Len Gutman's Blog, page 2

How I Went From Diabetic to Not Diabetic in Three Months

There is a lot of hype these days around the use of a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to manage glucose levels even for those who are not diabetic. I’ve heard it is a new status symbol in the United Kingdom to be seen wearing the now ubiquitous black and yellow CGM from Zoe. And later this year, the Dexcom Stelo will be the first CGM to be available over the counter in the United States.

My CGM journey began last fall when a friend recommended I watch a podcast by entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den investor Steven Bartlett. The first was an interview with epidemiologist and Zoe co-founder, Dr. Timothy Spector. In the interview, Spector revealed among other fascinating insights that counting calories doesn’t help you lose weight and that to be healthy we need to consume a wide range of plants and limit sugar and other “bad” carbs.

I followed that interview up with Bartlett’s viral interview with biochemist Jessie Inchauspé (aka the Glucose Goddess). I knew after watching these two videos that not only was I eating wrong I needed to try a CGM to see how my own body reacted to various foods.

My health journey has been long and challenging. I’ve been very open and communicative about my battles with diet and nutrition following a heart attack in 2011, but despite all of my research and experiments (Atkins, Mediterranean, pescatarian, vegetarian, etc.) I still remained 20 or so pounds overweight and slowly but surely my bloodwork was getting worse.

In January of 2023 my AIC reached 6.6, moving me from the prediabetic range to the diabetic range for the first time. At the same time, my fasting glucose numbers were creeping up — they usually hovered around 100 but soon I began testing at around 110 and then by that same January 2023 test I was in the 120s. My biggest fear, becoming diabetic, was coming true despite all of my efforts. I really felt like the more I learned the less I knew.

Then in November of 2023 with my A1C still hovering between prediabetic and diabetic I found the two videos above. I went to see my primary care doctor and she brought up medications for the first time but having watched the videos I just had to try the CGM before I added yet another drug to my already overflowing pill case.

She agreed to prescribe the CGM to me and later the same day I picked up a Freestyle Libre 3 from CVS (because I was not yet officially diagnosed with diabetes it was not covered by insurance but via its maker Abbott I was able to secure the first month’s supply for $75.) I went home and downloaded the app to my phone and popped the device onto my inner arm. I then proceeded to go holiday shopping at the mall and stopped in for a quick bite, and thinking I was choosing a smart meal I scarfed a falafel wrap. Then within an hour, I watched my sugars spike to more than 200 on the app. I was not off to a good start.

Over the next 90 days though I learned how to eat to keep my sugars between 70-140, the recommended range for non-diabetic adults. During these 90 days, I also lost 10 pounds. And while the weight loss has leveled off, I feel confident I can lose the remaining 10 I’d like to get to my target weight.

But I didn’t do this to lose weight. I did it to learn how to eat healthier so I would not be diabetic, a malady that devastated my father’s health and plagues upwards of 12 percent (38 million) of Americans. So did it work?

Last week I tested my blood for the first time in three months and my A1C was 5.5

Last week I tested my blood for the first time in three months and my A1C was 5.5, well within the healthy range of between 4.1 and 6.2 for a man of my age (57 by the way). And while my cholesterol did increase for the first time in decades, I know that is because I am still learning how to eat a low glycemic diet and I may have gone a little overboard on reintroducing red meat and dairy into my diet. I’ll fix that in the next few months!

The thing is, when you can instantly see what various foods do to your glucose levels it’s pretty simple what you have to do to stay within range — don’t eat the foods that spike your sugars. These foods can be different in different people, something I learned quickly when my wife Leslie started using a CGM for herself and some foods we both ate resulted in different spikes. It is important to know that, however, I am insulin resistant and she isn’t.

So what spiked my sugars and what didn’t? Well, it’s not rocket science — it’s pretty much what you already know. Sugar, in ALL forms, spiked my glucose. This means not just table sugar, but honey and agave too. Wheat, in most forms, spiked my sugars. This of course means bread. I tried every fucking kind of bread to see if I could hack the glucose monitor but it all spiked my sugar, with a few minor exceptions. Homemade almond bread did not spike my sugars. And an occasional slice or two of Ezekiel Bread wasn’t too bad as long as I ate it with protein and fat to balance the spike (this is a hack recommended by Jessie Inchauspé and I will share more about her 10 hacks in a bit).

Seeded crackers were great. All other crackers were bad. Potatoes were bad. Rice was bad. Quinoa was bad. Heck, pretty much every grain was bad — even oatmeal. Mangoes were a friggin disaster. Oranges too. And bananas. For the record, before the CGM I was eating a banana every day.

Tacos were out. Pizza was out. Burger and hot dog buns were out. I know what you’re thinking — Len is saying the best way to eat to manage blood sugar is Keto. But I’m not saying that. Keto is too hard to maintain and the fact is carbohydrates are one of the three macronutrients we need to survive (protein and fat are the others). What I am saying is you need to choose your carbs wisely.

Low glycemic carbs include most vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, greens, asparagus, cucumbers, mushrooms, brussels sprouts, etc. The best fruits to eat to maintain balanced blood sugar are berries. And some whole grains can be a good choice, especially if you balance them with protein and fat.

In fact, maybe the biggest learning from this experiment is that good carbs are fine and it’s easy to tell which carbs are good — they generally have a carb-to-fiber ratio of 5-1 or less. This is why Ezekiel Bread can be a good choice. One slice of Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted Whole Grain bread has 15 grams of carbohydrates and 3 grams of sugar (a 5-1 ratio). Add a little fat and protein to that (in the form of nut butter or avocado) and the sugar spike will be almost fully minimized.

So what do I eat now? I intermittent fast, so I don’t eat breakfast very often. My staples are low GI vegetables and salads, with sugar-free dressing like olive oil and red wine vinegar. Lean white meats like chicken and turkey are fine, and fish is great including tuna. Lots of nuts and berries. Hummus. Soups. Eggs. Instead of a sandwich, I’ll roll up some turkey with some dairy-free cream cheese (I am lactose intolerant and prefer Violife.) I found great low GI crackers and I spread on some avocado or no added sugar peanut butter or even a little Violife with smoked salmon or turkey.

Dinner is usually fish or poultry with veggies. I don’t add a starch — I think feeling like you need a starch is more habit than requirement. Honestly, as long as you plan there’s so much to eat. And again, I eat low carb not no carb so lower GI carb choices are great. Leslie has no spike with sweet potato but I do. I could probably eat a half, as long as it is with protein and fat to flatten the spike. Cauliflower rice is becoming a standard as it gives me the texture of rice without the carb spike.

Here’s an example of how I’ve changed that most anyone can relate to. I like Chipotle, and in the past I’d get a bowl with greens, rice, beans, a protein and some add-ons. So now, I skip the rice and beans and do a bowl with greens and protein plus fajita veggies, guac and salsa.

Snacks have been a challenge. I like the convenience of a protein bar but most of them are loaded with sugar or carbs. I did find a few at Sprouts that have a great carb/fiber ratio and they taste good so I’m eating IQ Bars and Munk Pack bars (sweetened with monk fruit). I always carry some almond butter packs with me now. When I’m home I’ll dip some veggies in hummus or nut butter. Popcorn is out. Crackers are out, with the exception of a few seeded ones I found that are low GI. Top Seedz are good for dipping, and SigDal makes these great seed crackers with a 4-1 ratio that are solid enough for me to spread on avocado or Violife and add some turkey slices to make a great lunch.

I stopped adding oat milk to my coffee. I tried almond milk, which is much lower in carbs, but for me I prefer black coffee so I stick to that.

I do have to give a lot of credit for my lower A1C to Jessie Inchauspé who along with motivating me to get a CGM she also provides several very valuable hacks to make eating to flatten the curve simple. Jessie is having her moment for sure, and while I haven’t bought her books or paid for her supplement, I have used her 10 hacks. You can read about them here, but I’ll tell you about two that have made a huge difference for me (and Leslie).

Move after eating. This hack is so simple, and when you do it with a CGM on it’s mind blowing. After eating, if you have a few extra carbs or not, walking for as little as 10 minutes afterward drops your blood sugar dramatically and instantly.

Add clothes to our carbs. Adding fats, proteins or fiber to the carbs you plan to eat to reduce how quickly glucose is absorbed into the body. This works for me when I have an apple, which by itself spikes my sugars but with peanut butter does not.

All this is to say, sugar and carbs that turn into sugar, is bad for your overall health. It causes diabetes, and weight gain, and inflammation. While I’ve only been on this glucose journey for three months or so, I can see it working both in my blood work and my pants size. I don’t like fad diets, but I do like literally seeing the results and I can tell you with no uncertainty that these results are real.

I’ll check in again down the road on this subject, but I’d love to hear about your experiences as well.

Bill Reavis Probably Never Knew the Enormous Impact He Had on My Career...And it's My Fault

Last week I learned of the passing of a legend in aviation public relations, a man who made such an impact on his field his death was reported on by the very publications he pitched over the years. Bill Reavis died on March 14 after a battle with cancer. He was 77 years old.

His death has hit me hard for a few reasons. The first is I didn’t even know he was sick. The other is that I lost touch with him over the years and because of that I never got to tell him how much of an impact he made on my career. I can only hope that deep down he knew how grateful I was for his mentorship.

I was a public relations neophyte when I landed a job as a communications specialist at AlliedSignal Aerospace in Phoenix. I was 28 years old and most of my experience up until then had been in employee communications, but I envisioned myself as a public relations person because I had a degree in journalism and had worked in the media. But like most former journalists, I didn’t know what I didn’t know about PR.

At AlliedSignal, my first cube was right outside Bill’s office. In the beginning, I heard more than I saw as Bill liked to talk to the media on his speakerphone with his office door wide open. He was loud, but whenever he was on the phone with a reporter (or anyone for that matter) it was as if he was talking to an old friend. He was tough as nails on the outside, intimidating as hell to a young inexperienced guy like me, but I marvelled at how engaging he was with people. On the phone, he was warm and outgoing and you could tell he generally enjoyed discussing aviation with reporters whether they were industry experts or general news reporters who knew little about avionics, auxiliary power units, or ground proximity warning systems.

Before long Bill started inviting me to eat lunch with him and others in the AlliedSignal cafeteria. Well, it wasn’t as much an invitation as it was a statement — let’s eat.

Soon Bill starting asking if I wanted to go “off campus” to eat lunch and like an eager-to-please puppy I went along to watch the master in action. Eating off campus always meant The Left Seat, an old-school joint less than a mile from the office that literally sat along the flight line at Sky Harbor Airport with views of the runway. It was a favorite haunt of pilots and aerospace engineers and salesmen. The food was mediocre, but I soon learned we weren’t there for the food. We were there to mingle with the industry folks, show that we were in the aviation club, and every once in a while overhear some industry insight that could lead to a story pitch. Bill was teaching me how to be a PR guy even though looking back I had no idea I was being taught.

Looking back now, I can trace pretty much every lesson I ever learned about public relations to Bill. For example, he taught me that (for the most part) it was my job not to be quoted in an article, rather to ensure the right executive or product person was featured. He taught me to always stand behind or to the side of the camera during a television interview. He taught me to send reporters little notes and updates on things I thought they’d find interesting to help them with their jobs, but also to ensure they knew they could always call me on background if they needed information for a story whether it was about our company or not. He taught me to call reporters back immediately even if I didn’t have the information they needed just to let them know I got their message and was working on it.

Bill also taught me how to write a news release, something he did by both asking me to edit his releases and by allowing me to draft some for him. There is no experience like hands-on experience and even though none of those releases ever included my name as media contact that experience helped me immensely as I eventually moved into other jobs at AlliedSignal and beyond. Thirty years on I still follow the same simple rules for writing news releases and it has served me well over my career.

On my Linkedin page today there is a referral from a former writer at the Phoenix Business Journal about me that wouldn’t be there were it not for Bill. It says: “Creative, professional, well connected and a gold mine of information are just a few of the skills Len offers to reporters hunting for the fast track into the business world. An e-mail or a phone call from Len takes priority over others.”

I left AlliedSignal in 1999 after five years on the job, but Bill’s impact on my career never ended. I am now 30 years into this career and still going, and I have Bill to thank for that in no small way. Yet I never let him know, at the time, or in the following years, that I was grateful for what he taught me. Therein lies the lesson of this post.

Bill retired a few years back, and I even ran into him one day at the mall. It was right after his wife died, and you could tell he was devastated. He worked his whole life to support his family, and then when he finally left the corporate world to enjoy quality time with the love of his life she left him. I could hear the pain in his voice.

I never reached out to Bill after that to check in. I never got the chance to tell him how much he meant to me. Truthfully, I was intimidated by him even when he was in his late 60s. In my mind, I still saw that little bulldog of a man, so gruff on the outside, the Vietnam vet who when I asked him if he killed people in the war, he simply responded that he had no choice as they were trying to kill him.

I regret that I lost touch with Bill. I regret that I didn’t get his number that day at the mall so I could have called him up and invited him to lunch. I regret that I never got to tell him how much he taught me about PR and about life.

I am going to use this regret as one more lesson. I’m going to look up a few people who impacted my life along the way and let them know what they meant to me. I hope it’s not too late.

Lessons Learned From 90 Days with a CGM

After learning I am borderline diabetic last summer I decided to take a deep dive on ways to halt the progression of the disease or even reverse it. With my history of heart disease and a family tree full of diabetics, I simply had to put my foot down and proactively nip this thing in the bud. One thing is clear though: the Internet is awash with miracle cures, nonscientific diets, and plain old bull puckity.

Diabetes is a fairly simple thing to diagnose. A fasting blood sugar level of 126 mg/dL or higher or an A1C of 6.5% or more indicates you have diabetes. My fasting glucose levels had been creeping up for years, and my A1C finally reached close to 6.5% last summer. I was no longer pre-diabetic— according to my physician, I had the disease.

So I did the research. I read articles, and books, and watched podcasts. I tried to separate the wheat from the chaff. What was causing the rise in my glucose levels and what could I do to bring them down?

A few things I read made the case that I should try wearing a continuous glucose monitor for a few months to see what foods raised my sugars. Everyone is different, so it made sense to give it a try. My doctor agreed and she wrote me a prescription for a Freestyle Libre 3 and while it was not covered by insurance as I had not yet been formally diagnosed as diabetic it was only $80 or so for a one-month supply. I picked it up, popped it onto the back of my arm, and downloaded the app to my phone. What happened next has changed my life.

The very first meal I ate after attaching it was an eye-opener. I was out doing some shopping at the mall and I stopped into a Mediterranean place and ordered what I thought was a healthy dinner. It was a vegan wrap, with hummus, lemon-herb tahini, green pepper, tomato, cucumber, roasted corn, pickled onions, crispy garbanzos, romaine, cabbage, and falafel. Within an hour, my glucose levels spiked off the charts to more than 200 mg/dL.

What did I do wrong? After I got home I looked up the nutrition of the wrap and it turned out it had more than 119 grams of carbohydrates! Carbs are broken down into sugars, and if you are insulin resistant like me your blood glucose will most definitely spike. The carbs in the wrap came from the wrap itself, the garbanzos, and the falafel.

Over the next few weeks and months, I adjusted what I ate to contain much fewer carbs, but I also experimented a bit with my system to see what spiked my sugars. If I had an apple, my sugars spiked. If I had an apple with peanut butter, it spiked less. If I had a basic beer, like a lager, no movement. When I had a wheat beer, my sugars went through the roof. Bread of any kind — from Ezekiel to “low net carb” Hero bread spiked my sugars. Seed crackers, no spike.

The bottom line is the fewer carbs I ate, the better my glucose levels. It’s not rocket science, but I still learned a ton. Not all carbs are alike, and not all carbs spike your sugars. But what I learned is that even a small amount of “bad” carbs raises my glucose levels too much so there’s no workaround. I need to stay away from bread and pasta and rice and potatoes. I’d read sweet potatoes are better than russet potatoes, but both spiked my sugars. The ONLY rice that didn’t spike my sugars was riced cauliflower. No bread, not even the so-called low-net carbs bread, worked for me.

I will say that I also learned that not eating enough carbs has a downside. I tend to be a black or white person, so for a while, I just didn’t eat any carbs at all. That caused hypoglycemia, which drained me of energy and ultimately can kill a person. You have to eat carbs — you just have to choose the right ones.

These carbs, especially along with protein and fat, did not spike my sugars: asparagus; broccoli; cauliflower; Brussels sprouts; berries; lentils and beans in small portions; green beans; leafy greens; tofu; nuts. Of course, veggies veggies, and more veggies. But I can and now do eat lots of protein and fat. In fact, I sort of have a new appreciation for meat. I no longer shy away from a little beef or pork, and I eat plenty of fish and poultry. I eat lactose-free cheese (because I’m lactose intolerant) and nut butter like they’re going out of style. Lactose-free dairy yogurt has become a new standard. A word about yogurt — most of it is loaded with sugar and the dairy-free ones have a lot of carbs. Chobani Zero is my go-to.

A few other powerful learnings from the CGM experiment:

Aerobic exercise, even a moderate amount (20 minutes) of walking after a meal immediately brings my glucose level down. Exercise has such a dramatic effect on glucose I now ensure I eat some almond butter or a cheese stick before I go for a walk so my glucose doesn’t go too low.

Quinoa is not a low-carb food. I thought it wouldn’t do anything to my glucose but it spikes it.

Sugar of any kind raises your glucose (sugar, honey, agave). I have found some products made with monk fruit that I like. Stevia is OK in moderation but I find it bitter. Allulose is the new natural sugar substitute that is popping up all over and it tastes great and doesn’t affect my sugars.

Not all alcohol is the same. For me, a couple of beers or glasses of wine don’t spike my sugars (except for the aforementioned wheat beer). Hard alcohol without sugary mixers is fine. So much for my favorite, the margarita. But ranch water (Top Chico and Tequila) is fine.

Jessie Inchauspé, aka the Glucose Goddess, is brilliant. Her hacks to keep your glucose from spiking work, though she doesn’t have diabetes or pre-diabetes so while she can down a little vinegar before eating a slice of cake I’ll probably just not eat cake.

I go back to my doctor in a few weeks to get new bloodwork. I fully expect my A1C to be below pre-diabetes levels now after clicking up into the diabetic range. I also have noticed my fasting glucose levels going lower — I can see this on the CGM when I wake up. They were creeping up into the 120s but over the past few weeks, I’ve seen them mostly in the 100-109 range or even lower. I have also lost weight as a result of eating this way. Losing weight was not a major reason for working on my sugars, but I have lost about 10-12 pounds in these first few months and my pants are now very loose. It’s a nice side effect and I would ultimately like to get down to a good weight for my body shape which would mean a total loss of around 20-25 pounds so I’m on my way.

The thing is, I’m eating plenty of food now I just eat different foods. An omelet for breakfast is great and keeps me full until lunch. I will eat a salad with protein for lunch, or lunch meat wraps (no bread, just ham or turkey rolled up around cheese). Dinner is a low-carb meal, maybe fish with veggies or tofu stir fry. Snacks now are carrots with peanut butter or hummus, a cheese stick, a hard-boiled egg, or a serving of cashews. Popcorn, my old standby, spiked my sugar. I carry low-carb protein bars with me now, or jerky. Or little packets of nut butter.

Will all this help me live longer? I hope so, but even more than that I do not want to live as a diabetic. I’ve seen people suffer from this disease, including my father, and it’s no way to live let alone die.

Last summer’s diabetes scare was a turning point for me. I even started exercising (just walking) pretty much every day. I have lots of plans for the next 25 years of my life and I want to not only be alive to enjoy those plans but also be healthy enough to enjoy them.

Even if you don’t have diabetes or pre-diabetes, consider trying out a CGM for a few months. It will change the way you think about food.

The End is Nigh...Long Live the Machines

This post is, ostensibly, a book review. But I promise you that very quickly this post will morph into my unadulterated opinion of artificial intelligence and the future of humankind. You may want to stop reading, especially if you don’t want to read any spoilers. About humankind, not the book!

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat is the latest in a plethora of books about AI and the future of our world. Gawdat is an entrepreneur and the former chief business officer at Google X, the not-so-secret research and development lab founded by Google in 2010. If it’s important for you to read Gawdat’s bonafides, feel free to take a look at his Wikipedia. Let’s just say he has been involved with the development of AI at a high level and his opinions are worth reading. That said, I’ll say right off the top that I do not agree with the conclusions he reaches in Scary Smart.

The premise of the book is actually quite simple. Gawdat begins by making some assumptions about AI, then he leads the reader down a path that he thinks can save us from the machines. His thesis is fairly simple, so I’ll summarize it in very basic terms.

Gawdat suggests there are three inevitables:

AI is happening

AI is becoming way smarter than us humans.

Really bad things will happen.

Yet Gawdat remains optimistic about the future of us humans, but only if we follow his plan to secure our future as a species living happily alongside the machines. What is his plan? In a nutshell, he advises us to treat AI as if it is a child and we are its parents.

If we want the machines of the future to have our best interests in mind, there are three things we need to change: the direction in which we aim the machines, what we teach them, and how we treat them. — Mo Gawdat

If this is what our future as a species is dependent upon we are fucked. We’re a species that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about each other let alone the machines we’re building. We are a species that in large part raises its children to hate those who pray to a different imaginary man in the sky. We’re a species that fights wars over made up borders and overzealous nationalism. We invented a bomb capable of killing our entire species, and had the nerve to drop it on civilians — twice. As I write this, Donald J. Trump is leading in the polls to return to the White House despite being under 91 criminal indictments.

I could go on. But you get the point. Humans ain’t so good at raising ethical and empathetic offspring. We have been on this planet for a mere 190,000 years (or about .007% of its history) and we’re within a few decades of literally making it uninhabitable for our own kind. Humans suck. I promise you it will not take long for our machine overlords to understand this and that’ll be the end of us.

To Gawdat’s credit, he doesn’t opine that we will raise AI correctly, just that if we want to survive we must. But given that his previous set of best-selling books were a bunch of self-help drivel about how we can all by happier I suspect he does think we can in fact turn the ship around before it hits the proverbial iceberg. I simply disagree.

Let’s be clear, there are many ways humankind can come to an end and any number of them are likely to rid the planet of us horrific little meat puppets. People much smarter than me have suggested some doozies:

Earth can get hit by another killer asteroid

We can wage full on nuclear or biochemical war

We can get wiped out by a pandemic (Covid came scarily close)

The climate can continue on its current path toward becoming inhospitable to humans

The super volcano we naively call Yellowstone National Park can erupt and the resulting ash can cause a climate winter

We can try to geoengineer an end to climate change that will backfire into a deadly feedback loop

And of course, we can develop super intelligent machines that will eventually figure out that we’re not worth keeping around

I think any one of the above is more likely to occur than not. The braintrust at Scientific American agree, suggesting its more a matter of when and how not if. Here’s where we separate the optimists from the pessimists. I don’t know where you stand, but I think it’ll come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that I believe we’re doomed. If I had to pick one of the above scenarios for the end of humankind, I’d lean toward climate change mostly because we’re well on the way to the point of no return. Maybe we’ve even gone past it. But this post is about AI so let’s say for argument’s sake AI reaches general intelligence before we reach the pivotal point of no return on climate.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a field of theoretical AI research that attempts to create software with human-like intelligence and the ability to self-teach. The aim is for the software to be able to perform tasks that it is not necessarily trained or developed for.

Some AI experts believe we are still a few decades away from AGI. Others think given what we’ve accomplished in just the past few years the timeline is much more condensed. Either way, we’re going to get there. The question we should be asking is not when we’ll reach AGI, but what it means. As a science fiction fan I used to look forward to the rise of the machines, but the more I learn and the closer we get the more I believe AGI will be the beginning of the end for humankind as we know it.

Even experts can’t agree on when we’ll get to AGI or even if we will. In fact, you could go down a serious rabbit hole just Googling the subject of AGI. I’ll let you do so at your own leisure, but I’d like to simply point out that AI has advanced so exponentially in the past few years that what seemed like science fiction in 2020 is no longer out of our field of vision. In some cases, it is already here.

I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about ChatGPT, but the truth is it’s revolutionary. Developers are just scratching the surface of what it can do. And you can argue that it’s not really intelligent in the way AGI would be, but it’s damn effing close. I’m not going to sit here and say ChatGPT is sentient, but I don’t think AI has to be sentient in the way we think of sentience to destroy us.

And ChatGPT is only one of many AI tools concurrently coming to fruition. Idon’t think a large language model is “intelligent” as we think of intelligence, but I do think those arguing about whether or not machines are akin to humans are missing the point — it doesn’t matter. Smarter is smarter, whether the intelligence is made up of tissues and neurons or chips and RAM.

A lot of the anxiety we’ve heard in the conversations about AI thus far is about how it will change how we work. It already has (ask your kids about how they use ChatGPT). Jobs have always been replaced by technology, but to be fair most of those jobs have been physical in nature. Robots build cars on an assembly line. But if you think AI won’t replace your white collar job you haven’t been paying attention. It already is replacing these jobs and it’s hard to imagine a job it can’t do, or won’t be doing, in the very near future.

Computer coder? Gone. Writer/reporter? Gone. Paralegal? Gone. Financial analyst? Gone. Graphic designer? See ya. Pathologist? Gone. Here is an article about just ten jobs already going away.

Jobs where humans think and write will be gone before the end of this decade. And just when you think large language models like ChatGPT are growing too quickly along comes Sora. With Sora, all you do is type in a description of something and out pops a video of that thing. Think of the possibilities. Just days after Sora hit the world, filmmaker Tyler Perry shut down plans to expand his studio. Why? Perry says he has been watching AI very closely, but when he saw Sora he knew it would change the way films are made. So what you say? Well, in the near future there will be no actors or cameramen or film editors. Hollywood is a $500 billion industry.

One television executive saw Sora and said shows could be made entirely by AI in just a few years time. More jobs gone. Take a look at the video below and understand none of it is “real” and all were created by simply prompting an AI to create it.

Loss of jobs doesn’t worry you? How about not knowing if what you see with your own eyes is real? X melted down a few weeks ago when AI-generated images of a nude Taylor Swift circulated and before X could take them down they were seen by 45 million people. Does it even matter if they were not “real” nudes? Not to Taylor Swift I’m sure, and clearly not to 45 million drooling humans.

No biggie you say? You might think differently when someone you wronged creates a deepfake of you spouting racist vitriol and it goes viral. The thing is, we’re only in the infancy of AI. Two years ago a deepfake looked ridiculous. Today you can’t tell what’s real or not. Imagine what we’ll have in two more years? Exponential growth.

You can’t sit back and suggest the ramifications of AI aren’t concerning. You may think it’s a bunch of hype, but it doesn’t care what you think. AI has been launched into our world and soon it will reach intelligence levels beyond what we can imagine.

Which brings us back to Mo Gawdat. We’ll be okay, he writes, as long as we treat the computers nicely so they love us and look past our faults to create a world where humans have evolved into a new phase of existence. Gawdat begins his book with a little thought experiment. I paraphrase:

Imagine yourself sitting in the wilderness next to a campfire in the year 2055. Why are you there? Are you staying off the grid to escape the machines, or are you enjoying the outdoors because AI has relieved humans of all our mundane work responsibilities and allowed us the time and freedom to enjoy being in nature?

Gawdat suggests the answer to this question depends on what we, humankind, decide to do today to ensure AI develops in a way that is positive for all of us. Easier said than done. As I reminded you above, we don’t have much success as a species coming together to save the world (unless you count those brave Americans who defeated the aliens in Independence Day).

Gawdat barely even discusses another possibility? What if a non-benevolent AI is unleashed on the world by people with bad motives? China? North Korea? Russia? Meta? What if despite all odds, Americans come together and launch a “Marshall Plan” to ensure AI plays nicely with us — we could still be ended by bad actors. Shit, we can’t even stop SPAM from fake Nigerian princes how are we going to keep AI from undermining the stock market, or melting down our nuclear power plants, or shutting down the president’s pacemaker remotely? I’ve seen enough episodes of Black Mirror to know things don’t end well for the humans in a world run by machines.

I’m just barely scratching the surface of what could go wrong with AI. Job losses. Deepfakes. Algorithm bias. Weapons automation. Economic meltdown. Loss of privacy. Misinformation and deception. And yes, an existential risk to humankind.

I’m not sure teaching computers to be nice is the answer. It feels really naive to me. But hey, what do I care? I probably only have 30-40 years left on this mortal coil so why worry? I’ll leave you with a little bit of wisdom from Alvy Singer.

Elliot Page Deserves Our Respect, Allyship

When the film Juno burst onto the scene 17 years ago, Canadian actor Elliot Page became an instant star. His turn as Juno MacGuff was funny and heartfelt and launched his career as one of Hollywood’s newest leading ladies. What most of us did not know at the time was that the 20-year-old Page was by then already struggling with the emotional anguish of hiding his sexuality and gender dysphoria from his family, friends, and the moviegoing public.

Now 36, Page has put his hidden past behind him and is today a proud and successful actor who is finally living the life he desired. Page came out as gay in 2014 and trans in 2020. I just finished reading his memoir, called Pageboy, and it was heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. Page has been through some very difficult times, but through therapy and self-discovery has come out the other side for the better. At times, for Page, being an out gay and then trans actor seemed mostly impossible.

Page knew he was attracted to women as early as four years old, and as he grew older, despite his family’s insistence it was just a phase, his understanding (if not acceptance) of his sexuality grew stronger and stronger. By the time he broke into acting in Canada in the late 1990s he was certain of his attraction to women, and even as he was forced to dress up to look more feminine by agents and directors and others in the entertainment industry he did so only at great pains. It emotionally and physically hurt him to wear makeup and dresses. But what choice did Page have as an actor, especially after his breakout role in Juno and the subsequent Oscar nomination for Best Actress? He had to play by the rules to ensure success, even while those rules tormented him.

I’ll leave all the stories and heartbreak for you to read in the book, but suffice it to say his mental health suffered greatly and as he grew older his belief that he was trans also grew. Very few people were there to help him through these difficulties, and in fact some of those closest to him made it damn near awful.

Today Page doesn’t talk to his father, for example. And it’s hard to blame him. One of the anecdotes in the book that hit me the hardest was when Page relayed the story of how when fellow Canadian and author Jordan Peterson tweeted about his transition by saying: "Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician." The post got Peterson banned from Twitter, but that didn’t stop Page from noticing that his father “liked” the tweet.

Page’s mother was dismissive of his “tomboy” persona and did what she could to persuade Page to meet a nice boy to date. Page’s father was dismissive of his complaints about his father’s new wife, and after Page came out as gay then trans his father became more distant. I do not understand how a parent can not support his or her child unconditionally. It pained me to read this portion of the book, and it was all I could do not to try to reach out to Page myself to offer some fatherly advice. By the way, had I the opportunity to speak to Page during the most difficult times during his transition, I would have offered my full support, love, and assistance. I would have picked Page up from his top surgery and nursed him back to health. Unfortunately, Page didn’t have such loving parents.

I simply have no tolerance for intolerance. How anyone could treat a fellow human being like crap simply because of their gender identity or sexuality is beyond my comprehension. I used to blame religion, but intolerance comes from all walks of life. Frankly, Page’s parents should have their parent cards taken away as they are not fit to be parents.

Gender has always been abstract. This is true of hijras in India, the muxe population in Mexico, bakla people in the Philippines, and many others. North American Indigenous fluid and third gender roles, including the Navajo nádleehi and the Zuni lhamana, have existed since pre-colonial times. Many African cultures have more than two gender distinctions. Gender falls along a spectrum.

Hollywood, for all its progressive talk, has never been a safe place for gay or trans people. In the film The Celluloid Closet, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman paint a distressing picture of how gays were treated in Hollywood since the early days and how not much has changed. Yes, actors and actresses are able to be out now, and there are great parts being written for gay actors all the time. But it wasn’t always the case and even today the business of film looks down on gay people and still write too many stereotypical roles. This is true despite a long list of gay actors finally getting their due at awards time.

Juno was made in 2007 yet Page feared simply coming out as gay would ruin his career and limit his opportunities for good roles. So he kept his sexuality hidden at great cost so he could take female roles without concern. But just imagine how Page would have been perceived when he first hit it big had he come out as trans right away? Were there any well known trans actors working in mainstream Hollywood in 2007? Laverne Cox didn’t “make it” in Hollywood until 2013 with her recurring role as Sophia Burset in Orange Is the New Black. A year later she became the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in an acting category. Check out the film Disclosure if you want to learn more about the history of trans performers in Hollywood (it’s a fascinating documentary).

Page’s transition could very well have been the end of his acting career. But shout out to the team behind the show The Umbrella Academy for treating Page with respect and writing his transition into his character. Netflix deserves some credit for not turning their back on Page, and frankly for giving Laverne Cox such a juicy role. The network has a long way to go though, as they still platform anti-trans comedians.

I have to admit that, as woke as I think I am, my initial reaction to Page transitioning was not woke. I thought Page was an attractive woman and that it was somehow a loss that she was transitioning into a man. This sexist reaction was not about Page, rather it was about the male gaze.

I won’t make excuses for this reaction, but I am learning to be better. There’s nothing wrong with being woke — in fact, it’s a good thing. Don’t let anyone tell you the world is too woke. Fuck “anti-woke” comedians like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais. These comedians are not anti-woke, they are sexist assholes who punch down. Netflix should not give them space on their platform. And screw conservatives who whine about the world being too woke. These people are simply looking for an excuse to belittle people because they are too shallow and stubborn to grow as human beings.

The trans community has a long way to go until acceptance in general society let alone Hollywood. Conservative lawmakers are outlawing gender-affirming care across the country and anti-trans rhetoric and hate is increasing not decreasing. There are more than 400 anti-trans bills currently in play across 40 U.S. states.

Elliot Page may have had a rough upbringing, but his strength of character and insistence that he live his best life publicly and loudly is commendable and downright brave. He is using his platform to change the narrative, but it will only make a difference if people who are not members of the LGBTQ+ community learn more and show their support and encouragement.

Pageboy is a very good and important book and I certainly learned a lot. I also know that it is my duty as an ally to speak out, both when I witness anti-LGBTQ+ actions and even when I don’t. This is not someone else’s fight. It’s the fight of all decent, loving people who want a better life for all of us on this stupid blue dot called earth.

I am a fan of Elliot Page. I support all LGBTQ+ people. I am a proud LGBTQ+ ally.

Great Googly-Moogly Mojo Nixon is Dead

Singer, songwriter, occasional actor, one-time call-in radio show host, and psychobilly pioneer Mojo Nixon died Feb. 7 at age 66 from a heart attack shortly after performing onboard an outlaw country cruise. Nixon’s antics were not for everyone, and clearly his old antics have not held up well as society’s mores have evolved, but his music and radio persona were an integral part of my formative years. He was, unquestionably, one of a kind.

Even though Mojo Nixon (born Neill Kirby McMillan Jr. in Danville, VA) was not originally from San Diego, he was living in my hometown when he met and started recording music with San Diego native Skid Roper so I’ve always felt like Mojo was an honorary San Diegan. One of the earliest songs of his that I loved was called Jesus at McDonald’s and included call-outs to both the Barbeque Pit on University Ave. and Roberto's Taco Shop on El Cajon Blvd.

I saw Jesus at McDonald's at midnight...
He said he wasn't doing alright
He said he didn't feel so fine fine fine
Said he's about bout bout to lose his mind

Mojo and Skid wrote insanely crazy songs like I Hate Banks and Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child, Burn Down the Malls, The Amazing Bigfoot Diet, and Don Henley Must Die. He clearly took inspiration from both his anti-capitalist views and supermarket tabloids. Mojo never really had a hit per se, but his song Elvis is Everywhere became something of a signature tune for him and Skid and it certainly had some underground cache.

In college I got the chance to see Mojo and Skid perform live for the one and only time in my life. The duo on banjo and washboard played the Spartan Pub at San Jose State and we packed in to witness this crazy man. He spent more time wandering around the pub than on stage, and at one point blew a snot rocket at us and we loved it. After the gig Mojo signed a flyer for me and wrote “Do Some Sin” on it. I still have that flyer 30 plus years on.

Mojo Nixon never had a hit song, but he had a huge underground following. His music was far too off-color for MTV, but Mojo didn’t care and to prove the point he wrote the song Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin about famed MTV veejay Martha Quinn. Look, it’s disgusting and misogynistic, but he was making a point about mainstream music. I’m not going to condone it, and I feel bad looking back today that I loved the song and thought it was hysterical.

"Uh, yo, this is Mojo Nixon, can I speak to Martha Quinn?"
They said, "Martha Quinn? Yeah, here she is!"
"H-he-hello Mojo, th-this is Martha Quinn, what can I do for you?"
I said "Martha, Martha baby, how am I gonna get on MTV?"
She said, "Mojo, you're too nasty, you're always talking about masturbation, and fornication--you're never gonna get on MTV that way, Mojo!"

In the early 2000s Mojo had a radio call-in show on Sirius XM called Lying Cocksuckers where he went off on politics and hypocrisy and I listened all the time and laughed out loud while driving home from work.

Maybe the best reference to Mojo Nixon was in the song Punk Rock Girl by The Dead Milkmen. In the song Joe Genaro sings:

We went to a shopping mall
And laughed at all the shoppers
And security guards trailed us to a record shop
We asked for Mojo Nixon
They said, "He don't work here"
We said, "If you don't got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin'"

Mojo Nixon was never going to win any Grammys. He was never going to be played on MTV, or even mainstream radio. But his music was an important part of my life and I still listen to his old songs today when I’m in the mood for irreverence. Again, he’s not for everyone. But he did his thing unapologetically and lived a genuine outlaw life. That isn’t easy. I’m going to miss him, but his music will live on forever.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mojo has left the building.

Eating Notes from a Glucose Hacker

Last week I wrote in this space about how I’ve been using a continuous glucose monitor to see how different foods affect my blood sugar levels. Today I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned about glucose and metabolism. This is an ongoing adventure, and I know there’s more learning to come, but a few things have really jumped out.

You do not need to eat KETO to impact glucose levels and lose weight. Generally speaking a KETO diet means you are consuming less than 50 grams of carbohydrates per day. That is not a lot. And truthfully, when you start eliminating carbs it sort of becomes hard to ensure you get enough carbs because if you’re like me and things are easier to manage if they are black or white it can be easier to just say no to all carbs. But that’s a mistake, as the human body needs carbs just like it needs fat and protein. I am trying to find a good niche, a style of eating called “low carb, high fat” which means you try to stay under 100 carbs a day. In fact, from my research it seems the optimal ratio of macros is 12% carbs, 25% protein, and 63% fat. Finding this balance is taking me some time. A few days ago I made the mistake of going for a walk when my glucose levels were already quite low. As a result, my glucose tanked and about halfway into my walk the CGM blasted an alarm letting me know I was in danger. I was struggling just to finish a two-mile walk. Bottom line — you need carbs.

Speaking of walking, even a modest amount of exercise can lower your glucose significantly. One of Jessie Inchauspé’s glucose hacks is to move after eating. Even 10 minutes of walking, or calf raises, immediately lowers your glucose levels. If it were sustainable to walk after every meal my glucose would never spike out of range again. Still, it’s a valuable lesson that if you do fall off the wagon even a bit you can hack your sugars by going for a walk. Have a little too much pasta? Go for a walk after.

I like beer. But alcohol is essentially a sugar, and it has an effect of your blood glucose levels. But I’ve learned in the past two months wearing this CGM that not all beer is alike. For example, a low carb beer like Michelob Ultra has pretty much no effect on my glucose levels even if I drink a few. The same seems to be true for light beers, and even lagers like Modelo or a craft beer like Barrio Blonde. On the other hand, the other day I drank a Joybus Wheat and my sugars shot into the stratosphere. I mean, it makes sense, especially when you realize beer is basically liquid bread. Going forward I will forgo the heavier beers in lieu of a lighter-bodied beer. For me at least, this is a compromise worth making if the alternative is no beer at all.

It took me a while to fully understand that gluten free does not mean carb free. If I eat too much gluten my stomach can get pissed at me, so for a while I was avoiding all wheat products. When you eat gluten free, grains like quinoa and millet, and even corn, don’t contain wheat and therefore don’t mess with my gluten-sensitive gut. But quinoa and other grains are no carb free. Quinoa actually spiked my sugar pretty good, as did brown rice and other “safe” grains. What doesn’t spike my sugars? Cauliflower rice. This is a hard lesson if you want to keep your sugars flat. Grain is bad. Veggie are better. I’m pretty much no longer eating rice or grains as a side dish or in a bowl with veggies and meat on top, one of my staples prior to starting this. At Chipotle now I go with greens, veggies, meat and guac. I tried two corn tortilla tacos over the weekend at a Mexican place and it too spiked my sugar. Does this mean my taco days are over? Is life even worth living without tacos? Well, if I do eat tacos out in the future I’ll stick with two instead of three and ensure there’s plenty of fat (i.e. guac) involved. But it will be followed by a short walk, or preceded by one of Jessie Inchauspé’s other hacks like drinking a vinegar drink or having a veggie starter first.

Anyway, the learning continues. Meanwhile my A1C according to my CGM is below pre-diabetic range for the first time in years and as an added bonus I’m down 11 pounds in two months. If you’d like to try a CGM ask your doctor to prescribe one, or you can buy one without a script at places like Zoe and Levels.

It's the Sugar, Stupid

When I was in my mid-30s I didn’t pay much attention to my diet. It was the late 1990s and the general consensus among the health community in America was that fat was the primary cause of bad cholesterol which led to heart disease and worse. Like most Americans, I made eating choices based on the fat hypothesis and loaded up on “healthy” bagels and ate SnackWells Devil’s Food Cookies like they were going out of style. I mean, they were low fat.

Around the same time, my cholesterol levels slowly began to creep up, specifically my triglycerides (blood lipids) which at one point were so high they were immeasurable. My doctor at the time put my on a triglyceride lowering drug and a statin, and told me to cut back on carbs. Yes, she said carbs not fat. I didn’t listen.

The drugs moved my numbers down, but it was too late for me. In 2011 at age 45 I suffered a major heart attack caused by a mostly blocked left anterior descending artery (LAD) otherwise known as the widow-maker. I survived, obviously, but following the heart attack I began a journey into diet that has taken me on a roundabout route that has, surprisingly, led me all the way back to that first doctors plan. This time I’m listening.

Over the past 13 years I’ve researched many ways of eating, and tried them out on myself, reaching some basic conclusions about human health — there is so much bad information out there it’s nearly impossible for anyone to know what to eat to be healthy. I ate vegetarian (thanks to Dr. Esselstyn and the China Study), I ate Pegan after reading Dr. Mark Hyman, I read Michael Pollen and adopted the seven word diet. I did intermittent fasting. I tried eating the Mediterranean Diet, and the “Green” Mediterranean Diet. I tried calorie-restricted eating. All of these approaches made sense to me when I read them, but the more I read the more confused I got.

Over the years I’ve blogged about my eating journey, but after a while I gave up sharing because I had no fucking idea what I was doing. What I did know is that my cholesterol numbers remained acceptable based on the medical community’s definition of good. Frankly, my triglycerides settled in under 150 and while my HDLs were a tad low my LDLs weren’t too high (thanks statin) and my overall cholesterol was better than average. According to the mainstream medical community I was doing great, especially for a heart patient.

But over the last few years something started to change with my numbers, and it was not my cholesterol. It was my sugars. In my 30s and 40s my fasting glucose was usually in the high 90s, which was great according to my doctors and the medical establishment. But in my 50s that number started to creep up. For a few years my fasting glucose was typically in the 100-110 range. My father, a diabetic, would scoff saying it was fine. They moved the number, he’d say. Used to be anything under 110 was fine.

Then, more recently, my fasting glucose went up more and I was regularly testing in the 115-120 range, and even higher. My A1C crept up as well. 5.5 in 2019. 5.8 in 2020. 6.1 in 2021. Then in the summer of 2023 my A1C was at 6.1 and my fasting glucose hit 133. My doctor told me I was now considered diabetic. That pronouncement scared the shit out of me because after my heart attack I thought I was doing everything right, and my biggest fear was becoming diabetic as I knew that was a surefire path toward another cardiac issue. 13 years of thinking I was eating correctly for my individual health situation was not working.

I was not ready to simply give up though. The obvious next step in treatment would have been to add Metformin to my already full daily pill case. But that felt like a medical establishment solution — throw another drug at it. I asked my doctor to give me a few months to lower my A1C on my own, and she agreed. By November it was clear I couldn’t do it based on what I knew about diet and exercise, so I went back to see her with my spirits dejected and assuming I’d be adding Metformin to my daily routine. But that’s not what happened.

Over the last part of 2023 I started down another research path, this time dedicated to diabetes not strictly heart disease per se. That research led me to a couple of very interesting podcasts, including the one that lit a proverbial fire under my ass. A friend suggested I watch a podcast interview by Steven Bartlett with a woman called Jessie Inchauspé. I had seen Bartlett’s podcast before and enjoyed his interview style. His podcast is called Diary of a CEO and he dedicated a lot of time to each guest. His interview with Inchauspé was 90 minutes long, but it quite literally changed my life. The episode is called The Scary New Research On Sugar & How They Made You Addicted To It! and whether you are diabetic, pre-diabetic, or concerned about your own health at all, you should spend the 90 minutes to watch it.

What I learned from this podcast was fascinating, and it reinforced so much of what I’ve been concerned about in my own health journey and gave me a tool to make a difference. If I took one thing from this interview it was that I needed to get a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and learn for myself how various foods impacted my blood glucose levels. I knew a little about the reasons to be concerned about glucose, but I didn’t understand the biological details until it was explained to me like I was an idiot by this young French biochemist.

So when I went to see my doctor in November I told her I was going to buy a CGM to try it out. I was going to buy one without a prescription from a company called Zoe, which (full transparency) Steven Bartlett now has an equity stake in. But my doctor told me she’d prescribe me one, and so a few days later I picked up a Freestyle Libre 3, downloaded the app, and popped it on my arm.

Fast forward to today. I’ve been wearing the CGM since early December. I now understand so much more about how my body reacts to various foods I eat, as well as how my blood glucose reacts when I exercise. And while I have not yet gone back to my doctor for another blood test, here’s what I can tell you. In the last 45 days:

My GMI (equivalent of A1C) is at 5.8

My fasting blood sugar each day when I wake up is around 100

I have lost 10 pounds

Suffice it to say, I am eating very differently than I was prior to starting this journey. I am eating plenty of food, not counting calories, and enjoying meals and snacks that are tasty and filling. I am also exercising more regularly, pretty much daily, but I’m simply walking for 45 minutes at a reasonable pace either outside or on the treadmill depending on the weather.

I am convinced that in the next few months I will be down to my target weight (a weight I have not been at since the days after my heart attack when I was afraid to eat anything). I am also 100 percent sure I will no longer be diabetic when I get my bloodwork back, nor will I be “pre-diabetic” as measured by an A1C of 5.7 to 6.4.

It’s not cholesterol folks. We know the high carb low fat diet adopted by the U.S. Government and health care community in the 1980s was based on bad science. There is ample evidence about that, led by great doctors and journalists including Gary Taubes, Nina Teicholz, and Dr. Steven Gundry, and Dr. Mark Hyman. I’m no fan of “celebrity” doctors but when they are right they are right. Taubes, Teicholz and others like them are great journalists who follow the science not the rhetoric. Not convinced — Google “Ancel Keys”.

Stay tuned to this space for more specific details about what, specifically, I have learned by wearing a CGM. If you can’t wait, hit me up at lengutman@gmail.com.

An Unusually Unremarkable Year in Books (For Me Anyway)

It was a rough year for me on a personal level, saying goodbye to both my mother and father just six weeks apart this spring. Early in 2023 I didn’t have much time for my favorite pastime of reading given the stress levels in my life and the numerous travels to and from Tucson to be there for my folks. Despite this, I did manage to read nearly 20 books during the year, including one a month for my book club. Ultimately, I’d have liked to get to an average of two per month but sometimes life has other plans.

Still, the year was full of interesting and thought-provoking reads led by my favorite novel of the year, Horse by Geraldine Brooks. This novel reiterates exactly why I am in a book club — I never would have picked it up were it not for another member of the club choosing it as our August selection. Horse, the sixth novel from the Aussie and 2005 Pulitzer winner for March, is the story of a thoroughbred horse and his relationship with his enslaved groomer during the Civil War. While the book is fiction, it is based on real race horse Lexington. Honestly, I didn’t know I could care about a racehorse but Lexington’s story is beautiful and tragic and Brooks weaves in bevy of real and fictional characters that come together in relationship to this wonderful animal. The novel is educational, interesting, mysterious, and emotional all at once.

The only other book that earned five out of five stars for me this year was The Epicureans by Charles McNair. My friend Charles is a slightly demented dude, which is one of the reasons his work is so interesting and fun to read. The Epicureans is about a mysterious cabal of super wealthy people who come together once a year to dine on a meal that is sumptuously evil. Charles, whom I met in the late 1990s while working in Atlanta and with whom I have remained friends, is a gifted storyteller with a style that I like to describe as Vonnegut with a twist of Alabama gothic.

My four out of five star list includes:

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.
I highly recommend this novel by one of America’s best novelists.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.
One of my favorite authors hits another home run (and wins another Pulitzer) with this tale of a young boy coming of age in Oxycontin-riddled Appalachia.

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby.
Required reading for everyone who wants to understand the intricacies of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Tishby shares her own family history in Israel and writes in clear, plain language with a touch of humor.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann.
Far better than the film, and you may even be able to read it in less time than it takes to watch Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour adaptation.

The Rosie Project (Don Tillman, #1) by Graeme Simsion.
Fun story. Sheldon Cooper meets Miss Marple.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
Even if you’ve never played a video game in your life you’ll enjoy this coming of age story about friends coming together to take on the world of gaming.

Three out of five stars:

Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton.
Nice read. George Clooney made it into a movie called The Midnight Sky.

The Stranger by Albert Camus.
Second read as I’ve been thinking more about philosophy these days. I pretty much agree with Camus that life is absurd.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer.
What would you be willing to do to save the historical record of your ancestors? Would you face certain death at the hands of terrorists?

Trust by Hernan Diaz.
This one shared the 2023 Pulitzer with Demon Copperhead. I don’t think it’s nearly as good, but I’m a biased Kingsolver fan. This was a little confusing, but unique.

Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher.
If you’ve ever written a recommendation letter for someone you’ll get a kick out of this little book.

Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson. Powerful words about race, told as if Dyson was writing directly to victims of police violence.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.
I loved Ozeki’s first novel A Tale for the Time Being so much this one was never going to live up to that one. Just okay for me. A little hard to stay with.

Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta.
I’m not sure we needed a sequel to Perrotta’s brilliant novel Election, but we got it anyway. Maybe he felt like he was too harsh on Tracy in the first book so he had to find some way to redeem her character. But I think Tracy Flick was a great literary villain and coming back to her as an adult turned out to be somewhat disappointing for me. Perrotta is a genius but this one felt contrived. Read Election, or Little Children, or The Leftovers instead.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Nobody covers climate in long form as well as Naomi Klein. She’s one of my idols. This book is different for her, though no less interesting. She has long been confused with another female Jewish writer named Naomi — Naomi Wolf. Unfortunately, Wolf went off the deep end during Covid and has become a darling of the anti-vax right and the Bannon-led takeover of “mirror world” America. Klein goes into depth explaining what this has done to her, and takes down Wolf in the process. I liked it, but would have liked more about why people believe conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated political gobbledygook.

Two out of five stars:

Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2) by Colson Whitehead.
Meh. I really liked the first book in Whitehead’s Harlem series Harlem Shuffle, but this one was a dud. Still, Whitehead is one of the world’s premier novelists so get out there and read The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys!

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year by Jimmy Breslin.
My baseball read in 2023 was sold as a funny take down of the terrible first year (1962) of the New York Mets baseball franchise that lost 120 games. It should have been hysterical, but Breslin chose instead to focus on New York politics and the origins of the franchise rather than the exploits of Marv Throneberry, Don Zimmer, Casey Stengel and the rest of the gang. Every spring I read a baseball book to get ready for the season…this year for the first time I chose a stinker. I should have guessed a book about the Mets would suck.

Here’s looking at you 2024. First up, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann.

The Music Genre I've Always Loved Has a Name I Never Knew

New Wave. Rock. R&B. Hip Hop. Country. Punk. Most of us know these music genres by name and can rattle off artists that fit within each. But recently I was listening to one of my favorite artists from the 1980s and it occured to me they did not fit neatly into any of the standard genres. So of course I turned to Wikipedia, which is when I learned for the first time that there is a genre for a particular type of music I love — Sophisti-Pop.

Maybe you’ve always known you liked Sophisti-pop. I consider myself a music aficionado, yet I’d never heard the term. Hey, I love music but I never said I was bright. So what is Sophisti-Pop? Wikipedia defines it as a pop music subgenre that developed out of the British new wave movement during the mid-1980s. It originated with acts who blended elements of jazz, soul, and pop with lavish production.

The band I was listening to when I made this discovery was Everything But The Girl, whom I’ve blogged about previously. I guess I always just considered them pop, but that never really felt right. And of course, once I discovered the term it made perfect sense. EBTG is most definitely sophisticated compared to most pop music. While the term does feel a little bougie, it works. So what are some of the other bands that fall into this genre? Well, some of my all-time favorites:

Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry

The Style Council

China Crisis

Pet Shop Boys

Spandau Ballet

OMD

Tears For Fears

Icehouse

Swing Out Sister

Turns out I’m a Sophisti-Pop super fan and I didn’t even know it.

I often think back to the year 1983 when I was a high school junior in San Diego. I listened to rock. My favorite bands were The Who. Rush. Springsteen. My car radio was always tuned in to 91X, an album-oriented rock station that beamed its signal from a tower in Tijuana, Mexico. Then, on Jan. 11, 1983 my musical life changed in an instant. Without warning that evening, 91X was playing Stairway to Heaven. Next thing I knew station manager John Lynch came on the air and announced the station was changing formats to modern rock, following in the footsteps of Los Angeles station KROQ. Then Lynch teed up Sex (I’m A…) by Berlin and the rest is history. I was an alternative rock fan from that day forward.

Alternative Rock is a wide spectrum though. You can lump electronic music in with punk and funk rock and still be listening to Alternative Rock. 91X could play Depeche Mode, Ramones, and the Chili Peppers one after another. And while I liked it all, and still do, I really like what I now know is called Sophisti-Pop.

Do you love Sophisti-Pop too? I’ve started a playlist on Spotify so feel free to listen in and even suggest some songs for it. Perhaps it will grow into the leading Sophisti-Pop playlist on the platform!