Seth’s blog

Alexandra Carmichael is one of the founders of CureTogether.com, whom I met at a Quantified Self meeting last year. A few days ago, she left an interesting comment on one of my posts:

I practice random acts of kindness, with a goal of helping at least 10 people a day (and at least 1 person I don’t know). I find this helps my mood toward the end of the day, when it is most likely to fall - no matter what else has happened that day, at least I’ve helped 10 people.

I asked her about it:

SETH Where did the idea come from?

ALEXANDRA It goes all the way back to my grandparents being Scout leaders - I was never in the Scouts myself but I observed how helpful and supportive they always were. Then during my university years when I was forming my life philosophy, I got to attend an incredible lecture by Jane Goodall. Her organization Roots & Shoots inspires people around the world to give back to the earth, animals, and people around them, with her amazing presence and the quote “Every individual can make a difference.” Service learning is also one of the things we thread into homeschooling our two daughters, along with design, simple living, and non-violent communication.

The specific goal of helping 10 people a day started last summer during a goal-setting weekend. I was curious to see if formalizing and quantifying something I had been doing in a fuzzier way would make a difference in my life, if measuring acts of kindness would result in an increased number of acts, or more friends, or help me with my chronic depression - plus I love quantifying things! I don’t find it necessary to actually record how many people I help in a day, but I keep a rough running tally in my head as I go through the day to make sure it’s at least 10 - my kids like to help with this count too.

SETH What are some examples of these acts?

ALEXANDRA I do a lot of different things. If I get extra free tickets to events or conferences, I will pass them along to people who I think would love to go; I will offer to take a picture of a tourist family where one person inevitably gets left out behind the camera; I will connect people who I think would benefit from knowing each other; I will take two hours to listen and hug and support a child who is having a hard time learning a new skill; I will answer a newbie entrepreneur’s questions about how to get started in business or help them spread their message; I will help coordinate gatherings that I believe in (such as Quantified Self); I will hold the door for someone. It can be anything really, no matter how small.

SETH How have people reacted when you tell them about this?

ALEXANDRA The most frequent reaction is “That sounds too challenging to do every day - 10 people? Why not 1 or 2?” The second most frequent reaction is “You are inspiring me to make positive changes in my own life.” My answer to both is “I love helping people!”

SETH What have you learned?

ALEXANDRA if you help people, without wanting anything in return, you get help when you need it - often surprising help, and often more than you gave. I learned that helping people seems to make them like you more, so my number of online friends has skyrocketed (1500 on Twitter, 800 on Facebook, 500 on LinkedIn) - but close “in person” friends I choose to limit to a handful because of my tendency to get overwhelmed by frequent or shallow social situations. I learned that helping people does help with depression, because (a) you have something else to focus on outside of yourself and (b) you go through the day with an expectant air of wonder at who will be the next person you can help. I also learned that helping 10 people a day is really not a lot, and I often wind up helping 20 or more people in a day. Of course, this is only from my perspective - I can’t guarantee that all of these people actually feel helped, I just know that I tried to help.

SETH When you say “if you help people, without wanting anything in return, you get help when you need it - often surprising help, and often more than you gave” I’m not sure I understand. Can you give some examples?

ALEXANDRA It’s not so much that the people I help help me in return, but more that by spreading goodwill and being tuned in to what others need, I also became more aware of my own needs and started to feel a greater sense of self-worth, like I deserved to have my needs met. This is not something I was taught growing up, and I went through two bouts of major postpartum depression without asking for or getting the support I needed. I feel much more open about my needs now, which perhaps makes it easier for others to help me. So the change was more in me than in others.

In terms of specific examples, when I learned that I have a Tourette’s spectrum disorder, and tweeted that, I made an incredible new friend who has been through similar neurological issues, and who in our conversations of support and empathy has helped me more than I can ever thank him for. Also, when I decided to find some consulting work to support my family while we build CureTogether, a very welcoming door opened (soon to be made public), and offered me basically a dream position. I guess I needed to learn to ask for and accept help as well as to give it.

SETH Thanks, Alexandra. It’s especially interesting that helping others raised your feeling of self-worth. I wouldn’t have guessed it would have that effect.

Justin Wehr asked me some interview questions and decided not to publish my answers. I thought they were good questions. Here they are, reworded slightly, and my answers.

QUESTION Of the experimental treatments you have studied, which ones have the most positive effect on your life?

ANSWER From more to less effect:

• Effect of morning faces on mood
• Effect of fermented food on health
• (tie) Effect of animal fat on health
• (tie) Effect of omega-3 on health
• Weight-control experiments.

QUESTION What about everyone else?

ANSWER  It depends on how far in the future you look. The morning faces stuff is the most important, I’m sure, but it’s also the hardest to implement. The fermented food stuff is easy to implement. It’s easy to eat more yogurt. So I believe that in the short term, the fermented foods stuff will have the most effect on others, in the long term, the faces stuff.

QUESTION Much of your research is related to the idea that we get sick because we live differently now than long ago. Can you explain this? Are there exceptions?

ANSWER Our genes were shaped to work well in one environment. Now our environment is quite different. All sorts of things go wrong — we don’t eat an optimal diet, for example — and our bodies malfunction in all sorts of ways. The exception is that once we know what an optimal diet (or environment) is we can assure it. For example, we can make sure we get the optimal amount of Vitamin C. The health problems caused by progress can be fixed, in other words, and we can emerge in better shape than ever before.

QUESTION How much time a day do you spend on self-experimentation?

ANSWER About ten minutes. Measuring various things, such as blood pressure and brain function.

QUESTION Why do few people self-experiment?

ANSWER Millions of people self-experiment. For example, millions of fat people try many different ways to lose weight. Professional scientists (e.g., med-school professors) do not self-experiment, at least publicly, because it is low-status, because it is frowned upon (by their colleagues), because it might be hard to publish the results, and because it won’t help them get grants.

QUESTION How do you determine an appropriate dosage for treatments that might have a good effect on what you measure but a bad effect on other things? For example, maybe animal fat is good for sleep but bad for other things.

ANSWER I don’t worry about it. Just as all electric appliances are designed to use the same house current, I’m sure all parts of our body are designed to work best with the same diet.

QUESTION Could advances in medical technologies (such as regenerative medicine) replace the need to live healthily? For example, if we could easily replace livers, maybe people could drink more.

ANSWER Not likely. Except that the more we know about nutrition the more we can replace our ancestors’ diet with a diet made up of the necessary nutrients. For example, I drink flaxseed oil to get omega-3. I’m sure our long-ago ancestors got omega-3 in other ways. So I no longer need to be like them. Basic nutrition isn’t medical technology, but it is a way in which it is easier to be healthy.

QUESTION What don’t you know, but wish you did?

ANSWER How to make book-writing as addictive as Wii Tennis.

Tyler Cowen’s new book Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World has a lot to say about two topics in which I am especially interested: autism and human diversity. What can the rest of us learn from people with autism? What does the wide range of outcomes among autistic adults tell us about our world? I interviewed Tyler by email about his book.

ROBERTS If I remember correctly, you think a book should be new, true, and something else. What’s the something else?

COWEN The “something else” should cover at least two qualities.

First, if everyone read the book and was persuaded by it, would anything change for the better? An author should aim to write a book which matters.

Second, the book should reflect something the author really cares about. If the author doesn’t care, why should the reader?

ROBERTS What was the tipping point for this book — the event that made you say: I’m going to write a book about THIS?

COWEN To me it’s very important what an author is thinking about in his or her spare time, if the phrase “spare time” even applies to my life, which has an extreme blending of work and leisure time. Ideally that is what an author should be writing about. At some point you realize: “Hey, I am constantly thinking about xxxxx in my spare time!” And then you want to write it up.

I also hit up the idea of this book through pondering the lives of some particular individuals I know — and how much they *live* the thesis of my book — although I am not sure they would wish to be identified publicly.

ROBERTS Have you been to Autreat, the annual conference of Autism Network International, that you mention? If so, did it affect your thinking?

COWEN I haven’t been to Autreat, which for me is located somewhat inconveniently away from major cities (that is on purpose, I believe). I’m also not clear on exactly who is welcome, who needs an invitation, etc. Most conferences have a very high variance in quality across presentations and mostly one goes to meet one or two key people; often you don’t know in advance who they will be. I suspect the same logic applies to Autreat as well.

ROBERTS Do you think there are jobs that persons with autism do better than persons without autism?

COWEN Autistics often exhibit superior skills in attention to detail, pattern recognition, what I call “mental ordering,” and they have areas of strong preferred interests, in which they are very often superb self-educators. So yes, that will make many autistics very good at some jobs but also poorly suited for others. But I don’t want to generalize and say “autistics are better at job X,” that would be misleading. Across autistics there is a wide variety of cognitive skills and also problems. Engineering and computer science are the stereotypical areas where you expect to find higher than average rates of autism. While I suspect this is true in terms of the average, it can be misleading to focus on the stereotype precisely because of the high variance of skills and outcomes among autistics. One of the central issues in understanding autism is grasping the connection between the underlying unity of the phenomenon and the extreme variability of the results. In the short run, positive stereotypes can perform a useful educating function. But the more we present stereotypes, the more we are getting people away from coming to terms with that more fundamental issue, namely an understanding of the variance.

ROBERTS There is a basic biological phenomenon in which animals and plants under stress become more variable. Some say variability in the genotype has been released into the phenotype. Do you think the variance seen in autism has been “released” in some way?

COWEN I am not sure I understand the question…for one thing I am not sure what is the postulated increase in genetic stress…

ROBERTS Yes, it’s a confusing question. Let’s try this: What do you think the high variance of outcome seen in autism is telling us?

COWEN I’ll try to make that more concrete. One view of autism is that autistics have greater access to lower-level perception and such that access is essential for understanding autism. On one hand it gives autistics some special abilities, such as pattern recognition, certain kinds of information processing, and noticing small changes with great skill. (In some cases this also leads to savant-like abilities.) This also may be connected to some of the problems which autistics experience, such as hyper-sensitivities to some kinds of public environments.

It could be that non-autistics have a faculty, or faculties, which “cut off” or automatically organize a lot of this lower level perception. The implication would be that for autistics this faculty is somehow weaker, missing, or “broken.” The underlying unity in autism would be that this faculty is somehow different, relative to non-autistics. The resulting variance is that the difference in this faculty gives rise to abilities and disabilities which very much differ across autistics.

That’s one attempt to come to terms with both the unity of autism and the variance within it. It’s a tough question and we don’t know the right answer yet, in my view. What I outlined is just one hypothesis.

ROBERTS A clear parallel in the increased variance of autistic persons is the increased variance of left-handers. Left-handers have brain organizations that vary much more than the brain organization of right-handers. Right-handers are all one way; left-handers are all over the place. Do you see any similarities between left-handers and persons with autism?

COWEN I recall some claims that autistics are more likely to be left-handed but I’ve never looked into their veracity. There are so many false claims about autism that one must be very careful.

ADHD is another example of something which produces high variance outcomes. I don’t think it is correct to call it a disorder *per se*.

We’re just starting to wrap our heads around the “high variance” idea. Most people have the natural instinct to attach gross labels of good or bad even when a subtler approach is called for.

ROBERTS The term left-hander is confusing because left-handers aren’t the opposite of right-handers. The dichotomy is okay but the two sides are better labeled right-handers and non-right-handers. In other words, one group (right-handers) has something (a certain brain organization); the other group doesn’t have that brain organization. Then the vast difference in variance makes sense. How accurate would it be to say that non-autistics have something than autistics don’t have? (I’m left-handed, by the way.)

COWEN I would say we still don’t have a fully coherent definition of autism. And “have” is a tricky word. I think of autistic brains as different, rather than “normal” brains with “missing parts.” Some researchers postulate differences in the kind of connections autistic brains make. In thirty years I expect we will know much, much more than we do right now.

ROBERTS I hope this isn’t too self-indulgent: What do you make of the correlation between autism and digestive problems?

COWEN I don’t think there are convincing theories about either digestive problems causing autism or autism causing digestive problems. There is *maybe* a correlation through a common genetic cause, but even if that is true it is not very useful as a means of understanding autism. This is another area where there are many strong opinions, often stronger than are justified by the facts.

ROBERTS Another “assorted” question: I loved the study you mentioned where people with perfect pitch were more likely to be eccentric than those without perfect pitch. That’s quite a result. How did you learn about it?

COWEN There is a somewhat scattered literature on music, cognition, and society. It still awaits synthesis, it seems. Someone could write a very good popular book on the topic. (Maybe Gabriel Rossman is the guy to do it.) The more I browsed that literature, the more interesting results I found.

ROBERTS I don’t think I’ve done justice to your extremely original book but here is a last question. You talk about Thomas Schelling’s use of stories. Presumably in contrast to other econ professors. I think of story-telling being something that once upon a time everyone did — it was the usual way to teach. Why do you think Schelling told stories much more than those around him?

COWEN Thanks for the kind words. Schelling has a unique mind, as anyone who has known him will attest. I don’t know any other economist or social scientist who thinks like he does, but we’ve yet to figure out what exactly his unique element consists of. I would say that Schelling views story-telling as a path to social science wisdom. They’re not even anecdotes, they’re stories. Maybe that doesn’t sound convincing to an outsider, but it got him a Nobel Prize.

I am very interested in the topic of “styles of thought in economics.”

I eat natto (fermented soybeans) once/day. Most of the natto I see in stores is from Japan (soybeans from America) but I found one local source: Japan Traditional Foods, in Sepastopol, California. Like many people I believe traditional diets are far healthier than modern ones. How can such diets, now almost extinct in rich countries, become popular again? To learn more about this, I interviewed the owner of Japan Traditional Foods, Minami Satoh.

How did your company begin?

I started it in 2006. We started to produce product in November 2008. So far natto is our only product. I went to business school at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a private business school in Arizona, and graduated in 1983. After that, I worked for DuPont in Japan, but I wanted to work in the US. At DuPont, I did marketing of Teflon and Silverstone (a sister brand of Teflon). Then I worked for my father’s company selling wholesale steel pipe and tubes. I was successful but felt it was boring. I thought food would be more interesting. I acquired a small natto-making company (Yaguchi Foods) in Japan in 2004 or 2005. The owner had died. His relatives sold it to me.

In 2004, I came to America to meet Malcolm Clark. He’s the great-grandson of Dr. Clark, who is very famous in Japan. Malcolm Clark was responsible for introducing shitake mushrooms to America. He owns Gourmet Mushrooms in Sebastopol and lives in Occidental. Natto is an unusual food, like shitake mushrooms. I thought he could give me good advice about how to start making natto or other possibilities. That’s why the company is in Sebastopol. When I met Clark, he was thinking of retiring. I bought a stake in Gourmet Mushrooms; now Gourmet Mushrooms helps Japan Traditional Foods sell natto. I moved here in June 2008 to manage this company.

Why natto?

Americans already eat tofu, soy sauce, miso, edaname, and soy milk — but no natto. Natto is more nutritious than the other forms of soy that we currently eat. It’s more nutritious because of fermentation. It has more vitamins. A enzyme found in natto called nattokinase dissolves blood clots. In Japan natto is a traditional health food. It is usually eaten at breakfast.

How is natto made?

You boil the soybeans in a steam basket. Spray with bascillus. Put the soybeans in a paper cup. Put the cups in a fermentation container for 20-24 hours. Take them out and put in packages. Then give to the distributor. If you ferment more than 20 hours, natto bascillus start to eat themselves, which produces ammonia. Most companies stop fermenting at that point to avoid ammonia. If fermented longer, it may smell of ammonia. Japanese accept this, but Americans may not.

How big is Japan Traditional Foods?

One person plus myself. I hired someone from my natto company in Japan. He makes artisanal natto. He handcrafts it.. We put it in the paper cups by hand.

How did you get distribution?

It wasn’t hard. There are two distributors, one for Los Angeles, the other for San Francisco. They specialize in Japanese markets. Now it’s in close to 30 stores, including Korean and Chinese stores. The Los Angeles distributor wanted to sell his stuff in New York but the shipping costs would have been too high. This summer we will start going to farmer’s markets. We’ll have a  booth there to sell and sample. The goal is to educate and share recipes. We’ll be at the San Rafael Sunday market and the Ferry Building Tuesday lunchtime market. It’s a kind of test. We’re talking to distributors about getting the product into non-Japanese grocery stores, such as  Berkeley Bowl and Whole Foods. From the farmer’s markets we hope to get feedback to improve the packaging, size, and recipes. We want to find the best ways to make the Western market receptive to natto. For example, we can sample it in different ways. In Japan, the most popular way to eat it is over rice with finely chopped green onions, often at breakfast. I’ve come up with many different recipes: with rice or bagel or lettuce or crackers. With different sauces and toppings.

What were the hard parts?

It was difficult to find a good temperature control system here; I had to import it from Japan. I also needed a big steam cooker, which I had to import. This was hard because it is prohibited to export them from Japan to other countries.

Your promotional leaflet says “stir natto more than twenty times” before eating it. Why?

We do not have any valid research on this. But somebody says stirring natto creates the “Fifth Taste” we call “umami.” Somebody else said that it gets the natto bacillus awake again with oxygen because the bacillus was sleeping in the refrigerator.

I sampled four brands of kombucha available in Berkeley; my favorite was from Rejuvenation Company. They are in Emeryville, which is close to where I live. “Can I visit your manufacturing facility?” I asked. The answer was no, but they were happy to be interviewed. So I interviewed Chris Campagna and Jerry Campagna, who are the company’s two employees. Before the interview I discovered they also made the rejuvelac I’d bought after a reader of this blog recommended it (”When I was a database administrator at Whole Foods, I used to drink it daily and never felt better”). Those are their two products: kombucha and rejuvelac.

How did your company begin?

It was started in 1983 in San Francisco by Dennis Campagna [Jerry’s brother, Chris’s uncle]. He was a health-food fanatic, a die-hard vegetarian, and a hippie. Now retired. He is ten years older than Jerry, but , Jerry says, looks younger.] At the beginning, he sold several health-food juices, such as carrot juice and wheat grass juice, but he also sold Rejuvelac. That was the part of the product line that’s lasted. He made them in a shared kitchen. Back then, there were dozens of small health food stores in San Francisco. It was a one-man show. Dennis drove around to them.

What’s rejuvelac?

A fermented grain drink. We use wheat. You sprout wheat berries with water,  ferment them for a while, then strain out the wheat berries. We’re the only company we know of that sells it.

Why do your products say “Keep Refrigerated”?

The Health Department wanted it. For years and years, they sat store shelves, not refrigerated.

When did you start making kombucha?

Five years ago. Dennis added it to his product line. It took a few years to catch on. He’d been making it for himself for years — making it, drinking it, giving it to friends. We’re tiny players in the kombucha market. Synergy is the big player. Maybe there are 10-15 manufacturers around the country, it’s hard to know the exact number. There’s no Kombucha Manufacturers Association.  Some commercial kombuchas are pasteurized; look on their websites to find out which ones. [Kombucha Wonder Drink is pasteurized.] Our kombucha isn’t pasteurized.

How has the business changed?

It used to be lots of mom-and-pop stores. The people who owned the store ran it. They recommended stuff to their customers. The customer would come in with a health problem, the owner would say, “Why don’t you try this?” Now Whole Food dominates. The emphasis has changed. The buyers want to know: Will it sell? As opposed to true quality. Nowadays, the main way we spread is that someone buys our products on a trip to San Francisco and goes home and sends us email: Where can we get it? We say: If you really want it, go to your store manager and tell him. You have a tremendous amount of clout. They listen to you. It often works out that we get a store out of that deal. We don’t do internet sales.

Over the last five years, our sales have grown a lot. Five years ago, we were mostly in San Francisco, mostly in small stores. Around 20-30 small stores. Now we’re in roughly 100-120 stores. It’s hard to have a store locator on our website because distributors don’t want to tell us who they deal with. [Their store locator page.] In the Bay Area, we’re sold at Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, Rainbow Grocery, plus smaller stores. In Santa Cruz, at Staff of Life. We’re moving into Whole Foods in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland. Pretty soon you should be able to get it in any Whole Foods on the West Coast.

What do your customers say?

A year ago, we got a phone call from a woman in San Francisco. I’m moving to Utah, where can I buy your product? Eight years earlier, she’d been sick. [Digestive problems, apparently.] Her doctor had given her antibiotics. She didn’t get better. She was given more antibiotics. Still didn’t get better. This went on for several months. She couldn’t eat anything. Even baby food would make her gaseous. She was turning ashen, suffering from malnutrition. Then she got a small bottle of rejuvelac. Just 30 minutes after drinking it, she felt a little better. She’d been drinking it regularly for eight years, didn’t want to be without it.