From an old Warner & Swasey advertisement, quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanac: “The person who needs a new machine tool and hasn’t bought it is already paying for it.”
It got me thinking about the suite of incredible tools available to knowledge workers now – if you aren’t using them, you’re likely already paying for it.
“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”| John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack)
I thought this’d be a good one as we start the week and contemplate the meetings we want to organize or attend. :-)
After 40 years of running experiments on the impact of diets on nutrition and health, Stanford University’s Christopher Gardner came to a simple conclusion – diet wars are a distraction.
I loved this distillation of the five lessons he shared –
(1) No single diet wins across the board. Low-carb, low-fat, vegan, and Mediterranean diets all produce similar average outcomes when matched for quality.
(2) Individual variation in response to diet is enormous – and mostly unexplained by genetics, insulin status, or any other single factor researchers have identified.
(3) Added sugar and refined grains are the dietary factors with the clearest, most consistent evidence for harm – and the ones most worth reducing regardless of which diet pattern you follow.
(4) The best diet for you is the one you can sustain. But that doesn’t mean the standard American diet – it means finding the highest-quality version of an eating pattern you can actually stick to long-term.
(5) There is more scientific consensus around the fundamentals of healthy eating than headlines suggest. Eat whole foods, plenty of vegetables, and legumes. Avoid added sugar and refined grains. Nearly every serious dietary framework agrees on this.
Dr Eric Topol wrote about a big milestone recently – Cardiology professional organizations have finally recognized that Apo(B) and Lp(a) should be part of the lipid panel.
After reading Dr Attia’s Outlive, I’d asked for these as part of my panel. But I’d been denied – so here’s hoping that changes. In his words – “Think of how many people would have been identified at high-risk for atherosclerosis and cardiovascular events who were missed all this time because the guidelines didn’t keep up with the body of knowledge.“
Dr Topol’s post goes on to advocate for the CHIP test as part of the lipid panel.
CHIP, which stands for clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential, refers to presence of myeloid blood cells with a driver gene mutation (with a frequency of ≥ 2%) without any clinical criteria of a blood cancer. It turns out CHIP is a major biomarker, not just for blood cancer (an 11-fold risk of a blood malignancy, or absolute 0.5% risk per year), but also for heart disease, blood clot events such as stroke and pulmonary embolism, and many other chronic illnesses
He makes the case with a simple chart that shows that the risk of heart rate with CHIP present goes up 1.8x.
You can also see the trend clearly here.
I’m hoping we’ll continue to see more testing here and will hopefully see it in the guidelines sooner than 8 years later.
Sid Sijbrandij (pronounced “see-brandy”), the co-founder of GitLab, was diagnosed with bone cancer and found himself running out of treatment options when the cancer returned in 2024.
After doctors essentially told him “good luck,” he decided to take ownership. What followed was impressive – He assembled a team, built a 1,000+ page health document modeled after the GitLab Handbook, and pursued what he calls “maximal diagnostics” – doing every test available, as often as possible.
Armed with that data, he identified experimental therapies, navigated the FDA for compassionate use access, and flew to Germany for a cutting-edge radioligand therapy that targeted his specific tumor markers. His cancer is now in remission.
He has documented his entire journey here (this story has a lot of the details too).
While Sid is undoubtedly fortunate to have incredible resources as someone whose net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars (or more), this is a glimpse of where cancer care is heading – personalized diagnostics, custom therapies, AI-driven drug discovery. He also highlights the aspects of the system that are broken – e.g., getting his own tissue samples and genomic data.
And, as he called out, the basics are not prohibitively expensive.
We have more agency than we think – especially with the tools available to us today.
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” | Epictetus
Epictetus had another note that made the same point – “It is impossible to being to learn that which one thinks one already knows.”
It is easy to say “I want to learn.” It is much harder to be committed to being okay with being thought as foolish and stupid. That is a lot of discomfort to endure.
It is why learning is hard.
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.” | John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack)
I discovered a collection of pithy and wise quotes from economist John Kenneth Galbraight.
This was one of those – so true.
There’s a short clip on the intense interaction between Maryland coach Brenda Frese and her star player Oluchi Okananwa that went viral.
After a bad third quarter stretch for Okananwa, Frese told her, “I need you to lock in. Stop being distracted. I believe in you, but you’ve got to want this moment. This is not my story.”
It sparked the turnaround she wanted and they went on to win. Both Frese and Okananwa reflected on that moment as just another day in their relationship.
The best players want their coaches to hold a high bar, and the best coaches hold a high bar.
Charlie Munger had a guiding philosophy on checklists: “No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.”
His investing checklist reflects that same discipline:
Easy to say. Really hard to do.
But underneath it all, Munger’s approach distills to four things: extreme preparation (work, work, work, work), consistent discipline, patience, and decisiveness.
Applies just as much to investing as it does to life.
“We are all permeable to the influence of the group. What makes us more permeable is our insecurities. The less we are certain about our self-worth as individuals, the more we are unconsciously drawn toward fitting in and blending ourselves into the group spirit. Gaining the superficial approval of group members by displaying our conformity, we cover up our insecurities to ourselves and to others.
But this approval is fleeting; our insecurities gnaw at us, and we must continually get people’s attention to feel validated. Your goal must be to lower your permeability by raising your self-esteem.
If you feel strong and confident about what makes you unique – your tastes, your values, your own experience – you can more easily resist the group effect. Furthermore, by relying upon your work and accomplishments to anchor your self-opinion, you won’t be so tied to constantly seeking approval and attention.” | Robert Greene in “The Laws of Human Nature”
A simple, well stated truth. Applies well beyond truth to authority figures and even family.
Our insecurities never fail to show up – in what we do, in who we choose to do it with, and in the way we talk about ourselves and what we do.
A Learning a Day 