Knives out. Cut Loose.

Most everyone has their own vision of retirement, financial independence, or whatever you want to call waking up and not having to rush to work. Mostly comes down to this: owning your time day after day, week in and week out. Not having to trade your autonomy in exchange for food, clothing, shelter, and Starbucks. 

So - how to use that time when it is solely one’s own? Many of my hours are spent writing these pieces, helping maintain the household (shopping for groceries, cooking, fixing stuff that breaks), and taking long walks near home or on nearby trails. These make up my ‘work’ now. But there also is more time for leisure than heretofore. For me, leisure means reading, listening to music, and enjoying the occasional movie or TV series. Here are a few things that I can recommend. 

What I am reading.

Back when I was in college, I worked summers to help pay tuition. I worked mostly in restaurants bussing or waiting tables. If I had met Anthony Bourdain in one of the restaurants where I worked, I probably wouldn’t have liked him much. I tended to disapprove of colleagues who used drugs on the job, shouted profanity at the other staff (especially me), or who threw things at servers in the kitchen. By his own admission, Bourdain did all these in his time as a line cook and executive chef before he became a famous food writer and travel show host. 

But I met him as a reader of his breakthrough memoir, Kitchen Confidential, which I read for the first time around 2001. Bourdain was a talented writer and not only is the book laugh out loud funny, it changed the way I cook perhaps more profoundly than anything else I have ever read. I am rereading the book now and reflecting on the ways in which he influenced me. Three things stand out.

Blade. Bourdain’s take on the importance of the kitchen knife inspired me to buy a better knife, learn how to sharpen it myself, and to learn to use it in such a way that I wouldn’t cut my fingers off. I am still on the journey. In the 20 years since I first read Bourdain’s book, I have  obtained a number of chef’s knives each time getting a little closer to perfection. I have bought at least five different sharpening systems before finally learning to hand sharpen my trusty bit of steel on Japanese made whetstones which range from 400 to 5000 grit and a leather strop to polish the edge. I can now achieve an edge on my kitchen knives that will push through paper with just their own weight or shave arm hair, but I still keep trying to get them sharper. A sharp knife is a joy to cook with and far safer than a dull one. If you don’t know why, you don’t cook.

Ingredients. Bourdain taught me to disdain shortcuts that diminish the quality of the end product. An example of this is garlic that is pre-chopped and sold in a jar swimming in oil. As YouTube Wünderkind Adam Ragusea and others have demonstrated, there is no substitute for fresh garlic. As Bourdain says, “You don’t want to peel garlic? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.”

Butter. Technically an ingredient but deserves a separate callout. Bourdain is hardly alone here. Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, and most everyone agree: there is little that can’t be improved with butter. And a small amount goes a long way in terms of flavor. Pitch the Smart Balance (you know who you are, mom, dad). I don’t know what that stuff is, but it’s not food. 

Find a knife you love. Learn to keep it sharp. Chop some garlic and mash it into butter. Bake it in some nice bread. Mr. Bourdain, with his particular and distinct voice, taught us that yes, life can be this simple.

I wish I’d had the chance to have him throw something at me after all. 

What I am watching. 

If you have access to Apple TV+, try the new series, Severance. This darkly humous take on “work/life balance” is part science fiction and part Orwellian dystopia. It reminds me of several places I have worked. Lumon, the fictional company at the center of the series, has developed a technology that allows workers to completely separate their work life from their personal life. Office workers voluntarily undergo a procedure called severance in which a chip is inserted into their brain. From that point on, their memories are bifurcated. While at work, they can remember nothing of their personal lives. When outside of work, they recall nothing that happened there.  The work personalities are called “innies” and the outside personalities are “outties.” Why would someone agree to have this done? Mark Scout, lead character played by Adam Scott, lost his wife in a car accident. Severance offers him the chance to completely immerse himself into his work every day and not have to think about his loss. The other characters have their own reasons. One can’t help but reflect on the place in our lives that work fills. How it can distract us from the pain of living. How it intrudes on or contributes to our happiness and how much or little it is central to our identities. 

How often have we heard that we should leave our personal lives at home when we go into work or been told the corollary, “Get your love at home.” The advent of email, text, and portable technology has meant that work and personal life have been bleeding together for decades. And pandemic life has accelerated the trend this by eliminating even the geographical line between work and home. Severance asks us to consider if there should be a psychological line and where exactly and how firm a line it should be. It also seeks to answer the question, “Hey kids, what’s for dinner?”

What I am listening to.

When I am at home or driving, I usually stream either WRUR Rochester or WXPN Philadelphia. Both are public radio stations that play a lot of interesting and diverse music. It was on WXPN that I recently heard a track from the OG Rapper MC Lyte. She was big in the 1980 and 90s. I like rap, but embarrassingly, I was not familiar with her. The song I heard was “Cha Cha Cha” from the 1989 album, Eyes on This. I downloaded the whole album on Apple Music and have been loving it. 

Here is a sample of lyrics from “I Am The Lyte.”

“I just thought that I should mention 
'89 is the Lyte year 
Now's the time to roll like a rhinoceros 
Step to Lyte, that's preposterous

I'm heavyweight, though I'm lightweight 
My looks the hook, my rhymes the bait 
And when I throw the line you proceed to take 
The goody, the treat that I hand you

That you couldn't refuse 
Damn, I cram to understand you 
Your love is to Lyte to lose.”

Check out this video of her performing at the White House on January 10, 2016 for President Barack Obama, the last commander-in-chief who didn’t need to be told to clap on the back beat. 

As different as can be is the other album I am enjoying. It’s an album of Bob Dylan covers sung by Emma Swift titled, Blonde on the Tracks. Even if you (as I do) consider Bob Dylan to be the greatest American songwriter who ever lived, it is not out of the question that you might occasionally weary of his voice, particularly in its more recent manifestations. If so, this album may be for you with its fresh and melodious takes on Dylan from classics like “Simple Twist of Fate” to the more recent, “I Contain Multitudes.” Swift’s simple interpretations allow one to focus on the genius of the songwriter without the irritation of having to defend Mr. Zimmerman’s vocal stylings to family and friends. I only wish she had recorded twice as many songs.   “Going Going Gone” is particularly lovely. For totally different take on Dylan try also, Bettye LeVette’s album, Things Have Changed. Like the Swift album, LeVette also ends with “Going Going Gone.”

It makes sense. 

“I been hangin' on threads 
I been playin' it straight 
Now, I've just got to cut loose 
Before it gets late 
So I'm going 
I'm going 
I'm gone.”

Me too.

Decrypting Crypto

I have been intrigued with cryptocurrency since I first heard about it. Even the story of how the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, came to be is shrouded in mystery and drama. Created in secret by a still unidentified developer known as Satoshi who unleashed it to roam the world without further intervention of the creator, Bitcoin, like Frankenstein’s monster, is its own beast. The way fortunes were created from nothing and lost again (sometimes literally lost in a dumpster), has all the makings of B grade movie. I am thinking of something along the lines of Bride of Tulipomania Meets Bladerunner.

Then there is the powerful underlying technology which has potential to disrupt the financial industry as we know it, by eliminating middleman institutions like credit card companies and banks. 

But like any new concept or technology, it is hard to understand and see its potential until someone else has really made it ‘work.’ Crypto doesn’t quite work yet. 

I am what is called an ‘early adopter.’ (euphamism for ‘person who wastes money on unproven technology’) I had one of the early cassette recorders in the early 1970s when many were still rocking reel to reel if they had a tape recorder at all. I talked my mom into buying the first Macintosh computer in 1985 (I couldn’t afford to buy one myself) and I had one of the first Newton MessagePads (the precursor to modern smart phones) back in 1995. I bought one of the first iPhones. Likewise the iPad. I bought the first Apple Watch sight unseen from behind the firewall in the Apple Store where I worked at the time when it went on sale at 3:00 a.m. in March of 2015. 

I buy these things less for what they can actually do, since early models often don’t do very much, but more to understand how they work and what their potential might be in the future. That is to say, I like to play with toys. 

It was that kind of curiosity that led me to buy some cryptocurrency in 2017.  I did not buy it because I thought it would be a good investment. On the contrary, I expected that it might well become worthless and that I would, or at least could, lose every penny. 

I had wanted to own some Bitcoin for a while but what pushed me over the edge was the formation of a new kind of company, the ‘crypto bank.’ Previously, owning crypto meant needing to store your crypto in digital form on some kind of device. Preferably a hard disk or thumb drive that was not on a computer connected to the internet and ideally physically secured in a fireproof safe. If someone could gain access to the code that represented your crypto, they could steal it. It all seemed a bit too fussy for me and I was pretty sure that I would misplace the drive or lose the key to the safe.  

That changed when crypto banks created the equivalent of a brokerage account that could hold ones crypto in a password secured online account. One account could hold multiple currencies the way a Charles Schwab account can hold stocks in multiple companies. Yes, that account could be hacked just as any online account can be but I figured a big company would probably be better at managing security than I. They at least seemed like they knew what they were doing. I opened an account and bought:

•  $200 of Bitcoin

• $250 of Etherium

• $250 of Litecoin

Today there are dozens or even hundreds of cryptocurrencies, but in 2017 those were the big three. I figured if I actually owned some of the currencies I would be more likely to pay attention to what was happening as the technology changed and developed and perhaps even be able to explain it to others at some point. Here is my attempt to do just that. 

Cryptocurrency uses something call blockchain technology, which works something like this. When a transaction or a transfer takes place with bitcoin, that transaction is recorded over the internet on tens of thousands of computers at the same time. That makes it almost impossible to falsify or ‘counterfeit’ a crypto transaction. In the Bitcoin model, the same process that records and verifies the transaction also ‘mines’ or creates new crypto for the computers doing the verification, thus incentivizing the owners of those computers to do the necessary work of recording the transactions. The fewer computers doing the work, the greater the chance of success each individual processor has of earning more Bitcoin. This tends to keep the level of processing high enough to sustain the system. 

Currencies other than Bitcoin may use different systems but the basic idea is the same. The fact that the transactions are recorded publicly means that it is virtually impossible to falsify them. This has a huge advantage over paper money, which is relatively easy to duplicate. Those issuing paper currencies (governments) are constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters as printing technology gets continually better and cheaper. 

Blockchain technology can substitute for the ‘trust’ institutions that we pay large sums to use. Credit cards are an example. When I walk into a Starbucks to buy a coffee, I have two choices. Pay now or pay later. There might be many reasons I might want to pay later. Maybe I don’t have any cash on me or maybe I don’t have any money until next week when I get paid. 

But Starbucks could be reluctant to accept an IOU backed by the full faith and credit of the Bank of Cherrytree. Also, it would be a huge pain to have to make the rounds on payday and settle my debts at establishments all over town. Enter the credit or debit card. This bit of plastic assures the seller that there is an institution standing behind me that will ensure they will be paid for the goods they are handing over to me. In exchange for this assurance, the seller pays a fee of around 2.5% of the transaction, which ultimately, I pay as it is factored into the cost of what I buy. Additionally, if I choose not to pay my balance in full every month (God forbid!) I pay interest on the balance of between 13-25% annualized. Needless to say it is an extremely profitable business for the credit card issuers. 

Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt this business by providing real time assurance that the money has been received for the goods at the moment they are handed over and at a very low cost per transaction. The seller knows instantly that they have been paid, and I walk out the door with coffee in hand. No cut for Mr. Visa or Ms. Mastercard.  The money saved should theoretically end up back in your pocket in the form of cheaper goods. 

But like the widely mocked Newton MessagePad, in 2022 block chain technology is not quite ready for prime time as cash. Nor does, crypto does not stand up to scrutiny as an investment into which any sensible person should invest a meaningful portion of their assets. 

Let’s tackle the “Is it money?” question first.  Well, what is money? 

According to widely accepted definitions, money has three characteristics.

1.  It serves as a medium of trade and is widely accepted in exchange for goods and services.

2. It serves as a store of value and can function as a way of holding the value of my work or productivity for the future when I need to use that value to buy things I need like food or clothes or to pay the guy who mows my lawn. 

3. Finally, money serves as a unit of account so that we can measure the relative worth disparate goods. Using units of currency, I can compare the price of a share of Apple to the earnings of the company. Or I can compare the cost of a pound of rice to a pound of potatoes, or precisely answer the question,’How many hours do I need to work to buy 100 grams of saffron?’

Major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are increasingly being accepted as a medium of exchange. Though far from universally accepted, if you are determined you can pay for some things with Bitcoin. Likewise, as there is an exchange rate for cryptocurrencies, you could value anything you wanted in whatever currency you like. 

But, the big problem with crypto as money is that it is much too volatile to serve as a store of value. Even with inflation running at 8%, the US dollar is far more stable than Bitcoin. Even the Russian ruble, as beaten down as it is now, is more stable than Bitcoin. 

Bitcoin is just too volatile to be super useful as money right now. 

But is it a good investment? First of all, I am probably the wrong person to ask this. Over the course of my investment life, almost every decision I have made to invest in an individual stock has been a poor one. Just once, I made a good decision but that must be chalked up to pure luck. So, to determine if crypto makes sense as an investment let’s turn to someone who could probably lay claim to being the greatest investor of all time, Mr. Warren Buffet the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffet says that crypto is a poor investment because it has no underlying value. It produces nothing and is only worth what someone thinks it is worth at a particular moment. 

If you invest in a farm or a factory, for example, you can evaluate the value of what those things produce. Not to say, that the value can’t change over time, it certainly will but you can evaluate that value at the time you invest and decide if it is worthwhile or not. 

When you buy crypto (or a tulip bulb) as an investment you are counting on ‘the greater fool’ theory for your profit. Crypto has no value in and of itself (even a tulip bulb at least has a nominal value). Rather, your profit depends on you finding someone who is a greater fool than yourself to buy it from you at a higher price than you paid. Sooner or later, the world may run out of fools and someone will be left holding the bag. It might be you. 

Buffet and his partner Charlie Munger have notable reputations as Bitcoin haters. Both in their 90s, it would be easy to dismiss them as cranky old men who don’t understand the 21st Century. But to be clear, the Oracle of Omaha has never said that the technology that runs Bitcoin isn’t useful, only that Bitcoin itself is not a smart place to invest any money that you aren’t prepared to lose. 

Gold, incidentally, is an asset a lot like crypto. It has very little intrinsic worth. To be sure, it has some industrial uses and is valued as jewelry and ornamentation. But it produces nothing and it doesn’t really appreciate. In real terms an ounce of gold has about the same purchasing power today as it did in ancient Rome. (Warren doesn’t buy gold either.) But at least gold has a track record of being valued by people that goes back thousands of years. Cryptocurrency and its bastard cousin the non-fungible token don’t have that history and you can’t make either into a pretty chain to wear around your throat if the price goes south. In addition, mining Bitcoin takes heaps of computer power which uses tons of energy most of which is being produced with fossil fuels. So unlike gold which doesn’t tarnish, Bitcoin is tainted with the environmental damage it is causing. (Mining gold causes huge damage to the planet also.)

So crypto doesn’t work well as money and it’s not a sensible investment. It isn’t even much use as a toy unlike my 27 year-old Newton Message Pad, which still works! So, what is it good for? 

As of now, cryptocurrency and NFTs simply serve as a proof of concept for these innovative technologies. When the World Wide Web appeared around 1994 most of us couldn’t have begun to imagine how this technology would transform the way we shop, learn, and consume news and entertainment. 

A digital currency issued by the US Government or the EU could one day solve some of the problems related to money in its current form. It could eliminate counterfeiting, dramatically reduce the cost of transactions, and allow central banks like the Federal Reserve to respond with more agility to recessions and to inflation by changing the money supply more quickly. 

The US Treasury is looking into developing a digital currency but the day when all our money is truly digital could be years away just as my MessagePad proceeded the iPhone by nearly 15 years. No doubt there will be incredible applications of this technology that my poor imagination cannot begin to fathom. 

Meanwhile, as of this writing I can, according to current prices, sell the crypto I purchased for $750 to a bigger fool for $6,859. But I have no plans to sell. I am holding on to hope that there is a still bigger fool right around the corner.

Spring Feeding

Writing this on Thursday, I am rushing to complete the annual ritual of cleaning my home, especially my kitchen, in anticipation of the Jewish holiday known as “Dry Cracker Week.” The purge includes any grain resembling barley, rye, oats, wheat and spelt. Frankly, I am not sure what a spelt is, but I can assure you there is none to be found here. Also banished are liquors that contain these, like scotch and bourbon and condiments like soy sauce (wheat) and more.

This is also the one time of year that I clean the oven and the fridge, whether they need it or not. My rule of thumb with the fridge is if something has been opened in there since last year, it should probably go, for example, the jar of horseradish I bought for last year’s Seder.

Whatever the tradition, most holidays are about the food. Sometimes it is about special foods that you eat, sometimes it’s about foods that you don’t eat. Passover tends to be more about the latter as are the Jewish dietary laws in general.

Cooking is the transformation of nature into culture. What we eat or don’t eat says more about us than what we wear, how we vote, or where we went or didn’t go to college. In some sense our food choices are tied to our deepest identity and sense of holiness. One person’s comfort food is revolting to another.

Here is a poem about a point in my life nearly 30 years ago when I decided to try following Jewish dietary laws for the first time while navigating the challenge of frequent business travel. I often found myself in sometimes awkward situations where attempting to select food that met the restrictions of the law was difficult and sometimes embarrassing. I hope you find it amusing. And I hope that whatever your tradition and whatever you are eating or not eating in the coming week it is an expression of your deepest identity that ties you to your tribe and culture. Or, at very least, I hope it is tasty and delicious.

Holy

For I the Lord am your God; you shall sanctify yourselves and be holy; for I am holy.

--Leviticus 11:44

After I started observing the dietary laws,

I travelled to a conference in Charleston where a

stately catered lunch was served in the grandeur

of the U.S. Custom House. As the waitress approached

our table, I asked if she could tell me

about the soup. “Honey,” she said, “The chef

calls that Every Creeping Thing Chowder.”

I passed and chewed thoughtfully on an oyster

cracker as my fellow diners slurped and moaned

with delight. When the main course arrived,

the waitress leaned toward me liberating a small

jade cross from where it lay nestled. It swayed

like a tire swing over a limpid Carolina creek.

“Sweetie, this bad boy right here,” she whispered

nodding toward the plate she was setting down

in front of a woman in a shiny blue dress, “while it

splitteth the hoof, it does not cheweth the cud.

It is unclean for you.” She oinked discretely in my ear

in case I had failed to catch her drift. “How about

the green beans?” I asked, knowing that

the aromatic brown sauce adorning them was almost

certainly a lost cause. “Rabbi,” she laughed,

“They’s ‘bout as trayf as it gits.” “Y’all go ahead,”

I said to my companions. “Please don’t wait.”

She returned with a plate containing a huge mound

of plain mashed potatoes. All eyes dropped away,

pretending not to stare as if I had been disfigured

in an accident or had just wrapped tefillin on my arms

and begun to daven. “Belinda, would you help yourself to

a biscuit and pass the rest down,” the blue dress

drawled. A colleague looked at my plate and then

at me. I reached for the pepper, busied myself with its

application. He was wondering how,

or perhaps, if, to ask.