In Defense of Pranksters.

This week, a prank my company created has been getting lots of press attention, prompting a deluge of critiques and celebrations on the art of pranking.  Did it go too far, or not far enough?  Was it funny, or a sick joke?  And of course, how would you react if it happened to you?!

I’m a big fan of a good prank and have given this topic more thought than most. I don’t think we do enough practical jokes in the world, and this blog will share some of my thoughts.

Let’s clarify what pranking really boils down to – it’s playing a joke on someone.  It’s fun.  But it is distinctly a joke on that person, not a joke with that person.  When we were children, we all pranked each other; often that involved hiding and jumping out to scare each other.  Pranking, or punk!ing, as Ashton calls it, has innocent origins.  However, most of us were also victims or instigators in some fairly malicious teasing – children can be cruel.  So what separates a prank from humiliation?

There are four main criteria.  Firstly, the actual act itself – a prank is a situation anyone would find awkward; it’s not a personal attack.  For instance, we knew in this prank that Alex had a slight fear of flying.  So Plan A was to charter a plane, attach some smoke canisters to the outside of the engines, like at air shows, and fake a double engine failure while the pilot dropped a few thousand feet.  We knew it’d be easy to film Alex’s terror, while he was actually completely safe.  But then we realized that as it’s a minor fear of Alex’s, it was too personal, and might have had the unintended consequence of sabotaging all future airborne travel for the poor guy!

The second is that a good prank must get the ‘pranked’ to play along.   Information should be exposed during the event from which, really, you ought to deduce it’s a prank.  But you don’t… and down deep, you’re playing along.  When Alex, Fred and Leo were arrested in LA, it was 7am.   They had slept for 2 hours after a big night. The arresting officers mentioned vague allegations from 4am the previous night, and claimed the officers had already reviewed surveillance tapes, identified the accused as the likely suspects, and were here to arrest them.  Really?  How would they know the accused names?  Or which hotel they were staying at?  What about warrants?  And however they did this, they worked it out in 3 hours?  Even Jason Bourne isn’t hunted down so quickly.

A good prank also needs to reflect the intended victim’s relationship to risk.  The fact is that Alex Tulloch is an alpha male.  He’s charismatic, confident and going places.  He would have laughed off a boring prank and, here’s the kicker, he nearly laughed off ours.  On several occasions he says to the police, is this a prank?  Somewhere deep inside, he knew this was too crazy to be real.  In truth, I will admit it was too long, but only by about 5 minutes.  Because 10 minutes before we end the prank, Alex finally looks at the policeman and says, “This is really happening…”  And it is only at this moment the prank has even worked.  It is only at this moment we have provided him with that gasping, roller-coaster moment of genuine fear (while actually being completely safe), that pumping of adrenaline, that primal edge of life stuff that actually helps us appreciate living - as close to the 'elixir of life' we're ever going to find.

This is why I can’t actually ask you how you would react to this prank.  Because I didn’t play this prank on you, and if I did play a prank on you, I’d think of a different one!

Finally, a good prank has to come from a place of love.  It is a gift of the most shocking proportions.  Think about it.  When Alex, Leo and Fred realize it was a prank, they enjoy a flash of euphoria - I’ll wager one of the greatest of their lives.  Pranking requires forethought, planning and usually some type of expense.  How many times have you bought someone you love a gift with less than 5 minutes’ effort?  We all have.  And we all know it didn’t show our love and hoped the recipient didn’t notice.  But you can’t pull off a decent prank with 5 minutes’ effort.  Throughout the planning of this prank, one thing that was completely obvious was the love Ben has for his buddy.  He wanted to treat him to an experience of a lifetime, to produce the best prank in the history of pranks.

And I think we did.  

Thoughts about Fitness. Part 3.

During the darkest years of the Great Depression, from 1929 - 1933, Americans living in the midwest were subjected to a famine of nearly biblical proportions.  It was the great 'dust bowl', with crops failing over huge swathes of landscape.  It was also one of the few times in history where such an intense famine hit a first world country with good doctors and records.  Hence, we know something surprising about it.  During a period of mass starvation, where people seemed to struggle to exist, life expectancy actually increased.  And not just a little - by 6 years.  

A couple of years ago, I lost a bunch of weight (about 50 pounds in 4 months), and wrote a couple of blogs about both the ideas and practices that helped me do this.  In the 2nd of those blogs, I made the following comment:

"It turns out, hunger can be incredibly good for you.  Various research suggests it acts as a natural anti-depressant, increases alertness, and can be good for learning."

I have a confession to make.  I was exaggerating a bit.  I had found a couple of studies online, but not that much.  Mostly I had felt the benefits of hunger, so I blogged about them.  Since then, I've come across some really interesting stories, and hard science, to take my understanding a lot further.  I had speculated that hunger could be good for you, and suggested that, from an evolutionary perspective, we would have benefitted "if hunger helped improve our vision and hearing", but even my wildly unscientific blog did not suggest that hunger could make you live longer.  Could there be a link between the famine of the 1930s Great Depression and increased life expectancy?

A recent BBC Horizon programme looked into this very question.  According to Professor Valter Longo at the University of Southern California, a clue lies in a group of South American people most of us would call midgets.  They actually suffer from a rare condition, but the clue lies not in their height, but how they die.  Or rather, how they don't die. They don't die from cancer, diabetes or cardiovascular disease.  Despite the fact that they smoke and drink and live just as unhealthily as the rest of us, they don't die from the 'big three'.

As it turns out, the condition they have means they have very low production of Insulin-like growth hormone 1 (IGF1).  The fascinating part is what IGF1 does in all of us, not just the midgets.  When we have a normal amount of IGF1, our body is in drive mode, and produces lots of new cells to cope with the demands of every day living.  However, with low levels of IGF1 our body stops producing new cells and - this is the fascinating bit - starts repairing the cells we already have.  With low IGF1, DNA damage is more likely to get fixed.  The theory goes in people with low IGF1, like our short South American friends, their cells are constantly repairing themselves which prevents certain diseases from ever developing. 

I was blessed with a gene pool filled with cancer, alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease.  Every single day my parents, in their early 70s, break a new family record for longevity.  If there's a way to get my cells to repair one another, I probably need it.  So what affects IGF1, and can I reduce my IGF1 production?

As you probably deduced, food plays a big part.  The food which seems to accelerate IGF1 production the most is protein.  So that's meat, my favourite food group.  Great.  But it turns out that all food stimulates IGF1 production, so to get really low levels of IGF1, the BBC programme recommends fasting.  So all my other favourite food groups.  Wonderful.

I've never fasted from food before.  My usual excuse is that I'm too busy, but in truth, I've never seen the point.  If fasting actually helps my body repair itself... I can see a point.  The typical 65-year old in America today takes 8 drugs a day.  Modern medicine is amazing, but living to 70 or 80 is abnormal for most of us.  In all likelihood, old age will be a regiment of drugs, side effects and regular visits to the doctor.  To me, this sounds even less wonderful than fasting.


The very tiny, minuscule, silver lining to the massive grey cloud is that fasting is being studied by loads of scientists and there are quite a few being recommended:

• The old-fashioned way: four days without food, several times a year.  You can have all the water you want, and up to 50 calories per day.  Apparently, day 1 is the hardest, and day 2 isn't that bad.  
• Alternate day fasting.  Eat anything you want on day 1 (so far, so good), eat 1 small meal on day 2 of about 500 calories.  Repeat.  This one is fantastic because you really can eat anything you want on day 1, you just have to keep to the single meal on day 2.  It seems easier, but you really have to keep on alternating... like, forever.
• The Five-Two Fast.  Five days of normal eating, followed by 2 days of 600 calories a day.  The beauty of this one is that you can choose the same two days each week, and just work it into your normal life.

None of them are easy, I suspect.  I've loosely had a few weeks of doing the Five-Two, but in truth I'm still on the sidelines.  I don't guess the point is being easy.  Whether we suffer now, by fasting, or later, in other ways, seems to be the choice.

And this is where we get to a final big idea about fasting.  In addition to the benefits of lower IGF1, and the reduced risk of aging-related illnesses, in addition to the benefits of losing weight and feeling good (when you're not fasting), there's something else.  According to Dr Mark Mattson from the National Institute on Aging, fasting appears to lower one's likelihood of contracting Alzheimer's and dementia.  According to the BBC programme, "Sporadic bouts of hunger actually triggers new neurons to grow.  It seems that fasting exercises your gray matter in ways that exercise strengthens your muscles."

So fasting is really, really good for you.  

In my original Fitness blogs two years ago, I proposed skipping lunch every day, as mankind has done for most of our history.  As I write this, I've skipped about 70% of my lunches for the last couple of years.  I've still got the 32-inch waist, and I'm still feeling fit and healthy.  The question is, does being hungry for an hour or two each day qualify as fasting... does this count?  I don't know, but I thought I'd mention it here as I know a few people who read this blog are doing two meals a day, and it seems there's a decent chance it's making us healthier, too.