Jack Dorsey Is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As somebody who grew up in Michigan not far from Battle Creek, I've always been interested the history of wacky self-improvement regimes. (You may remember "The Road to Wellville" as one look at that. [1]) E.g., the inventor of Graham flour believed in all sorts of self-harshness: "Graham created a theology and diet aimed at keeping individuals, families, and society pure and healthy - drinking pure water and eating a vegetarian diet anchored by bread made at home from flour coarsely ground at home so that it remained wholesome and natural, containing no added spices or other 'stimulants' and a rigorous lifestyle that included sleeping on hard beds and avoiding warm baths." [2]
I know these things are cyclical, so I expected it to come again. And as a someone who's currently trying eTRF [3] I think there's real value in self-experimentation. But it's really weird to see a full-blown health fad complex turn up in the tech industry where we see ourselves as so very rational.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wellville
John Harvey Kellogg was involved in the weird dietary movements of the era as well. Ran a sort of spa / psych hospital thing, recommended people eat super plain food and chew each bite 45 times, that sort of thing. Tried to make "pre-digested" food which led eventually to Corn Flakes.
Lots of weird health anecdotes out of there. Anything from one of the Kellogg brothers leaving the table during a meal and coming back with a pail of his own fresh shit, inviting others to smell it and describing it as "as if it were a warm loaf of bread," to recommending circumcision in young adults as a preventative measure to masturbation.
Whether you, an outsider, would want to move to a mid-size dying industrial town is also a question worth asking.
Also known as Fletcherizing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher
The book was written a quarter of a century ago, so it's not like this is a parallel T.C. Boyle explicitly set out to draw. It's just striking how these patterns seem to repeat themselves.
I often see the same people falling into fad after fad, first telling me how EMFs are poison and will be looked at like cigarettes in a decade, and how singing bowls realign my spirit, and trying to insist on the power of visualization can cure chronic pain. I'm curious what it is that causes this.
Rituals - even things like having morning coffee or an after work walk are things that I can say calm me down because they require little mental effort. The more you aim for variety the more effort it takes.
Beliefs are like the mental equivalent to acclimating to consistent and unvaried exercise. It stops requiring thought and no longer pushes you to improve.
given the breadth of ideas we are always exposed to now, I'd say that these semi-religious tendencies are defense mechanisms.
I wouldn't be surprised if Dorsey is only 2 degrees removed from Joe Rogan, for example. And in between those 2 degrees there are A LOT of influencers.
My own journey started with leangains (IF) leading into slow carb/keto, Starting Strength, a tourist trip to Iceland, some rabbit hole about xenoestrogens, another one about pesticides (actually that one goes back to Ruth Winter), Joe Rogan, Rhonda Patrick, etc. Something about it lends itself to forming strong opinions, but I know my journey is not very unique and many of you reading can probably relate.
Re-reading my comment I'm also using "invent" colloquially to mean, "start a pop culture trend" - not literally.
This is a really good point. I wonder how much of the nonsense extolled by Dorsey & Paltrow is something they've tried more than once, if at all.
This is the best one-line summary of current buzzwords ever :)))
I'm definitely skeptical of people selling home designed cryochambers, but cold stress seems to have real benefits[0], and I've found that a cold shower or a cold jog (15-30 degrees F) seems to have the benefits described by the adherents.
Similarly, I doubt I'll ever go on any sort of meditation retreat, but I really enjoy using Headspace[1] and I find it helps me focus when I'm otherwise scatterbrained.
Finally, intermittent fasting seems to get a lot of flack for being a veiled eating disorder, but so far as I can tell, putting your body in ketosis through calorie restriction is the only way to reduce body fat. You can cook three low-calorie meals everyday, but that's time consuming and expensive and terribly inconvenient for family meal planning. It's much easier to eat one normal-sized meal and skip the extra meal planning, grocery shopping and preparation required to eat healthy.
So have I drank the Kool-Aid on this stuff? Maybe. But at this point I'd need more evidence to push me off of it, because the evidence that pushed me on to it has been validated by my own results.
[0]https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/cold-stress-hormesis [1]https://www.headspace.com/
- Many of our current, preexisting beliefs about food and nutrition are proving to be extremely flawed and contrived, having essentially been pushed by big-food to drive more consumption of sugar and carbs in our meals as opposed to actually being research-based (just look at the USDA Food pyramid, that puts carbs, almost all simple, as a staple). The emerging research around restricted eating, fasting, and autophagy (research that won a Nobel Prize in 2016) is extremely promising albeit still developing.
- There's real value to proper self-experimentation for helping you discover and build better individual habits and determining what uniquely works for improving your health and wellness, as well as challenge your thinking on your existing beliefs, particularly around nutrition & dieting that tend to be ingrained in you during development. [See gwern's self experiments for some interesting ones](https://gwern.net).
- IMO, the core issue at the root of this rise of the "cult-like influencer" is a lack of accessible academic research (i.e the average person will opt to read blogs over a long, hugely technical research paper) which creates more and more noise and proliferation of misinformation and conflicting health advice.
I also agree there are too many "gurus" out there, and not enough evidence-based places like www.examine.com
Dorsey isn't doing any of this. All he does is have his personal way of living in the world (not that I personally agree with a lot of the things he does). He doesn't sell anything related to his silly behaviors. He doesn't profit from any of his silly behaviors. He's just sharing how he personally lives in the world with other people.
To me, this is VERY different than what Paltrow is doing and the comparison is not a good one.
And it just so happens that Silicon Valley is full of people who are addicted to the sensation of improvement. Eating disorders stem from the same psychological mechanism, just a different definition of "improvement".
But that's not something out culture really allows for or encourages. So we look to miracle cures so we can continue feeling productive.
The local community, where you’d buy your meat from your local butcher that had been in your neighborhood for 15 years, vegetables from the farmers’ market where the produce is all from within a 50 miles radius, where you go to church/temple/etc with the same faces every week, where the teachers and doctors that took care of you now take care of your children, etc, is pretty much dead.
What has replaced it? Amazon Prime, precarious contractor jobs, cheap replaceable crap brought in by cargo ship, startups claiming that they are just like “a family”. Of course this leaves a gap in people’s need for a sense of place and community. Of course it’s the perfect opportunity for charlatans who know how to tap into exactly that.
Long ago, I read this quip: (paraphrased) "Factory farming took a working integrated solution (use livestock waste to fertilize crops on the same diversified farm) and neatly turned it into two problems (where to dump the concentrated livestock waste from one specialized farm, and where to find fertilizer for the crops of another differently specialized farm)."
Seems like a lot of modern "solutions" have the same character.
I think, however, that it is fundamentally about a need to have rituals and routines in one's life.
For some people, this involves making coffee in the morning.
For others, it involves a jog around the block.
For a select few, it involves ice baths and near-infrared saunas and lemon water mixed with Himalayan salt.
I suppose all the Muslims/Christians that observe Ramadan/Lent also have an eating disorder?
However, I fail to see how daily intermittent fasting can be placed in the same category, maybe you can give me some more context here?
Can't understand how people can follow this guy and his trivial/dumb advices. To me, he is just like that person that can't stop blabbering about stuff that has been around for decades but that he has just discovered or one of those people that blindly follow every popular trend (see the ones listed in the article) without even thinking if they really should.
Doesn't quite seem equivalent...
I've come to understand that what I interpreted as "hunger" in the past was basically a sugar craving. I don't know how long it would take real hunger to get to that level, but even in a two-day fast I'd only gotten up to more-or-less "I could eat, yeah"... still a long ways from the hunger I've had in the past.
(Also, my interest in it has actually been coming from the scientific side, rather than the traditional side or crazywhack theory or any sort of Puritan impulse. I have an autoimmune disease, and there's been a lot of interesting work on those and fasting lately.)
Once you start reading about autophagy, fasting doesn't really seem that crazy after all.
Love the author's snark.
>He said the cold therapy gives him a high, as blood rushes to his head and chest, and he believes practitioners are addicted. “I’m addicted straight up, it’s a high and I love it,” Mr. Garrett said.
I never understood paying for cryotherapy - can't the same be accomplished by a cold shower? I definitely love a good cold shower occasionally, seems cold enough to get the blood rush effect (recommended to me by my cardiologist for this exact reason).
Cryo isn't bad if you only have 3 minutes, but if you run the numbers on cryo + add in the tech appeal angle - it's a GREAT business.
I can't remember the exact phrase for this, maybe "cost bias?" Related to, but distinct from, the sunk-cost fallacy.
I would like to try it sometime just to see how it feels.
But to be honest, it's a reasonable reaction to stimuli that are unique to human history. The 24 hour propoganda news cycle, density with increased stressors, cognitive fragmentatiom due to the number of distractions, and an absolutely horrible dietary culture that will lead us to squandering trillions on treating entirely preventable diseases. Not merely monetarily but literally reducing the cognitive potential of entire populations!
I don't see the quackery in adopting working strategies against these challenges. Note, working strategies. Personally implementing the above 3 along with with weightlifting has been like feeling a cold mountain breeze after living in a swamp.
Nietzsche's remarks, on how the priests of the world have ignored and (gravely) trivialized the 3 things that give arise to daily moral/cognitive judgement: Climate, Diet, and Habit, have been in my mind years after reading them. And their validity seems to flower the more experience life throws.
The infrared bulbs may be gimmicky but the rest of his routine seems pretty standard stuff that if more people adopted would lead to an increase in their quality of life.
They are ofrendas [0] which are part of the Day of the Dead celebrations. My understanding is that they are usually reserved for loved ones but beloved public figures are included as well.
People might ask Paltrow too...
Both meditation and fasting have been practiced for thousands of years and have plenty of scientific studies backing up their benefits.
Of course, it's still not really right to disdain people for being overly-optimistic to the point of being gullible.
The comparison would be closer if you were talking about IG fitness influencers selling 'fit tea' and 'all-day energy BBCAs'.
- sleep optimization products (white noise machines, blackout curtains, lucid dreaming BS guides)
- fasting-friendly recipes and nutritional guides
- branded water flasks
etc. etc.
I've seen college kids on IG sell "workout guides" which are basically a Word doc they converted to PDF. They look like models, so polish and presentation of the final product isn't nearly as important as the polish and presentation the influencer put on themselves before going on camera.
When it comes to health, there isn't one. The solutions aren't glamorous, or easy, nor do they guarantee you'll live to 100.
In general, eat less. Whether it's 1 meal a day, or 20, the amount of food you consume now is probably more than you need. When you do eat, eat more vegetables. Eat less meat. Eat healthy fats, less saturated, and trans fats.
Exercise, sometimes vigorously (as age permits).
Sleep well.
That's it. Lemon salt water and infrared bulbs aren't going to move the needle.
Yahoo News calculated it would cost you $300/day to feed your family from her cookbook:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130719034903/http://shine.yaho...
And speaking of Dorsey, this is another crazy article about him:
>Why are Silicon Valley billionaires starving themselves?
>Dorsey recently appeared on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast to explain his monkish lifestyle in more detail than the 240 character blasts he's known for sending out to the less biologically enlightened universe. He says he eats only one meal a day in the week and doesn't let any foodstuff pass his lips at the weekend. He also starts every day with an ice bath. "Nothing has given me more mental confidence than being able to go straight from room temperature into the cold," he says.
https://theweek.com/articles/835226/why-are-silicon-valley-b...
I lost interest in that kind of "information" after middle school.
And "manfluencer"? Really, this is New York Times now? Rhetorical question. Of course it is.
I find it a bit weird as I've not found any folks who I want to emulate what they eat or emulate their lifestyle in general. Granted I'd like to be healthier but that's a thing, not a person.
The traditional form of healthy is avoiding harm; avoiding less than normal health. Ice baths and fasting seem like an attempt to be above the baseline normal healthy. Its an addition instead of avoiding a subtraction.
Steve Jobs had some weirdness / bad choices.
I still wouldn't mind working for them. It's not like you have to do those things or are endorsing them by working there.
Weird folks come up with some good ideas sometimes.
I think of myself as very boring and normal, I'm not coming up with great ideas...
Now WeWork is a place I would never think about working. All catered lunches are vegetarian only and they won't let you expense any meals unless you can prove they were vegetarian. No thank you.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90202356/wework-is-a-vegetarian-...
""" Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. """
I guess our collective intellectual curiosity now amounts to shitting on Dorsey's pretty unremarkable diet.
Was unsure if the article would have any substance after that and, indeed, no substance.
He took a day off, went to a doctor and was told he need to wear a boot, stay off his foot for a while, etc. He proceeds to come into the office, proudly informing everyone how he knows better than the doctor, and that he only needs to rub peppermint oil and wear a compression sock. All while hobbling around the office, clearly in pain. Everyone pleaded with him to heed to the doctor's advice, and I even showed him how I have a messed up arm from a childhood incident that improperly healed and tried explaining the necessity of heeding basic medical guidance.
Didn't matter, this engineer "just knows" better than a doctor.
This is a weird world.
You could even go so far as to say those wielding the term also fall under the term: outside of your expertise, you're assuming engineers shouldn't have bad opinions. There's evidence abound that this is wrong - engineers can have bad opinions just like the general population. Yet some still insist on calling it out as "special" despite presenting no studies showing they're more likely to have these bad opinions.
[1] [PDF] http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf
Not really. Engineer's disease is specific to engineers, because at its core is the implicit belief that engineering (and science/math) is the ur-discipline whose mindset and techniques are universally applicable to all problems. That often comes with the attitude that other mindsets and techniques are inferior (e.g. those from the humanities in particular) and/or that engineers are more competent and can easily master needed parts of other disciplines when they choose (and thus the practitioners of those disciplines have little authority).
(this does seem to apply to "software engineers", too. But maybe I shouldn't elaborate).
OTOH, most of my fellow scientists are pretty chill and readily admit the boundaries of their knowledge.
The mere act of naming an "engineer's syndrome" could arise from the fact it's peculiarly remarkable against type, or satisfying to resentful observers - rather than actually common. And, once named, such a designation would tend to collect confirmation-bias-feeding anecdotal examples.
I've encountered cranks from every walk of life. I see more engineer cranks, too, but that's simply because professionally, I interact with more engineers than, say, hairstylists or bricklayers or actresses. And have you ever let a taxi/uber driver just expound on their confidently-expressed theories-of-the-world?
But without a comparison to the base rate of "off their rockers when it comes to alt medicine" in the general population, that 'many' doesn't mean much. And alternative medicine is very very popular across many populations!
A fracture is totally different and needs different care.
E.g. water mixed with Himalayan salt and lemon in the morning.
And since I'm mentioning it, Himalayan salt is not better than normal salt. It could also contain more contaminants and it has no iodine (that could not be desirable in some countries).
I speak from personal experience...
I drink just water in the morning and I am out to empty my bowels right after. I don't think that has much to do with Himalayan salt.
What does this mixture of himalayan salt and lemon do that causes the diuretic effect?
“For 10 days a year, he sits in silence at a meditation retreat. Before getting dressed each morning, he experiments with using his home infrared sauna and then an ice bath, sometimes cycling through both several times before he leaves home.”
along the same lines.
Or sauna/ice cold baths?
These activities have both been done for decades/centuries and have the backing of scientific studies.
Lemons contain vitamin C, potassium, fiber, etc.
If you are fasting, it may be a good idea to get those electrolytes. Even if not, this seems like a healthy drink; certainly better what I people see drinking at my office.
People might not want to macro dose iodine, so that rules out table salt.
Most importantly: it tastes good!
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_salt
And as far as taste go, I can just taste the lack of iodine.
If I had to recommend an alternative, for those that are not doing IF, eat a kiwi (double the amount of vitamin c, way more fibres) and some nuts (magnesium and potassium).
Selectively enforced skepticism is not real skepticism.
The phrasing seems designed to imply that Free Speech is only for bad people and terrorist propaganda.
The reason why Free Speech is a fundamental human right, is that it keeps powerful people and authorities from squashing dissent. We can't just have "Free Speech, so long as we like it and the speaker," precisely because biased parties can then smear their opponents to squash their speech. (Witness the behavior of the SPLC of recent years. Witness the false smearing of Ben Shapiro as a "white supremacist.")
This does mean that we need to let bad people speak as well. No one can be allowed to arbitrate Free Speech. Not only the government, but also powerful people, press conglomerates, and private organizations.
This is precisely why the ACLU in the 20th century often defended the right of (the same) bad people to speak. Because what must be defended is the right of everyone to speak.
Unfortunately, it seems freedom of speech has become one of those things a disturbing number of people only seem to see the negative side of. In a certain sense, it's in the same quagmire as capitalism, IP laws, and to some extent privacy; easy to see the negatives and abuses in, but also something that helps or protects everyone else too.
>Young men are staggering around, hungry for days. They are throwing themselves into ice baths and cryotherapy pods. There are not enough beds at the silent vegan meditation centers to accommodate them. They need more near-infrared bulbs.
They started doing something recently that occasionally throws up a popover in incognito mode, so that might not help. I haven't bothered to look into how it works, but clearing cookies or disabling JavaScript still seems to reliably get around the paywall.
I really should subscribe, though, since they do a lot of good reporting, and it would be great if more online publications became less dependent upon ads.
> “It’s such a strange service — who wants to be in the cold? You need to hear about it from someone you trust,” said Michael Garrett, the head of Reboot, a spa that offers cryotherapy around the Bay Area. (Cryotherapy is when you make yourself get cold.)
I can read it just fine, without an account. Maybe it's because I have JavaScript disabled (via NoScript)? If so, someone else's comment here that the paywall is porous is quite true.
I read up on Gwyneth Paltrow after reading the article, and checked her website where I found idiotic products that made my heart stop with some of their claims. When my heart finally started again I cursed god for letting me live to see things like $300 leather sandals, a $75 candle to "clear my energy" and a $70 crystal drinking straw that radiates heart opening...whatever the hell that means.
Now theres a guy telling people how to eat in Silicon Valley, and I cant help but remember how this ended last time. Steve Jobs was essentially a station of the cross at the holy church of silicon valley who could do no wrong, speak no evil, and walked a path of enlightenment akin to a god of knowledge...
until he died from trying to cure a common cancer with fruit cups and meditation, instead of medical science. Thats the part we dont seem to talk about very much, and I feel like it would do wonders to scale the wind back from the sails of these quacks. Being directly attributed to the cause of death for a diet related disorder would give these self-proclaimed lords of the human body a chance to reconsider their podcast --or at least hire a lawyer-- before they click upload.
And I think that this can yield very effective teams, but it can also result in cult like herd behavior. Two sides of one coin?
The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"
https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/travel/ct-trav-bat...
1) 10 day meditation retreats
2) Sauna and ice baths
3) Walking 5 miles to work
4) Daily intermittent fasting
5) Drinking salt juice
Could you point out which of these activities would be deemed 'quackery'? These all seem like fairly benign things, with backing from scientific studies or centuries of tribal knowledge being passed down.
I doubt we will ever escape the cult of idolization, that seems to be a recurring pattern no matter the century. Jack encourages a healthy lifestyle that if more people adopted in moderation, would end up being a net positive. The current norm of over-consumption, over-medication (1 in 6 Americans are given psychiatric drugs), and over-stimulation is one that has had a noticeably negative effect on society. Anyone that bucks this norm and encourages a more mindful approach to life is alright in my books.
You conveniently omitted the parts that aren't backed by science. It's not just a sauna, it's a "near infrared" sauna. Saunas aren't quackery but a near infrared Sauna is. It's also probably dangerous. The article also mentions his use of cryotherapy which isn't backed by any solid science and also conspicuously absent from your list.
Your last six comments are some version of this same question so I suspect you aren't asking because you're genuinely curious but rather because you dislike the conclusion others have reached.
From a quick Google Scholar search it seems that there are plenty of studies showing the efficacy of near-nfrared light treatment, so I can see why he would upgrade his sauna with one. Whereas I haven't seen you back up your claim of the danger of infrared saunas (Done in moderate dosages, not in extremes).
1) A Controlled Trial to Determine the Efficacy of Red and Near-Infrared Light Treatment in Patient Satisfaction, Reduction of Fine Lines, Wrinkles, Skin Roughness, and Intradermal Collagen Density Increase https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3926176/
"RLT and ELT are large-area and full-body treatment modalities for skin rejuvenation and improvements in skin feeling and skin complexion. The application of RLT and ELT provides a safe, non-ablative, non-thermal, atraumatic photobiomodulation treatment of skin tissue with high patient satisfaction rates. RLT and ELT can extend the spectrum of anti-aging treatment options available to patients looking for mild and pleasant light-only skin rejuvenation."
2) Biological effects and medical applications of infrared radiation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5505738/
IR appears to be more versatile than other electromagnetic wavelengths (such as visible light) as it can induce neural stimulation effects as well as promoting a wide range of therapeutic benefits in cells or tissues. An increasing number of new reports in recent years have indicated that different forms IR application have clear clinical benefits, and the mechanisms of IR are becoming clarified. Moreover therapeutic levels of IR can be delivered using devices without any external power source, simply by using the heat production of the human body to drive emission of FIR from materials containing minerals.
3) Far-infrared therapy for cardiovascular, autoimmune, and other chronic health problems: A systematic review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4935255/
"As a potential complementary therapy, FIR radiation had both thermal and non-thermal effects. The thermal effect of FIR therapy could increase blood flow and vasodilation by heating the tissue (hyperthermia), similar to ordinary thermal therapy composed of heat pads or hot water.87 In addition, FIR treatment with low levels of delivered energy (non-thermal effect) also had biological activities.88,89 A study of patients receiving HD treatment had shown decreases in stress and fatigue levels by FIR stimulation rather than thermal treatment (heat pads), which was probably attributed to the non-thermal effect.10 An explanation of non-thermal effect of such low energy levels was that nanoscopic water layers got disturbed by low irradiances, leading to the change of cellular membrane structure, then made the therapeutic effects.87"
I speak as secular fanatic myself. I have meditated 20 years now. 2-4 hours per day and have done maybe 50 week long retreats (over a year of my life meditating 8-10 hours a day) I teach newcomers. I'm worried of all this startup and commercial mentality around meditation. The beat and hippie generations had similar eastern spirituality fad and false prophet phase where vulnerable people were abused and taken for a ride. There are better ways to relax, there are better ways to fix anxiety and mental problems or become more productive citizen. I would not recommend meditation as alternative to therapy. The goal of really fanatical meditation is something completely different.
I suppose it's like how "right" because "far-right."
Do you remember Heroin Chic?
It is a distraction, a diversion, and, in so many words, whataboutism.