What We’re Reading (Week Ending 12 December 2021) - 12 Dec 2021
Reading helps us learn about the world and it is a really important aspect of investing. The legendary Charlie Munger even goes so far as to say that “I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading.” We (the co-founders of Compounder Fund) read widely across a range of topics, including investing, business, technology, and the world in general. We want to regularly share the best articles we’ve come across recently. Here they are (for the week ending 12 December 2021):
1. TIP399: The Real Life Tony Stark W/ Josh Wolfe – Trey Lockerbie and Josh Wolfe
Trey Lockerbie (00:14:13): That is interesting because yeah, it’s easy to assume that with that kind of money and success and ego, even, and experience, you would be tempted to apply that to the people you’re investigating and not let them be as autonomous as maybe you have. So that’s an interesting point. Bill’s also very interested in nuclear and I am as well. I’m just kind of hopeful for that for the future of energy. And you’ve got experience in the space as well and I’d like to just maybe take a minute and explore what the future of nuclear looks like in your opinion,
Josh Wolfe (00:14:44): In part the future of nuclear is going to look like the past, or I think ought to, but we’ll get to that in a second. Bill funded a company called TerraPower, which is a traveling wave nuclear reactor and he was quite bullish on that. And frankly pre COVID and pre some of the tensions between US and China, it looked probable that China was going to become a big, early customer. But we spent a few years going back 10 years here at Lux looking at every part of the nuclear fuel cycle and studying it. And we did this as an exemplar of, while I was discussing before being intellectually competitive and looking where other people were looking, everybody in the venture world, going back to the early 2010s, was looking at clean and green, and they were looking at biofuels, ethanol, batteries, electric vehicles, wind solar, things that were mostly talked about in Al Gore’s movie of the time An Inconvenient Truth, which helped to light a fuse under the movement.
Josh Wolfe (00:15:30): And it became a little bit of a religious movement, most of the people praying at the altar really did not talk about nuclear. Nuclear still had a, what I would consider, generational and celebrity taboo, the generational being going back to the ’60s and ’70s, and the celebrity being people like Neil Young and Patty Smith who were rockers of the day, who basically were singing at concerts, being like no nukes. And there was a conflation for the ever everyday person that no nukes as a form of nuclear weapon versus no nukes in the form of power, which is clean and green, and at the time nobody was really focused on low carbon. And so the conflation of nuclear war and nuclear power, I think, has set us back many generations. I think it’ll take another 50 years really until we see widespread nuclear use.
Josh Wolfe (00:16:12): So we looked at every part of the nuclear fuel cycle, we decided that uranium miners were mostly hucksters and fraudsters, as many mining companies are in Nevada and Montana. And we basically said, leave that to somebody else. And the other unique thing about nuclear, as opposed to say oil and gas, was a characteristic that, the marginal price of the input in oil or gas is basically defined by your marginal cost of extraction, and it’s what guides markets. The marginal price of uranium is just a very small percentage of the total operating cost for nuclear. Most of it is the operations, the regulations, the CapEx that goes into the physical equipment, the maintenance, the human labor, it’s a very different construct. It’s a small sub single digit, single digit percentage so that when uranium fluctuates as it did going back a decade from like 25, to 30, to $70 per pound of uranium, it didn’t matter.
Josh Wolfe (00:17:01): And so, we did not look at the mining people, we did look at modular reactors, and while Bill Gates had funded that in TerraPower, and there were probably six or seven other different constructs for efficient modular reactor instead of building a Gigawatt power plant that might cost $1 billion and could serve a million people. The idea was, could you build something that was smaller, maybe a $100,000 or $1 million and build hundreds of them? And put on powers you need in a very modular way. I think it’s a great idea, I just unfortunately think that it’s going to take a very long time, you’re going to have to have safety and approval and manufacturing. You also increase the chance that there’s a risk on any one thing that creates a failure point that could actually triple everything which normally in a redundant system you would be okay with, but in this you’re increasing more failure points.
Josh Wolfe (00:17:42): The history of traditional nuclear power, particularly in the US is somewhere between exceptional and extremely exceptional. You had Three Mile Island, which was a disaster, zero people died. There was more evidence of the efficacy of the fail safe systems that basically shut the system down. That also, unfortunately, happened to coincide with the movie The China Syndrome. So this is going back to 1979, I think. And again, it captured the zeitgeist of a nuclear down, and so that was just unfortunate. In contrast, Chernobyl was an absolute certifiable disaster, and that’s been well documented literally in documentary or a dramatized movie, I think on HBO or Showtime about Chernobyl and I think it really talks not so much to the engineering failure, but to the human failure of being able to report truthfully up a chain of command to prevent things from getting worse.
Josh Wolfe (00:18:26): And then Fukushima was also a disaster, less a human disaster, maybe you can say it would be the equivalent here of like an army Corps of engineers, but in failing to anticipate this super low, negative, back swan event, a super low probability high magnitude consequence, it wasn’t nuclear failure, it was a failure of the architecture to be able to prevent a breach from a tsunami. And so, that set it back, but already you see Japan beginning to restart and rebuild for nuclear. So one would’ve imagined that that would’ve been a generation or two before people would embrace nuclear again, already they are. You’re seeing the consequences both in energy scarcity in Europe, the rise of the green party, and Germany the increased leverage has given Putin in Russia with natural gas pipelines. France has, always generated about 80% of its electricity.
Josh Wolfe (00:19:09): Southern California had shut down nuclear power plants and had to import electricity from Arizona, which was producing it by a nuclear. And so unfortunately the religious zeitgeist around no nukes has, I think, created some worse devils in the world. And I believe that the future is going to be a combination of speculative investment that is going into phishing, primarily large dollars will go into fusion. I expect that, of course, there’s a very low probability that many of those things will ever actually produce energy. Obviously this entire planet is premised on receipt of power from a fusion reactor, that is the sun, but I’m more skeptical about it being on a timeline that’s investible. And so I would advocate that there just needs to be a rebranding of nuclear. I talk about it as elemental power.
Josh Wolfe (00:19:51): So people could talk about the sun, which they like the wind that they like. So solar and wind. You could talk about natural gas to an extent, and then you could talk about uranium, this wonderful yellow rock that, when enriched slightly can boil water with no carbon released and turn turbines and produce beautiful, clean electricity. As I joke that if elemental power were discovered, in recent weeks, we would be screaming with joy and it would grace every cover of every publication, exalted that we just solved the climate crisis. So, I think it more than any engineering or investment, it just needs a rebranding and zeitgeist to capture young people, advocate and demand for elemental power, and I think that would be the best thing for society…
…Trey Lockerbie (00:53:02): One of the sense that was missing in your outline there that I just couldn’t help, but call out is the smell. The smelling sense that I know you had a passion for developing that technology, is there any update there?
Josh Wolfe (00:53:12): No, it’s a constant hunt for me and maybe a hunt for a year or 10, I have no idea. But I am primed for the optionality of trying to discover it. What it is, just for people who are watching or listening, is the idea that I can pick up this phone and it is a remote control for pretty much everything in my life. I’m able to conjure a car, conjure a meal, control devices around me through response system, or iPhone, and I can capture high fidelity sound, I can play that sound back with high fidelity speakers. I can capture high fidelity imagery, static or dynamic in the form of video, increasingly 4k and 120 frames a second, and then I can play whatever high quality, high density, high pixelated displays.
Josh Wolfe (00:53:51): The one sense that I can capture today, and I already have haptics that are tapping me on my watch, so I have a sense of feel, I can’t capture smell. And when you say, “Well, why do you want to capture smell?” It is our most salient memory connected sense. And so whether it’s the smell of a loved one, the smell of nostalgia, the smell of a wine or a food, being on a beach in vacation, capturing that dimension, not just of the sound of the waves or the visual of it in a different speed, slow motion, or faster, as realistic as possible. But that smell that is like the one French word I know, that [foreign language 00:54:21] of that moment, and being able to share that with somebody.
Josh Wolfe (00:54:25): And so that second piece is not only, do you have to capture it? But you have to be able to play it back. Now capturing, if I would’ve told you 20 years ago, you can walk into a cafe and hold up a little magic Star Trek device and whatever song is playing, it will tell you exactly what that song is. You never have to write it down, you don’t have to record it and the ability to Shazam is effectively capturing a digital signature of sound waves that are permeating through the air, tied to a central database. It does pattern recognition, figures out what segment that is and what it matches to in the database. It says, “It’s this Drake song or whatever it is,” the same thing will happen with smell.
Josh Wolfe (00:54:56): There are volatile organic compounds, today you can use a mass spectrometry machine to be able to look at the chemical signature of that visually. And eventually those technologies will become solid state, they will shrink down. Maybe they’ll be small scale lasers in the same way that we have like LIDAR in our iPhone today that can do 3D depth sensing of physical spaces used to require big machine, and you’ll be able to get a smell signature, press a button and basically have a Shazam for, hey, what is that smell? And then somebody else will have to invent the playback mechanism. So they’ll be recording and they’ll be playback, and I’m absolutely convinced it will happen because it kind of already obey the laws of physics, and there’s no reason that it can’t, we just have to find the right combination of technologies to put together, to make it happen and I hope to fund the ones that win.
2. Blockchain Can Wrest the Internet From Corporations’ Grasp – Chris Dixon
As the internet has evolved over its 35-year lifespan, control over its most important services has gradually shifted from open source protocols maintained by non-profit communities to proprietary services operated by large tech companies. As a result, billions of people got access to amazing, free technologies. But that shift also created serious problems.
Millions of users have had their private data misused or stolen. Creators and businesses that rely on internet platforms are subject to sudden rule changes that take away their audiences and profits. But there is a growing movement—emerging from the blockchain and cryptocurrency world—to build new internet services that combine the power of modern, centralized services with the community-led ethos of the original internet. We should embrace it.
From the 1980s through the early 2000s, the dominant internet services were built on open protocols that the internet community controlled. For example, the Domain Name System, the internet’s “phone book,” is controlled by a distributed network of people and organizations, using rules that are created and administered in the open. This means that anyone who adheres to community standards can own a domain name and establish an internet presence. It also means that the power of companies operating web and email hosting is kept in check—if they misbehave, customers can port their domain names to competing providers.
From the mid 2000s to the present, trust in open protocols was replaced by trust in corporate management teams. As companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook built software and services that surpassed the capabilities of open protocols, users migrated to these more sophisticated platforms. But their code was proprietary, and their governing principles could change on a whim…
…There has been a lot of talk in the past few years about blockchains, which are heavily hyped but poorly understood. Blockchains are networks of physical computers that work together in concert to form a single virtual computer. The benefit is that, unlike a traditional computer, a blockchain computer can offer strong trust guarantees, rooted in the mathematical and game-theoretic properties of the system. A user or developer can trust that a piece of code running on a blockchain computer will continue to behave as designed, even if individual participants in the network change their motivations or try to subvert the system. This means that the control of a blockchain computer can be placed in the hands of a community.
3. Bill Doyle – Novocure: Using Physics to Fight Cancer – Patrick O’Shaughnessy and Bill Doyle
[00:03:04] Patrick: So Bill, where to begin this really interesting conversation? It’s a field that I have limited experience with, but a deep interest in and before we get into Novocure specifically, maybe the best place to begin is a little bit higher level with just the state of cancer research and treatment writ large. If you could sort of paint a picture for us of what the world looks like today, relative to maybe when you first got involved in this space. So that we can appreciate the rate of change and the state-of-the-art today.
[00:03:32] Bill: From my perspective, and I certainly don’t have the only perspective here, but I think, first and foremost. We’re all familiar with cancer, we’re all touched by it, either personally or through loved ones. I think we all fear it. We fear it because not withstanding all of the research and progress that’s been made. The approaches to treat chemotherapy haven’t changed all that much in a 100 years. We still have essentially three tools and I’ll expand upon this a little bit, but those three tools are well known. Surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, or I’ll make a slightly larger basket, pharmacological therapy. There have been progress made in all of those areas. They’re all 120 years old, approximately. A few trace back to the first surgeries for breast cancer at Johns Hopkins or the first chemotherapies that were used in Germany and clearly the Curie’s in radiation therapy.
We’ve got about 120 years of history, but still today, the majority, and really the vast majority of people who are diagnosed with cancer will die of that cancer. Now, we have some wonderful examples of some cures. Great progress in areas, leukemia, certain types of breast cancer. But again, I can make the statement that most of the people who are diagnosed with cancer will die, in fact of that cancer. Now, there is more than hope. There’s been incredible, tremendous progress, particularly over the last 20 years. I think our understanding of the cell, understanding of the genetics of cells and proteins has clearly expanded and that has led and is leading to new therapies. Today, it’s still most effective of cancers, so called the simpler cancers, the cancers that may result from a simple genetic mutation and the more complex cancers we’ve yet to make progress. But we think that progress may be very much on the horizon.
[00:05:41] Patrick: Can you just describe, maybe an overly simplistic question, but what cancer is literally? What is happening in the cells or in the body when somebody gets and has a cancer that grows and becomes life threatening?
[00:05:52] Bill: Of course, normal cells grow. They divide and they die and then are removed from the body. In its simplest sense, cancer is an uncontrolled growth. In the case of solid tumors, which are the cancers that we’re focused on, literally results in masses that impinge upon normally functioning organs, for the most part and disrupt their function. Furthermore, those cancers will metastasize. And that’s the fancy word for spread from their point of initiation to other parts of the body, creating satellite cancers that also have this deleterious effect…
…[00:19:12] Patrick: Now we can finally get with that great setup and great overview of the space itself, into the technology that you at Novocure have pioneered. This idea of tumor treating field. So introduce us first to the technology. And then we’ll use that understanding to start to dive into the business itself too.
[00:19:28] Bill: So we start where you started. Historically, the therapies available to the oncologists have been broadly surgery, radiation and drug therapies. We just discussed that the drug therapies are … And the strategies are expanding from poisons to things like immune stimulators, but it’s still in that realm of pharmacology. Novocure has developed a completely new modality, a fourth modality to fight cancer. The original invention was made by a gentleman named Yoram Palti. Dr. Palti, is an MD, PhD professor at the Technion in Israel and Dr. Palti’s expertise actually his many expertise, but his principle expertise is the effect of electrical phenomenon on tissue. He’s one of the pioneers in developing the technology that is used to treat, for instance cardiac arrhythmias. When there are electrical signals that are going to the wrong place in the heart, that results in atria or the ventricles beating too quickly or too slowly.
One of the therapeutic approaches to treat those arrhythmias is to map those electrical pathways that are firing in the wrong direction and then put a catheter inside the heart and make a small burn to prevent that pathway. Dr. Palti was at the forefront of developing those systems that are used in hospitals around the world. But about 20 years ago, he called me and I got to know him. In an earlier part of my career, I was responsible for R&D and business development in the medical device group at J&J. So I got to know Professor Palti, as we were working on these cardiac ablation systems together. And he called me and I flew to Israel. We had lunch at one of these delightful beach restaurants in Tel Aviv. And I was expecting to hear the next generation of cardiac therapy and he surprised me with an idea to treat cancer. And again, this was completely out of left field.
But his idea was that many of the proteins that are involved in cell division have a very strong electrical charge. They’re so called strong dipoles. So they have a strong negative charge on one end of the protein and a positive charge on the other end of the protein and electric fields, similar to magnetic fields or gravitational field. A gravitational field pulls on masses, a magnetic field pulls on ferous metals. An electrical field pulls on charged bodies. And he said, “If I can get an electric field inside a cell, I think I can push and pull in those proteins. And instead of getting a normal cell division, I think I can kill that cell.” And that was the fundamental idea that we now call Tumor Treating Fields. That we can get an electric field selectively now into a rapidly dividing cancer cell push and pull on the machinery of division. And instead of that cell dividing and becoming two cancer cells, have it die during cell division.
[00:22:37] Patrick: So going back to the issue that you brought up, cancer is different from a bacteria, or virus that are so different, we’ve got cells that are roughly similar to normal healthy cells. What is the mechanism by which … I want to come back to how this thing actually works. The pulverizer of cancer cells through electrical fields, but how do you first make sure that you’re not pulverizing good, healthy cells? What is the difference that you’re able to work off of to make this targeted?
[00:23:02] Bill: That was one of the big questions on day one. This sounds good, but other cancer therapies. One does it work and two, what’s the toxicity profile of this therapy? Because we were all brought up worried about our cell phones, worried about living under power lines. There’s sort of all this mythology around electric fields. Now, we’re going to put it into the body. We have some lucky biology here. What I just described, in order for that to happen, obviously the electric field has to get into the cell and it turns out the cell membrane that surrounds the cytoplasm is actually a pretty good filter for electric fields. It keeps the electric fields out of the cells. And in order to get the electric fields into the cell, we have to tune them to a specific frequency that will penetrate the cell membrane. And it turns out because of a number of physical properties, back to the difference between cancer cells and normal cells. There are enough differences having to do with the salt on the membrane, the thickness of the membrane, the size of the membrane, where we can differentiate between cancer cells and normal dividing cells.
The analogy I like to use here, when I’m describing this to my non-physicist friends, which are most of my friends. We all have car radios. You can think about all the radio stations that we listen to, all exist in the ether. It’s not as, if you’re pressing a button and you’re turning on one station, they’re all there. But the box that we use allows us to filter one at a time. In the old days, when I had my first car, it had a knob and I would turn that knob, which turned a capacitor. And I grew up outside of Baltimore. So I would go to 98 megahertz that would let 98 Rock into the amplifier. And that’s what I would hear. I’d get tired of that. I’d go to DC 101, a 101 megahertz, and that would let 101 megahertz into the amplifier. And that’s what I would hear. That’s what we’re doing with cells. We tune that frequency for GBM, the Tumor Treating Fields get into the GBM cells. If we want to treat pancreatic cancer, we tune the Tumor Treating Fields to get into the pancreatic cancer and then we treat that cancer. So it’s maybe not a perfect analogy, but it’s like tuning an FM radio…
…[00:34:42] Patrick: This might be another odd question, but prior to meeting you, why had I not heard of this? I’ve known people that have had GBM, for sure. Obviously, cancer writ large. And I was very familiar with the original three, surgery, radiation chemotherapy. This didn’t come out last year. Like technology’s been around for, I think almost 20 years now. What are the interesting non-obvious barriers to adoption? What do people fear about this? What are some of the non-medical challenges that you faced? Why hadn’t I heard of it?
[00:35:10] Bill: Being a pioneer creates great opportunity, but also, there’s huge challenges. I sort of joke, when I had that lunch with Palti. The good news is, I was trained as an engineer. So I knew what an electric field was, the bad news for me is, I had no idea how hard it was going to be to change how medicine is practiced. Let’s face it, surgery, radiation, chemo, as I said, they’ve all been around for over a 100 years. The current generation of oncologists study these modalities in medical school. I won’t call it the military industrial complex. The oncology industrial complex is focused around doing drug research. Most of the oncologists, there is always that point and I don’t know whether it’s in high school or college where you go to physics or biology. Vast majority of docs went biology. They didn’t go to physics.
A lot of my discussions with clinicians and brilliant clinicians, but they start with, this is an electric field, It really is Physics 101. I think too, if you diagnose with GBM, I would hope in the US at least, Tumor Treating Fields would be presented to you as a therapy option. I know that’s not universally the case yet. We’re working very hard to make that the case. Right now, about 40% of the eligible patients in the US receive a prescription for Tumor Treating Fields. Now, that’s better than five. The other 60 can all benefit. So we’re working very hard to overcome really the educational gap, but let’s face it. I was skeptical when I first heard about this, everybody starts skeptical. Oh, yeah. We’re going to zap it with magic rays.
4. Web3 is Bullshit – Stephen Diehl
At its core web3 is a vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public’s negative associations of crypto assets into a false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony. It is a distraction in the pursuit of selling more coins and continuing the gravy train of evading securities regulation. We see this manifest in the circularity in which the crypto and web3 movement talks about itself. It’s not about solving real consumer problems. The only problem to be solved by web3 is how to post-hoc rationalize its own existence.
The blockchain offers nothing new or worthwhile to the universe of technology. It’s a one trick pony whose only application is creating censorship resistant crypto investment schemes, an invention whose negative externalities and capacity for harm vastly outweigh any possible uses. Every single problem proposed to be solved by blockchain hits up against three fundamental technical limitations that inescapably arise from economic or legal concerns. The three technical issues of the narrative are:
1. The Compute Problem 2. The Bandwidth Problem 3. The Storage Problem
On a compute basis, blockchain networks don’t scale except by becoming the very same plutocratic and centralized systems they allegedly were designed to replace. There is an absurd cost to trying to do censorship resistant computation. In this regime there is a hard incentive to minimize program execution time because the entire network is forced to recompute every single program as part of it’s insanely wasteful process of attempting to reach consensus about a giant global state machine. This inevitably drives the cost per program instruction into the stratosphere. The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600 from the 1970s except it runs on casino chips that cost $500 a pop and every few minutes we have to reload it like a slot machine to buy a few more cycles. That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable. We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where the cost of compute time per person was nearly at post-scarcity levels, to the reverse of trying to enforce artificial scarcity on the most abundant resource humanity has ever created. This is regression, not progress.
And then there’s the inconvenient truth about the bandwidth problem of both computers and human resources. Blockchain solutions are vastly more expensive to maintain than centralized solutions, and centralization always wins purely from its ability to physically serve data over a network to customers more efficiently. For this hypothetical proposed decentralized Facebook there are several inescapable logistic questions. Who will pay for the global data centers to serve content? Whose lawyers will respond to the DMCA requests? Who is going to ban the Nazi accounts? Who will issue deletes on CSAM content? Who will reset grandma’s password when she forgets? Running a global business on this scale requires an inescapable amount of centralization just by the brute fact of having to exist and interact with the rest of the civilization. If you introduce centralized data centres and processes to handle all of the messy human interactions, well then congratulations you’ve just recreated Facebook by another name.
Finally there’s the notion of the storage problem, which taps at the heart of what many argue is one of the biggest societal questions of the 21st century: “Who owns our data?”. The web3 narrative is incredibly antithetical to the notion of data deletion because the technical underpinnings of append-only and immutable databases don’t admit this operation by design. Yet every new business model must cross the bridge about customer data visibility and who they will let on the platform. Who’s servers will have custody of your private family photos and who get’s to determine those access controls? And these are questions that are not about consensus algorithms, distributed databases or cryptography at all, they’re inescapably questions about power, privilege and access. Technology won’t save us from having to ask the hard questions of who should have power to control our digital lives. The answer will always be somebody, it’s just a question of who.
5. The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber – J.B. Mackinnon
Honnold is history’s greatest ever climber in the free solo style, meaning he ascends without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. Above about 50 feet, any fall would likely be lethal, which means that, on epic days of soloing, he might spend 12 or more hours in the Death Zone. On the hardest parts of some climbing routes, his fingers will have no more contact with the rock than most people have with the touchscreens of their phones, while his toes press down on edges as thin as sticks of gum. Just watching a video of Honnold climbing will trigger some degree of vertigo, heart palpitations, or nausea in most people, and that’s if they can watch them at all. Even Honnold has said that his palms sweat when he watches himself on film.
All of this has made Honnold the most famous climber in the world. He has appeared on the cover of National Geographic, on 60 Minutes, in commercials for Citibank and BMW, and in a trove of viral videos. He might insist that he feels fear (he describes standing on Thank God Ledge as “surprisingly scary”), but he has become a paramount symbol of fearlessness…
…The cognitive neuroscientist who volunteered to carry out the scan is Jane Joseph, who in 2005 was one of the first people to perform fMRIs on high sensation seekers—people who are drawn to intense experiences and are willing to take risks to have them. Psychologists have studied sensation seeking for decades because it often leads to out-of-control behaviors such as drug and alcohol addiction, unsafe sex, and problem gambling. In Honnold, Joseph saw the possibility of a more remarkable typology: the super sensation seeker, who pursues experiences at the outer limits of danger, yet is able to tightly regulate the mind and body’s responses to them. She is also simply in awe of what Honnold can do. She had tried to watch videos of him climbing ropeless, but being a low sensation seeker herself, found them overwhelming.
“I’m excited to see what his brain looks like,” she says, sitting in the control room behind leaded glass as the scan begins. “Then we’ll just check what his amygdala is doing, to see: Does he really have no fear?”
Often referred to as the brain’s fear center, the amygdala is more precisely the center of a threat response and interpretation system. It receives information on a straight pathway from our senses, which allows us to, for example, step back from an unexpected precipice without a moment’s conscious thought, and triggers a roster of other bodily responses familiar to almost everyone: racing heartbeat, sweaty palms, tunnel vision, loss of appetite. Meanwhile, the amygdala sends information up the line for higher processing in the cortical structures of the brain, where it may be translated into the conscious emotion we call fear.
An initial anatomical scan of Honnold’s brain appears on MRI technician James Purl’s computer. “Can you go down to his amygdala? We have to know,” says Joseph. Medical literature includes cases of people with rare congenital conditions, such as Urbach-Wiethe disease, which damage and degrade the amygdala. While these people generally don’t experience fear, they also tend to show other bizarre symptoms, such as a total lack of concern for personal space. One individual was comfortable standing nose-to-nose with others while making direct eye contact.
Purl scrolls down, down, through the Rorschach topography of Honnold’s brain, until, with the suddenness of a photo bomb, a pair of almond-shaped nodes materialize out of the morass. “He has one!” says Joseph, and Purl laughs. Whatever else explains how Honnold can climb ropeless into the Death Zone, it isn’t because there’s an empty space where his amygdala should be. At a glance, Joseph says, the apparatus seems perfectly healthy.
Inside the tube, Honnold is looking at a series of about 200 images that flick past at the speed of channel surfing. The photographs are meant to disturb or excite. “At least in non-Alex people, these would evoke a strong response in the amygdala,” says Joseph. “I can’t bear to look at some of them, to be honest.” The selection includes corpses with their facial features bloodily reorganized; a toilet choked with feces; a woman shaving herself, Brazilian style; and two invigorating mountain-climbing scenes.
“Maybe his amygdala is not firing—he’s having no internal reactions to these stimuli,” says Joseph. “But it could be the case that he has such a well-honed regulatory system that he can say, ‘OK, I’m feeling all this stuff, my amygdala is going off,’ but his frontal cortex is just so powerful that it can calm him down.”
There is also a more existential question. “Why does he do this?” she says. “He knows it’s life-threatening—I’m sure people tell him every day. So there may be some kind of really strong reward, like the thrill of it is very rewarding.”
To find out, Honnold is now running through a second experiment, the “reward task,” in the scanner. He can win or lose small amounts of money (the most he can win is $22) depending on how quickly he clicks a button when signaled. “It’s a task that we know activates the reward circuitry very strongly in the rest of us,” Joseph says.
In this case, she’s looking most closely at another brain apparatus, the nucleus accumbens, located not far from the amygdala (which is also at play in the reward circuitry) near the top of the brainstem. It is one of the principal processors of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that arouses desire and pleasure. High sensation seekers, Joseph explains, may require more stimulation than other people to get a dopamine hit…
…Even to the untrained eye, the reason for her interest is clear. Joseph had used a control subject—a high-sensation-seeking male rock climber of similar age to Honnold—for comparison. Like Honnold, the control subject had described the scanner tasks as utterly unstimulating. Yet in the fMRI images of the two men’s responses to the high-arousal photographs, with brain activity indicated in electric purple, the control subject’s amygdala might as well be a neon sign. Honnold’s is gray. He shows zero activation.
Flip to the scans for the monetary reward task: Once again, the control subject’s amygdala and several other brain structures “look like a Christmas tree lit up,” Joseph says. In Honnold’s brain, the only activity is in the regions that process visual input, confirming only that he had been awake and looking at the screen. The rest of his brain is in lifeless black and white.
“There’s just not much going on in my brain,” Honnold muses. “It just doesn’t do anything.”
To see if she was somehow missing something, Joseph had tried dialing down the statistical threshold. She finally found a single voxel—the smallest volume of brain matter sampled by the scanner—that had lit up in the amygdala. By that point, though, real data was indistinguishable from error. “Nowhere, at a decent threshold, was there amygdala activation,” she says.
Could the same be happening as Honnold climbs ropeless into situations that would cause almost any other person to melt down in terror? Yes, says Joseph—in fact, that’s exactly what she thinks is going on. Where there is no activation, she says, there probably is no threat response. Honnold really does have an extraordinary brain, and he really could be feeling no fear up there. None at all. None whatsoever.
6. The Secret Levels Master Plan (just between you and me) – Sam Corcos
Most people don’t yet realize the magnitude of the problem that metabolic dysfunction poses for society. If you want to dig deeper into this, you should check out our blog post, The Ultimate Guide to Metabolic Fitness, but the highlights are:
- More than 10% of the US is currently diabetic, and the rate is accelerating.
- There are almost 90 million prediabetic Americans; 70% of those people will be diabetic within 10 years, and 84% of people with prediabetes do not know they have it.
- Fewer than 25% of candidates of eligible age qualify for the military and this is largely due to being metabolically unfit; it’s a national security problem
- Metabolic dysfunction might be the single largest (preventable) force pushing up the cost of healthcare. Individuals meeting at least three criteria for metabolic syndrome have 60% higher annual healthcare costs; diabetes alone contributes to $327 billion in medical costs and lost productivity, expected to exceed $600 billion by 2030…
…One reason we’ve been so in the dark about metabolic health is that there are no good tools to measure how your diet affects you in a quantifiable way. The biggest levers for metabolic health are, in no particular order:
- Sleep
- Diet
- Exercise
There’s no way to say which is the most important because they’re so interdependent. If you sleep poorly, your body releases stress hormones, generates inflammation, triggers hormones that lead to sugar cravings, and develops acute insulin resistance. Together, this may result in erratic mood and energy throughout the day, making it harder to exercise and prepare healthy meals, and generate a negatively reinforcing cycle of poor metabolic health.
We currently have good tools for measuring and quantifying sleep (including Eight Sleep, Oura) and exercise (like the Apple Watch, Fitbit, Whoop). This has allowed people to discover how their choices affect those aspects of their life, but there hasn’t been a way to quantify how your diet affects you. This forces people into making guesses about what is working and what’s not, leaving 59% of people saying conflicting food and nutrition information makes them doubt their choices.
In the same way that everyone knows to get eight hours of sleep, and how Fitbit convinced people that walking 10,000 steps is a good target for exercise, we will show people that maintaining a flat glucose curve is optimal for lifestyle and long-term metabolic health.
Empowering people to see for themselves how their choices affect their health gives them agency. We all know that eating a box of donuts is bad for us in a general, ill-defined sense, but without an immediate consequence like pain or death, it’s hard to feel compelled to overcome the powerful rewards of smell, texture, and taste.
By quantifying the consequence of a choice in real-time, we can effectively close the loop on diet, connecting a specific action to the nature and degree of the reaction, and allowing us to continuously improve our choices. The first time you see the data that closes the loop on how your choice of breakfast directly caused your mid-day energy crash—that’s when you make a change.
7. Elements of Effective Thinking – Farnam Street
We’re seduced into believing that brilliant thinkers are born that way. We think they magically produce brilliant ideas.
Nothing could be further from the truth while there are likely genetic exceptions, the vast majority of the people we consider brilliant use their minds differently.
Often, these geniuses practice learnable habits of thinking that allow them to see the world differently. By doing so, they avoid much of the folly that so often ensnares others. Eliminating stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.
I came across The Five Elements of Effective Thinking, authored by Dr. Edward B. Burger and Dr. Michael Starbird, which presents some practical ways for us to improve our thinking.
They make a pretty bold claim in the introduction.
You can personally choose to become more successful by adopting five learnable habits, which, in this book, we not only explain in detail but also make concrete and practical.
The five habits are:
1. Understand deeply 2. Make mistakes 3. Raise questions 4. Follow the flow of ideas 5. Change
Disclaimer: None of the information or analysis presented is intended to form the basis for any offer or recommendation. We currently do not have a vested interest in any company mentioned. Holdings are subject to change at any time.
