Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You're 80 and Beyond by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge

Excellent book, readable, amusing even, with excellent advice on several levels.

Notes:

Aging vs decay: normal biological process vs optional biological process.

Choosing a "springtime" state of health vs winter/hibernation state.

Growth or decay, no middle ground... kind of like investing, you're either at new highs or in drawdown.

The need for struggle, privation, fasting, eustress, etc.

First Rule: exercise 6 days a week for the rest of your life.

Exercise as a "master signaler"

Second Rule: do serious aerobic exercise 4 days a week for the rest of your life.

The concept of "kedging": doing something really hard or way outside your comfort zone. Salience, growth opportunity... "BOOH" (breaking out of homeostasis) too.

Third rule: weight training, two days a week for the rest of your life.

Power is a function of strength as well as neural coordination.

Fall risk is massively reduced by weight training.

Coordinated strength sports: skiing, tennis

Proprioception

Yoga

On mindset: not getting grumpy, on staying "modern" in dress and demeanor, in your metaperception and meta-proprioception.

Fourth Rule: spend less than you make.

Fifth Rule: quit eating crap

Your body was not designed for overabundance or idleness. Our modern diet is outside our body's design parameters.

Alcohol: "You get another shot in retirement at being an alcoholic."

"In retirement, normal eating will make you fat; normal drinking will make you drunk."

Sixth Rule: Care

"Teddy doesn't care" On caring/having something to care about.

Keep a log. "Keep a log or lose your command."

Seventh Rule: Connect and commit.

Limbic brain and its play/love/connect and work together circuitry.

Humans as pack animals.

Limbic resonance

"Default to yes" and also organize stuff for others.

"I believe I am going to have an interesting life. I'm not going to pass my last years in idleness, petulance and anxiety."

"Exercise is absolutely the most important message of this book. Movement *is* life... most of what we call aging is decay, and decay is optional."

Metaphor about career paths for the young as superhighways: carefully marked, with huge, legible signs, while the paths of retirement are more like back roads, country lanes, with no signs to tell you where to go.

Levels of fitness:

1: 45 minutes of long, slow aerobic exercise at 60-65% of max heart rate without discomfort

2: 45 minutes at 60-65% of max heart rate four days a week with 2 days a week of weight training

3: 1-2 days at 60-65% of max heart rate and 1-2 days at 70-85% of max, plus interval training at 85-100% of max, plus 2 days weight training. Can combine aerobics and weights on single days. Add in a extra long workout at least one day a month.

Reading List:

Precision Heart Training -- Edmund Burke

Serious Training for Endurance Athletes -- Rob Sleamaker and Ray Browning

Long Distance -- Bill McKibben

Why We Run -- Bernd Heinrich

Successful Aging -- John W. Rowe and Robert L. Kahn

Never Cry Wolf -- Farley Mowat

How the Mind Works -- Steven Pinker

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all "riddled" with errors and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction by J. Allan Hobson for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as Restful Sleep by Deepak Chopra for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...

By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy by Michael G. Vickers

The least deceptive way to read this endless, muddled and minutia-laden memoir would be to view it as a very long piece of propaganda: a type of limited hangout of all of the covert (and overt) things the United States does globally in its attempts to project power. It can also be read as an attempt at an extended--and I mean extended --defense of the CIA and all of its meddlings all over the world. This is if you actually read the book. Don't. Piled up with words but saying little of substance, this is the most obfuscatory memoir I've ever read. The author's voice fundamentally irritates: he has a compulsive need to share staggering amounts of unnecessary detail, he comes across as a relentless credit hog, and he repeatedly attempts to place himself right in the middle of the action--even when it's clear he wasn't. Perhaps least ethical of all, he has a habit of framing his actions and decisions so they appear more correct and predictive in retrospect than they ac...

The Dhandho Investor by Mohnish Pabrai

Worth reading, and rereading, and re-rereading. An elegant book that teaches fundamental principles of value investing, and much more. The Dhandho Investor also has the highly unusual quality of being useful at a wide range of reader sophistication levels: you can gain tremendously from this book as a beginner or as a deeply experienced investor. I'll single out Chapters 5 and 6 for particular mention: Chapter 5 describes author Mohnish Pabrai's investing framework, with nine interlocking and synchronistic rules. Chapter 6 describes in very simple language all of the gigantic structural advantages of investing in the stock market, as it offers low frictional costs, a tremendous selection of possible businesses, and, most importantly, periodic incredible opportunities. These two chapters explain why you will take a pass on almost all investments--but then, once in a while, make large bets on specific situations that meet your requirements. [A quick affiliate link to Amazon ...

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