Hey, I Wrote Another Book

It’s really good, but don’t take my word for it. Here’s Bethany McLean, author of one of the best books ever in the genre, “The Smartest Guys in the Room”:

“Ever since the GameStop saga erupted into the headlines in the winter of 2021, we’ve all been waiting for the definitive take. Spencer Jakab’s book is it. No matter how much you think you know about Wall Street, this book will surprise you, infuriate you – and educate you.”

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And here’s Professor Burton Malkiel, author of the investing classic “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” with an astounding 1.5 million copies in print.

“Delightfully written illustrations of how “free” and gamified trading has contributed to frenzied stock market activity with some serious warnings about the dangers facing retail investors tempted to join the wild party. The saga of GameStop and other meme stocks is revealed with the skill of a thrilling whodunit. Jakab writes with an anti-Midas touch. If he touched gold, he would bring it to life.”

Burton Malkiel

And Robin Wigglesworth, chief finance correspondent at the Financial Times and author of “Trillions,” a fantastic read about the history of index funds:

“Spencer Jakab’s The Revolution That Wasn’t is essential, riveting reading if you want to understand the collision of long and short-term factors that sparked the remarkable “meme stonk” frenzy of 2021. Jakab adeptly skewers the popular but dangerously wrong narrative of Reddit’s David thumping Wall Street’s Goliath, and shows how the casino always wins in the end. DeepF***ingRespect for an important book with lessons far more durable than GameStop’s stock market levitation.”

Robin Wigglesworth

I could go on because I’m really vain and there are a bunch more, including from Scott Galloway, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, Mel Lindauer of Bogleheads fame, and Wired, but I won’t because I haven’t even told you what my book is about: I dissected GameStop mania and what it means for small investors. From the book jacket:

From Wall Street Journal columnist Spencer Jakab, the real story of the GameStop squeeze—and the surprising winners of a rigged game

During one crazy week in January 2021, a motley crew of retail traders on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets forum had seemingly done the impossible—they had brought some of the biggest, richest players on Wall Street to their knees. Their weapon was GameStop, a failing retailer whose shares briefly became the most-traded security on the planet and the subject of intense media coverage.

The Revolution That Wasn’t is the riveting story of how the meme stock squeeze unfolded, and of the real architects (and winners) of the GameStop rally. Drawing on his years as a stock analyst at a major bank, Jakab exposes technological and financial innovations such as Robinhood’s habit-forming smartphone app as ploys to get our dollars within the larger story of evolving social and economic pressures. The surprising truth? What appeared to be a watershed moment—a revolution that stripped the ultra-powerful hedge funds of their market influence, placing power back in the hands of everyday investors—only tilted the odds further in the house’s favor.

Online brokerages love to talk about empowerment and “democratizing finance” while profiting from the mistakes and volatility created by novice investors. In this nuanced analysis, Jakab shines a light on the often-misunderstood profit motives and financial mechanisms to show how this so-called revolution is, on balance, a bonanza for Wall Street. But, Jakab argues, there really is a way for ordinary investors to beat the pros: by refusing to play their game.

Please check it out and, if you like it, don’t forget to leave a review – it matters. And if you don’t like it? Well, you know what they say – nobody likes a gossip.

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Half-baked Marathon

 

Foiled again — sort of. I was signed up to run a half marathon in Brooklyn this morning. When I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to walk the dog before driving to the city, I double checked the email from the race organizer and noticed two-thirds of the way down the page that – doh! –  the bib had to be picked up yesterday in Brooklyn! Normally they would mail it, but I signed up too close to race day.

This is doubly frustrating because, not only would this have been my first race of that length, but I also was signed up for another race last month with my wife. I wanted to squeeze in a half marathon before being a half century old (too late now – I turned 50 this week). Two days before the race I injured my foot and could barely walk, much less run. (She was great).

Although not in tip-top shape with my still-sore foot, I was really looking forward to today’s race. The alternatives were driving down to a race on the Jersey Shore tomorrow and paying yet another entry fee or just running anyway. I chose the latter.

Behold the race bib of the winning runner of the 50 and over category (and the newborn and over category) in the first Closter Half Marathon! The setting was sunny, bucolic and slightly chilly Closter, New Jersey. There were no people handing out Gatorade, but I passed by my house at the seven mile mark and had a swig of water from a bottle I left there.

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About as hilly as the Brooklyn course, and with a couple of cars and dogs (and one wild turkey!) that forced me to slow down, I still managed to beat my goal of two hours – my time was 1:55:18. My trusty Apple Watch shows that I was pretty good about pacing myself.

So I feel really dumb for not reading the fine print, but also a nice sense of accomplishment for finally running the distance. As an added bonus, I’m now the founder of the Closter Half Marathon. The run leaves from my house and you can pick up a bib – and some coffee – at the start line. The entrance fee is zero dollars, parking is free, and you can even use a real bathroom instead of a malodorous port-a-potty.

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An Insider’s Guide to New York City

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Welcome to the Big Apple! 

They say that the best way to experience a city is to act like a local. I couldn’t agree more. I’m sure that you can spot out-of-towners a mile away wherever it is you’re from and, unless you have a heart of gold, steer clear in order to avoid dumb questions like “Where do I get onto the interstate?” Eye rolls, right?

Nope, you want to arrive not only prepared with maps and a list of local attractions but with the savoir faire to blend in and be treated like a native. Well here’s one local’s guide. As someone who has to weave his way through the most touristy area of Manhattan on his daily commute, I felt it was the least I could do. You’re welcome.

Yes, of course that Rolex is real

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You’ll see nice men from Africa wherever you go selling luxury Italian bags, French scarves and Swiss watches, and the prices can’t be beat. If you know anything about Louis Vuitton bags and the like then you’ll realize you’re getting an incredible bargain. At 80% off the retail price, it would be rude to haggle with these men and is in any case considered highly-insulting in their culture.

How do they do it? Well, no store or even table – it’s all wrapped up in an easy-to-move sheet – so zero overhead. Also, some of the wares may have slight factory defects like the accent in the “e” in Hermès pointing the wrong way or the second hand on that Submariner watch ticking rather than sweeping. Don’t worry — nobody back home will know the difference.

Stick to Times Square

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You’ve probably heard that New York has four boroughs other than Manhattan and, if you flew here, you probably passed through the one where I grew up: Queens. Sure it has about the same population as Chicago or Houston and is the most ethnically diverse county in the U.S., but there’s really nothing to see there, much less anything you’d want to eat. You can also skip the less-interesting parts of Manhattan. As a rough guide, if you’ve walked south of The Empire State Building or north of the entrance to Central Park, you’ve already gone too far.

Enjoy, and encourage, the entertainers

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And you thought Disney World had a monopoly on costumed characters! The ones in New York are way better too with all sorts of quirky costume variations. Instead of schlepping your kids all over The Magic Kingdom to see Minnie Mouse, you don’t have to walk 100 feet in Times Square to find her, and sometimes two or three of her. Ditto for Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man.

And when you’re tired of posing with characters, you can support and encourage members of New York’s budding rap scene. Don’t worry, they’ll find you. They’ll say the CD they press into your hand is a gift, and sure it probably cost them something like 10 cents to make, but what it really cost is their heart and soul. Strike up a conversation and tip generously. You’ll be the one who benefits if these young men turn out to be the next Jay-Z and you can say you met them in person. 

Walk slowly and stop frequently

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The way to tell a real New Yorker is his or her leisurely pace — nothing screams “tourist” like walking too quickly. This being the big city, we usually feel safer holding hands, even if there are three or four of us and we take up most of the sidewalk.

Not only do we stick together and take our time but, with all these confusingly numbered avenues and streets, we’re constantly stopping on busy sidewalks, and especially at intersections, to argue with our spouses about which way to turn. If we can’t keep track then who can? I wish they’d just name the streets after trees like the rest of the country!

Eat like a real New Yorker

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New York is the biggest city in the country, so naturally we have the nation’s largest Applebee’s, Red Lobster, and Olive Garden, all within a short walk of your hotel. Some of you might not want to dine in a chain restaurant just like the ones back home after flying halfway across the country, but these are a little different. For one thing, the waiters and waitresses have that “sassy” New York attitude. Another is that you’ll easily pay 50% more.

But you won’t have time for solely sit-down meals with everything there is to see and do. To eat like a real New Yorker, grab a hot dog, pretzel or ice cream cone from a street vendor near your hotel. It’s traditional for them to tell you the price only after the food is in your hand so don’t ask.

Look out for bargains

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If you can make it here then you can make it anywhere, as Old Blue Eyes crooned. Sometimes even savvy storekeepers can’t cut it, though. If you’re lucky enough to be walking by a shop that’s “going out of business,” don’t let the opportunity pass you by. The merchant’s misfortune of having to liquidate his entire inventory is your lucky break. But cut the poor guy some slack and don’t make him a lowball offer beyond the 90% he took off the original price of the merchandise — New Yorkers are hard-nosed, not heartless.

 

We love local politicians

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We don’t agree on many things, but a solid three-quarters of New Yorkers recently told a Quinnipiac survey that Mayor Bill DeBlasio, shouldn’t run for president. I guess they should have included a followup question like: “What about if he could stay mayor at the same time?” But then that’s not possible. People were so upset about losing “hizzoner” that hardly any said they would vote for him if he ran. DeBlasio knows how to take a hint and just dropped out of the race to make the subway even better and the streets even cleaner. You’ll earn extra brownie points by praising the job he’s doing.

And if there’s any doubt we’re proud of the latest New York native to occupy the White House, just take a look around. Not only are there are a half dozen buildings named for Donald Trump but MAGA hats  are for sale in souvenir shops all over. They’re the second best-selling item after the replica New York license plates that say “MAFIA.” So wear that iconic red hat proudly – only the haters and losers will be offended.

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Oh, Did I Mention I Went to Princeton?*

Flags of the Ivy League

The shocking college admissions scandal has produced some interesting reactions from outrage to schadenfreude to utter disbelief that well-heeled parents would be so idiotic. After all, there is a fully-legal, tax-deductible way to get all but the stupidest kids into almost any college. Heck, until I see his SAT scores, I feel pretty confident that our president, not to mention his children and son-in-law, used this avenue. But then I guess this might come down to the gap between the rich and the mega-rich (think NetJets vs owning your own Gulfstream).

The most annoying response to the scandal, though, has been people tsk-tsking on social media that:

  1. It doesn’t really matter where you went to college; and
  2. When they were at Princeton, Yale, Penn, Stanford, etc, there were lots of these rich dummies and they didn’t do so well.

On the first point, I beg to disagree. Obviously the world is full of many successful people who didn’t go to name brand universities or even to college at all. The quality of education received at a state school can be every bit as good and in some cases better than at an Ivy League institution. One’s personal character, which includes grasping what is and isn’t ethical, is a huge component of career success.

But let’s not sugarcoat why these parents spent a few hours in jail on Tuesday and why many more shell out legal sums for sports lessons, prep school, donations to fancy colleges, SAT tutors, essay coaches, send their kids to help orphans in Haiti so they can write about it in those essays, etc. Cutting corners often pays off and the reason is that the social connections one makes and the bragging rights one gets for life by going to Princeton actually are pretty valuable. You are forever a member of a club that invites as many people as possible to apply and then rejects 95% of them.

Why go through all the trouble of getting into Princeton, whether by actual hard work or by concocting a ridiculous résumé, if you aren’t going to dine out on it for the rest of your life? I’m sure most people who actually went to Princeton (see my asterisk) don’t do this, but plenty of people I follow on social media humble-bragged as news of the scandal broke that they did. The ostensible reason for mentioning it was to insist that it doesn’t matter or to confirm that there were a lot of rich, undeserving dummies (but not them!) when they went there. What a great way to puff out your chest and flaunt your credentials.

A quick perusal of my entire feed reinforces my point, though. The sheer number who did go to one of these esteemed institutions (I generally follow people in “important” positions in business, journalism, academia) proves the career impact of attending one of them, or the U.K. equivalent – Oxbridge.  

I understood that by the time I was 21 and succumbed to the siren song of the Ivy League after being nowhere-nearly diligent enough in high school to have done so as an undergraduate.  I racked up a lot of college loans back in the early 1990s to attend a graduate program at Columbia. I got a partial fellowship but, for the university, the program was a cash cow full of careerist eager beavers like me paying full-freight to get a credential and subsidize non-professional graduate programs.

My “investment” paid off pretty quickly. That master’s degree explicitly got me in the door for an interview at a big investment bank that led to a job that paid for my education many times over. It’s how I can afford to be a journalist now and raise my sons in an upper middle class suburb where people spend what for them is a lot of money to give their kids a legal leg up in the crazy college admissions process.

And so the insane cycle continues …

*(I didn’t really go to Princeton).

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Balut!

Eggs

Some exotic vacations engender envy. Mine often bring concerned expressions from friends and neighbors. (“Um, Uzbekistan?”) One I took last month fell into the latter category, with an added helping of rude comments about pole dancers and the like.

But The Philippines is lovely. It’s nice enough that I pounced on a ridiculously cheap fare from a Chinese airline and took my two younger sons with me (my wife had to work). Yes, it’s poor, crowded, and is getting headlines for extrajudicial killings at the moment, but there are many great things about it: pristine beaches, simmering volcanoes and World War II history. The people are number one, though.

I read some years ago in The Economist that Filipinos are some of the happiest people on earth despite widespread poverty. I believe it now. Friendly, even-keeled and almost universally conversant in English, they made The Philippines a most pleasant place to visit.

One thing that I noticed before traveling there was that, while it is surrounded by countries that have exported their dishes and chefs, you almost never see a Filipino restaurant. This is despite the fact that millions of Filipinos live abroad, mostly working as maids, ships’ crew, or manual laborers.

Part of the reason is that 400 years of being colonized by Spain and then being a U.S. territory before independence, the various Austronesian ethnic groups spread over well over 1,000 islands don’t really have much of a coherent, unique cuisine. Another is that many of their famous dishes feature on lists of gross-out foods.

Despite that reputation, I’m here to tell you that it isn’t bad and that some of it is really very good. My favorite few specialties include the ubiquitous milkfish, lechon (roast suckling pig) and buco (young coconut) — sold seemingly everywhere. Moving to the more extreme ones, I really liked the brain sisig (pig cheek and brain, pictured below), inisal (intestine skewers, both chicken and beef) and little fried whole fishes.

Sisig

But the pièce de résistance of Filipino cuisine is surely balut. Starring on many lists of extreme foods, the fertilized duck eggs are prized as a cheap source of protein (mine cost 40 cents) and even as an aphrodisiac. After teasing my friend and host about not having eaten it after a year-and-a-half spent in the country, I sort of backed myself into a corner and had to try it when I actually paid him a visit.

Balut, as you may imagine, has a little duckling embryo inside, complete with beak, legs, and (shudder) feathers. The most surprising thing about eating it wasn’t the taste, though (it was okay) or consistency (a bit rubbery), but who else tried it. No, not my squeamish buddy. On the way to buy the balut, my 11-year-old son said he wanted one too. Having tasted the brains, intestines and even rabbit head (on a food tour during our stopover in Shanghai) in the preceding days, I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked that he cranked his adventurousness knob to eleven. He ate the whole thing, hamming it up for the camera as my friend’s wife took pictures and his kids chuckled.

Balut

After starting out the trip anxious about exploring a chaotic, not-super-hygienic developing country, he not only had a great time but went native, eating a food that some Filipinos told me they wouldn’t touch. I’m really proud of him.

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Letter From a Failing Hedge Fund Manager

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Letter from a Failing Hedge Fund Manager

Dear valued clients,

Sometimes I feel like explaining what I do with your money takes almost as much effort as making it grow. Still, it’s worth it. I’m confident that one day these quarterly letters will be published as a tome not just on successful investing but on how to succeed in life.

In the meantime, though, I would like to once again point to the confidentiality agreements you all signed and ask whoever has been leaking our communications to the press to cease and desist. The Wall Street Journal’s quip that investing with us was “like paying someone to light a fifth of your money on fire” wasn’t helpful.

Moving on to more pleasant matters, I am happy to report that we have once again taken advantage of the market’s shortsightedness to further lower the cost base in our largest position, Hemlock Pharmaceuticals. The SEC and FDA investigations did have a temporary effect on its share price, which you will have noticed once again in our quarterly performance, but I have great trust that Hemlock’s world-class management team has a firm grip on these issues. In financing growing companies, we always look for human value that doesn’t appear on the balance sheet.

Great line, right? I wish I had made it up, but it’s actually by Michael Milken. Here’s another one that I got from a fortune cookie at that new Sichuanese place on the Upper East Side: “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” So true.

As I’ve said in past letters, patience is paramount and adversity builds character. It seems like only yesterday that Lehman Brothers went belly up. Junior high school is hard enough without losing all of your Bar Mitzvah money. While that stung, though, I sensed even then that I would make it back a thousand times over in performance and management fees.

And last year, when I left the trainee program at Morgan Stanley to hang out my own shingle, I was dismayed to find out that nearly all the good hedge fund names from Greek mythology had been taken. If only I’d been born 20 years earlier! Despite that, Oedipus Capital is off to a roaring start and, with your continued patience, I’m sure the best is yet to come.

And with that, it’s back to work making you all even richer. I know that the media image of a young master of the universe is glamorous, but it’s basically nose to the grindstone buried in financial models that would be too complicated for me to explain. Heck, I don’t even have a girlfriend. Like I read in another fortune cookie, women prefer men who have something tender about them – especially the legal kind. Get it?

 

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I Am a Bad Gym Member

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So there were a few new faces at my gym this week. I seem to recall seeing the same thing about a year ago and about a year before that. If you go frequently enough, and particularly if you normally work out at the same time of day, you notice these things. Although no Charles Atlas, I’m a creature of habit when it comes to getting daily exercise (and I like to get my money’s worth).

So why is such a loyal customer a bad gym member? Failure to wipe down the equipment? Loud grunting? Hogging the Stairmaster? No, no, and no – it’s precisely because I show up so frequently. I didn’t think much about this before my old gym started facing financial difficulties and finally went out of business. It had been there for 15 years with its main competitors being a fancier but much more expensive gym in town and a similarly-priced but less personal chain in a neighboring town.

During the last year that they were in business a handful of new competitors opened up nearby – a fancy spinning studio, an expensive interval training chain, a cult-like group workout/prison-style gym franchise, and finally my current gym, which is basically a newer, shinier copy of my old one.

Just based on what I could observe, my gym seemed at first to be plodding along despite all the new entrants. My view was limited, though, to two types of members:

  1. My fellow cheapskates who only paid for the “floor” and not the more lucrative group classes or personal training sessions; and
  2. Members who exercise almost every day.

People like me, it turns out, aren’t doing the owner any favors by showing up religiously. Gyms, you see, aren’t very cheap to run. They open early, close late, take up a lot of space and pay high bills for heat, electricity, hot water and janitorial services. Their machines are expensive (several thousand dollars for a new stair climber or elliptical) and break frequently. Even after they raised prices a couple of times, I was paying, by my rough calculation, about $1.03 per hour spent at the gym. How many people like me would a gym have to pack in per hour to cover its overhead? Probably a lot more than it can comfortably hold.

Therein lies the answer to how gyms can stay in business with such daunting economic factors working against them: All those people I’ve seen the last couple of weeks but probably won’t be seeing in a month or two. Author Dan Davies explains in “The Secret Life of Money” that 75% of gym memberships are taken out in January as people attempt to fulfill their New Year’s resolutions but that the vast majority only actually go a handful of times.

In addition to these nearly perfect customers, the other segment of my old gym’s clientele that kept them afloat were those who paid extra for premium services like zumba classes, personal training, or $5.00 protein shakes with an 80% profit margin. It seems, though, that many of the members willing to pay a premium were lured away by the new offerings in town. By last summer, a month or two before my gym said it would close, it offered a month of free spinning sessions for “floor members,” presumably in the hope that we’d step up our subscription. My wife and I went a few times and were shocked to see how few of the bikes were occupied. One time it was just the two of us.

So there you have it – I’m a bad gym member. I shudder to think how crowded the facility might be or how much they would have to charge if everyone were like me. Even if they leave dumbbells lying around or fail to wipe off the elliptical, I won’t complain about the new January people again.

(This post also appeared on LinkedIn and on Spencerjakab.com)

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Super Carb Me

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Morgan Spurlock, eat your cholesterol-clogged heart out.

The filmmaker and human guinea pig behind the documentary “Super Size Me” consumed nothing but McDonald’s for a whole month and – surprise, surprise – gained 24 pounds. How about eating fattening, salty food for twice as long and losing weight? Well, it can be done.

I’m not speaking from personal experience, unfortunately. I tried and I failed (ugly details below), but I know some people who didn’t and wrote about them on Page One of The Wall Street Journal. Their names are Alan Martin and Jeff Berman, both winners of Olive Garden’s annual “Never Ending Pasta Pass” promotion. It entitles you to all the soup, salad, bread sticks, pasta, sauce, and toppings you can eat for two months for $100.

One reason I love writing these stories is because I find enthusiasm infectious. Whether it’s floating cars, hot peppers, or wacky contests, I get to know people who are passionate about something most hardly know or care about. Alan and Jeff were no exception – two really nice guys with personalities as big as their appetites.

“The Olive Garden Diet” was a well-received story in large part because the editor wisely took me out of it and made it about them. Like them, I also was a Pasta Pass “winner” and also had the idea of turning all that cavatappi into muscle, or at least not into love handles.

I ate at Olive Garden once a day for a month before the story changed direction. The hours spent on the treadmill and thousands of calories consumed are what’s known as a “sunk cost” – a poor investment that I found painful to abandon for no journalistic return, even though that was the right decision. So here’s my belated attempt to salvage something good from my experiment.

When I first had the idea, I immediately went to my new gym, Impact Zone, in Norwood, NJ. The owner, Dave Paladino, isn’t just ridiculously fit and muscular – he also trained members of the Sopranos, including the late James Gandolfini. What better person to ask if I could eat all that pasta and not wind up looking like “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero?

His answer, after I managed to was convince him I wasn’t pulling his leg? “Fuhgeddaboudit.” But he agreed to try and mitigate the damage. Here we are at the start of my pasta binge when I weighed a mere 157 pounds:

Dave

Daves’s crack trainer Adrian Greenberg designed a really rigorous daily workout for me and I did it religiously. I also bought a FitBit and set myself a goal of 15,000 steps a day. The first few days weren’t kind to me, but I figured a pound or so of weight was to be expected simply from a big increase in salt and carbohydrates. I had a complete Olive Garden Never Ending Pasta Bowl meal a day, including a bread stick and a protein topping and I ate all my other meals normally. The calories in this meal ranged from a little over 1,000 for a salad, bread stick, whole wheat linguine, marinara sauce, and grilled chicken to a whopping 2,000 in a single sitting for certain soup, pasta, sauce, and topping combinations. Damn you, asiago garlic alfredo and crispy chicken fritta! Here’s a photo-montage of some of my meals:

Pasta

My main problem was that I ate my Olive Garden meals mainly at lunch when I might normally have something light such as a salad or a protein shake. When I got home for dinner, typically my big meal of the day, I ate everything on my plate and often seconds. I shouldn’t have been hungry, but all the extra food just made me crave more calories in the evening. After entering every calorie into MyFitnessPal, I found that I was having an extra 600 to 800 calories a day compared to my normal diet.

To put that into perspective, a man my size would have to walk an additional 20,000 steps a day to make up the difference (the average American takes less than 5,000 steps daily). Alternatively, I could run for an hour and 18 minutes, bike for an hour and 21 minutes, or swim for two hours and 15 minutes to use those 700 or so extra calories. I was working out, but I only had an hour or so to spare each day. What’s more, I already was a daily visitor to the gym so I merely went from a less-intense workout to a more-intense one.

Doing some quick math, had I done nothing to my energy usage, I would have consumed an extra 21,000 calories and packed on about six pounds. Had I gone all Morgan Spurlock and become sedentary, I would have packed on about 11 pounds. At the end of 30 days, when it was clear that the editor who had originally expressed interest in a fitness-related article had  lost interest in it, I was 5 pounds heavier. Yikes!

Given the extra calories I burned, maybe two or three pounds of that was fat. The rest was water (from all the extra carbs and sodium) and, I hope, a little bit of muscle from the extra weight-lifting. More than a month later, I’m still a pound or two heavier and I feel thicker around the middle (I blame Thanksgiving, a long vacation, and a family birthday).

Alan and Jeff, who ate every meal at Olive Garden, both lost weight (five pounds and one pound, respectively). Part of that is size (they’re both about five inches taller and can consume a lot more calories), but, let’s face it, much of it is my lack of discipline outside of Olive Garden. Gaining weight is a lot easier and more pleasant than losing it.

Despite my failure, I’m pleased that I undertook the experiment. I got a great article out of it (indirectly) and learned something about nutrition and exercise. For now, though, I have some work left. Dave Paladino spotted me huffing and puffing on the elliptical at 5:50 a.m. today and looked like he was about to wish me good morning. Instead, he pointed at my flabby body and yelled: “Keep working off that pasta!”

 

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I ♥ the Sunk Cost Fallacy

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The above picture was taken almost exactly 61 years ago in front of Hungary’s parliament building during the brief revolution against Communist rule. I don’t know who the people in the picture raising the old Hungarian flag atop a captured tank were, but I know for sure that my parents (who both lived in Budapest but hadn’t met yet) aren’t lurking somewhere in the background.

My mom, who had just turned 16, was staying far, far away from the  fighting. My dad, who was 26 and a recent medical school graduate, was in the process of getting far, far away from Hungary period, along with 200,000 of his countrymen – about 2% of the population. Just days after this photo was taken, 2,000 Soviet tanks rolled in to Budapest to crush the uprising. During the ensuing chaos, with the border guards having abandoned their posts, my dad joined 180,000 people who walked across the Austrian border (some others went south to Yugoslavia while heading north to north or southeast to Soviet controlled Czechoslovakia or Romania, respectively, much less east to the Soviet Union itself, weren’t viable options).

My dad told me that, as he hitchhiked and walked for two days to Vienna with the occasional sounds of gunfire in the distance, he knew that there was no going back. He also decided that he was a European and that he would try to seek asylum somewhere in Europe and not the U.S. or far-off Australia. As he got to Vienna, there were tens of thousands of hungry and confused refugees milling about. He saw a bunch of Hungarians standing in a long line and figured that there must be something good being handed out at the end of it. After waiting for a long time, he finally asked someone. He was standing in front of the U.S. embassy. After spending all that time in line, he decided to stay and go live in America.

My dad (thank goodness!) had just succumbed to a common but flawed way of thinking. He had decided at the outset that he wouldn’t go to America and, while the U.S. was very generous, taking in nearly 40,000 Hungarians, he still could have migrated somewhere else. Austria? Sweden? France? You’d be reading a blog by Johann, Sven, or Francois.

But, by “investing” time in the U.S. line, he felt a compulsion to stay, which is about as rational as buying a movie ticket and going to see the show despite later catching pneumonia and hearing from a friend that it’s awful. This sunk cost fallacy is best known as an investing blunder. You go out and buy a share of XYZ Corp at $100 a share and it subsequently falls to $90. Let’s say some new information comes out that makes you re-think the wisdom of investing in the stock at even this lower price. Many people will keep their investment in this case because of their fixation with their $100 investment rather than asking whether it is even worth $90, which is the “correct” way to view the problem.

Clearly the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree when it comes to cognitive biases as I personally am in the middle of a giant sunk cost blunder myself, despite writing a book about why people are bad investors. Having invested $100 in an Unlimited PastaPass from Olive Garden (long story – faithful readers may be hearing more about this soon), I’ve been making fairly full use of it, eating at the chain about once a day.

But I don’t have to eat pasta, and in many cases I went there when I really didn’t feel like eating at America’s favorite faux-Tuscan chain. Since I already had paid for it, though, I keep thinking it would be silly not to make use of it. This even has been the case when I could have eaten perfectly tasty leftovers for free or just skipped lunch, as I often do.

Anyway, I owe my existence, empty calories and all, to the sunk cost fallacy, so it isn’t all bad.

 

 

 

 

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For Whom the Ironman Tolls

stapler

The Wall Street Journal isn’t all business. Long time readers know that nearly every issue (“nearly” because there wasn’t one on Sept 12, 2001, for example) has a Page One article known as the “A-hed” that is whimsical. I’ve been reading them since I’ve been reading the paper — a pretty long time — but recently learned that they’ve been a regular feature of the WSJ about three times as long — over 75 years — by reading a piece written by Barry Newman.

Newman is known as “King of the A-hed.” He has written … wait for it … over 400 A-heds (*see correction below) in his time at the WSJ. A-heds are now about 1,000 carefully-edited words long, but they probably used to be longer, as much else was in the good old days. That, then, is (conservatively) A Tale of Two Cities times three. But, in my humble opinion, it’s a lot more impressive than what Dickens churned out in serialized form.

A-heds don’t only have to be funny. They have to be something funny that someone, somewhere else hasn’t written about yet, or did but in an unfunny way. Coming up with hundreds of A-heds while having a day job being a reporter is simply amazing. I started writing them soon after I joined the Journal and recently published my eighth and ninth A-hed in fairly quick succession. I had taken a couple of years off from A-heds to concentrate on writing and then selling my book, so call that nine in three years out of the five-and-a-half I’ve been at the paper, which is considered a lot. At that pace, though, I’ll be 178 years old when I catch up to Barry.

Naturally they are about quality rather than quantity, but Barry’s A-heds are great too. Many of them (and those of other current and former colleagues) were collected in a book, Dogfight at the Pentagon. Another, older collection is called Floating off the Page: The Best Stories from The Wall Street Journal’s Middle Column.

Every A-hed has come to me as an epiphany – usually hearing about something that I thought was funny and hadn’t been written about before. How many of those does one person have?

Even if I get out more and start working nights and weekends, I don’t think I’ll catch up to Barry in terms of sheer volume, much less quality, but I’m trying. I once wrote about one of my A-heds on this blog. Since I haven’t been updating Cacophony and Cheese much, I thought I’d recap a couple of recent ones while providing links to the rest. I don’t get paid extra for them or even get any time off from my job of writing and editing stuff about business. They are a labor of love and lots of fun. Even better than seeing them published is interviewing the subjects from odd car collectors to hot pepper eaters, sneaky hitchhikers, minivan racers, scavenger hunters and grammar pedants.

My most recent A-hed was about companies named after (or sharing the name of) fictional ones. For example, there were Stark Industries, Wayne Enterprises, Pied Piper, and Bluth Construction. Their founders didn’t call them that because they were superhero or comedy fans. They came about them in the normal way, such as having the last name “Stark” or “Bluth.” Still, having a name like that on the masthead makes life anything but normal for their owners. Then there are iniTech, Vandelay Industries, and Virtucon – all intentionally named after their fictional counterparts with lots of fun and unexpected consequences. Finally there Japan’s Cyberdyne Systems which makes a HAL robot but claims not to have gotten the name from The Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey. (It’s a heckuva coincidence, don’t you think?).

The one before that was about the disappearance of the word “whom” from the English language. Among the people I interviewed was the author of Dr. Whom: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication and the founder of the Grand Order of the Whomic Empire. I also spoke with a Google engineer who wrote a program that corrects the annoyingly incorrect (to me, at least) “Who to follow” prompt on Twitter. The spokesperson for Twitter was a very good sport about it.

HC-GV203_word.eps

Here’s a list of my earlier A-heds:

The Arms Race to Grow World’s Hottest Pepper Goes Nuclear

Grocery Shoppers, Start Your Engines: Minivans Hit the Racetrack

Offal Tale: For This Club, Everything Is on the Menu

Ahoy, Driver! An Amphibious Car Refuses to Sink Into Oblivion

The Trabant Takes Manhattan on a Tour of East Bloc Nostalgia

Flop at the Box Office Spawns a Generation of ‘Midnight Madness’

At Famous Hudson River Crossing, Picking Up Hitchhikers Takes a Toll

Which one was my favorite? I love all of my A-hed children equally and am looking forward to having a much larger brood.

*Correction: Barry contacted me weeks after this was written and points out that he wrote 400 Page One stories and not 400 A-heds (that figure came from an article about him). I’m still impressed!

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