Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Collabrity. Collaboration among celebrities. Used to describe a bunch of my colleagues at a conference.

Should be a word.

2) BLUF. Bottom Line Up Front. Mandatory strategy when presenting to the Department of Defense. Probably not a terrible strategy for slightly lower pressure presentations like our discussions a couple of weeks ago about how to educate our colleagues on mite-eradication.

Lower pressure, that is, unless you see a mite.

3) Beaker. Wordless Muppet’s character with hair that looked oddly similar to frozen vertical gummy worms. Strangely and consistently hilarious.

And apparently the inspiration for the most au courant hairstyle of the young male.

4) Healthspan 5. Supplements. The Holy Grail of longevity, right? Just give me a pill. No exercise. Eat whatever you want. Sleep when you’re dead. 300 yard drives until your 80, right out of a bottle. People have been talking about this since I was in grade school. Every single longevity “expert” has at least one chapter on this. Some, like Sinclair, have made their biggest marks doing research with this as the ultimate goal.

For the moment there is no magic bullet; what we have at the moment is supplements.

No reason to embellish, this is a pretty straightforward area at the moment. While there is literally a laundry list of stuff you COULD use, the list of stuff that is reasonable to add in at this stage is actually rather short. Over 40? Take one baby aspirin per day. Got any reason to take a statin? Just say yes. Metformin, the ubiquitous medication for Type 2 Diabetes has been shown to lengthen the telomeres, the end caps on chromosomes. Longer telomeres mean a younger chromosome. 500 mg/day, 1000 if you have an abnormal HbA1c or fasting glucose. There are almost no side effects and Metformin is so old that it is usually free.

How about stuff that is singularly associated with longevity and Healthspan? Nicotinamide Mono-nucleonside (NMN) is an NAD facilitator, increasing the efficiency of cell metabolism. 1000mg/day. Tirmethylglucolyte (TMG) facilitates the activity of NMN (500mg/day). Resveratol, the antioxidant made famous by 60 Minutes is somewhat controversial, but in my reading it is either beneficial or neutral; add in 1000mg/day. Round out your kit with 4-5000IU of Vitamin D3, 180-360 IU of Vitamin K2, and ~2500mg of re-esterified Omega-3 fatty acid and you have a cutting edge but conservative longevity supplement strategy.

Note that none of this is FDA-tested let alone approved. I am not providing medical advice or writing a prescription. This is my take-home from extensive reading and it is what I am doing at the moment. I am investigating “Fatty-15”, a newly discovered omega fatty acid found in healthy dolphins and will return someday with my thoughts.

I mean, if you could be as cool as a dolphin just by taking a pill…

5. Discoarse. Conversation or communication that is uncouth, unsavory, and impolite. Should be a word.

I think discoarse as I have defined it is a very apt description of the state of our national conversations. All of them. I find almost all of them to be lacking politesse in all ways. My granddaughter Lila once asked me what it sounded like if you were “reading cursive”. I really love that. The speech writers who backed people like JFK and Reagan spoke in cursive. Heck, Churchill THOUGHT in cursive and simply told the world what he was thinking. Now? There’s no elegance or style. Everything is a full-frontal assault. It’s as if everyone we read about on all sides of government is speaking in the big, bold, not very precise block letters we see in kindergarten homework.

It’s all so very coarse.

And so very personal. Vindictive and personal. It’s as if all of governance has been distilled down to nothing more than one zero-sum game after another. A policy installation is only successful if it knocks out an incumbent statute, a “game” that makes the writer of the new rule the winner at the expense of whoever wrote the prior one. As if a signature goal of every new policy is to turn the creators of the older policy into losers. What ever happened to working toward a common good? You know, something we would all rally around. I seem to remember that non-zero pursuits, the rising tide lifting all boats and all, I remember when that was how our leaders talked to one another and to us.

It’s been a very long time since all of us peasants out here in the villages were entirely in the dark about what actually went on in D.C. That all probably went away in the late ’60’s with Viet Nam and all that came with it. Would we have thought about “Camelot” in such romantic ways if we knew as much about what was going on as we came to know about the Nixon or Clinton administrations? Doubt it. But come on, they at least made an effort at smoothing out the bad news. Now? Language as if drawn by the literary equivalents of brutalist architects, laden with invective and shouted in ALL CAPS from the social media site of the moment. Next thing you know we’ll have a Senator channeling Khrushchev and pounding a podium with his shoe, or a couple of Members paying homage to Jackson era political battles by throwing down MMA style in the aisle during a House session.

Good idea, bad idea, idea you simply don’t care about, the discussions are toxic. Honestly, it just makes all of us Chez bingo unhappy; I don’t think we are alone in that. It’s ugly and unseemly and it reflects poorly on all of us, not just the folks who are supposed to be looking out for the common good. You can argue about who started it all and when, but whoever and whenever, it is now so coarse that it makes many (most?) people unhappy just from the listening.

Our public discourse has become coarse bordering on vulgar. We are all the lesser for it.

I’ll see you next week…

1) Leveret. A juvenile hare. No reason, really. Just thought you might like to know.

2) Coterie. A small group of people sharing a common interest, often exclusive, which is sometimes the point.

We were just in the Palm Beach area. Totally get it.

3) Buffet. When I look at Warren Buffet I always think that he looks happy. Don’t you think? For what it’s worth I always thought the same whenever I saw a picture of his corporate foil and friend Charlie Munger who died last year at 99. Munger always seemed to have a little edge, be a bit cranky or grumpy, but behind it I always sensed a little twinkle in his eyes as if he was playing with his audience. Warren Buffet and Charlies Munger always look like they are having fun.

Why does it seem like all of the other billionaires in our midst aren’t?

I look at any number of these “masters of the universe” and they all seem to be missing something. Wanting something. Other than the joy of garnering greater riches–especially if it comes in the form of some kind of victory over someone else who loses money–it just seems as if they aren’t all that happy. Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, the Google/Alphabet guys old and new. Or Tim Cook, the guy who runs Apple, worth a couple of billion dollars on the low side: have you ever seen a picture of him smiling or read a story about whatever it is that makes him happy? Neither have I.

For sure there are some billionaires out there who seem to be yucking it up and having a grand old time. Steve Ballmer may be getting more joy out of owning a professional sports team than any other person on the planet. Still, for every Steve Ballmer there are two dozen Stan Kroenkes walking around as if they are constipated. Searching for the thing. Seeking whatever’s next. Never enough. Nothing to really make them happy more often than they are not. Some seem to be trying really, really hard to at least LOOK like they’re happy, but I’m not too sure if it’s working.

With his beautiful and very bright fiancé balanced on his newly bulging biceps as he juggles the billions in his bank account, Jeff Bezos just never seems to have that Charlie Munger twinkle in his eye, no matter how hard he seems to be trying.

4) Second. In a Sunday NYT Magazine interview Denzel Washington was proving to be a difficult subject for the reporter. Notoriously reticent and progressively less transparent as he has gotten older, Washington turned the tables on the reporter and began to interview HIM. “What is your SECOND favorite thing? Everyone can name their favorite; I want to know what your SECOND favorite is.” It’s a great question, one that engages the reporter (and yet another question that Denzel declines to answer!) and keeps the interview moving. I’ve been mulling it over for about a week after returning home from our excellent visit to Hortilano’s winter home.

Denzel is right, your favorite thing is an easy call for almost everyone. Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that my favorite “thing” is Beth and our marriage. Hands down. There is a big gap, at least for me, between numbers one and two, which is why I spent a little bit of time thinking about it. My second favorite thing is “connecting”. Either creating a new connection for myself, or fostering a connection between two or more people I know and like who might benefit from making a connection themselves. At this stage in my life, having made and tried very hard to keep track of all sorts of connections both personal and professional, it’s kind of fun to offer up those introductions and then watch to see if they take the ball and run. Typically there is no benefit accruing in any column for me, just the satisfaction that I was able to share a tiny bit of myself while trying to help in a tiny way.

I’ll bet your favorite thing jumps right out whenever you are asked. Let me connect you with Denzel Washington: what is your SECOND favorite thing?

5) Nemesis (HT Rachel Feintzeig). Irish dementia: you forget everything except the grudges.

You are likely a very nice person. Really. I’ll bet you are. Your successes have been achieved through hard work and perseverance, and you have made herculean efforts to reach whatever peak you’ve been aiming for without having resorted to climbing on or over others who may have been on the same path. Your goal was arriving at your successes by taking the high road. Then you look around and maybe you haven’t climbed quite as high as you’d dreamed and you look at the super successful for clues to why that might be.

Maybe you need to take a page out of Michael Jordan’s playbook and either find or create a nemesis. Jordan was infamous for taking even the most trivial things personally and using them to fuel the fire. Ever wonder why underdogs sometimes topple the top dog? It’s all about taking umbrage at the fact that you’ve been declared “less” which gives you the incentive to prove that whoever did so is wrong. You don’t necessarily need anything special in your nemesis; either a mortal or a venal nemesis, a bit of a grudge that was created or arose organically, will do.

Something to light a fire under your ambition.

6) Non-Zero. So much “I win/you lose” in our world today, eh? Not that it’s really new, but it has certainly been stripped of any of the veneer of politesse. Made me think of a piece I wrote some years ago about “non-zero” approaches to interactions of all sorts. I reprise it here:

“Do you know people who seemingly can only feel good about themselves if someone else has fallen? Folks who cut others down in an effort to build themselves up? Everything, every encounter big or small, is a little Zero-Sum game. There can only be a winner if someone loses.

Have you ever listened to them talk? Their words are like little knives, meant to produce tiny injuries as they convey information. Many times these injuries are purposeful; other times they constitute collateral damage. What is notable is that the only effort that is apparent is the effort to wound, never an effort to protect or cushion or even prevent unintended injury. No opportunity is too small, and the effort to prevent injury seemingly too great, to miss the chance to inflict damage. You never know when that damage might helpfully/hopefully weaken someone to whom you might some day be compared.

Content and tone are inextricably mated. How you communicate expresses not only your thought but also your intent. Kindness, or not even that but neutrality, puts the content squarely in focus. Central. Untarnished. Funny, but speech meant to communicate and harm is often preceded by some qualifier such as “no offense” or “bless your heart”, as if that somehow makes the speaker blameless for any damage downstream.

The sad thing about this whole gig is that the person who seeks to elevate himself by bringing another down, seeks the win by creating the loss, achieves nothing of the kind. At best…at the very best, the situation created results in a loss for the other, but no more than a draw for the instigator. Which, if you’re keeping score, is actually NOT a Zero-Sum game at all, is it? Nor is it a Non-Zero Sum game, one in which both sides win, or one wins to the other’s neutral “draw”.

Nope, tearing another down in the vain hope that such a thing will boost you up, get one in the “win” column, is actually the third type of game, the Negative-Sum game. NOBODY wins.

Who would want to play THAT game? Who wants to be THAT person?”

7) Healthspan 5. As long as I’m sitting here with some time on my hands, how about a quick entry into our Healthspan series on the importance of sleep. Pretty on point with some of the stuff above, right? I mean, how’re you gonna win if you’re getting plenty of sleep? Well, as it turns out, some of the biggest winners in every competitive arena are also some of the most effective sleepers.

Lots of what we know about sleep is actually old news. Humans sleep in 90 minute cycles, plus or minus a few minutes. Each cycle includes a light or shallow phase, a rapid-eye movement or REM phase during which we dream, and two deep-sleep phases. A successful night’s sleep will entail sleeping through some multiple of 90-minute cycles. For instance, your sleep-driven recovery is actually much greater if you sleep for 7 1/2 hours (5 cycles) than if you sleep for 8 hours because you are awakening mid-cycle from a deep sleep phase.

Sleep is where our myriad systems recover and prepare for the coming day. Physical recovery is easy to understand: we really don’t move in our sleep. Our central nervous center recovers as well. Indeed, we can measure the quality of our autonomic nervous system recovery by tracking our Heart Rate Variability (HRV), the beat-to-beat variation of our heart rate. Higher is better. HRV is what all of our fancy monitors measure to give us our “readiness” value. This is how you can examine individual factors from the previous day and how they affect sleep and recovery. For example, the two things that typically reduce your HRV are very intense exercise and alcohol consumption.

Do what you have to do to sleep without interruptions for 4, 5, or 6 cycles each night. Go to bet and awaken at roughly the same time each day. Measure your sleeping patterns with some sort of tracker (Whoop is the most versatile all-purpose tracker on the market, probably followed by the Apple Watch), and keep track of things that detract from high quality sleep (like alcohol). Remember that you are playing the long game, trying to not only live longer, but in the doing also pushing back the onset of the ravages of the chronic illnesses associated with longer lives.

You know, so you don’t fall asleep on the loo.

I’ll see you next week…