Best book I've read on this topic. Really changes your thinking on all sorts of health topics. I've followed Peter Attia's podcast for a while, but thBest book I've read on this topic. Really changes your thinking on all sorts of health topics. I've followed Peter Attia's podcast for a while, but this is an excellent summary of all his best knowledge on health. He gave me a new goal and word - healthspan! Forget living a long time, the goal is to have a healthy body for as long as possible.
But the biggest takeaway from the book is exercise is the biggest lever on healthspan. I would have thought diet and exercise were close, but no, exercise is orders of magnitude the biggest lever. And this applies to reducing risk from all the "4 horseman" as he calls them (cancer, metabolic syndrome, alzheimers and brain degenerative diseases, and cardiovascular disease).
"Study after study has found that regular exercisers live as much as a decade longer than sedentary people. Not only do habitual runners and cyclists tend to live longer, but they stay in better health, with less morbidity from causes related to metabolic dysfunction."
One benefit of exercise is that it boosts your metabolism, which basically makes your body run healthier and be better at repairing itself. Interestingly, on the subject of taking supplements, Dr Attia was mostly negative on that with one exception, that he had a whole chapter about: rapamycin. I want to learn more about this drug.
"By cleansing our cells of damaged proteins and other cellular junk, autophagy allows cells to run more cleanly and efficiently and helps make them more resistant to stress. But as we get older, autophagy declines. Impaired autophagy is thought to be an important driver of numerous aging-related phenotypes and ailments, such as neurodegeneration and osteoarthritis. Thus, I find it fascinating that this very important cellular mechanism can be triggered by certain kinds of interventions, such as a temporary reduction in nutrients (as when we are exercising or fasting)—and the drug rapamycin."
Strength is also super important, as muscle mass and bone density decay significantly after age 50, and it's very hard if not impossible to gain back later. Dr Attia recommends that whatever age you are (20s to 80s) it's best to build strength. His goal for his patients is to be in the top 5th percentile of strength for their age. Strength is another top predictor of healthspan - in a way it even defines it as if you are strong you can still hike/bike/surf/etc, and if you can't do the things you love you will lose your zest for life.
"One of the prime hallmarks of aging is that our physical capacity erodes. Our cardiorespiratory fitness declines for various reasons that begin with lower cardiac output, primarily due to reduced maximum heart rate. We lose strength and muscle mass with each passing decade, our bones grow fragile and our joints stiffen, and our balance falters, a fact that many men and women discover the hard way, by falling off a ladder or while stepping off a curb."
To improve strength, Dr Attia does and recommends consistent weight training, with a lot of focus on stability, as the most important thing is to be strong in a way that avoids injury as we do other things. He also does things like rucking, which sounds interesting and I may have to get into - the thesis here is our ancestors did a lot of carrying of heavy things, and it's really good for us therefore, but we don't do it as much anymore. Goal: be able to carry half your body weight in each hand for 1 minute.
In my half-ironman training in the past few years I've done a lot of zone 2 bike rides, and I continue to do them. But I didn't realize they were actually really good for you outside of building base cycling form. Dr Attia does multiple zone 2 workouts per week. I love this, because it gives me permission to just go a long slow bike ride and know that is improving my fitness across the board. And of course, I use those to listen to audio books and podcasts - win/win!
"As fundamental as zone 2 training is for professional cyclists, however, San Millán believes that it’s even more important for nonathletes, for two reasons. First, it builds a base of endurance for anything else you do in life, whether that is riding your bike in a one-hundred-mile century ride or playing with your kids or grandkids. The other reason is that he believes it plays a crucial role in preventing chronic disease by improving the health and efficiency of your mitochondria"
The biggest correlated predictor of longevity number that we have is VO2 max. Dr Attia says his goal is to get to the top 2 percentile of VO2 max for his age. I love this, and this is my new goal in life. My Garmin watch says I'm 90th percentile, so I have more to climb!
"It turns out that peak aerobic cardiorespiratory fitness, measured in terms of VO2 max, is perhaps the single most powerful marker for longevity."
Good tip: "Where HIIT intervals are very short, typically measured in seconds, VO2 max intervals are a bit longer, ranging from three to eight minutes—and a notch less intense." And: "The tried-and-true formula for these intervals is to go four minutes at the maximum pace you can sustain for this amount of time—not an all-out sprint, but still a very hard effort. Then ride or jog four minutes easy, which should be enough time for your heart rate to come back down to below about one hundred beats per minute. Repeat this four to six times and cool down."
Alcohol is one of my weaknesses as I love a nice bottle of wine with a nice dinner. And I've listened to podcasts on the topic and read a book about it: Drink. My French teacher (and most French in general) swear that a small amount of wine is good for you, but the science is clear - alcohol is a net negative even in small amounts. But small amounts is much better for you than large amounts, and so if you are going to drink, Dr Attia recommends:
"I strongly urge my patients to limit alcohol to fewer than seven servings per week, and ideally no more than two on any given day, and I manage to do a pretty good job adhering to this rule myself."
Dr Attia highly recommends trying a GCM, which I haven't done yet but am very interested in.
One thing I didn't know is you can't overeat protein - if you do so your body just excretes it. However if you overeat carbs or fats your body has to store those, and this is the major cause of weight gain. His chapter on how to measure your blood results and eat healthier was nothing new but a good overview.
"Putting all these changes into practice typically means eating more olive oil and avocados and nuts, cutting back on (but not necessarily eliminating) things like butter and lard, and reducing the omega-6-rich corn, soybean, and sunflower oils—while also looking for ways to increase high-omega-3 marine PUFAs from sources such as salmon and anchovies."
I have been a fan of occasionally doing 8/16 fasting as a tool for losing weight or if I just had a big late dinner the night before. But as a regular tool, despite the popularity of fasting in the last few years, Dr Attia is not a big fan, as it causes too much muscular decay. I still think its a useful occasional tool, but not a regular habit to adopt.
"As a result of this and other research, I have become convinced that frequent, prolonged fasting may be neither necessary nor wise for most patients. The cost, in terms of lost lean mass (muscle) and reduced activity levels, simply does not justify whatever benefits it may bring. My rule of thumb for any eating pattern, in fact, is that you must eat enough to maintain lean mass (muscle) and long-term activity patterns."
Dr Attia's last chapter was on mental health, where he was quite vulnerable and shared his own issues with abuse and depression, which led to a lot of anger. I think a lot of successful people are driven by trying to prove something in this way. Was a really good reminder that we all are probably not spending enough time paying attention to our mental health - it's as important as exercising, eating well, and sleeping well. So those are the big 4!
Overall, great overview and one I may be re-reading parts of it. I was already applying a lot of this, some of it I was aware of but not applying so great reminder. And I learned some new things too. But mostly and overall, it's a strong case for living healthy now. If we are healthy now, we can find all kinds of things in the future to look forward to doing.
"“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,� Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.� Here’s to staying young, even as we grow older." ...more
Fascinating insider story of how COVID-19 was mishandled by the US government, the CDC, and the WHO. Michael Lewis's tactic that has worked in his pasFascinating insider story of how COVID-19 was mishandled by the US government, the CDC, and the WHO. Michael Lewis's tactic that has worked in his past books (Moneyball, The Big Short) worked great with Dr Charity Dean and others - he went deep into the character of this health worker from Santa Barbara, and through her told the story of ineptitude. My only criticism is I think he could have focused more on the global picture, as it was not just every state in the US fighting this thing differently, it was (and is) every country in the world. Maybe that would be good for a sequel...
Hilarious by the way that Charity Dean started in Santa Barbara, and the book describes her visiting the old age home where my grandmother lives!
One of the big things that at this point is lost on many of us, is that in ~Jan 2020, there was a chance to lock down quick on the virus and contain it. And because of the total lack of leadership, that chance was lost. This book describes how the Bush administration (I had thought it was Obama, but nope), had even put into place a plan, which had a lot of research behind it, for how to handle this very thing. But it was dismantled by the Trump and the CDC.
We also had no shot at containment because we were not fast to have tests. We could have been had there been leadership prioritizing that, but there wasn't. This was really where we lost the game.
I found this quote very interesting - I wonder how the world will react to this? I would bet many countries will now stockpile and/or build in country manufacturing, though that doesn't seem like it should be the answer. Though in country manufacturing for the vaccine has certainly mattered.
Walter Isaacson is a true storyteller, and this book yet another compelling, fast to read, educational, biography. He goes deep into the fascinating aWalter Isaacson is a true storyteller, and this book yet another compelling, fast to read, educational, biography. He goes deep into the fascinating and burgeoning world of CRISPR to explain it and its origins. And it's clear that CRISPR is changing the world, and will be something we are all familiar with in the decades to come.
The moral dilemmas CRISPR brings are large, and the book appropriately spends a lot of time on them. So far, most scientists and governments have approached it from the perspective that horrible genetic diseases (eg sickle cell) should be cured, but we shouldn't use it it for other purposes. So, Gattaca and designer babies are possible, but nobody is working on it. However, as the rogue scientist in China showed when he successfully birthed human babies after removing their HIV susceptible genes, it's only a matter of time before other rogue scientists show up. Eg, who knows
I really enjoyed the story of how CRISPR was discovered. Isaacson puts a lot of onus on the trait of curiosity across all his biologies (Steve Jobs, Leonardo Da Vinci, etc). And Jennifer Doudna was only a pioneer and discoverer of CRISPR's uses because she was being curious and exploring the bounds of science.
Very interesting too to learn that lots of animal breeders, cattle farmers, etc are using CRISPR and see lot's of opportunities to use it more.
The drama between scientists discovering CRISPR and the patent wars was an interesting peek inside a world I knew little about. It added to the story, but maybe could have been condensed slightly. OTOH, I get it, he was covering a space not just a person, and needed to tread carefully, which I think he did....more
Overall, very useful and helpful book that made me think harder about my habits around alcohol. My major takeaways that I'm enacting:
1. Two days in aOverall, very useful and helpful book that made me think harder about my habits around alcohol. My major takeaways that I'm enacting:
1. Two days in a row of drinking is extremely bad for you as your body doesn't have time to recover and you don't sleep well, it's a downward spiral. Avoid this if at all possible, and go light the second day if you decide to drink. 2. Binge drinking, or getting "wasted" is very bad for you, much better to limit how much you do this. 3. Occasional breaks from alcohol of 2-4 are very, very good for you as they establish the habit of not drinking, and tend to lower your drinking after you do drink again. It can take a few weeks to remove all effects of alcohol from your system and let your liver fully recover. 4. Have a glass of water for every glass of alcohol, and a big one before bed.
Other interesting tidbits:
Alcohol is a huge dopamine stimulant, which is in part why it feels so good, and why we might crave it when stressed.
I didn't realize that in the old days, beer and wine had much less alcohol in them than they do today (3-4% vs 5-8% today for beer). In middle ages I think it was even less, which is why people could drink it so often.
Drinking while driving is a huge cause of death. In the US we have a .08% limit, which is actually not even that safe. Many countries in Europe have .05%, and many in Scandinavia have .02% (basically sober).
A good way to drink consciously is to count your drinks and plan them for the week. If you know you will be drinking 2 nights in a given week, and then plan to have no more than 4 drinks on each of those nights, you are more likely to not exceed/overdrink.
Don't drink to drown your sorrows. I love this quote: "I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim. Frida Kahlo"...more
Fascinating book about the limits of human endurance, well researched and backed by science. Worth reading, but if your goal is to learn how to becomeFascinating book about the limits of human endurance, well researched and backed by science. Worth reading, but if your goal is to learn how to become a faster athlete, it ambles a lot and doesn't really focus on that question as much. That said, lots of interesting tidbits.
First, some basics - oxygen in the bloodstream fuels us up to a point, and with increased oxygen we get increased performance. That is only up to a point, of course, which is called your VO2max - as you approach that point you start to burn carbohydrates, which produce lactic acid, fatigue your muscles, and make you slow down or stop.
Disappointingly to me, the book didn't go as much into how to improve your endurance or train up to elite levels. With one exception - it focused a lot on mental stamina, which the author seemed obsessed by. It gave a lot of interesting examples of people who have done remarkable things by pushing boundaries (a guy lifing a car off a cyclist trapped underneath, a woman who drowned saving her son in dangerous surf by treading water for hours). And to be fair, it is an interesting question of how the mind regulates us and how you can learn to push those limits. Because we all rate limit ourselves - if you go out for a 5 mile run at the 4 mile mark you start to feel it because you know you are almost there - versus if you go out for a 10 mile run, at mile 4 you feel fine - because your brain regulates it. So if it's all in your head, can you improve mental endurance to affect that? The answer is it sounds like you can, but it's a nascent field.
Drugs can also help endurance - a placebo pill will boost performance by several percentage points, as will caffeine, Tylenol, or even crystal meth (which puts a whole new lens on the Blitzkrieg). Swishing gatorade or anything with carbs in your mouth and spitting it out also improves performance by a few points, which speaks to mental power.
Ice baths are something that many people I know and have read about swear by - but apparently the science says they are neutral - IE have no measurable impact on performance. (Curious if there are other takes on this?).
Your body starts to run out of fuel about about an hour of intense exercise, so even in a half marathon it's good to fuel - you can only absorb about 250 calories an hour though. Sports drinks like gatorade or gels.
But the best advice that I at least gleaned as a combo of improving mental belief and pushing your limits there:
The author, Matthew Walker, makes a compelling case for sleep that frankly even after having read many articles about the importance of sleep, and eveThe author, Matthew Walker, makes a compelling case for sleep that frankly even after having read many articles about the importance of sleep, and even watching his , changed my perspective. It has convinced me that I have likely been under-slept much of the past 10 years (3 kids and a busy job will make it hard), and that has been a negative contributor to my health and well being. Specifically, I have always been of the belief that I am a person who can subsist on 6-7 hours of sleep, but this book makes me believe I need to be getting 8, and that the difference is material to both my mental and physical health.
But more so, it warns of a global sleep epidemic. And this really rings true. Sleep is something we spend (if we are doing it right), a third of our lives doing, and which should be put up there with eating well and exercising. And yet how often have you heard recommendations for eating well and exercising that don't also include a recommendation to sleep enough? The book makes a strong case that we are vastly under educating people about the benefits of sleep. This sentence for instance, both rings true and is one of the scariest in the book:
If this isn't an epidemic, what is? Like me, many of us have a notion that we should work hard during the week and "catch up" later or (pre-kids) on the weekend. Interestingly, this notion is false - we can never catch up, the damage has been done.
It's not just our culture of working too hard and looking at screens too much, there are a few specific cultural things the book rants against. First (and in my opinion, justified) is a rant against schools that have start times that are too early - teenagers in particular still have forming brains and need their sleep. Second and most ironic is our medical schools culture of 24 or 48 hour shifts - the medical community should know better, and if they don't, it's no wonder the rest of us don't take it seriously enough.
So why do we sleep? One big reason is that it literally stores your memories from the day - it moves them from short term to long term storage, and if you don't get good sleep, you just lose the memories! I shudder to think of how many classes I crammed for during college on no sleep and then promptly forgot it all :(. The phrase "let me sleep on it" exists in every culture because it works - our brains will be better on a problem the following day, because the information has been moved to long term storage, and intermingled with our neural net of everything else in our brains.
One fascinating insight was the studies that showed that the last 2 hours of sleep (from hour 6 to 8) were some of the most key hours for deep NREM sleep, which does your memory storage. When you short those by only getting 6 hours, it matters a lot!
The bits about physical performance for athletes was solidly backed and fascinating. I'd heard that "Federer gets 9-10 hours" and the such for similar top performers, but this backed it up - you really do perform 30-50% better with more sleep, AND recover 30-50% better with more sleep the next night.
The book had several convincing chapters about the improved health risks of sleeping more. It reduces chances of cancer and probably about everything else, since sleep is what helps your body repair itself. These bits were scary to read, and intended to be so. His "convincer", that he opened with, is that men who are sleep deprived have 30% reduced sperm count, lower testosterone, and smaller testicles.
While the book was great at the science of what we know about sleep, it didn't go enough into what is known about how to improve sleep. But it did have good high level tips:
I did want more tips on beating jet lag, which the book didn't really go into, other than to say it will take 1 day to adjust 1 hour, so it takes a week to adjust to a move from the US to EU (which I knew).
I bought an Oura ring after reading this book, which gives great data and graphs about my sleep, but I am still struggling to get high Oura scores. So I'm still looking for what works for me. But now I'm committed to striving for 8 hours a night instead of 7, which has already made a big difference!...more
Harari is one of my favorite authors of late, and his books Sapiens and Home Deus are among my favorites. This book builds on those, and is equally faHarari is one of my favorite authors of late, and his books Sapiens and Home Deus are among my favorites. This book builds on those, and is equally fascinating. He is one of those clear thinkers who is able to put together multiple macro trends combined with philosophical perspective. Sapiens is about the past, Deus about the future, and this book purports to be 21 lessons about the present. But it is also rooted in the past, and preparing us for the future.
One of Harari's key themes in Deus and this book is AI and what it will mean for humanity in the future. Many people - thanks to Hollywood - equate AI with machines that achieve consciousness - I tend to not agree with that, as I think it more likely that AI will just be exceedingly smart. But regardless, along with nuclear power and climate change it's one of the great risks to our future. And it is being advanced rapidly. This will have a lot of side affects, the top one of which is what will happen to humans. I think this quote might be one of the most key from the book, and certainly a key theme of Harari's:
He goes on to further explain that our whole economic system is causing us to head in this direction, and to - except for a small number of people who opt to prioritize differently - largely ignore how to improve ourselves.
Another consequence of AI that is fascinating is that it can enable intelligence at a scale we today can't comprehend, which can be dangerous if it is controlled by the wrong people. AI is just a function of the data you put into it, so it follows that who holds the data in the future, will hold the power. I think this is a key concept.
Harari talks about trends in globalization, nationalism, immigration, religion, terrorism, and war. A common theme across these is that many people worry a lot that trends in these areas is a cause for concern and causing decline in our world. However the truth is that in most of them, we have come a long way and made a lot of progress - however because we live in an unprecedented age of information sharing - "media" - people are a lot more aware of even small issues in these areas. Also, our governments are predicated on keeping us safe from political violence, so even small issues like terrorism (small in the sense of how many people die from it each year) can have outsized importance to people.
He talks about the danger of propoganda/fake news and fascism and how in todays technological climate there is more risk of them so its better if everyone understands them. He explained this really well in his - highly worth watching.
But in the end, the only major recommendation Harari makes is around meditation. He impressively meditates for TWO HOURS per day, and TWO MONTHS per year. That is obviously a *huge* time commitment, and yet one he finds fulfilling. If we are going to invest in ourselves, the biggest way might be to start with our minds, and to stop worrying about all of these trends - because in the end, they don't matter to our ability to have a good, happy, loving life.
The book starts with a premise that many people generally have an impression that the world is full of of serious crises.
Basically, we worry a lot. A LOT. We live in dark times (with a scary president), etc. Pinker points out why we worry so much: the news. The news cycle is designed to play on our fears, and thus it is largely negative, focusing on all the bad things that are happening in the world. And we are consuming more news than ever in human history! And if the news focused on all the good things, the ratings would plummet, after all. But one of my favorite lines in the book points out that we would be hard pressed to find negative news if we were covering the last 100 years, instead of the last day.
And that was the eye opening thing about the book - if you take a long term view, every metric you can find has gotten better. Life expectancy, health, extreme poverty, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, literacy, leisure, and even happiness - he has chapters and graphs for each of them, showing them vastly improving over the past centuries and usually with most gains in the past century. An interesting point is that most graphs show third world countries only being ~20-30 years behind first world countries, but the shape of the graphs looks the same in terms of the rate of progress. I won't recap all the graphs and numbers, but here is a small example of how life has gotten better.
This is not to say that there aren't still large problems in all of those areas left to solve. Nor that we haven't created other problems - the book has chapters on some of those, notably climate change and nuclear war - but again there we have actually made progress. For some reason I haven't quite fully fathomed, Pinker and this book have gotten . I think some of this is from people who object to him saying "the world is great" because there is so much progress left to be made - yet Pinker often admits that in the book. Or from people who think he is measuring progress along the wrong metrics, and we are all headed for an apocalypse. Certainly, there are lots of books about apocalypse, but it's much more pleasant to be an optimist, and believe that as long as we keep applying reason and science and making progress, the world will keep getting better....more
A fascinating history of ESP and psychic's in the military. I didn't know that the US Military for ~30 years had a secret ESP program, but this is a wA fascinating history of ESP and psychic's in the military. I didn't know that the US Military for ~30 years had a secret ESP program, but this is a well researched book that apparently went through a lot of declassified documents and interviewed people directly too to tell the story. I hoped that it would shed new light on paranormal activity and how real it might be/not be, and it did... but just slightly.
The book does a decent amount of history of ESP and government programs. Did you know that mushrooms (the drug kind) was discovered the CIA and tested in government labs? Hilarious to imagine. The Nazis apparently had a whole ESP program too.
But of course, the US psychic program started the same way most government programs got started: we heard the Russians were doing it, and then we had to do it too in cold war era arms race style.
One of the more interesting characters mentioned in the book was , who is a Israeli psychic who can do things like bend spoons and read basic thoughts from other people (like what number am I thinking of). Now, in the modern era, if a person could really bend a spoon with their mind you would think that would be pretty notable, and people would have studied that in labs, and written about it. But basic google searches on Uri don't turn up anything conclusive (that I saw) other than controversy and lack of clarity. There but it could be faked. So I must conclude this is not possible. Though the author claims to have spent time with Uri and observed him bending spoons (and reading minds) first hand.
The most interesting aspect of the book was the description of the CIA's program. Remote viewing is where psychics use ESP to view remote locations in the world. The CIA tried to use it in military operations, to for instance view the inside of a Russian submarine factory, or locate a fugitive, or locate a kidnapped US general. The fascinating thing is that it kind of worked - there were a few individuals who - occasionally - produced "8 martini results" (aka results that blew your mind so you had to go consume 8 martinis after that). This is what kept the program going for so many years. But the issue was because it wasn't consistent, the signal to noise ratio made the intel not actionable for the military, so it was eventually closed. For example, they gave an example of a fugitive they were trying to catch, and they put 4 psychics on it, and one of the four it turned out correctly found him in a small town in the middle of the US - but the other 3 were nowhere close. This, if true, is fascinating. At the end the book theorizes a little about how such a thing might work - eg there could be a "energy" throughout the world you can tap into - or it could be related to quantum mechanics - specifically . In the end, it seems like there is more to learn here - but not a lot of people at least in pop culture are talking about or researching these areas - so I remain largely a skeptic, but a little intrigued by some of this. ...more
Fascinating portrait of da Vinci. I learned a ton from this, but my biggest takeaway was how insanely curious about EVERYTHING Leonardo was. He was a Fascinating portrait of da Vinci. I learned a ton from this, but my biggest takeaway was how insanely curious about EVERYTHING Leonardo was. He was a painter, but also viewed himself as a scientist and engineer. In his pursuits to understand human proportions he dissected hundreds of animals and humans, to learn about muscles and eyes and how everything works. He understood how the eye sees in the 3D hundreds of years before anyone else. But the craziest part - is he published none of it. He wasn't looking for fame or respect from peers. He put a lot of it in his notebooks, which Isaacson based this book off of - but he would literally go on year long tangents (eg to understand perpetual motion) - just because he was curious. To me, this speaks a lot about the power of curiosity.
I had no idea that there are only 15 completed paintings attributable to him. He had a ton of unfinished projects, but this is also because he was a perfectionist and also a scientist. We all the know Mona Lisa - but I didn't know that he was commissioned to paint it, and spent 20 years trying to perfect it, up until his death, never delivering it to the person who had ordered it!
Isaacson talks at one point about how he is fascinated with the intersection of unrelated disciplines, and that's what drew him to Steve Jobs and Apple, as he famously merged technology and design. Intersections can help you think differently, and Leonardo was impressive at this.
Not really designed for someone who took physics in college. If you have no base of physics this might be good. Though it was a good refresher and in Not really designed for someone who took physics in college. If you have no base of physics this might be good. Though it was a good refresher and in a few areas useful. Eg I knew about dark matter but not dark energy.
There were some fun tidbits too - I found it fascinating that the Moon is 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it's also 1/400th as far away from us, so they look the same size in the sky - a pure coincidence. Can you image how weird it would be otherwise?
Another one was how there is a high probability of a killer asteroid hitting earth within the next 100 million years. But that probability would be much larger if we didn't have big brother Jupiter in our system - who is so large that it acts as a shield and bats many asteroids out of harms way.
Sapiens was one of my favorite nonfiction books I've read in the past few years - so I was excited for the sequel. Overall, its very worth it and fullSapiens was one of my favorite nonfiction books I've read in the past few years - so I was excited for the sequel. Overall, its very worth it and full of a lot of the interesting high level perspectives and frameworks. But it also lacks the clear structure of a coherent narrative, isn't presenting (to me) quite as novel information, and also does some strange things - like using the word 'liberal' in contexts that I don't think definitionally make sense.
I like the train of the thought that Harari closed Sapiens with and continues in this book, which is about human happiness and how to optimize for it - though he doesn't have rosy conclusions on where we are headed. And the notion that we are going to beat death at some point soonish (I'd guess in 20-40 years) is not a new one, but is a very interesting one. Whether or not humans will over time stay human, or be divided into superhumans and regular humans, or create a class of economically useless people - are some of the larger questions we will face in the future as AI and aging advance.
Giving a high rating because I heard the organizer of the Long Now Foundation speak and it was very inspiring. in San Francisco is aGiving a high rating because I heard the organizer of the Long Now Foundation speak and it was very inspiring. in San Francisco is also awesome and has The Long Library in it.
The part of the story that I liked most was the power of long thinking. They created a search, and happened to ask the Oxford groundskeeper if any of the oak trees on campus would work, and he said yes, they should use the grove that was planted 500 years ago for that very purpose. So they did, and then planted another grove for 500 years from now. That's the power of long term thinking - how many of us are able to think that far ahead? That story is what inspired , which is getting closer to completion and sounds pretty cool.
The book was published in 1999 so I found a bunch of the ideas dated and found myself skimming through them, so only partially read this. ...more
I decided to give up eating processed sugar for the month of January, and so reading a book with this title seemed like it would help me adhere. And nI decided to give up eating processed sugar for the month of January, and so reading a book with this title seemed like it would help me adhere. And not only did it succeed in that goal, but I think it put a permanent, deep scare in me about sugar. The book basically argues that sugar is the root cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even a lot of cancer.
What is interesting is while all of us know that sugar is not good for us, the only thing that people officially blame on overconsumption of it is tooth decay. Obesity is highly correlated with diabetes, heart disease, and a number of other bad things. If you Google for the cause of obesity, you see statements like “Obesity is generally caused by eating too much and moving too little. If you consume high amounts of energy, particularly fat and sugars, but don't burn off the energy through exercise and physical activity, much of the surplus energy will be stored by the body as fat.� This book makes the argument that a calorie is not a calorie, that sugar is actually toxic, but unlike other toxins it takes decades of overconsumption to show up - which has made it hard to prove.
The statistics are fascinating. Fifty years ago, one in eight American adults was obese; today the number is greater than one in three. Diabetes has gone from 1 in 2,000-3,000 to 1 in 7-8, which is an astounding increase. The book listed numerous examples of native populations that suffered from a similar diabetes epidemic after adopting the “western diets and lifestyle�. What is it about western lifestyle that has done this? The culprit is almost certainly something in the diet, and linked to processed foods - and after reading this book, it seems very logical that sugar is either the root or one of the main root causes.
“By the late 1970s, though, sugar had mostly vanished from the discussion. Dietary fat had been implicated as a cause of heart disease. Nutritionists and public-health authorities responded by rejecting the idea that sugar could be responsible for the diseases that associated with heart disease, which included both obesity and diabetes.�
The book gives a fascinating history of how nutritionists and the government have viewed sugar as largely harmless. This included an impressive amount of lobbying from the sugar industry to vindicate themselves. Mind-blowingly, the sugar industry back in the 50’s actually advertised sugar as a great, healthy way to get calories. Sugar has never, and largely is still not thought of as a root cause of obesity - the narrative is still more about fats and “lifestyle� (i.e. lack of exercise).
“To the sugar industry, it has been the gift that keeps on giving, the ultimate defense against all arguments and evidence that sugar is uniquely toxic. This is the idea that we get obese or overweight because we take in more calories than we expend or excrete. By this thinking, researchers and public-health authorities think of obesity as a disorder of “energy balance,� a concept that has become so ingrained in conventional thinking, so widespread, that arguments to the contrary have typically been treated as quackery, if not a willful disavowal of the laws of physics.�
“Fat� is often the culprit named for people getting fat (even the word is the same!), and thus was born a processed food industry that touts “low-fat� items (which are then rich in sugar+salt to offset the bad taste). But looking at populations that eat high fat content but low sugar, shows lower rates of obesity and heart disease. For instance, the French.
“When researchers realized that the French had relatively low rates of heart disease despite a diet that was rich in saturated fats, they wrote it off as an inexplicable “paradox,� and ignored the fact that the French traditionally consumed far less sugar than did populations� the Americans and British, most notably� in which coronary disease seemed to be a scourge. At the end of the eighteenth century, French per capita sugar consumption was less than a fifth of what it was in England. At the end of the nineteenth century, even after the beet-sugar revolution, France was still lagging far behind both the British and the Americans� thirty-three pounds for the French compared with eighty-eight for the English and sixty-six for Americans.�
Interestingly, when we say “sugar� we can actually be referring to a number of things: fructose, glucose, or sucrose. Glucose is used to refer to blood sugar levels in blood, and also comes from eating carb rich foods like bread or potatoes. Sucrose is table sugar, which actually made of part fructose. Fructose is the scary one because “it is very different from other sugars because it has a different metabolic pathway and is not the preferred energy source for muscles or the brain.�. Fructose is found in fruit but as such low levels that it isn’t harmful, plus its offset by rich fibers. But high fructose corn syrup? Avoid at all costs.
The logic is basically: IF excess sugar (fructose notably) leads to insulin resistance, THEN we can say with confidence that it is likely a root cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer, as it’s been proven to be correlated with all those things. High fat diets - particularly the wrong sorts of fats - are also involved if eaten in excess. The logic seems solid - and yet even searching “what causes obesity� you don’t see sugar named as a key cause. I’d be very curious to learn from nutritionists what the think of this logic.
“Is it that we’re all simply eating too much and exercising too little, which is the one simple answer that the nutritional establishment will embrace in the face of so much evidence to the contrary? Another simple answer, and a more likely one, is sugar.�...more
Kevin Kelly, who is a Wired co-founder, lays out technological trends that are "inevitable". Like too many nonfiction books, I found a few chapters toKevin Kelly, who is a Wired co-founder, lays out technological trends that are "inevitable". Like too many nonfiction books, I found a few chapters to be worth reading, and a few not to be. I enjoyed the sections on AI and books. And sometimes just zooming out to get bigger perspective is engaging, which was the case for me in the sections on VR/AR and tracking. Much of the rest of the book seemed geared for people less technically savvy, which was my only complaint as it really drew the book out.
There is a famous saying in software said by Marc Andreeson that "software is eating the world". Kelly predicts, I believe correctly, that the next phase of this will be AI: "It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything� as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial". Kelly's perspective here that while it might feel like innovation in technology is slowing to some, it is much more likely that we are on the brink of the next renaissance, and we will all be "taking X and adding AI", much as happened with electricity and then the internet.
Kelly correctly identified the three key trends that are making AI an exciting space today: processing power (GPU's), data, and better algorithms. However he didn't dive more into the longest pole: how to get a lot more data than we have today - that seems to me to be the key. But cool to get an overview. He did address one of the big fears about automation that many people have today: will computers take all our jobs? The quick answer is yes, but we'll have new ones. This has already happened multiple times in history. I agree with this, but think the more interesting question is what will happen when we can provide most people the basics (food, water, shelter) for very little cost. This was predicted in Diamond Age, and the answer was "parking lots and chaos", and a lot of people with no purpose in life.
Another big idea that Kelly hits on that I think is big and inevitable is how each book will become networked, much as the WWW has. Once we have ability to have pointers into and out from each sentence of a book, the speed at which ideas will fly out of books will step function.
I haven't read a ton of "history of the world" books, but this was fascinating. Highly recommended. I think the author is incredibly good at explaininI haven't read a ton of "history of the world" books, but this was fascinating. Highly recommended. I think the author is incredibly good at explaining and simplifying big concepts. He take on complex things like religion & capitalism and explains them in very simple terms that you likely hadn't thought about before.
There was a fascinating bit on the scientific mindset, and how it was key to Europe taking power. After the scientific revolution, they believed in science and its ability to let man discover new things, make more money, etc. This made them into explorers, whereas many other cultures remained very static. Great example of China having had gunpowder for hundreds of years but not using it for anything other than fireworks, and didn't invent the gun. Reminded me a bit of the Mindset.
The chapter on capitalism was fascinating. There line about before its invention that the economy didn't grow, and was "frozen" as nobody poured money into new things, so there was no growth. Then the notion of credit was discovered, and as growth started, the combination snowballed. In 1500 the annual per capita production was $550 and today its $8,800 - this is an astounding increase, and all because of the virtuous growth cycle of capitalism: money is invested -> businesses grow -> people make money -> they invest their money. I never thought about the fact that reinvesting profits is a core piece of capitalism, but from this lens it really is.
What I didn't see coming is how the end of the book was dedicated to human happiness. Fascinating questions to ask if we are happier today than 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. By metrics of death rate, average age of death and general health, we ought to be. But clearly peasants after the agricultural revolution were on average less happy than they were before as hunter-gatherers. And now we live in an always-on internet age, with pressure to continue growing our economy. So are we happier? It is the right question, in my opinion. The book then gave the basics of the happiness framework that I've also read in other places and believe in: that people are happy when they have 3 things: (1) Friends and family that love them (2) Are part of a community that makes them feel like they below (3) have a purpose to their life and feel like they are doing something meaningful. However, the book then adds onto this in another way that I have been learning about but hadn't put together with this: meditation.
I kind of loved this book because it give a lot of the "why" - the science - behind a lot of best practices. This is the kind of thing that helps me cI kind of loved this book because it give a lot of the "why" - the science - behind a lot of best practices. This is the kind of thing that helps me change my behavior - when I know how it works under the hood.
The book is broken into a series of "brain rules" on different subjects. I'll list main takeaways:
Exercise We all know it's good for us and it feels good and we should do it. The best quote here was "Physical activity is cognitive candy." - also "A lifetime of exercise results in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary." The basic science is that blood flow through your brain is good for it and increases brain activity. Tip: exercise before you need your brain to be at its best.
Sleep First, great to have validation that there really are early birds and night owls. I'm definitely a night owl, despite my kids best efforts. The interesting implications of this for a company are that people are at their best - their most productive - at different times of the day - so building a culture that is flexible and let's people work their hours is key. The science about the history of naps and the fact that the mid-afternoon slump is a real thing was also very interesting. The studies about sleep loss being as cognitively limiting as alcohol were also illuminating. Another study showed sleeping on a problem really does work.
But the most interesting thing about the sleep chapter was the section on dreaming and what it might mean. In particular, dreams may at least in large part be a method of neural network training to enforce learning. "humans appear to replay certain learning experiences at night, during the slow-wave phase."
Stress Too much stress is bad for you - our systems weren't designed for constant stress. If you have too much adreline in your system constantly it leads to scarred blood vessels and then eventually a stroke. But a little stress is good - our brains will remember things that we are stressed about better (eg avoid predators on the savannah). But too much (chronic) stress can overwhelms the brain and hurts learning and can even make you depressed. Chronic stress is often the culprit in grief, or high anxiety households. The worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem� you are helpless.
Wiring “What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like� it literally rewires it.�
Attention I’ve said for a long time that humans don’t remember facts, we remember facts couched in emotions. We can easily recall all the strong emotional moments of our lives as if they happened yesterday. Now it’s great to have the science behind this: emotions release dopamine, which greatly aids in memory and information processing. This means that people will relate better to products that bring up positive emotions for them. It also means that an emotional hook to lead into an idea or product will always work as it triggers the emotion in the person.
Another interesting thing mentioned in this chapter is the 10 minute rule. We only have about 10 minutes of attention on something before we start to tune out. As the book says, “This fact suggests a teaching and business imperative: Find a way to get and hold somebody’s attention for 10 minutes, then do it again.�
To get an idea to stick you have to give people the mental model for it first - “meaning before details�. Specifically, you need to: “Give the general idea first, before diving into details, and you will see a 40 percent improvement in understanding.� And then you also have to simplify and hammer home concepts and let people digest them - force-feeding too many concepts at once won’t sink in.
In terms of paying attention (vs automatic things like riding a bicycle), “Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth.� - the brain can only pay attention to one thing at a time.
Memory There are different types of memory: declarative (I can remember my address and SSN), non declarative (I can remember how to ride a bike), short term, and long term. Short term memory isn’t converted to long term easily: “People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days. And the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.�. Keys to doing so are coding in emotion (why word association works), and repetition (“repeat to remember�). Also, thinking about what tree the person will mentally group the information and how to increase entry points or create strong ones.
Interestingly, “Memory worked best, it appeared, if the environmental conditions at retrieval mimicked the environmental conditions at encoding.�. This means if you learn something sad you will remember it better if you get sad again. Fascinating. This makes sense, as our brains must group similar patterns it remembers together. To get practical, you can create science, art, language stations to help people remember better.
We all know this to be true - our memory isn’t perfect. This is because we remember patterns, not facts or single instances. “Our brains give us only an approximate view of reality, because they mix new knowledge with past memories and store them together as one.�
Another tidbit I liked, that fits in the “repeat to remember� bucket: “A great deal of research shows that thinking or talking about an event immediately after it has occurred enhances memory for that event�. Basically the more an idea can be repeated - especially in timed intervals - the more chance it has of being encoded from short term to long term memory.
Sensory Integration We remember data from each of our senses, and we learn best if we stimulate multiple senses concurrently. You remember better if you see AND hear something, or even if given words and pictures. Smells or sounds or tastes can trigger additional associations or emotions and help us create positive or negative associations to things we see or do. This is why people who haven’t adopted digital reading say things like “I love the smell of a good book�, this is why smelling fresh roasted coffee is a key part of Starbucks playbook. Smells have the power to bring back memories that are associated with them.
Vision Vision trumps and overrides all other senses. I loved the story about the wine experts who were fooled by white wine with red dye in it because their eyes said it was red wine. Fascinating to read about the science of how the brain takes in the signals from the eyes, combines both signals, and applies pattern matching to fill in details. This means the brain has creative freedom to insert whatever it wants into our vision.
Practical applications: our vision is caught by bold colors, orientations, motion. We remember images better than words because it’s easier to pattern match the image, so use images in presentations.
Music Music makes us more empathic - we can better recognize the emotions in speech, which helps in social abilities. Making music is 10x better for kids than listening to baby einstein CD’s. Listening to music reduced cortisol and stress.
Gender Boys and girls have different brain structures. When under stress, men remember the gist of things better, and women remember details and emotions. These quotes describe it well:
“The difference between girls� and boys� communication could be described as the addition of a single powerful word. Boys might say, “Do this.� Girls would say, “Let’s do this.�
“When girl best friends communicate with each other, they lean in, maintain eye contact, and do a lot of talking. They use their sophisticated verbal talents to cement their relationships. Boys never do this. They rarely face each other directly, preferring either parallel or oblique angles. They make little eye contact, their gaze always casting about the room. They do not use verbal information to cement their relationships. Instead, commotion seems to be the central currency of a little boy’s social economy. Doing things physically together is the glue that cements their relationships.�
“In our evolutionary history, having a team that could understand both the gist and details of a given stressful situation helped us conquer the world. Why would the world of business be exempted from that advantage? Having an executive team or work group capable of simultaneously understanding both the emotional forests and the trees of a stressful project, such as a merger, might be a marriage made in business heaven. It could even affect the bottom line.�
Exploration We learn by doing, by exploring the world. We take pleasure in that exploration. Discovery based learning is best. Medical school offers the best on the job learning - other types of education should do better to model it. Learn and be curious....more
Mark Watney is a steely-eyed missile man. A man's man. A badass mechanical engineer botanist astronaut who is stranded on Mars during a Nasa mission gMark Watney is a steely-eyed missile man. A man's man. A badass mechanical engineer botanist astronaut who is stranded on Mars during a Nasa mission gone wrong, and left to fend for himself. I listened to this on audio on a roadtrip, and it flew by - what a fun story. Not surprised at all it's being made into . Also pretty amazing is that it was self-published.
There were two great things about this book: the humor and the science. The science appealed to the mechanical engineer in me - Watney is a bit like McGyver except he knows a lot more about chemistry and botany. I didn't double-check all the science, but loved the descriptions of all the math: calorie calculations, creating water, etc. Just fun stuff.
But the humor was top notch. Weir does a great job portraying a stranded man trying to remain upbeat by talking to himself in log entries. And the excellent audio narrator only made it better.
In the end, a well told story of survival against the odds. And one of belief - I liked the CNN Mark Watney watch - you could totally imagine how into this story the media would get. We humans love a good surviving against the odds story. ...more
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