A Learning a Day

The Exponential View team pulled together a thought provoking interactive resource on the Solar supercycle.

You can see the impact of learning curve projections as you tweak assumptions. The trend so far alone is fascinating however – as solar capacity increases, it is becoming exponentially cheaper.

It is a self-reinforcing cycle. The same forces that shaped the computing flywheel and made it ubiquitous are at work here.

Cost reduction creates demand. Demand drives deployment. Deployment drives more learning curves and cost reduction.

It is fascinating to think about the impact of lower costs. Suddenly, technologies that were out of reach given how energy expensive they were – from desalination to sustainable aviation fuel – become possible.

Positive exponential changes are fascinating to behold. And as far as the solar supercycle goes, we’re just getting started.

Derek Thompson shared a few fascinating charts.

Teenagers in the US aren’t reading.

They (along with adults) aren’t partying either.

But everyone is watching more YouTube (and TikTok).

The link between spending time on TikTok and most brain functions – from attention to memory to reasoning to inhibitory control are all negative. TikTok is melting our brain.

We’re seeing more young adults dislocated from both the economy and society.

Jonathan Haidt unearthed a fascinating insight among 12th graders – finding that conservatism and religion helped reduce the impact of this dislocation.

His hypothesis is that conservatism and religion might offer a binding moral matrix that protects young people from a rapidly changing world. While progressive moralities aim to grant people more freedom to “create their own identities”, this freedom is likely causing anxiety.

Societal dislocation and the legalization of gambling presents a toxic combination.

And this one continues to blow my mind – leading to the largest measles outbreak in the US in 20 years.

Don shared a quote from Michaelangelo when he was 87 years ago – “Ancora Imparo.”

It means “I am still learning” in Italian.

This is the from the person who painted the Sistine Chapel, sculpted David, and had produced more than most people could dream of in several lifetimes.

Inspiring – a lovely note to carry around.

Ancora Imparo.

Every Saturday morning, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton gathered his team for the same ritual.

First, they’d review the week’s sales in detail. Then, they’d discuss one question: what is a competitor doing that we should be paying attention to?

Employees would share observations from visits to Kmart, Walgreens, Sears. There was one strict rule: you could only talk about what competitors were doing right. Things that were smart and well executed.

Walton didn’t care what they were doing wrong. That couldn’t hurt him. What he cared about was not letting any competitor get more than a week’s advantage on something innovative.

It’s a beautiful way to institutionalize curiosity. And to steer a room full of people away from the instinct to talk about why they’re better – toward the harder, more useful question of what they can learn.

If you haven’t made an expectation explicit, don’t expect it to be internalized or understood.

The gap between what we expect and what we communicate is where most relationship friction lives – at work, at home, everywhere.

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.