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While out for a run this morning, I listened to a panel discussion from the Commonwealth Club about the current state of the Food culture in America. On the panel were a bunch of important Food people, including Alice Waters (renowned chef/founder of Chez Panisse, author, and champion of local, sustainable food sources) and Anya Fernald (Executive Director of Slow Food Nation), and it was moderated by Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation).

I’ll preface these comments by noting that I generally agree with most of the tenets of the entire Slow Food movement, particularly since I started eating more green things and learning about the environmental impact of eating meat. I’m lucky enough to have the option (financially) to shop at places like Whole Foods and I do think it’s a good thing.

That being said, I couldn’t help but chuckle, scoff, and even get annoyed by some of the answers and responses by the panel to a few very fundamental (and logical) questions. For example, the first question of the Q&A section of the discussion was, ‘Is it fair to force chain restaurants to post nutritional information on menus when small, local restaurants (i.e. Chez Panisse) would be exempted (per some ongoing potential legislation in California)?’ and was taken by Schlosser himself. This was a question that I myself had while I was running. While I agree that a lot of these chain restaurants should make clear that a Jumbo Jack is in practice ACTUALLY jumbo to your belt size, is it fair to set a double-standard just because they serve unhealthy food? If we’re talking about accountability, shouldn’t all food service establishments be accountable? Logical question, I thought.

Schlosser’s response was somewhere between righteous and dismissive. Oh, and completely illogical. It went something along the lines of, “Well, chain restaurants don’t make the food on-site, while places like Chez Panisse are buying fresh ingredients and cooking the food daily.” And then everybody clapped. No, seriously. it sounded like most of the crowd applauded an answer like that. Nevermind that the answer was essentially orthogonal to the question (which was, ‘Why should there be a double-standard? Why is the fact that a restaurant ships its food pre-cooked from God-only-knows-where grounds to enforce unique regulations on them?’). By the way, if someone has a legitimate answer to that question, I am actually interested to hear it.

A couple of questions later, Fernald was asked, ‘Is the Slow Food movement elitist? It generally costs more (in money and time) to eat local, sustainable ingredients. Is this really for folks who aren’t rich white people?’ I’ll get to (in my mind) the proper way to answer that question in a few minutes, but I was literally floored (had to stop my run to make sure I was hearing right) by Fernald’s response. She approached the question with a three-pronged answer, along the lines of:

1. The cost thing is perception and is built by the huge marketing budgets of fast food companies.
2. Sometimes Slow Food can cost as little as fast food.
3. People spend hundreds of dollars a year on things like their cell phones. We (they) all need to get used to the idea of paying a little bit more and spending a LOT more time preparing our food.

Let me start by giving some advice to anyone who’s ever in an argument. If your first point is that it’s the enemy’s fault, you’re screwed. If your second and third points then dispute your first point, you are insane. And, if your key point is making a plea to your potential audience that a technology they use 10’s or 100’s of times per day costs a lot and should be discarded for something they currently do not value at all (local food), you’re completely crazy.

These are arguments that work on people who, a) have the money/time to afford that optionality, and b) are skeptical enough to recognize the nuance of TV advertising campaigns. In other words, they are not for the vast majority of this country.

A parallel but completely unrelated movement, the renewable energy industry, has been tackling these same types of questions (’How do you create a model where your target audience recognizes transparent value?’) in a much more approachable fashion:

It’s better for the environment and it’s more affordable.

Is the technology there yet? Probably not. But they are at least approaching the messaging with a reasonable value proposition. Eric Schmidt went on the same radio program a few weeks ago (audio) with a simple message for other businesses: ‘We’ve moved to renewable energy on our campus and it’s economically cheaper. It costs less. Period.’

Now that is a message that resonates with its target audience.

For business executives thinking about this issue, cost is the ultimate arbiter. It is completely accountable, bears no double standard for ‘trying hard,’ and makes no excuses for itself. And, most of all, it doesn’t ask for people to sacrifice their time for something that costs more and lacks transparent value.

So the question is, then, what message should the Slow Food movement be using? Clearly I don’t think it should be, ‘We cost a little more and take a lot more time, but taste better!’ Try giving that message to a single mother who works two jobs, thinks a Big Mac tastes just fine, and likes the fact that Jack In The Box has a $0.99 menu. Seriously, go try.

No, the message has to be more similar to Alice Waters’ comments on the panel: local, sustainable agriculture is healthier and it’s fun/valuable/didactic to cook – kids will even eat chard if they’re involved in the cooking process. Now try giving that same single mother the message of:

Your children will get Diabetes, heart problems, a host of other medical issues, and probably die earlier if you keep feeding them fast food. Here are the numbers to prove it. Oh, and by the way, this shit (slow food) can taste good.

Now that is a value proposition that is clear and unassuming. No nuance required.

It’s simple. When a competitor competes on price, you can either complain about it or you can deliver the goods on greater value for the cost. You do that by emphasizing the value they get, not by pleading for more of their time.

Slow Food: it tastes good and it won’t kill you like fast food will.

Ship it.

I’ve gotten some random pings from folks lately asking:

• What happened to that crazy lifestyle eating change you were on? Are you still doing that?
• Have any New Year’s Resolutions?

Good questions both. One quick note, I usually do 5 New Year’s Resolutions every year, but I don’t call them that because it sounds like they’re afterthoughts and the word ‘resolution’ now has a loaded connotation of ‘IMPENDING COMPLETE FAILURE COMING MOMENTARILY’.

Instead, I usually call them ’simplifying principles’ because they’re things I’d really like to actively focus on this year and they’re meant to simplify my life, not add some additional thing I won’t remember to do. Before I get to those…

The Eating Thing

If you’ll remember, last year I attempted (mostly successfully) to undo 26 years of awful eating habits and prepare myself for the distinct eventuality that the next 30 years of my life are going to consist of: 1) working a lot, and 2) a gradually slowing metabolism. Let’s be very clear about this: I know of (maybe) five Asian males over the age of 35 who are not noticeably overweight. That’s it. If you’re Asian and your Dad is not overweight, then I’ll take your word for it and add him to the list, though he’s probably already one of the five.

With that backdrop, and because I often like to pit myself in games of will power against myself, I spent some time reading up on “What does eating healthy really MEAN?” last year and then attempted to live by that for 12 months. The results were largely good and I think the number of meals I strayed was probably less than 30.

This year I’ve made one slight adjustment to the approach, which I don’t think will make a material difference in practice, but I think will make an enormous difference in my personal mental state when driving by an In-n-Out. And that leads me to the five simplifying principles (of course non-work-related):

1. Eat healthy (as defined in 2008), with the exception that for every week in which I work out 3+ times, I get one free meal to eat whatever I want. Hopefully for all parties involved, that will be 52 weeks.
2. Write a short story. This was originally “Write more,” but in the name of setting actionable, measurable principles. Regardless, “Write more” is baked into this.
3. Read and thoughtfully review at least 12 books
4. Visit at least one new foreign country
5. Launch a couple (at least 2) useful, interesting sites

I would have added a sixth and a seventh (”Tailgate at least 10 times” and “Lower the beer to other beverages ratio”), but a) they seemed to work directly against one another, b) the seventh is pretty much covered by my #1, and c) I just really wasn’t ready to commit to seven different principles.

Let’s all have a solid 2009, people.

I’ve been looking for the proper metaphor for the stunning (and still continuing) crash of the stock market over the past two weeks and I’ve finally found it: ‘The Stomach Punch.’

‘The Stomach Punch’ is a term coined by Bill Simmons in his ‘13 Levels of Losing‘ column. As Simmons puts it, the ‘Stomach Punch’ is:

Any roller-coaster game that ends with A) an opponent making a pivotal (sometimes improbable) play, or B) one of your guys failing in the clutch … usually ends with fans filing out after the game in stunned disbelief, if they can even move at all … always haunting, sometimes scarring

I think every poker player I’ve ever met has had at least one such ’stomach punch’ moment in his/her time playing. It’s the sickening feeling that comes from being blindsided with a horrific loss, usually following an extended period of good fortune. The suddenness and degree of the stomach punch are its hallmarks. Maybe it’s a sick beat (”The guy had two outs with one to come… Two OUTS!”). Maybe it’s a cold deck. Maybe it’s getting outplayed/trapped. Whatever the case, there are two common ways to deal with it (in a cash game):

1. Feel your stomach knotting up while you slowly stand and stumble away, legs wobbly, head in a complete daze. You have a sudden urge to call loved ones just to hear the sound of humanity, or
2. In an opaque mental haze, reach into your wallet/clip and peel off a suddenly very uncomfortable stack of bills to put onto the table in a macho effort to win back your pride.

Neither feels good. One is, almost certainly, destined to feel worse in the morning.

The most real and human result of a ’stomach punch night’ is to wake up in the morning and question everything about your play. There is little that is more humbling than the continuous replaying of a hand gone wrong from the night before. It is a pure, introspective analysis, backed by the brutal honesty of big bills missing from your wallet. It is a sickening truth.

That’s how I feel about the market crash of the past week or two.

As a young man who only started making a salary four years ago, I’ve really never known negative results from investing in the market. Take a quick look at the Google Finance chart of the Dow from August 2004 through the beginning of this calendar year below:

In retrospect, it’s clear that a correction was probably in order – perhaps not to the upcoming degree, but it was inevitable. And sure, in hindsight it’s simple to label its timing as obvious. But when you’ve never personally seen a downturn like this, it’s no different than seeing your opponent spike a 2-outter on the River for a large sum of money. You get that knot in your stomach as you count the basis (or, actually, percentage) points leak out of your portfolio.

Sure, more seasoned/experienced investors may have warned you it would come, but the reality doesn’t humble you until it happens.

Like the ’stomach punch’ in poker, the perspective I’m taking to this crisis is humble and reasoned introspection. I’ve found myself being very honest about my own lack of knowledge and particular mistakes. I’m re-evaluating my appetite for risk-reward and questioning every assumption. It’s a healthy process, but it’s also brutal.

I think it was in 2004, when I had just finished college. I had (literally) zero dollars in my bank account just before I was starting my first job at Oracle. On top of that, I had a tidy sum in college loan debt staring me in the face. I knew nothing about houses, other than I wanted to buy one for myself some day. It was around then that a friend of mine mentioned that I should ‘buy a house now.’ I laughed and remarked that I had no money to put down, plus I hadn’t even started my job yet. The conversation went something like this:

Friend: “Why don’t you buy a house now? You’d just be throwing your money away renting.”
Jack: “What, you mean besides the fact that I don’t have any money?”
Friend: “Nah, you can get a no-money down mortgage. The interest rate’s not bad and you can just re-finance in a few years.”
Jack: (to myself) “I don’t know a whole lot, but that seems completely fucking absurd to me. Why would they loan me boatloads of money when I don’t have any?”

I never got a straight answer to that question then, but it’s clear now what kinds of shenanigans were going on.

As a single mid-20’s male, with no real life commitments, who has been worriedly following this whole crisis, the main emotion running through my head (besides ‘concern’) is, surprisingly, anger. It’s the kind of anger that comes from the feeling of being cheated and it’s directed out between the immoral executives and financial institutions who dealt with these irresponsible mortgages, the idiotic/naive/gullible Americans who decided on taking these outrageous loans that they couldn’t afford, and to a certain extent the government regulators who I feel like should have been doing something about this earlier.

Basically, it’s anger that the entire world economy and American taxpayers (including myself) will get to bear the pain that should, frankly, be felt by these people alone. I’ll admit it, I haven’t even considered stopping to feel sorry for anyone from Lehman or any of the other financial institutions that have collapsed (or laid people off). It’s awful for me to say it, but it’s true. It’s particularly true when they have, on average, been pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, much of it due to these types of instruments. I don’t feel sorry for them for a single moment. I hope some of them at least realize their responsibility in this whole thing.

And then today, as if sensing that it’s a great time to come along trolling for money, the big Detroit automakers went begging in Washington today. It just makes you cringe, doesn’t it? How about first you guys actually make some cars that customers want to purchase?

It’s all incredibly disturbing. Welcome to the new global economy.

Yesterday I had the tremendous pleasure of being a part of my own brother’s wedding. Needless to say, everything today (Sunday) has been incredibly dulled emotionally because of the dramatic high from their wedding. I probably could have been robbed today with zero emotional effect.

I told Michael and Mara on Friday night that at least a few small things were bound to go awry on Saturday, so not to worry about it. Miraculously though, it really feels like the whole ceremony/reception ran like clockwork. I’m clearly a biased party, but it was an amazing event. You can read about the long preparation the happy couple had at michaelandmara.com .

I also had the honor of giving a short toast/speech as the Best Man. Through the amazing power of the Interweb, you can see it here on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cZhR9rV3a4

And certainly over the coming days there’ll be a ton of photos getting posted up, but here are a couple choice selections from Angry Ninja’s album “Mike Chou Wedding”:

Introductions at the reception. Lots of blue.

Chocolate fountain at the reception is always a crowd-pleaser.

The First Dance for Michael and my new sister-in-law Mara.

Random asian guy who showed up at the reception.

Last week I came upon an article by William Deresiewicz, a Yale Associate Professor of English, entitled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” In it, Deresiewicz puts forth his theory that elite universities are disadvantaging their students and alumni. In particular, he identifies what he perceives as five generalized disadvantages of an elite education:

1. Elite educations make you incapable of talking to people who “aren’t like you.”
2. An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.
3. Elite educations train students to expect and accept an entitlement to be mediocre.
4. Elite educations willingly lead students to the “safe” and secure life.
5. There is no intellectualism (as he defines it) because students just do “good enough.”

It is certainly a critical article, and it is one that immediately drew a sharp reaction from me. After all, who wants to be labeled as, essentially, an elitist who skirts by in life? Assuming Deresiewicz would consider Stanford “an elite institution,” I (and all of my friends from school) just got slapped in the face by a man who has never met us, much less spoken to us.

Though to be clear, if he has trouble finding anything to say to a plumber with a Boston accent and a Red Sox cap, he would probably have trouble finding anything to say to me also. I can think of at least ten one-liners to rag on the Red Sox immediately (”Damn, how hard is it for your team to catch the fucking DEVIL RAYS?” or, as Stoops suggested, “It’s a good thing we both hate the Yankees.”).

Yes, I understand that his criticism is technically of the institutions themselves, but it’s a bit like we were all sprayed by stray bullets from the drive-by.

However, I would be lying if I categorically denounced the entire article. When I look closely, within his shockingly elitist examples, there is some truth. Let’s take a look:

Elite educations make you incapable of talking to people who “aren’t like you.”

I’ve probably covered this already, but I consider this point to be a complete fucking joke. I didn’t go to Yale (and maybe Stanford’s just not as stuffy of a place), but I have a feeling this is more an issue with the individual than the institution. As Phil put it in an email, “What I find comical is that he expects to be able to relate, and then blames his education and collegiate institutions for his deficiency.”

It’s unfortunate that Deresiewicz opens his article with this particular point, because I feel like the absurdity of it really discolors his other arguments and observations. Perhaps his inability to converse with ‘people not like him’ is more a reflection of another of his points – not all intelligence plays well in the classroom.

Frankly, socially intelligent individuals (many of whom I know endured these apparent ‘Elite Educational Prisons’) are capable of talking to any human about, literally, any topic. Are we to believe that attending an elite institution removes your ability to enjoy sports, music, movies, news, and every other potential topic of conversation that is shared commonly between large portions of the population? I think they’re allowed to listen to rap music at Yale.

I don’t even know what “people not like me” means – are these people who are lacking vital organs that I have? The whole point is crazy.

An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

It’s hard to deny the (at least half-) truth of this statement. I was witness to this fact while I worked at Google. In case you were not aware, Google likes to hire Ivy League and Stanford graduates in all of its departments, including departments where the primary job function is answering customer support emails from users/advertisers/publishers. I can’t tell you the number of times I heard the phrase “I’m/we’re over-qualified…” from such coworkers while I worked at Google, as if such work was simply beneath them.

That’s not an indictment of those employees, or even Google, but rather just an observation that there is a significant sense of self-worth inculcated by an elite education. I’m not positive that I view this sense of self-worth to be truly a disadvantage, save for (the fairly plentiful) occasions when it extends to arrogance.

Elite educations train students to expect and accept an entitlement to be mediocre.

I don’t imagine anyone would argue the presence of some level of grade inflation at elite institutions. Yet the generalization that all elite educations reward mediocrity seems overdone. And certainly Deresiewicz’s contention that all students of elite institutions expect that to be able to turn their work in late with no repercussions is absurd, at least at Stanford. I have no insight into Yale or Columbia.

I don’t remember ever hearing any of my friends talk about how they’d just run that paper over a day late. But I certainly do remember the eerie glow of rows of monitors at Sweet Hall at 3 in the morning, or working in the lab trying to debug that damn microprocessor implementation before it was due in a few hours at 9am.

The truth is that I would have been really fucking embarrassed to act as Deresiewicz describes. I think all of my friends would have also.

Elite educations willingly lead students to the “safe” and secure life.

Agreed (for 90+% of the Stanford graduates that I know). I can’t even really begin to argue with this point, as I’ve commented to numerous folks that temptation for security and fear of failure manifest themselves in my own psyche. After all, this temptation is the same reason that Google continues to be able to stock its customer service teams with Harvard/Stanford/Princeton/Yale graduates who end up incredibly conflicted due to their strong sense of self-worth.

For many Asian-Americans, I would add that parental influences often play an even more significant part than their elite educations. As an example, trying to explain to my own mother why I would leave a company like Google or go play poker for a living is somewhere between comical and impossible.

There is no intellectualism (as he defines it) because students just do “good enough.”

I’m extremely conflicted on Deresiewicz’s last “disadvantage.” His contention is that because elite institutions (and their students) have become increasingly focused on jumping the hurdles to reach a diploma (and subsequently the secure life), the students ignore true ‘intellectualism’. He describes the intellectual life as focus on “The Big Questions” and large visions. In doing so, he also takes a side swipe at all technical fields, which he paints as part of the evil commercialization of elite instititutions:

Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

There is some level of truth to his overarching point (I certainly did jump through the right sequence of hoops to graduate at school), however one can’t help but read his argument and wonder if he is just profoundly biased. After all, has Bill Gates led this “intellectual life”? Has Steve Jobs? And if they have not, is that because they haven’t focused on ‘The Big Questions?’ Or is it because their ‘Big Questions’ aren’t about understanding Kierkegaard or examining Faulkner’s inner motivations?

If, as Deresiewicz says, “Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas,” then how is it that ‘an infrastructure to serve an essentially infinite number bytes of information to small boxes in every home in the world over the fucking air’ not an idea?

The beauty of living in the Silicon Valley is that you see, meet, read about, and see the work of countless individuals who are passionate about ideas every day. For some (not all) of them, elite educations were four+ years spent building a foundation to just enable them to be passionate about ideas. And that seems like fairly decent work by our best universities, even by Deresiewicz’s own definition of why they exist.

A few weeks ago, on a random Thursday, I found myself inexplicably wide awake at 6:30am in the morning. With nothing else to do, I naturally headed into work early to get a headstart on the day.

Here I am, three weeks later, still coming in early to work on Thursdays (around 7am) every week.

In addition to all of the random benefits (i.e., I can actually justify leaving work to catch the 4:30 Pacific start time of the UNC game today), coming in early to work is actually something that I find myself looking forward to during the week. The opportunity for a few hours of complete quiet before the constant shuffle of the day is remarkably important to my week now.

I’m a big believer in the need to anchor your life around a few constants and pillars of consistency. For me, they currently happen to be: 7am Thursdays, Monday-Wednesday-Friday workouts, monk-like healthy eating, and beer… roughly in reverse order of importance.

I’ve been saying this for years, but every Linkin Park song I’ve ever heard sounds the exact same. Additionally, I happen to have a really unhealthy dislike of that one song. Imagine that for a second.

I can’t even come up with a really accurate parallel here, for fear of offending every Linkin Park fan, but I’ll try. It’s kind of like if you really hated cats and every time you walked out on the street, people were pointing out every single cat within sight, saying: “Hey, look at that cat! She’s ssssoooooo cute!! Friend, isn’t that cat so adorable??!!! She’s so talented, with such amazing instrumentals. And that guy’s lyrics are amazing! [well, you know what I mean].” And you’re thinking in your head, “I would really love to pick that cat up by its tail and hammer throw it across the street.” Yes, kind of like this guy, maybe with wifebeater, but probably not with kilt:

</soapbox>

Anyway, funny link from Reddit today that really makes me feel validated: “All Linkin Park songs sound the same: Two separate songs, one played in each speaker [MP3]. Apparently somebody layered two Linkin Park son–… whoops, sorry, so easy to do that. What I meant to say was: Apparently somebody took two of the “versions” of the same Linkin Park song, layered them on top of each other, and voila! The newest single from Linkin Park.

Seriously, before they put this mp3 up, I felt like Mugatu in Zoolander: “They’re the same [song]! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” Now I can finally live in peace. I’m filing this under ‘Life’ because this is really a seminal moment in my 26 years.

Hallelujah.

This link’s for Phil, who responded to my news about moving to an all-healthy diet with the line, “Is your vagina sore?” (And yes, my college friends and I really say things like that to each other): WSJ: Tony Gonzalez is a vegan?!

Now what I’m getting from the article is that I can get ripped and break several NFL season records by eating healthy. Totally reasonable goals and not at all outside the realm of possibility! By the way, I’m still asian and 5′11″.

Phil, be sure to note the Chuck Norris-like ‘Law & Order’ guns on Gonzalez in the video below. That’s going to be me in six months:

Video Link

God, I could really use a Jersey Joe’s cheesesteak right now. Time for another orange…

Over the last six or seven years, I’ve had numerous efforts to ‘get in shape’. This generally entailed running long distances many times a week, with the intention of basically exhausting myself so that I lose some weight. And you know what? That actually worked pretty damn well when I was 21 or so.

My junior year of college, I used to bang out seven brutal miles every morning up to The Dish and back. I lost about 45 pounds (no joke) and was so skinny that at least two close friends who hadn’t seen me in a while were genuinely concerned. The funny thing is, even while I was doing that, I was still eating like I was a 17-year old high school basketball player. Read more