How much would an exercise pill be worth?

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Chris

I recently went to a talk at Stanford by Kenneth Walsh of the Boston University School of Medicine, in which he spoke about his research on the molecular basis of obesity-linked cardiovascular disease. He did some fascinating experiments in which they took a genetically obese mouse (which many labs have shown have all the problems of obese humans) and turned on genes that build the fast-twitch muscles that we get from weight-lifting. These mice didn’t do much exercise and they still had the genes that caused them to become obese, but as they built up muscle tissue they lost excess fatty tissue and brought their insulin sensitivity, tissue regeneration and resistance to biological stress back to normal levels. Everyone in the room was thinking, “I want what they’re having.”

This got me thinking further. Exercise has been shown to have enormous and broad benefits. It reduces diabetes and insulin resistance. It builds stronger bones. It reduces atherosclerosis. It prompts the stem cells to create new brain cells. It lifts the mood, improves memory, makes one feel more confident and resilient. It extends life. It makes one more resistant to infection. There is strong evidence that exercise reduces the risk of cancer.  I began to wonder—If someone could create a pill that you take every day and which does everything exercise can do, what would that be worth on the open market? More than $10 a pill—that’s what it costs for impotency drugs like Viagra, and that solves only one of the problems exercise addresses. Would people pay $30 a pill, which would be about $10,000 a year? Would they pay $20,000 a year? $50,000 a year? Many cancer drugs cost more and do less in terms of extending life. I don’t know exactly how much such a pill would be worth on the open market or how much I would be willing to pay for it, but I would probably be willing to devote a good chunk of my income to procuring it.  I hate to think about how much I already spend on coffee annually.

But in the end my thinking comes back to one extraordinary fact: exercise is FREE. You can pay for equipment or join a gym to make exercise more fun or efficient, but the benefits of our imaginary exercise pill obtain, right now and for no cost, by going up and down stairs or lifting household objects.

We don’t need to develop such a pill because we already have the technology. And often, whenever we try to develop pharmaceuticals that mimic some of the effects of exercise, it messes up something else. Drugs developed to fight diabetes by activating PPAR receptors that are turned on during exercise have run into trouble because they increase the risk of heart failure. Exercise is like the conductor of a thousand-piece orchestra, perfectly tuned through evolution to get all the biological instruments in our body working together. When researchers learn about one biological mechanism and fiddle with it, the effect can be like giving the trumpets sheet music for the Star Spangled Banner while the rest of the orchestra plays a Viennese waltz.

 

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The myth of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Chris

I have been doing a lot of reading recently about what motivates us to do what we do, and I am amazed that there are so many different theories still in operation out there and that a lot of it is bosch. One of the most cited is the idea that we there are two kinds of motivations: instrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic rewards are those that come from the pleasure of doing the task itself, while extrinsic rewards are things like money and social status. The idea is that intrinsic rewards will have lasting motivational value, while extrinsic rewards lose their luster and can actually undermine motivation to perform a task. This idea has been a central feature of educational theory.

I’ve come to believe Steven Reiss’s idea that the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is meaningless. He says there are 16 basic motivations or needs, and that they are all intrinsic. Whether the need is hunger, sex, exploration, creativity, social affirmation, love, power or vengeance (Reiss’s interesting sixteenth need), they all create an internal feeling of pleaure. Which should be obvious on its face–you can’t have an external pleasure, it has to be based in internal neural circuitry.

Reiss points out that a lot of the studies on intrinsic/extrinsic rewards are single trial studies that have a “head I win, tails you lose” quality. If you give a prize to Joey for painting and Joey stops painting, subscribers to this theory say that the prize has undermined his internal motivation to paint. But if Joey continues to paint, they will say that he is just doing it for the reward.

It makes much more sense to say that we have a certain number of basic needs (16 or whatever), and that some needs are more fundamental than others (a la Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). You can live many years without social contact, but only a few days without water. Money itself, which is often used as an example of an extrinsic reward, is not really a basic need, but only a means to satisfy one of many other basic needs. If the money keeps you from starving, that’s pretty fundamental, but if the money is a means to social affirmation, that may be less immediately important. But still important in the end, if we want to satisfy our needs (and we all do).

The only problem is that people sometimes have an unmet need, such as the need to feel safe or the need for love, and try to ammeliorate that desire through the positive rewards provided by filling other needs such as hunger (eating) or self-reliance (through money or power). Those may provide a temporary balm, but ultimately they fail to make us happy.

If there really is no reality to the the theory of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, then we need to make a huge shift in our thinking about education and work.

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The “Aha!” moment, memory, intelligence and humor

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Chris

Interesting news from the Weizmann Institute about how “aha” moments, when we suddenly see how something makes sense, stick in the memory better than things we study to remember. That flash of insight is worth more than an hour of learning. Why? The difference seems to be the action of the amygdala–that almond sized part of the brain that is the “fear center” but also seems to be tied to positive emotions. It is well known that emotionally laden memories, or memories of intense experiences, stick better. The amygdala seems to provide that emotion to a moment of insight.

This is in line with my longtime belief that we are wired to get pleasure from understanding, and that a very quick coming together of cognitively disparate concepts is intensely pleasurable. The faster the connection and the wider the cognitive distance between ideas (for lack of a better word) the more intense the dopamine hit. Which is the basis for humor. I feel that jokes, riddles and humor in general are a biproduct of the brain’s drive to make sense of the world, an activity that is reinforced through a strong kick of pleasure.

If this seems obvious, it should be noted that many neuroscientists, like Pinker, continue to believe in a version of Freud’s theories that humor has to come at someone else’s expense, the it has to demean someone, preferably the mighty. Even if the joke is about an object, they think that we get pleasure from the joke because we degrade our idea of the object. On the contrary, I think that we get pleasure from such jokes because our idea of the object is suddenly linked to a much larger or totally different family of objects. If I have time I will write a post with examples.

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Traditional Publishers are not dead

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Chris

This is a follow-up to my previous post, in which I made the argument that traditional publishing is dead, due to the lack of value that they add to the process and the higher cost of printing when most people switch to electronic books.

There is a way out, however. The big publishing houses are still the gateway to respectability for published authors. They are still the stamp of approval for quality writing, and are able to get published books attention from the wider media. For a time. Eventually there will be micropublishers doing just ebooks who will take over some lucrative projects that would have gone to Random House, Harper Collins, etc.

These large publisher must embrace the new form of publishing and either buy successful micropublishers or, better yet, start their own exclusively electronic publishing ventures. These in-house epublishers have to be free to poach projects from the paper publishers and offer big advances and better terms. Of course the traditional publishing divisions won’t like it. They will complain that the epublishers are luring away projects, that ebooks will no longer have complimentary paper books or will have different paperbooks, that the epublishers are generally undercutting the profits of the larger corporation.

All this will be true, but they big houses must do it anyway, because they will be preparing themselves up for the future. If Polaroid had allowed an in-house division to use corporate capital to set up a digital camera branch, that company might still be around today. Instead, an innovative and profitable company was made completely worthless by the even better instant pictures that digital cameras could produce. Kodak, who’s main profits came from photographic paper and film sales, has survived only as a shadow of its former self. The big publishers can write a different ending for their stories if they are brave enough to take the plunge into digital-only publishing.

 

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Whither Bookstores?

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Chris

Are bookstores dying? This was a subject that really started taking off last year (although has been in discussion for far longer), and the question only gets more fraught now.

Let me be clear–I love bookstores. I practically grew up in bookstores. I love browsing and sampling books, finding something new and unexpected. At the same time, in their present form, the are as dead as traditional publishing. Why do I say this? Once enough people prefer to read an ebook, the economics do not support a physical store to sell books. For one thing, the cost of printing may only be a dollar or two per book for large volume print runs, but the cost goes up when far fewer people want the physical book and the print runs go down. The resulting higher cost drives more people to the ebook. In addition, when people can make an impulse purchase and get a book in seconds at midnight at home, how often are they going to wait until the next day to drive to the bookstore, find parking and journey into the bookstore to see if their favorite book is in stock?

There is way out for bookstores, however. Bookstores can, and I hope do, survive once they realize that they are not selling physical products. They are selling an experience. They are selling being part of a community. They are selling access to curators of culture, people of like mind with great expertise.

Here is how I imagine the thriving bookstore of the future. It will have physical books for browsing, but these will not be for sale or may be for sale at a higher price for paper purists. For the most part, these physical books will be like model homes–much like the home you are going to buy, but also have extras to give you a sense of how they fit into your life. Bookstores will be more like museums, hosting engaging displays that draw readers into the world of a particular book. The author talks will continue, and in fact play a central role in the survival of the bookstore–these are intellectual communion, where readers come together to hear the sermon and pose questions, and to meet and talk with each other. The bookstore employees and speakers are our jungle guides in the overgrown, fecund hothouse that is the modern information ecosystem. They steer us to things we like, and help us connect with others of like mind.

Readers will buy ebooks, but they will do it through their bookstore (even when they order from home) because of their affinity with that group, with that community. The nice part for bookstores is that customers don’t have to ever visit the physical store. Someone in Maine may feel a great affinity for the jungle guides at Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park (where I like to go) and link their purchases to that store. Actually coming to the store might become an occasional treat, a pilgrimage.

There are many ways that bookstores have to change if they are going to survive, but they can do it–I hope they do.

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The New York Times pay scheme: it might actually work

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Chris

The New York Times has come out with one more scheme to get readers to pay for content, an effort which is only the latest in a long line of failed schemes. But this one might actually work because it is not a pay wall, exactly. Unlike The Times, which doesn’t let non-paying riff-raff past the front page (and which Clay Shirky noted changed it from a newspaper to a newsletter), the NYTimes set up a porous transition zone for readers, who will only get charged if they read over 20 articles a month, and don’t get charged for referrals from Facebook or websites like this one. This is less like a palisade wall and more like defense-in-depth.

However, the pricing is a little funny. For one thing, I think they would have been better off letting people read at least 30 articles a month. One per day has a nice ring, and the NYTimes can always tighten up later. Making money is nice, but let’s charge only your most avid readers (which includes me) until people get used to the idea. Also, they are charging $15 for web access, $20 for web and ipad access, and $35 for web, ipad and iphone access. That’s just weird. If it does not imply that ipad access is worth $5 (due to the economics of bundling) it does imply that iphone access is worth $15 (I read it on the iPhone sometimes and believe me, the NYTimes app is not that great).

But it might work. I would like to see them be even more creative in how they think about publishing and economics, but this is a start.

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Traditional Publishing is Dead

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Chris

Well, maybe not dead now, but more like Dead Man Walking dead. I say this because the sales of e-readers like the Kindle are taking off in an explosive, exponential fashion. Very shortly, faster than almost anyone is realizing now, the traditional publishing houses will be going the way of Tower Records unless they can figure out how to do things very differently. This is already starting to happen for fiction. Authors like Joe Konrath are demonstrating that you can do quite well epublishing without a large publisher behind you. I tend to edge away from the phrase “self-publishing” because it carries the taint of a work that is so amateurish that no “real” publisher will carry it. But that is changing rapidly.

What do publishers do for you? Well, they can offer a nice advance. I have done respectably in that department. And they have a sales force that sells the book to bookstores. And they work on marketing it, setting up media interviews, etc. That all seems to be a pretty sweet deal that is hard to pass up for the less sure and less prestigious route of “self-publishing” (there, I said it).

But let’s look more closely at the traditional route. Yes, advances are nice, but you tend to get 25% on signing, 25% on completion, 25% on publication and 25% when the paperback comes out. So you only really get one-quarter in advance of writing, and only a half in advance of sales. And once you complete the book, it takes about a year for the publisher to take it through the publishing process and get it out in bookstores. They really resist putting photos in the book–that adds a lot to the cost of paper printing–and you can forget color plates, which blow away the cost and expenses estimate they made when they purchased the book proposal. With direct electronic publishing, you can insert an unlimited number of graphics, web-links and other things that totally change the reading experience.

And editors don’t really edit anymore. Non-writers are often surprised by this. First-time authors are surprised by this.

Publishers have a sales staff to talk up the book to bookstores, but if everyone starts e-reading, will bookstores die faster than they are already? Will they matter at all?

The marketing, in addition, is not very good or for very long. The accountants have realized that they really only make money on one or two books per season, they just don’t know which of the 20 books on the list will be the money makers. So as soon as the books are out there and the business people see which are taking off, they can concentrate on those and forget the others.

Now let’s look at the economics for authors. First point goes to the trad pubs: that advance is nice. (Although often I’ve spent a year writing the proposal.) But the whole thing gets spread out over at least three years (four, if you include the proposal writing year). Self pubs can start earning money as soon as you put it out. Here’s the clincher: a book may cost $27, of which the author earns $2-3, less if the books is sold (as they often are) at a steep discount to volume buyers or on the paperback or electronic edition. But put your own book out in Kindle, say for $10 (or $5 or even $1 if you want to go for volume) and you get 70% of that. You do or pay for your own layout and marketing, but that is not bad. Those numbers from Joe Konrath show that you can make a decent living that way. For now, these successes are mostly in fiction. But non-fiction will follow.

In another post I will talk about how trad pubs and bookstores can survive, and how I see the publishing ecosystem changing.

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Fountain of Youth

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Chris

I just went to a talk by Amy Wagers, who is a researcher at Harvard now but used to be at Stanford. She talked about work that she did with Stanford’s Tom Rando, putting young and old mice together so that they share blood circulation. It turns out that when old mice are exposed to young blood their aging stem cells in the muscle and brain start acting young again. They heal quicker and create more new cells. There seems to be some soluble factor in the blood that causes this, and researchers are now looking for that factor or factors.

What is really interesting is that they have found some gene candidates, and these genes are connected to the pathways that extend life in calorie restricted animals.

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In the Bloginning …

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Chris

Very late to the game, I am starting a blog. Although I have often felt that I don’t have the time to write in a blog, in addition to all the other writing I do, I have started to see how writing here can be complementary to my other writing. I have also been impressed by the social network and the widespread conversation that blogs can generate. Most of all, it’s a chance to celebrate the people, things and ideas that attract my emotional energy and to share that with others.

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