Two anniversaries went past this month and I marked neither one.
Five years ago, at a battery conference, I sat down to a dinner that changed what I ate for the rest of my life. That story is a book and it is not this post. And on the eleventh I turned seventy-two, which commemorates an event I had no part in arranging and cannot take credit for. My mother did the work. I have simply kept going, which for a while there was not the obvious outcome.
Then on Wednesday I wrote here that an entire aisle of products had been engineered to hit a number. That is a hard thing to say about somebody else’s business without saying something about my own.
So here is my own. There is no graceful way to volunteer your finances to several hundred people on a Saturday morning, and I am not going to attempt one.
A few weeks ago I gave you three questions for telling careful writing apart from merely confident writing, and said to use them on this page too. There is a fourth I left out, because it is the one you cannot answer from the outside. Where does the writer’s money come from, and what have they turned down?
The first half you can check in about a minute. The second half you cannot check at all, because refusals leave no trace. Nobody can see the offers I have declined, and no amount of reading me carefully will reveal them. So I am telling you now, while nobody has asked, rather than later when somebody does.
I sell books. That is the complete list.
I am aware that this is not a thrilling disclosure. It is the whole of it.
I want to be plain about it, because the usual version is dishonest in both directions — people who perform standing outside of business, and people who are in six businesses and mention one.
I am in business. I write books, I would like you to buy them, and I am not going to act reluctant about it. A book is a long piece of work — the reading, the drafting, the outside review, the revisions nobody sees — and it is the thing I actually make. Selling my own work, at a price anyone can decide about in a second, strikes me as a clean transaction.
Here is what I will not do:
— No supplements, ingredients, powders or products of any kind, mine or anybody else’s.
— No affiliate links, referral codes or revenue share.
— No sponsorship, paid placement or brand partnership, here or anywhere I appear.
— No coaching, program, course or certification.
Those four are permanent. If any of them ever change you will read it here first, stated plainly, before you see it anywhere else.
I am aware of how that list reads three days after a post about an aisle full of exactly those things. It is supposed to. An argument about what other people sell is worth very little from someone who has not said what he sells.
About this page specifically
I spent a career building things that ship, and I think about this publication the way I would think about any product after release. The books are the release. This page is the continuous improvement — corrections when I have gotten something wrong, extensions when new evidence arrives, the reasoning carried forward as the field moves under it. That work is already implied in the purchase. You bought the argument. Maintaining the argument comes with it.
So the reasoning here is free, and it stays free. Not as generosity. An argument you have to pay for cannot be checked by the people it concerns, and the checking is the entire point of how I write.
I will be honest that I do not know what this becomes. The work is about to be more public than it has been. If the advocacy grows into something substantially larger than maintaining what I have already published — original investigation, sustained effort that is not downstream of a book anyone bought — then that is a different product, and a different product may have to support itself. I am not going to promise you it never will.
If that day ever comes I would rather know in advance than guess. Substack has a way for a reader to signal that they would support the work. It is called a pledge. It charges nothing and it changes nothing about what is on this page, so what I have effectively done is install a button that takes no money and does not work, in order to find out whether anyone presses it. If nobody does, that is a useful answer and I will have lost nothing but a small amount of dignity. If people do, I will tell you what I decide to do about it before I do it.
What I will promise is the floor. The argument itself, and every correction to it, stays where you can read it without paying. Whatever else happens, that does not move.
One word about what more public actually means, since I raised it and then left it hanging. This week I filed a comment on a federal rulemaking — the first time I have put my name on the record in a proceeding rather than only writing about one. It took an afternoon. It cost nothing. The docket stays open to anyone until the ninth of December, and I wrote about it here separately (see recent SS Note post).
I expect there will be more of that. Not a campaign you are asked to join, and not instructions — notice of where the openings are, when I find them, with enough detail to act on if you want to. What you do with the notice is entirely your own business, and I would rather it stayed that way. An argument that needs followers is usually not much of an argument.
Why any of this matters
The moment my income depends on your believing something particular about what you should eat, you lose any way of telling whether I believe it myself. That is a real loss and it is not recoverable.
That dinner cost nobody anything and sold me nothing. I have thought about it a great deal since — that the most valuable thing I have ever been given about my own health was the one thing nobody was trying to sell me.
That is the standard I am trying to hold here, and it is the only reason any of this is worth reading.
The books are the long version of the argument. The reasoning is here whether you buy one or not.