Tito 🦇🔊

Change is the only sign of life.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[Boris Becker @TheBorisBecker]

One of the best matches, that I can remember ….it reminded me of Sampras v Federer first time at Wimbledon!
@DjokerNole #Fonseca

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

Thomas Sowell on who actually helps the poor:

“Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”

[Tito 🦇🔊 @edwinLC]

@itsokimori 🫡

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

An artist who uses AI is not cheating. A surgeon who uses imaging is not cheating. A pilot who uses autopilot is not cheating. Tools make masters better. They always have.

[Naval @naval]

The new competition isn’t Humans vs AI. It’s Humans with AI vs everyone else.

[Fascinating @fasc1nate]

A great way to see Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is to stare at the center of the spiral for 20 seconds and then look at the painting.

Why Starry Night was so famous: https://t.co/P8BvRGohvu

[Lewis 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @WaldronLewis]

Jeff Bezos just explained why changing your mind is a sign of intelligence, not weakness:

"You have to be able to be decisive and make decisions quickly. And that's a very hard thing to do as organizations get larger, because so many people have opinions."

"The thing to realize is most decisions are reversible. Very rarely are they high-consequence irreversible decisions. By the way, when they are, you should go slowly. Of course. But most decisions can be made by a single high-judgment individual. And if they go the wrong direction, you stop, you back up. It's a two-way door. You come in, you look at it again, and you change your mind."

"In politics, people call you a flip-flopper if you change your mind. How foolish would it be to get new data, to have new analysis, to see something in a fresh way, to have that beginner's mind, have a better idea, and not change your mind."

"I've noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot."

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos)

P.S. We build content infrastructure for founders and athletes. 1.5M views/week average. Your voice, cross platform, compounding daily.

If you need massive distribution or want to build your brand, apply here:

https://t.co/SgdQTldYgD

[Tiempo De Tenis @Tiempodetenis1]

Hermoso esto que hizo Roland Garros el año pasado como homenaje a Rafa Nadal.

♥️🥹

[Tiebreakovic 🐐🥇 (riri) @40l0ve]

Djokovic side quest: music producer #rolandgarros
#nolefam
@DjokerNole
@mosimannoff

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

The result was almost too clean to publish.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.

On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.

She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.

Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.

The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.

Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.

Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.

Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.

Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.

Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.

Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.

The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.

The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.

And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.

[Bitcoin Teddy @Bitcoin_Teddy]

“Over the last 40 years, the United States has been exposed to something that our biology was never intended to handle,” warns former FDA Commissioner David Kessler.

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

Thomas Sowell on engineers vs intellectuals:

“The engineer is judged by the end product. If he builds a building that collapses, it doesn’t matter how brilliant his idea was—he’s ruined.”

“Conversely, if an intellectual has an idea for rearranging society and that ends in disaster, he pays no price at all.”

[shirish @shiri_shh]

Anthropic built a model so good at hacking they refused to release it publicly.

INSTEAD they handed it to Apple, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare

one month later: 10,000+ zero days found in the software that runs the internet...bugs hidden for 27 years in OpenBSD. exploit chains the model built by itself

we are living through a quiet inflection point and most people have no idea

we are cooked fr 😭

[Israel Romero @IsraRomeroCoach]

¿Y qué haces cuando no estás a tu 100%?
Damas y caballeros, el gran Rafa Nadal.

[a16z @a16z]

Intelligence is getting cheaper

Charts of the Week: https://t.co/O1SZEaWPFX

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Tito 🦇🔊 @edwinLC]

Lol

[Saffron Sniper @Saffron_Sniper1]

These two giant turtles have been fighting each other for more than 120 years.

According to the zoo, one turtle stole the other’s food 120 years ago, and since that day they became enemies.

There hasn’t been a single day where they don’t fight for 2–3 minutes😂

[Dan Proft @DanProft]

Life is like a guitar. @ericchurch offers a brillianct commencement address (and guitar lesson) at his alma mater, UNC, that belongs in the pantheon of addresses of this sort with those of Steve Jobs (Stanford) and David Foster Wallace (Kenyon College).

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

Just a few conditions being pursued for secondary prevention or treatment by GLP-1/GIP/Glucagon drugs in a new and comprehensive review @NatRevDrugDisc