Time, Money

“No person hands out their money to passers-by, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”
– Seneca

Mise

Recently, I was talking to a friend who is trying to improve his cooking skills. Knowing that I attended culinary school, he asked if I had any tips. First and foremost, I told him, he needed to cook using ‘mise en place.’

A French term that roughly means “everything in its place,” mise en place is about setting up all of the ingredients needed before you start to cook. Like on a television cooking show, it’s placing all the prepped ingredients – peeled, chopped, ready to go – in little bowls and containers you can pull from when the time is right.

More than anything else, cooking well is about paying full attention to the food. Watching, listening, and smelling as food cooks, tasting and seasoning along the way.

If you go the route of most home cooks, you toss in the first ingredients right away, slicing and assembling the rest in parallel as you go. And though experienced chefs can make that work in a pinch, it’s far too much distraction for anyone still honing their skills.

Setting up your mise first adds only a few minutes to the total cooking time, but it pays huge dividends in the quality of food you can produce. So if you want to improve your cooking, try it out yourself. Prep first, then cook. Mise en place.

BHAG

Right now, the US is facing a terrible, relatively new problem: a surge in chronic disease.

One in two Americans suffers from chronic disease (more than half of those from multiple chronic conditions), which is responsible for more than seven out of every ten deaths annually. We spend more than $2.3 Trillion each year (about 12 percent of our GDP) treating chronic disease, and it’s likely only going to get worse going forward, as the rate of chronic disease in kids has more than doubled in the last twenty years.

Our healthcare system wasn’t built to deal with these kinds of chronic conditions. A century ago, our leading causes of death were acute, infectious disease (the top three: tuberculosis, typhoid, and pneumonia), and most other doctor visits were also for acute problems like appendicitis, gall bladder attacks, etc. For those kinds of issues, the medical system is incredibly effective: go see a doctor, get an antibiotic / have surgery, recover. And with new treatments and technologies coming online, we get better and better at acute treatment every year.

But that same system isn’t well-equipped to deal with chronic disease, where doctors’ current tools are largely focused on suppressing symptoms rather than dealing with underlying causes. If you have high cholesterol or high blood pressure, you can get a drug to take (for the rest of your life) to lower them, but rarely a serious look at why either is high in the first place.

Recent research suggests that more than 85% of chronic disease is caused by environmental factors, like diet, behavior (including movement / exercise), and lifestyle. Dealing with the root causes of those chronic diseases, then, involves helping patients build and sustain new patterns and habits over the long-haul.

Given the heavy load we already place on physicians, it’s not reasonable to expect them to accept responsibility for driving that kind of behavioral change, too. The average primary care provider has about 2500 patients on their roster, and sees each for visits lasting on average just 10-12 minutes. That’s enough time to diagnose symptoms, prescribe medication, and then follow up a few weeks later. But while most people will take a course of antibiotics their doctors prescribe, drastically fewer will make wholesale changes to their lifestyle, without substantial ongoing support.

Currently, the fitness industry is failing equally when it comes to providing that kind of support. Indeed, the vast majority of people who start a diet or join a gym today will be no better off (and often worse) a year from now, having seen little results, given up, and returned to their prior behavior. Roughly, the fitness world today is akin to where medicine was in 1850: a lot of new science is emerging, and a slew of potentially helpful tools and technologies are being developed, but it’s yet to coalesce into an effective standard of care.

Which, in short, is what Composite is really about. Our big, hairy, audacious goal is to bring the rigor of medicine into the world of fitness, to try and develop clinically-demonstrable effectiveness in treating the underlying causes of the majority of today’s chronic disease.

There are a number of other companies, too, living at the intersection of fitness, technology, and medicine, developing new best practices, to whom we look for ideas and inspiration. I strongly believe that, over the next twenty years, we’ll see a whole new fitness industry emerge from those kinds of companies, one that can work hand-in-hand with the existing medical system, to help the US address the problem of chronic disease. And I’m hoping that, with the right team, a bit of luck, and a lot hard work, Composite can help drive that change, can become a leader of that pack.

Best Served Cold

First, an admission: I hate iced coffee.

I love – love! – the hot version, whether a lovingly pulled single-origin double espresso or the cheap crap bodegas sling in paper cups.

But, for whatever reason, the cold stuff doesn’t do it for me. Nonetheless, I realize I’m an outlier, and therefore spend the summer watching my friends and family suck it down. In the past few years, the iced coffee trend has been towards cold brew. Yes, it’s smoother and sweeter than hot-brewed coffee, with less than half the acidity, and more caffeine kick. But, at most joints, it’s also upwards of double the cost of a hot coffee.

In part, that’s due to additional expenses on coffee shops’ part: plastic cups, straws, ice machines to crank out ice. But in larger part, it’s also due to the hipster factor; people really want cold brew these days, so shops up the price because they can.

But here’s the dirty secret: cold brew coffee is super-duper easy to make, dirt cheap, right in your own home.

Here’s what to do:

  1. Buy some coffee beans. Go medium or dark roast, and ideally not crap.
  2. Grind them coarsely; fine and medium-fine grinds will end up cloudy and silty.
  3. Find a big pitcher, and add the grounds and water in a 1:5 ratio. I.e, 1 cup grinds, 5 cups water.
  4. Leave the pitcher somewhere out of the sun for 12-24 hours (any less and the beans won’t properly extract), stirring occasionally during the first few hours.
  5. Strain out the grinds. You can use a French press (pour in the mix, affix and press down the top, pour out the cold brew), pass it through cheesecloth (or, if you’re ghetto-fab / in a pinch, a paper towel), or (for the clearest coffee) put it through a coffee filter lining a funnel or the swung-out body of a drip coffee machine. Really, you should probably just get a Chemex, as it’s perfect for this, and makes truly excellent hot coffee, too.

Voila. You now have cold brew concentrate that will last a couple of weeks in your refrigerator (or, thanks to Jess, about 48 hours in mine).

To serve, fill a glass completely with ice (as the concentrate is strong and needs the ice to properly dilute), pour in the coffee (and milk, if you’re weak), and enjoy.

For bonus points, collect the money saved over time, and fill a swimming pool with it a la Scrooge McDuck; the cold brew makes a perfect poolside drink.