In pursuit of exceptional human flourishing

Not an unusual scenario. Someone forwards me a study, or a social-media post that might cite one, or a polished clinical guide with dosing tables and a credentialed name on the cover. Healthy volunteers were given thymosin β4 by infusion, tolerated it well, and showed no serious adverse effects. The implication being: TB-500 is safe, so it is worth a try for a shoulder or a tendon that will not settle.

The data is genuine. The problem is that the molecule in those studies is not the molecule sold as TB-500.

Almost the entire case for TB-500 rests on that substitution. Human data generated on one peptide gets quoted to sell a different, related peptide for uses neither has been tested in. Once you understand that, most of the marketing becomes flawed.

Most of what we say about fibre and living longer comes from studies that pool men and women together. A 2026 analysis of US national survey data did something less common: it looked specifically at postmenopausal women, 7,708 of them, followed for up to two decades [1].

The headline is the kind that hits home. Women in the highest third of fibre intake had a lower rate of death over follow-up than women in the lowest third, with all-cause mortality about 15% lower and cardiovascular mortality about 31% lower [1]. Across 2,116 deaths, of which 657 were cardiovascular, that is a sizeable gap.

On 18 June 2026, Midjourney, the AI company best known for generating images from text prompts, announced it is building a full-body medical scanner. It uses sound waves and water, takes a target of sixty seconds, and will be housed in a wellness spa opening in San Francisco in late 2027. The announcement landed in a news cycle that moves fast, and the questions it raises deserve a careful answer rather than a quick one.

In 2024, more than 100 people in Japan developed a serious form of kidney injury that prevents the kidneys reabsorbing glucose, amino acids, and phosphate from the urine, a condition called Fanconi syndrome. At least 76 of them died. The product was beni-koji, a fermented rice supplement sold by Kobayashi Pharmaceutical for cholesterol support.

The story did not travel widely outside Japan. In the supplement aisles of London, New York, or Milan, very little visibly changed. The product family that contains beni-koji, rice fermented with moulds of the Monascus genus, is sold across most Western markets under different names and different specifications. The most common cousin is red yeast rice, marketed as a "natural" cholesterol-lowering supplement.

Breathwork has become mainstream wellness. The case for it is now firmly established in bestselling books, viral sleep hacks, and a steady stream of people asking about mouth taping, BOLT scores, and CO2 tolerance training. If you're genuinely curious about whether the air we move through our face via one route or another is something we should be optimising, read on.

The Pause is Part of the Work

A founder replies to a board email at 11pm, three minutes after it hits her inbox. Her message is fluent and quick, but slightly off. Twelve hours later, in the shower, a better answer arrives. But by then the email thread has moved on.

This is the new environment many Founders and leaders now find themselves in. Inputs arrive during the working day, and beyond, faster than they can be "metabolised". AI has now compressed that window even further, not because the technology itself forces you to respond but because everyone else's response time has rapidly accelerated. On the surface, this might look like productivity but the real cost is actually measured in quality of judgement or the delegation of that judgement.

The more interesting question is not do we do less. The question is what is actually being traded under that pressure, and what would it take to think more clearly?