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On Wisdom, Knowledge, Cell Phones, & Unchaining The Learning Beastie Within You

This is the last and longest video in the course, and I urge you to watch it through to the end, because there are some surprises:

Do you know what Google ethicists call cell phones? 

Tiny slot machines.

You know why?

Because cell phones are hard-to-put-down.

I recently heard a report — and I believe this — that the average person (this is average, mind you) sends 150 text messages a day and has multiple social-media accounts for the same platform on several different social-media platforms: i.e. two Instagrams, three Tumblrs, two Twitters, and so on — and that the amount of time spent on phones and social media is roughly proportionate to how depressed people rate themselves, and how unhappy they are in their jobs and in their romantic lives.

They also report a progressively harder time with face-to-face communication and an increase in their alcohol and drug use.

I personally know a number of people, male and female alike, who basically blog their lives and bare their souls on Instagram and Tumblr, and whose sun rises and sets with how many likes and reblogs they get. Many of these people won’t reply to important messages and emails because they are, as they will often be the first to tell you, chronically depressed — and yet they are absolutely glued to their phones and their social media accounts. I myself use social media, almost exclusively for marketing purposes, and I must consciously and carefully limit myself to no more than 20 minutes a day, and I make good use of the “schedule post” function.

Why, then, do people spend so much time on phones and social media if it’s making them depressed? Because each text message or LIKE sends a jolt of dopamine into the system, but it’s a short-term pleasure that results in long-term unhappiness.

Books, upon the other hand, even electronic books, have the opposite effect…

Giddy-up.


And support literacy by getting lit:

Click-click





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Power Learner: How You Can Read 200 Books A Year

This is a brand-new course I’m teaching — name your price if you pre-enroll.


Name Your Price!

Reading is a dying art.

And yet even as it dies, even as more and more people stop reading in favor of scanning, skimming, reblogging, LIKING, and so forth, it’s never been more important to become a real reader — if, that is, you want to live the life you’ve always imagined for yourself.

Reading promotes thought.

It is for this reason one of the key secrets of the stratospherically smart and successful — meaning:

All smart and successful people, almost without exception, are prodigious readers.

The internet, for all its mind-spinning benefits and advantages, has one significant disadvantage:

It’s threatened to turn each and every one of us into scanners, meme-hunters, and startling-photograph-miners — at the expense of real reading. We take in a great deal — more than ever before in world history — but we skim most of that which we take in.

The ancient Greeks had a word for people who read a lot but who do not read well: sophomores.

In this sense — the literal sense — the world is almost certainly more sophomoric than it’s ever been before, simply because of the sheer magnitude of data we have at our fingertips.

Two Things that can Instantly Speed Up Your Reading




Name Your Price!





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The Godless Constitution

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There is, among rightwingers predominantly, though not exclusively, a rather persistent misconception that the United States is at its roots a religious nation.

This is demonstrably false, and rather easy to verify, as we shall see in a moment, but first let us note that the subject is significant (and becoming more so) not because of any particular issue I or anyone else may have with religion in the capacity of religion, but rather because the true founding premise of this country cannot survive upon a religious base.

That founding premise is the principle of individual rights.

The United States, as we’ve noted before (and can never note enough), is the only country in the history of the world founded explicitly upon individual rights.

It was the principle of individual rights — the sheer strength of it — that corrected the contradictions and the great injustices that were also once a part of the United States.

It was the principle of individual rights that successfully overthrew the barbaric institution of slavery:

It was the principle of individual rights that brought this country to civil war, and it was the principle of individual rights that won out.

Among many other things, individual rights mean that if you choose to worship a Christian God, you are free to do so.

It means that if you choose to worship a Pagan God, you are free to do so.

It means that if you choose to worship no God at all, you are free to do so.

In this country, you are free to do anything you wish, provided you do not infringe upon the equal rights of any other person.

Your rights stop where another’s begin. In this way, rights are compossible — i.e. they do not and cannot conflict.

Such is the nature of individual rights.

Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions.

One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?

Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights: if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?

Answer: no one — because rights are inalienable in the literal sense: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked or transferred.

The reason rights cannot survive a religious grounding is that religion, by definition, is built upon faith, whereas rights are the exact opposite: they are demonstrably rooted in the human quiddity — namely, the faculty of volition, moral agency, and human individuation.

From a philosophical perspective, a religious defense of rights is absurdly unequipped to withstand the onslaught of secular attacks, as recent history has also proven, and indeed it is this as much as anything else that has eroded the principle of rights down to virtual non-existence:

The most prominent defenders of rights have sought to defend rights from a religious rather than philosophic premise, and rights have suffered immeasurably from it.

So much so, in fact, that the concept of individual rights is understood by only the slimmest minority of people, and that is why the subject of rights has all but vanished from political discourse today.

Religion must be separated from rights if rights are to survive.

It is a fact that neither the word “God” nor the word “Christ” appears anywhere in the United States Constitution. When asked why, Alexander Hamilton replied: “We forgot.”

The Jeffersonian “wall of separation” was actually originated by a Baptist minister named Roger Williams, who fought mightily to remove religion from government and vice-versa. Thomas Jefferson fully sanctioned this idea — all rightwing propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding — when, in 1801, he wrote the following in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Church:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all of his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Please note the First Amendment echoes there. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

And Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust of the United States.”

Note also in Jefferson’s native state of Virginia, the 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which he and his friend James Madison helped draft, read, in part:

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions of belief….”

John Adams: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” (Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli).

James Madison: “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

James Madison: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise…. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution” (Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments).

In a letter from 1819, James Madison wrote that “the number, the industry and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church and state.”

In an undated essay, Madison also wrote the following: “Strongly guarded is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States.”

Benjamin Franklin: “My parents had given me betimes religious impressions, and I received from my infancy a pious education in the principles of Calvinism. But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt Revelation itself” (p. 66 of Ben Franklin’s autobiography).

Thomas Paine: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all” (The Age of Reason, p. 89).

Thomas Paine: “All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit…. The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this think called revelation, or revealed religion…. What is it the Bible teaches us? Rapine, cruelty, and murder…. Loving of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has beside no meaning. Those who preach the doctrine of loving their enemies are in general prosecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches” (The Age of Reason).

George Washington: “I oppose the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution…. [Every American should] worship according to the dictates of his own heart.”

In 1783, George Washington rejoiced that in this country “the light of truth and reason had triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition.”

John Adams: “Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it’” (Letter to Charles Cushing, October 19, 1756).

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams wrote: “I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”

Also from John Adams: “The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity…. Thirteen governments [referring to the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without pretence [sic] of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”

Reverend Jedidiah Champion, closing his Sunday service with a prayer in 1797, said this: “O, Lord: wilt Thou bestow upon the Vice President [Thomas Jefferson] a double portion of They grace, for Thou knowest he needs it.”

Reverend Timothy Dwight, 1798, said: “Why should the religious support the philosophers, the atheists, like Thomas Jefferson?”

Reverend William Linn opposed Thomas Jefferson in print for “his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or in other words his rejection of the Christian Religion …”

“And if,” continues the God-fearing Reverend, “this opposer of Christianity [were to become President it would] destroy religion, introduce immorality and loosen all the bonds of society.”

New York clergyman, Dr. John Mason publicly referred to Thomas Jefferson as “a confirmed infidel and lacks so much as a decent respect for the faith and worship of Christians.”

New England Palladium (a popular newspaper): “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some infamous prostitute, under the title of Reason, will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to worship of the Most High.”

The Christian Federalist: “Can serious and reflecting men look about them and doubt that if Jefferson is elected president, those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin — which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence — defend our property from plunder and devastation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will not be trampled upon and exploded?”

Thomas Jefferson was repeatedly called by clergymen “a howling atheist,” and even accused of “libel against Christ.”

Ask yourself: if he was devoutly religious, why was he slandered so? And why did he edit out all the miracles in his copy of the New Testament?

Thomas Jefferson: “An amendment was proposed by inserting the words ‘Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’ but was rejected by a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and the Infidel of every denomination” (From Thomas Jefferson’s biography; please mark well those last words: “Infidel” meant “unbeliever,” which in turn meant “atheist”).

Thomas Jefferson: “Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions…. The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no harm for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (Notes on the State of Virginia).

Thomas Jefferson: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classes with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter” (From the margins of Jefferson’s Bible).

Thomas Jefferson: “They [the clergy who denounced him] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition of their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (i.e. any faith forced upon us).

Thomas Jefferson: “I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity [has become] the most perverted system that ever shone on man. Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter …”

Thomas Jefferson giving advice to his nephew: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than the blindfolded fear…. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue on the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Our rights have no dependence on religious opinions.”

Faith and force are the antithesis of reason and rights.

Rights do not depend upon religion or God or gods but just the opposite: rights are an inherent part of the human faculty of rationality.

Rights are how we survive on this earth, and they exist without any reference whatsoever to a religious ideology.

Until that principle is fully grasped, rights are every bit as endangered by conservatives as they are by liberals — and that’s saying a lot.

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The Great Electrifier: Nuclear Energy & the Myth of Nuclear Waste



There is no such thing as nuclear waste — and that’s just one of the many beautiful things about nuclear energy.

A nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste.

Quoting Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France’s main nuclear facility, in an interview he gave with William Tucker, author of an excellent book called Terrestrial Energy:

Pierre Guelfe: When the depleted fuel rods are removed, the reactors are shipped to La Hague for reprocessing. They let it cool down for a few years and then remove the uranium and plutonium. They ship the plutonium here. We take it and mix it with another stream of material, which is the scrap that is left over from uranium enrichment. The U235 content of this is very low … U235 is the fissionable isotope. But the plutonium is much more fissionable than the depleted uranium. So when we mix them together, you get a fuel that is very close to enriched uranium. It’s called ‘Mixed Oxide Fuel’(MOX). We have 20 reactors here in France running on MOX and there are ten more in Germany and two in Switzerland. So we’re pure plutonium, and we scrap uranium together. We use everything. We don’t leave any waste.

William Tucker: I’ve read this several times but I want to make absolutely sure: The plutonium that comes out of a commercial reactor, that you separate from the fuel rod, that cannot be used to make a bomb, right?

Pierre Guelfe: That’s right. You have four plutonium isotopes: Pu239, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242. Of the four, only Pu239 can sustain a chain reaction. The others are contaminants. The PU241 is too highly radioactive. It fissiles too fast so you can’t control it to make a bomb. But you can use all of them to sustain fission in a MOX reactor (source).

And yet on the basis of some colossal misinformation, the United States now has fifty thousand tons of nuclear “waste,” because our government won’t allow nuclear plants to reuse it.

The stated policy of the Department of Energy (DOE) is “not to reprocess” a perfectly reusable by-product — and all for absolutely no good reason.

That, as I discuss in Chapter 12 of my book, is why Yucca Mountain is unnecessarily, and at great cost, being built in southwestern Nevada: to store a nuclear “waste” that could instead be simply and efficiently reused.

Nuclear “waste,” incidentally, is also used for medical isotopes. In fact, over 40 percent of medicine now is nuclear medicine. Currently, we must import all our nuclear isotopes because we’re not allowed to use any of our own.

This is not only profligate.

It’s a kind of lunacy.



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Valedictorian Speech That Will Change Your Life: To the Graduating Class of 2017

Young women and men of the graduating class of 2017:



You are the magic.

You are the one.

You are the magic and the fun.

You are meant to be happy.

You are meant to enjoy your life, before it’s done.

So please, for goodness sake, have fun.

You are a tightly packed pod of living potential. Didn’t you know? You’re waiting to EXPLODE. Your will to believe this about yourself is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

Now, then, at last, your real education begins.

Now, at last, comes the process of learning that, one hopes, never ends.

You unfortunately have before you a great many things to unlearn — many things of great concern:

There are dogmas, both secular and non, green, blue, and red, that you will have to shed: false ideas, both secular and non, that school has inculcated into your head.

And yet, and yet …

You possess a powerful weapon — the greatest one in your entire arsenal — and that is your brain.

Think for yourself.

Your thoughts are things, and as such your thoughts are something you can train.

Cultivate thought. Cultivate your living potential. Cultivate your mind. Seek — and if you seek, you will, I promise, find.

I say again: Cultivate deliberate thought.

It is the most precious thing you’ve got.

Human excellence is a thing you develop — as talent is largely developed and learned:

Neither are inborn but earned.

The real secret of discipline is the insight that your values and habits are what you choose them to be.

Did you hear that?

Did you hear me?

Embrace human progress. Embrace technology, whether nano or nuclear, super-elastic, or the prosthetic limbs and artificial hearts and other organs that come from plastic.

Technology has gotten us to this point. Only technology can get us beyond.

The ingenuity of the human mind is limitless. Your mind is your magic wand.

And for enjoying the fruits of your labor and for enjoying the pleasure of technology, you owe no one — and I mean no one — any apology. None whatsoever.

Progress is good. Retrogression is not. Therefore I say: progress forever. For having fun, you owe no apology whatsoever.

Rejoice, oh, you beautiful young human beings, rejoice in your youth — revel in your time — and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, and walk in the way of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes. But know that there will come a time, as there comes a time for every one of us, when the beauty and power of your youth fades, and you’re left with one thing: it is the most important thing, the most powerful thing you can find:

Your mind.

Your vision of who and what you want to be is among the most very valuable of assets you have. Cultivate, therefore, that vision.

That is your mission. Come at it like a head on collision.

You will no doubt have already been told — and you will, I’m afraid, be told many times more — that genius cannot be taught or learned, that greatness comes from some rarified source: a precious DNA strand.

But I’m hear to say that the diametric opposite is true:

Greatness comes from within — it comes from within you — just as true originality comes from within you too.

Genius in fact can only come from within. It’s in what you think, but also, as important, in what you do.

Yes, you are simultaneously the source and the receiving force.

Because it’s not how talented or how smart you are.

It’s how deep down your desire goes, how high you’re willing to push, how far.

This is why ambition and persistence are the greatest predictors of success.

For this reason you and you alone are … what? Yes:

You are the magic.

You are the one.

You are the magic and the fun.

Your life is like a precious toy. It is meant to be something you enjoy.

Your passions are primarily willed: you mustn’t ever think of passions as something you either have, or not. If you’re interested in something — even if it’s at first only a moderate interest — and if you then pursue that interest, your passion for that thing develops as your understanding of it deepens.

The more time you spend with something, the more your feelings for it grow.

The more your feelings for it grow, the more about that thing you come to know.

Jobs are healthy. Work is good. Work is good for the soul. Nothing more than work is fundamentally necessary for the production of abundance and the good things that make your life pleasurable. Be happy in your work.

Don’t not be cruel. Don’t not be a jerk.

And remember: you are the magic. You are the one.

Your life is meant to be fun.

Your life is your values.

Your values are the things you most enjoy.

The secret key to the lock of life is nothing more — or less — than developing a durable purpose around which to arrange all the other things in your life, and against which all other things you measure and weigh.

This is also what I’ve come to say. This is what I wish to convey:

A central purpose is the unifying factor that molds together the human clay and integrates all the other factors in your life, year-to-year, month-to-month, day-to-day. So that to be in control of your own life, you must build this fundamental purpose, and, once built, you must not let it go.

But why is this so?

Because purpose forms the base and at the same time creates a kind of pyramid, the stones of which are your other desires, arranged in order of importance, which spares you any number of internal clashes and strife.

This great pyramid is your life.

The central purpose that forms its base allows you to enjoy your existence more abundantly, and on the widest conceivable scale.

Young women and men of the graduating class of 2017: the circuit of the seasons is to bud, to blossom, and to die, and no matter what any one you may become, or why — no matter how good or bad or ugly or beautiful or cruel — in the spring of life, you’ve all envisioned a beautiful and brilliant and dazzling future that sits waiting for you — and I’ve come to tell you that that vision, young women and men, is the correct vision:

It is accurate and incontrovertibly true — as true in 2017 as in any culture or era or time or season.

And the only real rebel is the dog who tirelessly sniffs out reason.



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Are You Fascinating?

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Well, are you, punk?

Or are you boring as hell?

How, furthermore, can you tell?

How can you tell if you’re an inveterate bore, or if you’re just in a kind of long-term funk?

Much of what we hear about commanding attention and the power to fascinate is theoretical and abstract, a sort of psychological jargon: fascination triggers, hotspots, personality tests and the like.

Let us, for once, get concrete.

Here are 7 differences between the fascinating person and the boring piece of meat:

1. Fascinating people have many activities they enjoy and become good at, which gives them a greater wealth of material to mine.

Boring people have one or perhaps two.

Diversify, therefore, your activity portfolio.

2. Fascinating people communicate what most others can’t — or communicate it in ways most others don’t.

Words, contrary to popular belief, are not primarily for communicating — which is their secondary function. Their primary function is for clarity of thought.

Before one can communicate clearly, one must have something to communicate clearly.

Language brings about this process.

The desire for clarity presupposes the desire to be understood, and this is why the ability to communicate clearly — in writing or in speech — is one of the surest signs of intelligence there is.

And intelligence, as you know, is always fascinating.

3. Fascinating people aren’t afraid to try new things — which means:

They’re not only willing to break out of their comfort zone but also motivated to do so. Why?

Because they know that comfort breeds complacency.

Interesting people, understand, are, to one degree or another, adventurous. They like to get out and explore.

Life is largely an adventure — provided you treat it as such.

4. Fascinating people are au courant.

They keep up-to-date on at least some news.

Which is why as a bartender you often find yourself charmed by those customers who have a certain knowledge of pop culture: because this, too, shows that an effort is being made to stay informed.

Thus:

5. Fascinating people are knowledgable.

Boring people are poorly informed — and so they’re unable to hold up their end of the conversation.

Being poorly informed, let it be noted, is entirely within each person’s control.

The better you’re informed, the more you have to talk about.

The more you have to talk about, the more fascinating you are.

Which is not to imply that fascinating people blast through one conversational subject after another.

It means, rather, that the deeper down your knowledge goes, the greater your conversational pow-uh.

6. Fascinating people don’t conform

Independent thinking is non-conformity.

Conformity is about as boring and banal as it gets.

Fascinating people have the confidence to think for themselves.

Boring people do not.

Fascinating people like variety.

Boring people prefer the same old.

Conformity is the same old.

It is also the opposite of courage. It takes courage to respond to non-thought — which is to say, conformity — as it takes courage to break away from the pack.

It takes courage to think for oneself.

If you’re one of those rare courageous people, the world will be riveted by you.

7. Fascinating people are driven and disciplined.

Boring people are passive.

Discipline is habit, and habit is a choice.

This is precisely why no one is fated to be boring — not even close.

How, then, does one go about expunging inveterate vapidity?

Studies show that you can bore people in two fundamental ways: both in what you say and in how you say it.

Being boring, in other words, can be a matter of style or a matter of subject. Combine those two things into one and it’s downright deadly.

The qualities that make someone fascinating, or beguiling, or hypnotizing, or mesmerizing are — and this is important — a side-effect. They are a by-product: specifically, a by-product of a life lived well, a life lived interestingly.

The real insight into the power of fascination is this:

The fascinating person is not living her life to be fascinating: she’s living her life, rather, in a way that cultivates her living potential, and that’s why age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.

Make no mistake, there are in the universe an infinite variety of fascinating things upon which you may fix your attention.

To be fascinating, therefore, you must come to recognize life as the adventure it is, and you must then proceed accordingly.

You must crave new experiences and desire a deeper understanding of the world.

Decide what you want and figure out how to get it.

Boring people don’t have big dreams. They actually believe it when they’re told, as we all are at one time or another, that they probably can’t do it.

Fascinating people, upon the other hand, believe no such thing.

Fascinating people shoot for the stars — and often reach them. If they don’t reach them, they become incontrovertibly more fascinating just in their singleminded striving.

Fascinating people picture their lives as they want their lives to be, and then they focus their energy on shaping their lives in that way.

Don’t let others decide your future for you. Don’t give people that kind of control over you. This is not only NOT fascinating: it’s fatal.

Be the master of your own fate. Be the captain of your own soul.

Because, in the final analysis, fascinating people are the shapers of their own soul.

And that is why they seem to others not fractured but whole.




Excerpted from my forthcoming book Whiskey Wisdom: A Bartender’s Guide to Living Ravenously


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Whiskey Wisdom: How to be the Smartest Person in the Bar

(The following is excerpted from Whiskey Wisdom: A Bartender’s Guide to Living Ravenously)


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You can spot her from a mile away, the smartest person in the bar — or, if not quite from a mile away, nonetheless from very far.

She doesn’t necessarily think of herself as smart.

Still, her brain is carefully crafted — self-crafted and stylized — like a work of art.

Her eyes are alert and bright and lively. They twinkle.

She’s relaxed and polite, with a well-modulated voice that speaks to you in the appropriate tone.

Her smile glows like expensive stone.

You do not quickly forget that smile.

She walks purposefully, and yet not aggressively, or with an overbearing style.

She has a sense of humor.

You can see that she knows there’s a kind of dignity in loneliness. She doesn’t go out of the way to seek friends or groups or any kind of crowd.

In general she prefers quiet to loud.

She gives and receives compliments gracefully, can be strong and assertive, quick to stick up for herself, but she can also speak of her shortcomings and accomplishments with an equal ease which you envy.

When communication or clarification is called for, she’s never dismissive or inexplicably silent — never, of course, in any way aggressive or violent.

What’s her trick?

What’s the secret?

The secret is this:

First, develop a total disregard for where you think your abilities end.

You must aim beyond what you believe you’re capable of.

Do things you think you’re not able to do.

Nothing is impossible, in this regard. The will to believe is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

The discipline to follow through is next. It is also the most difficult.

Why?

Why most difficult?

Because it requires hour-after-hour, day-after-day practice.

It requires diligence.

Second — unless you’re in a technical discipline like medicine or mechanical engineering — drop out of college immediately.

College stunts the mind.

It’s a breeding ground of mindlessness and unoriginality, and an exercise in non-thought. It’s a snake-infested swamp of dogma — and, like all dogma, it will corrupt you and scar your soul irreparably.

College is conformity.

The cost of conformity is colossal.

Individuality, on the other hand, is a prerequisite of genius.

Genius is the cultivation of your living potential.

The deeper your cultivation, the deeper your genius.

Cultivate, therefore, a purpose around which you can construct your life.

Passion is largely willed: the more you do something, the deeper your understanding of it grows, so that after time your passion for that thing develops and spreads like a gorgeous soft surge of water-ripples.

Third, whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy might.

What, after all, does it mean to be smart?

It means to self-stylize your brain, like a work of art.

It means to be intelligent — like you.

Intelligence is your mental capacity to deal with a wide range of thoughts and ideas.

That’s why it never mattered to you when you were voted least likely to succeed — why it never fazed you when they called you a misfit, a malcontent, alienate, disaffiliate, deviant, recalcitrant. And it’s why your natural-born predilections and proclivities and predispositions are and always have been irrelevant: because intelligence is an acquired skill.

It must be developed by each person’s own desire and activated by each person’s will.

It must be habituated and automated by each person’s own mind.

Which is why it’s quite rare and beautiful, and rather difficult to find.

This, incidentally, is true for both children and adults: the cultivation of intelligence requires effort — or, to put the same point in a slightly different way: thinking is an act of choice.

Thought requires work.

Whereas to be stoopid is relatively simple: all you have to do, in essence, is do nothing. If you do nothing, stoopid will naturally occur.

Being smart, however, requires a different sort of action.

It’s not passive.

On the contrary, thinking is an entirely active process the undertaking of which is, when you think about it, massive.

She’s intelligent, yes, but in a highly unorthodox way, they say, hard to pinpoint why: bookish but not book-smart, introspective, certainly, and everything she does — yes, everything — she does with all her heart.


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Moonraker, Mountain Dew, Moonshine, or White Lightning?

This article first appeared in the Coloradoan newspaper.

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If it shed any light on the subject at all — and it doesn’t remotely — I might be tempted to elaborate on the actual term “moonshine,” and where it originated: i.e. rural England (circa 1780), when country smugglers hid illicit barrels of French brandy in shallow ponds, to avoid the taxman, but were discovered one fated summer night, when the moon shone down so brightly on the surface of the pond that it looked as if a wheel of cheese were floating there, and so these bootleggers told the taxmen that they were, in fact, raking the water not for contraband but for a creamy piece of that cheese. This, however, is all rumor and rodomontade, easily sliced with an investigative blade.

It is in any case almost universally agreed that the term “moonshine” comes from the term “moonraker,” which in turn comes from this legend.

It is also generally agreed that moonshine — or white-lightning, if you prefer, or white-whiskey, or mountain dew — entered America in the early 1800’s, when Scots-Irish immigrants, who back home often made their whiskey without aging it, began settling the Appalachian region of America.

Yet the question remains: if many vodkas are essentially white whiskies, and if many whiskies made of corn mash are not moonshine, what, in the final analysis, is the distinguishing characteristic of moonshine?

The answer, it turns out, is this: illegality.

Moonshine, notorious for its high proof — frequently hovering around 190 (yowza!) — is any distilled spirit concocted in an unlicensed still.

That includes so-called splo, or bathtub gin, or the harrowing hooch concocted by your next of kin.





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A Green Fairy Named Absinthe

This article first appeared in the Coloradoan newspaper, which took a tomahawk to it and ruined it.


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You won’t like absinthe if you don’t like black licorice.

Absinthe — mint-green star in a constellation of multicolored bottles, over-proofed, over-hyped, overrated, mythologized, mystified and then demystified — won’t, all reports to the contrary notwithstanding, make you hallucinate.

It’s the sweet fennel and green anise that give absinthe its unmistakable licorice flavor.

In answer to your next question, the ban was lifted nearly a decade ago.

Was absinthe invented by hipsters for hipsters?

No. But you’ll be excused for thinking so.

The word itself comes from one of the many botanicals of which it’s composed: Artemisia Absinthium, which means “grand wormwood” — an herbaceous perennial with slender, silvery-green leaves that’s been used medicinally since at least 1500 BC, beginning with the Ancient Egyptians.

The standard story of absinthe’s modern-day manifestation is that it was concocted (circa 1792) by Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor who practiced in Switzerland, and who later passed his recipe along to certain sisters named Henriod.

In fact, though, some say that Madame Henriod is the actual originator of absinthe: a confection she made from plants gathered in the Swiss mountains around her home — this according to one Jessyka Birchard, brand director of Pernod Absinthe. This elixir, says Birchard, was later tinkered with by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, who marketed it as medicinal.

An ambitious entrepreneur called Major Dubied came across the absinthe recipe and, after seeing the potential to brand it as a kind of nostrum with vast medicinal properties, partnered with his son-in-law, Henri-Louis Pernod, to set up the first absinthe distillery. This was in Switzerland, in 1797.

Thus was born absinthe as we know it today.

The mint-green gem of absinthe deep in the glass, where you guzzle perdition and feel the thunder of god’s judgement that roasts the naked soul.

Paul Verlaine described it as.