"Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes." Sound familiar? It's a line from Dazed n' Confused, delivered by "Ms. Stroud," the bleeding heart liberal history teacher - a bit of silly dialogue capturing some of the naive philosophizing in fashion at the time.

It's a joke, of course, mocking the idealism for idealism's sake that materialized in the country's post-sixties hangover. But as I watched the movie the other night (it's on an HBO rerun loop this month) it struck me - Mrs. Stroud sounds like a lot of stuff we're hearing today. The populists, the protectionists, the redistributionists... A fair number of people are offering the same criticisms of this country made in the seventies.

Look at any magazine, paper or twenty four hour news channel and you'll see a piece on why or how excessive risk created this economic crisis, and why we may want to move back to the temperate habits and goals of the "company man." How we might be returning to the safety and comfort of traditional, long term employment and putting aside the entrepreneurial mindset and hyper-capitalism of the last few decades. Resigning ourselves to a future of lowered expectations and greater structure and giving up our love affair with risk. And that somehow this would be a good thing.

A highly impressionable swath of the public, and the media that serves them the red meat populism they want, seem to be reaching a consensus our society was far too enamored with the concept of risk. We'd be better served to work steadily, loyally at a job "producing something" than attempting to front load ourselves an early retirement using leverage or striking out in entrepreneurial ventures. That's a shame, because risk - sensible risk - bears none of the fault for our current financial mess. It's maligned for no good reason, confused with the actual causes. And this is a dire concern, because right now, sitting in the shithole we've dug for ourselves, risk is our only hope out.

As with any large event, a million smaller, finite causes led to the disaster that started last September. But they can broadly be boiled down to three simple categories, each of which might sound and look like "risk" but in reality is something entirely distinguishable.

On the corporate side there was opportunism, exploitation and fraud. Opportunism in that the people who were involved in creating and selling mortgage-backed securities and the people who brokered mortgages to home buyers both worked under "heads I win, tails you lose" bargains. Bargains so one-sided only a fool wouldn't have abused them. By as early as 2005, economists were warning that the housing market was overheating and would inevitably bust. At this point, the mortgage brokers on Main Street and the securities packagers and salesmen on Wall Street had two options. Suck all the profits they could out of the bubble before it burst, ballooning it even higher in the process, or pull back. Neither had any real skin in the game. Both knew they'd be laid off or see drastic decreases in income after the bubble burst, and that if they didn't push the market even further, someone else would. They did what any opportunist would - bankrolled as much as they could and waited for the walls to come down.

This led to the exploitations and frauds. Bankers pimped what they had to have known were garbage securities to all sorts of investors while brokers pushed liar's loans to any buyer with a heartbeat. Even the smaller local and regional banks got in on the deal, writing mortgages for people who clearly couldn't afford them, taking fees and flipping the paper to the larger securitizing banks. Everybody was incentivized by short term income structures and nobody faced any responsibility. Everything done at the banks was under the corporate umbrella, every actor one of thousands. The same went for the mortgage pushers. If countless other brokers were writing up garbage notes all over the country and every transaction was plausibly honest on its face, what chance was there any single malfeasant would ever face charges?

On the consumer side there was profligacy, envy and stupidity. Profligacy and envy in that people bought homes they couldn't afford and sucked cash out of them via home equity lines to buy "stuff" Madison Avenue trained them to think they needed or deserved. Stupidity in that they actually believed the housing market was immune to gravity. They needed only recall the wreckage of friends' and family members' finances when the Nasdaq cratered in 2000 to grasp where the market would inevitably go. They needed only consider the raft of articles on the business pages of every newspaper warning years in advance that housing was a time bomb. They needed only apply common sense where status obsession and the fleeting respite from reality that comes with buying shit ruled their brains.

Instead, they spent. Bought the $699,000.00 home with 2% down and a family income of $70,000.00. Whacked the HELOC to make the house look like the ones they saw on Home and Garden TV, pick up a Range Rover Sport and take the family to Disney World. Their wealth was fantasy, of course, and in the end, as often happens, the foolish brought down the foolish. Thousands of the most extended "homeowners" defaulted, and that started the chain reaction collapse that cost many of their brethren jobs. Left to consider their mistakes, some have manned up and moved on. But a lot of them haven't. They blame the bank. They blame the broker and the "Wall Street fat cats." And in a few limited cases, some have a point. But they're also refusing to admit what anyone who's been there understands - that it takes two defective minds to have a fraud. If a mortgage broker can hustle you, you should have known enough about your severe limitations to realize you didn't belong at the table in the first place.

Separate from those interlocking causes, but possibly the fattest roots of the debacle were hubris and "Institutional Autism." Hubris coming from academic absurdists who believed they could make the business of insuring bad loans profitable with mathematical models. Sounds silly in hindsight, that fluctuations in something as clearly irrational as our housing market could be predicted and countered by a computer program. But then it was entirely rational. Why check the street - actually go out and see what's happening in the mortgage brokering business - when you have mathematical formulas? What does a guy like Andy Beal know? Probably a gut investing caveman.

Working hand in hand with that was Institutional Autism, a cancer afflicting corporations far beyond Wall Street. The larger an organization is, the more hierarchical it is, and the more its managers live in a virtual reality divorced from the actual one outside its doors. The CEO speaks only to certain executives who get their information from upper middle managers who cobble that together from politically sanitized reports they get from underlings. The data gets massaged by every hand in the grapevine to suit his purposes, and by the time it reaches the top, it's diluted and convoluted enough that somebody like Stan O'Neal thinks, "Fuck! We're missing a golden opportunity! We ought to go deeper into this mortgage backed stuff." Few in a position of power to make the important decisions ever get the pulse of what's really taking place in the industry in which they're investing. Couple that with the false comfort of a risk manager claiming the models have everything under control and you wind up with a completely clueless organization.

How could so many brilliant people make so many bad decisions? The question's asked again and again, and it's the wrong one. The real questions are, How could so many brilliant people's bullshit detectors fail them? Why didn't a guy like O'Neal send undercover agents into the field, like Bill Gross did, to examine the mortgage markets up close and get the hell away from those investments? Why, when they get to the corner office, do so many of these masters of the universe become autistic, only able to deal with what's served to them on a platter by subordinates? Might the real concern with allowing companies to become too big too fail not be that they might implode, imperiling the economy, but that their implosion is all but inevitable, a mere matter of time? That when anything reaches a certain size, through inertia, impossibility of management and internal sabotage by self-interested employees, it necessarily regresses to imbecility?*

These are the causes of our current financial problems, and none of them - not opportunism, exploitation, fraud, profligacy, envy, hubris or "Institutional Autism" - have to do with risk. If anything, they're anathema to the concept, futile attempts to create impossible "sure things."

Risk is, simply, making a well thought out gamble on something with the intention that it will return a profit. And stepping away from the usual goal of money, how you define "profit" can be any number of things. Satisfaction with your work, making a difference, whatever it is, risk is taking a chance on losing something you have to gain something better. It's not a device to be shunned or discouraged. If a pack of greedy landowners didn't embrace risk two centuries ago, we wouldn't have the extended holiday we do this weekend. Risks sits at the base of everything good and correct in the American character, a bedrock of individual dignity - the right to strike out on your own and succeed. Or fail.

To personalize it a bit, risk is the guy who sent me an email noting that, due in small part to something I wrote, he left a lucrative cubicle farm job to pursue a career in medicine because, though it was a costly gamble, he always wanted to be a doctor. Risk is the guys who told me they quit their comfortable corporate positions to open a start-up brokering concert and sporting events tickets online, and how it's scary not having regular checks and living hand to mouth, but if given the option, they'd do it all over again. Risk is the person who started the Rudius Media platform you're reading - someone who chucked a career at one of the better law firms in the country to write a book. Which just now happens to be a major motion picture.

Not everyone will succeed, and not everyone can take risks, and they should only be taken when they make sense, but win or lose, they answer an important question for everyone who's made the effort - What if? That can drive some people mad, gnaw at them day and night. It'll make a person cynical and half-assed in his approach to the thing he's toiling at in place of the work he wants to be doing.** And generally, whatever the outcome, a well taken risk benefits us all. For every one that's attempted, vendors and suppliers get paid, and somebody learns something about running a business. For the one of ten that succeeds meteorically, a whole industry attached to the endeavor's production, marketing, accounting, etc... is created.

Now, at this moment, if instead of embracing it we vilify risk and run toward the comforts of collectivism, populism and protectionism - try to recreate a safer time when "company men" had guaranteed long term jobs and benefits, or a brave new world where Uncle Sam acts as "Handicapper General" - we'll have snuffed the only hope we have to climb out of this mess. As crazy as it sounds, we need to create a new, stabilized bubble to float us out, and we can only do that with some radical new technologies, inventions or markets that cause a massive inflow of investment. That only happens with innovation, and we can't innovate or invent anything substantial enough for the task if we employ draconian regulatory structures discouraging entrepreneurs and enormous redistributive spending initiatives on the backs of the investor classes.

So when you're watching the fireworks this weekend and the talk turns to where the country's going, as it easily tends to these days, and a "Mrs. Stroud" starts talking about how capitalism and "risk" culture brought us down, cut her off. Tell her yes, we are celebrating a bunch of aristocratic males who didn't want to pay their taxes. And there's absolutely nothing wrong, and everything right, with doing exactly that. Because without that gambler's ethos - the guy who gets up every day and says, "I'm going to get more out of my life" - none of what we have would have ever existed. And remind her that no, "risk" didn't cause this crisis. But its absence - our stifling of it or hesitance to embrace it now - will play a huge part in things getting a whole lot worse.
______________________________
* See: Congress.
** Which explains why half this country "phones in" its work and the quality of a lot of what we do, from production to service, veers from "mediocre" and "commoditized" to "defective" and "incompetent."

I did a couple interviews in the past two weeks, both with new college graduates, touching on issues ranging from the career choices they're facing in our present economy to my book's themes to whether Youporn beats Porntube. In the first, I answered the questions. In the second, which will be up in the coming week or so, I did the questioning and answered some follow-ups, not unlike the Sex Drugs and Death (A Trifecta of American Hangups) and A Running Conversation on the Intersection of Work and Life pieces I did with Dr. Rob of Shrinktalk a few months back.*

The first was for a writer calling himself the Velveteen Lust Catcher. Yes, the name caught my interest. Here are a couple excerpts and the link:

It seems that we have at least one thing in common when it comes to a Libertarian viewpoint, and you've mentioned in a past exchange that this sentiment is probably more widespread than it seems. I agree with you. The lack of cohesion among free thinkers most likely results from the absence of an appropriate atmosphere to express thought. What do you think the answer to that is? Can the mighty internets save us all? Or do you think we'll see the same degradation that we have with most mainstream media platforms?

I don't think individual thinkers will get together en masse because, by definition, they don't easily congeal behind any movement. Most rational people - and I think there are a lot of them out there - compile bits and pieces of various ideologies to form their views. The Internet's a wonderful device for creating independent thinkers because of the number of different viewpoints competing on it. But I don't think it will create a wave of independent thinkers arguing for logical, sensible policies. Those people tend to look at the broader systems, recognize them as hopelessly flawed and corrupt and focus on taking care of themselves.

[Do] you think that your criticisms of human behavior in the legal profession are specific only to that, or can it be applied on a more general scale? Is there something about human nature that allows individuals to fall so easily into the power structure of social and "corporate" hierarchy? Do you think it's just easier for people in general to buy into the illusion that they're important, or is there something about the Legal field in particular?

I guess we're just pack animals, and you have to play the game to compete for resources in this regulated jungle of ours. Regarding law, I think it attracts a lot of people - men, mostly - who are making up for shortcomings elsewhere. The title, the "prestige" it used to confer. The male ego's a ridiculously fragile thing, and nowhere is its weakness more on display than in law. Wall Street, sales, entertainment... People say professionals in those fields are driven by ego. I think they're driven more by money. Law's different. It's not a direct path to big money. I think the real currency a lot of lawyers are seeking is respect.

Continue reading "An Interview"

The biggest obstacles to formal pot legalization are the types of people arguing most vehemently for pot legalization.
- Me, on Twitter (April 15, 2009)

Of the myriad disingenuous arguments for marijuana legalization made over the years, none is less credible or more embarrassing than the present claim that rolling back its prohibition would create a desperately needed windfall in tax revenue for the states regulating its sale. The dumbest position yet. Dumber than the medicinal marijuana argument that has anyone claiming anxiety, sciatica or swimmer's ear walking out of "clinics" in California with bags of Blueberry Indica. Dumber than that nonsense your pony-tailed uncle spews about how hemp is superior to nylon - how we can build radial tires for Peterbilts from it we wanted to. "The Swedish do it, man... Or was that the Finns? I always mix them up. Which one's the island?"

Have you tried to make Champagne lately? Vodka? How about a nice Bourbon? Can't do it, can you? But if you could, you would. Who'd ever go to the liquor store again if he could brew Basil Hayden's or Perrier Jouet in his basement? And that's exactly what'll happen if the states legalize dope. Everybody you know who's smoked pot in the past or continues to recreationally use it today - roughly a quarter and a fifth of the people you've met under 50, respectively - would start up a garden or grow room in his house. Neighbors would swap strains of Sativa at coffee klatches the way they swap tuna casserole recipes. And that tax gain to the states? Minimal, if anything. A slight bump from the shoppers looking for super premium stuff only a large retailer could import. Or lazy jackasses like me who don't know shit about gardening.

But it's not the imbecilic economics of the argument that make it so offensive. The thing that makes this pitch so horrendous is it's a clear, pathetic pretext. If you support the concept of legalization as an issue of personal liberty... If you believe that we don't have a Bill of Affirmative Rights and Entitlements, but a Bill of Limitations on How Much Government Can Interfere in What Ought to be Private, Personal Decisions... And if you believe in having a society of people who take personal responsibility for those decisions, then you're smart enough to realize that this type of silly Trojan Horse argument ducks a long overdue conversation America needs to be having with itself.

As well meaning or effective as they might be, pretexts are sleazy arguments. Something hired liars use in courtrooms, lobbyists stuff into talking point memos and television ministers spit from the pulpit as "1-800-GIV-2GOD" flashes on the megachurch's Jumbotron. They're what you say you're doing when you can't say what you're actually doing because what you're actually doing is dumb, solely self-interested or malevolent. They're also embarrassingly obvious. Anybody with a child's appreciation for the art of debate can spot a pretext coming a mile away. And no, the fact that the other side's position is a fraud doesn't give you license to offer an equally false response, particularly in regard to an issue as important as personal freedom.

Why? Because all a pretext does, all it can ever do, is degrade and confuse the debate, invite the usual crowd of scolds, zero tolerance zealots and nanny state teetotalers to offer equally disingenuous arguments. That or the pretext's dim, but often effective counterpart - the "Slippery Slope" rebuttal:

"Legalize marijuana and we'll be substantially closer to balancing California's budget!"

"But--but--but if we allow that, then the people will use ecstasy, and then cocaine, and when they get bored with that they'll go on to LSD, and then they'll go on to PCP and heroin and as the older people become junkies the children will have no guidance and the users will get younger and younger and we'll have it in the high schools! We'll have the PCP and the LSD and the heroin, and grade schoolers will be sniffing the Angel Dust! I know what happens with this! I grew up in the Sixties and my sister followed the Jefferson Starship and she was never the same and you might think it's harmless but when it comes to your third grader with methamphetamines, you tell me-- tell me! Who will think of the children!"*

Never underestimate the power of an hysteric's imagination. They may not be much for facts or logic, but they can whip up doomsday scenario PR attacks faster than Simon Cowell can fart one hit wonders onto the pop charts.

Continue reading "If You Want Something to Tax, Tax Lies."

This is an outtake from the initial draft of Happy Hour is for Amateurs addressing a subject with which most of us who work in offices for any length of time are quite familiar - daydreaming through your job. Most think it's a simple reaction to boredom. I agree, but I also think it's a defense mechanism, a healthy sign you're normal.

I've worked in an office most of my adult life, but never really, fully been there. Anything I see or hear can take me from the moment, set me thinking about something entirely disconnected from everything I'm doing. Any image or sound I come across - the slightest stimulus providing a hint of a basis to start my imagination racing away from Where I'm Stuck. An advertisement for cheap plane tickets on a passing city bus will have me running a reel on what it might be like in Prague that time of year through the balance of most of the morning. A disc jockey's joke about George Bush crackling out of a radio in the bodega where I pick up the newspaper leaves me musing on what the administration's plan was - what the end game might have been in that seemingly mindless war, and why we can't seem to get the oil spigots flowing. Perhaps a conspiracy's afoot - some nasty plan between the administration and oil companies. But how would the delay help? What would their aim be?

Sometimes it's just that random image or sound repeating over and over like some warped form of meditation - focusing the mind on an odd, innocuous distraction. And once it's locked in my head, it'll often stay for hours, jammed on a rerun loop. I'll find myself humming and half-singing "Panama" under my breath in the line at the Starbucks on Market Street, unaware as to why - forgetting I'd just heard the song blasting from a car at a stoplight. And the playback's always vivid. I'll be standing there, salivating over the first caffeine fix of the day, moving in sync with the line, pulling the dollars out of my pocket and readying myself to pay, in every outward manifestation totally enveloped in the act of preparing for a day at the office. But in my head it's a different story. The spoken word "solo" near the end of the song is rolling.

I reach down, between my legs... and ease the seat back... The video of the song plays in the background, as immediate and electric as it was when I was thirteen on my parents' couch, watching it on MTV. She's blinding, I'm flying... Right behind the rear-view mirror now... David Lee Roth's sailing over the stage on a suspension pulley above Eddie Van Halen and Michael Anthony, and for a second I'm wondering what it was like in the dressing room after one of their shows - just how many groupies were involved in the orgies. Piston's popping... Ain't no stopping now...

"Sir, what size?"

"What?"

"What size?"

"Oh... Venti."

Continue reading "Sleepwalking Through Work (Nuggets, Vol. XIV)"

I used drink a lot of gin in college. When you're young and you don't know enough to drink your liquor straight - that the sugars in what you add to it are seventy percent of the hangover - you drink it loaded with mixers. And everything tastes great soaked in tonic.

Then, of course, there was this unfortunate incident I wrote about earlier, with those overtones of "kidnapping," "assault" and "terroristic threats," inspired by Tanqueray. That got me rethinking gin. Not in any sense of concern, or quitting it. More with an eye toward change - to the easier, smoother white liquor (one that might not have me aiming weapons so easily).

I shifted to vodka as my default "clear liquor" and a long time love affair ensued. Vodka's the cleanest of buzzes, and with some Eastern European blood in my veins, it went down like mother's milk. Somewhere in the fading days of college, I forgot about the charms of gin. I stuck with the bourbon for friends, the vodka for anesthetizing myself at business-related gatherings and the scotch for, well... Good scotch was a special event thing, for raping a friend's expense account. There's lovely ring to the words "Johnny Walker Blue" followed with, "Yeah, we'll call this a 'business dinner.' You're a client!"

"Of course I am. Now let's get down to brass tacks on this Penske file. You've got one of those Dartmouth kids fucking the whole thing up."

"Is there a good hand job joint nearby?"

"Which would you prefer on the charge receipt? 'A-1 Briefcase Repair' or 'House of Crepes, LLC'?"

I'm going to miss the boom years. I didn't get rich myself, but there was always that sense of excess - that the money would never stop. You didn't have to work on Wall Street. You only had to be in its shadow. Family, friends, neighbors, half of everyone you met... The world was drunk on its gains. Even the fucking lawyers were enjoying high class scraps. An actual trickle-down revolution, from '96 straight through to '07. And now it's over - popped finally, For Real. And here we are confused, trying to grapple with a semblance of what it was like in the days before the cleaning lady was worth six figures in Cisco stock and the high school guidance counselor down the street was flipping vacation homes in Naples and Avalon with financing from Bloated and Overlevered Bank, Inc.

People old enough to remember that decade say today's like the '70s. I wouldn't know. All I remember of those days was riding in the back of my old man's red coupe, hearing that sax line from "Baker Street" and all those awful Eagles tunes. To me it feels like the early '90s, the fading but nasty edges of the George Bush I Recession. And perhaps that's why I recently rediscovered gin. A sense of déjà vu, of a feeling I had back then that all wasn't going so well. That vodka wouldn't dull things enough, and bourbon would clarify too much. Gin's a nice middle ground - a sneaky, quirky buzz. Stronger than vodka or scotch, and smooth where bourbon enflames.

But who knows why, really? Might have just been laziness - finding a bottle of Tanqueray in a pile of holiday gifts, reacquainting myself with the taste and thinking, Damnit. Where have you been the last sixteen years?

I'm the kind of person who meets a problem head on, and I view the lack of gin in my recent history as a deeply disturbing shortcoming. In the spirit of making up for lost time, I've been soaking it up like a bar towel for the past several months. And I feel a need to share my experiences, in the hope nobody will forget the gin the way I did, and look back with all that regret.

I'm nothing if not a giver, so here we go - my top five:

Continue reading "Gin"

When you go to a music store (for those of us who still buy compact discs), do you shop by date? Walk up to the "New Music" section and purchase, say, the new Neil Young disc, a recent version of Wagner's Ring Trilogy, a Britney Spears' latest, recent speed metal offerings and a brand new boxed set of gospel standards all at once? Would you never buy a Beatles or Stones disc unless it was one of those remastered versions you found on the "Just Released" shelves?

Of course not. You don't shop art as you'd buy milk or meats. Or at least you shouldn't - if you're sane. So why do so many people do it online?

Sixty percent of the Net being filled with "expert" advice about how you can "Master the Internet and to get paid six figures!" or "Maximize your social media for optimal business networking!" I run across a lot of articles discussing how to write a "successful" website. The main thrust's always the same: "Post as much as you can. Post new material all the time!" "Make it pithy and constantly update!" People have died of heart attacks trying to maintain ridiculous posting schedules, working around the clock without sleep. And for what? To satisfy an asinine paradigm - a terrible mass production business model borrowed from the old line media.

Whether something's "new" or "breaking" is a concern for newspaper writers seeking scoops. There's no reason on Earth a website creating general entertainment bits or comedy should feel any obligation to flood its pages with constant new material. If what's written in the site is written well, and timeless, the site should work like a book. The reader can click in, scan the volumes of text and read what he or she likes. The only reason website content producers feel the need to crank out "New! New! New!" shit every day is because they've decided, for reasons beyond me, to compete with the 90% of bloggers who do nothing but grab hot stories, comment on them and link other comments about it from people in their network of friends. That's not an audience - that's an echo chamber. And lumping that stuff in with actual writer-created material is a horrible confusion of content with amateur editorializing.

Continue reading "The Fierce Idiocy of "New!""

Author's Note: I said I'd start offering shorter posts as described in the piece I put up Monday. I forgot, however, about this little gem I meant to put up a few weeks ago.

A couple of months ago, in the context of a quasi-investigative look at "Pick Up Artist" culture, I wrote a review of The Complete Asshole's Guide to Handling Chicks. I picked it as my favorite book in the genre because it wasn't actually a pick-up guide at all. It was funny satire of pick-up guides, laughing at a subject that deserved to be laughed at. I also found it hysterical that loads of readers bought a book with that title thinking it was an actual, earnest pick-up guide. It seemed ridiculous anyone could reach that assumption. Amazingly, disturbingly, many did. From hardcore PUA adherents upset at the book's lack of serious strategy tips to fulminating feminists foaming-at-the-mouth in response to the book's obvious conceit, it was clear: This was a deeply misunderstood text.

At the time, I thought about riffing on the subject of satire and allegedly "offensive" humor. Why some people get satire and some people don't, or don't want to, and what the difference is between the camps. Why some people can laugh at anything, while others have such hard-ons for their personal sacred cows. And what all of these biases say about their private neuroses.

My theory was that nasty satire can be disconcerting for certain audiences. Reality the's punchline, the gag never ends, nothing's held above reproach, and there's no obvious Fourth Wall between what's joking and what's serious. It makes a person who likes to keep high boundaries between the funny and the serious work for the payoff. And in a meta sense, it says, "Everything's a joke" (or at least everything about the subject at hand). I think that touches on truths about the absurdity of our lives a little too closely for some. They get the payoff and don't like it very much.

But that's a hell of a concept to flesh-out on a website's brutal deadlines, and I wound up lashing a pile of pedantic gibberish onto the page as I tried. Kind of like the pedantic gibberish in that last paragraph.

Thankfully, I got this email a few days later. It's from Dan Indante, one of the authors of The Complete Assholes' Guide, and he wrote what I couldn't, along with many other amusing things that ought to be said. This is untouched, used by permission and yes, we're 99% certain it's from the real author.

Continue reading "On the "PUA" World (An Admittedly Cursory Examination), Epilogue"