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Welcome to the third edition. Missed the second? You can find it here.

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Ok, now let’s get on with it …

The Best Things I Read: Longevity Freaks, A Word Bible, New Space Travelers, and The Mafia Comes to Dinner.

Here’s some good writing and a book about “writing good” …

The Bulletproof Coffee guy is hopeful, nuts.

Let’s just start with this:

Asprey, who is 45, has made the widely publicized claim that he expects to live to 180. To that end, he plans to get his own stem cells injected into him every six months, take 100 supplements a day, follow a strict diet, bathe in infrared light, hang out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wear goofy yellow-lensed glasses every time he gets on an airplane. So far, Asprey says he’s spent at least a million dollars hacking his own biology, and making it to 2153 will certainly take several million more.

That’s from Rachel Monroe’s profile of Dave Asprey, the godfather of biohacking. The guys is indeed as fascinating as he is bizarre (just wait until you read the story’s first paragraph, which explains all the different places Asprey injects his stem cells).

That Asprey believes he can be saved by science reminded me of a piece by my friend Dr. Doug Kechijian, who wrote:

Before “biohacking” was a thing, “anti-aging” was already alive and well in the medical community. Like organized religion, science is a vehicle for hope. Religion comforts us about the spiritual world, including what happens after we die, and science comforts us about the physical world by rendering everything seemingly knowable. Both domains ultimately provide hope and guidance in the face of uncertainty.

In the words of David Foster Wallace: “Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

A book for word nerds.

Speaking of the man, I recently found myself in a David Foster Wallace YouTube rabbit hole, which eventually led me into this weird interview, where a man called Bryan A. Garner, a usage expert and professor of law, interviews Wallace about the art of writing, specifically on the usage of “prior to.” The guy intrigued me.

Wallace believed Garner was “a genius” of words, and had written a lengthy piece about his work in a 2001 issue of Harpers. So I bought a copy of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, Garner’s opus.

The thing’s a tome. We’re talking 1,120 pages on words and how to use them. Which sounds intimidating. But the book draws you in with wit and wisdom and an approach to language that’s laid back and interesting.

For example, you’ll learn why writing should be grammatical but relaxed, refined but natural, correct but unpedantic (and how to make it so). You’ll also learn, quite literally, the optimal way to use any word or phrase you could ever think of.

Buy it if you write.

The best space travelers are the least fit.

“Fitness” is the ability to perform a task. In the gym: Lift some weight or run some distance. In the office: Make the company money. Fitness in outer space? The ultimate goal is to collect data. But doing that is complicated. It requires performing everyday task in a totally new, awkward world: going to the bathroom in an odd toilet, using odd machines to move around in zero G, not becoming motion sick when the shuttle is hurtling 17,500 miles per hour through space, and more.

To that end, NASA has developed absolutely insane training programs for astronauts. But, as Rose Eveleth writes in Wired, the space program may be overlooking the best candidates: people who do this kind of “training”—negotiating a world not built for them—daily.

The assumption has long been that this training is a necessity—traveling to space is a mentally and physically grueling endeavor. We need the strongest, smartest, most adaptable among us to go. But strength comes in many forms, as do smarts. And if you want to find people who are the very best at adapting to worlds not suited for them, you’ll have the best luck looking at people with disabilities, who navigate such a world every single day. Which has led disability advocates to raise the question: What actually is the right stuff?

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.

Have you ever eaten olives, olive oil, parmesan, or cured meat? Then your meal has likely been influenced by the mafia, according to this epic piece in the Financial Times:

Siphoning off farm subsidies does not carry the same dubious “glamour” as the racketeering or drug running usually associated with the Mafia. But it has become a highly lucrative income stream for Italy’s organized-crime syndicates. Their forays into farming do not end there: in recent years, they have infiltrated the entire food chain, according to a Rome-based think-tank, the Observatory of Crime in Agriculture and the Food Chain.

As in all good mob tales, this one has wise guys, death threats, hits, Omerta, and, of course, copious amounts of Italian food.

The Best Thing I Heard: Trevor Kashey on What Academic Knowledge is Good For

My friend Trevor graduated college at 17 and earned his Ph.D. at 22. He’s smart. Like, smart-smart. I learn a lot from him.

Trevor now owns a nutrition company and works with people like Olympians, first-responders, and executives. He recently appeared on this podcast to talk about science, working with people, and the distance between scientific theory and real-world practice.

I loved what he said about the value of having a lot of knowledge. I think his thoughts can apply to and enhance nearly any situation where you’re communicated with people or helping them do or understand something. For me: writing, teaching, etc.

… when you start to take your (science-based) theory and turn that theory into what you think is perfect programming, and then you try to translate that programming to a human that does human stuff?

Well, you look at the differential and it essentially throws the practicality of any theory out the flipping window. Now your job as a practitioner isn’t to give a person a perfect program. Essentially the job of the practitioner is to shrink the gap between intention and intervention. Because the perfect plan is always going to be the most straightforward—like Occam’s razor, right? And so, now the objective is that you have a person who knows what they want, you have a person who knows what they need to do to get there, and your job as a practitioner is to shrink that gap. And that’s where you realize that the academic knowledge that you have … well almost none of it is applied in terms of creating plans for people, and the value of a vast amount of academic knowledge is to basically know what is worth ignoring. Because if you have an extremely strong inductive machine, if you have a strong grasp on the fundamentals, then you have the capacity to essentially combat everything else that is trying to interject itself into fundamental reason.

The Best Thing I Did: This Weird Stretch

Mark my words: If you do this stretch every day, you will be able to touch your toes.

Which is helpful for a lot of things. Being able to move better can help and prevent back and shoulder aches, make you better at sports, and you’ll also just feel better.

Do it.

One set of 20 breaths—meaning hold the pose and breath deeply in and deeply out 20 times—every day.

The Best Science I Stumbled Upon: Playing the Long Game, and Thought-Changing Health Research

Let’s go against prevailing thought …

Pull the goalie.

Don’t like hockey? Stay with me. The wisdom from this study applies far beyond hockey.

Ok, so one of my students is a Canadian who, as Canadians do, plays on the hockey team. We got into a discussion about the game and I asked him if he’d ever heard of this study.

Background: If an NHL team is down a goal or more, the team will pull their goalie in order to gain another attacker and, hopefully, increase their chances of scoring. This generally happens with one minute left in the game.

But when a couple of quants crunched the data, they determined that NHL coaches have been doing it all wrong. If an NHL team is down one goal, the math dictates that the optimal time to pull the goalie is with 6:10 remaining in the third period. “A team that practices optimal goalie pulling gains an average of 0.05 more points per game. That is worth 4.18 points in an 82-game season,” the author say. Translation: more wins.

Down two goals? The math says you pull your goalie with 13:00 to go. Three? Pull with 3: 40 remaining in the second period.

Yes, pulling the goalie also increases the other team’s chances of scoring. Their odds of netting a goal become 4.3% per 10-second game interval compared to 1.97% for the team that pulls its goalie. BUT, as the authors point out, “A team down a goal with short time remaining gains a lot by scoring, and loses little if the other team scores, as losing by two goals is no worse than losing by one.”

My student’s answer: “Yeah, I’ve heard of that. No one actually does it.”

This is because, the authors explain—and this is the larger wisdom you can draw from the study—people tend to shy away from short term-risk (in this case, the coach looking bad if his team loses big) at the expense of long-term reward.

Always play the long game.

15 studies that challenged medical dogma in 2018.

Last year scientists found that dairy is good, probiotics sometimes aren’t, cancer could be an immunity problem, low-dose aspirin may not protect your heart, and vitamin D might do nothing to prevent bone fractures, according toDr. Eric Topol.

Something That Made Me LOL: This Stupid Twitter Thread.

This thread is what Twitter was made for. You will never see a Peloton exercise bike advertisement the same way. Ever.

In Parting, One Context-Free Quote:

“America’s fanatical, perverse obsession with football is rooted in a multitude of smaller fixations, most notably the concept of who a quarterback is and what that person represents. There is no cultural corollary in any other sport. It’s the only position on the field a CEO would compare himself to, or a surgeon, or an actual general. It’s the only position in sports that racists still worry about. People who don’t care about football nevertheless understand that every clichéd story about high school involves the prom queen dating the quarterback. It serves as a signifier for a certain kind of elevated human, and Brady is that human in a non-metaphoric sense. He looks the way he’s supposed to look. He has the kind of wife he’s supposed to have. He has the right kind of inspirational backstory: a sixth-round draft pick who runs the 40-yard dash in a glacial 5.2 seconds, only to prove such things don’t matter because this job requires skills that can’t be reliably measured. Brady’s vocation demands an inexact combination of mental and physical faculties, and it all hinges on his teammates’ willingness to follow him unconditionally. This is part of the reason Brady does things like make cash payments to lowly practice-squad players who pick off his passes during scrimmages—he must embody the definition of leadership, almost like a president. In fact, it sometimes seems like Brady could eventually be president, or at least governor of Massachusetts.”

Until next, next Thursday …

-Michael