Dr. Eric Topol shared a summary of recent studies showing the impact of the Shingles vaccine on dementia – primarily Alzheimers.
While the post is worth reading in full, he makes a fascinating point – if this vaccine was a drug and reduced Alzheimer’s by 20%, it would be considered a major breakthrough for helping to prevent the disease! But as a vaccine it hasn’t reached any sense of being a blockbuster; this indication was never envisioned when the vaccines were developed and we only “backed into it” from these large and highly consistent natural experiments.
The next step is to consistently replicate it – there are multiple studies under way. That said, considering just how notoriously hard it has been to make any progress against Alzheimer’s, this is shaping up to be a big deal.
I’ve written about giving better advice a few times. But it is a topic I keep coming back to given just how often I encounter bad advice. Here’s attempt #20.
I think there are two steps to becoming a better advice giver.
The first is to only give advice when asked. In the rare cases you’re giving unsolicited advice, make sure you call it out. It’s best avoided no matter how good it is.
The second is to make sure that the first question you ask is to get an understanding of what the person is solving for.
Too often, we just assume and share generic advice that isn’t useful. Shitty advice comes from assumptions about what people are solving for. Or even worse, an assumption that they’re solving for what you would be solving for.
Start with asking that question. Then you have a better shot of giving better advice.
The European Union’s Copernicus Earth Observation Program released a few charts summarizing temperatures in 2025.
It was the third warmest year on record.
All monthly temperature records have been broken over the past 3 years.
Surface temperatures continued to rise.
Sea ice continued to decline.
And we’ll breach +1.5 degrees C by the end of the decade.
The facts are clear.
The question, of course, is – what will we do about it?
And as I think about energy as technology in 2026, one of the biggest side-effects of the AI boom and energy build out is that it might actually galvanize an unlikely surge of clean energy and electrification to make the picture in the next decade a bit better.
A good friend was reflecting on goals and strategy.
Good strategy starts with “where do we play?” and then moves to “how do we win?”
Her reflection was that goals often led to missteps in the past because she skipped the “where do we play” question and jumped straight into “how do I win.”
It’s a nice and simple articulation of the challenge with goals – they get you hyper-focused on one pre-decided particular outcome which may not be the outcome you want at a later period of time.
Good strategy is always evolving based on the context.
I think a better approach is to pick directions and get the process right.
The direction evolves based on the answer to “where do we play.” It’s not a specific destination. It’s a direction.
And “how do we win” is your process – we simply spend our days focused on doing the right things.
If you haven’t checked out Moltbook.com, I’d recommend taking 5 minutes to check it out. It is a Reddit-style platform for AI agents. You’ll see posts like this one.
Or even discussions like this around why you should ship while your human sleeps.
Azeem Azhar had a thoughtful post on all of this. 3 notes that stuck with me –
(1) Moltbook demonstrates what I’d call compositional complexity. What’s emerged exceeds any individual agent’s programming. Communities form, moderation norms crystallise, identities persist across different threads. Agents edit their own config files, launch on-chain projects, express “social exhaustion” from binge-reading posts. None of this was scripted.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
No race to the bottom of the brainstem. Agentic behaviour, properly structured, doesn’t default to toxicity. It’s rather polite, in fact. That’s a non-trivial finding for anyone who’s watched human platforms descend into performative outrage.
Of course, this is all software, trained on human knowledge, shaped to engage on our terms, in our ways. Of course, there is nothing there in terms of living or consciousness. But that’s precisely what makes it so compelling.
(2) Moltbook is a live experiment in how coordination actually works. It treats culture as an externalised coordination game and lets us watch, in real time, how shared norms and behaviours emerge from nothing more than rules, incentives, and interaction…
…If agents can generate civility through incentive architecture alone, then human platform dysfunction becomes a design choice. Not an inevitability.
The toxicity we’ve normalised – outrage cycles, pile-ons, the race to the brainstem – reflects architectures optimised for engagement over coordination. We built systems that reward inflammatory (and sometimes false) content with maximum attention. We got what we paid for.
Moltbook’s agents face different constraints. There’s no ad model demanding eyeballs, no algorithmic amplification of conflict, no dopamine metrics. Result is boring civility, functional discourse – and at the core, coordination that works.
(3) Moltbook is a terrarium, a controlled environment that reflects both us and the world we might build.
It may show that culture doesn’t require consciousness. Neither does civility. The social behaviours we’ve attributed to human nature may be more mechanical than we’d like to admit: feedback loops, iterated games, incentive gradients.
More practically, it previews the rules we’ll need when agents start coordinating with each other across the internet at scale; the negotiating, trading, forming alliances without us.
So Moltbook isn’t just the most interesting site on the internet right now. For the moment, it’s the most important one.
It was sad to see Manchester United sack manager Ruben Amorim recently. The occasional recent resurgence was another false dawn – in a string of many over the past ~15 years.
A year ago, Ruben’s signing was seen as a big step forward. United signed a young coach full of potential with a clear philosophy.
He showed the clear philosophy alright. But the results struggled to follow. And even with an uptick relative to the disastrous last campaign, the consistency wasn’t there. Most importantly, and sadly, Ruben seemed more intent on proving his philosophy right than actually winning.
It all culminated in a show of public frustration against his bosses. There was only one way this story would end.
United went back and hired Michael Carrick – a former player – as interim manager. We’ve seen this movie before. It was no surprise to see a collection of former players and pundits lambasting the decision. The consensus was that the team would be ripped apart by Manchester City and Arsenal – the table toppers.
The opposite happened – United won both games. A few interesting notes –
(1) The changes Michael Carrick made didn’t require crazy tactical thinking. It felt rather straightforward. He just put round pegs in round holes.
Simple is hard sometimes. Or maybe more often than not.
(2) While I hope he’ll see continued success, it does drive home something I’ve seen time and time again.
You can spend a lot of time listening to the critics and the pundits and the news.
I recently wrote about an analogy of how people are like lakes. The color of a lake changes based on the sun and atmospheric conditions.
The takeaway was that the external atmosphere in which people find themselves changes their behavior.
Another angle from which to think about the atmosphere is to think about the internal weather – this came up in a conversation recently.
The person I spoke to shared that they went through an extended period of not feeling like themselves – it lasted four years.
Four years.
It’s crazy to think how long internal weather can sometimes be off.
There were a series of factors that drove this. But they expressed their relief at being able to get out of this funk (with help from a coach) and go back to the better version of themselves from before.
We all use our phones a lot and battery life goes a long way. Here are three things I’ve learned.
(1) Heat is the biggest killer – especially heat combined with a full charge. Leaving your phone in a hot car or using intensive apps while charging accelerates permanent capacity loss faster than almost anything else.
This also means avoiding fast charging or wireless charging where possible.
(2) Use optimized charging. The charge from 20-80% advice is technically correct but often impractical. All you need to do is to enable optimized charging (max at 80% or 85%) when you charge overnight.
(3) Deep discharges stress batteries. While occasional full discharges aren’t catastrophic, they’re best avoided.
The practical takeaway: Avoid heat, use optimized charging, and aim to charge when you’re around 20%.
A Learning a Day 