Author: christinestaffa

My life's journey has taken me from the streets of New York, up the Hudson Valley, to a little goat farm under Vermont's highest mountain.

Book Corner 2023.42

Outlive

by Peter Attia, MD

Dr. Peter Attia is an oncology surgeon, a data guy, and an extreme athlete with trauma in his past. That all plays into his approach to longevity: lots and lots of screening, monitoring, and “training” for old age as if you were training for a sporting event.

The chapters on exercise and nutrition were fantastic. My favorite quote: “Cardio or weights? Low-carb or plant-based? Olive oil or beef tallow? I don’t know. Must we really take sides?” This is NOT a book telling you the One True Secret to long life; it all depends. Some certainties though: Exercise is the best medicine. If your metabolism is not functioning well, make it a priority to get that under control. Screen for everything, screen early, screen often.

Then come chapters on sleep and emotional health. I had really been looking forward to the chapter on sleep, as it’s kind of a bugaboo for me. I had grown to feel I could trust his opinions, and I wanted know what he thought about better sleep through pharmaceuticals. He had stated in an early chapter that he had nothing against using medications in general where appropriate, such as statins; so it felt promising that I wouldn’t get some knee-jerk anti-medication attitude.

I started reading the chapter one night shortly before bedtime, and didn’t get up to any of the advice; just lots of emphatic “Sleep is crucial! Quality, uninterrupted sleep! It’s a must! You risk Alzheimer’s if you don’t get it!” Nice scary nightmares to put a random chronic insomniac to sleep with.

The next night I delved in further. Alas, he’s anti-Ambien. Ambien sleep isn’t REAL sleep and yadda yadda yadda. However to give him credit, he had positive things to say about trazodone.

The whole sleep chapter was disappointing and did not feel nearly as data-driven as the previous chapters. It just felt like he got it in his head that sleep was very important to health and decided it warranted a whole chapter on a par with exercise & nutrition, but he didn’t want to put any work into it.

For the emotional health chapter, I commend him for telling so much of his personal story. This chapter was driven by his own experience and that was OK.

I guess the real overarching theme of the book, though, was that everyone is different, and you must find what works for YOU. Your exercise ability, your own metabolic reactions – these are going to determine the “right” exercise and diet for you. He could have been a LITTLE more understanding about chronic insomnia, though, and respected that different things work (and don’t work) for different people. As I said, a bit of a bugaboo for me…

Book Corner 2023.40

Elderhood

by Louise Aronson

First, the negatives. I am so glad to be done with this 300-page book. Did this woman have any editor whatsoever? She must have put down every single thought on the subject of elderliness that ever entered her mind.

Now the positives. I liked learning about geriatrics. I feel a geriatrician is exactly what my mother-in-law needs – a whole-person doctor. (If only I could get her out of the house to see one.)

And I did feel inspired to bookmark one thing. Why do we all hesitate to call ourselves “old”? “Imagine a forty- or fifty-year-old saying, ‘I don’t like to think of myself as an adult. I’m just a kid who’s been around a few extra years.'” Well, actually, I can and do know at least one person who’s said something to that effect, so, not so shocking… “Or a children’s hospital that eschews the term ‘child’ because of its association with immaturity, and instead markets itself as serving short, unemployed people.” OK, that part is funny to imagine.

Book Corner 2023.38

Easy Money

by Ben McKenzie & Jacob Silverman

An antic-crypto screed in which Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and the implosion of FTX figures heavily. I spent most of my 2020 workyear researching cryptocurrency, blockchains, stablecoins, etc., so I have an interest. I also have been a follower of the Effective Altruism movement, with which SBF was associated, so that’s given me a double-interest in the FTX story. I read this with glee. It’s not bad; while unabashedly anti-crypto, it doesn’t come off like a bone to pick, but rather one person’s not unreasonable opinion. Ben McKenzie does make constant references to his being an actor, a somewhat famous actor in his day, but I never saw anything with him in it so I didn’t care. (His biggest role was on a show called the O.C. which was for people younger than me.) For an actor, he’s damn smart.

He’s got lots to share firsthand about SBF because he actually once scored an interview with him as well as something of a Twitter relationship. He found the guy to be really weird (no surprise there), intrinsically; and also, it just felt so weird that SBF wanted to talk to him at all – not only that, but really seemed to want him to LIKE him. McKenzie shares some insight he got form a former FBI agent: Just listen. “Tell the suspect you know he is a good person, but you need help understanding what happened…” Bad actors, all of us, need to see ourselves as good people.

So, the FTX story. I remember it well (it wasn’t even a year ago). Binance, a rival crypto exchange, held tons of FTX tokens (FTT). When they announced that “concerns” about FTX’s balance sheet had led to them to decide to liquidate all their FTT tokens, that was the end. The CEO of Binance, “CZ”, had gotten into some kind of bicker-war with SBF, Well, all it took was the announcement of intent to sell a major quantity of FTT, and “Voila, bank run.” “CZ had played his hand well.”

McKenzie’s problem with crypto is that it has no use case, nothing for the here and now – use cases are always presented as “Someday it could…” His fundamental problem is that it seems to misunderstand the nature of money. Money has value because we TRUST the government to back it. We TRUST that other parties will accept it as legal tender because it has the government of the USA backing it. Crypto is “trustless” – that’s allegedly a feature, not a bug. But he doesn’t think that the necessary trust that could make it ever be anything more than a speculative gamble can be conjured out of thin air, or out of trusting the code – code is written by people. I could see having some good arguments with the guy.