[*] I screen my phone calls
[*] I lie more
[*] I watch TV instead of reading
[*] My runs are shorter. I never end them with sit ups
[*] I stopped cooking altogether (down from rarely)

It's not Los Angeles. It's me. They aren't changes I am particularly proud of.

Check out the balls on this guy. It's the worst media inquiry I've seen to date. Think about how illiterate you have to be to judge books not on their covers but on the idea of them having covers.

This isn't so much a new media lesson as it is one of most shocking and disturbing things you eventually realize about the world:

Most people are absolutely incompetent.

Even at the very highest levels they are incompetent. Executives. Writers. Bloggers. CEOs. PR people. The ones you read about in the paper - you meet a good chunk of them and realize, "Holy Shit, the emperor has no clothes." They don't know how to use common sense. They have no empathy. They can't plan. They're uninformed. They do things like this and then throw up their hands and wonder why it doesn't work.

This guy is the host of his own 4 hour radio show. Not on some tiny station either. That's pretty fucking cool. He managed to work himself firmly into the middle of a highly competitive field, name a show after himself and hold on to it.

And yet, here he is sending unquestionably the worst media request I've seen in the last two years. It's so bad that I thought I must have read it wrong. There's no way someone would admit upfront that they hadn't bothered to read a 200 page book and then follow it up with the narcissism it would take to think that their approval would still be appreciated. No. Way. But of course, here we are.

So, if you're sitting their thinking that it's too hard to crack into media or maybe you don't have what it takes to do whatever you want to do, realize this: Chris McClain is not an anomaly. He's better than average. Some would call him accomplished. That should be the most inspiring thing in the world.

Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War in Iraq - Paul Rutherford (decent but the author should be ashamed of himself. ignoring the wealth of data, he relied on a 'community panel' of people to discuss the marketing of the war. it would have been fine if they hadn't been quoted like experts, all had the same education level, been asked leading questions or I don't know, if they didn't all LIVE IN CANADA.)
No Logo - Naomi Klein (klein has some big logic and belief problems but this book is great)
Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids - Donna Gaines (held up well. cool Iron Maiden references)
Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham (more coming on this)

Ben has an awesome piece about American Apparel. On the same level as this one about Zappos.

Fail Dogs is one the a Top Ten Pet Trend of the year.

I want to live in this apartment.

And like I've been saying, there is a market for what you do online.

When you see stupid billboards. Like the one I saw yesterday that had pictures of some people's faces (token black guy) and then said "Toyota." It's easy to dismiss that as bad marketing. You forget though that someone with a fancy title -" VP of West Coast Advertising" - wrote a 40 or 50,000 dollar check for your viewing pleasure. Some other artist rushed to work each day to put the finishing touches on his big campaign. And of course, there's the pesky little problem of advertising not working.

What about those Hedge Fund managers that go through divorces, raise fucked up kids, work 90 hour weeks that they need coke to get through, all for the glorious pleasure of not beating an Index Fund. A life exchanged for the privilege of deceiving people that you have a skill that you objectively do not. A gambling addiction without the self-awareness.

Or think about all the sleepless nights executives at Microsoft and Yahoo have spent over the last three months. Traveling, phone calls, lunches, dinners, frantic memos and pages of reports. All of that and they know - empirically - it will be an enormous failure.

And at least they were in the arena, marred in dust and blood. Unlike the journalists, analysts, consultants, trend watchers, coaches, authors - whose skills lie in breathlessly reporting the same story with different words. Apparently forgetting how laughable the chatter looks a few years later.

All those people subjugated their lives to showing up every day to an office. That is, in most cases, in the place of doing something they want to do. They stressed. They put shit off. Bogged in office politics. Missed the little pleasures. Philosophy. Reading. Thinking. Improving. They deferred. Wondered why their not happy. Debt. Turned around and tried to impart their 'wisdom' on the next generation.

Maybe they think about this daily and go ahead and do it anyway. Or, they never stopped to consider it. Probably the latter. No matter how many times they use the words "war room," "attrition," "4th quarter" - it's not going to change the fact that it's all a big charade. A joke. A lie.

Is that what you want to work your whole life for? I don't. It's my worst fear.

Honesty Box: I feel like all the time I am right on this edge. I'm trying to put this stuff on the record now. Reverse pressure. So I'm always thinking "but it'll look bad if I become the person I said I never wanted to be." I think I need all the help I can get.

"Let's start with a test: do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told." Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters

Which reminds me of something that Cicero said, that at first I felt may have been a logical fallacy but am starting to finally understand.

"Ah, you're trying to refute me by quoting things I've said or written myself. That's confronting me with documents that have already been sealed. You can reserve that for people who only argue according to fixed rules. But I live from one day to the next! If something strikes me as probable, I say it; and that is how, unlike everyone else, I remain a free agent." Cicero, Discussions at Tusculum

One of the most humbling things in the world is to see great thinkers struggling towards an understanding - Godin, story and organizational innovation; Gladwell, the evolution of genius; Greene, strategy and self-control; Lewis, what makes someone the best. You can see if everything they write, the circling of the drain or the stacking of the bricks, how they're methodically closing the gap between what they sense and what they know.

When you stop looking at issues as right or wrong and more like problems to be wrestled with, you conveniently end up with an amalgam with opinions satisfactorily qualified to upset everyone. If, like Cicero, you're engaged in an endlessly race to seal, discard, adopt, seal, discard as many ideas as possible maybe you'll end up right where Graham thinks you should. A place where the only plausible explanation for being there is that you made your own way.

And if innovation comes at the crossroads where ideas intersect, then you should be embarking and subsequently colliding as many different paths as possible. I think that's correct. I'm trying to pick up a book here and crash into a television show I'm watching over there. Or something my Dad told me and some different thing that I've seen Tucker do. An implication and somebody else's actions.

I can only say what's working for me but for the first time, I'm starting to come up with my 'own' ideas.

I'd start here:

I get weird feelings when I go back to places that I used to live. School. Where I grew up. Restaurants I spend lots of time at. Streets I walked down before. It's always a "oh what a better time" kind of feeling. I was running the dorms after dark, through grassy knolls lit up and empty. I felt really at peace. For a second, I wished I could be back there. Where it was easy and I wasn't always worried.

Which is totally bullshit. I caught myself. Being there was horrible. There was all kinds of pressure. I was always stressed about this or that, waiting, bored, fighting about something. I had all these deadlines and all this anxiety if I didn't make them.

What I came away with wasn't that we tend to idealize the past. I already know that and I don't think that's what I was doing. Being back it's a lot clearer that it didn't need to be that way. It's actually a great place - I was the problem. Running through campus at night is one of my favorite things to do. It's so peaceful. I never once did it when I lived there.

I made all the pressure up. It was a mental creation. An unnecessary torture I inflicted on myself. I am the source and the sufferer of my own anxiety. Idealizing rarely involves adding anything new, it's mostly about trimming the details - the shit agonized and stewed over. You know, everything you don't even remember anymore.

I think that driving force is responsible for a lot of the places I'm going. It propels you. But it also eats at you. It's crushing. Epictetus said "that your son is sick, not that he may die of it." Doesn't mean you ignore it and pretend that he's well. You just opt out of the anguish. Opt out of The Pressure. Or, I guess, you can wait for the past to do it for you.

I'm trying to do that this time around. That's the nice thing about trying to live in the present - and how brief our piece of it is - you always seem to get another shot.

The British Medical Journal once proposed something called an "Honesty Box" - a place where contributors were supposed to mention oddities in the data, problems that may have shown up in the research. It seems like common sense, especially in light of documented bias like this or this, but it never caught on.

The Wall Street Journal has the balls to called the section where they admit that their mistakes "Corrections and Amplifications." That doesn't sound like humility to me.

In The Wisdom of Whores, Pisani gives an entire chapter to the notion of an Honesty Box. She tells us everything that's wrong or missing or vague about the data behind AIDS. And all of a sudden, she seems above the din of rhetoric and activism.

We could use more honesty boxes.

JP Rangaswami (who has a fantastic site) said it well:

"What I hadn't appreciated was that, for some classes of information, I would go to Wikipedia in preference to other places because of the willingness of Wikipedia to point out its own provisionality."

Wikipedia relishes in Honesty Boxes - users are encouraged to challenge the validity of an article on dozens of fronts even if they wrote it themselves. Because Wikipedia enjoys pointing out its own flaws it's considerably easier to trust than sources that go around pointing out their reputation for quality.

I've tried to do this a little more with my site, adding footnotes and links to the books where I got the idea. But I think I want to get more in the business of discussing the flaws in my thinking or the bias I might be holding. One of the best parts of the 48 Laws of Power is at the end of each chapter where Robert admits that it's not as much of a Law as he made it out to be. There is almost always a reversal.

So for my box:

- Someone rightly pointed that a lot of the stuff I talk about is limited to less scientific fields - it's harder to leverage new media to make you a better doctor. The internet is not the answer to everything.
- I tend to fall head over heels in love with an idea and then slowly ratchet myself down as I weigh it against subsequent things I've learned. It's better to catch me at that end of the cycle than the beginning.
- I've gotten incredibly lucky 3 or 4 times with the people I've met. Had I been older, I probably wouldn't have been granted the same access.
- My Alexa rank is disproportionate to the amount of traffic I actually receive. I get to see a lot of the hard data for other sites and mine is definitely a favorable rank.
- My inability to calmly deal with some of the stupid comments I often get on this site is a sign of a pretty obvious insecurity.

So, if you had to put together an honesty box that went along with the way you presented yourself, what would be in it? It's mostly rhetorical but think about, what are you not telling people that might their perception if they knew? And are you buying into your own deception?

US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man - Charlie LeDuff (Charlie feels like Hunter S Thompson and Philalawyer mixed together. good book)
Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia - Marya Hornbacher (very rarely do you read someone with the ability to write about themselves with this kind of self-awareness. it's almost as if she's able to step outside herself and write from a perspective hovering above.)
The Myth of the Robber Barons - Burton W. Folsom (sort of cheesy self-published vibe but has a ton of great anecdotes)
The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder - Vincent Bugliosi (bought this at the airport because I forgot my books and finished it four hours later. Amazing. It's his Swan Song. A retired 73 year old man absolutely eviscerates the most powerful person in the world.)
The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS - Elizabeth Pisani (thought this was going to be a little bit more about economics but it confirms what smart people already know about AIDS. each culture has its own unique cocktail for the spread of the disease and only by addressing those specifically will you be able to do anything about it. the author is honest and practical and entertaining.)

-My friend Shawn started a site. He's the one that helped me come up with Fight Club Moments

-Kevin Kelly posted "Books that Changed My Life". I want my library to look like his. At the bottom, he asks people to send in lists of people they respect. I'd really appreciate anyone who would send him mine.

-Valleywag has a nice example of exactly how NOT to do guerrilla PR. If you have a site or deal with the press at all, you know that horrible emails are the curse of the industry. And because most people can't step outside their own head and look at things from someone else's perspective, they are laughably bad at cold contact emails. If you can craft something decent -and it really is a craft - you can open up all the right doors.

-I've had two brothers email me off and on for the last few months. Together they've sent me emails addressed to the wrong person, hit me with the obnoxious Tim Ferriss autoresponder, invited me to join a FB group one of them created about himself, tagged me the same blog from like four different accounts and asked me to look at a quote list they didn't bother to give me credit for.

Its funny because as ridiculous as all those things are, at least they've shown some initiative. That's great. I know who they are. I just have a sneaking suspicious that they might be retarded.

-Tim did a great post on this a few weeks ago but he's missing one thing: Humanness. For young people, your emails need to have life. Spirit. Use the word "really" or "thank you" or "hope" or anything that makes you real. Because you are real When I see "I am grateful for your consideration" I think this isn't someone I have going to bother giving anything back to.

-Everyone has their own their own style. There is not right or wrong way to navigate new media emails. But if I had to offer some advice...

* Be human
* Be brief
* Be personal
* Offer something in exchange
* Create a reason for a response ("getting an answer" implies something)
* If you're going to go covert, be untraceable

Again, emails, questions, comments, views - all of those incur a cost upon the person you want something from. It's your job to make those as low as possible.

I turn 21 in the next few days. Friday was the day I was supposed to graduate from college. Writers live interesting lives, I remember Tucker saying a couple years ago. That's what I've been trying to do since.

It's funny how stuff comes together. Nature's inadvertence. How it all lines up. You get lucky. You get fucked. Get so worked up about something and it just fades away. In two or three days, it goes a direction you couldn't even have even considered. When you space that over a year, the distance you can travel is almost incomprehensible. If you can just have a little faith in yourself and the ability to get lost a little in the present.

I've been fired. Twice. Promoted. An Executive. Thought about going back to school. Met some celebrities, cashed a big check. Been humbled, a little. Tried to listen more than I talk - failed. Started to know what I need to be happy.

But if I were a start up, my valuation would just be starting to accelerate. I haven't turned Pro yet, but I'm starting to know what that means.

Which, by the way, is exactly how I'm starting to look at developing yourself. Like a start up. You are start up. Don't worry about monetization. Or a safety net or health insurance or an office. Aim for critical mass and pick up support wherever you can. Woo every customer. Find something that no one else does and do it better than they ever can. Invest in yourself. Sweat equity. What are you doing? Do you love it? Start ups run on love. Read the books. Look for the angel investors. Have an exit strategy.

Most of my friends are moving home for the summer. Or they're graduating and moving home again anyway. Apparently, that's something to be admired. Fuck That. This is your life. All the tools and opportunities and chances that you're supposedly waiting for, you can leverage now. And not only will you be rewarded for doing so, but people are desperately hoping that you will.

I'm in so unbelievably above my level that I can't articulate it, but you know what - it's working. It's working so well that I'm having to seriously thinking about learning how to say "no." Whatever skills I have, there are a lot of people who not only have them too, but in addition to a cadre of others that I will never be able to call mine.

Like I said, this is your life. I can only speak about mine. That's all I really try to do here. I've been extremely lucky to meet people who've giving me the freedom to develop myself on their tab. But they're a different breed of people and they're only going to invest in you when you make the conscious decision to be different yourself.

So I did it. You should do.

When I first took my internship at the management company in Hollywood, they were investing in a social networking site that had all kinds of cool potential. A year, close to a hundred thousand dollars and a total redesign later, the site is actually less popular that where it was before. There were a bunch of reasons for this, but going over the site recently, I came across the most telling one. Not once in the last six months has the founder uploaded anything to his own site. Nothing. And he can't figure out why no one is joining.

Clay Shirky tells this story about Flickr. Caterina Fake, one of the founders, insisted from the beginning that employees not only have their own Flickr accounts but that they actively comment on the photos of other users. The community didn't come from nowhere.

Since I took over Fail Dogs, traffic is up for two reasons. One, I update all the time. Two, I've systematically gone through and touched almost everybody that matters in that space. In less than 30 days it's gone from 565,000 pageviews a month to just over 750,000, all because I sat down and got involved. And if you count all the impression off the site itself, we're just inches away from cracking the million mark.

There is only one way to build a New Media presence.

Your blog will fail unless you post on it. Your delicious account is worthless if you're not using it. You'll get nothing from Wikipedia without editing. You'll never be the source of conversation if you don't personally start it. Your connections will dry up unless you make consistent contact. And all of the equalizing power of new media is lost on you if you can't step up and extend yourself.

One day you'll probably want something from the internet - you'll have a book to promote, a business that needs customers, someone you need to meet, a ebay auction you're trying to sell, a job you're after. It'll be too late then. You have to start before. And there's only one way to do that.

"nobody in their right mind would hold back making revenue if it were available." - comment on TechCrunch

There are two reactions to that comment. It either makes complete sense or you can't even comprehend someone believing it. If a company's goal is to make money, why would they ever turn it down? Well that's like saying that no general would ever withdraw when they could advance. Why would they ever not take territory? A quick look at history shows us that they do that all the time:

Pericles in the Black Sea. Stonewall Jackson at Shenandoah. Themistocles at Salamis.[1] In some cases it's even got it's own name, Tactical Retreat

Smart companies, like smart generals, know that money is just money unless it has strategic value. You can get revenue anywhere, especially an innovative place like Google. So that's not the question. It's "what does this revenue bring me and am I better off for it?" If it doesn't have strategic value, then it's not worth going after.

It's really easy to latch on to aphorisms or take for granted commonly traded assumptions. Getting yourself to the point where you can think strategically - deeply and counter intuitively - is difficult. It takes a lot of work. It would be easier if things fit in nice little logical boxes but they don't. There's this messy middle ground between ignorance and critical thinking that's discouraging to navigate.

Ultimately, though that's YOUR JOB. And if you don't do it, if you don't want to, then don't expect the benefits.

[1] Pericles and Stonewall examples from 48 Laws of Power Law 47 (pg 416) and Law 17 (pg 127) respectively.

Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity - Kerry Cohen (short, but interesting.)
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (thought it would focus more on decentralized criminal organizations but it doesn't. a look at how Russian culture breeds serial entrepreneurs and hustlers)
The Price of Experience: Power, Money, Image, and Murder in Los Angeles - Randall Sullivan (the title of this book is a complete injustice. TheExecutive gave it to me. it's a detailed history of the Billionaire Boys Club and Los Angeles in the 80s. It's like Less than Zero but more fucked up. on par with the Bugliosi true crime books)

Life tips from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the article they're cribbed from is great)
Obama and the Rise of Asymmetrical Competition (this is why you need to study the evolution of warfare and organizations)
Why Mergers Don't Work - James Surowiecki
Warfare, Infanticide, and Statistical Inference: A Comment on Divale and Harris(pdf) (short rebuttal to Cannibals and Kings)

In the two years that I've worked with Tucker Max not once have I been called a "mini-Tucker" or a "wannabe" or anything like that. That's not to say I don't have my collection of enemies. I do and I hear from them quite often.

Since I defined myself first (look at his masthead and mine, they're opposites) I can only be attacked on the terms that I set. The people that disagree with those terms aren't the people I'm looking to impress. Not only did I define myself first, I defined myself as I actually am--weaknesses and all. There's no illusions I'm trying to protect or any other "brands" I'm hoping to one up. There's no competition for me, I'm the only one.

Deciding to be yourself is scary. There's no one to follow, and well, what if they don't like me? But if you can make that bet, the act of actually being you is easy. All you have to do is wake up in the morning.

Define yourself. Or someone else will do it for you. And worse, you might end up listening.