Rocking

On the chance that you missed the Oscars (and odds are pretty good you did, as this was the lowest-viewed Oscar telecast in quite a while), it’s still worth taking a moment to read Chris Rock’s scathing opening monologue.

Consider this no-punches-pulled excerpt:

“It’s the 88th Academy Awards. It’s the 88th Academy Awards, which means this whole no black nominees thing has happened at least 71 other times. O.K.?

You gotta figure that it happened in the 50s, in the 60s — you know, in the 60s, one of those years Sidney didn’t put out a movie. I’m sure there were no black nominees some of those years. Say ‘62 or ‘63, and black people did not protest.

Why? Because we had real things to protest at the time, you know? We had real things to protest; you know, we’re too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer.

You know, when your grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short.”

At a later point, Rock asks, “Is Hollywood racist? You’re damn right Hollywood is racist. But it ain’t that racist that you’ve grown accustomed to. Hollywood is sorority racist. It’s like, ‘We like you Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa.'”

Which, based on my time in that world, rings totally true.

Interestingly, the tech world, which has it’s own issues with lack of diversity, often seems to be racist in the same way. Quietly racist: ‘but it’s a level playing field – it’s a meritocracy; and, look, I have black friends!’ Which, in a world of shootings and #blacklivesmatter, is far easier to ignore.

So, as a really, really white dude (though, look, I have black friends!), I applaud Rock for sticking his neck out last night. It pissed off a slew of people. But it’s a conversation this country badly needs to play out.

Hippos on Holiday

Each year, with the Oscars upon us, I miss working in film. But, really, it’s watching movies that I most enjoy, that feeling of being sucked for a short time into a different world. And regardless of where I am, of what I’m working on, I can still relish that pleasure. A movie ticket is a remarkably inexpensive luxury. And I can call entire libraries of them up to my home TV screen just by clicking play.

“Hippos on Holiday”
by Billy Collins

is not really the title of a movie
but if it were I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theatre.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?

Entrepreneurial Time Management, Redux

About six months ago, I wrote about Dan Sullivan’s Entrepreneurial Time Management System. Since then, I’ve drifted away from the approach a handful of times. And, each time, like noticing attention drifting away from the breath while meditating and then refocusing on it, I’ve noted a drop in my work output, switched back to Sullivan’s approach, and been pleasantly surprised anew at both how much more I get done, and how much less stressed I feel.

Since the prior post, My only real change is a reorganization of when the different types of days fall in my average week. Instead of using Buffer days on Tuesday and Thursday to break up Monday, Wednesday and Friday Focus days, I now make Monday and Friday the Buffers, and do Focus work Tuesday-Thursday.

That uninterrupted stretch of really getting down to it seems to help hugely in terms of work output. And it dovetails well with a slew of additional suggestions from my friend Cal Newport’s great new book Deep Work, which is also worth a read.

As this is a Focus day, back to work!

Broscience

broscience

A few weeks ago, I took a look at science, and at how it should form the basis of fitness and health decision-making.

But in the fitness world, there’s ‘real science,’ and then there’s ‘bro science,’ which Urban Dictionary defines as “the predominant brand of reasoning in bodybuilding circles, where the anecdotal reports of jacked dudes are considered more credible than scientific research.”

Oh, bros. Thinking they know stuff!

But it turns out, they actually do know some stuff.

Sometimes, they even know stuff that’s not just correct, but actually ahead of the curve. Stuff that simply hasn’t yet been picked up and researched by (non-bro) scientists.

Consider a piece of bodybuilding wisdom that’s long been poo-pooed by the kinesiological establishment: that different movements hit different parts of the same muscle. For example, bodybuilders have long claimed that the regular bench press predominantly hits the outer pec, while flyes and close-grip bench presses are needed to pump the inner pec.

For years, physiologists explained that’s just not how muscles work. When you work out your pectoral muscle, you work out the whole thing. Your pec shape is largely genetic, and though you can make the muscle bigger, you’re only making it a bigger version of that genetically-determined shape.

More recently, however, research has shown that you actually can build different parts of the muscle preferentially. (Here’s a good review paper.) Muscles are made up of a number of different kinds of tissues, and even individual muscle cells have multiple nuclei across their lengths.

As the review puts it, “an individual muscle cannot be simplistically described as a compilation of muscle fibers that span from origin to insertion.” The review concludes, “electromyographic data indicate that there is selective recruitment of different regions of a muscle that can be altered, depending on the type of exercise performed. Longitudinal resistance-training studies also demonstrate that individual muscles as well as groups of synergist muscles adapt in a regional-specific manner.”

In other words, the bros were right.

So do we listen to the scientists, or do we listen to the meatheads?

My answer: you need to listen to both. At Composite, we scour the current published research to develop a base of practice. But we also follow trends from the in-the-trenches strength and conditioning community, to find new ideas that might be worth testing, too. From there, we take science in our own hands.

In the tech world, constant rigorous experimentation is nearly ubiquitous. If you’re running a Facebook ad, for example, you’d start with a handful of versions of an ad, and A/B test their click-through rates against each other, iteratively selecting the best performers, then testing them against similar variants based on those best performers to see if you can continue to incrementally tweak results.

The same thing works with fitness, too. By taking new ideas, whether from science science or bro-science, and structuring them into periodized cycles of implementation, we can test them head-to-head against our current best practices, within randomly-assigned portions of our client base. Because our workouts are heavily quantified, and because we track results-focused biomarkers, we can then empirically see what actually works.

From there, we can take the most successful approaches, make them our new best practices, and continue to evolve forward by testing additional new ideas.

Sure, all that testing takes a lot of work. As does keeping up with a slew of science journals, and with new on-the-ground innovations in the strength and training world. But we think the improved results yielded more than make up for the effort. As Bruce Lee put it: “Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.” That’s what Composite is all about.

The Oven of Akhnai

Though I consider Judaism a strong part of my identity, I’m also, at best, agnostic. Fortunately, Judaism gives plenty of space for questioning; it’s a religion based on the primacy of action, rather than, as with Christianity, the primacy of belief. Sort of a ‘feel the doubt, and do it anyway’ setup. Even the name Israel, for example, literally means ‘he who wrestles with God.’

So I’ve always particularly loved the story of the Oven of Akhnai, which appears in the Babylonian Talmud [Baba Metzia 59b], a record of the leading rabbis of the 2nd century discussing and interpreting the Torah and Jewish law. At it’s core, it’s a story about Judaism being in the hands of its practitioners, rather than in the hands of an unquestionable, all-knowing God.

The story centers around an innovative clay oven, built with layers of sand in between each of the clay coils, rather than with the clay coils placed directly upon one another, as was the standard construction at the time.

Usually, cooking non-kosher food in an oven would render the oven non-kosher. But Rabbi Eliezer, one of the sages featured in the Talmud, argues that this new sand-separated oven is different. Because each of the coils doesn’t qualify as a cooking utensil on its own, and because the sand between the coils keeps the oven from being a single unit, then the oven can’t be rendered non-kosher.

The dozen other Rabbis, however, disagree. They point out that the outer structure of the oven unifies the coils, making it a single item, regulated by the same laws as any other oven.

The story picks up from there:

It is taught: On that day Rabbi Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument, but the Sages did not accept any of them.

Finally, he said to them: “if the Halakhah (religious law) is in accordance with me, let this carob tree prove it!”

Sure enough the carob tree immediately uprooted itself and walked one hundred cubits, and some say 400 cubits, from its place.

“You cannot prove an argument with a carob tree,” the Sages retorted.

So again Rabbi Eliezer said to them, “if the Halakhah agrees with me, let this stream prove it!”

Sure enough, the stream stopped flowing, and then began to flow backward.

“You cannot prove an argument with a stream,” the Sages rejoined.

Again Rabbi Eliezer urged, “if the Halakhah agrees with me, let the walls of this study hall prove it!”

Sure enough, the walls tilted as if to fall. But Rabbi Joshua rebuked the walls, saying, “when disciples are engaged in a Halakhic dispute, what right have you to interfere?”

In deference to Rabbi Joshua, they did not fall, but in deference to Rabbi Eliezer they did not resume their upright position; they are still standing aslant today.

Rabbi Eliezer then said to the Sages, “if the Halakhah agrees with me, let it be proved from heaven!”

Sure enough, a divine voice cried out, “why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer, with whom the Halakhah agrees?”

Rabbi Joshua stood up and protested, citing Deutoronomy: “‘the Torah is not in heaven’! We pay no attention to a divine voice, because long ago at Mount Sinai, You wrote in your Torah, ‘after the majority must one incline’.”

Bam. Sorry God, but majority rules, and you just got out-voted on this one.

(That said, at least God’s not a sore loser. Later in the Talmud, Rabbi Nathan meets the prophet Elijah, and asks, “what did the Holy One do at that moment?” Elijah replies, “he laughed [with joy], saying, ‘my children have defeated Me, my children have defeated Me.'”)

Florence

With Oscar season well underway, studios are already starting to roll out potential contenders for next year’s awards. Which is how I found a trailer this morning for the inimitable Stephen Frears’ next film, Florence Foster Jenkins:

I am wildly excited about this film, in large part due to having just discovered Jenkins (the person) myself. A socialite and aspiring operatic soprano, she became famous for, according to one biographer, “her complete lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability.”

In case you’re not already familiar with her ‘work,’ I’d highly recommend this stirring rendition of something vaguely resembling Mozart’s “Der Holle Rache:”

Zoinks.

Tender

Over the years, I’ve discovered that most industries have basic pieces of general knowledge, best-practices that are broadly followed, but somehow never make it out to the rest of the world. That’s particularly true on the culinary front, where the way restaurant chefs cook is, in a slew of ways, completely different from what most of us do at home.

So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover the Jaccard a few years back, a handheld device that completely revolutionizes cooking steak. In short, the Jaccard is a stamp-punch of dozens of long thin blades, which you push down repeatedly along the top of an uncooked steak. The small blades break up fibers in the meat, which both leave it far more tender, and prevent those fibers from wringing juice out of the steak as they contract during cooking.

The Jaccard is used nearly universally by steakhouses, but by almost no home cooks. Skip a couple steak dinners out, and cook them at home instead (for those who don’t know how, here’s a short tutorial on pan-roasting from Lobel’s, and a longer, illustrated one on pan-searing from Serious Eats), and your Jaccard will quickly more than pay for itself.

Squared and Infatuated

For years, whenever I traveled around NYC (or the rest of the world), I depended on Yelp to pull up quick hit-lists of places to eat, drink, grab coffee, etc. But in the more recent past, the taste level and discourse of Yelp reviewers seems to have swung down to YouTube-commenter levels. (Relatedly illustrative piece of techno-art: this mashup of the most recent comments from YouTube alongside the most recent comments from Metafilter’s faithfully erudite community.)

Over the same time, however, I started seeing Google search results for bars’ and restaurants’ Foursquare pages. While Foursquare initially launched as a way for people to ‘check in’ at venues (and thereby see if friends might be checked in somewhere nearby), over a decade of use, the app developed an impressive database of reviews and venue-specific tips. About two years ago, Foursquare spun out the check-in functionality to an entirely separate app, Swarm. Foursquare, in turn, became simply a search-engine for places. Based on the quality of the search results I’d been stumbling across, I re-downloaded Foursquare on my phone, and it’s now become my first-pass go-to when trying to pull up a list of spots nearby, whether to find a new restaurant, or to jog my memory about bars I’d visited drunkenly years back and since forgot.

In parallel to Yelp-ing, I’d also long depended on Zagat for more focused restaurant reviews. But once the company was acquired by Google, the whole thing seemed to sort of fall apart. So, instead, I switched over to LocalEats, whose listings of restaurants beloved by local professional reviewers would invariably align with the stuff I already liked in areas I knew well. Because LocalEats skewed towards well-established spots, I also regularly checked in on Eater, to keep up with the cool and new.

A few months ago, however, I discovered the Infatuation. As they put it:

You know the trusted friends you turn to when you need a restaurant suggestion? That’s us. We aren’t “professional” food critics, meaning you won’t hear any pretentious foodie hobnob from us. We also aren’t restaurant industry insiders, nor do we accept invites, comped meals, or solicited reservations. Ever. What we are is a website and mobile app [started] by two guys who wanted to help their friends find not only great restaurants, but the right restaurant to suit their needs on a particular evening. That’s still what The Infatuation is built on today.

With a great new app, The Infatuation has become the second half of my one-two punch (alongside Foursquare) when trying to figure out where to head off to eat.

I highly recommend downloading both apps – The Infatuation and Foursquare – and using them to do the same.