I have fond memories of my heavy squat sessions. They were often on Friday nights, when the gym was empty but for the true believers. The core of my routine was 8 sets of 10 reps of 225 pounds. The endorphins, the sweaty heart-rate spike and the iron-denominated gains in strength were addicting; the return to existential baseline real.

“The king of all exercises”

Weighted back squats are one of the most demanding compound movements there is, because they recruit multiple muscle groups and joints simultaneously. NFL players, powerlifters and generations of coaches and dedicated gym rats the world over swear by them. They’ve long been considered one of the most complete lower-body exercises. They’re good at making your butt and legs look great. And they show the world—quite literally—how much of it you can shoulder.

And you should probably quit doing them.

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For most people over 50 (and, very arguably, anyone) bar squats are not the best way to achieve well-balanced, injury-free lower-body strength for the long haul. Back squats tend to exploit pre-existing structural problems in your hips, glutes and core and create the potential for insidious, slow-developing back, pelvic and knee injuries that, in midlife, become harder to heal.

Also, squats aren’t even the best way to make your butt look great.

To build lower-body strength, balance and stability, several other workouts beat squats, and I’ll get into those below. But first, the case against bar squats—and some context:

I know people love their bar squats. After 40-odd years, however, I reluctantly stopped doing them, once it became painfully clear how they were setting up my body for pain and injury. I know I’m not alone and, conversely, also that my experience isn’t universal and that lots of people love squats. Which is why I’m hoping you’ll….

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The case against weighted back squats

My argument is simple: Though legendary, bar squats—especially at or above body weight—are an outdated way to build lower-body strength. Depending on how hard and heavy you go, I’ve come to think of them as the workout equivalent of petting the bison in Yellowstone National Park: kinda not worth the risk.

Bar squats create lumbar spine compression

When you descend into a loaded barbell squat, you put your lumbar spine under significant compression. One study, albeit from 41 years ago, demonstrated that at loads between 80% and 160% of body weight, the compressive force on the lumbar spine can reach 6 to 10 times body weight.1

Heavy bar squats combined with deep knee flexion, in particular, carry increased risks as discs L4-L5 (the primary load-bearing segments of the lower spine) and L5-S1 (the lowest movable segment) are being compressed and sheared simultaneously while in a mechanically disadvantaged position.2

Back squats exacerbate your accumulated asymmetries

Back squats tend to magnify the asymmetrical muscle development that almost all of us have to some degree—a slight lean to one side, one hip dropping slightly lower than the other, a tilted sacroiliac joint, one foot turned out more than the other. Over time, these asymmetries tend to concentrate stress on one SI joint more than the other, which is a common source of the chronic, hard-to-diagnose low back and hip pain that long-term heavy squatters—me included—often develop in their 40s and 50s.

Beware the asymmetric, tilted SI joint. When SI joints are continually stressed by asymmetrical loading under heavy compression, the surrounding ligaments and joint surfaces can become chronically irritated in a way that is genuinely difficult to treat and often misdiagnosed as a lumbar or hip problem.

This is where the insidious negative impact of bar squats can become a problem, because SI joint dysfunction tends to accumulate quietly and become a nagging problem—the low-grade but persistent pain that seems to live in the middle of your lower back that you can’t stretch or massage away. (Once again, I’m speaking from personal experience.)

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Okay, but what about people who haven’t been damaged by four decades of heavy squats?

Other reasons to ditch loaded back squats

At 50 or older, mobility deficits tend to become baked in from decades of sitting, asymmetrical muscle imbalances and accumulated tightness. All these factors, I believe, argue against starting a new habit of squatting with a heavy bar on the back of your neck.

Hormonal changes that reduce the protective buffer. Particularly in women post-menopause, high-compressive loading of knees and hips under a barbell becomes a different proposition after 50 when hormonal support for ligaments, tendons and cartilage diminishes.

The human tendency to ego load. Who among us isn’t susceptible to throwing more weight on the bar in an attempt to impress everyone else in the gym, none of whom actually notice?

Joint pathology accumulates silently. Plenty of people in their 50s have cartilage degradation, meniscus degeneration or disc issues that don’t produce symptoms during most movements but can flare up under barbell squat mechanics.3 That footnote refers to a 2024 paper in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology that identifies excessive arching of the spine and knee valgus (inward movement under load) as the two most common problems in older adults who do bar squats, creating the potential for injury, on top of all the other factors mentioned above.

In that regard, I’m pretty much Exhibit A for my argument to ditch bar squats. I can squat heavy, and my form may look fine at first glance. But as you watch the above video, notice how much my left knee wanders with each rep, relative to the red vertical line (my right knee also does but not as much). That’s knee valgus, likely a function of weak hip stabilizer muscles, including medial glutes.

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I hadn’t noticed that movement until I recorded myself, and for anyone who continues back squats, I recommend they do the same, from the front, side and rear, to understand exactly how their bodies may be compensating to manage the weight.

Further below, I offer a video of me doing a different weighted leg exercise that works the same muscles but without the lateral knee movement.

Don’t take just my word for it

As it turns out, some heavy hitters in the professional strength and conditioning world have come out in favor of ditching bilateral back squats. Here’s Mike Boyle, a renowned former strength & conditioning coach for the NHL’s Boston Bruins, the U.S. Women’s Olympic Ice Hockey Team and the Boston Red Sox, speaking in September on Peter Attia’s podcast (before Attia’s troubles) about why he moved away from training athletes on bilateral back squats:

Boyle argues against bilateral training in favor of unilateral strength work, which I was heartened to hear because it validated one of my favorite lower-body strength routines—it’s No. 3 in my list below.

6 better alternatives to squats for lower-body strength

If back squats work for you, and you love them and you’re convinced your form is excellent and you don’t want to give up the exercise, don’t. Just don’t go heavy.

But if you’re willing to consider better strength workouts for your legs and core, here are my top 6 strength workouts with explanations why I think each is superior to back squats.

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Are you happy? I don’t know anyone who says they are, except for few venture capitalists. The rest of us are moving too fast, talking too fast, listening too fast, eating too fast, and just trying to keep up too fast. This is neither a healthy nor good way to age with strength. Something about the way we’re living now has to change.

1966: The 59th Street Bridge Song → 2026: The 59th Open Browser Tab Song

The most famous anthem for slowing down to savor life’s simple pleasures may be Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 classic, The 59th Street Bridge Song. It documents what life was like about 300 years ago, kicking around cobblestone streets, talking to flowers and taking afternoon naps. Here’s what I believe that song would have turned into, had a young Paul Simon written it today:

The 59th Open Browser Tab Song
Slow down, you swipe too fast
You got to make the doomscroll last
Just puttin’ down my soulless phone
Looking numb and feeling shitty
Ba da-da da-da da-da, and self pity

Hello shitpost, you’ve got ‘em going
I’ve come to watch the anger growin’
Ain’t you got no memes for me?
Doo-ait-n-doo-doo, feeling shitty
Ba da-da da-da da-da, and self pity

I got no job (do you?) no deepfakes to peep
I’m laid off and lousy and ready to weep
Let ChatGPT drop its algos on me
Life, it’s over, AI’s winning

(If that didn’t make any sense, here’s The 59th Street Bridge Song’s actual lyrics.)

Why life now feels too fast, and what to do about it

Relentlessly adopting ever more technology is perhaps the primary way that many of us become trapped in the cultural speed cycle that only seems to be accelerating with AI-everything-all-the-time. (There are other ways, too, such as over-exposure to present-day politics, but I’ll focus here on the tech and AI.) But it’s not only the speed of the changes but the opacity of what’s causing them, who’s influencing them and why that is creating a sense that we no longer have agency in how we get to live our lives.

The feeling that you don’t know what you don’t know can be incredibly destabilizing.

We’re at only the beginning of a massive—to use the technical term—enshittification phase of our professional and personal lives, in which trying to understand and keep up with the changes that we are continually told are good (really good!) for us can often lead, instead, to more stress, uncertainty, dysfunction and a lower quality of life.

For a clever take on this idea, watch this:

Disenshittifying AI to slow down your life

Ignoring AI isn’t the answer, and learning how to functionally use it will be, for anyone who needs to professionally function or understand how other people do, essential. Because it creates that critical sense of agency. For example, I’m not a tech person but I use AI every day to solve practical business problems, test arguments, understand complex subjects and be more creative.

In the past week or so, I’ve used paid versions of AI to:

• identify false claims about longevity supplements, including those made by well-known longevity doctor who shall remain nameless (Mark Hyman)

• plan two summer vacations (because the original plan fell through)

• create a spreadsheet of my 2025 business income and expenses for my taxes

• examine the condition of a 150-year-old gold coin

• examine aging research claims made in published scientific papers

• create images to top off AGING with STRENGTH articles

• understand the circular financing problem at the heart of “AI bubble risk”

• transcribe the audio of two hour-long interviews of , for a profile I wrote of her for the forthcoming issue of Geezer magazine

• find the best credit card offer with the best benefits for the lowest annual fee

• proofread my articles before I publish — though I still missed a typo (since fixed)

• ruthlessly cuss out Claude.ai after I caught it condensing two of Sari’s remarks in the raw transcript of our interview, contrary to my explicit instructions.

What I have not used AI to do is write this or any other AGING with STRENGTH article. Because certainly you’ve noticed how many other Substacks, including many doctors, have begun feeding readers dense slabs of AI-generated Content that feels like it came from a vending machine running an Nvidia chip.

However, in the spirit of stress testing my ideas on practical steps we can take to slow down our lives and recapture a diminishing sense of agency, I did what any modern reporter would do: I asked the most robust AI model I can find. Here’s what my paid version of Claude (Sonnet 4.6) had to say about how to slow down your life in actionable ways—and its rather candid response to my interrogation of its answers.

Disclosure: I think some of Claude’s recommendations are effective. Including committing to mastering an analog skill—resistance training, sport shooting, restoring bicycles or cooking, for instance—and trying a weeklong “information fast.”

Keeping the phone pocketed more often, and keeping it quiet always

One habit I changed that had a cascading effect on slowing my life down is refusing to pull out my phone on the walk home from my daughter’s school in the morning. Like almost every other parent, once you see the kid walk past the gate, I’d pull out my phone and occupy my brain with…nothing really important. But one day a year or more ago, I forced myself to keep the phone pocketed and just walked home occupied by only my thoughts. About a week later, I no longer had the urge to “enphone” myself on the walk home, and since then, I’ve also been able to stop habitually looking at it while in grocery check out lanes, waiting rooms and the car, at stoplights.

I also don’t allow emails and text messages to ding, bleep, buzz or vibrate my phone. As a result, I can focus without interruption when necessary, and life feels a little slower and more on my terms. I check texts a few times a day, in batches. Your friends and family may complain at first, but they get used to it. I still regress to checking scores of teams playing sports I care nothing about, just because. But keeping the phone quiet has made me feel less like Harrison Bergeron (thanks, Kurt Vonnegut) and more like a pre-internet version of myself.

Going back to writing hand-written letters

One of the cultural truths that Geezer has proved, as a print-only, thrice yearly coffee-table magazine with original reporting and writing about the Gen X aging experience, is that people are hungry to read real words on real paper written by other real people. (That appeal crosses generational frontiers: Geezer has, to our surprise, a growing number of Gen Z and Millennial readers. I think they react to Geezer the same way I reacted to grainy, 1960s film footage of Sasquatch: “What the hell is this?”)

Which got me thinking about starting a new thing: writing a hand-written letter and mailing it, in an envelope addressed by hand and affixed with a stamp, every month to whomever wants to receive one. The letters will be four handwritten pages, give or take, and include notes and observations about the analog world that keeps life interesting, and will probably also have some drawings from my 10-year-old daughter, an artist at heart.

Whoever wants to receive these mailed letters will get one, for a flat rate of $8 a month. I’ll create a website dedicated to this idea shortly, but I thought I would first share it with you, dear readers. If you’re interested, you can message me here

…or use my ko-fi page to set up a monthly $8 payment (and cancel anytime).

If you hate that I’m even writing about this idea, please leave a comment. Any honest feedback is good to have. Be sure to explain why you hate it.

Until my next post, on more unconventional strength training movements, consider experimenting with AI, to build agency, and reading paper, to keep one foot in the analog world.

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The BLUF (bottom line up front): Research into the biology of long-living older adults reveals unique differences in so-called super agers and centenarians vs other people, and suggests what we can do to help us live longer, too.

The bodies and brains of very old and healthy people are roadmaps with some useful directions for people interested in aging with existential strength.

Two recent studies examined complementary facets of what separates so-called super agers—people who live well into their 80s in superb health—and centenarians from everyone else. Each report suggests that the biology of staying remarkably fit in body and mind may be far more flexible than most people over 50 have been led to believe.

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Join me on a live chat on Wednesday, March 4, at 10am Pacific Time / 1pm Eastern Time / 6pm GMT. Join me for a lively conversation about aging, ageism, strength & fitness, food & nutrition, sleep, stress, sex, menopause (I’m not an expert but I recently interviewed someone who is), and any other subject relevant to life after 45. I’ll happily take your questions, suggestions, curses and criticisms.

Find the chat thread here: https://www.agingwithstrength.com/chat

In other words: the new science supports the idea that moving your body with purpose daily, and feeding it whole food and clocking sufficient sleep, puts you in position for maximum healthy longevity. (For paying subscribers, here are several actionable recommendations to move and feed your body like its 1899).

What the centenarian & super ager studies revealed

The research on Swiss centenarians (press release here; scientific paper here) finds that certain 100‑year‑olds have blood protein patterns that look more like those of middle‑aged adults.

The new examination of brain tissue taken posthumously from “super‑agers” in their 80s (decent NYT summary here; scientific paper here) finds that they made roughly twice as many new brain cells as their peers, helping them keep unusually sharp memories.

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Together these findings suggest that, even very late in life, the brain and body can stay far more youthful than we once thought.

• People in their 80s with exceptional memories are still growing roughly twice as many new brain cells in a key memory region as their peers, the super agers study found. The study also found that Alzheimer's leaves marks on the physical structure of brain cells before those cells even start changing how their genes behave — suggesting the disease may be taking hold earlier than previously understood.

• 100‑year‑olds who reach that age in relatively good shape carry blood protein patterns that look closer to those of middle‑aged adults and, fascinatingly, have significantly lower levels of antioxidant proteins than the standard geriatric population—the opposite of what one might expect, since antioxidants combat “free radicals” that damage cells, proteins, fats and DNA.

  • A note about the paper’s methodology: The researchers did not document nutrition, exercise or lifestyle factors. Rather, they drew blood from 39 Swiss centenarians 100–105 yrs old, a few dozen hospitalized octogenarians (aged 80–90) and 40 healthy younger adults aged 30–60, then measured 724 proteins across inflammatory and cardiovascular panels. The paper is part of a larger analysis of centenarians called The SWISS100 Project.

For anyone over 50, 60 or 70, that raises the stakes on unglamorous habits—how often you actually move, how hard you exercise, what you eat, how well you sleep, and whether you keep forcing your brain to learn difficult new things—because those day‑to‑day decisions appear to feed directly into the same systems that help a small minority stay sharp and physically capable deep into old age.

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Put yourself in position to live healthier for longer by:

• Moving your body. Every day. With purpose.

  • Walking every day is good. Walking briskly is better.

  • Three-minute mini-workouts you can do at home in street clothes with no equipment help build strength & flexibility across multiple planes of motion.

  • Resistance training builds muscles you’ll need.

• Shopping for whole foods (ie, food that spoils if you don’t eat it) and think of eating meals based on lean meats & fish, beans & legumes, olive/avocado oil and greens.

• Sleeping 7–8 hours a night, optimally on a regular schedule.

• Working on one hard mental task each week (learn, practice, or memorize something new).

• Practicing daily gratitude and, by all means, daily self-forgiveness.

See you on Wednesday’s live chat, if you can make it.

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The billion-dollar longevity industry has become the Las Vegas of clinical science: a faux oasis that cares about only one thing—taking your money. To do that, Vegas built casinos; longevity marketers just lie.

Longevity literacy is therefore a skill—the ability to understand how a growing society of wellness chiselers and charlatans present half-truths as settled science and unproven supplements as the best $149 purchase you’ll ever make—but only if you act now.

lon·​gev·​i·​ty chis·​el·​er, n. someone who intentionally promotes unproven anti-aging claims or misrepresents science for financial gain, often unacknowledged.

Below are three recent examples of how agents in the Longevity-Industrial Complex take advantage of their own readers—their most dedicated customers—to enrich themselves or burnish their reputations. I know some AGING with STRENGTH readers don’t enjoy articles like this one and, candidly, I don’t enjoy writing them. But I believe pushing back against wellness hype is important, to set a standard for the future.

Let’s get into each longevity literacy example in detail.

1 | Dr. Mark Hyman misrepresents research to sell a supplement

Hyman is a well-known and relentless figure in Big Longevity. He runs his own branded website and co-founded an online wellness site, Function Health. He’s published best-selling books and prominently advertises his proximity to famous influencers.

On Sunday, subscribers to Hyman’s newsletter woke up to an email, titled, “A Non-Negotiable in My Healthy Aging Routine.” In the first paragraph, Hyman presents his hook, which is “the science behind how you can slow biological aging,” and then baits that hook with a saturated fatty acid called C15:0, which, Hyman says, has “caught my attention.”

Turns out there’s a C15:0 “standout supplement” called fatty15. Hyman enthusiastically recommends it, citing 15 research papers to support his assertion that fatty15 can “improve our everyday lives.” And, as luck would have it, fatty15’s manufacturer is offering Hyman’s “community” a 20% discount.

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But what he presents as a personal anecdote of research and discovery is, in fact, an unacknowledged sales pitch.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I reached out to Dr. Hyman and his website’s support staff by email several time, asking for his response to my questions about his financial relationship to fatty15 and his interpretation of the clinical studies about its active ingredient. He did not respond. A representative from the DrHyman.com support staff replied, suggesting I review Hyman’s website writings.

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The undisclosed commercial relationship

Though he doesn’t acknowledge it in his email, Hyman financially benefits from fatty15 sales (the supplement’s website identifies Hyman as a paid promoter of the product). Hyman also sells fatty15 directly through his own website, with his own branded product page and has a promotional code relationship with the company.

Hyman’s email structured as a personal letter from a doctor (“as I dug into the emerging research…”) is actually cloaked marketing of a product pipeline.

The intentional misrepresentation of research to sell supplements

Hyman’s email dives into what seems like convincing evidence that fatty15 is a supplement with a proven clinical track record. Hyman cites no fewer than 15 research studies. But in fact:

• Almost none of the research Hyman cites was conducted in humans, and the two studies that were found effects too small, too narrow, and too preliminary to support anything he's claiming

• Several of the 15 cited studies are authored by the co-founder and CEO of fatty15’s manufacturer, Seraphina Therapeutics.

• Several other papers Hyman cites studied only mice, rabbits, or dolphins, or involved petri-dish experiments on isolated human cells — the kind of early-stage science that routinely fails to translate into human benefits.

• The only human clinical trial of C15:0 supplementation in Hyman's entire reference list involved 30 obese 20-year-olds, and across most key measures—cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose, and inflammation—found no significant improvements.

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None of the 15 papers Hyman cites is a randomized, controlled trial testing C15:0 in healthy middle-aged or older adults — which is precisely the population to which he’s surreptitiously marketing.1

I asked two longevity scientists about Hyman’s representation of the research behind fatty15. One of the scientists said the supplement may have potential but has “extremely weak evidence for human benefit at this point.” The other scientist called Hyman’s email “100% advertisement.”

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“I looked up this product…a while back and read through a lot of those papers,” this scientist told me. “There is no data worth citing, all conjecture and animal data designed to sell a ‘new’ type of fatty acid.”

The sad part is that C15:0 might turn out to have real benefits for people. Hyman’s fatty15 hustle may turn out to be everything he already says without evidence that it is. But when a doctor says things that aren’t fully supported by science, it’s a longevity scam.

2 | Katie Couric Media disguises a supplement ad as straight journalism

Before she became infamous for hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, Katie Couric had been famous for being a journalist, and rightly so. Today, she runs what appears to be a rather successful media company that blends soft-focus marketing content with some wellness advocacy. But Couric still trades on her previous career as a broadcast news maven, so when her company publishes what looks like reporting, there’s an expectation of transparency and truth.

Which is why I was surprised when I came across a Katie Couric Media article whose headline, I’ve Tried Countless Wellness Products — This One Is Different, sounded like straight-up marketing. The subtitle, Showing your liver some love has never been easier, felt like Marketing 101. But okay, I’m an old-school reporter. Maybe I was just being a curmudgeon.

Turns out the article, whose opening line is, “I’m a sucker for a good Instagram ad,” is a wet-kiss “advertorial” for a liver supplement called Dose. But there’s nothing at the top of the post to alert readers. To the contrary, the post is presented as a piece of (flabby) reporting. To appear more like a real news story, it even includes an interview with “an expert in the dietary supplement and nutrition market,” Kiran Krishnan.

“As an expert, Krishnan can vouch that the brand has done rigorous clinical research,” the article squeals, “to show that Dose’s clinically backed formula is effective in supporting liver health.”

What the article does not disclose is that Krishnan is a member of Dose’s scientific advisory board. At the bottom of the piece, an icon reveals that it was “sponsored by Dose,” and the penny dropped for this reporter.

So it’s an ad. Who cares?

As with Hyman’s email, you may ask: What’s the big deal? Anybody with a nose for b.s. would quickly determine that this fluff piece wasn’t a New York Times investigation. And that’s a fair point. What’s also fair is treating your readers, who are your customers, with enough respect to be transparent in your operations. In this case, that means putting the sponsorship notification at the top of the post, so readers can decide for themselves what value, if any, to give a piece of marketing schtick masquerading as reporting.

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Transparency doesn’t sell supplements, apparently.

3 | A university dementia study opts for misleading clickbait headlines

Could diet soda increase dementia risk? That was the head-turning headline of a recent article by the University of Miami’s medical school (or probably more accurately, the school’s marketing department) to stoke attention to its new analysis.

When a university medical school publishes research, there’s a very reasonable expectation of accuracy, without which public trust in even that institution will quickly fade. I’ve written previously about Stanford aging research that didn’t quite back up what the medical school’s press release claimed.

But I haven’t before seen a university medical school so blatantly imply a potential spit-out-your-diet-soda conclusion—drinking Diet Coke could bring on dementia—before acknowledging a few paragraphs later that, in fact, it doesn’t.

“A new analysis…suggests that drinking diet soda every day may be linked to a higher risk of developing dementia,” the article, published Jan. 26 by Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, reported. Some 15 paragraphs later, the article casually mentions that:

”41% of high diet soda consumers in the study had diabetes, compared with 18% of the rest of the cohort.

“When researchers repeated the analysis excluding participants with obesity or diabetes, the association between diet soda and dementia disappeared.”

Translation: Nevermind! Nothing to see here, folks. Thanks for coming.

That’s why I believe it’s necessary to publish analyses of poor or disingenuous longevity and wellness marketing intentionally disguised as honest reporting. In this case, a peer-reviewed research paper published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease stood up a straw-man argument with a juicy headline before essentially knocking it down.

Yet another reason why longevity literacy matters now more than ever.

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Because Substack is increasingly l…

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Happy Friday, everyone. I’ll keep this short, because there’s more to come from AGING with STRENGTH this weekend, on counterintuitive strength training routines that build muscle and increase neuromuscular fitness after 50.

A recent study got a lot of attention from major media (and from some Substacks) because its main finding was that genes account for about 55% of longevity—more than double the 20% to 25% influence that scientists believed genes had on human lifespan.

But what virtually everyone else failed to report is that, according to the study’s authors themselves, that 55% figure is probably low, and that their research suggests that lifespan may be 70% or more hereditary.

In case you missed it…

Published in the journal Science, the study used mathematical models to analyze historical data from three sets of twins in Scandinavia—including twins raised apart—and from siblings of centenarians in the United States. Those models estimated that if you could eliminate all deaths from accidents, infections and other external causes, genetics would account for about 55% of the remaining variation in how long people live.

But halfway through the study, there’s this Easter egg: The researchers also ran a simpler, statistical analysis of their data that found heritability of longevity to be closer to 70%, perhaps even more. That would mean that genes are roughly three times more influential in lifespan than previously thought.

In this excerpt, the authors are essentially saying: our careful, conservative estimate is 55%, but a cruder method suggests it could be 70% or higher. The true answer is probably somewhere in that range.

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Here’s Figure S6, from the study’s supplementary text, that researchers noted in the excerpt pictured above:

If 55% genetic influence on lifespan is likely a conservative conclusion, that’s significant and worth reporting. The 70% figure from the study’s model-free analysis appears only in the paper itself. No journalist picked it up.

While I’m picking on journalists…

…let’s also recognize what I originally failed to mention about longevity.

One of the most gratifying parts of writing AGING with STRENGTH is that its readers are incredibly sharp and engaged. After I published this article, made this excellent point, here shown as a screen shot:

Genetics can give you a shot at extreme longevity, but you have to survive long enough to access that potential: “Lifestyle remains the dominant lever.” Well said, and thank you for making this important point.

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Next week on AGING with STRENGTH:

> strength training workouts that build neuromuscular fitness (incl. unconventional routines)

> the single best piece of equipment to build enduring functional strength

> 3-minute #WorkoutWednesday video #27

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Yesterday at 5pm, I stood over the Sunset Boulevard surf break in Los Angeles, the air filled with the smell of briny ocean and the glottal brrrr of motorcycle engines on Pacific Coast Highway behind me. A swell had come in, producing six-foot waves with a lot of mid-Pacific energy in them, and I was suddenly uncomfortable: I hadn’t surfed in more than a year, after shoulder and knee surgeries. I had, in the vernacular, lost my stoke. In this moment, all I wanted was to get back in my car. I wordlessly recited the excuses why this wasn’t the right day, the right hour, the right conditions to get back in the water with my not-right surfboard—a 10-foot fiberglass log better suited to knee-high rollers.

I could come back tomorrow….

I pictured myself driving home, peeling off my (dry) wetsuit and then….no. Just no. I couldn’t let myself off the hook like that. The reason I couldn’t is that this moment was familiar to me. I understood that meeting it was important and retreating from it would be a regression of a larger kind—one with consequences.

I had to start the lonely process of getting my stoke back, and just get in the water.

Hello ocean, my old friend, I’ve come to paddle into you again

Which I did, extremely inelegantly, and was immediately reminded that gym workouts are great for many things, including making you look good at the beach, but don’t always build functional strength the real world demands. Just paddling out past the big sets of waves exhausted me. Once I could sit up on my board, I said to myself, “Good job, dude. You got back on the bicycle.” Tomorrow, I’d be sore and creaky.

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The hard lesson: As the years accumulate, getting back to baseline after an injury (or the surgical procedure that addressed the injury), is long and hard. Even when you’re physically able to resume your athletic routines, hopping back on the proverbial bicycle can feel a lot worse than remaining in one’s new, post-injury, slightly uncomfortable comfort zone.

In case you missed it….

Failure isn’t in the performance but in the excuse to avoid performing

Yesterday’s ordeal reminded me of another time, this past July, when I literally got back on a bike, two months after a shoulder surgery that, to that point, had made any exercise all but impossible. I thought I was ready to jump back into a simple cardio workout. My mind wanted nothing to do with it.

The bike I mounted was a stationary one, in a sad little excuse for a workout room at an otherwise very pleasant old hotel. Cranking the peddles of this bike felt like stepping onto a treadmill sideways—an alien maneuver that made no physical sense. My aerobic ability had vanished since my surgery, and this first step toward regaining it felt like starting from less than zero. I peddled for two minutes and was physiologically forced to stop, out of breath, sweating and very much wanting to throw that stationary bike into the wall of the sad little room. I vividly remember the bad mood that my failed workout spawned.

Except that it wasn’t the workout that failed, but rather my expectations of it.

Embrace the journey back to baseline

One thing the surgeons never tell you beforehand is that regaining your athletic self is a mental battle, requiring a brand of fortitude and self-forgiveness that may not be part of our emotional IQ.

The hard lesson: Throwing myself back into the ocean or atop a stationary bike, there is no failure. Failure would have been accepting a (reasonable) excuse not to try. In these critical moments starting the journey back to baseline, one’s performance isn’t important. What matters is putting oneself into motion again and being willing to suffer the indignities that come with starting the journey back to baseline.

I got my stoke back by getting back into the water and paddling into those six-foot waves. Whether I caught any waves was, for the moment, irrelevant. Oftentimes, the universe rewards you just for putting yourself out there.1

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This article was updated on Feb. 10 to include Diamandis’s attempt to visit Epstein’s New Mexico ranch in 2008 and his 2014 interactions with Epstein at a TED conference, according to documents that are not in the Justice Department’s files. They contradict Diamandis’s statement that he was “introduced” to Epstein only in 2013.

Peter Attia isn’t the only notable longevity-wellness industry figure who went out his way to engage with registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution.

, the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and the co-founder (along with Tony Robbins) of a longevity clinic that charges more than $10,000 for its most basic membership, pursued a connection to Epstein over at least a six-year span, from 2008 to 2014, records show. Notably, Diamandis says he “was introduced” to Epstein in 2013, though emails show him arranging an in-person visit with Epstein five years earlier.

As of this writing, Diamandis has not offered a public explanation of the disparity.

Why this matters: the longevity industry’s integrity problem

In the billion-dollar wellness industry, transparency and sound judgment matter—because they’re often in questionable supply. Diamandis, who earned a Harvard medical degree, is one of the most prominent evangelists and entrepreneurs in the longevity-industrial complex. He charges up to $250,000 to give a speech, so clearly his words and actions matter greatly to a lot of people. He co-founded two venture-backed companies; Fountain Life, with Robbins, and Human Longevity Inc., that sell premium diagnostics and concierge health services to wealthy clients, marketed around the idea that, if you can pay enough, aging can be slowed or reversed.

Ambition is admirable, but so is speaking candidly to the people paying you. At a time when the longevity industry is bloated with misdirection, false claims and shaded truths, the people at the top should practice more transparency, not less.

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Diamandis & Epstein: unanswered questions

In May 2008, Diamandis wrote an email to Epstein’s assistant connecting Epstein to a business associate of Diamandis’s and asking for “proposed dates” to meet at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, documents show. The email was sent about seven weeks before Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution and began serving his jail sentence in Florida, on June 30, 2008.

Whether the men actually met in person that year is not clear. (You can peruse the Jmail trove of all Epstein files, including many not included in the Justice Department’s file, in a format vastly more searchable than the government’s.)

In April 2009, while Epstein remained incarcerated but was allowed to leave jail from 8am to 8pm six days a week, Diamandis emailed him directly seeking a “catchup.”

“Hi Jeffrey- It’s been a while since we chatted,” Diamandis wrote. “I’d love to connect and catch-up,” he added. “Are you in NYC or Florida these days?”

There is no indication in any public record thus far that Diamandis’s connection to Epstein went beyond business interests.

Diamandis’s response to this article

A day after this article first published, on Feb. 4, Diamandis responded with a statement in two parts that minimize his connection to Epstein and contradict the historical record of their six-year correspondence, most of which occurred after Epstein’s public reputation has become odious to many.

Diamandis says he was “introduced” to Epstein in May 2013 by his book publisher, who later urged him to meet with Epstein to discuss an XPRIZE donation. “I had a single fundraising meeting with Epstein about XPRIZE,” Diamandis says in the first part of his statement. “That’s it.” He also says, “Had I known more about him, I would have never pursued a meeting.”

In the second part of his statement Diamandis says his introduction to Epstein occurred at “TED Monterey,” facilitated by the publisher, John Brockman, during a group dinner. “We introduced at that time but we didn’t connect beyond an initial introduction,” Diamandis wrote. “It was later that Brockman suggested that I approach Epstein for XPRIZE Funding, which I did.”

But emails show Diamandis had wanted to visit Epstein at his New Mexico ranch as early as 2008 and had asked Epstein to reconnect and catch up in 2009. Moreover, the Brockman group dinners occurred at the main TED conference, which in 2013 wasn’t in Monterey. Further, an email exchange between Diamandis and Epstein in March 2014 (see below), suggest they had interacted at the big TED event in Vancouver that year, not 2013.

Notably, by 2014, TED conference organizers had barred Epstein from attending, so he held meetings in hallways and a hotel lobby—and apparently also attended Brockman’s dinners.

“Hi Jeffrey- Great to see you too.”

By May 2013, Diamandis’s and Epstein’s mutual interest in meeting was clear. “Jeffrey wants you to please contact him whenever you come to New York….he would love to get together,” Epstein’s assistant wrote to Diamandis in May 2013. Diamandis replied the same day, asking his assistant to “figure out when I’m next in NYC & schedule time with Jeffrey.” On June 9, 2014, Diamandis was scheduled to see Epstein for an hour-long meeting, these documents show.

This is a note I published on Feb. 10 after coming across the Jmail rendering of further emails between Diamandis and Epstein.

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Epstein later wrote to another acquaintance about Diamandis: “know him well.”

In an email sent a couple weeks before meeting Diamandis at a TED conference and three months before the two men arranged to meet in New York, Epstein referred to Diamandis as a “bullshitter.”

Only a fraction of the more than 270 documents in the government’s Epstein files that include Diamandis’s name are personal correspondences between the men or their assistants. Many are versions of the same emails.

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Other health and wellness entrepreneurs in Epstein’s orbit

The overall longevity market, encompassing complementary and alternative medicines, gene sequencing, and anti-aging therapies and products, generated $65 billion in revenue in 2023 and is projected to reach $314 billion by 2030.1

The two Peters—Attia and Diamandis—were hardly the only luminaries in the longevity-wellness industrial complex to have associated with Epstein.

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So did Bryan Johnson, the wax-skinned tech bro who wants people to pay him $1 million to avoid death. So did Katie Couric, who attended (now arrested former) Prince Andrew’s birthday party—and rearranged weekend plans to have tea at Epstein’s New York City home—17 months after he was released from prison. So did Deepak Chopra, who met with Epstein at least 12 times between 2016 and late 2018, during which time Chopra published two NYT best-selling self-help books, including “The Healing Self: A Revolutionary New Plan to Supercharge Your Immunity and Stay Well for Life.” So did George Church, a Harvard genetics professor and longevity business entrepreneur who, along with two Harvard colleagues, once proposed Epstein fund a “pleasure genome initiative” exploring neural correlates of pleasure, and who shared meals with Epstein as late as 2014.

The list goes on. Each of the above names has offered what feel like regretful if also professionally vetted apologies or explanations for their interactions with Epstein.

A few thoughts on Peter Attia’s relationship to Epstein

What distinguishes Attia’s relationship with Epstein from all the others is that:

• he wrote to Epstein with crude comments about women’s bodies

• he has wrestled with deep emotional issues that he described with admirable candor in his best-selling 2023 book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

• unlike almost everyone else with a direct, personal connection to Epstein, he’s made no excuses for his interactions with the man

A day before this article published, Attia, who is 52, posted a lengthy statement on X (fitting, considering Elon owns the often vile, increasingly toxic platform and is also featured in Epstein’s emails) to his staff, explaining his relationship with Epstein and not attempting to defend his crude sexualized remarks. You can read Attia’s statement here.

The cancellations begin

Attia, who CBS News just hired a week ago as a special health-wellness-longevity guru-slash-correspondent, is not expected to hold that job for much longer. For many people, the Epstein revelations were the disappointing icing on the proverbial cake—a layer cake of Attia product affiliations (like the overpriced David protein bar, which until Monday had paid Attia to be its chief science officer) and business ventures (like his high-end longevity clinic chain, Biograph, which he launched from stealth with a venture capitalist a year ago) that create real or perceived conflicts of interest.

The heartbreaking failure

Then there’s the most damning, heartbreaking Attia failure of all, which he himself disclosed on page 379 of his book, in a chapter titled “Work in Progress”: In July 2017, during a business trip to New York, Attia received a panicked call from his wife: their one-month-old son had stopped breathing and nearly died before being revived with CPR, and was in an ambulance to the ICU. His wife pleaded with him to come home. But instead, Attia wrote, he stayed in New York—for another 10 days—because of what he called “important” (his quotes) work.

That work, it turns out, involved a few meetings with Epstein, according to the time stamps on Attia’s emails released by the government. He chose that work over his family—his desperate, fragile family in a world of pain. It’s hard to fathom.

What happens next?

Peter Attia is almost certainly now in the process of disappearing, voluntarily or otherwise, from our collective longevity consciousness. At least for a while. (Peter Diamandis may lose a few speaking engagements but is not likely to disappear, is my guess.) Does that mean that Attia’s book, Outlive, which contains a lot of objectively valuable explanatory and clinical information about living better for longer, should no longer be read or discussed, due to the extreme failures of its author?

At a time when many Americans see equally poor, if not worse behavior from many other public figures in entertainment, academia and, especially, government, time will tell.

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Author’s request: If you like this podcast, please “like” this podcast! It really helps.

Even knowledgeable listeners will learn something new here, because Annie is one of the best communicators of clinical women’s- and brain-health information there is.

As Dr. Fenn says near the beginning, “There are no stupid questions about menopause.” My response: “Just wait, Annie.” (See her verdict is at the end).

“Menopause for men” podcast timestamps

01:27—Defining menopause and perimenopause in clinical terms. “It is a retrospective diagnosis,” Dr. Fenn says. “There’s also a lot of misunderstanding in the medical community.”

04:15—Typical age ranges for perimenopause and the clues that it’s arriving.

05:24—Estrogen, progesterone & the hypothalamus. “They rise and then they fall, and then they rise and then they fall….“

07:00—The rise of the menopause/perimenopause conversation (and the subsequent industry) during the past few years. “On social media, there are many ‘menopause experts’ talking about it.” Baby Boomers started it; Millennials wanted to talk more about it; celebrities took it to the next level.

08:25—The biggest male misconceptions about menopause. “You can’t just say, ‘Go to the doctor, get on hormones’ and you’ll be fine.”

08:58—How the Women’s Health Initiative study of 2003 “scared off a generation of doctors.”

10:05—The dearth of experienced menopause doctors. “There is a huge gap.” The “counterintuitive” choice for women.

11:20—Male misconception #2 about menopause/perimenopause. “There’s a lot more things going on than what’s happening to a woman’s emotions.” The problem of poor sleep quality.

12:30—“Zoom out a little bit” to understand a woman’s menopause experience: She’s taking care of work, kids, home, husband, etc., and then….”the bio-energetic crisis” hits.

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13:38—The “injured athlete” corollary to menopause: how a guy might, might be able to relate to the changes and challenges menopause may bring.

14:41—The specific hormonal changes that occur during menopause. Estrogen, the master regulator, has receptors throughout a woman’s body—including hundreds in the brain. “Whatchamacallit Syndrome.” Brain fog, fatigue: “This can be very distressing.” Exercise becomes more difficult, through lack of sleep & food choices.

17:10—Making the right food choices in menopause & perimenopause. “Women are constantly pushing against this pre-diabetic state.” Eating for stable blood sugar. The great harm of UPFs. “Muscle is mandatory” — and its “a glucose sink.”

19:07—Being a good partner to women in menopause. “The last thing in the world a menopausal woman wants to hear is, ‘Oh, is it your hormones again?’” Being proactive and enabling (with some specific examples). Volunteering to take the kids out for a few hours or taking care of the damn groceries (or both).

21:34—Foods to avoid during menopause.

23:19—Alcohol’s role and caveats during menopause and perimenopause.

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24:55—Two books for men (or anyone) interested in learning more about menopause and perimenopause. The amygdala & The I Do Not Care Club. “Women don’t care about stuff that they used to.”

(Also: check out Annie’s articles about menopause and perimenopause.)

27:16—Sex and intimacy during menopause and perimenopause. “Most of the time, it’s not about she’s mad at you (although she might be).” Lack of estrogen in vaginal tissues = “an easy fix.” Work on sex communication beforehand, if possible.

29:20—Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). Estrogen & progesterone; “testosterone could be included in the mix.” The new way to refer to this therapy: MHT. Tablets, creams, etc. Reducing colon-cancer risk and maybe risk of dementia. “Not every woman wants to be medicalized. But every woman deserves a discussion about the pros and cons.”

34:42—Resources for further reading. ”Your questions were not stupid at all!”

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If you can figure out why you want to work your body for those 20 minutes a day, you’re much more likely to end up doing it.

Last January, I published an audio & text essay, Physical strength and flexibility in 2025. The thesis was that our bodies are meant to move and that, for healthy aging, some form of strength training—which need not be intense or include more than your own bodyweight—is non-negotiable.

(See two video examples below.)

My goal, I wrote, was to “get both stronger and faster, and leaner and more flexible.” (Oh, is that all?) I also said I wasn’t after bigger muscles but greater neuromuscular efficiency. Looking back, my 2025 goals bring to mind a childhood admonition from my grandpa, when I failed to eat what I’d put on my dinner plate: “Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.”

In 2026, I’m organizing around a simple mantra:

Move your body. Every day. With purpose.

The simplicity of this 11-syllable mantra is intentional.

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A year ago, I wrote about jumping rope, bar squats and box jumps as means to achieve my personal physical strength and flexibility goals. The jumping rope habit stuck, thankfully, but bar squats—one of my oldest and most reliable weighted exercises—no longer work for me, I realized after one too many “uh-oh” setbacks. (If you’re interested in a fuller explanation of my break up with heavy bar-squat routines, drop a note in a comment, and maybe I’ll write a separate post about that.)

On the other hand, moving with purpose for just 20 minutes a day is a goal that each of us can interpret and tailor to our 2026 physical strength and flexibility goals.

What does “with purpose” mean?

Moving with purpose simply means intentionally putting your body into motion and your muscles into positions of healthy stress. For some people, gardening or a brisk walk is sufficient for their goals and bodies. For others, moving with purpose means resistance training, practicing yoga or pilates, a short swim or bodyweight movements in the living room after lunch.

1-minute rings movements: My No. 1 recommendation for neuromuscular strength & fitness after 50. Gyms and weights are good. Rings are x10 the ROI, in less time.

In other words, purpose means doing more than only the minimum movement required to continue your existence and fulfill your daily obligations and needs. It means doing more than moving your body from bed→bathroom→kitchen→car →desk→car→kitchen→couch→fridge→couch→ bathroom→bed each day.

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Another way to think about moving with purpose is that it’s a want, not a need. And that suggests how much of physical strength and flexibility is really about desire. If you can figure out why you want to work your body for those 20 minutes a day, you’re much more likely to end up doing it.

Why 20 minutes?

For physical strength and fitness, small wins lead to bigger wins. We can’t all realistically get to the gym, pedal 10 miles or grind out a run three times a week. But we can all burn more calories being active in our own homes, 30 seconds or 2 minutes or 5 minutes at a time.

My argument is that 10 minutes a day (while a great place to start a fitness journey) is not enough to build into the latter stages of fitness, and that 30 minutes can feel unrealistic to many people, 20 minutes a day of purposeful physical movement is enough to build significant gains in functional strength, flexibility, balance, proprioception and neuromuscular fitness that you can feel and that gives your body and brain invaluable, habit-forming rewards for long-term strength into old age.

If Chris Hemsworth can do it, so can you….and you can do it in fewer than 5 minutes, at home, in street clothes, with no equipment. Start slow and build up.

If you’re like me and want to be able to walk briskly when you’re 80, think about moving your body with purpose now, for 20 minutes a day.

An eminently achievable goal for 2026

Twenty minutes represents roughly 2% of a 16-hour waking day. Can you carve out 2% of each day to build physical strength and flexibility in 2026? I think you can.

In a subsequent post—if there is sufficient interest from all of you—I’ll stake out specific movements and exercises for building muscle (lean or large), cardiovascular endurance (VO2 max), greater balance and core strength (highly correlated to greater longevity) for 2026. All of which are the result of some hard lessons I’ve learned after 47 years of physical training, 7 orthopedic surgeries…and some unexpected breakthroughs from last year.

Until then…keep going.

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Near the end of hot yoga last week, the instructor asked everyone in the room to consider kissing their knees. I did not consider it. Not because I’m incapable of or above putting my lips on my own sweaty knees, but because kissing them is goofy.

My only previous encounter with hot yoga had been back in the days when people still called the internet the World Wide Web. But then between Christmas and New Year’s last month, thanks to a promotional trial week offered by a local yoga chain, I found myself unrolling a grease-stained yoga mat (borrowed from my sport-shooting tackle box) in a dark room heated to 107.4° F and filled with very mindful-looking people talking in teeny-tiny voices.

I attended three “hot power yoga” sessions, the first of which required almost every ounce of physical and mental energy I could muster (followed by an afternoon nap). I welcomed the new challenge. Those who know me know I don’t mind looking stupid (briefly) for a worthy cause and, more to the point, I refused to be the “gym guy” who couldn’t handle an hour of infernal chaturangas.

Being open to whatever happens next is not how we’re trained to exist, as adults. Instead we plan, execute, revise and re-execute until our ships are moving aggressively against whatever opposes our interests. But that’s not yoga, at all. Yoga, as the hot-power instructors reminded each class that I attended, was about letting go of expectations and end games, and giving yourself a break.

And that’s when I heard the yogi leading the class say it: Your body is not you.

It’s funny, just writing that phrase makes my throat clutch and my eyes well up.

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Your body deserves your compassion

I think I get emotional because, like a lot of you, I put a lot of hard expectations on my body, physically, emotionally. It’s always performed pretty much at or above the high standard I’ve established, starting from an early age. When it hasn’t, I’ve come down hard on it, seeking repair, improvement, adaptation and—always—performance. I would never do that to someone else.

At yet, I have. Because my body is not me. It’s a separate entity from Paul, the guy with seven orthopedic surgeries to his name; the guy who now tells himself to remember to go a little lighter at the gym, for crying out loud; the guy trying to not fall over sideways while attempting to execute tree pose in the hot dark.

My body is not me. Just as I deserve compassion, so too does my body. And it damned well deserves a regular break from me and my expectations.

My conclusion, after holiday yoga, is that I’ve been too hard on this one body of mine. It has performed really well over the years, and now it struggles to keep up with a growing number of my expectations.

I don’t know if I’ll continue hot yoga, though I hope I will. But the invaluable lesson I’ve already learned from those three yoga sessions is that my body is not me, and it deserves my respect and compassion at regular intervals.

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Here’s a New Year’s resolution suggestion you won’t find anywhere else:

Take a few minutes to learn about acetylcholine—a brain chemical linked to reduced risk of dementia that older people can boost by playing specific kinds of speed-based brain games, according to new research.

Why is acetylcholine vital for cognitive health after 65?

Acetylcholine (ACh) is a neurotransmitter critical to decision making and detecting errors. It’s prevalent in the nervous system, hippocampus, which plays a big role in memory, and other areas of the brain. We lose 2.5% of acetylcholine every decade after age 40 or 45; without it, we’d be in a fugue state, unable to cognitively function.

Catastrophically low levels of acetylcholine are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

The near-term rise in expected dementia cases among Baby Boomers

Thus, people in midlife or older have a great interest in preserving and generating as much acetylcholine as possible, especially after 65. Roughly 10% of American adults age 70 or older suffer from a form of dementia. But as Baby Boomers age, the total number of people with dementia will rise by several million in the United States alone in the coming decade.1

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The specific brain games that stimulate more acetylcholine

A recent McGill University study2 showed for the first time that brief but taxing cognitive “workouts” helped reverse the decline in acetylcholine in people 65 or older. These workouts were brain games that test memory under a compressed time frame, sort of like playing rapid-fire rounds of Concentration on a timer.3

Ten weeks of daily speed-based brain training (about 30 minutes/day) increased acetylcholine activity in brain regions that support attention, memory and executive function by 2.3%—offsetting about a decade of normal age-related decline.

(A previous study had shown that these specific speed games reduced dementia risk, but scientists weren’t sure of the mechanism. The recent McGill research revealed acetylcholine as the mechanism.)

A specific kind of cognitive workout helps, and passive games don’t

Each of the speed-based games forced players to concentrate, pay attention to visual details and rely on memory. In the older adults who played these speed-based games, acetylcholine levels remained higher for up to three months.

Notably, more passive cognitive games, including video games, Solitaire and Candy Crush—which is to say, games that didn’t tax players’ concentration levels under time constraints, and didn’t force them to memorize rapid-fire information—did not raise acetylcholine levels in a control group, the research showed.

The upshot: The intensity of a brain game’s “cognitive workout,” ie, the depth to which it forces you to concentrate your attention under time pressure, seems to matter greatly.

McGill researchers did not evaluate other kinds of cognitive activities that require intense concentration, such as chess, debate or reading long and challenging passages about an unfamiliar subject.

Misleading headlines cognitive research

I often talk about “longevity literacy,” and brain research is a topic that requires a big dose of it.

This research, published in October (which I’ve been remiss in reporting on AGING with STRENGTH until now—mea culpa) spawned several misleading headlines online that claimed, for example, that playing the speed-based cognitive games leads to younger brains, improves memory, or reverses aging—none of which are true.

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NPR, on the other hand, accurately reported a substantive summary of the findings and an interview of one of the McGill researchers. Read or listen to that report for more on acetylcholine’s relationship to lowered dementia risk.

Increase acetylcholine through food

You don’t need to play games to boost your acetylcholine reserves. Choline, which is converted into acetylcholine, is found in many foods, including:

• eggs

• beef liver

• soybeans, kidney beans

• chicken breast

• cod

• quinoa

• shiitake mushrooms, broccoli and Brussels sprouts

Here’s wishing you a healthy, peaceful and prosperous start to 2026.

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There’s a saying in pro hockey: One shift at a time. It means focusing not on the ultimate goal—winning the game—but on winning only your next 45-second shift on the ice. Stacking small wins consistently is a proven strategy for achieving big goals.

The problem is that the Longevity Industrial Complex tries to convince you otherwise.

On Substack and a growing number of online media sites that have traded their credibility for say-nothing clickbait, wellness “experts” shill longevity through this one thing you should buy: a popular supplement, an expensive membership or a silly workout regimen featuring an AI image of a fake ripped 60-year-old.

As is often the case, though, the simplest solutions tend to be the most effective.

After more than a year of reporting on healthy longevity, I’ve collected a lot of thoughtful, actionable longevity advice from scientists, researchers, doctors, athletes, coaches, nutritionists and actual, ass-kicking older folks. Instead of spending your money on supplements and apps, they talk about a way of creating what I call practical longevity—one shift at a time.

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In its simplest form1, practical longevity boils down to three simple commitments.

Ignore most of what the Longevity Industrial Complex says

Commitment 1 — Stop trying to live to 100

A lot of “healthy aging” marketing tries to convince you longevity is measured in years—the more, the better—and can be acquired by credit card. Health & wellness chiselers2 tend to portray longevity as a competition you can win, if you just invest in their bullshit product, at their bullshit price, despite zero clinical evidence that it works in humans.

(Not all longevity supplements are scams, of course. Many show promise or straight-up work, and I’ve written and interviewed reputable scientists about several of them.)

Instead of focusing on reaching a certain age, cultivate the mindset of winning your current age one shift at a time. That’s the better way to “stack wins” (ie, healthy years) and end up a strong and sharp 88, 94, 103 or whatever number your Wheel in the Sky has in store for you.

You already have the facility, the means and, probably, the time to live healthy for as long as your body can — if you apply the discipline to build just two basic habits.

Warning: The two ideas I’m about to share are exceedingly simple in concept, and executing them as daily or weekly habits is exceedingly difficult if you don’t know why you want to. Before you start your practical longevity journey, take time to understand what’s motivating you. (Hint: “Looking better in the mirror” probably isn’t enough…unless it is.)

Dig past the surface rewards to ask yourself why healthy aging matters to you, really. Caveats aside, let’s get into these critical two commitments:

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In this audiocast, I invite you to join me on a slightly provocative thought experiment: Imagine you could reach back through time to ask your younger self a simple question: What do you want for me?

Not what did you want for me, but what do you want for me now. Because this conversation is happening in the present — and because that vision your younger self had remains alive — and actionable — in you today. That’s my argument….and here’s why.

I came across this quote recently.

There are four important parts to that idea:

1 | You had a vision for yourself

One is simply that you had a vision for who you wanted to become. It was specific, ambitious, thoughtful and achievable. And it came from you. Decades ago, for instance, I had dreams of becoming an oceanographer, a literary travel writer, a jazz bassist and a spy.

2 | It was about who, not what, you wanted to become

Second, your vision is about who — not what — you wanted to be. We often default to defining ourselves by what we are, professionally. But for many of us, what we do for money is a superficial proxy for who we are, really, if or when our jobs disappear. When I left The New York Times, I began the uncomfortable exercise of figuring out who Paul von Zielbauer — no longer from The Times — actually was.

3 | You spoke your vision

The third important part of this idea that “Discipline is remembering who you said you wanted to be” is that verb — said. You spoke this vision. You expressed it to family, friends. And speaking it put life into it, whether or not you knew it at the time. Back in 1993, I’d talked about traveling the world so much that, after a Chicago taxi smashed the front end of my trusty Mazda 626, I used the insurance money to instead buy a plane ticket to Hanoi and ride my mountain bike through Vietnam.

4 | It starts with discipline

The fourth important part of this idea is that it starts with discipline. It takes discipline and self-belief to move the idea of who you said you wanted to be from nostalgia and memory to the present and actionable.

After I left The Times, which I did because its vision for me had become a pale shade of what I knew I could accomplish, I started a social enterprise, called Roadmonkey, that combined ass-kicking physical adventures in remote foreign lands with hands-on volunteer projects for local communities in need. I had no idea how to do it, and it didn’t make much money, but it was the purest expression of who I am and what I believe in as I could have imagined.

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What are the purest expressions of who you are?

I suppose starting Roadmonkey, and building playgrounds and school rooms and chicken farms for struggling, disregarded communities in Vietnam, Peru, Tanzania and Nicaragua was my version of remembering who I said I wanted to be. (I just wish I’d been smart enough to figure out how to make a living wage from it.)

It was me asking my younger self: what do you want for me? As fate would have it, I had to ask that question yet again in 2023, when my last salaried position — head of content for a Bay Area venture capital firm — was terminated with prejudice.

“Hey, it’s me again. Yeah, I know. So, one more time: what do you want for me?”

I’ve written about that experience in a different post, about aging with resilience, but I raise it here because many Gen X, young Boomers and even late Millennials are now going through a reckoning of forced reinvention thanks to a combination of old-school ageism and the corporate imperative to cut workforces to the bone, because…AI!

What’s in your “radiantly imagined future”?

I have a feeling it’s going to get much worse. If it doesn’t, I still encourage you to reach back through the years to ask your younger self what she or he wants for you. It’s not a question born of desperation but of determination: to live as fully and completely as possible with the years you still have. Or as we used to say at Roadmonkey, to live like you mean it.

Speaking of which: Maybe my single favorite line in literature is from an obscure F. Scott Fitzgerald short story called “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”

Encouraging you to pose this question to your younger self, about what he or she wants for you, is another way of pushing you to think about and define your radiantly imagined future. That’s where the discipline comes in: to imagine radiantly, even fiercely, who you will become, even well into middle age or older adulthood.

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Nothing I’m saying here requires making radical changes to life as you know it—unless that’s what you want. It does require re-connecting to your innate understanding that you’re absolutely capable of so much more than you think you are, if you just give yourself a chance to prove it to yourself.

Audaces fortuna iuvat (fortune helps those who dare)

After successfully completing far-flung Roadmonkey expeditions — cycling through the highlands of Vietnam, or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or horsebacking through Patagonia sheep country, followed by those several days of hands-on volunteer work — people would often return home with a burning sense of mission and purpose and belief to keep that momentum going.

Many ended their jobs or the relationships that weren’t working for them, and began doing the things that matched their visions of who they said they wanted to be.

Roadmonkey is dead, unfortunately. But you aren’t.

So what are you going to do about it?

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The time-coded highlights are below, so pick what interests you and let me know what you think. Find the full transcript on Jon’s page here.

In the next AGING with STRENGTH post: My audiocast about an important exercise: Reaching back through time to ask your younger self one really important question.

Time-coded highlights:

01:08: Laura’s professional background: theater, ad copywriting and big tech; Geezer marks her first major personal creative project in her 50s.

02:09: Paul’s professional background: 11 years at The New York Times, including a Pulitzer nomination, then founded Roadmonkey, an “adventure philanthropy” company.

04:30: Why start a magazine called Geezer?

Need a gift for your favorite Gen Xer? Give Geezer!

Subscribe on the Geezer magazine website, where AGING with STRENGTH subscribers can use code HOLIDAY15 to get 15% off an annual subscription.

If you’re sending it as a gift, tell us who your lucky Geezer is, and we’ll ship the magazine with a hand-written gift card. Discount valid until December 25.

04:59: The “visceral rage” Laura felt when she got her first AARP subscription mailer, and how media generally approaches the aging experience in ways that are “patronizing and anodyne and not relevant to where I was personally.”

06:58: How Geezer’s co-founders began working together.

10:51: The many shades of “Geezer.”

11:24: How the magazine’s name, Geezer, format, came to Laura “in the shower.”

13:50: How personal experiences with ageism fueled the rise of Geezer.

15:55: The shower epiphany — why Geezer works as a large-format, 11x15 print-only magazine, and the recent rise of print-only periodicals for niche audiences. (Mountain Gazette, Ori, etc.). “It feels tribal.”

17:32: “We’re drowning in empty calories of digital content... none of it really sticks”

19:37: The bands written on the blank cassette tapes shown on the cover of Geezer’s inaugural issue: XTC, 10,000 Maniacs, Till Tuesday, etc.

22:30: Is print the new vinyl?

24:06: “We’re craving authenticity in a world that is becoming complete. you know increasingly plasticized”

25:05: “Analog is fire.”

28:50: How the first issue of Geezer came to be, and finding the right kinds of stories.

31:09: Geezer’s profile of Mark Pauline, “the last dangerous artist in America” who creates robots that hunt humans.

33:19: The role of nostalgia in Geezer: not too much, but not an afterthought, either.

33:58: The “Memory of a Goldfish” story about a sandwich-generation mom whose son is leaving the house for college and whose mom is moving in, because of dementia.

35:15: Caring for parents with dementia is a Gen X issue.

38:17: Paul’s ageism experience: from head of content at a Bay Area VC firm to zero job offers for two years. “I have 8 friends that are going through the exact same thing.”

42:57: Geezer is a rejection of our culture’s rejection of career professionals once they hit 55.

46:00: The Gen X childhood story swap: Tales of how we wandered off and our parents had no idea where we were until we showed up for dinner.

48:45: Spaghetti Os & Steakums….

53:48: “If we broadcast on a frequency that’s genuine to us, people attuned to that frequency will hear it and respond.”

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Substack has many problems these days. One of them that should concern us all is the increasing number of medical doctors — and those who call themselves doctors — who publish health and wellness content that feels like AI-generated boilerplate.

I’ve been contemplating whether to write this post for a while now. Will anyone care? After all, AI is everywhere, and even Substackers that shamelessly copy/paste ChatGPT twaddle below their bylines still manage to accumulate dozens of likes and comments. Maybe readers don’t mind being spoon fed machine-made thoughts.

But after speaking with a few doctors on Substack who don’t use AI to write their posts, I realized I wasn’t alone in my growing dismay at the preponderance of rote, AI-derived health & wellness information on Substack. One doctor who has a substantial Substack following sent me a note that concurred.

“The funny/sad thing is that people seem to like it,” this doctor told me. “Mindless to write, mindless to read. I feel like it steals potential intellectual capital from over-50 readers. And longevity literacy has got to be impaired, too.”

In case you missed it….

Agreed. So I decided it was time to investigate how AI is now infiltrating what is starting to feel like the Substack health and wellness industrial complex. What I found, within and beyond Substack, was revealing and dismaying, compelling and crude — and probably just the tip of the AI iceberg that could sink all our ships, if we’re not careful.

Longevity literacy in the age of AI

Before I dive into the Substack doctors whose work I examined, let’s first take a step back to view the extent to which AI, in the hands of non-licensed, unscrupulous humans, is gaslighting us every day. (Last year, a Substack writer tackled the rising use of AI on the platform in a post that, according to a leading AI text analyzer, appears to be substantially AI generated.)

Esther Perel deepfakes posing as therapeutic advice

The three YouTube videos below are a prime example of why all of us need to develop what I call longevity literacy — without which we’re susceptible to believing, taking advice from or giving money to some of the worst people on the internet.

Each of these videos is from a different YouTube channel and claims to depict Esther Perel, the renowned psychotherapist, giving advice about a ridiculous subject. They each sound very much like Perel and, in the case of the first video below, look like her. But each is a deepfake — entirely AI generated.

The first video below may be the creepiest of the three.

UPDATE Jan. 1, 2026: After I published this article, YouTube removed all three videos below, which were AI deepfakes of Esther Perel talking about what women want from men and how they show their needs — utter AI bullshit. Unfortunately, many other AI-generated deepfakes of Esther Perel, like this one immediately below, persist on YouTube.

For about the first minute, you wonder why Perel would speak so condescendingly about how sexually needy women over 60 respond to men. Then comes the creepy part: At the 00:55 mark, AI Esther Perel pauses and announces: “Hi, It’s Vernon again….” and asks you to like and subscribe to his channel.

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And so you wonder: If YouTube can’t or won’t fight off its own egregious, almost certainly defamatory AI enshittification, is resistance to global AI enshittification futile? If so, who cares if doctors on Substack publish information that may come straight from, or be filtered through, AI?

Why we should hold doctors to a better-than-AI standard

We should all care, I think, because doctors — including those on Substack — aren’t just content machines who can ethically trade in the trust readers give them for a warehouse of AI-derived insight and instruction. That’s not transparent at all.

“When a physician publishes health explanations, the MD (or equivalent) degree after their name signals training, experience, judgment and accountability,” , a cardiologist, told me in response to my questions about doctors publishing content that appeared to be AI generated. “Readers reasonably assume that the analysis reflects the clinician’s actual expertise and that the author takes responsibility for the accuracy of the claims. When the substance is outsourced to AI, that trust is misplaced. It misleads the public and, in my opinion, crosses an ethical boundary.”

Running Substack docs’ content through an AI text analyzer

With that in mind, I spent this week reading through several Substacks published by 6 health & wellness professionals — 5 medical doctors (and one who calls herself “doctor”) to get a sense of whether and how much they routinely use AI in their posts.

I ran selections of their Substack-published work through a leading AI text analyzer, GPTZero, which claims to be able to discern AI prose from human writing with high confidence, and which Wired magazine has previously used to analyze other Substack content for AI influence. I then reached out to each person, to ask if and how much they use AI in their Substacks.

The results of that reporting are below. Two of the six people, Howard Luks MD and Mohammad Ashori MD, responded at length to my questions; the four others did not. One doctor, Laurie Marbas MD, MBA, blocked me.

It’s important to say clearly that this exercise is one of transparency, not playing gotcha. I wish my reporting had turned up no evidence of AI at all. Since it did, I hope this post leads to a greater awareness among readers and, indeed, greater transparency among MDs who regularly lean on AI to generate health & wellness advice.

In no particular order:

Laurie Marbas MD, MBA, who publishes The Habit Healers on Substack

• Dr. Marbas is notable for her large following and for being a prolific producer of Substack content, posting lengthy, encouraging and prescriptive articles almost daily.

• GPTZero indicates many posts are mostly or entirely AI generated, including this one on how cold water impacts health (here’s the GPTZero report on that post); and this one on movements that are better than workouts (here’s its GPTZero report). And several others.

• The AI tool also indicated that the introduction of Dr. Marbas’s book, “Plant-based 101,” published in January, was likely AI generated. Many parts of her published work, in fact, carries the anodyne vernacular of AI, and the online analyzers corroborate that impression.

• Dr. Marbas blocked me and did not respond to several requests for comment.

, a cardiac surgeon who publishes Longevity Docs on Substack

• Dr. Luu is an entrepreneur cultivating Longevity Docs’ physician-only audience and who hosts large events in several cities.

• GPTZero indicates many posts, which tend to be extremely long, detailed and lavishly designed with customized photos and graphics, are mostly or partly AI generated, including this one on the “Biomarker gold rush” (GPT Zero report); this one on electronic medical records, peptides and other topics (GPTZero report); and this one on a “longevity clinical trial network” (GPTZero report).

• Dr. Luu did not respond to a request for comment.

, a cardiologist who publishes eponymously on Substack

• Dr. Kelly publishes a mix of first-person posts, including this recent one about an 80-year-old patient’s extraordinary VO2 max results, which the eye test and the online AI tool each indicate is human written; and another on why people die from heart disease, which suffers from tell-tale staccato AI tropes such as:

  ”You should not die of cardiovascular disease before old age.
  Not anymore.
  Not with what we know.
  Not with the tools we have.”

  (GPTZero rated the post as 40% AI generated)

• And another, more personal story of “when fear becomes physical” that unfolds with similarly common AI phrases and cadence (GPTZero rates it as mostly AI).

• Dr. Kelly didn’t reply to requests for comment.

, an orthopedic surgeon who writes Built to Move, Born to Heal: Notes on Midlife Fitness on Substack

• Dr. Luks has been writing about his work, patients and thoughts on fitness and health for a few decades. He wrote a book, “Longevity…simplified,” and as he told me in a Substack chat, “On my topics, I’ve forgotten more than some will ever know.” He will sometimes use AI, he said, to ensure he’s writing at a level that his non-technical readers most appreciate.

• A few days earlier, he published a post on the importance of not slowing down with age, and when I read it, I became quite convinced it was almost pure AI. (So did GPTZero.) The purple prose. The tortured metaphors. The litany of three-word paragraphs. However, Dr. Luks, in an email response to my questions, said he wrote the majority of the post himself. “On short-form posts I will use an AI to edit it…and in some instances to soften it up a bit,” he said. “I wrote the entire lead in, the take home message and the rationale and reason for the post. I’ve listened intently to thousands of patients over the years detail their reasons for not doing X, Y and Z. I’ve had many patients come back a decade later and comment how they wish they had listened to me years before. Those stories have shaped many of the messages I try to convey. If, at times I feel that an LLM can enhance the message, so be it.”1

• I can only take Dr. Luks at his word but have to admit it’s hard to read this passage from his Sunday post and not raise an AI-brow:

  Comfort can be a coffin.
  Excuses are chains.
  Your body doesn’t negotiate, and your future will not wait.

  Cry if you must.
  Fight if you can.
  But fight.

  Because time will take everything you refuse to earn…
  and it does not give refunds.

If that’s not AI-generated prose, I’m not sure what is. I think we’d all prefer that Substack writers, especially MDs, disclose when they’re relying on AI to generate content under their names, instead of pretending otherwise. Since this post originally published, Dr. Luks has become more willing to acknowledge how much AI his posts and notes actually contain.

, a family physician and health coach on Substack

• Dr. Ashori is “an MD turned health coach” and runs an online coaching business, as well as a health-coaching YouTube channel. On Substack, he tackles very practical subjects with mass appeal, such as how to avoid waking up in the middle of the night (GPTZero rates it as almost entirely human written) and how to fix back pain, which the AI tool also rates as penned by a real person.

• Not much of Dr. Ashori’s writing struck me as clearly generated by AI, but in the interest of creating a broad canvas of doctors writing on Substack, I asked him if AI plays a role in what he publishes. Here’s his response, via Substack chat:

• “The practice of writing itself is what I’m after, without it the brain will atrophy quickly,” Dr. Ashori said. “So it’s important that I think about each piece creatively and grammatically. That said, some paragraphs are too verbose or I just can’t get my meaning across. Once I have something written I’ll pick the worst paragraph and ask my AI task manager to rewrite it only for clarity. Most of the time it’s great and I don’t need to make changes. When I have a complete block for an article I want to write I have Chatty [his pet name for ChatGPT] give me some suggested outlines. Usually only with bullet points so I don’t lose the cranial task of coming up with my own content.”

• His comment reminds me of something , creator of Brain Health Kitchen on Substack (and author of an excellent book with the same title), told me recently: That sometimes she congratulates her readers for making it to the end of a particularly thorny topic.

  • “I remind them they are building cognitive reserve,” Dr. Fenn told me. “Just hanging in there and trying to grasp complex topics is one way to build brain resilience. So I want them to feel good about reading stuff that’s hard even though it’s more of an effort than plowing through easy, AI-generated stuff.”

, who writes The Strong Doc on Substack

• She earned a degree in dentistry from an Indian university, according to her LinkedIn page. She is not a medical doctor, which may not be apparent to readers who see the her name preceded by “Dr”, not to mention the name of the Substack itself.

• Most of the posts I reviewed, including one on “invisible fat that’s killing millions,” and another on uric acid, seem plausibly written by AI. (GPTZero agrees.)

• But it seems there are larger ethical concerns about a Substack that gives advice and insight into medical topics if the author isn’t a physician.

• Ms. Chawla did not respond to requests for comment, but after this post published, her business partner left a post calling this article “AI slop.”

In summary

GPTZero’s analyses are not dispositive. My hunches could be off base—except in the case of Dr. Marbas, whose production of lengthy articles filled with programmatic advice would be virtually impossible to create without AI. Moreover, my reporting is by no means exhaustive, and, as stated above, it’s not intended to embarrass or play gotcha.

It is, however, a decent argument for greater doctor transparency on Substack.

AI-generated content is likely playing a bigger role in Substack’s increasingly crowded health & wellness category; doctors are among those using AI to produce a growing body of advice and opinion — often without telling their readers. My personal antennae go up when I observe practicing physicians posting lengthy, detailed articles daily or several times a week, when most doctors I know struggle just to see their patients and record their clinical notes.

Maybe I’ll create a separate post that examines Substack’s doctors’ and other other clinicians’ work for evidence that they’re using AI to trade on their credentials. What do you think? Worthy endeavor or “give it a rest, bud”?

One last thing some readers may be wondering about….

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How I use AI and disclose it on AGING with STRENGTH

I use AI almost daily the same way a lot of other Substack writers do: to ask questions, gather information, and tease out ideas that might be worth writing about. The images topping most AGING with STRENGTH posts (but not this one) are courtesy of Midjourney.ai. My posts evaluating longevity supplements and wearable fitness trackers were each created with research help from AI, which I disclosed in each post.

When I use AI in my writing or reporting, I make a point of saying so. That way, the reader can make an informed decision about the information I present. That’s basic communication transparency.

We all want doctors, including those writing about health and wellness on Substack, to be equally transparent, don’t we?

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There are many fitness trackers out there. You probably have an idea of what brand, functionality, price tier and look and feel you prefer: Apple, Garmin, FitBit, Oura, etc.

I’m not here to change your mind. What follows, however, is a comparative chart of popular fitness tracker strengths and weaknesses that you can’t find through a normal online search or Wirecutter reviews.

The chart below, which paying subscribers can view and download, compares several different fitness trackers across a few metrics beyond device cost — such as:

• data accuracy

• health data privacy, ownership & jurisdiction (who owns your data & where it’s stored)

• app subscription comparisons and cost comparison over time

• water resistance (for swimmers, surfers and folks who run in the rain)

• notable privacy incidents (server breaches; ransoms paid, etc) for each company

• and more

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The data privacy and ability to own your health data is a complex area that isn’t often covered by the (numerous) fitness tracker reviews you can find online. For example, one thing I learned researching the downloadable chart (for paying subscribers) below is that FitBit is now owned by Google — which means that Google also has access to, if not owns outright, all the health data it collects from your FitBit device.

Other, Chinese brands treat your health data as you would expect: it’s theirs now and thanks for donating.

The 4-page PDF below, containing a series of charts, covers all the information I mentioned in the above bullet points and presents fitness tracker information you can’t find in one place anywhere else. (NOTE: I used an upper-echelon, paid version of Claude.ai to research and compile this data…and spent several hours vetting it.)

I hope you find it helpful.

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Greetings—from my garage. Here’s the video (scroll down ￬) for paid subscribers that I promised in my most recent Saturday Coffee. Because so many of you asked for it, I decided to send it to all paying subscribers.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of working with rings is that they force your gym body to adapt to new forms of instability, to keep your weight centered and balanced on the rings. Thus, this workout builds muscles that regular gym weights and weight machines can’t. Talk about functional strength!

NOTE: This movement isn’t for everyone and requires some shoulder and triceps strength as well as some equipment, which I discuss in the video. But if you’re interested in developing upper-body strength in just one minute of daily movement, this simple rings movement works. It also builds six-pack abs in short order, I’ve found.

Let me know what you think in a comment.

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The “healthy aging” conversation frequently over-focuses on physical fitness, and little wonder why: muscle strength, balance, cardio, flexibility and the things you do to acquire them make you look good and feel good. I say this as someone who’s contributed plenty (including more than 20 3-minute #WorkoutWednesday videos) to Substack’s vast library of articles on how to build physical strength.

But there are other necessary pathways to cultivate strength after 45, and one of them is curiosity. Curiosity is a powerful healthy-aging force multiplier.

1 | Why curiosity is worth cultivating, especially after 45 🤔

As a journalist, I learned first-hand how much more interesting life becomes by developing, instead of suppressing, one’s childlike desire to ask people questions. The winsome quality of asking second-, third- and fourth-tier follow-up questions tends to get beaten out of most of us in adulthood — when posing an off-schedule question is too often regarded as an unfortunate lack of knowledge or propriety. This is especially true nowadays, when our communication is so often filtered through a sterile digital interface.

Let’s be less sterile and more habitually curious. The beauty of having come of age before the internet is that we learned to look at people (or call them on the telephone), to talk to them directly and to expect them to respond.

Those people expected to be talked to, asked things and be paid attention to. And possibly even asked more than one question. 🤯

Today’s preponderance of one-way communication — via text messages, emails, and the slop bucket of social media — has stunted our tendency to indulge curiosity. Curiosity, among other benefits, helps build social connections that are the proven foundation of healthy aging.

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We each have a story about the positive consequences of having asked a question we almost didn’t bother to ask. Here’s one of mine:

Cruising by a Connecticut dairy farm and wondering, “What the…?”

Twenty-five years ago, as The New York Times Connecticut bureau chief (which is to say, I was the chief of a one-man bureau) I decided to spend an autumn Sunday exploring the backroads north of New Haven. After almost two hours of driving, I found myself southbound on state Route 67, in Oxford, Conn., wondering why the hell I agreed to take this job when I spotted several cars conspicuously parked on the shoulder across from what looked like a farm on a hill with a gravel driveway.

I drove on. I was tired, I was hungry. I was bored. But I kept wondering: Why were so many cars parked by a grain silo?

I turned around and sped back up the road, parked and walked up the gravel driveway. The result of that simple act of reluctant curiosity was this story, which ran in the following Sunday’s paper. A week later, I checked in with the farmer, Dave Rich, who said, in his reticent manner, that the article had caused such a huge increase in his ice cream business that his financial worries were, for the time being, over.

Instead of selling to some asshole developer, Rich Farm Ice Cream Shop became a regional tourist destination and today appears to be going stronger than ever.

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That’s the power of curiosity: a grumpypants newspaper reporter wonders “What the…?” and flips a U-turn to find out. I suppose my message is that we should try to flip more U-turns — actual and metaphorical — as we age into midlife and late adulthood, because that’s what makes us stay interested and, thus, interesting.

Challenge: The next time you find yourself beside an amiable stranger — in the checkout line, at the gas station, in an elevator, at the movies — find a reason to ask your fellow human a friendly question. You can even start with: “I’m trying to be more curious, so do you mind if I ask….”

The results of such acts of minor boldness are hard to overstate.

2 | Gynmast’s rings: one of the best no-weights exercises

Now, back to our regularly scheduled physical strength programming!

I recently started doing a powerfully effective one-minute daily exercise using a pair of gymnast’s rings hanging from a bar in the garage. It’s one of the best time-to-value movements I’ve found to develop noticeable upper body and core strength (by which I mean muscles) in just 60 seconds a day.

It requires having —or building — a minimum amount of triceps and shoulder strength. But the rings movements I’m talking about quickly develop those very muscles, which opens the door to other ring exercises that anyone with a little determination can do.

If you dream of having six-pack abs, this movement is for you.

Paying AGING with STRENGTH subscribers can message me or email agingwithstrength@gmail.com to get exclusive access to a 3-minute video in which I go through these ring movements, tips on proper form and how to set up rings in your own basement, den, spare bedroom or garage at minimal cost. Message or email me, and I’ll send you a private link.

3 | Remember Campbell’s “Soup is good food” campaign?

It began in the mid-1970s and endured until the 1990s. It was cheesy but effective.

This week, The Wall Street Journal took a lead pipe to that myth, deconstructing just how much ultra-processed crap is in a can of Campbell’s chicken soup. It’s not pretty.

The WSJ analysis came after a Campbell’s executive was recorded disparaging the soup as being unhealthy and for “poor people.” Campbell’s fired the executive. Which led the WSJ to report the following fact:

“Campbell’s does not use 3D-printed chicken,” the company said in a recent fact sheet about its chicken.1

A good reminder why we should do whatever we can to avoid corporate deathfood, defined as anything that wouldn’t spoil after two weeks at room temperature or that has a long list of chemical ingredients you wouldn’t find in a regular kitchen.

Here’s another good reminder: Never, ever eat a 3D-printed chicken.

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How’s it going over there?

Have you managed to get through the day without responding to Uncle Joe’s “whatabout!” rant on Obamacare or Cousin Amy’s lamentation on the depravity of Trump?

It’s Thanksgiving in America — despite the corporate attempt to jump straight from Halloween to Christmas. Thanks-giving. At a time in our history when even the late-night TV comedians are imploring us to lay down our political arms and un-cancel the members of our families whose political views we find abhorrent.

When the comedians who earn their livings pillorying one of most corrupt presidential administrations in American history are asking Americans to tone it down and be nicer to one another this holiday season, you know it’s bad.

I have personal experience with the Thanksgiving dinner that turns political. During my time as a New York Times reporter, my uncle took the occasion to redirect his hostility toward The Times editorial board at me. I remember saying at one point, “I’m not The New York Times!”

So, whether you’re one or three glasses into “the holidays,” here’s a reminder that part of the strength element of the aging process is having the confidence, self-possession and, yes, tolerance of people in your family who don’t see the world the same way you do. Because all those judgy opinions you really, really enjoy having about them? They’re enjoying having their own about you.

That doesn’t require capitulation — not a winning strategy. But respectful disagreement, and, when necessary, the choice to say nothing instead of something.

Happy Thanksgiving. Stay strong and, by all means, keep going.

— Paul

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