Hi folks, thanks for joining me.
Welcome to another edition of Digestable, the short, weekly email where I share information, ideas, and what’s new with me. This email was sent to subscribers on May 17th, 2021.
This week’s goodies:
- How and Why to Conduct a One-on-One Check-in Conversation with Staff or Family Members: A one-on-one conversation might be the most powerful tool you have to alter the trajectory of a person’s life or their relationship with you. In this new blog post I share notes I’ve collected on how and why to do it.
- How to Take Digital Notes and Build Your Second Brain: Taking notes, storing notes, and retrieving notes using powerful digital technology is not a skill your parents can teach you – it is a new frontier. But Tiago Forte can. Tiago is at the forefront of our new ability to literally build a “second brain” that can store and retrieve everything that is or ever has been important to you. His 70 minute workshop on YouTube is a great launching point and will benefit anyone wanting to improve their note taking, storage, and retrieval skills. It is especially valuable for students, and I know you are all lifelong students. As it is stated on the timeless Field Notes notebooks: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.“
As an example of the topics covered: What kind of notes should I take and keep? Tiago advises these 4 criteria:- Inspirational info: is this something that could inspire me in the future?
- Useful info: is this a useful source or tool for the future?
- Easily lost info: is this information I am unlikely to find in the future?
- Personal info: is this hard-won knowledge that is worth revisiting in the future?
- How to Take Podcast Notes On the Go: AIRR. Airr is an app that lets you bookmark, highlight, and share the best snippets of the podcasts you listen to – even handsfree while you drive using Siri or by tapping your AirPods. Sorry Android users, you’ll have to join the waitlist.
- Highlights from my recent vaccine research (pros & cons):
- Paul Offit, M.D.: The latest on COVID-19 vaccines and their safety, herd immunity, and viral variants: ““If you ask me the question, ‘What do I fear most about this whole pandemic?’ it’s actually not the variants. … It’s that there would be a significant percentage of the population that is going to choose not to vaccinate so much so that we can’t get to that 80+% of population immunity we need to slow this virus.” —Paul Offit. This longform podcast interview by Peter Attia, M.D. takes a deep dive into the latest vaccine research. The two M.D’s debate the merits of mandating vaccinations, highlight the importance of getting your 2nd dose, and discuss how the idea that this virus originated in a lab is no longer in the realm of conspiracy theory.
- Unintended Effects of Vaccines: “As important as it is to quickly arrest the spread of the virus by immunizing the population, it would be vastly worse if hundreds of millions of people were to suffer long-lasting or even permanent damage to their brain or heart microvasculature as a result of failing to appreciate in the short-term an unintended effect of full-length spike protein-based vaccines on these other organs.” – John Patrick Whelan, MD, PhD, in his letter to the FDA.
With any intervention to human health, the question is not, “What IF there are unintended effects?”, but, “What ARE the unintended effects?”. It is important we gain a clearer understanding of the tradeoffs when forming health policies with global reach. In this letter, Harvard-trained UCLA Prof is asking the FDA to further investigate “the possibility that the new vaccines aimed at creating immunity against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (including the mRNA vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer) have the potential to cause microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys in a way that does not currently appear to be assessed in safety trials of these potential drugs.” This is not an anti-vaccine letter. Patrick Whelan goes on to wonder if a truncated version of the spike protein would be less damaging in a vaccine, as it was in mice. More time and study will shed light on this as well as any other unintended effects of the vaccine intervention.
- Paul Offit, M.D.: The latest on COVID-19 vaccines and their safety, herd immunity, and viral variants: ““If you ask me the question, ‘What do I fear most about this whole pandemic?’ it’s actually not the variants. … It’s that there would be a significant percentage of the population that is going to choose not to vaccinate so much so that we can’t get to that 80+% of population immunity we need to slow this virus.” —Paul Offit. This longform podcast interview by Peter Attia, M.D. takes a deep dive into the latest vaccine research. The two M.D’s debate the merits of mandating vaccinations, highlight the importance of getting your 2nd dose, and discuss how the idea that this virus originated in a lab is no longer in the realm of conspiracy theory.
- Quote I’m Pondering: “Whoever wants really to get to know a new idea does well to take it up with all possible love, to avert the eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that is objectionable or false. We should give the author of a book the greatest possible head start and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new idea, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Later, reason may set its limits, but at the start that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, is the device needed to entice the soul of the matter into the open.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche — Human, All Too Human
Thanks for reading. If you know someone who would like to receive these types of updates I’d appreciate it if you shared it. Should you come across anything noteworthy this week please send it my way!
Yours truly,
Jeff
Jeff Sutherland 