we're past the point where he's Americas's problem, we're even past the point where he is an annoyance or a hindrance on the world stage. The United States, under President Trump, has become a very serious and very pressing problem for the entire world. Pulling out of the Paris Accord is an act of such… gah!
… I want to use words like "existential threat" or "clear and present danger"… but those phrases pop up and people think you're being unnecessarily hyperbolic.
And I'm not for a moment suggesting that the Paris Accord would have "fixed the problem". Even if it was strictly adhered to — which it probably wouldn't have been. It would not have averted Climate Change (a multi-century process already underway). But it formed a platform. A reminder that collective agreement could be reached, and a template for future attempts at it. It was a minimum point at which the entire planet could gather. A base-camp from which to forge forward. If the dude who owns most of the tents and the cooking gear decides to go home in a sulk? Well, you may as well cancel the expedition.
I have no idea how that metaphor got to where it did. Makes no bloody sense by the end. Still, my point is effective action to limit Climate Change must now be put on hold. At least until the Americans rejoin civilised society and/or consensual reality. Not saying those two always overlap, but either will do right now.
We can imagine best-case scenarios where the rest of the world continues onward — even redoubling our efforts to compensate — and America swiftly rejoins us after Trump's impeachment in December.
But we can also imagine the next few months and years being punctuated by announcements from Saudi Arabia, Russia and the Philippines, that after careful consideration they too have decided to withdraw. This provokes a complete breakdown of faith in the agreement and it's another decade before we even get everyone around the same table on this issue. By which point the militarisation of southern and eastern Europe has begun in a desperate response by populist governments to the tens of millions of Africans and Central Asians fleeing the devastation of the places that once sustained them (Climate Change is going to hit those places first and hardest — places that have been politically and economically screwed for the past century are about to be given a whole other sort of kicking). Meanwhile topsoil depletion, drought and catastrophic land management decisions in China force a massive State of Emergency and tripartite tensions between China, India and Pakistan result in… … …
Well. See that's the thing about Climate Change. Words like "existential threat" or "clear and present danger"? There are issues where they aren't hyperbole. This is one of them.
Climate Change is no longer a binary possibility. It's happening and it's become a question of how much? How severe? Even small differences in the answers to that question can equate to huge amounts of human suffering. International cooperation is surely the best way to minimise that suffering… to adopt a united front against a problem that faces us as a species… as a biosphere.
And so. To turn your back on that is a grossly profane act. Whatever the hell the word "immoral" means; if it doesn't cover this, it's not a useful concept.
In a sane world, the United States would be hit with an active trade embargo until it returned to the fold. This sovereign individualism go-it-alone schtick only works when you're not shitting in the village well. So long as you do that, you're everyone's problem and you need to be made aware of that. Trump should have his personal assets seized, just as we would do if it was a Liberian or Angolan president threatening the stability of others. He should be prevented from all foreign travel and all diplomats should be withdrawn from the US. All US embassies should be closed. The United Nations should collectively relocate to Beijing or Berlin (or wherever we think it would most annoy Trump) and we should send one bloke to sit in the UN building in New York with a pen and a copy of the Paris Agreement.
Soon as we get a signature, it all goes back to normal.
Sure sure, most Americans, even the liberal ones, will bristle at that suggestion. How dare anyone tell us what to do! US culture insidiously promotes exceptionalism to the extent that it's a part of the fibre of anyone growing up in America (just like Catholic guilt burrows to the heart of every Irish person even if they've never gone to church, and the most militant British anarchist still unconsciously views the world through the prism of class stratification). It's just in us because it's the water we've spent our entire lives swimming through. We can't help it.
But in this case, dear Americans, you can shove your exceptionalism right where you think this sentence was going to end. You're shitting in our goddamn well. Stop it right now!.

subset: commoncrawl


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Today is my last day of full-time employment. I have resigned from my role of Design Communicator at Liquidnet, and as of tomorrow will officially be an independent user experience design consultant.
The notion of working for myself has always been there, lurking in the dark recesses of my mind. My parents are entrepreneurs and have been running their successful public relations firm, HWH PR, for more than 30 years. That's what I grew up knowing. The ins and outs of a major corporation, its red tape and bureaucracy, interdepartmental tensions, "work/life balance," professional development, 360 feedback, bonus structures, endless hierarchies, the relationships between managers and direct reports — up until four years ago, all of these things were totally foreign to me, and often still are to my parents.
Instead I learned other skills: how to build a network and market myself, how to pitch a proposal to win business, how to hire and fire the necessary resources, how to manage a client who calls at 4 in the morning with a genius idea, how to tighten up in a bearish market, how to chase down a client who won't pay. These are the things I heard discussed at the dinner table. My parents have been working their tails off for as long as I've known them. Even while on vacation my mom calls the office to get her messages, make deals, mentor her staff, review deliverables, and find out what checks have come in. They never rest.
Only a business owner with his/her name on the line would have that determination and passion. They can't rest on their laurels because they know they're only as good as their last deal. A coworker isn't going to pick up the slack and a manager can't reassign the work. When something goes wrong, they have no one to blame but themselves, and when something goes right, they deserve all the credit. They are responsible for their own success, and they've taken that responsibility more seriously than any other two people I've ever known.
I have been successful as a cog in the wheel. At Digitas, my first job out of college, I was assigned to some of the highest profile projects. I helped to research, design and test an innovative card search for American Express and was given the opportunity to present a prototype to the CEO, Ken Chenault; later I was named as a co-inventor on a patent for the system. I was sent to the Chicago office with Dom Vial, an art director at the time, for what was supposed to be two days to support a team in the 11th hour before a pitch to Allstate; we ended up scrapping the previous designs and stayed six days to build a functional prototype from scratch. They won the pitch, and three months later convinced our bosses in New York to send us back to Chicago for 10 weeks to work on the project. I was 23 and had been with the company for six months when I was first sent there.
I don't want to use my blog as a platform to brag about my accomplishments. And anyway, it sounds better when someone else says it. I just wanted to illustrate that I learned how to play the game, and well.
But quite frankly, I'm tired of it.
I thought maybe it was agency life that got me down. The timesheets. The juggling. The scope creep. The bipolar clients. The creatives' thirst for awards. The negativity and backstabbing. The all-nighters. I did it for two years at Digitas and then Tribal DDB, and though I produced a ton of work I'm still very proud of, I was burned out.
When Liquidnet came calling, I decided it might be a good idea to go client-side. Regular hours. Flexible deadlines. One, maybe two projects. Development of my designs in-house. Access to the CEO. A new, complex domain and deep-seeded culture. Access to our users! A thorough and complete design process! Collaboration! So many promises brought me there, and for the first year I was on cloud nine. It was such a pleasure to be supported by a design team who worked together on the same suite of products for the same company; to share knowledge about the same set of users; to plan long-term design goals and to be assigned to the project long enough to see them through; to work directly with developers who have a stake in the success of the product and who understand and respect the design process.
Even learning about the stock market, a domain I knew absolutely nothing about before I started, was an incredibly exciting challenge and I rose to the occasion. I remember after six months my boss noted how surprised he was that I had learned so much in such a short period of time. And I really had — my passion for what I do as well as for the company had turned me into a sponge.
But then one day I wondered: is my heart really in it?
Since January, my most rewarding experiences have been outside of work. Rather it's been what I've learned from blogging, the connections I've made through Twitter and tweetups, the inspiration I've drawn from my peers at conferences and events and reading their books and blogs and listening to their podcasts. I have been moved and invigorated by my community of practice, and I feel a stronger-than-ever urge to make a positive impact on people's lives.
I want to affect a much larger group of people than I could ever have access to at Liquidnet. Or at an agency. I don't want one or two clients. I want 50! I want to be involved in as many domains and as many product types as possible. I want to design for the web, for the desktop, for mobile devices, for household gadgets, for kiosks and touchscreens and interactive billboards. And I want to have ownership over my designs, involvement in the strategic process, collaboration with the most influential stakeholders and the guys on the production line.
Being a consultant is the only way I can do all of that, the only way to cut through the red tape and work with the organization as a whole and be engaged for my specific skills and insights. And being independent means that I can take the jobs that interest me, that challenge me and allow me to flex my muscles, learn new things about business, learn new things about myself. I am ready to be my own boss and to have control over my own destiny (as much as is possible in this world).
I know it's going to be amazingly difficult. I know I'm going to have periods of self-doubt and insecurity. I know that some months it might even be a struggle to pay the rent. But in the end, I'll have no one to blame but myself, and no one to thank but myself. Independence will bring strength, greater influence, greater competency, and most of all, pride.
I'm young and I have a lot to learn, about the world and about myself. But failure simply doesn't exist. Every mistake I make along the way will be a lesson. And every disappointment will be an exercise in humility and courage. Failure is doing nothing when your heart is telling you exactly what you want.
So I'm doing it. I'm cutting the cord, and I'm ecstatic for what's to come. More of the same will get you nowhere. So here's my message to the universe: shock and amaze me. Make every day different. Create hurdles and boundaries. I'll never give up on myself, and you'll help me prove it.
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- The 5-Year Anniversary of My LLC August 4, 2010 | 10 comments
- Strategy Starts with Honesty July 20, 2009 | 12 comments
- You Are What You Ink August 7, 2012 | 6 comments
- Maimonides' Eight Levels of Charity Applied to Building Your Personal Brand February 18, 2009 | 16 comments


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NASCAR Is Back! Live Racing to Resume May 17
NASCAR will resume live racing in May, with seven races scheduled across 10 days, starting with a Cup Series race on May 17.
The seven races include four Cup Series races (May 17, 20, 24, 27) at two tracks. The circuits at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Charlotte, N.C., and Darlington Raceway in Darlington, S.C., are 100 miles apart and near where many teams set up on a permanent basis. This allows most teams involved to drive to the track, race and return home in the same day.
NASCAR made the announcement on Twitter on Thursday, adding that the races be broadcast on Fox or FX1. Of course, changes will be made to keep everyone safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
Upcoming NASCAR Schedule:
May 17, 3:30PM — Cup Series Race at Darlington Raceway In Darlington, S.C.
May 19, 8PM — Xfinity Series Race at Darlington Raceway In Darlington, S.C.
May 20, 7:30PM — Cup Series Race at Darlington Raceway In Darlington, S.C.
May 24, 6PM — Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway In Charlotte, N.C.
May 25, 7:30PM — Alsco 300, Xfinity Series Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway In Charlotte, N.C.
May 26, 8PM — North Carolina Education Lottery 200 at Charlotte Motor Speedway In Charlotte, N.C.
May 27, 8PM — Cup Series Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway In Charlotte, N.C.
No fans will be in attendance, and broadcast crews will be spread apart to conform to social distancing guidelines. NASCAR is uniquely positioned to return sooner than other sports (with the exception being tennis), because competitors don't need to be near one another. However, pit stops involve several crew members working together in close proximity. How that is going to be handled is still unknown, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
NASCAR drivers last raced in a Cup Series race on March 8. Since then the sport has taken to virtual racing and enjoyed some success as all other sports vanished from the television landscape. Drivers are more than enthusiastic about the return.
"I'm excited to get back racing," former champion Jimmie Johnson tweeted. "While it's unfortunate that there won't be fans in the stands, it's obviously necessary at this time." Others quickly agreed.
It's not clear if NASCAR has a plan beyond late May or beyond the two Carolina racetracks. The Kansas 400 at Kansas Speedway would be the next scheduled race after May 24. It's set for May 31.
Check Out Country Music's Sexiest Men Over 50


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Kelly Clarkson Says Stars Were 'Really Mean' During 'American Idol,' Reveals the One Celebrity Who Was Nice
Kelly Clarkson says that most celebrities were mean to her during her American Idol days—except for one kind star.
On the Thursday (January 14) episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show, the "Piece by Piece" singer shared just how terribly famous people treated her back in 2002, during her time on American Idol.
But there was one celebrity who was nice to Clarkson.
On her talk show, Clarkson spoke to Jennifer Love Hewitt via video chat about their very first meeting. "You probably don't remember this, but it stuck with me [for] so long, almost twenty years now ... Right after — you have no idea I'm about to say this and you probably don't remember — but it was at some kind of MTV Awards or something or VMAs or something, I don't know what it was, but you ran up to me."
The television host and pop star explained that their meeting took place shortly after she and the other two final contestants were revealed during the first season of American Idol. "We were just so slammed and everything was happening like in a whirlwind and people like were really mean to us because we're from a talent show and it was the first season," she admitted.
"Like, everyone was so rude to us, like, on the carpet, like at the show," Clarkson recalled. "It was so bad. It was a horrible experience... and you came up to me and ran up to me out of nowhere and were like, 'Oh my gosh! I'm really rooting for you!'"
At the time, the actress offered Clarkson words of wisdom regarding her newfound fame. "You told me, 'Please keep the ones you love so close and it'll end up being about a few people in your life, unfortunately, but this business can be really hard. And just remember to keep those people who really love you' — and you just gave me this advice that was really, really kind in such an… unkind rather time for me, personally."
Watch the interview, below.


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The synoptic problem refers to scholars' attempts to understand the relationship among the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (known as the synoptic gospels because they have so much material in common).
Two solutions to this problem—the Q or two-source hypothesis and the Farrer hypothesis—begin with the premise that the first gospel to be written was Mark. What arguments are used to support this view?


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Strife hardens Syrian rebel brigade
Associated Press
| Monday, December 3, 2012, 10:05 a.m.
MAARET MISREEN, Syria — A year ago, a soft-spoken sweet shop owner from this poor Syrian town got together with his little brother and eight friends to declare war on President Bashar Assad.
They didn't have enough guns to go around. Their leader, 35-year-old Mustafa Filfileh, had no real military experience and little idea how to face one of the Mideast's strongest armies. He didn't even know how to drive.
They learned fast. On Nov. 17, the brigade called "The Beloved of Allah" braced for its biggest challenge yet, making it clear how far its members had come and how far the war had brought them from their former lives.
Men who once sold real estate, laid bricks, wore suits and treated sick farm animals armed themselves with vests laden with ammunition, hand grenades and pocket-sized copies of the Quran. After a two-month siege, they planned to storm a major military base in one of the larger coordinated attacks of the uprising.
It was late 2012, the year that Syria's uprising outpaced the other Arab Spring revolts to become the longest, deadliest and most brutal, killing more than 40,000 people and chasing more than 1 million from their homes.
During the past year, scores of rebel brigades across Syria like The Beloved of Allah have evolved from hapless bands of lightly armed men into formidable fighting groups, shifting the balance against Assad's military. This progress has been marked in recent weeks, with rebels storming military bases and claiming to shoot down government aircraft with newly captured missiles. The government has continued to strike rebel areas, and activists accused it last week of blacking out Syria's Internet for two days.
As the rebels racked up successes, their leadership in exile reorganized under pressure from the West and was recently recognized as Syria's sole legitimate representative by France, Britain and several Arab states. U.S. officials say the Obama administration is moving to do the same.
However, this new leadership body has little traction with the rebels inside Syria, many of whom have evolved during 20 months of conflict from civilian protesters into hardline, Islamist fighters. The shift among rebel groups toward a more militant Islam will likely alienate them from other Syrians and from Western nations that could provide badly needed military aid.
The transformation of The Beloved of Allah, now 150 men strong, was documented in hours of interviews and days spent with the group in June and November 2012, plus dozens of videos shot by its members.
"Our only allegiance is to Allah," Filfileh told his fighters before they attacked the base. "Victory or martyrdom, God willing."
The Beloved of Allah began with ten men, five rifles, one rickety machine gun and a few rocket-propelled grenades soon discovered to be duds. It was born in Maaret Misreen, a town where tractors and motorcycles outnumber cars in Idlib province, a center of rebel activity along Syria's northern border with Turkey.
The town first protested in April 2011, one month after the uprising began in the southern city of Daraa. Filfileh, well-liked by the young men who hung around his sweet shop, helped organize.
Filfileh, then 33, wasn't overly religious, sporting a trim beard and often missing some of the five daily Muslim prayers, his brother Mohammed said. He never cared for politics, but joined the uprising to fight a hereditary regime he felt had done little for poor Sunni Muslims like him.
Syria's Sunni majority forms the backbone of the opposition while Assad's regime is dominated by minority Alawites — an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
Through 2011, that regime resorted to increasingly brutal tactics to crush the spreading dissent. By December, Filfileh decided that protesters needed arms, a conclusion reached by many across Syria, starting what would become the Free Syrian Army.
His men pooled their cash to buy guns. They traded a rifle for a van stolen from a security officer, painted it black and adorned the back window with the Muslim declaration of faith, the shehada, a central tenet of the religion that the devout recite in prayer and before traveling, sleep and death: "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet."
The hood bore their new name: The Beloved of Allah Brigade. The name was inspired by a protest chant about martyrs killed fighting the enemy.
Their first operation was to blow up the house of a Muslim sheik who was arming local residents to fight the opposition. It failed, sparking a two-day clash in December 2011 that killed six people, including Filfileh's brother Ahmed.
"After the battle with the sheik, the whole town rose up and gave up on peaceful means," said Mohammed Tallal, an early member. "It was as if the protesters were tricking themselves."
Young men flocked to the group, leaving their old lives behind. Mohammed Akram, 24, abandoned the suits he wore as an accountant at a brick factory. Abdullah Qadi, 25, dropped his dream to be a professor of veterinary medicine. Abdullah Biram, 23, quit his university business degree. His mother, a teacher, bought him a rifle.
The group's oldest fighter, Mohammed Ibrahim, 41, nursed a grievance. When he was a boy, security forces broke into his home to arrest his father, whom they suspected of belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
"I woke up, saw them and wet myself," he said. "Since then, I've hated the state."
They started small.
"At first we couldn't attack checkpoints, so we did what God gave us the power to do," Tallal said.
They ambushed security officers to steal their cars, sometimes kidnapping them until they promised to leave the regime. Filfileh learned to drive, rushing wounded people to the Turkish border in his black van and ferrying back guns when he could find them. He rarely visited his wife and five children, but argued with his brother Mohammed when he tried to join the group, Mohammed said. Filfileh felt one of them had to stay alive to support the family.
The Beloved of Allah remained weak.
By June, they were hiding from the army in an unfinished, one-room farmhouse. One wall displayed seven of the group's dead, their faces imposed over a photo of the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
Most days, they'd sleep in, then while away the afternoon drinking tea, smoking and complaining about their lack of ammunition. On hot days, they'd don shorts and swim in the farm's irrigation tank.
They had little idea how to get better arms or challenge Assad's tanks.
Through mid-2012, rebel power grew and Assad's army ramped up its response.
Relentless government shelling leveled neighborhoods and killed hundreds. Regular reports emerged of mass killings by the regime or thugs loyal to it, pushing more Syrians toward armed struggle. The government, which often calls the opposition terrorist gangs backed by foreign powers, denied any role, and does not respond to requests for comment on its military. The rebels, too, were accused of atrocities.
Fueling the rebel advances were breakthroughs in arms and organization. Rebels seized a large swath of territory along the Turkish border, and different brigades and groups came together to carry out bigger attacks and solicit funding.
The Beloved of Allah rode this current. In August, Filfileh coordinated with other rebel groups to attack an army convoy heading to the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, hauling off machine guns, rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and more ammunition than they'd ever had. He also associated his group with the Farouq Brigades of Aleppo, an umbrella group.
Farouq bought regular supplies of ammunition from arms dealers in Turkey and Iraq with aid from abroad. In return, the Beloved filmed its victories against the regime and claimed them for Farouq to solicit further aid.
All the while, the war was growing more sectarian, with the Sunni Muslims who led the revolt becoming increasingly dominated by Islamists. Extremist groups also waded in, terrifying Syria's Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other minorities.
As the war dragged on and the rebels lost more friends and family members, Filfileh and his men, all Sunnis, increasingly sought motivation and solace in the only ideology with any traction in their patch of rural Syria: Islam. Filfileh grew out his beard, spiced his speech with increasingly religious rhetoric and wore black, Afghan-style outfits, adopting the image of a fighter in jihad, or holy war.
In September, The Beloved coordinated with a half dozen other groups to besiege the 46th Regiment of the Syrian army, near Aleppo. The group had never worked so closely with so many other fighters or tried to take a major military base. They hoped its fall would provide them with valuable booty.
After one failed raid, they realized they didn't have the firepower to take the base. So they divvied up the territory, cut the supply lines and braced for a long wait.
The Beloved of Allah held a section near a gated community of luxury villas they assumed belonged to rich businessmen and government officials. They settled into a stately, white villa with a columned entryway, a grassy, tree-lined yard and a swimming pool half full of green water and trash.
"The first time I walked into this villa, I saw that four of its doors were worth more than my entire house," said Qadi, the veterinarian.
The place had three stories, but the fighters stayed on the ground floor, hoping the house wouldn't totally collapse if the government bombed it. The army shelled the area regularly and most of the house's windows were blown out. But the ground floor had a fireplace to keep it warm and a foosball table to fill idle days.
Militarily, the group had advanced much. Instead of wasting ammunition in frequent clashes, they put snipers in the villas overlooking the base to cover more ground with fewer bullets.
"If you can't destroy a car or shoot a solider and kill him, don't fire," Filfileh said.
One afternoon, the scraping sound of a fighter jet filled the villa. Fighters rushed in, fearing an airstrike.
"To the trucks!" Filfileh yelled.
Within minutes, trucks with anti-aircraft guns blasted at the jet. It dove and struck nearby, sending up a huge cloud of gray smoke.
The rebels downed two jets and sent another away smoking, Qadi said. He had a video of a flaming L-39 training jet falling from the sky, and another of rebels chanting over its wreckage. The videos and claims could not be independently verified.
As the siege drew on, scores of soldiers defected from the base, reporting that morale inside was low and food was short, Qadi said. The helicopters dropped packages of bread. Sometimes, the bread fell to the rebels.
When the attack on the base finally came, Filfileh called his men together.
Many had long hair and scruffy beards and laughed at how different they looked from their clean-cut selves in old ID photos. They wore camouflage uniforms and black headbands with "There is no God but Allah" embroidered on their foreheads.
Filfileh told them to look out for each other, to fight to the death and to take no prisoners. He said they were fighting for everyone who had been killed or wounded during the uprising. But he framed the fight in stark religious, not political, terms.
"We are heading out for the same goal, all of us," he said, stroking the black beard that now reached his chest. "We are not heading out to topple the regime. We are heading out to raise the banner 'There is no God but Allah.'
"If anyone is martyred, it is because God chose him," he said. "He only takes those whom He selects, the beloved of Allah."
Amid chants of "God is great!" they headed for the base. They stormed their assigned barracks and caught two government soldiers. They were questioned and "eliminated," said Akram, the former accountant.
By dawn, the rebels were clashing with soldiers in another barracks further in. Filfileh and 10 others came under fire and took cover behind a dirt mound. They lay on their chests, shooting at soldiers so close they could shout to them.
And shout they did. "Hey you dogs! Come have a cigarette!" Akram yelled, making his colleagues laugh. "Let me take you for a ride in my pickup!"
The base was falling, and the mood was buoyant. Just then, Filfileh told Akram to get him a rocket-propelled grenade.
When Akram returned, Filfileh was lying face up in the dirt, blood rushing from his forehead.
"Cover! We need cover!" Akram screamed into a walkie talkie. "Filfileh is wounded!"
The fighters carried Filfileh to a van, which raced to the Turkish border. Filfileh lay still on the floor, eyes open, with blood pooling under his head as fighters yelled his name.
At one point, he lifted his index finger in a sign of oath and mouthed the shehada: "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet."
"He became a martyr next to me!" a fighter wailed. "Filfileh became a martyr!"
That night, the base fell.
The next night, the Beloved of Allah collected at the old farmhouse where they once hid from the army. The place had changed little, other than the new martyr photos on the wall.
The rebels had lost about 10 men in the battle, and Filfileh was badly wounded. But some 500 rebel fighters had routed the government soldiers, taken about 50 prisoners and made off with more booty than any could recall seeing in north Syria, including tanks, rocket launchers, armored vehicles, artillery guns and truckloads of munitions.
The survivors laughed when asked about their past or future lives.
"I try to ask myself where I'll be after the revolution and I can't imagine myself anywhere but in the grave," said Qadi, the veterinarian, who had planned to become a university professor before the uprising. "I've forgotten everything that came before."
Tallal invoked religion.
"If God permits, we could reach the presidential palace or we could all be martyred in the same battle," he said. "We depend only on Allah."
Filfileh was rushed to a hospital in Turkey, where surgeons stopped the bleeding from the bullet that had blown through his skull. Now he is conscious, can speak and says he will return to fight in Syria.
His doctor says he'll be released on Monday. Only time will tell if he'll walk without a cane.
Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser contributed reporting.


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The delicate dance of status
Posted: - Modified: | braindump, connecting, reflectionThe interns helping my mom put together a memory book asked me to rank the top 25 people who have influenced me. I refused, explaining that I felt very uncomfortable doing that.
I remember coming across this speaking tip: During Q&A, don't say "great question" to fill in the silence while you're thinking of the answer, because then you'll have to say something like it for the other questions or risk making people feel their question isn't as important as others'.
It reminded me of a tip I'd read in a different book, even longer ago, which went something like this: Introducing one person as "my friend" and omitting that when introducing the other can lead to friction.
One of my friends once anxiously asked me if it was okay if he considered me a best friend, but not his best, best friend. I told him it doesn't matter to me, and that I'm glad we're close friends.
My middle sister can be more particular about sibling ranking than I am, and often jokes about the pecking order. I've opted out of caring about that, I guess. =)
I have no qualms about praising people in public. In some contexts, though–comparative ones?–status gets odd.
It reminds me of how, at a conference on education that I attended in my sixth grade, I spoke up about cooperation instead of competition.
I try to minimize the distance between me and whoever I want to help. I want people to be able to easily identify with me.
I try to think of people as approachable and human, no matter what their job titles or life situations are, and to let them also interact with other people that way if they want to.
Presenting through web conferences–with full back channels and closer facial expressions–feels more intimate than giving a talk in an auditorium, separated by lights and a stage.
It reminds me of improv. There are games you can play with status and the inversion of status. I still need to practice and relax more before I can easily play those games, and even more before I can play those games for laughs, but it was interesting to learn about the games and start seeing the patterns of conversation.
Unequal status can feel okay, too: introducing someone to a potential mentor, for example. The status difference is justified by the context, not the title (and sometimes is inversely related to job titles or experience).
I'm okay with starting one-up if I know how I can help someone, but I feel uncomfortable if I don't know or we have to dig for it. I usually introduce myself as equal-ish. In presentations, I sometimes take the slightly-up-at-least-in-this-context position (here are some things I learned that might save you time), and sometimes the slightly-down position (here's what I know, and I'd love to bring out what you know).
/Thanks to Judy Gombita (@jgombita) for the nudge to reflect on this!/


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Welcome to a special holiday edition of Music Friday when we bring you fun songs with jewelry, gemstones or precious metals in the lyrics or title. Today, 98 Degrees frontman Nick Lachey is ready to pop the question in the 1999 Christmas hit, "This Gift."
In the chorus of the song, we learn that the "gift" is actually an engagement ring. He sings, "'Cause I've been waiting to give this gift tonight / I'm down on my knees / There's no better time / It's something to last for as long as you live / Tonight I'm gonna give you all my heart can give."
The song also includes a gemstone reference in the first verse. Here's how Lachey sets the romantic scene: "The snow is falling / The city is white / Your eyes are shining / like diamonds tonight."
"This Gift" was the first single released from the group's third studio album and first holiday album, This Christmas, which sold more than one million copies in the U.S. alone. "This Gift" also was well received, as it peaked at #40 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart, #25 on the Canadian Singles chart and #14 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks chart.
98 Degrees — comprising band members Lachey, brother Drew Lachey, Jeff Timmons and Justin Jeffre — enjoyed a phenomenal run from 1996 to 2003. The group notched eight Top 40 singles in the U.S. and sold 10 million records worldwide.
The group disbanded in 2003, although Nick Lachey stated on the group's official web site that there was no breakup, just an extended hiatus. Group members pursued other creative endeavors during the "hiatus" but came back together in 2012 for what was supposed to be a one-time performance at the Mixtape Festival in Hershey, Pa.
After the show, group members agreed to get back into the studio to work on a new album, 2.0, which released in May of 2013. They also thrilled their fans during "The Package" tour of 2013 — a series of nearly 50 concerts featuring three prominent boy bands (Boys II Men, New Kids on the Block and 98 Degrees.)
Trivia: The group agreed on the name 98 Degrees after rejecting two other possibilities: Just Us and Next Issue.
The group continues to tour, with upcoming performances in Windsor and Niagara Falls, Canada, Honolulu, Singapore and Manila.
Please check out the video of Nick Lachey and 98 Degrees performing "This Gift." The lyrics are below if you'd like to sing along…
"This Gift"
Written by Anders Bagge, Arnthor Birgisson, Dane Deviller and Sean Hosein. Performed by 98 Degrees.
The snow is falling
The city is white
Your eyes are shining
like diamonds tonight
And we're all alone
There's no one home
You're finally in my arms again
The night is silent
And Christmas is here
I couldn't ask for more than having you near
'Cause I love you girl (love you girl)
And I always will (always will)
And now I know the moment is right
The moment is right
'Cause I've been waiting to give this gift tonight
I'm down on my knees
There's no better time
It's something to last for as long as you live
Tonight I'm gonna give you all my heart can give
I thought I'd give you something shiny and new
I'd try to find something worthy of you
But I realized when I looked inside
There's some things that money can't buy (oh no)
I feel the magic whenever you're near
I feel it even more this time of the year
'Cause I love you girl (love you girl)
I always will (always will)
And now I know the moment is right
The moment is right
You know I'll always be true to you
And you know I'm the one you can turn to
Any time, any place, or anywhere
You know that I'll always be there
Credit: Screen capture via Youtube.com.
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