Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers are all Tiny Desk alumae, but here they play together at NPR for the first time as boygenius, one of this year's best surprises.
Halloween is the one holiday that’s best celebrated in the dark. Which is why The Old Reader is excited to be able to introduce the all-new Dark Mode. It’s time to embrace the dark side of reading on the web.
Okay, Dark Mode really has nothing to do with Halloween, but this seems like the perfect time to introduce it to everyone. It is all about readability, reducing eye strain, and making your experience using The Old Reader better.
Dark Mode was one of the most commonly requested features we’ve had from our users and there is even a user-created plugin that does a similar thing. With this new, built-in feature, all you have to do to use it is hit the “d” key while using The Old Reader, and voilà, you’re in Dark Mode.
Dark Mode is just one small way we want to keep The Old Reader moving forward. Give it a try, we think you’ll really like it. Thanks again for all the great feedback and happy darkmoding!
There are only two days until Halloween!!! The most high-stakes part of the evening is, of course, the trading of candy. After interviewing 10 kids between the ages of 5 and 14, we put together THE official guide…
Snickers and Reese’s are at the top of the heap.… Read more
Some researchers think putting lithium in our water could save lives.
Lithium is a potent psychiatric drug, one of the primary prescribed medications for bipolar disorder. But it’s also an element that occurs naturally all over the Earth’s crust — including in bodies of water. That means that small quantities of lithium wind up in the tap water you consume every day. Just how much is in the water varies quite a bit from place to place.
Naturally, that made researchers curious: Are places with more lithium in the water healthier, mentally? Do places with more lithium have less depression or bipolar or — most importantly of all — fewer suicides?
A 2014 review of studies concluded that the answer was yes: Four of five studies reviewed found that places with higher levels of trace lithium had lower suicide rates. And Nassir Ghaemi, the Tufts psychiatry professor who co-authored that review, argues that the effects are large. High-lithium areas, he says, have suicide rates 50 to 60 percent lower than those of low-lithium areas.
“In general, in the United States, lithium levels are much higher in the Northeast and East Coast and very low in the Mountain West,” he told me on a new episode of the Vox podcast Future Perfect. “And suicide rates track that exactly — much lower suicide rates in the Northeast, and the highest rates of suicide are in the Mountain West.”
If you apply that 50 to 60 percent reduction to the US, where about 45,000 people total died by suicide in 2016, you get a total number of lives saved at around 22,500 to 27,000 a year. That’s likely too high, since you can’t reduce suicide rates in places that are already high-lithium. Ghaemi’s own back-of-the-envelope calculation is that we’d save 15,000 to 25,000.
Ghaemi and a number of other eminent psychiatrists are making a pretty remarkable claim. They think we could save tens of thousands of lives a year with a very simple, low-cost intervention: putting small amounts of lithium, amounts likely too small to have significant side effects, into our drinking water, the way we put fluoride in to protect our teeth.
The case for skepticism on lithium
The size of the numbers Ghaemi is claiming should make you skeptical: Those are huge, arguably implausibly huge, effects. In 2015, the Open Philanthropy Project, a large-scale grantmaking group in San Francisco, shared an analysis with me implying that if two specificstudies were right, a “small increase in the amount of trace lithium in drinking water in the U.S. could prevent > 4,000 suicides per year.” That’s significant, but far short of 15,000 to 25,000.
And while Ghaemi is very enthusiastic about the potential of groundwater lithium, other researchers are more wary. A comprehensive list of lithium studies, updated just last month, shows that while many studies find positive effects, plenty more found no impact on suicide or other important outcomes. In particular, a large-scale Danish study released in 2017 found “no significant indication of an association between increasing … lithium exposure level and decreasing suicide rate.”
The Open Philanthropy Project, which had previously been quite interested in new research on lithium, states on its website that the study “makes us substantially less optimistic” that trace lithium really helps guard against suicides.
Just this year, a study using health care claims data in the US found that greater amounts of trace lithium in the water didn’t predict lower diagnoses of bipolar disorder or dementia. That’s a different outcome than suicides, but also suggests that low doses of lithium might not have a profound effect.
Why this hasn’t been tried
These recent studies have made me less confident in the link between lithium and lower suicide rates than I was when I first encountered Ghaemi’s research. But it’s such a cheap intervention, and the odds of serious side effects sound low enough, that it seems worth a try.
At the very least, I’d love for some governments to conduct real, bona fide experiments on lithium. Maybe a state could randomly add lithium to some of its reservoirs but not others, or, conversely, a high-lithium state could try removing it from the water. There are serious ethical questions about doing experiments like this that affect whole populations, but if lithium’s effect is real and we don’t pursue it because we lack compelling enough evidence, thereby endangering thousands of people — that’s an ethical problem too.
But no study like that has been conducted. And if you want to know why, you should consider the case of fluoride.
As you probably know, putting fluoride in our drinking water dramatically reduced tooth decay, by around 25 percent per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But as you likely also know, the initial rollout of fluoride in the 1940s and 1950s was intensely controversial.
Jesse Hicks, a science journalist who wrote a great history of the fluoride wars, told me on this week’s Future Perfect podcast that the backlash started in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, with a local gadfly named Alexander Y. Wallace who was convinced the substance was poison, and who wrote a parody song called “Goodnight, Flourine” to the tune of the folk song “Goodnight, Irene.”
From there, the conspiratorial, far-right John Birch Society became convinced that fluoride was a Communist plot; the Ku Klux Klan came out against fluoride too. “I think part of the longevity of this controversy has to do with the way it can activate so many different biases and prejudices,” Hicks told me. “As soon as you start talking about putting something in the water supply you have small or anti-government people responding very vigorously against that.”
The absurd controversy continues to this day. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the wildly popular, wildly irresponsible TV doctor, has brought on a fluoride conspiracist — Erin Brockovich of Julia Roberts movie fame — to sow fear and disinformation.
If that’s the reaction to an effort to improve dental health, just imagine the public outcry against a major push for adding lithium to the water. The rap against fluoride, mocked in movies like Dr. Strangelove, is that it’s a mind-control plot. But putting lithium in the water would actually be a mind-control plot: It would be a concerted effort by the government to put mind-altering chemicals in the water supply to change the behavior of the citizenry. And I say that as someone who thinks that, if it works, that it would be a great idea! Preventing suicide is really important, but it does require changing how people think, a tiny bit.
So figuring out if, and how well, trace lithium in the water works is only half the battle. Advocates would then have to win over a very, very skeptical public.
Hicks thinks we need a rock-solid, impenetrable scientific case if we’re going to do it. The science so far is promising, but not firm enough. “When you start making it a public health policy, you activate all of these other considerations that make it that much harder to make it happen,” he says.
For more, listen to the full episode above, and be sure to tune in again next Wednesday for more Future Perfect!
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
In a study, those who ate more organic produce, dairy, meat and other products had 25 percent fewer cancer diagnoses over all, especially lymphoma and breast cancer.
On Start to Sale Ari Weinzweig discusses the real meaning of synergy and non-hierarchical thought
Zingerman’s, a group of 20 loosely associated businesses mostly focused on hospitality and food in the Ann Arbor area, encompasses a deli, bakehouse, restaurant, creamery, training organization, candy business, tour company and more. Behind it all sits co-founder Ari Weinzweig, an inspirational figure who spurns the idea of growth for growth sake, refuses to duplicate any business, and detests hierarchical thinking.
This week on Eater’s business podcast Start to Sale, hosts Erin Patinkin (CEO, Ovenly) and Natasha Case (CEO, Coolhaus) talk to Weinzweig about his groundbreaking Community of Businesses and theories on business-ownership.
Some highlights:
On uniqueness: “From the get go, for me, for Paul, it was very important to only have one. I really like unique things. The folks at the Positive Organizational Scholarship section of the business school here I have a little saying, which I love, which is, ‘Excellence is a function of uniqueness.’ It’s true. It’s true in the food business, it’s true in art, it’s true in music. And I’ve never been into the sixth unit of the same place and thought like, ‘Wow, that’s incredible’... Pick any great restaurant that you’ve been to, and then show me the one that opened seven years later, and it’s fine but it never has that spirit and energy that you get in the original.”
On the synergy of his businesses: “The idea of synergy comes not from some seventies buzzword but actually from Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist in the thirties who studied Native American tribes and found... that the most successful tribes were not the most competitive, but rather than most collaborative. And so synergy literally means if I help you, I’m inadvertently helping myself, and if I help myself, whether I intended to or not, I’m helping you.
So the idea was each part of the organization would be contributing back to the others just by what it did. So like when we opened the creamery and we started making handmade cream cheese, then the bagels and cream cheese at the deli were elevated to new heights. When the roadhouse opened, the bakehouse got this great new wholesale customer, et cetera, et cetera, so that each piece was contributing positively to the other.”
On growing for growth’s sake: “Going along with growth just because everybody else is growing or just because you could grow is not a great answer, in the same way that living your life the way your mother wanted you to may overlap with what you wanted, but if you’re just doing it because your mother wanted to, you’re going to end up with a hollow life and a lot of internal angst and frustration.
... Murray Bookchin, a very interesting anarchist said, “It’s sad that people don’t realize that the model of, grow as fast as you can as big as you can, is the same growth model as the cancer cell.”
On the importance of visioning: “All successful organizations, whether it be a podcast or a food business or a basketball team, have a vision of where they’re going. Businesses are not mushrooms and they don’t just pop up spontaneously after rainstorms. Somebody had to have the idea, the dream, the image in their mind of what they were going to create...
This visioning process... basically, you plant yourself in the future. If it’s for your business, it might be five years, eight years, 20 years down the road, and you describe that success and you describe that success with a whole lot of detail so that when you get there, you will actually know you’ve arrived.”
On non-hierarchical thought: “And I think a lot of what I learned from the anarchist work is to try to stop thinking hierarchically because almost all of us in the U.S. have been raised to think hierarchically. Like what’s the most important thing, what’s the top three things, et cetera, et cetera. I think that thinking is actually antithetical to what’s happening in nature, and it creates a lot of people chasing the gold ring, chasing the magic answer instead of understanding that it’s all nuanced, it’s all interacting, everything’s influencing everything else, right?”
Listen to the show in full in the audio player or read the full transcript of the interview below. And please subscribe to hear entrepreneurs from various sectors tell Case and Patinkin about their struggles and victories of business-building in the weeks to come.
Ari Weinzweig: Thanks. It’s great to be on. I came to Ann Arbor from Chicago to go to U of M, which for those who don’t know, is University of Michigan. I studied Russian history, a particular focus on the anarchists, which we could talk about later if you want.
Erin Patinkin: I’d love to.
AW: After graduating, I had no vision of what I wanted to do. I had only what David White caused the via negativa. That’s where you’re super clueless about where you want to go, but you’re really clear on where you don’t want to go. So I just knew I didn’t want to move home. In order to not move home, I needed a job, and so I ended up getting a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant here in town. That’s how I got into food. So there was no lifelong entrepreneurial dream of opening a business or opening a food business or cooking or anything like that. I just needed somewhere to work.
And so that’s how I started. So Paul was the general manager at that restaurant when I started to wash dishes. That’s how we connected. Frank Corolla, who’s one of the partners in our bake house was a line cook, and Maggie Bayliss, who’s one of the partners at ZingTrain, our training business, was a cocktail waitress. So I don’t know why, but here we all are, the four of us plus a lot of other good people 40 years later and we’re still working together.
So anyways, I started prepping and line cooking and managing kitchens. I worked for that restaurant group for about four years. Paul left about halfway through that and opened a little world class seafood market called Monahan’s with Mike Monahan. And he and I stayed friends. Fall of ‘81, I reached a point that is not uncommon in the world, which is that I didn’t hate going to work, but I was sort of less and less inspired by what that organization was doing and where they were headed. So I gave two months notice, unsure of what would be next.
Not knowing I had given notice, Paul called me like two days later and said there was this little building coming open near the fish market that he had opened, and that we should go check it out because in Detroit where he grew up, you could get good deli food, and in Chicago you could get it where I grew up, but you couldn’t get it here. And somehow, within like a week we decided we would open and four and a half months later we opened March 15th, ‘82.
And we started in a little 1,300 square foot space selling all the old Jewish stuff that we had grown up with, corn beef, and chopped liver, and chicken soup, and all that. But also at the time, a radical if small in context, selection of what’s now called specialty foods. So a little bit of olive oil, a little bit of jam, honey, salami, smoked fish, all that sort of stuff, squeezed into 1,300 square feet.
So that’s how we started. And then fast forwarding, we operate as one organization with these semi-autonomous pieces within it. So we have a bakery, a creamery where we make fresh cream cheese and other fresh cheeses and gelato. We have a coffee roasting and candy business where we make handmade candy bars. ZingTrain is our training business. We have a mail order business and we ship food all over the country. The deli, of course, is still the main focus of the organization originally, but is one piece.
Zingerman’s Roadhouse is a sit down restaurant. It’s all regional American food. Zingerman’s Corn Man Farms is a 1830s barn and farmhouse that we totally renovated to do events like weddings and corporate events. And then Miss Kim is our second newest business, which is a really nice little Korean restaurant. And then our very newest business, as of two weeks ago, is we spun our food tours out to become its own business. And Kristie Brablec, who’s been with us a long time, but she’s now the managing partner there. So we have, I don’t know, what 20 something partners altogether and about 700 employees.
Natasha Case: Wow, is that it?
AW: That’s it.
NC: Only 20 businesses.
AW: It’s all relative.
NC: Amazing.
AW: Gigantic by our standards, tiny by Whole Foods standards.
NC: It’s an incredible feat by any standards. Can you quickly describe your role in the ecosystem? Like just give us, pick any day in the life. Give us a day in the life for you.
AW: Well, although I’m not a morning person, I get up early every day and then I journal every day, which is exactly what I did this morning, and I did it at the Roadhouse. Drink coffee, wake up, and then get going. So that could be, it could be meetings, which we certainly have plenty of, and in between, I guess I tested out a potential new brunch special item that was in my mind.
EP: So on any given day, you could be managing people, writing, or telling someone to make a different type of pancake? Is that what I’m getting?
AW: Yeah. I don’t know that it would be telling them to a different type of pancake.
NC: Very dogmatic.
AW: Might be discussing pancakes with them.
EP: Collaborative pancake effort.
AW: Yeah. So I don’t eat breakfast and I don’t eat lunch. I just taste, I’m not fasting so I’m quality checking food all day. But at some point in the later part of the afternoon, usually, depending on the day and the weather, I go run every day and then I do whatever else. And then I ended up at the Roadhouse, usually on the floor, working the floor, pouring water and bussing tables or whatever. And then I get home late, and then we cooked dinner. And then I go to bed later than I should, and then I get up earlier than I should, and start over. Yeah.
EP: Rinse and repeat.
AW: Yeah.
EP: So explain the Zingerman community model, how you came up with the business idea.
AW: Okay. So in part one of Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, there’s an essay called ‘12 Natural Laws of Business,’ and it is my ever stronger belief that all healthy organizations are living in harmony with those natural laws, i.e. living in harmony with nature. The first one on the list is that all successful organizations, whether it be a podcast or a food business or a basketball team, have a vision of where they’re going. Businesses are not mushrooms and they don’t just pop up spontaneously after rainstorms. Somebody had to have the idea, the dream, the image in their mind of what they were going to create.
And so Paul and I, when we opened in ‘82, we wouldn’t have been able to explain vision remotely like we do now. I wouldn’t have even probably understood it, but in hindsight, we had one, and our original vision with the benefit of history, and I’m a history major and we know this is how history is created is later, we figure out what we think happened, is that we would create something really unique and special. We didn’t want a copy of something from LA or New York or Detroit or Chicago. We wanted something unique to Ann Arbor.
We knew we wanted great food, great service, great place for people to work, but do it in a very down to earth setting. And from the get go, for me, for Paul, it was very important to only have one. I really like unique things. The folks at the Positive Organizational Scholarship section of the business school here I have a little saying, which I love, which is, “Excellence is a function of uniqueness.” It’s true. It’s true in the food business, it’s true in art, it’s true in music. And I’ve never been into the sixth unit of the same place and thought like, “Wow, that’s incredible.”
When you go to the first one, there’s something really special about it, and that’s really what we wanted to create, was this destination spot that would be known all over for doing what it did. The general wisdom when we opened was we were doomed to fail. Ann Arbor had 10 or 12 delis go out of business in the previous decade. Everybody said it was a bad neighborhood to go into. There’s no parking to this day, et cetera, et cetera. Five years later, we were geniuses. Turned out Ann Arbor always needed a deli, and everybody was behind us from the beginning.
NC: Yeah.
AW: Anyways, so fast forwarding to 1993. So about 11 years after we had opened, Paul sat me down on a little bench out front of the deli at about 10 in the morning, which is of course the worst possible time in a busy lunch restaurant to be sitting down, but anyway, sits me down and sort of with no warning asked me like, “Okay, in 10 years, what are we doing?” And I’m like, what? He’s like, “In 10 years, what are we doing?” I’m like, “Paul, I got work to do.” He’s like, “This is our work.”
In hindsight, I realize he probably was angsting and couldn’t sleep for six or eight weeks worrying about the issue. And what he, in essence, was asking me is, what’s your vision? He had an instinctive sense that we had fulfilled our original vision. I think he was right. I certainly wouldn’t have known it. It’s not like we were satisfied. It’s not like we were rich and it’s not like we didn’t have a lot of long lists of things to improve, but there’s a difference between improving what you have and going after some great long-term inspirational vision.
EP: Can I interrupt to ask a super quick question?
AW: Yeah, sure.
EP: It took 11 years to get to that point.
AW: Yeah.
EP: In that first 11 years, were there sit down discussions between you and Paul wherein you questioned what you were doing, wondered if you were doing the right thing, if you were happy, if the deli was fulfilling you?
AW: We have four. No, I don’t know. I’m sure we had a lot of them. I don’t know. I worry about everything at some level. I’ve just trained myself not to follow the worry. I think that’s a normal part of human existence, is embracing that anxiety, and I can do it a lot more healthfully now than I would have been able to do it then.
NC: It’s sort of a working on the business, not just in it kind of mentality that starts to evolve.
AW: Yeah, absolutely. I think that in the beginning when you only have two employees like we did, it’s appropriately a lot working in the business. It’s not that what we were doing was wrong in the beginning, it’s just as we grew, it became apparent to us both instinctively and through reading other people’s stuff that we needed to work more and more on the business. And you know, that’s part of the work.
EP: Absolutely. So you created this vision 11 years in.
AW: Yeah. So we spent about a year of our ... He didn’t have the answer. It’s not like he had a vision that he was advocating for. It just, he had the sense that we had fulfilled it. And so I didn’t know what I wanted to be doing in 10 years. I had no clue. So we ended up spending like a year of arguing about it, and talking about it, and conversing, and coming back to the table over and over and over again. And that was the first time we actually wrote out a vision in the way that we do it now.
And that vision, we actually went 15 years into the future, not 10, and that’s where we outlined the idea of the Community of Businesses and that vision is the first time we really learned this process, and we learned it from a guy named who very sadly passed away about 15 months ago, but he learned it from a guy named Ron Lippitt who was at University of Michigan in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. And so that’s what we set out to do.
NC: So you mentioned the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses. So how are all of those linked?
AW: So we could have clearly created a vision or a future where we were going to, whatever, invest in other businesses and then the businesses themselves might have had nothing to do with each other, but for whatever reason, and I think it worked out well and I’m happy we did it, but what we determined in the vision is that it would be this singular organization, but with these pieces within it that were operating with a great deal of independence, and that we would create a synergistic setting.
And the idea of synergy comes not from some seventies buzzword but actually from Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist in the thirties who studied Native American tribes and found what Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist, had found earlier, which came out in his book in 1902, Mutual Aid, but that was that the most successful tribes were not the most competitive, but rather than most collaborative. And so synergy literally means if I help you, I’m inadvertently helping myself, and if I help myself, whether I intended to or not, I’m helping you.
So the idea was each part of the organization would be contributing back to the others just by dent of what it did. So like when we opened the creamery and we started making handmade cream cheese, then the bagels and cream cheese at the deli were elevated to new heights. When the roadhouse opened, the bakehouse got this great new wholesale customer, et cetera, et cetera, so that each piece was contributing positively to the other. So we do have a central services organization that’s funded by a percentage of sales from each of the businesses, so like HR and marketing and that kind of thing. But there’s a lot of freedom and autonomy within each business too.
EP: I think that’s important for the audience because I think not being in Ann Arbor, never seeing the whole thing, and what you’ve done is so different than what other people have done. And I can’t think of another place in the United States that is doing something that you guys are doing.
NC: Yeah, you really thought outside the box with the structure, sort of like what you said about, I think a lot of people apply the uniqueness is that excellence to product or to team, but they don’t necessarily rethink the whole model of how they’re going to literally be in business. So that’s pretty amazing that you not only did that, but that it’s thriving.
AW: Yeah. Well I think that’s ... So there’s one of the key actually beliefs of anarchist thinking is that the means that you use must be congruent with the ends that you want to achieve. So agreeing with what you just said, in hindsight, it makes a lot more sense that we would have been able to create uniqueness in the business by using a unique model.
EP: So how specifically are you, are all of the companies working together? What is the structure by which the Zingerman’s Community operates?
AW: Well, interestingly, there’s really never been a legal entity, Zingerman’s Community of Businesses. It just exists in our minds.
NC: Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.
EP: Stop, stop.
AW: No, it’s true. So Paul and I own shares in all the businesses, but the key is that we operate as one organization, so it’s sort of like Tinkerbell rules. As long as you believe, it works. But more formally, we actually have a lot of governance stuff that’s super clear that we’ve worked on, imperfect though it is, that we’ve worked on for decades. So we run the whole organization at the partner’s group level. Every month, there’s a Zingerman’s Community of Businesses huddle, which is the open book work so that those meetings are open to anybody in the organization that wants to come.
We even get outside people sometimes, not through intent, but they’re there, whatever. And we use a consensus model for decision making amongst the partners, and that consensus three years ago or four years ago, we added three staff partners. So these are people who are not managing partners. They’re hourly staff managers, whatever, and they’re chosen through a whole process that I’m not going to get into now. But so they’re part of the consensus.
So in essence, from a formal standpoint, they have the same say that Paul or I have in the decision making. So that’s for organization wide decisions. Then within each business, there’s managing partners and they’re running their business too, right? And then we also, I mentioned the central services and then we do a lot of what we call one plus one work. So again, there’s an essay on this in the most recent book, but these are like work groups. So we have a benefits work group, a training engineers group, et cetera.
And those are generally coming, people coming from different parts of the organization and the main one and the one plus one is the person’s core work. They’re a baker or they’re an accountant or whatever. But the plus one is an optional piece where they’re getting involved in a different part of the organization in a different role. So you might be a baker full time but you’re on the benefit committee, and it’s connecting people in different ways than they normally would connect, and so instead of everything being hierarchically arranged where it all has to flow up, up, up to the top and then back down the other side, you’re getting a much healthier array of relationships, which I think is far more resilient and effective.
EP: So do each of the managing partners own shares in all of the company?
NC: And are the companies their own incorporated entities?
AW: They are, except now some are LLCs but for all practical purposes it’s the same thing. So up until three years ago no one owned anything other than their own business, but they were charged with running the whole organization. At the partner’s group level one of the things we did early on, which now we can say was an inflection point, was that we asked, when people are in the partner’s group making decisions, all of our charge is to make the decision that we believe is best for the organization, not the decision that’s best for our individual business. Right? So there’s a lot of things that I’m talking about that are the total opposite of the American political system.
So no voting, because voting leads to disconnect and anger and resentment because immediately somebody lost and they’re mad and set about trying to destroy the one who won, and vice versa. And then people aren’t representing their business, they’re charged with making the decision that’s best for the organization.
Now, we might not all agree on what that is, but like Maggie from ZingTrain, we’ll frequently say there are times where she’s made the decision at the partner group level that’s actually not good for ZingTrain, but it’s a small part of the whole Zingerman’s Community of Businesses and it’s clear that this decision is better for the group, even though for her little business it’s not super optimal.
That’s totally the opposite of I represent, pick your state, and yeah, this is bad for the country but I’m looking out for the voters in my state. That’s not ill-intended, but it just creates this constant disconnect and conflict.
EP: Okay. Great.
AW: I guess I should finish with saying so three years ago, after six years of trying to figure out how to do it, we created an employee ownership piece which we call community shares. It took a very long time because there’s no model like ours, as you said, and so we basically, Paul and I own shares in the businesses, but we also own intellectual property and so we took a piece of the intellectual property ... I’m going to go fast and people have a million questions, but they can email me and it’s AW@zingermans.com ... and that became the community shares, right? It’s a co-op model, so everybody who is eligible can buy only one share, including me and Paul, and that now makes it so people own a small piece of the brand.
EP: Was this something that you had come up with individually? You came together to decide this?
AW: I woke up one day. No.
NC: The Russian anarchist gave you the idea.
AW: ... No, because it is, it’s a lot about autonomy, and federalism is actually a big piece of anarchist stuff. But that’s not what was, consciously it wasn’t. But no, a lot of the visioning work as we do it is all about collaboration, and collaboration frequently means creatively dealing with conflict and coming up with win-win solutions, and so I was super adamant about only having the one business because I just, everywhere I’d been in the food world and really, I think in any industry, when you go to the sixth unit it’s just never as interesting as the first one.
It’s not bad and people like the convenience of having it closer in the suburbs or whatever, but it’s just never the same. Pick any great restaurant that you’ve been to, and then show me the one that opened seven years later, and it’s fine but it never has that spirit and energy that you get in the original.
So I was really driven to keep that and make it even better, and Paul really wanted to grow, which I wasn’t opposed to, I just didn’t know how to grow while keeping the one business unique and special. So anyway, out of that creative tension, this is what we ended up with. We could grow but we would grow by opening other Zingerman’s businesses, where each would have its own unique specialty.
And then also, I really wanted owner’s on site. My experience of the work world, not always but in general, is that when the owner is present you just get a different buzz and energy than when there’s absentee ownership. I understand clearly, there’s some great managers in the world and there’s some lousy owners, so it’s a generalization.
Anyway, we wanted managing partners that would own part of the business and really be part of running it and so that’s what we created. But I mean this isn’t like we just sat down and wrote this. I mean this was a year of frustration and conversation and trying to figure it out.
NC: Something I want to get into is, you talk a lot about great business versus big business, and I’m wondering first if we can just hear directly from your mind how you really define those two things and how they’re separate to you.
AW: Well, I’m not sure they’re separate. I think the key is that greatness is an internally determined future, right? So there’s no right answer as to what’s great. The key is that you decide what’s great for you. If going public and being global is somebody’s definition of greatness, I think they should go for it.
But I think going along with growth just because everybody else is growing or just because you could grow is not a great answer, in the same way that living your life the way your mother wanted you to may overlap with what you wanted, but if you’re just doing it because your mother wanted to, you’re going to end up with a hollow life and a lot of internal angst and frustration.
I think with business, the key is that people hopefully can realize that they get to decide. In the food business you could have, I don’t know, you could have a little diner with 12 seats at the counter, and you’re the chef and owner, and you cook almost every meal, and I think if that’s what makes you happy that’s totally great. There’s no right or wrong.
NC: It’s sort of the harmony point, you’re saying. That there should be a harmonious element with what you might not.
AW: Yeah, with what you want. It’s what you want. I mean it’s how you want to work, and it’s how much you want to work, and it’s where you want to work, and so I’m not ethically opposed to bigger businesses. People have grown because they think they’re supposed to grow, or they grow because they could grow, or they grow because they’re chasing money because their cousins all make more money than they do, and they feel like they should make money.
EP: Someone told them to, or that-
AW: Yeah, yeah.
EP: ... or that, I think one of the dangers is a lot of business owners think growth means success, and then there’s a lot of unhappiness that can come in with that. I think it’s a really important moment to say how big do you want to be?
NC: Yeah, and also AW, what you’re saying, even to just take the time to really meditate on that, to think about and visualize what that’s going to feel like for you, versus personal goals.
AW: Yeah, and that’s the visioning process that we use and teach. I mean it’s designed to do that, and it’s a specific process. It’s not just sitting around thinking about it, because you could think yourself, or at least I could think myself, to death. It’s a process of doing it, but the point of it in this context is it’s a very inside out exercise. I’m trying to work more, not less, or I’m going to run out of years. So people want to work less, I don’t really care. What I care is just that people are doing something that’s aligned with the kind of life that they want to live.
NC: Right. There’s no one way.
AW: No, there’s no perfect way. Rollo May, the mid-twentieth century psychologist, who I never met but seems super interesting and insightful, said that the opposite of courage is not cowardice, it’s conformity. And there’s enormous pressure to conform. That’s difficult. Murray Bookchin, a very interesting anarchist said, “It’s sad that people don’t realize that the model of, grow as fast as you can as big as you can, is the same growth model as the cancer cell.”
NC: That’s interesting. Speaking of no one way, workplace culture. This is a big one for you and it’s certainly becomes a bigger and bigger theme, I know for us at Coolhaus it’s huge. But can you speak to the specific things that really create that buy in? What do you think are the ones that move the dial, that you guys do and practice, that are game changers for your team?
AW: Well, I think there’s a million things. In the most recent book, which is Part Four of the Leadership Series, I started to work more actively with the metaphor for organization of ecosystem, because almost all the models of business, and saying this respectfully, but even the idea of moving the needle all comes from machines. So high performance organizations, and keep the gears greased, and all of that stuff is based on the industrial model, and it’s all based on machines, which is very dehumanizing and not aligned with nature.
I just started to imagine, I’m sure others have done it too, but more and more the idea of organization as ecosystem. In a healthy ecosystem in nature, one of the key parts is that everything’s contributing and everything matters, even the things that seem really statistically insignificant, like bees, turn out to have enormous implications.
And I think a lot of what I learned from the anarchist work is to try to stop thinking hierarchically because almost all of us in the U.S. have been raised to think hierarchically. Like what’s the most important thing, what’s the top three things, et cetera, et cetera. I think that thinking is actually antithetical to what’s happening in nature, and it creates a lot of people chasing the gold ring, chasing the magic answer instead of understanding that it’s all nuanced, it’s all interacting, everything’s influencing everything else, right?
So the culture, I mean all the things that are in the books, are things that influence the culture. Vision, leadership, customer service, et cetera. I mean there’s dozens and dozens of things, and just everything down to did the leader greet the newest employee with a smile, is a big part of the culture, right? So understanding that it’s all of this nuanced stuff and that there’s no perfect model, and even in a healthy ecosystem there’s still problems and things that are failing. It’s just that the overarching health of the ecosystem will help repair those problems relatively quickly, whereas in-
NC: And is it, sorry to jump in, but you have a lot of people in the organization now. How does everyone touch this philosophy? I mean there’s a certain amount maybe they can garner from the interaction, but is it like there are words and passages that must be read, and then are trained and practiced? Or how do you get this philosophy into their heads and into their actions?
EP: Especially with such a diverse staff, because that must mean you’re dealing with everyone from porters to CFOs.
AW: Yeah, yeah. But because, again my anarchist thing, the CFO doesn’t really know any more than the dishwasher knows, they just know different things, and they’re not necessarily more intelligent or more capable. So part of my, our, strong belief is like everybody’s, I’m just going to believe everybody’s a creative, intelligent human being that can do great things. Then I’m going to treat them accordingly, right?
EP: Sure, but I think the reality is also just people respond differently to different ways that they’re taught.
AW: Yeah, absolutely. That’s for sure, but that’s true of CFOs.
EP: Yeah, totally.
AW: So the answer to your question is they’re learning it in a multiplicity of ways. We have, I don’t know what, 75 different internal training classes that we do, but those are spread out and not everybody goes to all of them. They’re going to learn stuff on shift, right? They’re going to learn stuff culturally, so just through conversation with their trainer who might say oh, that’s not how we do it here, or yeah, yeah, that’s what happened at my old job, but when I came here I realized x.
So they’re getting it formally through our “educational work,” but they’re also getting it culturally, I think when those two things are not aligned, then you get a lot of problems. There’s a lot of unhealthy organizations where they might have a fabulous handbook but nothing remotely close to that happens in real life, and that creates a lack of integrity and a disconnect that’s really problematic.
NC: Yeah. I was going ask, if someone were more starting out and may not have the wherewith all on lets say, the classes and those, like you said, those more formal training sessions versus getting it from the culture, what do you think is the number one thing that they could do to help instill that from the get-go?
AW: See, there’s that hierarchical thinking.
NC: Like a specific thing.
AW: You’re asking about what the organization could do to instill it in a new staff member?
NC: Yeah, let’s say.
AW: Well, again I don’t think there’s any one thing. I think it’s just being super mindful of every tiny interaction. So literally, how they’re greeted. Literally, did the owner go, the leader, the manager, whatever, go seek them out and welcome them? But more formally, one of the things that we still do that I think is really impactful, and I wrote and essay on it in the newest book, is that Paul or I still teach the new staff orientation class ourselves. I think that’s huge, because it’s the time that the leader is really-
NC: It’s a personal connection.
AW: ... sharing the history, sharing the philosophy, getting to know just a little bit about who the new employee is. Your point about diversity, I mean, it’s mixed from the organization, so literally when I teach it, it could be a new dishwasher, it could be a new head of HR, it could be a 16 year old and a 60 year old, and they’re all sitting at the same table together and there’s no correlation between their ability to have insights and the formal title or age or seniority.
Actually, I taught a class on servant leadership about six weeks ago, and one of the people who came worked part-time for our catering. I can’t remember if he asked me, but I think he asked if he could bring somebody with him, and I just said, “Sure, why not?” Who he brought was a sixth grader from a non-profit program that he works with, that he’s mentoring this kid, and his name’s Christian, the kid, and so we do intros in the class, and we do intros, at any meeting or class we start with ice breaker introductions. Sometimes when somebody brings a kid, because it’s not the first kid who’s come to a class, they just sit there and color, they do their thing on the computer, whatever, but he actually introduced himself the way everybody else did, and talked about who he was. Then through the class he starts raising his hand and making comments and asking questions, and they’re as good as everybody else in the class. It’s great, because-
EP: Maybe more honest, and that’s something kids bring.
AW: Well, it’s engaging. Well, he wants to be president but he might be in the NBA first.
EP: Humble goals.
AW: Why not? It’s okay. He was super nice and grounded, and his insights and comments on the class material were really good.
EP: I have a question for you. All right, so you mentioned you have over 700 staff. Have you found that there have been inflection points where the culture almost crumbled? Where you’ve had to regroup and rethink about your culture?
AW: Every day.
EP: Is that before or after your jog?
AW: Either.
NC: During.
AW: I mean I don’t know, but I think inflection points are overrated and they’re only created by history. So I think the reality is, it’s all failing and succeeding simultaneously every day, right? And I think none of us do it well enough. I don’t. I think we’re all making mistakes and that we’re all at risk, but I think that’s our work, right? So coming back to the idea of ecosystem, I mean even in the most beautiful forest, there’s still some trees that are dying, there’s still some problem patches, whatever.
Again, the idea is to create organizational health that overrides the disease. And then to keep working on improving things, so it’s never perfect. It’s always falling short. I mean, I don’t know, pick your metaphor. In a big basketball game, whatever, you’re in L.A., Kobe Bryant. If they won the championship, they still missed a lot of shots and they made a lot of bad decisions during the game. But they won the game, and nobody really worries about it.
EP: Is there a way that you internally measure culture? Do you have any ways that you can quantify intimation to see if you’re ... I know everything is failing and succeeding every day, I totally agree with that, but ultimately you still have to move more towards success than you do failure.
AW: No, without question. I think the key is multiple metrics, so again, if you have only a singular metric in anything in your life, it’s not going to work. If you’re metric of personal health is your body weight, that’s great, but you still need to know your blood pressure and your cholesterol level, and your whatever. And I think in organizations when people pick only one metric, that’s not healthy either. So we do a staff survey.
I think the financial metrics are certainly one metric, one way to measure, and we have multiple of those. We have service metrics, food quality metrics, and they all impact each other, right? So if people aren’t engaged in their work and they don’t really care, the quality of the product is going to suffer.
Even though that’s not a direct metric of workplace satisfaction, which is a bad word anyway, happiness or well being is probably better, it’s telling you that there’s something wrong. Right? Because when people really care and they’re living the systems that they helped to design, the product is going to come out good.
NC: Do you find that you’re able to get, if people are unhappy, are you able to get that kind of openness for them to share that with you, because it’s historically so difficult? You don’t necessarily want to tell your boss, even if it’s feedback that could be very constructive, there’s a fear with, okay, then I’m rocking the boat too much, or I just want them to think I’m happy, so they think I’m doing a good job. How do you create that back and forth dialogue? And what tricks are there to be found that work, if so?
AW: It’s hard. I mean it’s hard for me, and I’m the whatever, co-CEO of a sixty-something million dollar company, and it’s awkward for me to bring stuff up. I don’t want to do it. I guess part of it is honoring, not that everybody believes me, but I’m afraid of all of it. I just learn to try to do it anyway. I think there’s a common misconception and a commonly used statement that we have to make it so people feel comfortable bringing up the difficult thing. But I’m like, “I’m not comfortable. I’m never gonna be comfortable, I just need to do it anyway”, and then it’s, again, it’s systemic, it’s cultural.
So, we have process we teach in the class on it that’s about four steps to going direct, so that helps. We’re open book management so people are in huddles. We have staff survey, we have managers, staff chat sessions. We ... and then if you’re present and you’re engaged, people are gonna tell you things that they’re not gonna call headquarters and Antwerp, and report, necessarily. So its all of the above, I mean ... and it’s still imperfect and it’s just trying, it’s like any relationship. Anybody who has been in a long term relationship, it’s not like you bring up every issue the day that it happens, I don’t think. I mean, usually I think about it. Is it me, is it her, is it ... have I brought it up, should I bring it up, am I really being empathic enough?
It’s a complex, emotional intellectual construct, and if you have seven people, they’re all somewhere in that construct, generally moving from place to place within minutes sometimes, depending on other things. So, again, it’s just trying to create a healthier eco system. Maybe one person is too anxious to bring it up but they’re gonna complain to their coworker, who’s gonna go, “Come on man, I’ll go with you. Let’s go to the huddle, we need to bring this up.”
EP: Culture, obviously extremely important. Effects staff well-being, affects how customers perceive their experience, et cetera.
AW: Right.
EP: You also have a unique model, from what I understand, of how the new businesses begin within the community. So, if I had a business idea and I wanted to join the Community of Businesses, what would I have to do to start my concept within Zingerman’s, and then, how do the current managing directors vet the people coming in? Do you have a way of figuring out if someone is vision and value aligned with you, if it’s gonna be the right partner. Tell us a little bit about that?
AW: Well, I was just thinking about when you brought up culture again, metaphorically I started to look at culture as the soil in the ecosystem because when you study organic, sustainable, whatever agriculture, it’s always about feeding the soil and creating more health. I think the partners emerge hopefully from a healthy soil in the first place, but we have a whole path to partnership, which is a documented process which started out completely undocumented and much looser. Every time we screw up something, we add another piece to the process to try to avoid the pain point.
The point of the process is just what you described. I mean, as best we can to see if the person’s values aligned and vision aligned, et cetera. When Paul and I do the new staff orientation class that I mentioned earlier, one of the things that we both bring up, each in our way, is that literally everybody at the table, or anybody at the table could become a partner in the organization, and we hope that they will be. If they have an idea about a Zingerman’s business that would fit with what we do, and it would be geographically here in town, we would love to talk to them. So, that’s really how it starts, I mean, as a conversation.
A next step would be for them to draft division of what that business would look like, and then of course, there’s a lot of back and forth and iterations of drafts, and then the formal process moves forward. We asked the people working the organization for at least a year, that they do a leadership change project, that they go through our leadership development program. Stuff like that, where we’re ... it’s not perfect but its just trying to get people more and more engaged with the work that we do, and the way that we do it. I think, really, honestly we learn a lot just from, or I learn a lot and I think they learn a lot from going through the process, because like all long term projects, there’s moments that you feel like, that you describe before. You feel like you’re failing, there’s moments where its like, I’m gonna kill these guys, it’s never gonna work, and there’s moments where its like, this is gonna be fabulous, we can do this.
I think that we learn a lot about the quality of the partnership, or potential partnership from those frustration points, and from those success points. Then it sort of gets near the end. They’ve had conversations with the other partners, et cetera. I should mention we make organizational decisions at the partner group level, which means a consent, and we use a consensus model at that level so, they will have talked to all those people. There’s the formal application they fill out if everything’s gone well to that point, and then from there we go into town hall meetings with frontline staff.
There’s a final approval, which by that point, it’s sort of a done ... pretty much a done deal because it’s gone on so long, and everybody’s been a part of it. That’s actually just what happened last Thursday with Kristie Brablec, with this food tour business.
NC: Wow. Is there a cash buy in as well, right?
AW: There is. We don’t look at the partner as the major funding source, per se, because I mean, we’re not looking for people with necessarily with. We’re not opposed to it, but generally if somebody is coming from within, they’re not sitting on zillions of dollars so, it’s more-
NC: Gives them skin in the game.
AW: Exactly.
EP: Have any of the companies in the community failed, or have you ... is there any moment where you had a Brexit, where you were like, “You gotta, we gotta break up. You gotta get out of here.”
AW: Well, Brexit’s fairly extreme. But, yeah we have ... I mean I think this is, Paul taught me this early on, is if we’re gonna do this there’s gonna be failures. Again, in the ecosystem model, it’s less cataclysmic and sort of in the sports model, its like this horrible thing we lost. In the ecosystem, I mean ... my girlfriend’s a farmer. I don’t remember how many pepper seeds she put down, but a lot of them didn’t grow. There’s stuff that she didn’t think was gonna be as successful as it is, that’s growing really great.
Right, so, I think again, it’s the overall success is what we’re trying to look at, and to honor the reality that there’s gonna be failures and frustrations. That’s hard for me, coming from a perfectionist upbringing, but then to realizing over the years that actually nature is imperfect, and so perfectionism is actually the pursuit of the unnatural.
NC: Can you tell a story of a specific, I’m trying to go with my nature metaphors so I don’t scare you off with more machine, parallels, but when the tree was chopped, or ...
AW: Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean I’ll go back ...
NC: There was a weed you had to pull.
AW: Yeah. I mean, I’ll go back a long ways so, it doesn’t impact anybody in the moment directly, but
NC: This is top secret, don’t worry. No ones gonna hear.
AW: I thought there’s like, you told me there were 40 million listeners to this podcast.
NC: Oh, yeah there are. It’s four billion actually.
AW: Billion, that’s so cool. I heard this is listened to regularly on Mars, yeah. We had a low produce market, this is in the mid 90’s, and it didn’t work. It’s not through malice and it’s not through anything. The partnership didn’t work out and it’s painful, I mean, it’s like getting divorced. It’s not fun, you can go through that process with grace and respect, and dignity is difficult and stressful, and challenging as it is and still come out the other side. I’m sure we didn’t do it as well as we could’ve, but that’s what we try to do.
NC: Sometimes you have to reboot. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
AW: There you go, another machine metaphor. People leave the organization, and super important we would say, and I believe it strongly. We need to treat them with dignity when they leave because they’re free human beings and they have the right and freedom to choose to not be there. The reality is a lot of them, that just actually happened this morning, one of them is coming back because, well, other ecosystems are not always so healthy.
EP: Yeah. We were just talking before this, that second marriages often are more successful than the first, so.
AW: Well, you learn a lot by failure, too. I mean, it’s seriousness ...
NC: Just opening a flood gate with that one.
AW: Yeah. That’s a different podcast.
EP: That’s a different podcast. We’ll stay away from that for now.
AW: Well, I think we learn ...
NC: These parallels are useful, yeah. I think, obviously what you created is so big and so great that it can withstand, like you said ... there’s gonna be failures, there’s gonna, but there’s the greater good is a broader operating ecosystem. So, it allows for imperfections and flaws to kind of organically work their way out, or sometimes, like you said, back in.
AW: Yeah. It’s not a totally wild ecosystem so, there’s a farmer, right. But the point is to work in harmoni- ... in ways that are harmonious with nature, and that, in nature the healthiest ecosystems are the most diverse, and so in the same way within organizations. So, because we’re in so many different businesses, or industries within organization, we really never get the boom years that a lot of ... like if you’re in a really great spot in a particular industry and everything booms, then you rock it to the, whatever. For us, it’s more likely that three or four business are doing well, two or three are struggling. And that sort of shifts over time, but it also provides more stability.
EP: We have, like you said, I think there’s so much more that we would love to ask.
AW: We could do a whole podcast.
NC: I know, yeah.
EP: I’m like, “oh my gosh, I don’t know more.”
NC: I mean, even what we have learned is so valuable and cool, and it’s incredible what you built, truly, from the inside out. So, thank you for what you’ve brought to the planet.
EP: From my perspective, my company reads your books, we bring it Zingerman’s for training, and it’s just really amazing to have you here with us today.
NC: Yes.
EP: We have one last thing.
NC: The skill?
EP: The skill.
NC: You have eluded to, you’ve described, actually, tons of school and the ways in which you do what you do, but what we’re wondering, ‘cause we really wanna create for our audience, some takeaways that they can really apply to what they’re doing. So, is it possible, of all these great, to choose one and really break it down for us, how you do it, so that a listener can go and apply that skill themselves potentially?
EP: In their business.
NC: In their business, or life.
EP: Or life.
NC: Or nature. All of it.
EP: To that point, I would say, part of what makes our approaches work, is that they actually are identical to what you do in your personal life. So that instead of what most businesses are doing, which is teaching stuff that’s almost antithetical to what you’re trying to do at home, this is teaching techniques and processes, and mindsets that are the same, whether it’s with your kid, or whether its at work. But anyway.
I don’t know. Visioning, does that sound good?
NC: Sure. Let’s break it down.
EP: Lets break it down.
AW: Okay. So, and I’ll just say, because I don’t wanna space it out, but so with the business books, we actually are sort of off the grid, so we print them here in town. We do all the design and everything, and so it’s sort of the farm to table version of books. So, we’re kind of not on Amazon, so they’re at Zingtrain.com, along with the training seminars and there’s a whole two day seminar on visioning. I’ve written a bunch of essays about it that are gonna give you way more detail than I’m gonna fit in to the next three minutes.
So, the visioning process I will say, changed my life. It’s completely not how I grew up, it’s almost the opposite of how I was raised. It’s basically a process of getting clear on what we talked about earlier, which is, what does success look like for you. So, not what is the business school tell you you should do, not what’s your competitor doing, not what’s possible theoretically, but what does success look like for you, so.
NC: Do you draw this, or think this, or write this, or any of the above?
AW: We write it. I know a lot of people work with vision boards, which I think is a good way to, if you’re a visual thinker, to trigger ideas, but my belief is that although the vision board will be super clear to the leader who created it, the odds of someone else interpreting it, seven layers through the organization, remotely close to the original, is not that high and that we live in a culture that’s written, and that the writing is clearer to people what you mean.
This visioning process, like I said, was developed in it’s core work by Ron Lippitt, and he called it preferred futuring. We’ve adapted it and adjusted it somewhat, but it’s still basically that process, which is basically, you plant yourself in the future. If it’s for your business, it might be five years, eight years, 20 years down the road, and you describe that success and you describe that success with a whole lot of detail so that when you get there, you will actually know you’ve arrived.
Our current vision for 2020, which was written in ‘07 over about an eighteen month period, is nine pages long. So, it talks about how people will feel that work there, it talks about how the community will feel about us, it talks about having fun, it talks about learning and people coming from around the world to learn. It doesn’t reference podcasts because we didn’t know they existed in 2007, but anyway.
The point is that you’re describing success, so it’s basically writing a story but it’s your story, and it’s written in the present tense, as if its already happened. It’s an affirmation, it’s not a statement of what’s gonna happen. It’s as if it already happened.
NC: I like that.
AW: It’s not a list. I like lists, but bullet points are not the same as a vision because there’s no emotion in the bullet points, and the vision is all about emotion, right. It’s about yes, roughly what are your sales gonna be, so you have some idea of scope and scale, but also how do you feel when you go to work. Not every detail of what you do, but if you’re passionate about woodworking, then put it in there.
We use vision for everything, so it’s not just for the organization. People write personal visions, we write visions for projects, we write visions for changes we’re about to implement. It becomes really a way of thinking and through neuroplasticity, which people now know the brain changes shape, and you change the way you think overtime. If you do use the visioning process regularly, for a period of years, it really shifts your mindset from what most of the world is doing, which is fixating on what’s wrong and who’s screwing it up, and who’s keeping them from where they want to go, into a much more positive affirmative mindset of what do I want to create and what will this look like, feel like, in our case, taste like when it’s working really well.
NC: So awesome. I have to share really quickly, that our first angel investors/mentor coach, who got involved with Coolhaus, this is one of the first activities he had us do, is he called it Vision book, and it was a complete game changer for us. And I think just the accountability of putting it on their page, it does kinda push you to strive for it for yourself, for your team, for those outside your organization, you may be looking to attract. It’s such an amazing feeling to look back at something you put on a page, theoretically, and say, “Wow, I did that.”
EP: Also, I think that there’s so many of us, we did this vision, your specific exercise, my business partner and I. We’ve done it twice. I think one of the things that was really amazing about doing this, and why anyone listening to this podcast should try it, is because I think a lot of us just doubt ourselves so much everyday because we’re afraid to admit that we have talents, or we feel insecure about our ability to accomplish or whatever those things are. And what I loved about writing this and writing it in the present, as though it’s 15 years or 10 years in the future, or however many years you want to take it, forces you to think about what you can do to get there.
I think that one of the things my business partner realizes, as women, we can be humble to the point of self deprecation and it really took us out of that, really was fundamentally essential to our partnership, and to the company when we first did it. So, I love that exercise and I’m glad that’s the skill that you chose to break down.
NC: Yes, thank you. For sure, that’s a huge one.
AW: Changed my life.
NC: I wish we could talk to you so much longer.
EP: Me too.
NC: But, I wanna thank you for joining us today and for all you’ve shared, and just so excited to see where ... what’s next for you and where this all continues to go.
AW: We’re working on the next vision, so we’ll see where that goes, and people can email me directly if they want. It’s just Ari@zingermans.com.
NC: Awesome, thank you AW.
AW: Thank you. Have a wonderful day.
EP: Thanks for listening to start to sale. We really want to hear what you’re getting out of the conversations we’re having with these wonderful entrepreneurs, and we wanna know what you want more of. Are there entrepreneurs that you love, that you want us to talk to, is there a resource you need? Feel free to send us an email at hi@starttosale.co or direct message us on Instagram. I’m and Natasha is @natashajcase. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve been able to apply anything from start to sale to your business.
The Economist, famed enemy of billionaire worship, says the media (and its consumers) have an unhealthy obsession with the work habits of successful businesspeople, especially their long hours and early mornings. By acting like getting up at 5:30 is what made these people rich and powerful, we ignore the obvious, says the socialist outlet:
If long hours were the key to success, after all, people who hold down two jobs, or nurses on the night shift in emergency rooms, would be rolling in wealth.
Other clichés of executive profiles—meditation, enforced “off hours,” limited screen time—might seem to contradict each other, but they all fit the same narrative: that these execs are “earning” their status, that the reason they’re so much richer than the rest of us is that they’re more virtuous than the rest of us. The Economist again:
No boss is going to admit that on Friday nights they consume pizza and watch box sets of “Game of Thrones”. Instead they claim to meditate or read improving books. Many business profiles resemble medieval “lives of the saints”, with the subjects of the hagiographies receiving share options instead of canonisation.
These details also reveal a lot of privilege—you really don’t have as many hours in your day as Beyoncé—sometimes earned privilege, sometimes the very privilege that enabled these executives’ rise in the first place. Getting up early isn’t what made Tim Cook successful, and getting up late is not necessarily what’s holding you back.
Advertisement
Neither is any one part of the work habits of successful people. In fact, some of our best How I Work profiles are with successful people who get honest about their failures and flaws—and not just in that “aw shucks here’s what I learned” way. For example, we asked bestselling author Roxane Gay, “What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else? What’s your secret?” Her answer: “I am really good at missing deadlines. My secret to this is overcommitting to projects because of a profound inability to say no.” There, sincerely, is a real role model for you.
So listen to leading Marxist mouthpiece The Economist, and don’t let the titans of business convince you that if you just wake up two hours earlier, some day you’ll be rich like them. Everyone has to find their own path. Life is not a meritocracy. And the greatest successful people are the ones who don’t pose as demigods.
Really interesting read. Dude is on his high horse but still really solid analysis.
If I were a senator, I would not vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.
These are words I write with no pleasure, but with deep sadness. Unlike many people who will read them with glee—as validating preexisting political, philosophical, or jurisprudential opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination—I have no hostility to or particular fear of conservative jurisprudence. I have a long relationship with Kavanaugh, and I have always liked him. I have admired his career on the D.C. Circuit. I have spoken warmly of him. I have published him. I have vouched publicly for his character—more than once—and taken a fair bit of heat for doing so. I have also spent a substantial portion of my adult life defending the proposition that judicial nominees are entitled to a measure of decency from the Senate and that there should be norms of civility within a process that showed Kavanaugh none even before the current allegations arose.
This is an article I never imagined myself writing, that I never wanted to write, that I wish I could not write.
I am also keenly aware that rejecting Kavanaugh on the record currently before the Senate will set a dangerous precedent. The allegations against him remain unproven. They arose publicly late in the process and, by their nature, are not amenable to decisive factual rebuttal. It is a real possibility that Kavanaugh is telling the truth and that he has had his life turned upside down over a falsehood. Even assuming that Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations are entirely accurate, rejecting him on the current record could incentivize not merely other sexual-assault victims to come forward—which would be a salutary thing—but also other late-stage allegations of a non-falsifiable nature by people who are not acting in good faith. We are on a dangerous road, and the judicial confirmation wars are going to get a lot worse for our traveling down it.
Despite all of that, if I were a senator, I would vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. I would do it both because of Ford’s testimony and because of Kavanaugh’s. For reasons I will describe, I find her account more believable than his. I would also do it because whatever the truth of what happened in the summer of 1982, Thursday’s hearing left Kavanaugh nonviable as a justice.
A few days before the hearing, I detailed on this site the advice I would give to Kavanaugh if he asked me. He should, I argued, withdraw from consideration for elevation unless able to defend himself to a high degree of factual certainty without attacking Ford. He should remain a nominee, I argued, only if his defense would be sufficiently convincing that it would meet what we might term the “no asterisks” standard—that is, that it would plausibly convince even people who vociferously disagree with his jurisprudential views that he could serve credibly as a justice. His defense needed to make it possible for a reasonable pro-choice woman to find it a legitimate and acceptable prospect, if not an attractive or appealing one, that he might sit on a case reconsidering Roe v. Wade.
Kavanaugh, needless to say, did not take my advice. He stayed in, and he delivered on Thursday, by way of defense, a howl of rage. He went on the attack not against Ford—for that we can be grateful—but against Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and beyond. His opening statement was an unprecedentedly partisan outburst of emotion from a would-be justice. I do not begrudge him the emotion, even the anger. He has been through a kind of hell that would leave any person gasping for air. But I cannot condone the partisanship—which was raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial—from someone who asks for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial actor. His performance was wholly inconsistent with the conduct we should expect from a member of the judiciary.
Consider the judicial function as described by Kavanaugh himself at his first hearing. That Brett Kavanaugh described a “good judge [as] an umpire—a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no litigant or policy.” That Brett Kavanaugh reminded us that “the Supreme Court must never be viewed as a partisan institution. The justices on the Supreme Court do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle. They do not caucus in separate rooms.”
A very different Brett Kavanaugh showed up to Thursday’s hearing. This one accused the Democratic members of the committee of a “grotesque and coordinated character assassination,” saying that they had “replaced advice and consent with search and destroy.” After rightly criticizing “the behavior of several of the Democratic members of this committee at [his] hearing a few weeks ago [as] an embarrassment,” this Brett Kavanaugh veered off into full-throated conspiracy in a fashion that made entirely clear that he knew which room he caucused in:
When I did at least okay enough at the hearings that it looked like I might actually get confirmed, a new tactic was needed.
Some of you were lying in wait and had it ready. This first allegation was held in secret for weeks by a Democratic member of this committee, and by staff. It would be needed only if you couldn’t take me out on the merits.
When it was needed, this allegation was unleashed and publicly deployed over Dr. Ford’s wishes. And then—and then as no doubt was expected, if not planned—came a long series of false last-minute smears designed to scare me and drive me out of the process before any hearing occurred.
He went on: “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”
As Charlie Sykes, a thoughtful conservative commentator sympathetic to Kavanaugh, put it on The Weekly Standard’s podcast Friday, “Even if you support Brett Kavanaugh … that was breathtaking as an abandonment of any pretense of having a judicial temperament.” Sykes went on: “It’s possible, I think, to have been angry, emotional, and passionate without crossing the lines that he crossed—assuming that there are any lines anymore.”
Kavanaugh blew across lines that I believe a justice still needs to hold.
The Brett Kavanaugh who showed up to Thursday’s hearing is a man I have never met, whom I have never even caught a glimpse of in 20 years of knowing the person who showed up to the first hearing. I dealt with Kavanaugh during the Starr investigation, which I covered for the Washington Post editorial page and about which I wrote a book. I dealt with him when he was in the White House counsel’s office and working on judicial nominations and post–September 11 legal matters. Since his confirmation to the D.C. Circuit, he has been a significant voice on a raft of issues I work on. In all of our interactions, he has been a consummate professional. The allegations against him shocked me very deeply, but not quite so deeply as did his presentation. It was not just an angry and aggressive version of the person I have known. It seemed like a different person altogether.
My cognitive dissonance at Kavanaugh’s performance Thursday is not important. What is important is the dissonance between the Kavanaugh of Thursday’s hearing and the judicial function. Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable pro-choice woman would feel like her position could get a fair shake before a Justice Kavanaugh? Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable Democrat, or a reasonable liberal of any kind, would after that performance consider him a fair arbiter in, say, a case about partisan gerrymandering, voter identification, or anything else with a strong partisan valence? Quite apart from the merits of Ford’s allegations against him, Kavanaugh’s display on Thursday—if I were a senator voting on confirmation—would preclude my support.
Perhaps if I believed Kavanaugh’s testimony in its totality, if I believed his denial—and thus his anger—to be entirely righteous, I could see fit to look past the impropriety of his performance. If Kavanaugh is, in fact, wholly innocent, after all, what has happened to him is so monstrous that perhaps we might forgive him the excess in view of the pressures he is under and the wrongs he would clearly have suffered—though the outburst was part of his prepared statement and thus should be seen as his considered decision about what he wanted to say.
But there are reasons to worry about the integrity of Kavanaugh’s testimony. A number of senators, most notably Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, suggested in the hearing’s wake that the evidence was in some kind of equipoise, that both Ford and Kavanaugh had testified credibly, and that norms of fairness thus counsel giving Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt. Before he shifted gears and sought a delay and an FBI investigation, Flake stated that he “left the hearing yesterday with as much doubt as certainty” and that “our system of justice affords a presumption of innocence to the accused.” Corker, for his part, declared that “both individuals provided compelling testimony” but that since “nothing that has been presented corroborates the allegation,” he would vote to confirm. President Trump presumably feels similarly, given that he continues to support Kavanaugh despite having declared Ford “a very credible witness.”
I fear the evidence is not, however, quite in equipoise, even if one believes that a senator should confirm a justice on the basis that the presumption of innocence should break the tie between two equally compelling testimonies. At least as I read it, though it pains me to say so, the evidence before us leans toward Ford. Let’s consider the balance sheet carefully.
On one side of the ledger, Ford is wholly credible. Yes, her story has holes. The location of the event is unclear in her memory, as is—importantly—how she got home and what happened after she left the house in question. Yet few observers seem to dispute her credibility. Not even Kavanaugh and his supporters contend that she is lying or making up the incident in question, merely that she is mistaken as to his involvement in it.
Her story is certainly plausible, and certain details she offers lend it additional credibility. She correctly identifies, for example, a social circle that appears actually to have existed around Kavanaugh during the summer in question. A fabulist likely would not know, for example, of Kavanaugh’s friendship with Mark Judge and their propensity to drink beer together in the relevant period with other individuals she named. While Kavanaugh said he didn’t recall meeting Ford but that it was possible they had interacted, it seems overwhelmingly likely that her claim to have known him and his circle socially while the two were in high school is true.
While Ford can offer no contemporaneous corroboration of story in the form of testimony from people who remember being present at the alleged event, her story is not wholly uncorroborated either. She appears to have told her therapist about the alleged event years ago, and she identified Kavanaugh as her attacker to her husband years ago, as well.
She initially raised the allegation with her congresswoman before Kavanaugh’s nomination took place. At a minimum, it seems quite clear that Ford was genuinely part of the world in which she claims the attack took place and that she genuinely believed—long before Trump’s election, let alone Kavanaugh’s nomination—that Kavanaugh attacked her.
That she believes this story sincerely is corroborated, if only weakly, by her polygraph exam. Polygraphs are not especially reliable, but the willingness to take one can be a show of strength in a witness. The polygraph is not evidence that Kavanaugh attacked Ford. It is evidence that Ford believes her story truthful and is an earnest accuser, not a conspirator.
Her story is also corroborated, imperfectly but perceptibly, by Kavanaugh’s high-school calendar. Ford describes the attack as taking place at a gathering at which at least four boys—Kavanaugh, Judge, Patrick (P.J.) Smythe, and a boy whose name Ford could not remember—and one girl, Leland Keyser, were drinking beer. Ford specifically allowed for the possibility that there might have been others present as well.
Kavanaugh’s calendar entry for the evening of July 1, 1982, contains an entry that reads, “Go to Timmy’s for skis with Judge, Tom, P.J., Bernie and Squi.” In the hearing, Kavanaugh acknowledged that “skis” in this entry referred to “brewskis,” or beer; that P.J. was Smythe; that Judge was Mark Judge; and that “Squi” was a boy who, Ford had earlier testified, just happened to have been someone she “went out with” for a short time. The calendar entry does not include Ford or Keyser, so the corroboration is far from perfect. It also includes people not mentioned by Ford. Then again, the degree of overlap with Ford’s story is striking. In the summer in which Ford alleges that Kavanaugh attacked her at an evening get-together with a small group of boys drinking beers, his calendar identifies an evening get-together with a small group of boys drinking beers, including three of the boys named by Ford, along with one she dated. Why exactly Kavanaugh imagines his calendar entries to be powerfully exculpatory I am really not sure.
Ford’s story also finds some degree of corroboration in Mark Judge’s employment history. Ford claims that she saw Judge some weeks after the alleged attack at the Safeway where he worked and that he was visibly uncomfortable seeing her. The Washington Post verified from Judge’s own memoir that he was, in fact, working at a grocery story as a bagger in the relevant period. Assuming the FBI investigation firms that up, it would offer another data point tending to corroborate her account’s consistency with verifiable facts.
On the other side of the ledger is Kavanaugh’s testimony, and here we cannot be quite so confident that the witness was being candid.
Kavanaugh’s testimony, whatever one makes of his impassioned claims of innocence on the specific charge, is not credible on the more general issue of his drinking habits. It is, as Kavanaugh suggested at the hearing, absurd for senators to argue with a Supreme Court nominee over his high-school yearbook. Then again, Kavanaugh’s unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious—that his yearbook described a hard-drinking culture that he was a part of and that makes Ford’s account more plausible—made it necessary to do so. Kavanaugh would not concede that the phrase “Beach Week Ralph Club—Biggest Contributor” referred to drinking culture, claiming it was simply a reference to his having a weak stomach. He ascribed implausibly innocent definitions to other terms that appeared in the yearbook. He diminished the casual cruelty he and his friends showed to one girl, Renate Schroeder Dolphin, by describing themselves as “Renate Alumni.” He claimed they intended to show her respect and friendship, but that is not how she reads it three and a half decades later. She told The New York Times, “The insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way.” She is not a fool. His repeated suggestion at the hearing that he had never been so drunk as to have any possibility of memory loss flies in the face of the memories of a number of classmates from college.
My point is not that his confirmation in any sense turns on how much Kavanaugh drank or whether he and his friends made misogynistic jokes as teenagers. But his testimony doesn’t have the ring of truth either. And lack of candor in a witness in one area raises questions about the integrity of that witness’s testimony in other areas.
Thursday evening, after the hearing, former FBI Director James Comey tweeted, “Small lies matter, even about yearbooks. From the standard jury instruction: ‘If a witness is shown knowingly to have testified falsely about any material matter, you have a right to distrust such witness’ other testimony and you may reject all the testimony of that witness.’”
In response, I tweeted a passage that had been haunting me all day from a Guantanamo Bay habeas case in the D.C. Circuit called Al-Adahi v. Obama. The passage reads:
Several days later, bin Laden summoned Al-Adahi for another meeting. According to Al-Adahi, at his meeting bin Laden asked him about people he was connected with in Yemen—some of whom were involved in jihad … In the habeas proceedings, Al-Adahi tried to explain his personal audience with bin Laden on the basis that “meeting with Bin Laden was common for visitors to Kandar.” This is, as the government points out, utterly implausible … [Yet] the district court said nothing, despite the well-settled principle that false exculpatory statements are evidence—often strong evidence—of guilt.
The opinion was not written by Kavanaugh, but Kavanaugh was on the unanimous panel that decided the Al-Adahi case.
There’s another factor that weighs in Ford’s favor: the failure of the committee to meaningfully engage Mark Judge. The current FBI investigation should ameliorate this problem, and it’s possible, I suppose, that Judge could change the picture significantly in Kavanaugh’s favor—if, for example, he informs the FBI that Kavanaugh was never out-of-control drunk with him or if he denies ever working at the Safeway. The committee’s contentment with the perfunctory letter he sent, however, has the air of fear—fear of what Judge would say. This unwillingness to ask Judge obvious questions erodes Kavanaugh’s position.
To be clear, I am emphatically not saying that Kavanaugh did what Ford says he did. The evidence is not within 100 yards of adequate to convict him. But whether he did it is not the question at hand. The question at hand is how a reasonable senator should construct the evidence to guide a binary vote for or against elevation of a judge to a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. By my read, we have two witnesses who both profess 100 percent certainty of their position—one whose testimony is wholly credible and marginally corroborated in a number of respects, and the other whose testimony is not credible on a number of important atmospheric points surrounding the alleged event.
It’s not a tie, and it doesn’t go to the nominee.
There’s one more reason I could not vote to confirm Kavanaugh: His apparent lack of candor on the culture of drinking at Georgetown Prep and later is a problem of its own, quite apart from what it may indicate about the truth of Ford’s story. People throw around words like perjury too blithely. I won’t do so here. I will say that I do not believe he showed the sort of candor that warrants the Senate’s—or the public’s—confidence. To the extent some commentators on the right are defending Kavanaugh’s testimony as containing the sort of white lies that anyone might tell under the circumstances, let me just say that I don’t believe that Supreme Court justices get to tell self-exculpating white lies—and I don’t believe in white lies from anyone else either in sworn congressional testimony.
Over the weekend, I listened to a number of podcasts in which liberals mocked Kavanaugh as an entitled white male refusing to face accountability for what he had done. I find the tone of these discussions nauseating—undetained by the possibility of error. I, like Jeff Flake, am haunted by doubt, by the certainty of uncertainty and the consequent possibility of injustice. I spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about Oliver Cromwell’s famous letter to the Church of Scotland in which he implored, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” I also spent some time with Learned Hand’s similar maxim, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” We all need to think it possible that we may be mistaken; we all need to be not too sure that we are right.
But my bottom line is the opposite of the one Flake expressed in his statement: Faced with credible allegations of serious misconduct against him, Kavanaugh behaved in a fashion unacceptable in a justice, it seems preponderantly likely he was not candid with the Senate Judiciary Committee on important matters, and the risk of Ford’s allegations being closer to the truth than his denial of them is simply too high to place him on the Supreme Court.
We are in a political environment in which there are no rules, no norms anymore to violate. There is only power, and the individual judgments of individual senators—facing whatever political pressures they face, calculating political gain however they do it, and consulting their consciences to the extent they have them.
As much as I admire Kavanaugh, my conscience would not permit me to vote for him.
Mr. Harrelson, as an activist, are you hopeful for the next generation?
I think there are young people that are true leaders. It’s absolutely inspiring. That’s why I am hoping that finally a change happens where things like gun control and environmental issues are concerned. When the youth are the ones commenting on this, they are coming from a very pure perspective.
What do you mean?
It’s not connected to economics, it’s pure heart. You know, I showed a movie that I did at five colleges in the States, and I realized all those students who I met, what I found so great and reassuring, is that they haven’t developed this cynicism that creeps in as you get older and you are faced with all these disappointments. You naturally develop an almost self-protective cynicism as you get older!
“I think there is a lot to be said for an optimistic viewpoint — just to be positive.”
Is that something you’re trying to combat?
I do really try to be conscious of that and not be cynical. I think there is a lot to be said for an optimistic viewpoint — just to be positive. That’s what helps. It’s not that I am convincing myself to be positive, I just feel positively about things. I was hanging with one of the most brilliant guys that I know recently, that’s Matthew McConaughey, and he said something that really hit me. He said, “Cynicism is the worst disease of old age.” I forget how he put it exactly, maybe he called it the disease of aging. Now I don’t even have the damn quote right! (Laughs) Anyway, that is why I love hanging out with Matthew and people who aren’t cynical or sarcastic all the time!
Is it hard to find those people?
You just meet people. It’s how you discern who to hang out with of the people you meet. I meet people very easily — but making friends, that’s not so easily accomplished. To have someone you consider a friend is one of the most important things we have in our lives on an emotional basis. As a foundation for your life, friends and family are crucial. Pretty much everyone who has gone through a good bit of living, who has experienced a lot, in the end they can look back and say the most important thing is friends and family.
It is so true that it’s almost a cliché.
Absolutely. So to have someone become your friend is a big step, for sure. But I am one of those guys that once you are my friend, it’s very hard to get me to stop being your friend.
What else helps you to keep negative energy at bay?
This is not what a therapist would recommend but a lot of times I trick myself out of any kind of down or depressive moment. I recognize that I have hypnotized myself into this negative space and I do a trick to get out of it. But it’s no more palliative than a pill that a psychiatrist might prescribe.
What’s the trick?
You don’t sit and look at your own life and think about the things you are upset about. For me, I might just binge watch some show and then by the time I have watched four episodes, I am not even thinking about whatever it was that got me upset before. I try to just forget about it. Speaking to Matthew, he always likes to tell about one time he went through the same thing. He asked, “What do you do when you get all these things stacked up and they are really bothering you?” I said, “Just forget about it.” It’s like getting involved in an alternative life.
Has it always been that simple for you?
Well, looking back at when I was in New York, I was having a hard time getting a job, even just jobs to keep me afloat and pay the rent. I would get fired all the time! I sunk into a depression. And it was deep. One of the jobs I got was at Random House, I was a temp secretary because I could type although I might have fibbed a little on my ability… At the end of the day, they had this wall full of books, like Dickens and all these great classics, and they said you can take whatever you want. “Take whatever I want?” Well, I filled up a bin and dragged that all the way home. I couldn’t even lift it; it was so heavy. I just started reading and that slowly brought me out of my depression, almost more than anything.
Apparently you’ve also found Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings to be very enlightening.
I am very inspired by Paramahansa Yogananda! The way I see it, in order to be happy, you have to be relaxed. In order to be relaxed, I do Yoga, exercise, meditate… Yogananda’s Kriya technique is one that I have tried to learn through teachers and people who practice it. But that’s more the style. I have a lot to learn! I have a hard time sitting and doing it, but once I do it, it’s usually pretty rewarding.
“It is still in my nature to fight but these days, I want to walk away from that.”
Would you say these philosophies have calmed you down?
I have really tried to address the way I deal with emotions like anger. I used to let people get me really mad. It’s not like it’s just their fault, it’s my fault obviously, but I have tried… I have done a lot better about getting really angry. That’s pretty rare — really rare. Anger tends to be an automatic response when someone is doing something really unjust. It’s not unusual to have that feeling, of course, but whether or not that develops into something personal…
That’s something that’s now under your control?
Well, it is still in my nature to fight if I feel someone is aggressing — not necessarily a physical fight, but an argument. It’s in my nature to stand my ground. But these days, I think I just want to walk away from that.
“What should we do with all the left-handed people?”
“There are far too many people in this organization who wear glasses. It’s hurting our ability to compete.”
Here’s a simple trick: Every time you consider identifying a group to exclude, overlook or fear, every time you consider naming your football team after an ethnic or cultural group, or wonder about how a group makes you feel…
Substitute a label or perhaps a slur that’s been used against a group you belong to instead.
It sounds ridiculous when you say that out loud, doesn’t it?
Susan B. Glasser writes about Paul Manafort’s trial under Judge T. S. Ellis III as part of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign.
I think this is a really important debate right now. I've always thought censorship was a bad thing, but some really strong points in here about why we need to censor blatant liars. The question is who gets to draw the lines.
Jack Dorsey’s argument for not banning Alex Jones reveals the limits of his understanding — and a major problem with Big Tech’s outsized role in our society.
In the past week, tech giants including Facebook, Apple, Youtube, and Spotify banned notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their platforms. Jones, perhaps most famous for promoting the idea that the Sandy Hook, Connecticut, school shooting was a hoax, was banned from these platformsfor allegedly violating their terms of service in all sorts of ways.
But there was one Silicon Valley corporation that opted to allow Jones to stay: Twitter. You can still go to President Donald Trump’s favorite social media outlet and scan the @RealAlexJones feed, where you will learn that the bans are a plot by “deep state actors” to prevent the American public from learning the real truth about our government.
Tuesday night, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote a lengthy statement — published as a series of tweets, naturally — defending his company’s decision. My colleague Aja Romano has a lengthy and sweeping takedown of Dorsey’s full logic; I encourage you to read it.
But I want to focus on one of Dorsey’s specific tweets, one that — to my mind — reveals a deep issue at work here:
Accounts like Jones' can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.
The tweet displays a profound misunderstanding of the way that conspiracy theories and “fake news” work. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough journalists correcting misinformation and myths; there’s tons of evidence out there that what Jones says is patently false. Rather, it’s that conspiracy theories, once they spread, create hermetically sealed communities that are impervious to correction. The only way to stop this process is to stop them from spreading on platforms like social media, which is exactly what Twitter decided not to do.
It’s not surprising that Jack Dorsey doesn’t understand this: He doesn’t really have time to read the latest social science on conspiracy theories. And that’s the real problem: Tech giants are increasingly being asked to handle social problems, ones their leaders don’t seem equipped to address.
What Jack Dorsey gets wrong about conspiracy theories
Michael Cohen/Getty Images/The New York Times
Jack Dorsey.
In 2008, Harvard Law professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule penned an article on conspiracy theories and how they work. They argued that conspiracy theories — which they define as “an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role” — are, in their own way, quite rational.
“Most people are not able to know, on the basis of personal or direct knowledge, why an airplane crashed, or why a leader was assassinated, or why a terrorist attack succeeded,” they wrote. As a result, they search for information that fits what they already believe about the world and is confirmed by people they trust.
Conspiracy theories, Sunstein and Vermeule argued, spread in a variety of ways. One of these pathways, called an “availability cascade,” happens when a group of people accepts a conspiracy theory because their preexisting beliefs about the world make them likely to believe it.
This is what happens with Alex Jones and people on the American right. Theories like “Sandy Hook was faked so Obama could take your guns” and “the deep state is conspiring against Trump to destroy democracy” appeal to their basic, gut-level political orientation, which is that Democrats are nefarious and Trump is a hero.
Not all conservatives accepted these ideas when presented with them, of course, but it was appealing enough that Jones managed to build up a significant social media presence and shockingly large amount of influence. In December 2015, then-candidate Trump went on Jones’s show, telling the host that his “reputation is amazing” and vowing that “I will not let you down.”
Jones has created a thorny problem for society. Once people start believing in his conspiracy theories, and trusting him as a source, it becomes extremely difficult to change their minds.
“Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be persuaded by an attempt to dispel their theories; they may even characterize that very attempt as further proof of the conspiracy,” Sunstein and Vermeule wrote. Because conspiracy theorists “become increasingly distrustful and suspicious of the motives of others or of the larger society,” efforts to debunk their myths often “serve to fortify rather than undermine the original belief.”
This isn’t just Sunstein and Vermeule’s theory: A significant body of empirical research on conspiracy theories finds that it’s extremely hard to change believers’ minds. One 2017 study, by two UK-based psychologists, presented people with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and evidence debunking them — but randomly switched whether they saw the anti-vax arguments or the actual facts first. Then they asked them how that affected their opinions on vaccinating a child. The results were sobering.
“Anti-conspiracy arguments increased intentions to vaccinate a fictional child but only when presented prior to conspiracy theories,” the authors explained. “These findings suggest that people can be inoculated against the potentially harmful effects of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, but that once they are established, the conspiracy theories may be difficult to correct.”
This is the problem with Dorsey’s logic. Now that Jones has an audience on Twitter, journalists’ attempt to “refute” him will fail. His fans will mostly disregard the debunkings, and his audience will continue to grow. This is what was happening on every other platform, prior to the bans. The other companies recognized that Jones was spreading dangerous lies, and that journalists simply couldn’t debunk them. The only way to stop these ideas was to deprive them of oxygen, to prevent people from being exposed to them in the first place.
Twitter’s CEO just doesn’t get that.
The problem with tech making social decisions
As frustrating as Dorsey’s statement is, there’s a part of me that doesn’t blame him. It really is not his fault that he hasn’t read the academic literature on conspiracy theories. His job is running a massive technology company.
While Twitter was alone on the Alex Jones issue, Dorsey is hardly the only tech CEO to make glaringly ignorant comments about social issues that affect their platform. Just last month, for example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered this nugget of anti-wisdom in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher:
I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but … it’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent.
Zuckerberg’s argument is that Holocaust deniers are merely deluded people (he later clarified that he “didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny the Holocaust”). But the purpose of Holocaust denial is not to have a good-faith argument about history — it’s to advance an anti-Semitic political agenda. Letting deniers spread poison on Facebook doesn’t serve the purpose of illuminating debate. Rather, all it does is allow yet another vile conspiracy theory to spread.
How to approach Holocaust denial has been, historically, a hard problem for liberal societies. The United States, with its expansive free speech tradition, permits Holocaust deniers to publish freely on grounds that it would be dangerous to let the government regulate speech in this fashion. Germany and France have both decided to criminalize denial, on grounds that it’s a form of incitement to racial hatred rather than legitimate political speech. Both approaches have benefits and flaws; brilliant scholars have written tomes making the case for one or the other.
But today, the spread of Holocaust denial, Sandy Hook trutherism, and other vile conspiracy theories isn’t just a problem for governments. It’s a problem for technology corporations, who regulate the primary means through which information is disseminated today.
Those companies — none of whom have the legitimacy or public accountability government officials do — have no choice but to engage with all sorts of extremely hard social problems surrounding free speech and bigotry. People like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are not the people who ought to be making these decisions for a democratic polity, but they have no choice but to make them. Sometimes they’ll get those decisions right, as most of these companies eventually did with Alex Jones. But often, they’re going to get them wrong — and the public will have no real way to hold them accountable.
Here’s How America Uses Its Land is a nice presentation by Bloomberg on land use in the US. The land and resources used for livestock makes a great case for Americans eating more vegetarian.
More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture — by far the largest land-use type in the contiguous 48 states. And nearly 25 percent of that land is administered by the federal government, with most occurring in the West. That land is open to grazing for a fee.
There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Between pastures and cropland used to produce feed, 41 percent of U.S. land in the contiguous states revolves around livestock.
Urban areas take up relatively less space but are growing the fastest. And only 100 people own a space the size of Florida? Wow.
On a percentage basis, urban creep outpaces growth in all other land-use categories. Another growth area: land owned by wealthy families. According to The Land Report magazine, since 2008 the amount of land owned by the 100 largest private landowners has grown from 28 million acres to 40 million, an area larger than the state of Florida.
It would be interesting to see this data sliced and diced in a few different ways. I’d love to see land use by state or area of the country or how much each category is growing or shrinking, with projections 5, 10, 20 years into the future.
In the late 1970s, when he was 10, Rob Nissen played for the only soccer team available to kids in his middle-class, New Jersey town. “It cost $20 to join, and you got a T-shirt and you played,” said Nissen, who today is a book publicist, still in New Jersey. On Saturdays, he would put on his white canvas Keds and head over to the one park in town that was big enough to accommodate an actual game. No girls’ teams waited on the sidelines—only boys played soccer. Soccer has come a long way in America. Today, millions of American boys and girls play it. It’s a shift that has delighted many: the sport’s fanatics, parents who don’t want their children getting tackled on football fields, and the kids themselves, who often develop a lifelong passion for the sport.
But American youth soccer—and, in particular, the kind played outside of school, on competitive private “club” teams at the highest level—has also come under criticism. The problem, of course, is not with the sport itself, but with the highly demanding nature of the top tier of play. (In the U.S., other sports, such as lacrosse, volleyball, and basketball, have club systems that can be just as demanding as soccer’s, though soccer’s is the most widespread.)
For one, the risk of injury is high, due in part to many kids’ decision to focus intensely on one particular sport. In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that “the increased emphasis on sports specialization has led to an increase in overuse injuries, overtraining, and burnout.” An analysis in the medical journal Pediatrics of soccer-related emergency-room visits among children aged 7 to 17 reveals a dramatic uptick in injuries: Researchers found that the annual rate of injuries for every 10,000 soccer players rose by 111.4 percent between 1990 and 2014; the annual rate of concussions and other “closed head injuries”—when the head is hit, but the skull isn’t penetrated—over the same period went up by 1,595.6 percent. Girls are injured more than boys. Knee injuries, including ACL tears, are nearly four times more likely to bedevil female soccer players than male. (The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons reported that female soccer players have a higher rate of concussion than football players.)
“Almost all researchers in the field agree that later specialization”—ideally, after the early growth spurt associated with puberty—“is the healthier route (from the perspective of the child’s overall well-being),” Richard Bailey, a senior researcher at the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education, wrote me in an email. “And that is why they predominantly recommend … [the] sampling of multiple sports, the development of a broad base of movement skills, and delayed specialization as the preferable approach.”
U.S. Soccer, the sport’s national governing body, has a different perspective. The organization’s chief medical officer, George Chiampas, told me that findings from an upcoming study that he co-authored, which compared injury rates among boys on teams in its Development Academy, a program set up by U.S. Soccer to cultivate top players, found no difference between those who just played soccer and those who played additional sports. Is it ever too early to specialize? “It depends on the environment,” he said.
Unlike U.S. Lacrosse, which has come out in favor of multi-sport play, U.S. Soccer has taken no definitive position on specialization. “We’re still analyzing the research,” said Ryan Mooney, U.S. Soccer’s chief soccer officer. As evidence of the organization’s commitment to protecting kids, Chiampas pointed to a safety and injury-prevention platform, Recognize to Recover, and to the fact that in 2015, U.S. Soccer instituted a rule disallowing children 10 and under to head the ball. Chiampas also said that the organization has stepped up its coaching education and is deeply committed to creating a “culture of safety” for all players.
Intense youth travel teams can also send unhealthy messages, to kids and adults alike, about a family’s priorities. Club soccer can require heroic measures on the part of adults—driving regularly to and from distant games, giving over sacred weekends to a child’s pursuit, and dividing up the family to deposit different kids at separate venues. One of the main jobs of parents, said Madeline Levine, a psychologist and the author of The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, is modeling for children what adulthood should look like. Youth sports teams that require parents to devote huge amounts of time and incomesignal to children that grown-ups are an afterthought, and that being a parent is an exercise in passivity and boredom. “We have become so child-centered that what kids have to look forward to [when they become parents] is diddling with a cellphone and sitting passively, not being an active participant,” she said.
Another downside for elite youth-soccer players is that their clubs tend to pull them away from their high-school communities. Those who play for the rarefied Development Academy teams are prohibited from playing for their schools. Even if they make friends on their soccer teams, “the kids lose out,” said Roberta Moran, the athletic director at Kent Place School, a private girls’ school in New Jersey. “They miss the social aspect of playing a sport with their community of friends at school.” Less-competitive club teams don’t draw kids away from school as strongly—many play for their schools as well—but also exact a social cost, as their year-round schedules make it difficult for players to participate in other sports at their high schools.
Last year, U.S. Soccer imposed a new rule that made these problems worse. The rule was seemingly innocuous: Clubs had to start organizing teams according to players’ birth year rather than their academic year, which caused a lot of roster reshuffling. Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross, said that U.S. Soccer made this change to more easily identify the top 20 teenage players for the 17-and-under World Cup, which will be held in Peru next year. He says the change has further disrupted players’ social lives, as it has split up established teams made up of longtime friends. “The entire program is designed to train and identify an elite core of 20 players who will be on the U.S. team in 8 or 18 years,” said Matheson, adding, “this is a tiny fraction of kids who play soccer.”
Part of the reason soccer has this incredibly demanding top tier, said Rick Eckstein, a professor of sociology at Villanova and author of How College Athletics Are Hurting Girls’ Sports, is that it’s one of the most commercialized of youth sports; it contains a flourishing industry of tournament directors, private club and travel teams, and assorted soccer-related businesses whose financial interest is served by the status quo. And unlike basketball, say, which also has a sturdy commercial presence, soccer has developed so that the top players are identified and nurtured only through clubs. While college-basketball coaches still scout players at gyms and high schools, their counterparts in soccer rely on “showcase” tournaments to fill out their teams. “Soccer is the poster child for hyper-commercialized youth sports because it is played across the country and across the world, it has extraordinarily high participation levels, and is equally commercialized for girls and boys,” Eckstein wrote in an email.
Though U.S. Soccer sits atop the pyramid of organizations that oversee all American leagues and teams, it has limited authority over private clubs, and tournament directors, college coaches, and others who make money from youth soccer have little incentive to change. The clubs’ business model “is not our expertise,” Mooney told me, and the most the organization can do is offer incentives for good behavior. Chiampas added that parents need to intervene and do what’s best for their child if a club team is too demanding.
More can be done. Instead of imposing policies that revolve around building a strong national team, regardless of the impact on ordinary players, U.S. Soccer could establish rules that serve more kids (and still cultivate top-tier talent). For example, it could reverse itself and require teams to be formed on the school calendar, so that classmates can continue to play together. It could also use its platform to discourage early specialization and to encourage players to take part in multiple sports, even through high school.
Parents, too, can reassert their authority and insist that their own children not play one sport year-round, especially when their kids are constantly exhausted, sidelined with nagging injuries, and devoid of unscheduled time. “If the sport has knocked out the family environment and nothing else is happening, and others in the family are suffering from the lack of attention, then summon up the courage to say, ‘We’re a family, and we’re not doing this anymore,’” Levine said. “All the things that seem so life-altering when they’re younger—when they get older, you think, That didn’t make much difference,” she added.
Those who care about soccer in the United States could learn something from Belgium. Eighteen years ago, Belgium’s national football (the European term for soccer) team lost in the first round of the World Cup. It was a staggering failure, which prompted the national director of coach education, Kris Van der Haegen, to overhaul the way they trained football coaches. The main principle of the new approach was to put the players first, before coaches or teams, and to “create an environment of freedom” that restored the game’s creativity and fun. In 2015, Belgium became the world’s top-ranked team. “When things are going well, people don’t want to listen,” Van der Haegen said during an interview. The loss “was the perfect moment to get everyone around the table and ask what we were doing wrong.”
I’m catching up with the latest season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which I used to enjoy, but now seems like it should be renamed Rich People in Expensive Cars Getting Coffee and Looking Nervous About Not Having Proper Seatbelts.
There was one great spot in the Dave Chappelle episode, though, that I felt was worth transcribing and sharing. Seinfeld asks Chappelle whether he feels like, knowing he can do a great TV show, he shouldn’t try to do another one.
CHAPPELLE: Sometimes the offering drives. If I [have] an idea, it should drive. It’s like the idea says, “Get in the car.” And I’m like, “Where am I going?” And the idea says, “Don’t worry, I’m driving.” And then you just get there.
SEINFELD: The idea’s driving.
CHAPPELLE: Sometime’s I’m shotgun. Sometimes I’m in the f—ing trunk. The idea takes you where it wants to go.
SEINFELD: That’s great.
CHAPPELLE: And then other times, there’s me, and it’s my ego, like, “I should do something!”
SEINFELD: “I should be driving!”
CHAPPELLE: Yeah.
SEINFELD: That’s not good.
CHAPPELLE: No, ‘cause there’s no idea in the car. It’s just me. That formula doesn’t work.
SEINFELD: If the idea is in the car honking, going, “Let’s go…” It pulls up in front of your house.
CHAPPELLE: That’s exactly right.
SEINFELD: “You’re in your pajamas. Get dressed!”
CHAPPELLE: “I’m not ready!” “You can go like this.” “Where are we going? What are we doing?” “Don’t worry about it. You’ll see.”
Tom [Waits], for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized.
But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. And he’s speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it’s gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn’t have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder.
So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, “I’m going to lose this thing, and I’ll be be haunted by this song forever. I’m not good enough, and I can’t do it.” And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving?”
“Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”
And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn’t have to be this internalized, tormented thing.
“Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.” Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.
On one side of Eno’s scale diagram, he writes “control”; on the other “surrender”. “We’ve tended to dignify the controlling end of the spectrum,” he says. “We have Nobel prizes for that end.” His idea is that control is what we generally believe the greats – Shakespeare, Picasso, Einstein, Wagner – were about. Such people, the argument goes, controlled their chosen fields, working in isolation, never needing any creative input from others. As for surrender, that idea has become debased: it’s come to mean what the rest of us do when confronted by a work of genius. “We’ve tended to think of the surrender end as a luxury, a nice thing you add to your life when you’ve done the serious work of getting a job, getting your pension sorted out. I’m saying that’s all wrong.”
He pauses, then asks: “I don’t know if you’ve ever read much about the history of shipbuilding?” Not a word. “Old wooden ships had to be constantly caulked up because they leaked. When technology improved, and they could make stiffer ships because of a different way of holding boards together, they broke up. So they went back to making ships that didn’t fit together properly, ships that had flexion. The best vessels surrendered: they allowed themselves to be moved by the circumstances.
“Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.” Eno considers all his recent art to be a rebuttal to this attitude. “I want to rethink surrender as an active verb,” he says. “It’s not just you being escapist; it’s an active choice. I’m not saying we’ve got to stop being such controlling beings. I’m not saying we’ve got to be back-to-the-earth hippies. I’m saying something more complex.”
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones. But people's data is also increasingly being vacuumed right out of their living rooms via their televisions, sometimes without their knowledge. From a report: In recent years, data companies have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs, then using that information to send targeted advertisements to other devices in their homes. Marketers, forever hungry to get their products in front of the people most likely to buy them, have eagerly embraced such practices. But the companies watching what people watch have also faced scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates over how transparent they are being with users. Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to make personalized show recommendations. The company said it collected viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, and it has raised $40 million in venture funding from investors including Time Warner, the cable operator Liberty Global and the billionaire Mark Cuban. Samba TV has struck deals with roughly a dozen TV brands -- including Sony, Sharp, TCL and Philips -- to place its software on certain sets. When people set up their TVs, a screen urges them to enable a service called Samba Interactive TV, saying it recommends shows and provides special offers "by cleverly recognizing onscreen content." But the screen, which contains the enable button, does not detail how much information Samba TV collects to make those recommendations.... Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even video games played on the TV.
Time was, you couldn’t browse the web without seeing RSS icons of all persuasions gracing the façades of Web 1.0’s finest. This was before they were mercilessly devoured by the tracking devices … ahem … “social sharing buttons” of people farmers like Google and Facebook.
There was also once a push for browsers to auto-detect and expose RSS feeds. Currently, none of the major browsers appears to do so.
Google ostensibly killed Reader because of declining usage, but it was a self-inflicted wound. A 2011 redesign removed all its social features, replaced with Google+ integration, destroying an amazing community in the process.
The audience for Google Reader would never be as large or as active as modern social networks, but it was a critical and useful tool for independent writers and journalists, and for the dedicated readers who subscribed to their work.
There are great feedreaders out there — I use Feedly myself, but people love Newsblur, Feedbin, Inoreader, The Old Reader, etc. But Google Reader was a community and not easily replaced. Google fragmented an entire ecosystem, for no good reason, and it never recovered.
Badges, buttons, and links to RSS feeds used to be all over the web; now, they’re almost like a nerd calling card — it’s an indication that a website is cool with an audience reading new material on their terms. I’d like to think there’s a certain confidence in a website indicating to its readers that it doesn’t need a precise count of how many people visited the website, nor does it need all the tracking and surveillance nonsense that comes with that.
Russian writer Varlam Shalamov spent 15 years, from 1937 to 1951, in a Soviet gulag (forced labor camp) for engaging in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities”. He wrote a book of short fiction about his experience called Kolyma Stories. He also wrote down 45 things he learned while in the gulag.
1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.
15. I realized that one can live on anger.
17. I understood why people do not live on hope — there isn’t any hope. Nor can they survive by means of free will — what free will is there? They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.
26. I realized that you can achieve a great deal-time in the hospital, a transfer-but only by risking your life, taking beatings, enduring solitary confinement in ice.
30. I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.
44. I understood that moving from the condition of a prisoner to the condition of a free man is very difficult, almost impossible without a long period of amortization.
I like paying for my software when I’m buying it from a company that’s responsive, fast and focused. I like being the customer (as opposed to a social network, where I’m the product). I spend most of my day working with tools that weren’t even in science fiction novels twenty-five years ago, and the money I spend on software is a bargain–doing this work without it is impossible.
One of the reasons that I switched from Linx to OSX was so that I could pay for more of my software. Why? Because then I more of the software I used could be maintained by someone who had the time to dig into bugs and UI problems and to fix them. But in Linux, couldn’t I just edit the source myself? Realistically, no. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to source-dive in a totally new project in a language I never use, especially without someone willing to give me a walkthrough of the architecture and fundamental models of the program. It is waaaay more efficient for these to be fixed by an engineer working not in their spare time, but as their full-time job.
Kombucha’s unlikely rise from Soviet elixir to modern-day miracle drink
In May of 1995, Ruth Patras realized that something was wrong with her 5-week-old daughter, Ciara. Initially happy and healthy, about a month after Ciara was born, the whites of her eyes started to turn yellow. Over the next few days, the color deepened, and her appetite diminished. Patras took Ciara to her pediatrician, who sent the family to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Tests revealed that Ciara had biliary atresias, a rare liver disease in which the ducts that pass bile from the liver to the gallbladder and the first section of the small intestine become blocked. Bile serves two functions in the body, helping to digest fat and carry waste out of the liver. When trapped, the excess bile damages liver cells, eventually leading to liver failure.
Doctors told Patras that the only hope for Ciara was a complex surgery known as the Kasai procedure, in which the gallbladder and bile ducts are removed and the liver is connected directly to the small intestine. The Kasai procedure is hardly a cure, though: It’s only successful 30 to 50 percent of the time, and when it fails, patients need a liver transplant as early as age 1 or 2; even when it works, around three-quarters of patients still require a liver transplant by their 20th birthday.
After the procedure, doctors explained, the rest was up to Ciara’s immune system. Hearing this, Patras felt the first spark of hope she’d had since the diagnosis. She walked out of the room, away from other shell-shocked parents, to the pay phone at the end of the hall, where she called her husband. She told him that she was bringing the baby home that weekend, and that he needed to open a package that was waiting on the kitchen counter.
While pregnant with Ciara, Patras had heard a guest on the daytime talk show Leeza discussing a drink that could boost the immune system. Patras had already lost her mother, uncle, several aunts, and both grandmothers to cancer, so strengthening her immune system seemed appealing. She ordered a kit to make the beverage, a fermented tea called kombucha.
Through the confusing whirlwind of doctor’s appointments leading up to Ciara’s diagnosis, Patras began bottle-feeding kombucha to her sick child. One week after Ciara underwent the Kasai procedure, Patras continued the kombucha regimen. Ciara’s pediatrician objected, but within a few weeks, bile began to drain from her liver, and in follow-up exams, Ciara’s liver appeared softer and smaller. Patras knew this could be the result of a successful Kasai procedure, but suspected that, somehow, the kombucha was involved. She waited nearly a year before telling Ciara’s pediatrician about it again. When she did, the doctor ordered her to stop giving it to Ciara immediately. “She actually reprimanded me,” Patras told me.
The doctor said that there was no scientific evidence for kombucha’s safety or efficacy, but Patras didn’t need any: Her daughter’s health was proof enough.
Some $600 million worth of kombucha was sold last year, peddled everywhere from bodegas to bars to Bed Bath & Beyond. It’s on tap at cool coffee shops; it’s in your neighbor’s fridge; it’s on Entourage and The Mindy Project and Flaked. Its ubiquity in post-Portlandia America has been largely powered by the reverberations of the claims that attracted Patras over 20 years ago: that it supports digestion, metabolism, cell integrity, immunity, appetite control, weight control, liver function, and healthy skin and hair — or as artsy labels put it today, by promises that it will “rejuvenate, restore, revitalize, recharge, rebuild, regenerate, replenish, regain, rebalance, renew.”
A small fraction of today’s kombucha drinkers consume it in hopes of curing cancer or alleviating psoriasis. The vast majority are just taking part in the recent aspirational hegemony of “wellness” — the cultural tidal wave that has given us skincare as coping mechanism, turmeric lattes with almond milk, and brain dust — hoping that kombucha might be part of the recipe, whether it balances their microbiome or simply boosts their energy levels.
Bruce Chassy, a professor emeritus in the department of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there’s a short explanation for why people have turned to kombucha to be healthy, or at least for a whiff of wellness: “More and more people are mistrusting of many, many different things, whether it’s politicians or corporations or traditional medicine.”
Americans are choosing to believe in their intuition, to choose whole foods and natural products instead of processed foods and pills. “The more important part of this is that people have changed remarkably in what they will consider as evidence or reason for forming an idea about something,” Chassy says. “We’re inundated with information and conflicting claims. People are believing what they want to believe, and ignoring the rest.” (Case in point: The debate over genetically modified organisms, in which Chassy is embroiled after documents showed that he accepted money from Monsanto even while presenting himself as an independent academic researcher.) Seeded by dubious prophets with tidings of good health, and stoked by thrifty entrepreneurs, the kombucha phenomenon took root in America at a perfect moment — just as some people began to lose trust in modern medicine and wanted to believe in something more.
A few months before Ruth Patras heard kombucha touted on a daytime talk show, a group of housemates in Portland, Oregon, tried it for the first time after a friend left some behind. One of them, Robert Deering, was especially intrigued. Deering holds a BS in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a master’s in microbiology from the University of Washington; after grad school, he spent a few years working in a cancer research lab in Seattle before moving to Portland. Curiosity led him to the library at nearby Portland State, where he found a 1940s book on fermentation with a short section on kombucha. It explained that kombucha starts with a SCOBY — a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast — which forms in the organic compound cellulose.
In your hand, a SCOBY feels like Play-Doh that’s soaked in water; in the bottom of your glass, it looks about as appetizing as a loogie. Kombucha is produced when a SCOBY is combined with sugar and brewed tea — black, oolong, or green, as long it’s from the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. The entire process takes about two weeks. First, the sugar and hot tea are combined. Once the sweetened tea has cooled, an acidifier — often matured kombucha — can be added to prevent unfriendly bacteria. Then the SCOBY is placed on top and the container is covered with a breathable cloth, so that air can get in but dust and fruit flies can’t. As the SCOBY lowers the pH of the sweetened tea, its rising acidity kills off pathogenic bacteria, and acid-tolerant microbes consume the oxygen in it, beginning fermentation. When the oxygen is gone, the yeast starts breaking down the sugar, converting it to alcohol; the bacteria in the SCOBY then breaks that down to form various acids, resulting in the final product: kombucha. It smells like diluted vinegar and malty yeast, and when poured into a glass, it bubbles like champagne. Once bottled, the bubbles remain, making it more interesting than water, less sweet than juice, and less potent than soda.
Deering learned that no two SCOBYs are exactly the same, and no two batches of kombucha are exactly alike, in part because each batch picks up different yeast microbes from the air. Room temperature and the water also affect the flavor, the speed of fermentation, and the development of gases. Alcohol continues forming as long as there is yeast and sugar in the mixture, so the final alcohol content depends on when the SCOBY is removed, or when the kombucha is pasteurized. If kept unpasteurized, or raw, fermentation continues, and so does alcohol production. When treated properly, each SCOBY can be used to start a new batch — or two, because every few days SCOBYs sprout a thin layer of cellulose that easily peels off the bottom and can be used on its own.
Science has yet to offer a better explanation of how kombucha develops than what Deering found in that 70-year-old book, and no one has definitively determined where the first SCOBY came from — only that kombucha has almost always been synonymous with miraculous health claims.
Egyptologist Zahi Hawass once claimed kombucha was first brewed during the reign of Khufu, who commissioned the Great Pyramid, around 2500 BCE; The Big Book of Kombucha points to a legend claiming it originated in northern China in the third century BCE, but wasn’t regularly consumed there until the seventh century CE at the earliest; authors Harald Tietze, Andra Anastazia Malczewski, and Marie Nadine Antol each claim a Korean physician named Kom-bu brought it to Japan in 414 CE, as he attempted to treat the Emperor Inkyo’s various disorders. Some say Genghis Khan’s armies carried it west, others say it traveled along the Silk Road. Whatever its ancient origins, German scientists were referencing it in their work by the 1850s.
Dozens of far-fetched stories detail the drink’s healing powers. In one tale, people live to over 100 in the 8,500-person village of Kargasok on the Ob River because they drink kombucha. There, legend has it that kombucha allowed an 80-year-old woman to give birth to her first child, fathered by a 130-year-old man. Russian and German doctors mentioned kombucha in more than 100 publications between 1917 and 1935. During that time, it came to be known as the “tea of immortality” in various parts of Europe; in France, it was known as l’élixir de longue vie.
These claims traveled predominantly by word-of-mouth, including informational leaflets, until 1994, when Tietze, a German-born kombucha drinker, perpetuated its mythos in a dubiously sourced book called Kombucha: The Miracle Fungus, which claimed to summarize the various medical benefits that European doctors, as well as people who wrote him letters, ascribed to kombucha — and which devoted kombucha drinkers once pointed to as evidence of its medical efficacy. Tietze describes, for instance, a 1987 study by Reinhold Weisner, a possibly made-up physician and biologist working in Bremen, Germany, who conducted a trial with 246 patients to compare kombucha treatment with Interferon, a common immune-boosting drug used in the treatment of various illnesses. According to Tietze, Weisner found kombucha more effective in treating asthma, 92 percent as effective in treating rheumatism, and 89 percent as effective on kidney disorders. (“There’s a long history of bad studies coming out of the former Soviet Union,” Chassy notes. “The medicine was deeply rooted in folk beliefs, and what they wanted to come out influenced what came out.”)
Tietze questionably claims that kombucha made its first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on the strength of those Soviet health studies, when Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with cancer in 1985. According to Tietze’s fantastical account, Reagan read the semi-autobiographical novel of Nobel Prize recipient Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and credited kombucha with helping him overcome cancer in the 1950s; inspired, Reagan acquired a SCOBY from Japan and started drinking a liter of kombucha every day, stopping the cancer from spreading. (Reagan in fact had a polyp and two feet of his lower intestine surgically removed.)
The White House has never confirmed whether Reagan drank kombucha, and it’s not mentioned in any official biographies — if he did drink it, he was one of the few known to do so outside niche hippie communities in the U.S. until 1992, when it emerged on the alternative health scene in California. (A mycologist in Olympia, Washington, once told the New York Times that a pharmaceutical company asked him to research kombucha in 1980.) That year, a German-born instructor offered it to a class at an LA meditation center, saying it would “help heal the planet.” In that meditation group was a graphic designer named Betsy Pryor, who might have been the first person to commercialize kombucha in the U.S. “One evening after class, where I’d silently asked God to help me keep people alive ... the meditation instructor emerged from the center kitchen clutching an odd, pancake-looking thing encased in a clear plastic bag,” Pryor wrote on her now-defunct website. “[The instructor] paused, looking at me intently. ‘It’s going to help heal the planet.’ A few weeks after I started to drink the Kombucha Tea, I felt like I’d been reborn.” An immediate believer, Pryor and her partner began selling SCOBYs by mail order the next year, charging $50, or $15 if a customer was ill. A sticker on each package said to “Expect a Miracle,” and Pryor repeated this claim in various interviews.
The next year, 1993, kombucha appeared in a lengthy feature in a bimonthly health magazine in Florida, and by 1994, the New York Times reported, Pryor’s company, Laurel Farms, was selling more than 400 SCOBYs a month and fielding at least a hundred calls a day. It became especially popular within the HIV/AIDS community after an article in the November 1994 issue of New Age Journal detailed the story of an HIV-positive man who claimed kombucha had boosted his T-cell count, among other life-changing improvements. A month after the article was published, a doctor at the Pacific Oaks Medical Group in LA estimated that at least 15 to 20 percent of AIDS patients were experimenting with it. By the end of that year, with believers able to purchase SCOBYs at health food stores from Manhattan to LA or by mail order, kombucha’s reputation as a modern philosopher’s stone seemed to have cemented itself.
And that’s when it nearly all came undone. By December, a New York Times headline asked whether kombucha was “A Magic Mushroom or a Toxic Fad?” That same month, the FDA’s Los Angeles spokeswoman, Rosario Vior, told the Washington Post, “You have to ask, if this stuff is so wonderful, why don’t the medical professionals know about it?”
The concerns seemed to be validated a few months later, when a woman named Lila Mae Williamson died one month shy of her 60th birthday in the conservative farming community of Spencer, Iowa. Williamson had been taking medications for seizures, diabetes, hypertension, and other ills when her son told her that a tax client had informed him that kombucha would cure all of her aches and pains, and boost her energy. She started drinking 4 ounces a day and reported that her mood was improving and some of the aches were subsiding. Her daughter Vonada thought it was “bullshit,” she told me, but there was no changing her mother’s mind.
On April 1, Williamson passed out near her bathtub. A neighbor found her and called 911; two days later, she died. Doctors said she’d suffered from severe lactic acidosis, or excess levels of lactic acid in the bloodstream; the coroner listed the official cause of death as peritonitis, an inflammation of the thin abdominal lining than can be a precursor to sepsis. When FDA investigators asked Vonada if her mother had recently changed anything in her diet, one thing came to mind: kombucha.
One week later, a 49-year-old woman, also from Spencer, entered the ER. She was having difficulty breathing, which doctors attributed to acute pulmonary edema, and her lactic acid levels were even higher than Williamson’s. She went into cardiac arrest, but was revived and went home two days later. She too had recently started drinking kombucha. Investigators later found that of the area’s 10,000 residents, several hundred people had tried kombucha tea, and about 80 percent of them had become “committed drinkers,” according to a Washington Post story published at the time.
The FDA and CDC investigated both incidents, but didn’t find a conclusive link between the symptoms and kombucha. Regardless, a spokesman for the Iowa Department of Health told the Post, “We are still suspicious of it.” On April 10, 1995, the department issued a news release recommending “that persons refrain from drinking kombucha tea until the role of the tea in the two cases of illness had been evaluated fully.”
In another, more recent era, perhaps news of a pair of incidents in Iowa and a strongly worded warning from the health department would have spread, and smothered the American kombucha trend just as it was beginning to go mainstream. But kombucha’s march to ubiquity never even slowed down. Robert Deering, after many more nights at the Portland State library studying kombucha, had launched Oocha Brew, the first bottled kombucha brand in the U.S., just a few months prior. The label originally said “sparkling tea” — the word “fermented” was purposefully left off the bottle because the company didn’t want to scare off potential customers outside of alternative health circles. It worked: A growing grocery chain called Whole Foods became interested in distributing it.
On the night of November 16, 1995, Steve Lee was a dinner guest at the home that his Russian business partner, Peter Lisovski, shared with his mother in St. Petersburg. They lived in a nine-story Soviet-era building, where the hallways reeked of urine. As they finished dinner, Lee excused himself to use the bathroom. On the short walk through the starkly furnished apartment, he passed Mrs. Lisovski’s bedroom. The door was wide open, and he couldn’t resist peeking inside. There, he spotted a single bed, the corners of a drab wool blanket tucked neatly under the mattress. On the metal nightstand he saw a gallon-sized glass jug filled with dark liquid, the opening at the top covered with cheesecloth. A thick, whitish blob floated near the surface. When he returned to the table, Lee asked his host about the contents of the jug. Mrs. Lisovski hesitated at first, but eventually, with her son translating, she explained that the liquid inside the jug was “mushroom tea.”
Mrs. Lisovski seemed surprised by Lee’s interest. To her, mushroom tea, or kombucha, was simply part of everyday life. She had been drinking it since 1939, when her great-aunt gave her a slice of a SCOBY. After her husband was killed in one of Stalin’s gulags, Mrs. Lisovski carried the culture as she moved her family from Siberia to Petrograd (which is now St. Petersburg). She offered Lee a piece to take back to Portland. That evening, he wrote in his journal: “Introduced to ‘mushroom tea,’ a fermented tea. Strange, unique old world taste allowing for a clear light headed feeling.”
Lee had made his fortune in tea: Inspired in 1971 by the herbs, spices, and teas displayed in a department called “Gates of Eden” in Portland’s first health food store, he went on to establish what would become the world’s largest mail-order tea company in the 1970s, and co-founded Tazo, a high-end tea company, in 1993. He was in Russia to develop a Russian tea label. As he boarded his flight home two days later, he carried a piece of the SCOBY wrapped in tinfoil. Before settling in, Lee asked the stewardess to place the package in the mini fridge. Lee and his “mushroom” were bound for Portland. He made a few batches at home but eventually let the SCOBY die, and thought that was the end of his ventures in kombucha.
A year or two later, Lee found kombucha being served at a ballet festival in Portland, by Robert Deering’s Oocha Brew. The scale of the health claims, that this drink was a cure-all, reminded Lee of the hype surrounding plain old tea back in the 1960s and ’70s. “If you were sick, have tea; if you were well, have tea. Need a pickup? Have tea,” he recalled. He looked around for other brands, road-tripping along the West Coast to speak with the owners of natural food stores to see if they knew about kombucha and if they would sell it. Along the way, he discovered a teenager in Beverly Hills who had launched GT’s Kombucha after his mother, Laraine, said that drinking kombucha had helped her beat breast cancer. GT Dave was selling his brew in “ugly salad jars” with no branding, Lee said. Sensing a business opportunity, Lee contacted the brewers he’d met at the festival. He planned to offer to invest. No one called back.
Lee tried again in 1999, and this time heard back from Deering, who reported that Oocha Brew had folded. The company nearly landed a deal with Whole Foods, he explained, but it had eventually fallen apart because the chain wanted to pasteurize the drink to keep it within the FDA’s specifications for non-alcoholic beverages. Oocha Brew was too small to take on the expensive process of pasteurization, and it eventually sank the entire company. A few months later, Deering joined Lee and a few other partners to launch Kombucha Wonder Drink, which they decided to pasteurize. (That same year, Starbucks bought Tazo for $8.1 million.)
With a label that featured the phrase, “A Legendary Health Drink,” KWD hit stores in June 2001, first in Portland and then slowly along the West Coast. Sales were strong — “like hot cakes,” Lee said — in the first year, but started to slow as the novelty wore off. Kombucha brewers struggled to gain fans outside of the health market. “People would spit it out and cough,” Lee says. “Every time someone spit it out, I’d hear that voice. ‘What are you doing, Steve? What are you doing, Steve?’”
Lee and Deering stuck with it, though, and their product led the market for a few years. By 2002, a bunch of regional brands were available, all selling unpasteurized kombucha. GT’s, which had grown out of its ugly salad jar days to become the number-two bottled kombucha brand in the country, remained confident that raw, not pasteurized, was the only way to maintain the drink’s integrity. In the mid-2000s, this decision paid off during a resurgence in the raw food craze — people were running scared from carbohydrates and sugar, avoiding soda at all costs. Probiotics were trendy, which made raw kombucha, with its probiotic claims, seem like the gold standard. By 2003, Whole Foods was no longer concerned with pasteurizing, and GT’s quickly took over as market leader, helped along by photos of Madonna, Reese Witherspoon, and Halle Berry sipping from the colorful bottles, touting the transformative healing powers of a raw diet in magazines; mainstream media outlets reported that Paramount Studios ordered GT’s by the case.
As suddenly as being raw had boosted GT’s to the top of the kombucha pack, that decision threatened the entire burgeoning industry. In mid-2010, an inspector with the Maine Department of Agriculture’s consumer protection unit noticed a few leaking bottles while performing a routine inspection at the Whole Foods in Portland, Maine. He decided to send the bottles to the food sciences lab at the University of Maine, where test results showed alcohol levels ranging from about 0.5 percent to over 2.5 percent. Several state chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous had also reportedly complained to Whole Foods. On June 15, 2010, Whole Foods stores nationwide removed all kombucha from their shelves, replacing displays with small laminated notes explaining that the stores were looking into “slightly elevated alcohol levels in some products.” Within days, tabloids reported that drinking kombucha had set off actress Lindsay Lohan’s alcohol-monitoring anklet.
Testing of various raw brands revealed alcohol levels as high as 3 percent, far above the Federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau limit of 0.5 percent for non-alcoholic beverages. In comparison, the alcohol level in a can of Coors Light is 4.2 percent; in glasses of red wine, it varies from 11 to 14 percent. Deering and Lee’s Kombucha Wonder Drink was the only one left in stores, because it was pasteurized. Several regional kombucha companies went out of business, unable to afford the heavy bills associated with refining their production processes. Others applied for approval to be sold as alcoholic beverages. GT’s fought the new rules at first, but eventually adjusted its process enough to meet the appropriate alcohol levels. (The company says it still does not pasteurize.) A few brands were back on the shelves by the end of the summer; for others, including GT’s, it took several months. Still, the stable of believers had grown strong enough that the burgeoning industry survived.
Then came what could’ve been a fatal blow: Just as sales started to recover from the alcohol-related ban in September 2010, a woman in California sued the GT’s parent company for personal injury brought on by false advertising. “This lawsuit is intended to put an end to the deceptive, misleading, unfair, unlawful labeling and advertising of GT’s Organic Raw Kombucha and Synergy,” stated the complaint.
The woman had been drawn to the product because the label promoted kombucha as “wonder drinks that possess amazing health benefits.” She then discovered that “available scientific evidence does not substantiate claims that kombucha-based beverages ... possess any of those health benefits,” and that GT’s, which had conducted no trials that would support the claims, was a “scheme to deceive consumers.” The complaint concluded that she wouldn’t have purchased the bottles if she’d known that the health claims were not scientifically supported.
When a similar claim was filed against Honest Kombucha, the label produced by Coca-Cola subsidiary Honest Tea, Honest Tea settled out of court and discontinued the Honest Kombucha line soon after. The reward was not enough for a corporation to justify the risk. GT Dave, however, beholden only to himself, his employees, and his customers, forged ahead, settling out of court while continuing to tout kombucha as the miracle that saved his mother’s life. By then, the story of kombucha as a cure for cancer hardly mattered; for the general consumer, it was enough to know that kombucha might do something for their health.
Perhaps the only kombucha study that meets today’s scientific standards came out in the September 2000 issue of Nutrition. A team of researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks department of psychology gave kombucha to a group of lab mice. Male mice that drank kombucha lived 5 percent longer than males that didn’t drink kombucha; for females, kombucha extended life by 2 percent. Kombucha also inhibited weight gain, even though kombucha-drinking mice ate and drank more than those that didn’t drink it. The authors speculated that this could be due to the free xanthines — naturally occurring chemical compounds with the same base as caffeine — in the kombucha stimulating the metabolism. The tea leaves are likely the source of the xanthines, as xanthines are found in green, black, and oolong tea. These results were in line with anecdotal health claims, but that’s not all the study found. The mice that were treated with kombucha also developed smaller brains and larger livers and spleens, which are all associated with poor health in humans.
Subsequent studies on mice, rats, and human tissue cells have concluded that antioxidant molecules and detoxifying agents that form during fermentation — polyphenols, flavonoids, lactic and glucaric acids, and others — may offer health benefits. A 2001 study showed that after drinking kombucha for 15 days, rats exhibited less stress and had healthier livers. According to one study, kombucha can fight off H. pylori, the bacteria that causes 90 percent of stomach ulcers. There is some additional evidence that kombucha might be useful in treating obesity and diabetes. In 2012, researchers in Tunisia found that over the course of 30 days, kombucha tea suppressed blood glucose levels of diabetic rats by inhibiting pancreatic activity and easing the digestion of carbohydrates. In both studies, kombucha delayed the absorption of LDL cholesterol (the bad stuff) and increased that of HDL (the good stuff). The researchers concluded that kombucha has cholesterol-lowering effects. Still, these studies do little to explain what kombucha does in the human body, as is true of all animal studies.
It’s possible, too, that humans experience a placebo-like effect, or that people drinking kombucha simply eat healthier in general. Until a clinical study is done on humans, it’s impossible to say if any of these findings pertain to our digestive process. It’s similarly impossible to say that kombucha has detrimental effects on humans, despite efforts to prove as much. The Journal of General Internal Medicine noted in 1997 that two people had allergic reactions, one developed jaundice, and one had nausea, vomiting, and head and neck pain after drinking kombucha. But at the end of the report, the doctors noted, “We have no evidence for the mechanisms of the side effects, or whether they are related to the Kombucha [sic] or to a contaminant.” In 2004, a 53-year-old man developed severe muscle weakness about two weeks after he started drinking a variant of kombucha involving milk. In 2009, a 22-year-old HIV-positive man developed hyperthermia, lactic acidosis, and acute renal failure within hours of drinking kombucha. The subsequent Journal of Intensive Care Medicine report warned against consuming the drink. But all of these links were tenuous, reaching the same conclusion as the investigation into Lila Mae Williamson’s 1995 death: None definitively proved that kombucha was dangerous.
Deering, who eventually left KWD and is now an eighth-grade science teacher outside of Portland, has a theory for how kombucha made it so far. He chalks up the incredible health claims to the lack of nutrition in centuries past. “Through much of the time where you have this association with it being a health tonic, nutrition was not great,” he explains. “A lot of people were low on B vitamins.” Fermentation produces B vitamins, so, he adds, it’s not surprising that people felt healthier when they ate and drank foods that provided the vitamins they lacked. It’s hard to say if kombucha really produces the same health benefits today because there are fewer nutritional holes in the modern Western diet. With a stilted laugh, Deering adds: “The best health benefit is drinking kombucha instead of drinking soda pop. That stuff is poison.” Dr. Oz, the cardiologist-turned-miracle-cure-peddler, expressed a similar sentiment on an episode of his show, telling viewers, “Swap soda for kombucha and you’ll lose 7 pounds this year, with no effort.”
Until kombucha is studied more rigorously, says Chassy, the food scientist, there is no reason to believe that it has health benefits. Lee, who wrote a kombucha recipe book called Kombucha Revolution published in 2014, thinks that studies will eventually support the claims surrounding kombucha. But he doesn’t think it matters anymore. As long as people continue to feel overwhelmed by the constant assault of information that is modern life, it’s likely that the general public will continue to choose intuition over scientific evidence. Experts are on his side, predicting that annual kombucha sales will top $1.8 billion by 2020. That’s a lot of believers.
Ciara Patras’s current physician won’t say that kombucha has helped her, but the doctor is at least willing to write a prescription for kombucha when Ciara is traveling, so that she’ll never be without the drink her family believes saved her life. Where once Ruth had to ship SCOBYs and kombucha brewing instructions to other desperate parents of children battling biliary atresia, she can now just guide them to their local supermarkets, where they can purchase their own pre-brewed bottles of Ciara’s Kombucha. As kombucha made the jump from brewers’ basements to the shelves of mainstream grocery chains, Patras launched the brand in order to ensure that all consumers have access to “authentic” kombucha. Ciara still drinks nearly 32 ounces of her namesake kombucha every day. Unlike most people with biliary atresia, she has never needed a liver transplant. “She doesn’t need treatments,” says Patras. “She just drinks kombucha tea.”
Danielle Elliot is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. Chrissy Curtin is an illustrator based in Ireland. Fact checked by Samantha Schuyler Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11955949/872279522.jpg.jpg)
Michael Cohen/Getty Images/The New York Times
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10603279/4.KombuchaNeue_SPOT1revised_300DPIrgb600x800_chrissycurtin.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10603273/3.KombuchaNeue_INTERIOR2_300DPIrgb3197x1800_chrissycurtin.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10603287/2.KombuchaNeue_INTERIOR1_300DPIrgb3197x1800_chrissycurtin.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10603283/5.KombuchaNeue_SPOT2_300DPIrgb600x800_chrissycurtin.jpg)