It is breathtaking.

If you have been on Twitter the past few days you’ve seen it. If not, you need to. The tool is a bit of software that allows you to ask questions or give commands and get responses from the computer that are extremely human-like and impressive.

You don’t have to be a techie to get enthralled with this. In fact I predict every person in the world will be interacting with some form of this technology in the next couple years.

I’m going to try to explain it to you but it is better to show than to tell so most of this edition will be screen shots of me and others interacting with the Chat GPT AI.

First I asked Chat GPT to explain what Chat GPT is, in a way that is simple to understand:

Then I figured I’d experiment with Chat GPT writing part of this edition:

Whoa.

Many are saying that this release this week will be a turning point we will look back to years from now as the marker of a new era of technology. Below I’m sharing a bunch of examples of how incredible this AI is and how it might be applied. Everything I share below is a real query and a real answer written “out of thin air” by the AI. It’s something. I’m also sharing some of the limits I’ve found.

Read widely. Read wisely.
Max

1. Example use: Writing a polite note to a customer.

2. Example use: Assessing business strategy

3. Example use: Travel recommendations

4. Example use: Drafting a commercial lease

This one is wild. You have to click the link to see it. The author asks Chat GPT to draft a commercial lease in the state of South Carolina. Look out lawyers. The software does it in about thirty seconds.

5. Example: Writing odd poetry

This afternoon I was talking about Chat GPT with my parents and my in-laws. My dad suggested asking if tight jeans or baggy pants are better. I asked the AI to answer in the form of a poem

I got into this poetry idea and asked Chat GPT to write a sonnet about Warren Buffet’s investing philosophy.

6. Example use: Create a fun choose your own adventure

This is a fun one I borrowed from someone’s tweet:

7. Example use: Replacing me in The Weekend Reader

I decided to ask the chat bot to write something I might write about — the dangers of social media — in my own style. What it came up with made me wonder if I’m not so special:

Luckily (?) I found that I can’t quite completely replace myself though. The chatbot isn’t connected to the internet.

This software is so believable and creative, it is almost scary.

At least it can seem scary. Take this example of venture capital investor Marc Andreesen asking the Chat GPT about how it might take over the world…His response to this:

“Oh no.”

But don’t fear. This thing isn’t omniscient (yet). It does make mistakes!

Most of the time the software seems pretty “humble” and doesn’t answer questions it can’t answer. But I found a great example of it being at once both very confident and dead-wrong. Look at this conversation with a user about the fastest marine mammals from Tim Connors:

postscript

You really ought to try this thing out for yourself and you can begin to see its power. You might conclude, as some have that “homework is finished forever” because of this.

Even if ChatGPT can’t replace me completely yet. I’ll let it have the last word on this edition:

subscribe to the weekend reader

A huge leap for artificial intelligence was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is the final recommendation in my mini-series on Blindspots. You can read the first few recommendations here:
- The Hazards of Confidence — about cognitive bias
- Our Lying Eyes about the problems with eyewitness testimony,
- Confident idiots — about the Dunning Kruger Effect and
- Your Brain is primed to reach false conclusions. The link on that article was off — you can use this.

TODAY’S RECOMMENDATION:

Why you think you’re right — even if you’re wrong
Julia Galef TedTalk (11 minutes to watch)

SUMMARY:
This short talk explores the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning’, the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal.

This tendency exists in all of us. It is also known as confirmation bias. Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it.

Julia Galef explains this bias in two ways — by way of history, through the Dreyfus affair and by way of analogy. Her analogy is the military and she uses the image of the Warrior and the Scout. A Warrior has a cause and fights for it, defending against attackers and making attacks himself. A Scout, on the other hand is not looking for a fight. He is looking for new information.

I find this simple analogy incredibly helpful in thinking about politics, Covid policy, racism, religion, or any other controversial topic. It can be a diagnostic tool; When are you being a Warrior? When are you being a Scout?

Some people, by nature go on the war path frequently. They have a soapbox and they yell from it. Warriors often win themselves seats on cable news channels.

Scouts make headlines less often because they are less strident and controversial in their approach. They try to see both sides of the issue to seek real knowledge. That is valuable, but it doesn’t make for great TV.

I believe sometimes you have to be the Warrior. Sometimes you have to fight for what you believe is right. But you can overplay that role. We’ve overplayed it at a society-wide level and now struggle just to talk to each other. We just yell past each other.

What we lack is enough Scouts. Where are the people who want to learn more than they want to lecture? Where are the people who will approach issues without an agenda? Where are the people who aren’t afraid of having their minds changed? Where are the people who are comfortable enough in their own skill to hold an opinion while simultaneously truly considering whether they might be wrong?

I think there are a lot of Scouts on this email list. Most of you who write me don’t have a Warrior’s axe to grind. You have questions. You may have opinions, but you are curious. I love that. I find it inspiring.

Occasionally, some of you will write me and your inner Warrior has gotten ahold of your keyboard. That’s okay. I get it. It happens to me sometimes too. If it happens all the time, it’s not a good look. But sometimes you gotta say what’s really on your mind. And on your heart.

The problem, I have found, is when you are acting like a Warrior, you are more likely to encounter other Warriors. Your aggressiveness and defensiveness can prompt others to pick up their swords and shields too. It’s a matter of survival. They sense a threat from you so they gear up for a fight. Or they run. Neither of which will help you convince them that they are right.

On the other hand, when a Scout encounters someone, they rarely provoke that person into acting like a Warrior. People usually don’t feel threatened by someone who is asking honest questions (not leading questions, honest questions). Sometimes when a Scout encounters a Warrior, if the situation is just right and they are both lucky, the Warrior maybe willing to disarm and join the Scout on a shared mission of fact-finding.

Let me make this practical, in case I’m hovering too long in the abstract. We’ve been talking about racism, the police, and Black Lives Matter the past several weeks. Not just The Weekend Reader, but the entire country. Let’s apply this framework to the issue at hand.

I know for a fact from the emails I receive that this newsletter’s readership includes a whole spectrum of viewpoints on these topics. I’d like to describe the spectrum of views but I’m not sure if “right” and “left” is the best way.

On the one side are those who lean towards Social Justice Advocacy, who are more convinced of the need to reform the police, who see systemic racism as a real threat to blacks and to our society. We’ll call them Social Justice Advocates. They are concerned that George Floyd’s death is more than an isolated incident. It represents the widespread plight of the black community. Most of them don’t support violence or looting, though some say ‘how else can we get your attention?’

On the other side are those who see racism as bad but as an individualistic behavior of bad people rather than a holistic system we are all a part of. They are more likely to be concerned about law and order. They fear “soft-totalitarianism” where it isn’t okay to have a view that differs from the Social Justice Activist party line. They were saddened and angry about George Floyd’s death but were just as (more?) concerned about the looting, rioting and tearing down of statues. They feel for the small business owners who lost their shops in the fires. We’ll call this group the Traditionalists.

These are not actual groups. And they aren’t binary. There are a thousand points people stand along the spectrum. I’m simplifying to two camps for sake of this argument.

I have talked with Traditionalists who are Warriors. They are angry about being called racist. They argue to me that “Black Lives Matter” is a phrase that cloaks a lot of anti-white, anti-institutional, harmful-to-society baggage. They think ‘Woke Folk’ are not only tearing down statues but are tearing down the institutions that make America great. They have no interest in listening to self-righteous, politically correct, entitled Social Justice Advocates.

I have also talked with Traditionalists who are Scouts. They are concerned about law and order and fear the political correctness police are taking over to the harm of individual liberty. But they also see the the Floyd video and the demonstrations and are asking what they have been blind to and how they might need to open themselves to understanding something new about the sins of our past and present and about how we may need to change.

I have talked with Social Justice Advocates who are Warriors. They are quick to call people racist and accuse others of “white privilege” and “centering” and use other new terms that if you don’t know what the term means they use that as proof that you are out of touch and exhibiting that systemic racism and privilege. There is no room for disagreement with them. You are either all in — admitting your personal guilt or you are the problem. They have no interest in listening to privileged self-centered heartless Traditionalists.

I have also talked with Social Justice Advocates who are Scouts. They still see and feel and believe in the painful and disturbing reality of racism. But they don’t see every cop as an enemy. They have mercy on Traditionalists who aren’t yet convinced. They avoid name calling and jargon. They are patient with those who disagree. And they are willing to admit when others who believe what they do have gone too far in their advocacy.

We talk a lot about polarization in this country. The problem isn’t that people disagree. The problem is that too many of us too much of the time act like Warriors instead of Scouts.

I want to add one other archetype to this imaginary ideological realm we’re describing: the Farmer. Throughout history when armies march across land, they cross the land of bystander farmers. The Farmer isn’t in the middle of the fight. He may not have even formed an opinion of which side should win. He just wants to tend to his crops and not be bothered and hopefully the battle never comes to him.

Farmers can be valuable to Scouts — they know things and have information to share. Farmers can also be valuable to Warriors. They can passively support them as the warriors carry their torches and the sometimes can be recruited by Warriors to pick up their own pitchforks and fight.

Farmers in a war are not agents of change because they haven’t mustered the energy or interest to get involved. Farmers are why things stay status quo. Farmers can provide information because they know things and they can be influenced because they haven’t aren’t in a position of defending their views. But Farmers mostly don’t make a difference because of they are apathetic.

Most people are Farmers most of the time. Their little lives are busy and it’s too inconvenient to get involved. That’s okay — it’s a big world with too many issues and problems to try to learn about all of it for fight for every cause that deserves it. But the Farmers are who Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to in his Letter form a Birmingham Jail. They were the white moderates who were not overtly racist but couldn’t be troubled to do anything about the Jim Crow laws in the country. Only by having peacefully protests violently put down by the police on national TV was the conscience of the nation of farmers changed enough to pass civil rights reform.

My point in all this talk about Warriors and Scouts and Farmers is that these are different approaches we each take to issues. And your default approach might not be the right one for the moment.

The truth is we can choose how we act at any time and on any issue. We can be farmers and keep our heads down, focused only on our little plot of land. We can be Warriors, trying to smote our enemies, bookmarking evidence that agrees with our view and disregarding evidence that doesn’t. Or we can more like Scouts, who have a view but are constantly surveilling the landscape not just for information that agrees with what they believe but they are on the lookout for what is actually true.

The choice is ours.

Read widely. Read wisely.
Max

The Warrior, The Scout and The Farmer was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reality Check:

Two weeks ago was the last time I wrote. Globally there were 661,394 confirmed coronavirus cases and 30,671 deaths. Today there are 1,850,345 cases and 114,053 deaths.

Two weeks ago in the U.S., there were 122,273 confirmed cases and 2,047 deaths. Today there are 558,897 cases and 21,991 deaths.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

I’m writing this edition as an essay, rather than my typical newsletter format. I wanted to address some questions that have obsessed me for the past week, about the U.S. change of policy on face masks, whether they help slow the spread of coronavirus, and how that might change our culture.

What I learned was stunning.

This past week may be the hardest I have ever worked. Based on what I have learned about the role of face masks in preventing coronavirus spread, in the last week, through our company Saturn Five, we have started a wholesale business to supply masks to hospitals and health systems. That business is called Saturn Five Health and we have already sold thousands and thousands of units to healthcare providers in the U.S. Our mission is to care for those who care for us — the doctors and nurses on the front lines — by getting their organizations needed N95 masks, gowns, gloves and even ventilators. If you know a health care provider in need of large amounts of PPE, direct them to us to help.

In the last week we also started a social enterprise to offer a buy one, give one face mask program. It is called face2facemasks.org. You can buy masks for yourself and your family. For every mask you buy, we will give a mask to a homeless shelter serving people who have no ability to social isolate and “stay home” and have no ability to purchase masks for themselves. I’ll write more about that at the end, but I unashamedly ask you to buy masks and give masks through our program. 100% of profits go to the American Hospital Association’s 100 Million Mask Challenge, getting donated PPE to the hospitals with the most critical needs.

Now, on to the content. I’ve read more than one-hundred fifty articles on masks in the past week and am distilling what I learned there for you.

Here is what you will take away from reading:

Eleven Reasons Everyone Should Wear A Mask

1. Because this virus is airborne (and what that means)…
2. …and Masks work against airborne diseases like SARS
3. Because Covid-19 spreads asymptomatically
4. This should be common sense
5. The mechanics of how transmission happens and is blocked by a mask
6. How “‘perfect” is the enemy of the good
7. Masks disrupt the three pathways of transmission
8. Studies have proven masks to slow disease growth
9. Countries that wear masks fight Covid-19 more effectively than countries that don’t
10. Masks create the right kind of social signalling
11. Masks are our best hope to move past lockdown into freedom

Why the government initially discouraged us from wearing masks

1. The terrible decision to downplay the severity
2. The reality of being underprepared and ill-equipped
3. Why we have a mask shortage
4. How our post-truth culture is causing faith in institutions to crumble

The Tank, the Motorcycle, and the car — What kind of mask should you wear?

• Why you shouldn’t wear an N95 Mask
• Why you shouldn’t rely on a t-shirt or a handkerchief
• Why a simple surgical mask is your best bet

Wearing a mask is a culture-changing decision and could save all of us

• Some countries have worn masks for years (and why the West hasn’t)
• Some thoughts on identity and freedom
• The era of the handshake is over

What you can do TODAY to help

Read widely. Read wisely.

Max

subscribe to my weekly newsletter here

It is time we all wear masks.

Up until a week ago Friday, the Centers for Disease Control recommended that Americans need not wear masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Then, they suddenly changed their minds.

Why?

In the middle of the biggest public health emergency our generation has ever faced, did our leading experts have it wrong? What I’ve read in the past week has convinced me that our initial thinking about masks may have caused irreparable harm and thousands more deaths.

I want to share what I’ve learned about the importance of masks, the challenges we face in changing our habits, and what we can do now to turn things around.

Why Everyone Should Wear A Face Mask

1. Coronavirus is airborne in the way that matters

Initially, the main guidance we got about the disease was to wash our hands and to social distance because we knew the virus traveled mainly on droplets of liquid and didn’t remain in the air. It lives on surfaces for a while we learned, so we know we better keep the counters clean. But we may have underestimated the risk of the virus in the air. In The Atlantic, Ed Yong had a great piece to explain this:

“Confusingly, in public-health circles, the word airborne has a technical meaning that’s not just “carried through the air.” When people are infected with respiratory viruses, they emit viral particles whenever they talk, breathe, cough, or sneeze. These particles are encased in globs of mucus, saliva, and water. Bigger globs fall faster than they evaporate, so they splash down nearby — these are traditionally called “droplets.” Smaller globs evaporate faster than they fall, leaving dried-out viruses that linger in the air and drift farther afield — these are called “aerosols.” When researchers say a virus is “airborne,” like measles or chickenpox, they mean that it moves as aerosols. When the World Health Organization asserts that the new coronavirus is “NOT airborne,” it’s claiming that the virus instead spreads primarily through the close-splashing droplets, which either land directly on people’s faces or are carried to their faces by unwashed, contaminated hands…

“…The question, then, isn’t whether the coronavirus is “airborne” in the tediously academic way the word has been defined. As the journalist Roxanne Khamsi puts it, the virus is “definitely borne by air.” The better questions are: How far does the virus move? And is it stable and concentrated enough at the end of its journey to harm someone’s health?

In the New York Times, microbiologist and Pulitzer-prize winner Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee agreed, “I think the vast amount of data would suggest that the coronavirus is an airborne infection carried by respiratory droplets, and it also can be passed on by direct contact.”

2. The good news is masks are pretty effective at blocking airborne pathogens

In “What’s the evidence on face masks?” Dr. Adrien Burch, who holds a P.h.D. in microbiology from Cal Berkeley, reports that the single most effective intervention for fighting SARS was not hand washing but wearing a face mask:

“Although Covid-19 is a novel disease, it is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is closely related to the virus that caused the SARS epidemic 17 years ago. However, since Covid-19’s true genetic identity was not widely publicized until recently, influenza research probably shaped doctors’ initial opinions about face masks instead. What does the actual science say about SARS?

“According to research on the SARS epidemic, face masks were the most consistently effective intervention for reducing the contraction and spread of SARS. In a Cochrane Review on the subject, six out of seven studies showed that face masks (surgical and N95) offered significant protection against SARS. Hand washing was also very effective, supported by four out of seven studies in a multivariate analysis.”

Others are less conclusive. From the Wall Street Journal, “Is it Time To Wear A Face Mask?”:

Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, says a 2005 study found that face masks reduce respiratory virus transmission by about 10%.

That doesn’t sound impressive to me, but the article continues, “Though modest, a 10% effect could be huge, says Dr. Vermund. ‘I don’t scoff at small effects applied to millions and millions of people,’ he says.”

3. Covid-19 spreads asymptomatically

According to the BBC the number of Chinese Covid-19 cases may have been underreported because people didn’t exhibit symptoms. That is good news because it may mean that the mortality rate is much lower than the official rate when compared with confirmed cases. On the other hand, it means that the virus may spread most through people who act and feel healthy.

“A recently published study of cases in China found that “undocumented cases of infection”, or those with either mild or no symptoms, were significantly contagious and could have been responsible for nearly 80% of positive virus cases.”

NPR reports that we should wear masks because we’re contagious before we we start feeling sick:

“The primary benefit of covering your nose and mouth is that you protect others. While there is still much to be learned about the novel coronavirus, it appears that many people who are infected are shedding the virus — through coughs, sneezes and other respiratory droplets — for 48 hours before they start feeling sick. And others who have the virus — up to 25%, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield — may never feel symptoms but may still play a role in transmitting it.”

Four physicians writing an op-ed for the New York Times reported that 25–50% of all Covid-19 cases may be asymptomatic. Their conclusion? That because of those rates it would be best if every wears a mask when in public, to support others.

In other words, the most generous thing you could do, and likely the most reasonable, is to assume you have Covid-19 even if you don’t have symptoms.

You should behave as if you need to protect others from catching it from you. And the best way to do that is to wear a face mask.

A letter in the medical Journal The Lancet put it bluntly, “As evidence suggests COVID-19 could be transmitted before symptom onset, community transmission might be reduced if everyone, including people who have been infected but are asymptomatic and contagious, wear face masks.”

4. This Should Be Common Sense

I admit I was kind of surprised when I first learned that the Surgeon General had encouraged Americans not to buy masks. I wasn’t the only one.

“It’s just common sense that a mechanical barrier must do something,” said Annalies Wilder-Smith, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who recommends using masks to prevent transmission in the home.

As the doctors in the op-ed, I mentioned earlier put it,

“Even if masks don’t completely protect each individual, they could considerably reduce the spread of the virus. Even if the coverings only reduced transmission to and from each wearer by half, that would reduce the chance of spread by 75 percent. So face coverings could reduce the exponential growth of new infections and avert disaster in America’s hot spots.”

When Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee was asked by the New York Times if everyone should wear a mask, he replied;

“I think so. I think the issue is there are various kinds of masks. There are the expensive and highly efficient N95 respirators. Doctors have to get fitted for them. They are hard to get. Not everyone should be wearing those, and no one should be hoarding those. Those should be reserved for medical personnel. But then there is a simpler, so-called surgical mask, which is just a filter across your face, which prevents you from secreting respiratory droplets, and prevents others from getting respiratory droplets from you. These are cheap. In the hospital, we used to just use one and throw it away. But under these circumstances, we need a good decontamination protocol. So if you are talking about the simpler ones, then yes. Everyone should be wearing them, because the risk is low, and the return may be high.”

5. The mechanics of transmission

In a terrific article, Sui Huang from the Institute of Systems Biology, explains how transmission occurs through sneezing or coughing,

“How viruses that cause airborne diseases are carried by droplets from person to person is a complicated, understudied matter. Droplets can (for this discussion) be crudely divided in two large categories based on size (FIG. 2):

FIGURE 2. Droplet larger than aerosols, when exhaled (at velocity of <1m/s), evaporate or fall to the ground less than 1.5 m away. When expelled at high velocity through coughing or sneezing, especially larger droplets (> 0.1 mm), can be carried by the jet more than 2m or 6m, respectively, away.

(a) Droplets below a diameter of 10 um (micrometer), the upper size limit for the definition of ‘aerosol’ (particles so light as to be able to float in the air). For brevity, let us call this category “aerosols”. These small aerosols are carried by ventilation or by winds and thus can travel across rooms. What makes N95 facial masks different from the surgical masks is that the former are designed (as per regulatory requirement) to stop aerosols: they have to filter out 95% of droplets smaller than 0.3 um.

(b) Droplets larger than 10um (micrometer), reaching 100um (0.1mm) or more. Let us call these large particles “spray droplets” here. (For a more detailed discussion, see Nicas and Jones, 2009). Of course, droplets can be even larger, up to a size visible to the naked eye in the spray generated by coughing or sneezing (0.1 mm diameter to above). Calculations by Xie et al suggest that if exhaled, the >0.1 mm droplets may evaporate or fall to a surface within 2m, depending on size, air humidity and temperature. But coughing or sneezing can shoot them like projectiles out of the mouth with a “muzzle velocity” of 50 meters/second (for sneezing) or 10 m/s (for coughing), and droplets can reach distances as far as 6m away. If so, then the much mentioned “safe distance” of 6 feet in social encounters may not suffice — except you wear a (simple) mask –more on that later.”

6. How “Perfect” is the enemy of the good

Huang makes this point to those who who pooh-pooh face masks because they aren’t 100% effective in preventing contagion through aerosols. I quote it at length below.

“Nuances do not translate well to lay people.(as well as many arm chair experts) who now, owing to message binarization, think that masks are useless.

However Huang writes that the truth is more complicated. He says we must not forget that “the partial filtering provided by surgical masks is better than nothing. In an experimental simulation of the filtering capacity of masks in 2008, van der Sande and her colleagues in the Netherlands compared three masks, (i) home-made (DYI) of tea cloth, (ii) standard surgical masks and (iii) FFP2, the European equivalent of N95 masks, with respect to their ability to stop small aerosols in the range of 0.2 to 1 um –droplets that can reach the lower lung.

“What the authors found for inward protection warrants some questioning of CDC’s message that surgical masks are “not effective”: While FFP2 (or N95) masks indeed filtered out >99% of particles (thus, reducing the aerosol load by 100-fold), the surgical masks lowered the number of aerosol droplets behind the mask still by a substantial 4-fold compared to outside of the mask.

“If all we want is to mitigate the pandemic, that is, to “flatten the curve”, how much does a 4-fold reduction of particles that reach the lungs decrease transmission from person to person? Intuition suggests that even an imperfect mask may offer some protection that is at least in the range of the recommended separation by more than 6 feet in social interactions or wasing hands or not touching your face

“Sure, surgical masks, and improperly worn N95 respirator masks, do not offer perfect protection. But if the stated goal is to “flatten” the curve (as opposed to eradication of the virus), we have to abandon the black-and-white thinking, and embrace shades of grey. We cannot any longer claim that masks “are not effective”. We cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

7. Masks disrupt the three pathways of contagion

Masks aid in decreasing COVID-19’s virality by three pathways, concludes MasksSaveLives:

• Decreasing virus spread by infected individuals. The mask traps virus particles on the inside, preventing the virus particles becoming airborne. Protect others.
• Decreasing new infections by uninfected individuals. The mask prevents airborne virus particles being inhaled from the outside. Protect yourself.
• Limiting hand to face contact. The mask puts a physical barrier between potentially contaminated hands and passages to one’s lungs.

Let’s focus on the hand/face contact. Two lecturers from Yale University wrote in the Boston Globe that masks are:

“the best way to enforce the “do not touch your face” mantra we are hearing about for COVID-19. The coronavirus, like all respiratory viruses, needs to enter mucous membranes in the nose, throat, and eyes to cause infection. If you can successfully block access to these critical entry points, you will avoid infection by the coronavirus, flu, and any of several hundred other respiratory viruses.

“Unfortunately, we humans are relatively unique among mammals in that we continuously touch our eyes, noses, and mouths for seemingly no reason every 2.5 minutes. This behavior is hard-wired and starts in utero. Let’s get real — we’re not going to be able to instantly stop doing something we’ve been doing our whole lives.

“So what’s the answer? Cover your face with a mask. This will deny you access to your own face and make you conscious of how often you are tempted to touch your nose and mouth.”

Masks serve as a reminder to help us remember all kinds of behaviors that will keep us safe.

“Wearing a mask is a mental reminder that things are not normal,” writes the author of Idle Words. “Just like many religions ask believers to wear a special garment to keep them mindful of their duty to God, having a mask on your face can help you remember that you are in a situation that calls for special behavior.”

In addition, “Masks are somewhat uncomfortable, a helpful feature when we’re trying to limit time spent in public places. Wearing one out in the world gives you an incentive to get your business done quickly so you can go home, scrub your hands, and paw at your naked face in voluptuous luxury.”

8. Studies show masks can slow disease growth by preventing transmission

From Idle Words: “A study published in Nature on April 3, Respiratory virus shedding in exhaled breath and efficacy of face masks, tested viral transmission by having sick and healthy people exhale through a procedure mask for half an hour. It concludes that “surgical face masks could prevent transmission of human coronaviruses and influenza viruses from symptomatic individuals.”

Vox wrote this about of the evidence for mask efficacy:

“A 2008 systematic review, published in BMJ, found medical masks halted the spread of respiratory viruses from likely infected patients. In particular, studies on the 2003 outbreak of SARS — a cousin to the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 — found that masks alone were 68 percent effective at preventing the virus. By comparison, washing hands more than 10 times a day was 55 percent effective. A combination of measures — hand-washing, masks, gloves, and gowns — was 91 percent effective.

“A 2015 review, also published in BMJ, looked at mask use among people in community settings, specifically households and colleges. Some studies produced unclear results, but the findings overall indicated that wearing a mask protected people from infections compared to not wearing a mask, especially when paired with hand-washing. A big issue was adherence; people were often bad at actually wearing masks, which, unsurprisingly, diminished their effectiveness. But if masks were used early and consistently, the authors concluded, they seemed to work.

“Other studies have produced similar results, typically finding at least some protective value from masks as long as they’re used consistently and properly.”

9. Countries that wear masks fight coronavirus more effectively than those that don’t.

Wearing a mask is standard and recommended by public officials in many Asian countries. And though the virus began in China and first spread to Asia, it is under control in China and Taiwan and South Korea where mask protocols are universal.

George Gao, director general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said this in an interview with Science magazine:

“The big mistake in the US and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role — you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.”

Last month, the New YorkTimes reported, “places like Hong Kong and Taiwan that jumped to action early with social distancing and universal mask wearing have the pandemic under much greater control, despite having significant travel from mainland China. Hong Kong health officials credit universal mask wearing as part of the solution and recommend universal mask wearing. In fact, Taiwan responded to the coronavirus by immediately ramping up mask production.”

There are many factors at play in a country’s rates of infection, but these charts from MasksSaveLives about face mask use and infection rates are compelling:

10. Masks Create the Right Kind of Social Signaling

I shared above a writer who compared mask wearing to head coverings in religious observence — both creating powerful reminders to the wearer that this is a special moment. It can also send a signal to others. As the authors of the Boston Globe write,

“Wearing masks is a powerful signal to others that these are not normal times, and that we all need to change our behaviors to stop a potentially devastating epidemic. Wearing a mask for the first time can be deeply uncomfortable, especially when others are not doing the same. We felt strange at first, but after a few days, we’ve become proud rather than embarrassed to wear a mask outside. If more people donned masks, it would become a social norm as well as a public health good. If we can stop handshaking to fight COVID-19, we can also end mask stigma.”

Idle Words also made a good point: If we don’t all wear masks when we feel healthy, people who feel sick but must go out for some reason might be too embarrassed to wear it.

“Universal mask use gives cover to sick people who, for whatever reason, need to be out in the world. If we only ask people to wear a mask when they have symptoms, they might as well put on a flashing neon sign that says INFECTED. Obviously, we want sick people to stay at home, but if they have to go out, they need be able to wear a mask without stigma.”

11. Masks are our best shot at freedom

Some might argue that mandatory mask-wearing restricts our freedom and so must be dismissed out of hand. I disagree. Masks are the key to our freedom in the near future. The alternative to mask use is continued lockdown and isolation. Once we have flattened the curve, we won’t all just return to normal like nothing happened. Everything will have changed. As Anthony ‘Fauci said, the era of the handshake is over. Similarly, the era of the maskless is over. Not forever. But for now. And whenever there is a recurrence.

Because face masks prevent transmission, the are the keys that will unlock our ability to return to a more normal and social life. Without them, we’d be gambling with our health. As Dr. Huang writes,

“If we are soon loosening the lockdown due to the political pressure to sustain the economy, perhaps encouraging face masks to be worn in the public would be a good compromise between total lockdown and total freedom that risks resurgence of the invisible enemy. There is now a robust scientific basis for putting an end to the officials’ anti-surgical mask hysteria and to recommend or even mandate a broad use of masks as in Asian countries that have bent the curve.”

Now, if, like me, you find this data compelling, you might ask, “Why were we discouraged from wearing face masks earlier?” It is to that question we now turn.

Why the government initially discouraged us from wearing masks

The first reason has been widely covered so I won’t spend much time on it. The administration initially dismissed the seriousness of the coronavirus threat. The president called it a Democratic hoax and treated it as something that was happening “over there” in China. Instead of preparing, we were caught flat footed. one shudders to think of the lives that might have been saved had the administration acted faster.

Even if they had acted faster, the U.S. at the time of the outbreak’s growth was underprepared and ill-equipped. As of a few weeks ago, the US was expected to need some 3.5 billion respirators to deal with the pandemic for the next year, but the Strategic National Stockpile contains just 13 million.

“In a recent survey, nearly 90% of mayors said their cities lacked sufficient supplies of masks to treat the epidemic.”

At the time people were starting to get scared and started buying up respirators from stores. In the face of the coming shortage, the Surgeon General Jerome Adams on February 29th tweeted,

“Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

But as Ed Yong, pointed out, the message was confusing. “If masks are limited, conserving them for the people who need them most makes sense. But that message was lost amid the confusing claim that masks somehow protect health-care workers but are useless for everyone else.”

As the masks grew harder to find, the federal government passed the buck to the states, saying, in effect, it is every man for himself, get your own PPE. Administration officials spin this as a free market approach to securing medical supplies. That spin belies the fact that the federal government just hadn’t planned well enough. They were scrambling too, igniting ewhat newspapers in Europe called The Mask Wars:

“A week ago, about 200,000 N95 masks were diverted to the US as they were being transferred between planes in Thailand, according to the Berlin authorities who said they had ordered the masks for the police force.

“Andreas Geisel, the interior minister for Berlin state, described the diversion as “an act of modern piracy” and appealed to the German government to demand Washington conform to international trading rules. “This is no way to treat trans-Atlantic partners,” Geisel said. “Even in times of global crisis there should be no wild west methods.”

The CDC came out last week with a recommendation that Americans use homemade masks like scarves and t-shirt sleeves. That wasn’t because a new study came out showing the efficacy of those means. They issued them because the realize we need to cover our mouths and noses and there haven’t been enough masks for all of us. Their recommendation wasn’t a full-throated endorsement of a Lone Ranger handkerchief mask. The recommended that Americans use them “as a last resort” in “settings where face masks are not available.”

Why do we have a mask shortage?

Masks are hard to make. They require specialized equipment to meet stringent regulatory standards. So we didn’t have a lot of suppliers to begin with. The largest maker in America was doing 250,000 per day pre-crisis (now they are trying to produce millions per day).

Most of the world’s masks are made in China. Some say they account for as much as 80% of the world’s supply. When the pandemic hit China, the country shut down exports. As Vox explains, the “supply chain wasn’t prepared for a pandemic, especially one that originated in the same country where many of these masks are produced. And as the novel coronavirus spread throughout China, the country’s government bought its domestically produced masks, ensuring they weren’t exported. That’s made the gap between supply and demand in the US much larger.”

When China hit the brakes on exporting masks, the whole world suffered. But it gets worse, after the coronavirus outbreak began, China became a net importer. “China did not just stop selling masks” reports the New York Times, “It also bought up much of the rest of the world’s supply. According to official data, China imported 56 million respirators and masks in the first week after the January lockdown of the city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged.” Since the start of the crisis, China imported two billion masks.

So the government discouraged us buying masks because they knew we had a supply crunch and couldn’t risk any more masks not getting to hospitals. But instead of saying that, they said masks weren’t effective. Or more exactly, they said, in the words of the Surgeon General’s tweet, that masks “are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” how could the masks be needed by healthcare providers and be “NOT effective” for the general public?

How our post-truth culture is causing our faith in institutions to crumble and putting us at greater risk

Unfortunately, this is the latest in a long series of official statements that are mistaken at best or intentionally misleading at first. It erodes our trust in our leaders. And makes it more difficult for us to know what, or whom, we can trust. “Fake news!” someone yells.

A few days ago Zeynep Tufecki wrote a piece in the Times that does a thorough job explaining the problems with how the government approached this (bold sections are mine):

“As the pandemic rages on, there will be many difficult messages for the public. Unfortunately, the top-down conversation around masks has become a case study in how not to communicate with the public, especially now that the traditional gatekeepers like media and health authorities have much less control. The message became counterproductive and may have encouraged even more hoarding because it seemed as though authorities were shaping the message around managing the scarcity rather than confronting the reality of the situation.

“First, many health experts, including the surgeon general of the United States, told the public simultaneously that masks weren’t necessary for protecting the general public and that health care workers needed the dwindling supply. This contradiction confuses an ordinary listener. How do these masks magically protect the wearers only and only if they work in a particular field?

“Second, there were attempts to bolster the first message, that ordinary people didn’t need masks, by telling people that masks, especially medical-grade respirator masks (such as the N95 masks), needed proper fitting and that ordinary people without such fitting wouldn’t benefit. This message was also deeply counterproductive. Many people also wash their hands wrong, but we don’t respond to that by telling them not to bother. Instead, we provide instructions; we post signs in bathrooms; we help people sing songs that time their hand-washing. Telling people they can’t possibly figure out how to wear a mask properly isn’t a winning message. Besides, when you tell people that something works only if done right, they think they will be the person who does it right, even if everyone else doesn’t.

“Third, of course masks work — maybe not perfectly and not all to the same degree, but they provide some protection. Their use has always been advised as part of the standard response to being around infected people, especially for people who may be vulnerable. World Health Organization officials wear masks during their news briefings

“Fourth, the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. told the public to wear masks if they were sick. However, there is increasing evidence of asymptomatic transmission, especially through younger people who have milder cases and don’t know they are sick but are still infectious.

“Providing top-down guidance with such obvious contradictions backfires exactly because lack of trust is what fuels hoarding and misinformation…Research shows that during disasters, people can show strikingly altruistic behavior, but interventions by authorities can backfire if they fuel mistrust or treat the public as an adversary rather than people who will step up if treated with respect. Given that even homemade masks may work better than no masks, wearing them might be something to direct people to do while they stay at home more, as we all should.

“We will no doubt face many challenges as the pandemic moves through our societies, and people will need to cooperate. The sooner we create the conditions under which such cooperation can bloom, the better off we all will be.”

The next way we can cooperate with each other and beat back this disease is by doing everything we can to prevent its spread. We’ve been isolating and washing our hands. Now we need to wear masks. But what kind should we wear?

The Tank, The Motorcycle, and the Car — What kind of mask should you wear?

When it comes to face masks, we have three main options: the medical-grade n95 mask, the common surgical mask, and now homemade masks made of common fabric. Which should you choose to wear? Let me address that by way of analogy.

Imagine you have some precious cargo you need to drive somewhere. It’s a long drive so you’ll drive fast but you’ll need to park overnight somewhere halfway. And you have to leave the cargo in your vehicle. you don’t want it falling out and you don’t want anyone getting in. I’ll give you three choices — a tank, a motorcycle, and a sedan. Which would you choose for the journey?

The tank would be ultra-safe. It’s nearly impregnable. But it is very hard to get a tank these days no matter how hard you look. And it’s pretty uncomfortable in there for making a long journey. Finally, it’s not exactly easy to drive a tank. You need to be trained.

The motorcycle would be faster and it would be a lot of fun. Imagine the wind whipping through your hair as you cruise down the road. Unfortunately a lot of people die in motorcycle accidents, and it’s not really safe to keep things on the bike.

The sedan is boring. It’s not flashy like the motorcycle or tough like the tank. it’s middle of the road, so who wants it? Well the good news is it is reasonably comfortable for the long journey. And when you need to check into the hotel for the night, you can keep your cargo locked in the trunk where, if it’s not 100% safe, it’s still a pretty good bet.

It should be obvious that the tank represents the N95 mask. It is tough — it keeps out 95% of all airborne particles 3 microns wide and larger. But it is hard to find. It is uncomfortable to wear. And you need training on how to fit it right.

The motorcycle represents the homemade or designer-made cloth mask. It can be fun and sporty and actually good looking. But it’s questionable how safe it is. Pretty easy to get on and off a motorcycle and it is pretty easy for viruses to get in and out of cloth masks

Surgical masks are the boring sedan. They aren’t cool looking. They are affordable and easier to find. But they are pretty safe. Let me say a little more about why surgical masks are the right choice for you to wear at this moment rather than cloth homemade masks or N95s.

Why you shouldn’t wear N95s

The primary reason you shouldn’t wear an N95 mask (even if you can find one) is that these are the best masks for doctors and nurses to wear who are in close contact with Covid-19 patients and they need them.There is a shortage of N95s for medical personnel and we should get all N95s we can to them instead of using in private settings. My company Saturn Five Health has secured manufacturing supply for these masks but are limiting our sales to healthcare providers and government entities.

Vox reports, “The PPE shortage is a real problem too. There are reports of doctors, nurses, and other health care workers using bandanas and scarves for masks and trash bags for gowns. Hospitals are considering do-not-resuscitate orders for dying Covid-19 patients out of fear that such intensive, close-up procedures could get doctors and nurses without PPE infected with the virus.”

A second reason not to wear an N95 is that it is overkill. As the author of Idle Words put it, wearing an N95 is “like putting on a fireman’s coat instead of wearing suntan lotion — it doesn’t do much for you, and wastes an invaluable resource that could save the life of a first responder.”

Finally, it probably won’t work for you if you haven’t been trained. “When used properly, N95 might offer more protection since it filters out smaller particles (discussed above) and also creates a tighter seal against the wearer’s face than a surgical mask. On the other hand, N95 masks are less comfortable, are frequently misused, and are taken off more often than a surgical mask.” — Better Humans.

Vox found this: “N95 respirators in theory outperform surgical masks (which are the more traditional, looser-fitting medical masks), but they’re genuinely difficult to fit and use properly — to the point that a 2016 review in CMAJ couldn’t find a difference among health care workers using N95 respirators versus surgical masks for respiratory infection, likely due to poor fitting. Given how difficult these are to use, and the extra layer of protection they can provide, experts argue these masks should, above all, be saved for health care workers.”

The Case Against Cloth Masks

Since the CDC gave the go-ahead for people to use cloth masks in situations when they couldn’t get other masks, I’ve started to see a lot of people wearing bandanas and other masks with cool designs. Let me be clear that I support cloth masks over no masks. They provide more protection than no mask at all. But i don’t support them over surgical masks. Here is why:

• Cloth masks, are much less effective than the modern alternatives, as a 2015 study in BMJ found. And they can be extra risky, since they can trap and hold virus-containing droplets that wearers can then breathe in. — Vox
• It’s worth emphasizing again that sewing your own face mask may not prevent you from acquiring coronavirus in a high-risk situation, like lingering in crowded places or continuing to meet up with friends or family who don’t already live with you. — CNET
• In one experiment, a surgical mask filtered 89 percent of viral particles from volunteers’ coughs, a tea towel blocked 72 percent, and a cotton T-shirt blocked 50 percent. — The Atlantic
• Another study determined that, while masks made out of cotton T-shirts were far less effective than manufactured surgical masks in preventing wearers from expelling droplets — Snopes
• In laboratory tests, some homemade masks did a poor job, while others rivaled the filtration of a medical mask. — New York Times

Why Surgical Masks Are Our Bet At The Moment

First of all, they perform well at keeping particulates out.

Buzzfeed: According to a 2013 study in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, fabric masks that fit snugly on the face provided three times less protection than surgical masks. “We found they are not as good as surgical masks,” Anna Davies, the lead study author, told BuzzFeed News. Davies and her colleagues found a surgical mask had about a 90% filtration efficiency for very small particles (around 2 microns). The next best materials found at home at blocking particles were vacuum cleaner bags (about 86% filtration efficiency) and tea towels (about 72% filtration efficiency), but they would be so difficult to breathe out of that they wouldn’t be suitable for a mask. Meanwhile, a cotton mix material had about 70% filtration efficiency compared to roughly 57% for a pillowcase, about 62% for linen, about 54% for silk, nearly 51% for a 100% cotton T-shirt, and nearly 49% for a scarf.

They can even rival N95 performance: “a 2016 review in CMAJ couldn’t find a difference among health care workers using N95 respirators versus surgical masks for respiratory infection, likely due to poor fitting. Given how difficult these are to use, and the extra layer of protection they can provide, experts argue these masks should, above all, be saved for health care workers.” (Vox)

I found a great article on the science of testing surgical and other masks that explains the efficacy of blocking:

“Researchers from the University of Edinburgh tested different common masks by running a diesel generator (to mimic car exhaust) and piping the exhaust through the masks. They used a particle counter to see how many particles made it through the mask. Here’s my super scientific rendering of the setup:

“One important detail: the particle counter they used measured particles as small as 0.007 microns. That’s over 10 times smaller than the coronavirus particle diameter. We’re talking about truly tiny particles here! They tested a whole range of masks, and here’s what they found:

“3M industrial filters were able to capture over 95% of particles down to 0.007 micron. Given that news outlets have claimed surgical masks can’t capture nanoparticles, it’s particularly surprising that the surgical mask was able to capture 80% of the tiny particles.”

Here is some other evidence on the effectiveness of surgical masks:

• A study published Friday in Nature showed that surgical masks of the flat, paper variety can also reduce emission of virus-carrying droplets from the nose and mouth. The study suggests that the masks “could be used by ill people to reduce onward transmission,” the authors wrote — Bloomberg.
• Although most of the studies in the Cochrane Review were on medical workers in a hospital setting, one study followed community transmission of SARS in Beijing. It found that consistently wearing a mask in public was associated with a 70% reduction in the risk of catching SARS. Additionally, the authors of the paper noted that most people in the community wore simple surgical masks, not N95 respirators. (Better Humans)
• In 2015, Abrar Ahmad Chughtai, a lecturer in international health at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, helped conduct the world’s only clinical trial on the effectiveness of cloth masks — fabric coverings which are not specialist surgical masks…The rates of all infection outcomes were consistently higher for cloth masks than for surgical masks. However, since most of the study’s control group were also wearing surgical masks, it was difficult to determine the performance of a cloth mask versus no mask at all. (South China Morning Post)
• There’s still a good case for masks, though, even if they can’t stop viruses from getting in: They can stop viruses from getting out. A new study shows that people who are infected with milder human coronaviruses release fewer viral particles when they wear surgical masks. “I’ve been slightly dismissive of masks, but I was looking at them in the wrong way,” Harvard’s Bill Hanage told me. “You’re not wearing them to stop yourself getting infected, but to stop someone else getting infected.” (The Atlantic)

Wearing a mask is a culture-changing decision and could save all of us

In China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, people assume that anyone could be a virus carrier. So people wear masks not just when they are sick but anytime there is an outbreak, as a sign of social solidarity and commitment to the wellbeing of their neighbors. In Asia it is considered impolite to sneeze or cough openly so people wear masks in allergy season too. And of course, they have been shaped by history:

“The 2003 Sars virus outbreak, which affected several countries in the region, also drove home the importance of wearing masks, particularly in Hong Kong, where many died as a result of the virus.So one key difference between these societies and Western ones, is that they have experienced contagion before — and the memories are still fresh and painful…In Hong Kong, some tabloids have splashed pictures on their covers of Westerners not wearing masks and congregating in groups in the city’s nightlife district, and criticised expatriates and tourists for not taking enough precautions.” (BBC)

Ed Yong writes in The Atlantic, “Judy Yuen-man Siu, a medical anthropologist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told me by email that mask-wearing went from being uncommon in Hong Kong before SARS to being widely adopted afterward — as an important component of containing a viral outbreak, and as a civic duty and a signal of “support to health-care providers.” Today in Hong Kong, “if you do not use a face mask in public areas, you will be stigmatized and discriminated against, not just because people would [be] afraid of you as a potential virus-spreader, but [also because] it can mean you have low civic responsibility.

“What can be said more definitively is that mask-wearing tends to be widespread in countries that view disease outbreaks with the gravity that comes from firsthand experience with the horror of an epidemic.”

But in Asia masks aren’t just shields to protect yourself from an invisible enemy, they are also symbols. “They’re an affirmation of civic-mindedness and conscientiousness, and such symbols might be important in other parts of the world too. If widely used, masks could signal that society is taking the pandemic threat seriously. They might reduce the stigma foisted on sick people, who would no longer feel ashamed or singled out for wearing one. They could offer reassurance to people who don’t have the privilege of isolating themselves at home, and must continue to work in public spaces.” (The Atlantic)

Masks are widely used in Japan and there has been study as to why, “Some say the practice conforms with the country’s notions of cleanliness and purity. One study suggested Japanese society has lost trust in public institutions in recent decades, prompting people to become more self-protective. In another survey, Japanese people said they primarily used masks to protect themselves but that the practice also demonstrates consideration for others and a respect for etiquette. For many, masks are a kind of “safety blanket,” and the simple act of putting them on is a “risk ritual” that provides comfort and quells anxiety.” (Sapiens)

According to MasksSaveLives, “Japan has the strongest mask-wearing culture in the world and one of the lowest COVID-19 infection rates. Despite Japan’s large elderly population and early infection, the infection and death rate is one of the lowest in the world. A leading reason for this is Japan’s strong mask-wearing culture lowering the virality of COVID-19 to manageable levels. Japan has only had 1,387 infections, yet being one of the earliest countries to become infected.”

In China, mask wearing is part safety strategy and part culture. “When SARS broke out in Hong Kong, wearing a face mask expressed collectivist values, and declining to do so was met with public censure, noted sociologist Peter Baehr. By putting on a mask, “people communicated their responsibilities to the social group of which they were members,” he wrote. “By disguising an individual’s face, it gave greater salience to collective identity.” (Sapiens)

We have a much different view of masks in the West. At least we have so far. “In the West, I think we need to overcome — I wouldn’t call it a fear of the mask, but [the] stigma with a mask,” Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, told me. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I was carrying a mask in the airplane but I was too ashamed to wear it.’ Where does this shame come from? Is it because people will think you are a wimp? Because people will think you are ill?”

“If you wear a mask in a British supermarket, he noted, “people react strangely,” for a number of possible reasons: the association with East Asian countries, a suspicion that you’re using something that others are more in need of, a concern that you’re wearing it because you’re ill and shouldn’t be there, a conviction that you’re “unnecessarily spreading panic.” (The Atlantic)

This culture can be disorienting for Asians living in America. “I’m so tired of being harassed for wearing masks in the US. I wore a mask on my way to work today. One man walked up and coughed loudly at me. A few minutes later, another man aggressively approached me&asked: “r u a nurse?” I’m no nurse. I just know what’s coming for all of us.

— Xinyan Yu (@xinyanyu) March 18, 2020

In the West we associate an uncovered face with individual identity and with freedom. When the president announced the CDC’s support for masks he said he wouldn’t be wearing a mask and stated, “We want our country back. We’re not going to be wearing masks forever.”

As Uri Friedman pointed out in The Atlantic,

“The president seemed to be implying that a masked country couldn’t be our country — that such a sight would be alien and alarming, and thus hopefully a short-lived ordeal. It was an expression of the stigma long attached to mask-wearing in the Western world, unlike in many Asian countries, where those who don’t wear masks during public-health crises are the ones who are stigmatized. While an American might walk into a grocery store these days and view the proliferating number of masked shoppers as crushing confirmation that the apocalypse is nigh, someone in Hong Kong or South Korea might see the same scene as an uplifting indication that the community is coalescing to fend off catastrophe.” Unless we come to see the situation more like the South Koreans, we are in for trouble.

But if Anthony Fauci says the era of the handshake is “over,” then we also need to say the era of never wearing masks is over. We won’t need to wear masks always. We might get a break this summer. But if the virus resurges in the fall, our best bet to keep working and keep society moving is to avoid not only handshakes but coughs and sneezes outside of mask.

The author of idle words put it well:

“If you’ve never seen it before, a subway car full of people wearing surgical masks can be an arresting sight. In America, we still tend to associate face masks with hospitals and illness. But it only takes a short time for the practice to start feeling normal, and that’s where we want to get to in the next couple of weeks across America and Europe

“By the end of the month, wearing a face mask should be like wearing a shirt — a routine social behavior that is expected of everyone and gets you weird looks if you don’t do it.

“…The goal is not only to keep people safe, but to make it rare and weird to see anyone outside with a bare face.

“…This doesn’t mean we’ll never see a stranger’s bare face again. Once the immediate crisis is over, we can dial things down and adopt the same social norms as East Asia, where wearing a mask is an optional and unremarkable choice people make, one that tends to increase during cold and flu season, but is just a normal part of the social landscape.”

“The point of wearing a mask in public is not to protect yourself, but to protect other people from you….The job of protecting you, meanwhile, falls to everyone else! That’s why it’s so important that we adopt mask wearing as a social norm.”

In other words, we need each other. We need to take care of each other. You’re safest not when you take measures to protect yourself but when I take measures like a mask that protect you. I’m safest not when I take measures to protect myself, but when you take measures like a mask to protect me from you.

Our culture has grown increasingly isolated, independent, and lonely. We’ve given up on religion, given up social clubs. We’ve turned to entertaining ourselves to death on Netflix and to the Infinite Scroll of Instagram and Facebook. Our ethic has become to “do whatever you want so long as you don’t bother anyone else” instead of being called to service and self-sacrifice.

Doing whatever you want with fewer strings attached should make you happy right? But it hasn’t. As my friend John Kingston keeps arguing, it is leading to more drug use, depression, and suicide.

It would be an ironic twist and a small frail silver lining if this existential threat we face causes us to change and shows us how much we need each other. Our need for each other has always been there. Now we’re just seeing it in stark relief, in the eyes of the nurses commuting to hospitals to care for contagious patients, putting their own lives at risk for sake of others.

Of course it is Easter today. Those who celebrate Easter celebrate the story of one who also put himself at risk for the sake of others. I’ve been thinking about that today and I’ve been thinking about what more each of us can do.

What you can do today

As i mentioned at the top, this last week some friends and I started a social enterprise called Face2Facemasks.org. I started it because I was frustrated. Frustrated that I couldn’t help. In a natural disaster, you can go down to the local homeless shelter and serve or you can volunteer with FEMA. But with Covid-19 we’ve been told the best thing we can do to help is stay home. That’s right. But I wanted to do something more active.

I texted my friend Scott, who has imported level 1 medical supplies from China to the U.S. for years to ask if he had started selling masks. He said he had not because there had been so much fraud and so many shady outfits rushing in to make a buck. But, he said, if I needed masks, he knew several FDA-approved suppliers he could connect me to. Wow, that was easy I thought and an idea popped into my mind.

I had just read this devastating story in Wired Magazine about Covid-19’s effect on the homeless:

“Shelters are full, or closed, or too fraught with coronavirus risk to consider sleeping in. They have no access to toilets, much less toilet paper. They’ve been laid off, and there’s nobody on the street so they can’t even panhandle. Common places to find shelter and a bathroom — libraries, gyms, fast food restaurants — are closed. Soup kitchens are closing, out of food, out of workers.

“Homelessness is incompatible with health. Experts like Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who studies homelessness, have been saying so for decades, but, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s never been truer. “It’s a calamity. It’s our worst nightmare,” Kushel says. “It’s an enormous crisis superimposed on an existing crisis.” Unhoused people are already among the most sick in society, and now they’re physically incapable of following the [CDC’s} most basic virus-fighting directive: stay home.

“It’s nearly impossible for homeless people to maintain social distance. Their needs are met en masse. The CDC recommends 110 square feet per person for people housed together during the outbreak. Most homeless shelters simply don’t have that kind of space. “There has always been an increased risk of communicable diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis A, and influenza,” Kushel says. Covid-19 is just the newest addition to the list. Some shelters are rearranging the furniture to house people farther apart, but those adjustments inevitably mean fewer beds, leaving more people outdoors. In Las Vegas, people are sleeping in parking lots, confined to white painted rectangles spaced six feet apart.”

I had a feeling that there must be a lot of other people like me. People who were fortunate to be healthy and financially stable but who wanted to do something to help.

So what about a buy-one, give-one program for face masks? Buy a pack of surgical masks for yourself and give a pack to shelter serving the homeless in some of the nation’s bigger cities, with 100% of profits going to donate more PPE. I worked with Scott to contract with a vetted, authorized supplier and recruited other friends to build the website. As of today, Easter, we are live.

Would you buy some masks and give some masks at face2facemasks.org? I won’t make any money off of it — we’re giving any profit away. I’m just doing this to protect my family and to practically help.

What we need is not a buy-one, give one project. What we need is a cultural change — a change where wearing a mask isn’t weird, it is a sign of social solidarity. What we need is a cultural change where we aren’t living isolated lives but are actively caring for each other. A buy-one, give-one mask won’t make that change. But it’s a start. Will you join me? Visit face2facemasks.org and throw your punch at this disease.

Read widely. Read Wisely. Wear a mask.

Max

p.s. if you found this essay helpful, please give it a clap and share it with someone else.

The Tank and the Motorcycle was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reality Check:

One week ago globally there were 156,653 coronavirus cases and 5,833 deaths. Today there are 300,227 cases and 12,948 deaths — a total mortality rate of 4.3%. In the last week, global case numbers increased by 192% and the death numbers increased by 222%.

One week ago in the U.S., there were 2,943 cases and 57 deaths. Today there are 24,137 cases and 288 deaths. In the last week, the U.S. case numbers increased by 820% and the death numbers increased by 500%.

I take pride in the Weekend Reader covering a breadth of topics, from sports to politics to technology, parenting, health, etc. But like many of you, though I’m still reading from a wide variety of sources, I’m reading very narrowly about this disease and its impact on our health, our economy and our society.

Today I have several good and important pieces to share. The core question: Are we doing enough to fight coronavirus or is the remedy we’re prescribing worse than the disease?

Articles:

1. This is How We Beat the Coronavirus — The Atlantic
2. Bill Gates’s greatest fear: viral influenza (from 2015) — Vox and TED
3. The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst — Nicholas Kristoff in the NYTimes
4. Evidence Over Hysteria — Covid-19 — Aaron Ginn in Six Four Six Nine
5. Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than The Disease? — David Katz in the NYTimes
6. Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance — Thomas Pueyo

Read widely. Read wisely.

Max

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Recommended Readings

1. This is How We Beat the Coronavirus
The Atlantic (12 minutes)

A professor of Global Health at Harvard and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Indiana, argue that we need to engage in suppression not just mitigation of the coronavirus.

SELECTION

Let’s start with the bad news. The Imperial College response team’s report looked at the impact of measures we might take to flatten the curve, or reduce the rate at which people are becoming sick with COVID-19. If we do nothing and just let the virus run its course, the team predicts, we could see three times as many deaths as we see from cardiovascular disease each year. Further, it estimated that infections would peak in mid-June. We could expect to see about 55,000 deaths, in just one day.

Why does the Imperial College team predict this for the West when things seem to be improving in Asia? Because we are taking different approaches. Asian countries have engaged in suppression; we are only engaging in mitigation.
Suppression refers to a campaign to reduce the infectivity of a pandemic, what experts call R0 (R-naught), to less than one. Unchecked, the R0 of COVID-19 is between 2 and 3, meaning that every infected person infects, on average, two to three others. An R0 less than 1 indicates that each infected person results in fewer than one new infection. When this happens, the outbreak will slowly grind to a halt…

…Because we failed to set up a testing infrastructure, we can’t check that many people. At the moment, we can’t even test everyone who is sick. Therefore, we’re attempting mitigation — accepting that the epidemic will advance but trying to reduce R0 as much as possible.

2. Bill Gate’s Nightmare Scenario: Viral Influenza
Interview with Vox in 2015 (3 minutes)

Recorded in 2015. Gates describes how we are unprepared with a global viral disease like coronavirus.

3. The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst
Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times (8 minutes)

Solid, concise exploration of the tail end outcomes on either side of Coronavirus, from best case to worst.

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Here’s the grimmest version of life a year from now: More than two million Americans have died from the new coronavirus, almost all mourned without funerals. Countless others have died because hospitals are too overwhelmed to deal adequately with heart attacks, asthma and diabetic crises. The economy has cratered into a depression, for fiscal and monetary policy are ineffective when people fear going out, businesses are closed and tens of millions of people are unemployed. A vaccine still seems far off, immunity among those who have recovered proves fleeting and the coronavirus has joined the seasonal flu as a recurring peril.

Yet here’s an alternative scenario for March 2021: Life largely returned to normal by the late summer of 2020, and the economy has rebounded strongly. The United States used a sharp, short shock in the spring of 2020 to break the cycle of transmission; warm weather then reduced new infections and provided a summer respite for the Northern Hemisphere. By the second wave in the fall, mutations had attenuated the coronavirus, many people were immune and drugs were shown effective in treating it and even in reducing infection. Thousands of Americans died, mostly octogenarians and nonagenarians and some with respiratory conditions, but by February 2021, vaccinations were introduced worldwide and the virus was conquered.

4. Evidence Over Hysteria — Covid-19
Aaron Ginn in Six Four Six Nine (32 minutes)

Aaron is a friend and is a wonderful analytical thinker as you will see in this article. He argues that the media is overplaying the severity of coronavirus and that governments are making freedom-stealing policies based on mimetic cover-your-butt instincts rather than on evidence.

His data is helpful to read but I disagree with his interpretations of it and fear his recommendations may be dangerous in facilitating spread. But you should read and judge for yourself. We’ll all think better for reading clear arguments.

Note, since I originally wrote this, Aaron’s piece was taken down from Medium and Twitter

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As the US continues to expand testing, the case fatality rate will decline over the next few weeks. There is little doubt that serious and fatal cases of COVID-19 are being properly recorded. What is unclear is the total size of mild cases. WHO originally estimated a case fatality rate of 4% at the beginning of the outbreak but revised estimates downward 2.3% — 3% for all age groups. CDC estimates 0.5% — 3%, however stresses that closer to 1% is more probable. Dr. Paul Auwaerter estimated 0.5% — 2%, leaning towards the lower end. A paper released on March 19th analyzed a wider data set from China and lowered the fatality rate to 1.4%. This won’t be clear for the US until we see the broader population that is positive but with mild cases. With little doubt, the fatality rate and severity rate will decline as more people are tested and more mild cases are counted.

5. Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than The Disease?
David Katz in The New York Times (7 minutes)

Katz is the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center. He argues that if we are “at war” with the Coronavirus, we can be more surgical in our strikes rather than carpet bombing and all the collateral damage that entails. He advocates for protecting the most at-risk (the elderly) and allowing the rest of us to develop “herd immunity.”

SELECTION

The clustering of complications and death from Covid-19 among the elderly and chronically ill, but not children (there have been only very rare deaths in children), suggests that we could achieve the crucial goals of social distancing — saving lives and not overwhelming our medical system — by preferentially protecting the medically frail and those over age 60, and in particular those over 70 and 80, from exposure.

Why does this matter?

I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.

5. Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance
Tomas Pueyo (28 minutes)

SUMMARY
Pueyo’s pieces have been read by tens of millions in the past couple weeks. This one is a must-read. Here’s his own summary:

Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.

When you’re done reading the article, this is what you’ll take away:

• Our healthcare system is already collapsing.
• Countries have two options: either they fight it hard now, or they will suffer a massive epidemic.
• If they choose the epidemic, hundreds of thousands will die. In some countries, millions.
• And that might not even eliminate further waves of infections.
• If we fight hard now, we will curb the deaths.
• We will relieve our healthcare system.
• We will prepare better.
• We will learn.
• The world has never learned as fast about anything, ever.
• And we need it, because we know so little about this virus.
• All of this will achieve something critical: Buy Us Time.

If we choose to fight hard, the fight will be sudden, then gradual. We will be locked in for weeks, not months. Then, we will get more and more freedoms back. It might not be back to normal immediately. But it will be close, and eventually back to normal. And we can do all that while considering the rest of the economy too.

SELECTION

So why is the fatality rate close to 4%?

If 5% of your cases require intensive care and you can’t provide it, most of those people die. As simple as that.

…What happens if all your healthcare system is collapsed by coronavirus patients? Others also die from other ailments.

What happens if you have a heart attack but the ambulance takes 50 minutes to come instead of 8 (too many coronavirus cases) and once you arrive, there’s no ICU and no doctor available? You die.

There are 4 million admissions to the ICU in the US every year, and 500k (~13%) of them die. Without ICU beds, that share would likely go much closer to 80%. Even if only 50% died, in a year-long epidemic you go from 500k deaths a year to 2M, so you’re adding 1.5M deaths, just with collateral damage….

…When you hear: “We’re going to do some mitigation” what you should really hear is: “We will knowingly overwhelm the healthcare system, driving the fatality rate up by a factor of 10x at least.”

Postscript

First, I want to say thank you to all the nurses, doctors and health care workers on the front lines around the country and around the world who are putting themselves in harm’s way to care for the sick. You are heroes. Even when you are exhausted. Even when you don’t feel like it. I speak for millions when I say we appreciate you and admire you more than we can say.

Now, I want to talk about the death rate. The U.S. coronavirus death rate is about 1.2% (288 out of 24,137 cases). The death rate in Italy is 9% (4,852 out of 53,578 cases). Why would the numbers be so different? Are U.S. cases more mild?

Some speculate that the Italians have an older more at-risk population than the U.S. — they have one of the oldest populations in the world with a median age of 46 years old, compared to 38 years old in the U.S. And nearly 99% of the Italians who have died had other illnesses. That may not be good news for America. Obesity is a complicating underlying factor for all kinds of diseases and America is in much worse shape on that score. Only 21% of Italians are obese, compared with 33% in the United States.

I think the bigger reason the death rate is so different is that Italy’s hospitals got overrun with cases. And when people in critical condition can’t get the medical treatment they need, they die.

I’ve read arguments that we don’t have that many cases in America. Only a small fraction of the population has the disease. But that is a naive focus on a snapshot in time. Wait one week, when our case rate has doubled and then doubled again, especially in places like New York City where they are facing a severe shortage of ventilators and hospital beds. My suspicion is that we will see the death rate rise faster than the infection rate once these local hotspots get overwhelmed.

I am a small business owner and I fear the implications of our businesses being shut down for a period of time. But I fear even more the risk that millions could die if we don’t act boldly enough. A “hammer” approach will buy us time, and that matters. As Pueyo writes,

We’re about to face the biggest wave of pressure on the healthcare system ever seen in history. We are completely unprepared, facing an enemy we don’t know. That is not a good position for war.

What if you were about to face your worst enemy, of which you knew very little, and you had two options: Either you run towards it, or you escape to buy yourself a bit of time to prepare. Which one would you choose?

As for the current government actions, I wish we would act big and decisively for a short period of time to hammer this disease into the earth, then relax restrictions once we’ve bought ourselves time to respond. It’s harder to plan when you don’t know if the government will let you keep working or not. I’d rather be told — everyone is taking off one month than to keep guessing. Better to pull the bandaid off quickly than slowly and painfully.

I like the idea of protecting the most vulnerable and allowing more of the younger healthy population to get a light and non-serious form of the disease and develop “herd immunity.” But I don’t know enough about the argument that the disease could mutate and make any immunity of the herd fruitless.

We need a hammer, an not one wrapped in velvet. Again, Pueyo writes:

The measures [China] took were pretty similar to the ones taken in Italy, Spain or France: isolations, quarantines, people had to stay at home unless there was an emergency or had to buy food, contact tracing, testing, more hospital beds, travel bans…

Details matter, however.

China’s measures were stronger. For example, people were limited to one person per household allowed to leave home every three days to buy food. Also, their enforcement was severe. It is likely that this severity stopped the epidemic faster.

In Italy, France and Spain, measures were not as drastic, and their implementation is not as tough. People still walk on the streets, many without masks.

Some people interpret this as “Democracies will never be able to replicate this reduction in cases”. That’s wrong.

For several weeks, South Korea had the worst epidemic outside of China. Now, it’s largely under control. And they did it without asking people to stay home. They achieved it mostly with very aggressive testing, contact tracing, and enforced quarantines and isolations.

If an outbreak like South Korea’s can be controlled in weeks and without mandated social distancing, Western countries, which are already applying a heavy Hammer with strict social distancing measures, can definitely control the outbreak within weeks. It’s a matter of discipline, execution, and how much the population abides by the rules.

The government should step in and support individuals and businesses affected by the Hammer. They have already begun this, though as my friend DJ says, I wish they would support the airline attendants (who are at risk of missing rent if they don’t have work) more than they support the airline investors (who can likely weather the losses that will come).

A friend asked me what I think of the U.S. government’s response to the crisis so far. I said that I have CNBC on all day and when Trump, Pence, Fauci and company appear every day (and I think it’s good that they appear every day rather than appear to be hiding) I usually feel encouraged (except when the president picks a petty fight with a reporter or has his deputies brag about what he’s done). I think those in Washington are taking this seriously now and doing a lot to mitigate the financial fallout.

But when I read about South Korea and Singapore’s response, I conclude that they have been able to stem the tide because they were more prepared and had tests ready so they could see ho was sick and isolate them and the people they had contact with. The U.S. government, sadly, was horribly underprepared and didn’t take the threat seriously early enough. Now we are in damage control mode and more painful remedies are required to make up for the prevention we failed to do months ago.

Read widely. Read wisely. Wash your hands.
Max

Coronavirus: Do We Need to Do More or Less? was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week I wrote a note to our investors explaining our perspective on how our company, Saturn Five, is positioned in this market environment. I thought you might be interested.

Despite the market gyrations, it is an exciting time for us: 1) We delivered distributions to investors last month; 2) Our venture Icon was just named one of the most innovative companies in the world by Fast Company; 3) We have three new businesses, each positioned to deliver cash-on-cash returns in the 20–25% range each year; and 4) Our newest fund is about to be oversubscribed. (We have a little space left. Let me know if you are interested!)

Thanks for your friendship. Stay healthy!

Best,
Max

***

Dear Saturn Five investors,

It is a tumultuous time in the world. Covid-19 has shaken the markets. This weekend’s oil price shock is creating more turbulence. We are watching these events with great interest, as people who care about the health of our friends and families, and also as investors. Since you have placed money with us, we wanted to share our perspective on Saturn Five in the midst of the disruptions.

As you know, Saturn Five is seeking to build value through long-term investments in both new and established companies. Unlike traditional private equity, we aren’t looking to flip positions in three to five years. We are looking to buy and build companies with fundamental strengths that will hold their value for years and years. Our model is to buy businesses at low multiples and operate them in a consistent manner to realize high cash-on-cash returns. We keep things simple and believe you will win in the long run if you buy businesses with high intrinsic value for low prices.

In a market like this, the biggest risk with a portfolio like ours is over-leverage. If business activity drops precipitously, a company with very high monthly debt obligations may soon find itself in distress and unable to pay its bills. Saturn Five often employs debt as part of the financial strategy when buying a new business. However our debt levels are far lower than most PE deals and lower that what you might find in companies in the S&P. According to a recent study by Bain & Co., the average PE deal in the U.S. last year had a Debt to EBITDA ratio of 7 to 1. According to Yardeni, the average for the S&P is 3.5 to 1. By comparison, the Saturn Five portfolio Debt to EBITDA ratio is 1.4 to 1. What does this mean? Saturn Five has less debt to worry about than the largest publicly traded companies and far less than typical private equity deals so we have a lower hurdle to jump over every month. This is not a fail-safe but it is good news.

A coronavirus related-risk particular to our portfolio is that many of our businesses do not lend themselves to a telecommuting option. A company like Apple may encourage employees to work from home but several of our businesses do not have that option. You can’t telecommute to pour concrete or do landscaping. A big drop in demand and/or productivity may create a sharp decline in revenue across the portfolio. Hopefully, demand will then bounce back and create V-shaped or U-shaped financials, as my old boss, Ray Dalio (of Bridgewater Associates) predicts. But this is a risk we are susceptible to. To prepare for it we are working with the CEOs at each of our companies to assess our exposure and do what we can to mitigate the risks.

The good news is that our long-term approach helps in a moment like this. We don’t have pressure to sell off our assets at discounted prices because our fund life is ending or because we need to relieve debt. Unlike others, we can sit tight without realizing the losses others are facing by selling into the drop. Second, if the market enters a longer-term bear cycle, there may be an opportunity for us to buy assets at discounted prices. To paraphrase Buffet, we could get “greedy when others are fearful.” As a rule we are avoiding buying “turnarounds” and companies in distress. But if presented with the opportunity we may opportunistically buy deeply discounted assets (equipment, customer accounts, etc) for our already viable businesses.

The most significant change we are making in response to this economic environment is that we are growing more conservative about new acquisitions. We are under contract with three new deals at the moment and are actively evaluating whether to go forward, walk away, or renegotiate terms. Our new bias is to remain cash-strong for the short-term. On the other hand, we don’t want to give up on great long-term acquisitions because of short-term fluctuations. The net is that we will continue pursuing deals, but will keep the bar very high for any individual deal to consummate in a buy decision.

I hope this note is helpful for you to understand our perspective and approach. We’ll keep you posted as things progress. We are grateful for your partnership and wish you and your families good health.

Best,
Max

Letter to Saturn Five Investors about Coronavirus was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m going to teach you a secret that could save you thousands of dollars on your taxes.

This secret is a strategy that is only two years old. Most people haven’t heard about it. Even fewer know how to take advantage of it.

Many billionaires and hedge fund managers are making this secret a major focus of their investments this year. After reading these articles and my summary, you’ll know enough to do what they are doing.

What I’m going to teach you is totally legal. It’s just a little complex. I’m here to break it down for you.

I’ll warn you that this is long and there is some math involved, but I know you can handle it and there is a potentially big payoff for muscling through it. You can decide how much deeper you want to dive with the articles, but here’s what they are:

This week’s articles:

1. Will ‘Opportunity Zones’ Help the Rich, the Poor or Both?- The Washington Post
2. Opportunity Zones: Can a tax break for rich people really help poor people? — The Washington Post
3. New ‘Opportunity Zone’ Tax-Break Rules Offer Flexibility to Developers — The Wall Street Journal
4. New opportunity zone rules answer pressing questions — GrantThornton
5. Opportunity Zone Overview — LISC

Read widely. Read wisely.

Max

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Taxes are complicated. The best estimate of our current federal tax code is that it is 2,600 pages long. The new tax reform act of 2017 was itself over five-hundred pages.

Tucked in the middle of the reform act is a six-page provision concerning the creation of “Opportunity Zones.” This little section is the key I’m talking about for getting smart on your taxes. Here’s the background.

While San Francisco, New York and a few other areas are growing at phenomenal rates, there are areas all over the country that have been and continue to be economically marginalized. As a society, we have three choices with this situation.

1. We can do nothing for these areas and let them suffer. This is cold-hearted and probably foolish.
2. Government can invest directly in the areas. This will likely lead to all manner of waste and corruption.
3. We can encourage private investment in these areas, to spur the market to create new jobs and businesses. The new tax act pursues this third option.

The Opportunity Zone provision gave local governments the power to designate thousands of economically disadvantaged areas as “Opportunity Zones.” That designation gives investors clear and compelling incentives to plow money into these areas that might otherwise be overlooked. The incentive allows investors to defer their capital gains taxes, reduce their capital gains tax basis, and reinvest gains in a way that eliminates taxes altogether.

Before we go any further, let me be clear that I am not a tax professional and this is not advice of any kind. I am sharing my understanding of a complex issue. Please consult an accountant before acting on anything you read about here.

To understand how Opportunity Zone incentives work, let’s describe a hypothetical investor named Mary. Mary invested in Amazon stock years ago and just recently sold it. When she sold, she realized a capital gain of $100,000. Normally what would happen is Mary would pay a capital gains tax plus an investment income tax, which, for simplicity, we’ll say totals 25% of her gain. So Mary pays her tax and has $75K left. Now that Mary is a little older, she doesn’t want to invest in another risky internet company and instead invests in an asset that grows steadily at 8%. Seven years later, Mary sells that investment, pays her capital gains tax (for simplicity we’ll assume the tax rate holds steady over that time), and so has $115K after-tax at that time. We’ll call this the base case. It is shown below:

Now let’s consider what would happen if Mary instead invested her capital gains into a Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ). There are three benefits. We’ll take them one at a time.

QOZ Benefit #1: Deferring Capital Gains Taxes

Mary has an alternative to immediately paying taxes on her Amazon sale. She can instead invest her gains into a Qualified Opportunity Zone. If she does, she can defer paying any taxes on her stock gain until 2026.

That means, instead of having only $75K to re-invest today, she’d have the full $100K. And that turns out to be valuable. In fact, if she pursues the same 8% investment as in the base case she will have $13,384 more dollars just by deferring her taxes. In other words, paying her taxes later allows her to end up with 12% more money than she would have in the base case. Here’s how the numbers look:

Deferring when you pay taxes is a good benefit, but if Mary invests in an Opportunity Zone, she’ll get a lot more than that.

QOZ Benefit #2: Reducing Capital Gains Tax Basis

The second benefit of investing in a QOZ is that you get to reduce your tax basis (the amount of money the government is taxing you on). Here’s how it works:

If Mary invests her $100,000 of Amazon gains into a Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ) and holds the investment for five years, she gets a 10% reduction in basis. In other words, when she finally pays taxes in 2026, she would only pay the capital gains tax rate of 25% on $90,000 of her gain. The other $10,00 would be tax-free.

And it gets better. If Mary holds her QOZ investment for seven years, she gets a 15% reduction in basis. She would only pay taxes on $85,000 of her $100,000 capital gain. When you add these first two benefits together, at the end of seven years Mary would be $17,134 better off than the base case if she invested in an Opportunity Zone. Again, here is the math:

Mary is doing pretty well. She is 15% better off now than she would have been if she hadn’t invested in a QOZ. But if she is patient, it gets better still.

QOZ Benefit #3: Money invested in Opportunity Zones grows tax-free

This is potentially the biggest benefit financially, but it is also the hardest to achieve because it only works if you hold your investment for ten years. If Mary doesn’t sell out of her investment in the Opportunity Zone for ten years, then her tax liability for her capital gains is completely erased. Gone. How much tax will she pay when she sells her QOZ investment after ten years? Zip. Zero. Zilch. Even if she made millions of dollars on it.

Again, I think it will help if we look at the numbers. First, here’s what it would look like if Mary pursues the base case, sells her Amazon stock, pays 25% on the gain, then reinvests it in an asset yielding 8% growth every year. Then after ten years, she sells it. Her original $100K would be worth $183.6K after tax.

Mary got an uninterrupted 8% annual return and ended up with an 83.6% gain after-tax after ten years. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’d like that return stream. But both Mary and I could do better.

If Mary pursued the same exact strategy but instead that 8% investment was in an Opportunity Zone, she would end up with $32K more money in her pocket after taxes. That’s an 18% improvement. Many fund managers would kill for that kind of alpha. Here is what the OZ scenario looks like:

Mary was already doing well. Heck, she had $100K in gains to work with. But an investor with only $10K in capital gains would make an additional $3.2K from the same strategy. That’s significant.

And still, there is more.

The value really piles up if Mary can invest in an asset that is not only growing in value by 8% a year but that also distributes cash to her along the way. Imagine Mary had the opportunity to invest her money in a business that grew at 8% a year but also paid out a 20% cash-on-cash return every year. In other words, imagine every year Mary gets a $20K check from the company she invested $100K. Sound too good to be true? I understand. But these deals exist. we’re doing several of them.

One last time, let’s compare a non-QOZ investment with a QOZ investment, each sharing the traits I describe above. Here’s what a non-QOZ return looks like:

This is a great investment for Mary! In ten years she took her $100K and increased it by 2.5x after taxes. In year 1 she gets $15,000 paid back to her from her investment (20% x $75,000). I assume Mary is in the 37% tax bracket (the highest federal rate). So she pays $5,550 in ordinary income tax on that distribution, leaving her with $9,450 net.

As the company grows, so do her distributions. I calculate the value after ten years as the sum of her after-tax distributions along the way ($136,898) plus her after-tax sale proceeds when she exits the investment after ten years ($121,440). The total after-tax value of her original $100K after ten years is $258K.

Now, let’s see what happens if the same investment is in an Opportunity Zone and she gets the advantages of 1) deferring the original capital gains tax, 2) reducing her basis by 15% and 3) not paying taxes on new capital gains.

Whoa. By investing in this same deal in Opportunity Zone, Mary is 54% better off! She makes nearly $200K more than the base case and has turned her pre-tax $100K into nearly $400K after-tax in ten years. That is a smokin’ deal.

Her cash pre-tax cash distributions are $20K instead of $15K because the 20% cash-on-cash return is based on a $100K investment instead of a $75K investment. Then when she sells, she gets $215K after-tax instead of $121K.

How do you invest in a Qualified Opportunity Zone?

If I’ve succeeded in the first part of this article, I’ve persuaded you that Opportunity Zones are a potentially attractive strategy for reducing your taxes and increasing your take-home investment returns. So how do you invest in them?

1) There are two types of assets you can invest in: Qualified Opportunity Zone Property (QOZP) and Qualified Opportunity Zone Businesses (QOZB). QOZP is real estate. QOZBs are operating businesses located in one of the designated zones.

2) But you cannot invest directly in these assets. For your tax savings to qualify, you must invest through a Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund (QOZF) whose managers will invest in the underlying assets on your behalf. Each fund must register with the IRS for the purpose of investing in Opportunity Zones and at all times must have 90% of its’ assets invested in Opportunity Zones.

There are lists of QOZFs online. They each have their own requirements for minimum investments and their own focus for what they are trying to do. So in addition to the risk of needing to hold an investment for a longer-term, you need to trust that the QOZF manager knows what he is doing and can be trusted.

3) Regardless of which QOZF you invest in, in order to maximize the tax benefits, you need to invest by the end of this year. All QOZ capital gains tax deferrals must be paid by the end of 2026, so to qualify for the seven-year holding period / 15% basis discount, you need to invest by December 31, 2019.

4) For your capital gains to qualify, you must have recognized them in the last 180 days before investing.

Why I’m Sharing This Information

The best way to make sure you learn something is to try to teach it to others. I’m interested in these investments so writing about it here forced me to dive deeper to learn more.

My business partner and I are buying a business that happens to be located in an Opportunity Zone. We like the business on its own merits. It’s one of these deals like I described above, where I think investors will receive at least 20% cash-on-cash returns every year. We are going to buy it because of that (among other reasons). The fact that it is also located in an Opportunity Zone is just icing on the cake. But it has given me an excuse to go deep.

Based on this research, we think the Opportunity Zone landscape is attractive enough that we are opening our own Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund: The Saturn Five Opportunity Fund.

At a minimum, we will acquire this $5M business we are already targeting. It generates $1.5M in free cash flow each year and has lots of room to grow. But we plan to do more. We are raising a $25–30M fund aimed at making 4–6 Opportunity Zone investments in the next two-and-a-half years. This is small potatoes compared to some other funds raising hundreds of millions, but we think it is a good size for our strategy and is more realistic given our goal of raising the money before the end of 2019.

We started Saturn Five with a vision for building businesses that gave investors fantastic returns while simultaneously investing in projects that create meaningful social impact. Opportunity Zones are designed to marry those two goals through the incentives to invest in and build up economically struggling neighborhoods.

If you are an accredited investor (see definition) and would like to learn more about our fund and opportunities to invest, please email me at max@saturnfive.com. Unfortunately, we cannot share investment materials with unaccredited investors or talk about investment opportunities with them.

Whether by investing with us or another group, I hope this information is ultimately useful to you and that you save some money and do some good before the end of the year.

Read Widely. Read Wisely.
Max

Recommended Readings

1. Will ‘Opportunity Zones’ Help the Rich, the Poor or Both?
The Washington Post

SUMMARY

History of Opportunity Zones and a good high-level overview of what they are.

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It was hatched in a 2015 white paper by Jared Bernstein, who was an economic adviser to Joe Biden when he was vice president, and Kevin Hassett, who is now chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for U.S. President Donald Trump. They wrote it for the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank co-founded by Sean Parker, the Napster creator and first president of Facebook Inc. A group of Republicans and Democrats introduced bills in the House and Senate to create opportunity zones in 2016, but the measures never reached a floor vote. One of the sponsors, Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, successfully pushed for a modified version that was tucked into the tax overhaul.

2. Opportunity Zones: Can a tax break for rich people really help poor people?
The Wall Street Journal

SUMMARY

A thoughtful and cautious argument for Opportunity Zones from one of the creators. He emphasizes the need to study whether these investments really payoff for the people they are designed to help.

Today the New York Times ran a front-page story speculating that 1980s junk bond king, and current philanthropist, Michael Milken lobbied the White House for rules changes to make hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property he owns fit in the Opportunity Zone definitions. Whether or not it is true, we will have to watch how much this law benefits investors vs. people living in these zones. — Max

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OZs don’t assume that just because they get a tax cut, wealthy people will make investments that will somehow lead to higher incomes for others. The tax break is conditioned on investing in economically left-behind places where patient, equity capital is a scarce commodity. To push back on sheltering risk, investors can’t just park their deferred gains in OZs. They must be used to build new homes or businesses, finance new or expanding companies in the zones, or substantially rehabilitate preexisting structures and/or businesses.

As an early contributor to this idea, I was motivated by two realities. One, the United States is fraught with capital scarcity in most places amid race/gender unbalanced capital accumulation in just a few places. The vast majority (over 75 percent) of venture capital goes to white male founders in Massachusetts, New York and California. Two, it is increasingly well understood that the facile economic solution to being stuck in a depressed area — move to a better place! — isn’t working. Diminished geo-mobility has left too many families in places with too little opportunity. If policy is going to help them, it needs to bring jobs and investments their way.

It is inconceivable that a few white guys in three states are the only people and places where untapped potential exists. Instead, I’m sure the status quo underinvests in the future of ailing regions and less-advantaged demographics. Hence the bipartisan backing the Opportunity Zones idea garnered in both chambers of Congress before it was wrapped into the tax overhaul package.

3. New ‘Opportunity Zone’ Tax-Break Rules Offer Flexibility to Developers
The Wall Street Journal

SUMMARY

Explanation of some of the rules clarifications that came out last fall. These rules are guiding investors.

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Earlier this year, after getting recommendations from governors, the Treasury designated nearly 9,000 census tracts as opportunity zones, spread across urban and rural areas and including almost all of Puerto Rico.

Nearly 35 million Americans live in the zones, which have higher poverty and unemployment rates than the rest of the country, according to the Treasury. Developers have been planning projects that would qualify for the incentive, including a Marriott hotel in Arizona, affordable housing in Los Angeles and a 22-story office building and hotel in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood.

4. New opportunity zone rules answer pressing questions
GrantThornton

SUMMARY

This piece is a little dense, but good for those of you who want to geek out on the topic. Covers the new guidance offered by the IRS in April of this year.

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The unique nature of the Dec. 31, 2026, mandatory gain recognition date requires taxpayers to make investments in a QOF by Dec. 31, 2019, in order to receive the additional 5% basis increase for holding the asset for seven years before the deferred gain is recognized.

Only gain from the sale or exchange of a capital asset to an unrelated party may be deferred by investing in a QOF. A taxpayer generally does not need net capital gain on the year, and can defer gain even if it only increases a net capital loss. The investment must be made within 180 days after the sale or exchange that created the gain. Ordinary gains are not eligible.

5. Opportunity Zones Overview
LISC

SUMMARY

Good, short PDF with an overview of Opportunity Zones.

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More than half of America’s most economically distressed communities contained both fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 than they did in 2000.

New business formation is near a record low. The average distressed community saw a 6% decline in local businesses during the prime years of the national economic recovery.

The U.S. economy is increasingly dependent on a handful of places for growth. Five metro areas produced as many new businesses as the rest of the country combined from 2010–2014. Now is the time to diversify.

How To Beat The Tax Man was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a different kind of Weekend Reader. YOU became the curators when I asked for your favorite single podcast episodes. I couldn’t include every suggestion, but here are the top twelve. Each of these is worth a listen. Some are funny. Some are tear-jerking. They are all exceptional. Thanks for the suggestions everyone! Load up your playlists and enjoy.

Listen widely. Listen wisely.

Max

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Recommended Shows and Episodes

1. Kohn — by Andy Mills

Andy Mills (8 minutes)

SUMMARY from Tim:

My favorite single podcast episode is a piece produced by Andy Mills called “Kohn.” It is an amazing story and the narrative itself is uniquely linked to the audible component of the production. I don’t think the story would be nearly as good in writing or even in film. The episode is also special because it was written by a job hopping Denverite (who many knew for years as their favorite Cafe Europa barista), and eventually led him to Radiolab, and then on to co-creating The Daily at the NYT. More on Andy:
https://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/person/andy-mills

2. The Callout

Invisibilia (55 minutes)

SUMMARY From Andrew:

Check out “The Call Out” …..David Brooks referenced it in an article I read a few months ago…….what does society look like when there is no room for error and this group of interesting 20-something punk rockers feel a deep need for grace, but are so distant from that concept they can’t even articulate what they want….but are immobilized by the ramifications of Call Out.

This is the beginning of the Brooks article with a link to the podcast and a bit more info about it…..
A number of months ago, I listened to a podcast that has haunted me since — because it captures something essential about our culture warrior moment. It was from NPR’s always excellent “Invisibilia” series and it was about a woman named Emily.

Emily was a member of the hard-core punk music scene in Richmond, Va. One day, when she was nearly 30, she was in a van with her best friend, who was part of a prominent band. They were heading to a gig in Florida when the venue called to cancel their appearance. A woman had accused Emily’s best friend of sending her an unwelcome sexually explicit photograph.

His bandmates immediately dismissed her allegations. But inwardly Emily seethed. Upon returning to Richmond, she wrote a Facebook post denouncing her best friend as an abuser. “I disown everything he has done. I do not think it’s O.K. … I believe women.”

The post worked. He ended up leaving the band and disappeared from the punk scene. Emily heard rumors that he’d been fired from his job, kicked out of his apartment, had moved to a new city and was not doing well. Emily never spoke with him again.

3. Lucy

Radiolab (59 minutes)

SUMMARY From Peter:

My favorite podcast ever is a Radiolab episode called “Lucy” from 2010. It’s got everything — nature vs nurture, science experiments, chimps and humans, and the universal ties between animals and humans… and it’s the only podcast to ever make me cry! When I first heard this, I realized the power of the medium.

4. Conversations with Tyler: Michelle Dawson

Conversations with Tyler (51 minutes)

SUMMARY From Derek:
Huge fan of long-form interview podcasts, the most compelling (ie not just a venue for book tours and standard talking points) is Tyler Cowen’s Conversations with Tyler.

As for specific episodes, I love his conversations with David Brooks and Ross Douthatdue to their subject matter being close to my heart, but in terms of most fascinating is an episode with Michelle Dawson, an autistic academic in the area of autism research who compellingly discusses the value of thinking in a fundamentally different way than the “typical.” I found it an arresting perspective.

5. This American Life: Cars

This American Life (1 hour)

SUMMARY From Michael: This American Life’s focus on car sales. The interviews of the car sales people, highlighting the emotional roller coaster that sales goals create was amazing! Totally worth a listen!

6. EconTalk (2 episodes)

1. Mary Hirschfeld on Economics, Culture, Aquinas, and the Market
2. Taubes on Fat, Sugar and Scientific Discovery
EconTalk

SUMMARY
I got two separate recommendations for EconTalk, but two different episodes so I’ll include them both.

From Matt:
The single podcast episode I’d most recommend: The recent Econtalk eposide with Mary Hirschfeld on Economics, Culture, Aquinas, and the Market. Why? Because it’s a brilliant discussion of one of the more important issues we all face: what is the role of material things in making us happy and how does our modern economy bias us toward counterproductive behavior. This episode demonstrates why this podcast is so great: Russ is an incredible interviewer, asking intelligent questions, providing the right level of pushback, dealing with really stimulating ideas and interesting guests.

From Dan:
I’d recommend EconTalk (in general) and in particular the episode “Taubes on Fat, Sugar and Scientific Discovery” Why?

Important topic (Is calories in versus calories out true? Is fat bad? How could a false idea grip the establishment for 40 years?)

Skilled interviewer (many in podcast land are not)

Engaging interviewee

Teach us not only the topic (health) but also about causality, a crucial topic in health, economics, history — just about any field. The body is a complex system and determining causality in it is hard (e.g. if you do X to the body, then Y will happen).

7. The Problem We All Live With

This American Life

SUMMARY From Wendy:

This episode takes you deeper into Ferguson, MI to better understand the de-facto segregation in public schools and how the efforts to integrate races expose real human tragedy — the overt categorization into groups that we don’t know but don’t want to associate.

Personally, it made me re-evaluate my own philosophy toward parenting. Am I willing to send my own children to less than stellar public schools b/c ultimately that’s better for society when we opt-into helping to improve a community versus sequestering my kids into academically higher achieving schools? Still not sure what the right balance is…

8. Revisionist History: My Little Hundred Million

Malcolm Gladwell — Revisionist History

SUMMARY From Wendy: Gladwell discusses the philanthropic absurdity of giving millions to higher-education universities that don’t need the money and poses the question of what role these organizations should have in social inequity given we all subsidize the untaxed endowment gains.

9. Montessori Academy of Colorado

Robin Hoch (usually 4 minutes)

SUMMARY
This is an unusual one, but such a cool idea that I wanted to share it. If you want to talk to Robin, shoot me an email

From Robin:
I have also been super into podcasts for a few years now, Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert being my current favorite. This prompted me to have an idea last year to put a weekly “podcast” together as a marketing and communications tool for my school. We have a lot of career-driven, fast-paced parents and many were missing important announcements that had previously only been shared via email so why not get those messages across in something they can listen to while hurrying to their next meeting?

However, it has now become a great community-building project that also doubles as an exciting learning tool for my kiddos. They are involved in all aspects of the production, from interviewing peers and faculty to choosing segment music and writing scripts. My upper elementary kids also help me edit and are learning the tech side of media production and it has now become an impressive enrollment incentive for prospective parents when they tour. With all of the positive feedback I’ve received from parents, I hope to seek opportunities to educate other schools on how they can add a podcast to their curriculum soon.

Most episodes include weekly news and events as well as a special segment, sometimes an interview with the community or an audiobook, as well as a weather report :)

10. Founders 15: Mi Golondrina

Kevin Lavelle of Mizzen+Main (1 hour, 27 minutes)

SUMMARY
Interesting — he asks the same 15 questions in every episode.

From Will:
The Mizzen & Main founder Kevin Lavelle hosts a podcast called Founders 15, and I liked it as a compliment to the more popular “How I built this” because it deals more in smaller businesses that are on a path towards being great/big. I liked the one interviewing Cristina Lynch who founded Mi Golondrina.

11. Michael Lewis: Ref You Suck

Against the Rules (37 minutes)

SUMMARY
From Justin:
It’s his first podcast and it shows, but the content is amazing. Lots of variety but basically about the loss of referees in society and how people hate but need those who create boundaries for society.

12. The Cathedral

Reply All (37 minutes)

SUMMARY
This one is my own recommendation.
When Ryan Green’s son was one-year old, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He responded by creating a video game about the experience. If that strikes you as odd and possibly inappropriate, know that I felt the same when I first heard about it.

But know also that this story is heartbreakingly beautiful. Know that these parents were wrestling with how to cope with an unimaginable situation. Know that this is a story about death, but also about grace and enduring love. I can’t hear it without falling into tears.

This article about the same story is also amazing. “Playing for Time” by Jason Tanz in Wired.

POSTSCRIPT

I got lots of other suggestions for shows and podcasts, including: “What it Takes” from the Academy of Achievement, “The Porch” from Watermark, “The Eric Metaxas Show”, “Start-up” by Gimlet, “The Tim Ferriss Show” and others. My friend Henry suggested not even an episode, but a four-minute clip from his podcast about Faith Driven Entrepreneurs (minute 26:30–30:30 of the interview with VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer).

I also got tons of feedback on the idea of doing a Weekend Reader podcast. The vast majority of people I heard from liked the idea a lot. Some suggested just reading the Reader for the podcast so folks could get the same content delivered via audio. Others imagined doing interviews with the authors or subjects of the pieces each week. A couple of you said “Don’t do it!” because you think the printed word is what makes this special or that you feared I don’t have the time to add this in. I appreciate all the feedback.

Dan F shared an interesting link: “On the heels of your ‘podcasts are growing’ letter, you might like this blog post, “What’s wrong with books?” (link). He argues that finishing books (non-fiction) has low ROI. They take a lot of time relative to how much people retain. Whether you agree or not, it’s an interesting point of view. In his view, podcasts in his view are mixed. (I personally find that many podcast hosts don’t know how to stay on track.) However, the opportunity cost is low, he argues, because unlike books you can listen while doing something else.”

I’ll share my thinking on doing a podcast as it evolves, but I don’t have any immediate plans. Just getting this email out is enough work for now. Thanks for reading!

Max

The 12 Best Podcast Episodes You Need to Hear was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Viral Nancy Pelosi Slurred Speech Video

The line between what is real and what is fake is getting blurry. For all the talk about “Fake News,” the last two years, it is easier than ever for misinformation to spread across social media and the web.

On this Memorial Day weekend, some readings and reflection on DeepFakes and the uncertain future of “reality.”

Articles:

1. Faked Pelosi videos, slowed to make her appear drunk, spread across social media — Washington Post
2. Fake video makes Nancy Pelosi look drunk. Facebook won’t take it down. -Vox
3. Bill Hader’s Al Pacino impression with the help of deepfakes — Fast Company
4. AI Recreate Podcast Host Joe Rogan’s Voice To Say Anything- PCMag
5. Facebook Removed Over 2 Billion Fake Accounts, But The Problem Is Getting Worse — Buzzfeed News

Read widely. Read wisely.

Max

P.s. I’m including a mailbag section at the end for a few of you who’ve written back to recent editions.

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Recommended Readings

1. Faked Pelosi videos, slowed to make her appear drunk, spread across social media
Washington Post (5 minutes)

SUMMARY
Distorted videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), altered to make her sound as if she’s drunkenly slurring her words, are spreading rapidly across social media, highlighting how political disinformation that clouds public understanding can now grow at the speed of the Web.

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One version, posted by the conservative Facebook page Politics WatchDog, had been viewed more than 2 million times by Thursday night, been shared more than 45,000 times, and garnered 23,000 comments with users calling her “drunk” and “a babbling mess.”…

Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, tweeted a link to the altered video Thursday night with the note, “What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre.” The tweet has since been deleted.

2. A fake viral video makes Nancy Pelosi look drunk. Facebook won’t take it down.
Vox (5 minutes)

SUMMARY
Facebook has taken all kinds of heat for hosting false political information.And rightfully so. Now it invests millions into scrubbing the content on it’s site. But just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean they will take it down.

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Facebook’s third-party fact checkers reviewed the video on Thursday eveningand rated it as false, and now the company is reducing its distribution and showing additional context alongside it in the form of a related article in news feeds where it appears. But Facebook’s community standards don’t require that information posted on the platform is true. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment on the record for this story.

3. Bill Hader’s Al Pacino impression gets even more real (and creepy) with the help of deepfakes
Fast Company (4 minutes)

4. This AI Can Recreate Podcast Host Joe Rogan’s Voice To Say Anything
PCMag (4 minutes)

SUMMARY
The day when technology can recreate your voice to say anything — no matter how insane — is pretty much here. A group of engineers has created an AI program that can convincingly mimic the voice of podcast host Joe Rogan.

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You can hear the results in the video in the link. The voice is not only identical to Rogan, but it can also produce a natural-sounding rhythm to almost every word said.

However, the voice is artificial. The engineers at the AI company Dessa can get their fake Joe Rogan to say anything — all they have to do is type in the text. In this case, they made the AI-powered voice talk about sponsoring a hockey team full of chimpanzees and also tout the benefits of being a robot.

The video will probably both amuse and disturb you. And that’s the point.

5. Facebook Removed Over 2 Billion Fake Accounts, But The Problem Is Getting Worse

BuzzFeed News (8 minutes)

SUMMARY
Facebook announced this week it removed 2.19 billion fake accounts between January and March, its biggest-ever takedown of fakes in a single quarter. Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg confidently told media that “we’re taking down more fake accounts than ever.”

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What he didn’t say is that there are also more active fake accounts on Facebook than there were six months ago — more than ever before. Facebook now says 5% of active accounts are fake, up from its previous estimate of 3% to 4%.

The sweep of more than 2 billion fake accounts, while impressive, mostly removed profiles at the point of creation. As Zuckerberg said, “they were never considered active in our systems and we don’t count them in any of our overall community metrics.”

So based on Facebook’s own key metric for measuring fake accounts, the problem is actually getting worse. People who investigate fake accounts on the platform also told BuzzFeed News that the company still fails to remove obvious fakes — even during critical periods, such as the ongoing European Parliament election.

Postscript

There is a scene in Forrest Gump when Forrest goes to the White House and meets JFK. The filmmakers edited in Tom Hank’s face to appear in archival footage of the president. At the time, it looked completely real — like he was really meeting Kennedy. I remember seeing it in the theater for the first time and being blown away. This changes everything, I thought. If they can make this look believable, they can do anything.

Of course, back then, the technology to alter the film was new and extraordinarily expensive. Not today. With tools you can download this afternoon, you can create videos of people saying things they never said and the quality would be good enough to fool your friends.

These videos are called deepfakes. They use deep-learning artificial intelligence to create believable fakes of people saying whatever the creators want them to say. The NancyPelosi video isn’t actually a deepfake, it’s a crude alteration that just slowed the video down. As we head into 2020, I expect we’ll see dozens more and the newscycle will be filled with fake videos of candidates followed by their statements that the videos weren’t real.

Now, to be balanced, the rise of DeepFakes aren’t necessarily cause for panic. People have been altering and manipulating photos for years and we’ve learned to live with that, deciphering the fake from the real. Video is just the next step. On the other hand, I’m not sure living with photo alterations has been harmless. As a father of daughters, I don’t like that they will grow up looking at retouched photos of other women, giving them distorted ideas of the female body.

The optimistic take on The Information Age has always been that the web opens up an unlimited opportunity for accessing knowledge. The pessimistic take is that it also opens up an unlimited opportunity for spreading misinformation. Russian interference in the 2016 election is only the most well-publicized example. There are others.

• Axios reports that “A Pew survey last year found that two-thirds of tweeted links to popular websites came from non-human users (bots or other automated accounts).”
• Another study found that more than half (half!) of all web traffic was from bots, not humans.
• Anti-vaccine content is proliferating online

Meanwhile, Facebook is beginning to censor individuals they consider dangerousfor spreading misinformation, recently banning conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, among others. In other words, without any meaningful government oversight, Mark Zuckerberg has a power that few have imagined in history: the power to determine what is helpful and hurtful to the public, even more, to determine what is true and what is false. That kind of power is what has led Zuckerberg’s co-founder Chris Hughes to argue it is time to break up Facebook.

The AI Foundation has created a browser plugin called Reality Defender “built to run alongside digital experiences (such as browsing the web) to detect potentially fake media. Similar to virus protection, it scans every image, video, and other media that a user encounters for known fakes, allows reporting of suspected fakes, and runs new media through various AI-driven analysis techniques to detect signs of alteration or artificial generation.”

Just think of that. We live in an era where truth is so much in question that we feel compelled to defend reality.

In a way, The Weekend Reader, is my low-tech version of defending reality. Instead of sharing the hottest link and most viral tweet, I try to take my time, only sending once a week. And instead of relying on one source, I share multiple articles, from a variety of sources. The hope is that the variety will give a fuller picture of reality and help us all think a little better about what’s actually true. Someday soon there will probably be an AI that can do it better than me. But until then, thanks for reading.

Read widely. Read wisely. Don’t believe everything you see.
Max

MAILBAG

I thought I’d share a couple of the responses to last week’s issue. If you want to respond to this week’s issue, drop me a line! No promises that I’ll publish it or even reply, but it’s fun to keep the conversation going.

On Last Week’s Sugar Issue (LINK)

MAT writes: Two things… 1. Where does Shake Shack fit into this? And 2. So glad they know about Fit Fat people being healthy. Makes me feel fat strong.

• MAX: 1. Shake Shack is like Doritos and Ice Cream. So delicious I think it’s foolhardy to build a diet that excludes it. 2. I like the Fit Fat club too! #chartermember #fatstrong

***
JAMIE writes: The best book I’ve read [on this topic] has been The Obesity Code. You may enjoy it. Connects a lot of thoughts together and gives a solid plan. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945404-the-obesity-code

• MAX: Thanks for the recommendation!

***
JEREMY writes: I love your selections. I read them every week. But as a physician, I had a problem with #2. Sorry, man. Just sayin’. I don’t know many — no, any — obese doctors. Sorry, but I just don’t. They’re probably out there. But I don’t know any.I also lived in Ethiopia for 4 years. Guess what? I didn’t see any fat patients in Ethiopia. None. The people there are skinny. They have malaria and TB and HIV. But in general, they don’t have strokes and heart attacks.

It’s hard for me to believe that obesity and patients being overweight is not a Western problem. And a problem of an excess of available cheap calories. Sorry, but I disagree with Mr. Hobbes wholeheartedly.

It is true that diets do not work. But it is not because being slimmer is not healthier. It is! It is because diets are extremely hard to abide by in our Western culture. I know because I weighed 20 pounds less when I lived in Ethiopia. In the last 4 years, I have done keto, paleo, you name it to remove the excess 20. But I can’t. You know why? Because just when things are going well, I eat a burger and onion rings, and a bag of chips, and it’s all downhill from there.

Do some obese people have normal blood pressure and normal cholesterol? Sure. Do some skinny people have high blood pressure and high cholesterol? Sure. But it’s an undebatable scientific fact that obesity in general leads to poor health outcomes, and the author of this piece cannot dispel that no matter how eloquent he is.

• MAX: I’m glad you wrote this. Good to have some back and forth on an idea as controversial as “you can be fat and be healthy.”

DeepFakes was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s get something out of the way.

I love Doritos and ice cream.

I’ve long known that I eat too much of both of them. So you can imagine how my spirits fell when I read the articles this week, about how sugar and processed foods lead to obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and heart disease.

I’m not ready to go cold turkey, but this info is going to change the way I think about my diet, and hopefully, it will actually lead me to change my diet as well.

This Weekend Reader is nutrition, and why sugar is so bad for you.

This week’s Articles:

• Death of the Calorie — 1843
• Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong — Highline
• How I Saved My Kids From Sugar — The Walrus
• Here’s How A Colorado Dentist Became Big Sugar’s Worst Nightmare -BuzzFeed News
• The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer’s — The Atlantic

Read widely. Read wisely.

Max

Recommended Readings

1. Death of the Calorie
1843 Magazine (29 minutes)

SUMMARY
If you want to know if you are eating healthy, you can’t simply count calories.Many of us believe “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.” That’s isn’t right and that oversimplification may be a contributing factor to our obesity epidemic.

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The calorie as a scientific measurement is not in dispute. But calculating the exact calorific content of food is far harder than the confidently precise numbers displayed on food packets suggest. Two items of food with identical calorific values may be digested in very different ways. Each body processes calories differently. Even for a single individual, the time of day that you eat matters. The more we probe, the more we realise that tallying calories will do little to help us control our weight or even maintain a healthy diet: the beguiling simplicity of counting calories in and calories out is dangerously flawed.

A US Senate committee report in 1977 recommended a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet for all, and other governments followed suit. The food industry responded with enthusiasm, removing fat, the most calorie-dense of macronutrients, from food items and replacing it with sugar, starch and salt. As a bonus, the thousands of new cheap and tasty “low-cal” and “low-fat” products which Camacho used to diet tended to have longer shelf lives and higher profit margins.

But this didn’t lead to the expected improvements in public health. Instead, it coincided almost exactly with the most dramatic rise in obesity in human history. Between 1975 and 2016 obesity almost tripled worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO): nearly 40% of over-18s — some 1.9bn adults — are now overweight. That contributed to a rapid rise in cardiovascular diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke) which became the leading cause of death worldwide. Rates of type-2 diabetes, which is often linked to lifestyle and diet, have more than doubled since 1980.

2. Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong
Highline (42 minutes)

SUMMARY
Argues that weight loss plans often don’t work, and that overweight people can still be healthy.

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Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people — long after we knew there was a better path.

About 40 years ago, Americans started getting much larger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV put together.

Forty-five percent of adults say they’re preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time — an 11-point rise since 1990. Nearly half of 3- to 6- year old girls say theyworry about being fat.

For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism — a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

3. How I Saved My Kids From Sugar
The Walrus (12 minutes)

SUMMARY
One parent shares how she’s fighting an uphill battle against sugar in her kids’ diet.

SELECTION
What I can say with certainty is that the world has become one giant candy store. Its sugar “pushers” — a term generally associated with those who encourage the use of recreational drugs, and which I am using intentionally — are everywhere. There are pushers in schools, hawking candy as a reward for good behaviour. There are pushers in our parks, slinging sport drinks as a reward just for showing up to play. There are pushers in our grocery stores, selling chocolate bars to support local charities. There are pushers in our friends’ homes, handing out loot bags and just because treats. At family gatherings, sugar pushers are often better known by the names Grandma and Grandpa (or, in my kids’ case, Bubbie and Zaidi). However, unlike drug pushers, sugar pushers hawk their wares out in the open, and their offers are considered fun and normal. And that’s the problem.

4. How a Colorado Dentist Became Big Sugar’s Worst Nightmare
BuzzFeed News (16 minutes)

SUMMARY
The “Big Sugar” lobby may be just as powerful, and duplicitous, as “Big Tobacco.” Profile of Cristin Kearns, a dentist-turned-investigative-researcher, who is making the case that sugar producers have long known how bad sugar is for us, but have covered it up.

SELECTION
By combing through thousands of pages of internal documents, Kearns and her team have gained unprecedented clarity into the machinations of the sugar industry during the mid-20th century.

They’ve found, for example, that a trade group knew as early as the 1950s that sugar caused tooth decay. But when the group went on to work closely with the federal government on a program about strategies to fight decay, it downplayed the most obvious, cutting out sugar. Another time, the group funded research that inadvertently linked sugar with bladder cancer, then killed the research. Then there was a 1967 paper — secretly funded by that same trade group — that blamed fat and cholesterol for causing heart disease, but minimized data showing sugar’s risks.

5. The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer’s
The Atlantic (9 minutes)

SUMMARY
A high-carb diet, and the attendant high blood sugar, are associated with cognitive decline.

SELECTION

A longitudinal study, published Thursday in the journal Diabetologia, followed 5,189 people over 10 years and found that people with high blood sugar had a faster rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar — whether or not their blood-sugar level technically made them diabetic. In other words, the higher the blood sugar, the faster the cognitive decline.

POSTSCRIPT

I confess I didn’t really know what a calorie was until this week’s reading:

A calorie is a measurement of energy. The calorie — which comes from “calor”, the Latin for “heat” — was originally used to measure the efficiency of steam engines: one calorie is the energy required to heat 1kg of water by one degree Celsius. Only in the 1860s did German scientists begin using it to calculate the energy in food.

I had heard that somewhere before, but couldn’t have told you about it.

My rudimentary approach to a healthy diet has been “Burn as many or more calories as you consume.” I’d wager I’m not unique in having my nutritional sophistication trail off there. Our widespread failure to control our diets suggests we might not know enough. Today 1 in 11 Americans has Type II diabetes.

Growing up, I thought that fat was the thing to avoid if you didn’t want to become fat. But now we know that a certain amount of fat is good for you. What isn’t good for you is sugar.

I know that isn’t exactly a mind-blowing revelation.

But this week’s articles (and I especially recommend reading the first two on calories and obesity) put things in a whole new light for me. They caused me to realize how little I really know about nutrition. And from what they argue, most of us know very little.

Given how much time and money we spend eating, it’s funny that most of us spend so little time learning about nutrition. Nutrition classes we optional in my high school. I guess we assumed that kids would learn good nutrition at home. But if your parents aren’t eating healthy, they won’t be good at teaching you to eat healthy.

I have long argued that we need to re-think educational priorities in high school and college. If I were in charge, I would have students spend time studying nutrition, in addition to personal fitness, personal finance, friendship, neighboring, dating & marriage, and parenting. After all, these topics are far more correlated to our levels of happiness than the traditional curriculum. I would include lessons in these areas along with more typical studies in English, biology, or trigonometry.

In lieu of that, here’s my cliff’s notes version of good nutrition, borrowing heavily from Michael Pollan:

Eat real, whole food, but not too much. And avoid sugar.

Have a good start to the week and happy eating!
Max

Sugar is Worse Than We Thought was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Happy 2019 everyone and welcome back!

Most colleges have application deadlines in January. So I thought I’d start the new year with an edition for all the exhausted parents and nervous kids: Does it matter where you go to college?

Articles:

• Does It Matter Where You Go to College? -The Atlantic
• It’s Time to Tell Your Kids It Doesn’t Matter Where They Go To College — Time
• What Straight-A Students Get Wrong — Adam Grant, NY Times
• The Inescapable Weight of My $100,000 Student Debt — The Guardian
• The Future of College Looks Like the Future of Retail — The Atlantic

Read widely. Read wisely.

Max

p.s. Thank you to everyone who became a contributor to The Weekend Reader over the holidays! I really appreciate it!

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Recommended Readings

1. Does It Matter Where You Go To College?
The Atlantic (8 min)

Summary

The bottom line: Do you make more money if you go to a more selective school? No. Unless you are a woman or a minority. That is vastly oversimplifying things. You’ll have to click through to the article for the full story. This is an interesting read.

Some highlights:

In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paperby the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers.

This month, economists from Virginia Tech, Tulane, and the University of Virginia published a new study that reexamines the data in the Dale-Krueger study. Among men, the new study found no relationship between college selectivity and long-term earnings. But for women, “attending a school with a 100-point higher average SAT score” increased earnings by 14 percent and reduced marriage by 4 percent.

For the vast majority of women, the benefit of going to an elite college isn’t higher per-hour wages. It’s more hours of work. Women who graduate from elite schools delay marriage, delay having kids, and stay in the workforce longer than similar women who graduate from less-selective schools.

2. It’s Time to Tell Your Kids It Doesn’t Matter Where They Go To College
in Time Magazine, by William Stixrud, the co-author of The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, with Ned Johnson. (14 min)

Summary

Two authors talk about how (and why) we over-stress the importance of college when talking to our kids.

Selection

So why don’t we tell our kids the truth about success? We could start with the fact that only a third of adults hold degrees from four-year colleges. Or that you’ll do equally well in terms of income, job satisfaction and life satisfaction whether you go to an elite private college or a less-selective state university. Or that there are there are many occupations through which Americans make a living, many of which do not require a college degree.

Many adults worry that if their kids knew that grades in school aren’t highly predictive of success in life, they’d lose their motivation to apply themselves and aim high. In fact, the opposite is true. In my 32 years of working with kids as a psychologist, I’ve seen that simply telling kids the truth — giving them an accurate model of reality, including the advantages of being a good student — increases their flexibility and drive. It motivates kids with high aspirations to shift their emphasis from achieving for its own sake to educating themselves so that they can make an important contribution. An accurate model of reality also encourages less-motivated students to think more broadly about their options and energizes them to pursue education and self-development even if they aren’t top achievers.

3. What Straight-A Students Get Wrong
Adam Grant in The New York Times (8 min)

Summary

Adam Grant is always a good read. This article is no exception. The social psychologist talks about Type-A kids who get Straight-A grades and suggests they may be missing the bigger picture.

Selection

The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.

In a study of students who graduated at the top of their class, the education researcher Karen Arnold found that although they usually had successful careers, they rarely reached the upper echelons.“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.

4. The inescapable weight of my $100,000 student debt
The Baffler and The Guardian (23 min)

Summary

MH Miller left university with a journal full of musings on Virginia Woolf and a vast financial burden. He is one of 44 million US graduates struggling to repay a total of $1.4tn. Were they right to believe their education was ‘priceless’?

A terrific first-hand story of the debilitating impact of student debt. It makes one skeptical about whether the degree is worth all the financial stress.

Selection

Now 30, I have been incapacitated by debt for a decade. The delicate balancing act that my family and I perform in order to make a payment each month has become the organising principle of our lives. I am just one of 44 million borrowers in the US who owe a total of more than $1.4 trillion in student loan debt.

I have spent a great deal of time during the last decade shifting the blame for my debt. Whose fault was it? My devoted parents, for encouraging me to attend a school they couldn’t afford? The banks, which should have never lent money to people who clearly couldn’t pay it back to begin with, continuously exploiting the hope of families like mine, and quick to exploit us further once that hope disappeared? Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realise it was a mistake to spend roughly $200,000 on a school where, in order to get my degree, I kept a journal about reading Virginia Woolf? (Sample passage, which assuredly blew my mind at the time: “We are interested in facts because we are interested in myth. We are interested in myth insofar as myth constructs facts.”) The problem, I think, runs deeper than blame. The foundational myth of an entire generation of Americans was the false promise that education was priceless — that its value was above or beyond its cost. College was not a right or a privilege, but an inevitability on the way to a meaningful adulthood. What an irony that the decisions I made about college when I was 17 have derailed such a goal.

5. The Future of College Looks Like the Future of Retail
The Atlantic (8 min)

Summary

Online retailers like Amazon and Warby Parker have found there is a benefit to having brick and mortar stores. The future of retail will be a mix of online shopping and real-world stores. Apparently, that is the future of college as well — a mix of physical facilities and online courses.

Selection

The number of students in the U.S. enrolled in at least one online course rose from 1.6 million in 2002 to more than 6 million in 2016.

As online learning extends its reach, though, it is starting to run into a major obstacle: There are undeniable advantages, as traditional colleges have long known, to learning in a shared physical space. Recognizing this, some online programs are gradually incorporating elements of the old-school, brick-and-mortar model — just as online retailers such as Bonobos and Warby Parker use relatively small physical outlets to spark sales on their websites and increase customer loyalty. Perhaps the future of higher education sits somewhere between the physical and the digital.

75 percent of the 56,000 undergraduates at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, took at least one online class at the school last year, even as they were enrolled in face-to-face courses. (Another 10 percent took a hybrid course, a mix between online and face-to-face.) Nearly a third of the university’s classes take place online, which officials say has eliminated the need to build at least five additional classroom buildings.

Postscript

Does it matter where you go to college?

Our spending would indicate we think it does. According to the Atlantic, American parents now spend almost half a billion dollars each year on ‘independent education consultants,’ and that’s not counting the cost of test prep or flights and hotels for campus visits.” In the casino of the American economy, many American parents are betting big that elite colleges will help their kids succeed.

Some stats suggest that they’re not crazy for thinking this. Again, according to the Atlantic, “Elite schools seem disproportionately responsible for minting the American elite. About 45 percent of America’s billionaires and more than half of Forbes’s list of the most powerful people attended schools where incoming freshmen average in the top first percentile of SAT scores.” There are more than 200 law schools in the U.S. but all nine of the current Supreme Court Justices attended either Harvard or Yale. Similarly, every president since George H.W. Bush attended an Ivy League school.

But those stats paint a misleading picture. While the very pinnacle of business and politics is over-represented by graduates of “elite” schools, the majority of students who attend those schools don’t reach the very pinnacle. A student who gets into Yale may have “won the lottery,” but their prize is simply another lottery ticket. For some, skipping through the Gothic porticos of elite campuses will open doors to success that only a handful of people in a generation experience. On average, however, as the Dale-Kreueger study found, students at elite colleges won’t experience career or financial outcomes any better than equally qualified high school students who don’t attend those schools.

It is true that women benefit financially from attending elite schools, but not because they earn higher salaries. The study from the first article suggests that on average, they simply work more. It appears women who attend elite schools tend to prioritize careers more than women who don’t.

When we were living in New York City, my wife and I attended an evening seminar for navigating the New York public and private school options for our daughter. The presenter talked about for parents to hire tutors for their children to prepare for the gifted and talented tests in pre-school. Looking around the room I saw mothers and fathers diligently scribbling notes about any edge they could potentially give their child. I felt my palms begin to sweat. Surely not all the families in this room could get the highest marks. Would it only be those who could spend the money who would get into the good programs?

Then I started wondering, what is this all for? At a superficial level, the answer was obvious — you get a tutor so your kid can get into a good G&T program. You do that so that they can get into a selective middle school and then into a selective high school so eventually, they can get into a selective college. Why? That’s where the answers start to unravel. So they can have a miserable, though lucrative, career as a corporate hoop jumper? So they can be no more financially successful than their peers at other colleges?

And what kind of success do I want for my kids anyway? Ultimately I want them to have good character and to be happy. Unfortunately, those things aren’t highly correlated with elite school attendance either.

We have made the college application process into a high-stakes, high-anxiety ordeal, but the stakes are lower than we think. Within a very few years after college, it is who you are rather than where you came from that will count the most. And there is a lot more to who you are than where you studied History.

As the MH Miller article described, student loan debt can cripple a person. Could it be that we need to come to terms with the uncomfortable notion that college might not always be worth it, regardless of the cost? The good news is we are also seeing the dawn of a new era in higher education, one that mixes expensive in-classroom experiences with cheaper online instruction. This may help bring costs down. We may also see more students take alternative educational paths, like three-month coding schools. We are on the precipice of a big disruption in higher education. The more expensive it gets, the more people will look for alternatives because they won’t believe it matters so much where you go anyway.

In another sense, yes it matters where you go to college. For many of us, we make life-long friends in college. As a result of sharing the life-altering experience of living away from home for the first time, you have the opportunity to grow up a lot together. You have adventures, you have stress, you have success. And you begin sharing these things with your friends in college. In my case, in college, I also met the girl who would become my wife. So where we went to school mattered a lot.

To all the applicants, my hat is off to you. Applying is a lot of hard work. You’re probably nervous about how it will turn out. That’s natural. Just remember the research here — it suggests it’s all going to turn out fine.

- Max

Does it Matter Where You Go To College? was originally published in THE WEEKEND READER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.