Luck & Risk: What I read...

Bill Gates had a one-in-a-million head start because he went to Lakeside School. In 1968, it was one of the only high schools in the world with a computer because a forward-looking teacher used $3,000 in proceeds from a school-sponsored rummage sale to lease it. Gates told the school's graduating class in 2005: "If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft."

There were three computer prodigies at Lakeside School: Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Gates' best friend Kent Evans. Evans had a one-in-a-million risk when he died in a mountaineering accident before he graduated high school. Gates shares this story in the 2019 Netflix documentary Inside Bill's Brain, and it's retold through this lens of luck and risk in a 2020 book written by first-time author Morgan Housel.

Although it's not mentioned in the book, Housel writes in a blog post about a similar one-in-a-million moment he experienced in high school: the day two of his best friends were killed while skiing. After skiing a first run together, Housel opted out of the second run that buried his best friends in an avalanche. Housel argues that the tail-end events in life—the low-probability situations with high-impact consequences—are all that matter.

"The same force, the same magnitude, working in opposite directions. Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort."

HEALTH

Big Idea: Ageing leads to increased disease risk

Ageing & healthspan

- Ageing leads to increased disease risk ->
- What if ageing is the most important part of health to care for preventatively, rather than just the diseases that follow it? ->
- What can we do every day to increase the number of healthy years lived (healthspan)?

Dissonance: studying longevity while life expectancy in the U.S. is declining

We've been able to rethink ageing, the number of healthy years lived, and even the upper limits of lifespan because life expectancy has been increasing around the world for decades. But life expectancy in the U.S. is declining. (Harvard Medical School)

Declining mortality in the U.S. & deaths of despair

Drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease—coined "deaths of despair"–caused the fastest-rising death rates among Americans (STAT). The increase in all-cause mortality of middle-aged white men and women in the U.S. has been documented since 1999 (Case & Deaton). Now overdoses are the leading cause of death among young Americans under age 45, replacing suicide (CDC via FT).

Deaths of despair: America & opioids

Fentanyl: America’s struggle to contain a deadly drug. Enough fentanyl was seized last year to kill every adult and child in America. (FT)

The fentanyl king. An Iraqi translator for the US military emigrated to Texas to start a new life. He ended up becoming one of the biggest drug dealers on the dark web. (WIRED via The Profile)

Dave Chappelle SNL opening monologue. “Remember that for the first time in the history of America, the life expectancy of white people is dropping because of heroin, because of suicide." (SNL, Nov 2020)

Around the world: ageing populations & pensions

- U.S. Social Security won’t have enough money to pay all beneficiaries starting in 2034 (WSJ; reply if you can’t access the story)
- U.K. state pension age rise to 68 will not be brought forward yet (BBC)
- French reform raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 causing civil unrest (Google News)

The puzzle of millions of missing workers

- U.S.: Nearly 12 million women left work during the pandemic (The Journal podcast)
- U.K.: More than 2.5 million people out of work due to long-term health issues (BBC)

HEALTH/TECH

“Memory”: A superhero, Alzheimer’s, and the APOE gene. Thor star Chris Hemsworth learns he has a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s—specifically two copies of the ε4 variant in the APOE gene—increasing his risk of developing the disease by 8- to 12-fold in this episode of Limitless with Peter Attia, a six-episode series documenting Hemsworth's mission to live better for longer on Disney+ by National Geographic. Scientist and author Andrew Steele reviews this moment and suggests how gene editing might help people like him in the future. (Andrew Steele YouTube)

Bonus: Chris Hemsworth changed his life after an ominous health warning. In this revealing interview, Hemsworth shares even more about the experience of learning about his risk for Alzheimer's through genetic testing, why he chose to share it openly, and his subsequent desire to take time off work. (Vanity Fair)

TECH

A plan to hack the planet. In this 15-minute podcast, WSJ’s Eric Niiler discusses Make Sunsets, a startup that is cooling the earth by launching reflective clouds into the stratosphere. The founder, a former director at the startup incubator Y Combinator, is not a scientist—he got the idea from a sci-fi book and has since raised $750,000 from venture capital firms and friends. It's a short primer on the principle of geoengineering—and the philosophical and scientific debate around it. (The Journal podcast)
"But what makes you so confident that when you do it, you won't screw it up?" "Oh, we'll definitely screw it up."

How MrBeast learns. MrBeast is a 24-year-old YouTuber with over 200 million subscribers. This case study on how he learns suggests he's leveraged feedback loops at warp speed since age 12 as scaffolding for the platform he has today. (Escaping Flatland Substack)
"You can’t just feed your brain information if you want to learn effectively; you also need a serious project."

Why curation is the future. Curation is looked down upon as the lowest form of creation in media. In this blog post, CJ Chilvers offers six arguments on why curation is the future—and explains five reasons why curation isn't seen as the future. While it looks simple in concept and form, he concludes it's the hardest to execute and suggests it's the biggest opportunity to stand out in any industry. (CJ Chilvers blog)
"Curators are needed more than creators. The crush of mediocre human-made content, combined with bland AI-generated content, will only increase. We need picky people with fine-tuned BS detectors to comb through it all and surface the good stuff."

MONEY

Lauren Sánchez on going to space and working with Jeff Bezos. The helicopter pilot and former co-host of Good Day L.A. shares that she cries every time she tells the story about learning she has dyslexia for the first time—something she wasn't tested for until college. Anecdotes like this help position her as driven, likeable, and hard-working in the first profile since her relationship became public. Barbara Walters helped guide Sánchez at one point in her career, with Walters giving her the following advice:
"'They will try and make you ordinary. Don’t let them. Then, if you fail, at least you fail as yourself.' I never forgot that." (WSJ)

U.S. spending run rate on war in Ukraine is greater than Afghanistan. The U.S. Congress appropriated more than $112 billion in 2022 for military aid to Ukraine (BBC). The U.S. spent more than $2 trillion over 20 years in Afghanistan (Costs of War, Brown University).

Who is Evan Gershkovich? WSJ reporter loved Russia, the country that detained him. Russia's FSB detained the 31-year-old American reporter and charged him with espionage, the first spy case against an overseas reporter since the Cold War. The Journal promptly withdrew its Moscow bureau chief, Ann M. Simmons, a veteran correspondent who's covered Russia since the early 1990s when she reported on the aborted coup against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
"Many Western news agencies that posted reporters to Moscow under Stalin have determined that President Vladimir Putin's Russia is too dangerous for journalism." (WSJ; see Google News for latest)

DOSE OF WONDER

On complexity. "A resistance to complexity, in our moral or aesthetic lives, should make us wary."— Alex Karp (Palantir shareholder letter, May 2022)