One of the more important relationship decisions we make is whether we default to trust or default to distrust.
There are obviously trade-offs on both. And it depends a lot on what situation you’re in.
The benefit of defaulting to trust is that trust begets trust. People have a wonderful way of repaying the trust you place in them.
The downside, of course, is that once in a while, you’ll find somebody who will misuse that trust. And hurt you. Some in small ways, some in much larger ways.
Defaulting to distrust means you place a very high bar before you trust somebody. That obviously insulates you from those failures in trust.
But it also means you get to enjoy very little of the upside. Because trust is the foundation of great relationships.
My thesis is that while there are environments where distrust might be the dominant strategy, in most professional environments, defaulting to trust tends to be the way to go. There’s a lot more upside because the strength of the relationships you build often end up shaping the rest of your career.
There’s no right answer, of course. There’s just trade-offs. Don’t let a “policy change” be the outcome of a bad experience or a tough upbringing.
Best to choose our default intentionally and thoughtfully.
I was reminded of a time in high school when a gaming center called Crazy Planet opened up near home.
Crazy Planet had 10 computers hooked up to each other where you could play LAN games. This was a new experience for us. We hadn’t played too many video games (Playstations were too expensive). Computer games tended to be single player experience. Crazy Planet unlocked the opportunity to play together at a reasonable 30 rupees per hour to get into this dark room with haptics and amazing sound.
The game of choice was Counter Strike. We teamed up, 5 vs 5, went onto one of the maps, and played against each other.
It was our first taste of being in a virtual world while we screamed at each other in the real world. I remember how much it gripped us. It’s a core memory from that time.
There was even a time when I was extremely sick – with a fever well above 101 degrees. And it was on a day when a (wealthy) friend decided to host his birthday party with 3 hours at Crazy Planet.
I so badly wanted to go that I somehow convinced my family I was okay. It was a blast. I’m sure being sick was bad already. This didn’t help. I ended up missing school for a week and needed to treat a low platelet count.
But if you’d asked me then, or even if you ask me now, I would have taken that trade any day of the week.
We all graduated high school and went our separate ways to college. Many years later – I think it was 3 years after we started working – most of that group got together on a New Year’s evening.
We were debating what we should do to celebrate New Year’s. And someone came up with the idea that we all play Counter Strike. After an hour of set up, we spent the entire night playing Counter Strike. We played for 8 hours straight until the morning.
That was the last time we played Counter Strike and it was probably the best New Year’s get together we ever had.
It’s amazing to think that this simple game was part of such core memories. This trumped any educational trip or formal milestones. It was simply a dark room with friends playing video games.
And we appreciated it a whole lot more because we didn’t grow up with it. It was a lovely period of time – but in just the right amounts.
Many lessons there about shared experiences and moderation.
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.
A Learning a Day 