🧬 The Distilled Download - Jan 24

Greetings, fellow science nerds! 🤓 Here’s your latest installment of The Distilled Download.

With all the TikTok ban drama last week, I’m happy to return to a medium where no big companies or legislation can get in the way! And I get to ramble a bit without leaning into the clickbait. 🙂 

Some quick “Me” updates:

1. I finally started a Patreon! There’s a free tier for those who want random updates and sneak previews throughout the week, a low-cost paid tier that gives you Discord access (we’re doing our first Live Q&A / hangout session this Sunday!), and various higher tiers that I’ll be experimenting with! These include perks like “Exclusive book club where I’ll send you a book, and we meet to talk about it,” as well as merch discounts (merch coming soon; I’ve been hard at work!), and even some high-end ones that come with periodic 1-on-1 meetings with me, in-person dinners, or business networking opportunities. My goal here is to make each Tier more valuable for you than what you’re putting in, and I’d love to get your feedback on all of it!
[BONUS: The first 314 people to join a paid tier will get access to a limited edition run of merch, where they will be a part of the design in a cool way–details coming soon!]

2. I just got a new standing desk, and one week in, it’s already done wonders for my computer-work-induced back pain. I'd highly recommend it for anyone who has thought about getting one but resisted!

3. It is cold. Please run humidifiers 24/7. And stock up on fuzzy socks.

And now.

The Download

🤸‍♂️ You Might be Wasting Your Time Stretching
Past research has shown that there are limited health benefits to static stretching beyond just improving flexibility. But sometimes flexibility is precisely what you want for a specific goal, like doing high kicks, splits, or acro-yoga (the reason I still work on my hamstring flexibility). But what’s the optimal dose of stretching to maximize your ROI on time? A recent meta-analysis of 189 studies found that:

I love this type of research because it lets me take an 80/20 approach toward balancing my time vs. physical health activities of various sorts!

💊 EVEN MORE Benefits of Creatine
The supplement world is full of scams, but creatine is one of the few compounds that consistently delivers excellent results in actual human randomized control trials. It's been shown to help workout performance and cognitive function, and now a new study shows that it might even help with depression! 100 adults with major depressive disorder in India took 5g of creatine daily, vs. a placebo group. After eight weeks, the creatine group showed a greater improvement in depressive symptoms! This could be due to its ability to improve energy production (regenerating ATP) or due to its ability to activate dopamine and serotonin receptors. In this trial, participants were not on any psychiatric medications, but others have shown creatine having an additive effect with medications for improving depressive symptoms!

I generally take 5g of this* creatine daily, split between my coffee and smoothie.

🤖 AI Agents are Among Us!
OpenAI just released its new “Operator” agent. It’s an AI that can browse the web for you and perform actions like making restaurant reservations, booking travel, setting up meetings, etc. One of the cool demos from their intro video was going from an Allrecipes recipe and using that to build an Instacart cart with all of the ingredients added in. The key development is its ability to essentially operate a keyboard and mouse, visually analyzing the results almost like a human would–this allows for it to interact with any website we could, even if there was no programmatic API (pre-made set of integrations that up until now were required for programs to interact with other services).

Right now this is only available for Pro users (the $200/month subscription), but it’s only a matter of time before this type of AI agent becomes commonplace. Another current example is the Perplexity Assistant. Get ready–those who don’t use AI will be the first to get replaced by it!

[Side Note: I’ve been thinking about creating a separate newsletter or social account around how I integrate AI into my everyday tasks as a solo creator and showing similar examples from folks in other professions. If this would interest you, let me know!]

📚 Book to Help You “People” Better
“Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection”* - this was released last year, written by Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit*–one of my favorite books of all time, and the nonfiction book I’ve probably gifted the highest number of times.
We all know someone who seems able to talk with anyone, any time, and somehow forge a genuine connection while the rest of us are still looking at our phones and figuring out how to say “hello” in a not-deathly-awkward manner. In this new book, he breaks down many of the specific techniques used by these “supercommunicators,” whether they realize it or not. I can see this being one I re-read once every year or two just to keep it all fresh.

Recent Video Roundup

Presidential Freeze on Governmental Science Organizations – I hate talking about politics, but when a president puts a stop to NIH meetings that award grant funding…. I get angry 👿.

Six Types of Depression - A recent fMRI study found six distinct patterns of brain activation associated with different sets of symptoms and found that some respond differently to treatment!

Wicked Science - For those of you who haven’t seen the new Wicked movie, stop and go do that. For the rest of you who enjoy nerdy movie breakdowns, I spent WAY too much time analyzing some problematic physics in the Defying Gravity scene, eventually resolving the issue and tying it into the main movie themes.

Thanks for reading! I love to hear feedback, so feel free to respond to this email or tag me on Twitter or Threads (which I’ll start using seriously one of these days 🙊).

*This is an affiliate link. Feel free to order from elsewhere or without the added bit after the url, but if you do use this link I’ll probably earn enough to buy myself a brand new gum-ball!