Category: Uncategorized

Pre-Date Sleuthing, Cancer & New Homes

A lot of people in tech believe that if we build a smart enough AI, it will simply figure out cures for cancer and every other disease. This assumes we already understand human biology well enough that a clever reasoner could find the answers hiding in our data. We don’t. We’ve barely measured most of what goes on in the human body.

Making a drug has three steps:

  1. Figure out which biological mechanism to target
  2. Design a molecule that hits it
  3. Test it in patients

Nearly all the AI excitement is around step 2 (designing molecules, thanks to breakthroughs like AlphaFold). But that’s not where drugs fail. Over 90% of drugs that reach clinical trials flop, and usually it’s because the target was wrong, not because the molecule was badly made.

We’re getting great at cutting keys, but we keep cutting them for the wrong locks. Meanwhile, the industry keeps piling onto the same few “safe” targets (dozens of GLP-1 copycats) while the number of genuinely new targets pursued each year has collapsed.

Biology is enormous, messy, and idiosyncratic. Even the biggest cell datasets are orders of magnitude too small, and they mostly lack the kind of “what happens if we poke this?” data that matters for drugs. Worse, the diseases we understand least (Alzheimer’s, ALS) are the most human-specific, so animal studies don’t help and human data is scarce, expensive, and ethically constrained.

Self-driving AI systems work great when there’s a fast, cheap way to check if they’re right (like a compiler for code). In drug development, the only real test is a human clinical trial, which takes years and costs millions. Automating the lab just means you produce wrong answers faster.

AI can trim paperwork and logistics, but most trial time is spent waiting to see how a disease progresses in real people. That clock can’t be compressed by compute. The only way to shorten it is deeper understanding of the disease itself, which lets you pick the right patients and detect early whether a drug is working.

All these AI tools are useful, but they’re side improvements. The hard, unglamorous, essential problem is understanding disease mechanisms, which requires measuring human biology the right way and using AI to draw insights from those measurements.

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A new online platform called Stud or Dud, which launched by public-records company PeopleFinders, lets interested parties do a simple, free background check on their wannabe dates; including address history, bankruptcies and other publicly available records.

The site aims to simplify the pre-date sleuthing ritual familiar to most singles by putting all public records in one place, by also adding context to the material like compatibility read outs and color coding information with red and green flags. It’s your own little black book.

Before a first date, the standard vetting process for a potential romantic partner typically went as follows: send his dating profile to the group chat, where your best friend deploys the finsta for career-level private investigator work.

Comb through tagged photos. Check LinkedIn for employment. Search Facebook forums like “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” — all in an attempt to verify that your 7:00 pm drinks aren’t the beginning of an elaborate dating scam.

A recent survey found that 1 in 4 Americans reported interacting with a fake profile or AI bot, while 15% reported losing money to an online dating or romance scam. And 21% of men and 10% of women surveyed reported losing money to an online romance scam.

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The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing:

  • In 2015, 18 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books were nonfiction.
  • In 2025, only 7 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction. Fiction now dominates.

Reading habits are extremely gendered, with 80% of women making up the fiction market, and nonfiction being a more 50-50 proposition.

The collapse of nonfiction is less a “male reading crisis” than a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority other than follower count and force of personality.

The tide going out on nonfiction sales and reading is entirely reshaping the power balance in the industry. Not overnight, but slowly, the money is flowing to fiction and away from nonfiction. It is causing quite a scramble.

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Every three years the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, releases the results of international school tests sat by 15-year-olds all across the world. There were reasons to hope that the latest data, published on September 8th, would bring good news. It did not.

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Historically, a new home has sold for about $40,000 more than an existing home. The obvious reasons: lower maintenance costs, warranties, and the appeal of living in a home that no one has ever lived in before. New homes are also bigger (2,200 square feet for the average new home vs. 1,800 square feet for existing).

New home prices are down 15% in the last four years, and for the first time, new builds are cheaper than existing homes. The average new home is selling at $40,000 less than an existing one, a 9.3% discount.

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The past 10 years through this summer has been the worst decade for 15-year+ treasuries since 1803.

In 223 years, a negative 10-year return has happened in only 25 months. 24 of them just happened. The only other month was Dec 1959, at -0.08%.

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Stock market concentration of the top 10 largest stocks by country. There are only two stock markets with less concentration than the United States; Japan and India. Everywhere else the concentration in the top 10 names is way higher.

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The College Wage Premium in the Generative AI Era

After expanding for four decades, the U.S. college wage premium is experiencing a sustained contraction, dropping sharply from 0.626 in 2022 to 0.575 in 2026.

Using Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group data through 2026, standard market-clearing supply-and demand accounting implies an unprecedented drop in relative demand for college labor-the first sustained negative relative demand growth in a series spanning back to 1914.

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For U.S. workers without college degrees, this is one of the best job markets in decades. The unemployment rate for workers ages 22 to 34 who never graduated from college has rarely been lower in the past two decades.

Just as job hunters without degrees are having one of their best runs, those with college educations are having one of their worst. And those with advanced degrees or in fields such as science and technology are having an even harder time than usual.

That divergence of fortunes is a departure from what the U.S. economy has seen for years, and much of it boils down to supply and demand: There aren’t enough skilled tradespeople to go around as older generations retire and immigration drops.

Meanwhile, more Americans have college degrees than ever, just as artificial intelligence is doing more of the entry-level work companies typically hire young graduates for.

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Parenting, Meditation, Stimulants & Yoga

Early in the psychologist Peter Gray’s new book, “Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety” he proposes a thought experiment:

Imagine that your spouse or your closest friend had the same power over you that parents typically have over children. Although you’re an adult, this loving person insists that you never leave the house without an accompanying guardian or a G.P.S. tracker. When you return, they demand a full account of what you did. Frequently, they communicate with your boss, who controls you the way a teacher controls children at school. This boss reprimands you for arriving even a minute late, and prohibits you from talking with your co-workers without permission; you must even ask, publicly, to use the bathroom. Everything you do is judged and ranked in comparison to the work of your coworkers. And, when you wrap up at the office, your employer also requires you to do more work at home, and encourages your loving spouse (or friend) to be sure you do that work.

This doesn’t sound like a very nice life, does it? It’s an existence in which you’re micromanaged and surveilled, given almost no freedom or privacy, and put under constant pressure while, at the same time, being seen as incompetent and lazy.

And yet, it’s how many children live in the United States. Now eighty-two, Gray has spent decades studying kids, particularly how they spend their free time. In “Restoring Childhood,” he warns that they now have none, in both senses: they have no time, because they are over-scheduled and over-schooled, and their time isn’t free, because adults are neither willing nor able to leave even older kids unsupervised.

Child-protective services used to intervene mainly in cases of child abuse; over the decades, however, their remit grew to include not just neglect but “supervisory neglect,” a new parental offense that might involve leaving children briefly unattended in benign circumstances. 38% of children will be at the center of a C.P.S. investigation at some point in their lives. If you let your children play at the park by themselves, you could be reported by your neighbors and led away in handcuffs: it’s no wonder that many of today’s parents keep their kids on a short leash. 

The ultimate goal of childhood is to break away from dependence on parents and establish oneself as one’s own person. But adults, increasingly, are building a world in which this is impossible, and the result has been an ongoing decline in the happiness and mental health of young people.

Many intertwined changes have eroded children’s freedom to play and move about independent of adult control.

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In 2004, Willoughby Britton, then a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, began recruiting participants for a study that, she felt sure, would show meditation improves sleep.

But when she reviewed the results, she was dismayed to find they were the opposite of what she had predicted. The participants in the meditation group slept more fitfully, with more frequent awakenings, than those who didn’t meditate. They spent more time in “Stage 1,” the lightest sleep phase, from which people are easily roused. Graph after graph after graph, no matter how you looked at it, number of awakenings, number of micro arousals, number of Stage 1 minutes, the amount of meditation that the subjects practiced was directly correlated with worse sleep quality.

Because most kinds of meditation aim to enhance concentration, the practice can act like a stimulant. And just as chemical stimulants such as caffeine and Adderall can interfere with sleep, so, too, can excessive meditation.

What else, she wondered, did meditation teachers know that they weren’t telling people? Gradually, starting with that sleep study, the tiers of thought propping up Britton’s worldview, that Buddhism is a cure-all, and that meditation was always beneficial, and could never cause harm, would collapse.

Over time, she would find that meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse, addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis.

Losing the belief system that had been foundational to her life would lead her to produce a trailblazing body of research about the adverse effects of meditation, and then to found a clinical practice geared toward helping the people, a lot of them, as it turns out, who believe that meditation has harmed them.

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Millions of Americans are doing the same thing, swallowing down gallons of “energy” every month. Around 30 percent of the U.S. population consumes at least one energy drink per day. Among the under-35 crowd, it’s 60 percent. The older demographic still prefers coffee, and 66 percent of Americans drink that every day, too.

The deceptive part is that “energy drinks” don’t actually provide “energy,” beyond what you’d normally get by digesting a bunch of liquid sugar. Instead, they block your capacity to feel how tired you are. To severely oversimplify, all that caffeine functions as an antagonist for adenosine, the chemical that builds up in your brain during the day and makes you feel sleepy. The caffeine molecules fit into your adenosine receptors, blocking the “time to sleep” signal your brain would normally be getting. 

Taurine, meanwhile, is an amino acid that has some health benefits for nerve cells, and L-Carnitine promotes burning fat cells, but neither can create “energy” as such. So when you drink a few Monsters or Red Bulls, you’re still getting physically and mentally fatigued; your brain just doesn’t know it yet. It’s as if, instead of using an oven mitt, you just shot your hand full of Novocaine before grabbing a hot pan. 

Forbes reports that we’re currently in a new energy drink boom, with a global market for the neon-colored liquids estimated at $85.25 billion in 2025 projected to reach $158.53 billion by 2033. The Red Bull company alone is valued at $20-25 billion.

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What happened to Yoga?

Fitness trends come and go. But the workouts people choose also reflect the contemporary understanding of what it means to be well. For years, that meant yoga and its promise of stress reduction and mindfulness. In today’s world of fitness-maxxing and social-media-driven obsession over image, though, the cultural ideal seems to have shifted from inner peace to outward perfection.

Simply exercising and eating well is no longer enough;“biohacking” has become hot. Some of today’s wellness devotees wear continuous glucose monitors to clock blood-sugar spikes in real time as well as $400 titanium rings to track heart-rate variability and REM sleep. The goal: 24/7 self-improvement.

Although people surely sign up for yoga to better themselves, the practice typically encourages them to do so slowly, with humility. Yoga tends to be about letting go of ego and striving, and about surrender, principles that don’t quite fit into a culture obsessed with optimization.

Predictive Processing, Dating & End Credits

Most of us assume that our senses collect data, send it to the brain, and then we react. But a large body of research suggests that’s not how it works.

Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality. It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.

You start with a prediction, a top-down expectation of what your brain thinks it’s about to see. Then bottom-up incoming sensory data either confirms this prediction or updates it if things don’t fit. This is known as the predictive processing theory.

Higher-order areas of the brain were first making predictions about what they expected to see, and then sending them down the hierarchy. Only when something didn’t match the prediction, what they called a “prediction error,” did the lower levels sound the alarm and send information back up the hierarchy.

When the brain guesses correctly, there’s no need to notice anything. When it guesses wrong, like mistaking a wall for an aisle in a dark theater, the system lights up. It’s not that you didn’t see the wall with your eyes when you walked into it. It’s that your brain never expected it to be there in the first place.

This happens all the time with people when trying to solve problems, having conversations, and making decisions. The inner propagandist, the inner double agent, runs the show. The truth is whatever prediction doesn’t get proven wrong.

The brain deals with a world full of data and ambiguous messages. It makes the best possible predictions in moments of uncertainty. We don’t realize we’re making guesses, of course. The brain fills in the gaps using past experiences and context to figure out what should be there. You’re able to understand that sentence even though it’s painful to read:

Tahts wyh yuo cna uesndratnd tihs snetecne eevn thuogh teh wrods aer jbmlued pu. Oh, nda I klei yuro silme.

You don’t just see, then believe. You believe, then you see. Most of the time, it works great. But now and then, there’s a glitch.

Have you ever waved at someone who wasn’t there? Maybe you were walking down the street, and you saw a friend. So you smiled. Maybe you even raised your hand. And then you realized … it wasn’t them. This is an example of what feels like a positive hallucination, a moment when your brain sees something that isn’t there because it expects it to be. When you add to the scene around you.

There are also negative hallucinations, when you don’t see what is there. When your brain has removed things from in front of you. It’s asking your spouse where the keys are, when they’re sitting on the table right in front of you.

Our inner propagandists work 24/7, filling in blanks, removing things, and selling us the illusion that we are, in fact, seeing the world as it is. But we are, in fact, not.

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LinkedIn has accidentally become a dating site, despite its no-romance rules.

A deepening exhaustion with dating apps has pushed many to look beyond swiping. Singles are trying speed dating, connecting through shared real-world interests and even using spreadsheets to break their dating algorithm. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a public-facing platform with clear headshots and ample information about a person’s path in life, everything dating apps today seem to lack, has become a go-to tool in the modern search for love.

Just don’t expect to fly under the radar while you’re checking someone out. The site alerts users when someone has viewed their profile, which can either help or hurt your dating plans.

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In 2014, Bumble launched to solve a problem: an epidemic of aggressive men on the apps. If women were the only ones allowed to initiate conversation, they’d be in a position of power and agency; for once, they’d get to be the pursuers. And perhaps the Bumble man, knowing what he signed up for, would be an enlightened type, content waiting patiently to be chosen.

This was the dream of girlboss dating, and how lovely it was while it lasted. It died this past Tuesday, when Bumble announced that men will now be allowed to message women first.

When Bumble surveyed its female users, two-thirds said they would prefer not having to instigate each interaction. Younger women especially reported that having to go first added pressure. And many said they were fed up with men who seemed to put little effort into romance. In the game of online dating, an opening line is a delicate, high-stakes maneuver: Send something too basic (“Hey”) and you’ll fail to catch someone’s attention; send something too quirky or try-hard (“What’s your biggest fear?”) and you might scare them away. Bestowed with a very important responsibility, women wanted to toss the hot potato right back to the men.

In reporting on singlehood, you don’t tend to hear women complain about getting bombarded with messages or vigorously hit on. They say they do want to feel sought after. The women are constantly seeking, only to be met with a big, apathetic shrug.

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For most of cinema’s first seventy years, the end of a film was exactly that; it ended. A typical film of the 1930s, 40s or 50s ended with a cast reprise or a simple “The End” card. The median credits length didn’t shift much over forty years, going from 25 seconds in the 1930s to just 34 seconds by the 1960s.

Something weird happened to cinema in the 1970s. End credits changed dramatically, more than doubling in length within the decade, and then doubling again over the 1980s. By the 1990s, end credits were 4 minutes long, and they’ve kept climbing ever since, reaching 5:43 for films released in the 2020s. Current movie credits are almost thirteen times longer than those of the 1950s.

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Why Walking Gets Tougher When You Age:

As we age, the body appears to sacrifice walking efficiency in exchange for stability. Older adults stiffen the ankle more with each step, which may help prevent falls but also forces the muscles to work harder while producing less forward motion. This leads to shorter strides, slower walking, and faster fatigue. Exercises targeting balance, coordination, and lower-leg strength could help preserve mobility.

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Seventeen percent of American adults say they smoke marijuana, tied with the high notched in 2023. That’s a big shift from 2013, the year Gallup started polling the question, when just 7% said they used pot. A record 15% of US adults also say they use edibles.

Childhood Amnesia, Testosterone & Blue Zones

Childhood amnesia, coined by Sigmund Freud in 1910, describes the lack of recall adults have of their first three or four years and our paucity of solid memories until around the age of seven. Research suggests that the memories we form in these early years simply disappear.

To form long-term memories, an array of biological and psychological stars must align, and most children lack the machinery for this alignment. The raw material of memory (the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of our life experiences) arrive and register across the cerebral cortex, the seat of cognition. For these to become memory, they must undergo bundling in the hippocampus, but some parts of the hippocampus aren’t fully developed until we’re adolescents, making it hard for a child’s brain to complete this process.

Young children have a tenuous grip on chronology. They are years from mastering clocks and calendars, and thus have a hard time nailing an event to a specific time and place. They also don’t have the vocabulary to describe an event, and without that vocabulary, they can’t create the kind of causal narrative that’s found at the root of a solid memory. And they don’t have a greatly elaborated sense of self, which would encourage them to hoard and reconsider chunks of experience as part of a growing life-narrative.

Frail as they are, children’s memories are then susceptible to a process called shredding. In our early years, we create a storm of new neurons in a part of the hippocampus and continue to form them throughout the rest of our lives, although not at nearly the same rate. This process, called neurogenesis, can actually create forgetting by disrupting the circuits for existing memories.

Memories are less vulnerable to shredding and disruptions as the child grows up. Most of the solid memories that we carry into the rest of our lives are formed during what’s called ‘the reminiscence bump’, from ages 15 to 30, when we invest a lot of energy in examining everything to try to figure out who we are. The events, culture and people of that time remain with us and can even overshadow the features of our ageing present. The movies were the best back then, and so was the music, and the fashion, and the political leaders, and the friendships, and the romances. And so on.

If we can’t remember much of anything from our early years, does it matter what actually happened? If a tree fell in the forest of our early development and we didn’t have the brains and cognitive tools to stash the event in memory, did it still help shape who we are?

Yes. Even if we don’t remember early events, they leave an imprint on the way we understand and feel about ourselves, other people, and the greater world, for better or worse. We have elaborate concepts about birds, dogs, lakes and mountains, for example, even if we can’t recall the experiences that created those concepts.

We are not the sum of our memories, or at least, not entirely. We are also the story we construct about ourselves, our personal narrative that interprets and assigns meaning to the things we do remember and the things other people tell us about ourselves.

These narratives guide our behavior and help chart our path into the future. Especially lucky are those of us with redemptive stories, in which we find good fortune even in past adversity.

Our stories are not bald facts etched on stone tablets. They are narratives that move and morph, and that’s the underpinning to much of talk therapy. Here is one uplifting aspect of ageing: our stories of self get better. For whatever reason, we tend to accentuate the positive things more as we age. We have a greater willingness or motivation to see the world in brighter terms. We develop a positivity bias regarding our memories.

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Average testosterone has been declining among men for the past several decades. A recent review of studies involving more than a million men all over the world found that average testosterone levels in blood have dropped by about 20 percent over the past half century. A new, unpublished study put the decrease during that basic time period at closer to 50 percent.

Medical researchers aren’t certain what’s causing the drop. One theory is that the environment is playing a role: endocrine-disrupting “forever chemicals,” such as the phthalates in our plastic kitchen utensils and the PFAS in our nonstick pans are chemicals that can interrupt both the creation and the activity of testosterone in the body.

Men who are very physically active are less likely to have clinically low testosterone. Obesity, a condition that about 14 percent of men around the world have, can suppress the hormone. Fat tissue contains high amounts of an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen, and excess fat can overheat the testes. Obesity can’t explain the entire decrease, however. Even among normal-weight men, there is the same decline.

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There’s a website called Series Graph that allows you to see the ratings for an entire television series episode by episode. It can show you if a series fell off in later seasons or if it stuck the landing through the finale.

Game of Thrones is a famous example of a show falling apart at the very end after 7.5 incredible seasons:

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The Blue Zones are places on earth where people supposedly reach exceptionally old ages, often beyond 100. The pitch is this: if we copy the habits of Blue Zones people, we’ll also live to over 100.

The problem: No one ever really checked whether the people in these places are as old as they say they are. When someone did, they found that people in the Blue Zones weren’t living to extremely old ages. Instead, these locations just had terrible record-keeping.

The man who did the research was asked what the real secret to longevity is. “Be born in a rich place that has free health care. That’s what the data suggests, anyway.”

Nobody can act on that. So the Blue Zone health market fills with things you can buy and act on, whether or not they work. What does work? See a doctor. Exercise. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t eat too much junk. Have some friends.

It’s free. It’s boring. You can find it anywhere on the map.

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Gen Z is moving money from stocks to sports betting in wealth plans, 52% of them have redirected investment funds to sports betting and a quarter of them treat sports betting as a deliberate part of their long-term financial plan:

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One of the best reasons to study history is that it’s a constant reminder about how uncomfortable life have been for the majority of human existence.

In 1870, food, rent, and clothing took 91 cents of every dollar made (today it’s under 40 cents). The typical American owned just one and a half shirts. That is an actual historical statistic. To make money to buy this expensive food and the other half of that shirt, the typical man worked sixty hours per week. Women worked more. And the dollars people were paid in could lose their value overnight, making them no more stable than cryptocurrency today.

Financial life was mind bogglingly complex throughout the 1700-1800s. There just wasn’t enough money. To fill the gap, nearly anything counted as cash, sometimes even counterfeits. The values of “real” currency changed regularly. If you could manage to find money, know it was legit, and discern its worth, there was still next to nowhere to safely keep it. Every citizen tracked hundreds of variables. A mistake could cost your life’s savings.

By the Civil War in 1861, there were 10,000 unique notes in circulation. Some were worth more than others. You had to redeem a dollar with the bank that printed it. Many of those banks went under, making the money worthless.

In the late-19th century, three-quarters of men 65 or older were still in the labor force. Half of the people who were able to retire lived with their children or other relatives.

In the 1920s, 60% of the elderly had a net worth of $80k or less (in today’s dollars). Nearly two-thirds of American households lived below the poverty line in 1929, before the Great Depression began.

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The number of small-cap public companies has declined sharply since the peak in 2000, and the number of private equity–backed private companies has surged to take their place.

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Europe’s GDP was larger than the U.S. until 2015:

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The U.S. violent crime rate plunged 9.7% last year, the largest annual drop since the FBI’s national estimates began in 1936. The decline in crime was unusually broad, touching every population group in the FBI’s violent-crime data, from the largest cities to small cities, suburbs and rural counties.

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Why hold risk-free cash at 4% interest when stocks always go up 15% or more, right?

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Mimetic Desire, Move 37 & Magic Mushrooms

We need to have a little talk about René Girard. He didn’t study psychology. He made his name in literature, the place where humans reveal themselves by pretending to be fictional.

He read Proust, Cervantes, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, all those dusty classics about European folks having feelings in carriages. And in those books, he saw the same wiring under the floorboards every time: people wanted the stuff everybody else wanted. They all copied each other relentlessly and were so very sure that what they wanted was totally original.

We spend a lot of time worrying we won’t get what we desire. But that’s not the worst outcome. The worst outcome is spending your whole life chasing (and maybe even getting) something you never really wanted in the first place.

Girard has this concept he calls The Romantic Lie. You experience it as saying, “I’ve always appreciated vintage ceramics.” (Oh c’mon. You only started caring about them twenty-four seconds after seeing one in an Instagram reel.)

His other big idea was The Novelistic Truth. Simply put: our desires are usually borrowed.

Why do we do this? Psychologist Leon Festinger realized that humans don’t have an objective way to know how they’re doing. Nobody gets an Adulthood Report Card. With no objective metric, we look to others to learn what defines success, which is why happiness often seems so slippery.

We’re social creatures. It’s through other people that we learn to work, love, play and eat non-poisonous fruit. The problem is unconscious imitation. When we unknowingly mimic others and lead ourselves astray. 

We think we’re just hustling after things, but Girard says, nope, we’re usually chasing people. We don’t actually want the career as much as we want to feel successful like the person we saw with it. Girard calls these people “models.”

That’s why we often feel let down when we get something we want. Getting the car gets you a car. It doesn’t turn you into the person in the Super Bowl ad who seems to have solved all their problems by driving through the mountains at dawn.

We laugh at young people because they’re always copying each other’s slang and clothes. Then we turn into adults and copy each other’s cars and homes.

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The first glimmer of our AI future revealed itself a decade ago in the form of a single black stone. 

It happened during a historic match between one of the world’s best Go players and AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google’s DeepMind lab to conquer this ancient board game. The artificial-intelligence system stunned everyone by winning their opening showdown. In their next encounter, with millions of people watching online all over the world, Lee Sedol took a midgame smoke break to calm his nerves.

When he came back, he looked at the 37th move. He couldn’t believe his eyes. 

Go, like chess, is a strategy game with black and white pieces that unfolds one move at a time. As he stared at the black stone that AlphaGo dropped on the board, Lee saw a move that no professional Go player would have made. In fact, the DeepMind team calculated the chances of a human playing it at one in 10,000.

The novel move was so unconventional and counterintuitive that nobody could be sure what to make of it. At first, commentators believed it was a strategic blunder. They soon realized it was a masterstroke.

“This move,” Lee said, “made me think about Go in a new light.” 

Ten years after that illuminating Move 37, the entire world is suddenly beginning to feel like one massive Go board.

Back in the prehistoric days of 2023, AI struggled with elementary math. In 2024, it was considered a landmark achievement when DeepMind earned a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. By 2025, DeepMind and OpenAI were taking gold. And in 2026, IMO success is so unremarkable that Anthropic announced its perfect score on page 153 of a technical document.

Why is math so vulnerable to AI? Because math is unusually verifiable. 

The field is governed by precise logical rules, which allow proofs to be checked step by step. In verifiable domains like math and coding, AI systems can follow a simple formula: try an idea, test it, learn from the results, try again and keep trying until it works.

But for all the advances in group theory, quantum complexity and theoretical computer science, AI hasn’t gotten as far in the less theoretical sciences. We’re still waiting for AI-generated miracle drugs, AI-invented consumer products, AI that’s smart enough to crack the economics of AI.

After IBM’s Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, chess began experimenting with a format that allowed human players to consult computer engines. The result was a new breed of centaur: half-man, half-machine. For a time, the best human players with AI were better than AI alone. Demis Hassabis, the creator of DeepMind, believes we are now entering that centaur era of science. 

“I don’t know how long that period will last,” he said. “But for very complex domains, it could be a very long time. Like drug discovery, biology, chemistry—they’re very messy, very emergent and you can’t verify everything. You need the human intuition and the human vision of which direction to go.” 

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If someone asked you in a questionnaire whether you’re afraid of snakes, you might say no. If they threw a live snake in your lap and then asked whether you’re afraid of snakes, you’d probably say yes, and never talk to them again. The gap between believing something as an outsider and experiencing real uncertainty and risk and fear in the moment can be a mile wide.

You can apply this to very big things, too. There’s a theory that we get major events like world wars every sixty to eighty years, because that’s how long it takes for the generation that experienced the last one and said “never again” to die off. Then you have a new generation that’s never experienced that kind of trauma, and they think maybe we should give it another shot.

So if you go out of your way to see the world through other people’s eyes, two things happen. You become less cynical about other people’s bad decisions and their apparent irrationality. And you become a little more humble about your own beliefs.

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Question to Morgan Housel: “If you were someone that saved a lot of money when you were young, if you could go back to your twenties or thirties, would you dedicate a much larger portion of your income to fun and memory dividends?

Answer: “The question is whether it was a mistake to make sacrifices when I was young to save an amount that means far less to me now? I think the answer is no, and here’s why. Learning to save at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen built up the muscle memory of how to make sacrifices. So when my income went up in my thirties and early forties, saving was no issue. I’d been doing this forever. The value of saving when you’re young isn’t necessarily the money you save. It’s building the muscle memory so that saving is easy when you’re earning more later on.

A lot of amazing experiences don’t cost much, and a lot of hollow experiences cost a great deal. To some extent, the more you try to force money into having a good time, the less fun it becomes. If you ask a lot of adults when they have their best memories, when life was most enjoyable, many will say high school or college; so much fun with friends, so many funny stories, so many road trips. The common denominator of that phase of life is that most people have no money at all and are having a blast.

And when are people saddest? Statistically, from all the surveys, it’s midlife: the forties and fifties, when you’re probably earning more money than you ever will again. It’s not that there’s a negative correlation between money and happiness, but the more we try to force it, the harder it gets.“

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Research from Science Daily showing Magic mushrooms may reshape the brain long after the trip ends:

  • A single dose of psilocybin produces measurable changes in brain activity and possible changes in brain structure that lasts for up to a month.
  • Participants who experience the greatest increase in flexible, varied brain activity also reported more personal insight and later improvements in well-being.
  • Findings suggest that the psychedelic experience itself may help people break free from entrenched patterns of thinking.

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Data-center capex added 1.7 percentage points in just two years, from 1.4% of GDP in 2025 to 3.1% in 2027, or roughly 0.85 percentage points a year. Housing’s quickest phase, from 5.1% of GDP in 2002 to 6.6% in 2005, increased at only 0.5 percentage points a year, and telecom’s at only 0.15. 

The AI cycle is building at close to twice the pace of the housing boom at its fastest. The same arithmetic runs in reverse: housing’s unwind, from 6.2% of GDP in early 2006 to 3.0% by the end of 2008, is what made that recession severe, while telecom’s much smaller reversal produced the mildest one. 

A cycle that builds at 0.85 percentage points a year can unwind at a similar pace, and that, rather than the buildout itself, is the macro risk if AI demand disappoints.

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While 91% of Japanese and 88% of American households have air conditioning, just 4% of UK homes do.

Ovarian Cancer, Padel & Shorting Stocks

Ovarian cancer is a misnomer. Nearly all ovarian cancers, and nearly all fatal ovarian cancers, are actually cancers of the fallopian tubes. The 20 percent or so that start in the ovaries are different, and usually can be cured.

Women who have their tubes (the gummy worm-shaped ducts that carry eggs from the ovaries to the uterus) removed reduce their chances of getting ovarian cancer by nearly 80 percent. It’s a five-minute operation that can be done as part of nearly any abdominal surgery, including a hysterectomy, tubal ligation, gallbladder surgery and hernia repair.

Most doctors (and the public) do not know about this new approach, even though professional groups like the American Cancer Society, the American College of Surgeons and the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology have recently issued statements encouraging doctors to offer tube removal at the time of other abdominal surgeries.

The American Cancer Society is now working on a national campaign to make more women and doctors aware that tube removal can help prevent most ovarian cancers. 

Women have, on average, a 1.1 percent risk of being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, among the most deadly of all cancers. Screening to find it early does not work (death rates do not budge). Ultrasound, blood tests and advanced imaging have all failed. And most of the 20,000 women a year who receive a diagnosis of ovarian cancer have no known risk factors. By the time they find out why they have vague symptoms like bloating and abdominal pain, the cancer has spread throughout their bodies. Surgery and chemotherapy, the standard treatments, are unlikely to cure them.

The tumors start as microscopic specks of cancer cells that spill out of the wide end of the fallopian tube that is nestled against an ovary. They seed the ovary and abdomen, where they grow and become lethal. You can liken these tiny cancer cells to dust coming up from a rug and floating through a room. They’re like dandruff drifting down to a person’s shoulders.

It explains why early diagnosis so often fails: Those tiny cells do not show up on ultrasound or other imaging.

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Padel is the new pickleball.

There are now 1,000+ publicly accessible padel courts in the U.S., up from about 227 three years ago. Last year, padel drew one million players domestically and, padel club and individual memberships grew by about 50 percent year-over-year.

Padel is mostly played as doubles, and courts are smaller than tennis courts, making it more social and easier to get to know other players.

Across the country, entrepreneurs are capitalizing on the interest by retrofitting unconventional spaces, from parking lots to distribution warehouses, with padel courts. On the sidelines of some are saunas and bars where players can mingle between matches.

Last year, over 24 million Americans played pickleball, up from about 4 million in 2020. Investors believe padel has the potential to grow like pickleball, but the cost to install one padel court can be around $50,000 because of the glass and other materials for the walls. Pickleball courts are much cheaper to build.

Instead of strings, padel rackets have holes in their dense heads. Padel balls share a color with tennis balls, but are less bouncy. The sport’s rectangular courts are 66-feet long by 33-feet wide, divided by a net and surrounded by four walls made of glass panels and mesh.

Playing singles tennis is still the best exercise, but padel doubles provides more exercise than tennis doubles.

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Of the 233 countries and territories in the dataset, men outnumber women in just 33%. Despite the smaller number of male-majority countries, there are roughly 42 million more men than women worldwide.

There are two main reasons for this.

  1. The Gulf states are the clearest outliers. Countries such as Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Kuwait rely heavily on temporary migrant workers employed in construction, energy, and infrastructure, industries dominated by men. Because many of these workers arrive without their families, national gender balances become unusually skewed.
  2. Three of the world’s most populous countries, China, India, and the United States, all have more men than women. Although their ratios are less extreme, their large populations magnify the difference. In India alone, a ratio of 106.3 men per 100 women translates into a male surplus of more than 40 million.

Countries with more women:

Russia offers one of the region’s most prominent examples. Higher male mortality, shorter male life expectancy, historical wartime losses, and alcohol-related deaths all contribute to its ratio of 86.4 men per 100 women.

Sex ratios at birth naturally favor boys by a small margin, but populations rarely maintain that balance. Migration, life expectancy, war, public health, and economic opportunity can all reshape a country’s demographic profile over decades.

As these forces evolve, the map represents a snapshot rather than a permanent reality. Countries experiencing rapid immigration, population aging, conflict, or major improvements in healthcare may see their gender balance shift substantially from one generation to the next.

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Hedge funds that are short-biased or short-only surged after the 2008 downturn, and they are slowly disappearing as the U.S. bull market in stocks extends toward its 18th year.

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Shareholder Yield = the total cash a company returns to its investors (stockholders).

This occurs through three main factors: (1) dividends (2) net stock buybacks; repurchases minus newly issues shares (3) net debt reduction.

Closure Compulsion & Charts

From Oliver Burkeman:

In some ways I’m as productivity-obsessed as ever. What’s changed, and it’s a big change, is that I no longer take myself to be en route to some final state in which I’ll have discovered the best system, and can feel good about myself at last.

I’m convinced it’s a balm for much of what stresses us out: “the compulsion to closure,” which is the hope that all of this is leading up to some kind of permanent resolution. It isn’t. It’s better than that: you get to just be here, and do stuff.

The lack of resolution feels like a problem that needs solving. But have you considered the possibility that the only problem is your belief that such tensions might ever get resolved?

Living without hope of resolution is liberating because it removes a terrible weight from your actions and decisions – the weight that arises from the feeling that they must always be moving you toward some settled state. (Which often just leads to procrastination, since you’re unsure which action would be most helpful for getting you there.)

It frees your past actions, too, from being judged a waste of time or a blind alley, simply because they seemed to be headed in a different direction from the one you’re now embarked upon. It’s best to be freed from the notion that you need, in some other basic way, to fix yourself before life can truly begin.

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Monthly market share for the top LLMs:

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Nigeria now has the best performing stock market in the world, taking the lead over South Korea.  As of the end of 2025, there were over 5,000 ETFs, mutual funds, and CEFs that focused on U.S. stocks. There used to be one ETF that invested in Nigerian stocks, but it closed back in 2023 because no one owned it. 

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2025 Returns:

2026 Returns:

As U.S. stock prices continue to rise into the stratosphere, the percentage of U.S. household net work in stocks (equities) is higher than any point over the last 80 years.

The difference between forward earnings earnings (where analysts project S&P 500 stocks’ earnings will be a year from now) and trailing earnings (what S&P 500 stocks’ earnings actually were over the last year), has rocketed up to record bullish extremes.

The defining story of the first half of 2026 was not a macro shock, it was the continued structural transformation of equity markets

Market concentration remains near historic highs. Passive investing continues to absorb capital at unprecedented rates. Retail investors have become a persistent source of demand. Leverage has migrated toward increasingly short-dated and concentrated exposures. Together, these forces are reshaping liquidity, price discovery, and the behavior of volatility.

Retail investors have poured into stock options in 2026:

Unlike previous periods of elevated retail activity, today’s retail investor is increasingly concentrated in the same sectors driving benchmark performance, led by semiconductors and broad-based ETFs.

In June alone, retail traded approximately $1.9 billion of semiconductor options premium per day (6x the historical average) with about 75% of that activity concentrated in call options.

One out of every three listed options traded in the US now expires the same day, roughly doubling zero day options’ market share since daily expirations launched in 2022.

Following the introduction of Monday and Wednesday expirations in single stocks at the beginning of this year, nearly half of all retail options volume executed by Citadel Securities now trades in zero day contracts, up from 30% in 2025 and just 13% in 2021. Average time to expiry on Citade’s platform is less than 3 days.

Investors chase what’s hot (semis and tech) with leveraged ETFs:

In 1949, four of America’s seven richest metro areas were in Ohio. Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton and Akron were out-earning New York, San Francisco and DC.

Q3 2026 Global Stock Market Valuations By Country

A higher price to earnings ratio (CAPE) means a country’s stock market is more expensive. A lower number is less expensive.

  • United States Stock Market: 40
  • Average of Foreign Developed Stock Markets: 24
  • Average of Foreign Emerging Stock Markets: 19

The rankings below show the price you are paying for the earnings, dividends, cash flow and book value for the companies within these countries.

*Abbreviations:
CAPE: Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings – a valuation measure that uses real earnings per share (EPS) over a 10-year period to smooth out fluctuations in corporate profits that occur over different periods of a business cycle.
CAPD: Cyclically Adjusted Price Dividends – a valuation measure that uses dividends over a 10-year period to smooth out fluctuations in corporate profits that occur over different periods of a business cycle.
CAPCF: Cyclically Adjusted Price Cash Flow – a valuation measure that uses cash flow over a 10-year period to smooth out fluctuations in corporate profits that occur over different periods of a business cycle.
CAPB: Cyclically Adjusted Price Book – a valuation measure that uses book value over a 10-year period to smooth out fluctuations in corporate profits that occur over different periods of a business cycle.

Source: The Idea Farm

Polymarket Fakes, Eighth Graders & Reliable Cars

Michael Cancelleri, an entrepreneur in San Clemente, Calif., has poured tens of thousands of dollars into his son’s baseball career—club team fees, tournament travel and top-of-the-line equipment. As high school approached, Cancelleri decided that wasn’t enough. He paid about $20,000 for his son, a straight-A student, to repeat a grade at a private middle school sports academy.

Sixty other boys are repeating a grade at the same academy, The Togethership, where coursework includes throwing mechanics, game film review and nutrition along with traditional subjects such as Algebra and English. Holding kids back in school for an athletic edge has existed for decades on the elite fringe of prep sports. In recent years, it has exploded in popularity for middle school boys. 

Fueled by the lure of Name, Image and Likeness money in college, families are delaying high school so their sons can get bigger, stronger and more recruitable. The practice, known as “reclassifying,” “reclassing,” “bridge year” or “gap year,” is spreading fast in football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse and other sports where height and strength are key.

The demand has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry. For-profit sports academies, some focusing on a single sport, are popping up from Virginia to San Diego, while private schools, home-school programs and even a public school district are adding—and aggressively marketing—holdback years. For many athletes, eighth grade is the last chance to repeat a year and still compete for a full high school career. Interscholastic rules generally limit high-school students to four years of athletic eligibility and cap participation at age 19. 

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In his videos, George Makihara appears to have a lucrative side hustle making bets on Polymarket. In January, the college student posted a video that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word “McDonald’s” that month.  

The bet was one of 145 that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket’s website between January and mid-May, based on his videos—bets adding up to almost $410,000.  But none of those bets were real, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

Makihara is one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins, according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the Journal, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the company. On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made the McDonald’s bet in January, public data shows. All of them lost.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket. To get the videos to go viral, Polymarket has recruited a social-media army to copy and re-post creators’ footage.

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As recently as 2015 the 10 largest US stocks represented just 17% of the S&P 500 market cap. That was also the level that prevailed during the mid-1990’s. Now this figure has risen to about 40%.

However, relative to the rest of the world, the US has one of the lowest concentrations for its top 10 largest stocks:

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This graphic ranks the car brands with the fewest reported problems in 2026 based on J.D. Power’s Problems Per 100 Vehicles metric. Lower scores indicate fewer owner-reported issues and better long-term dependability.

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Random Facts From The First Half Of 2026

From The Idea Farm:

  • Half of U.S. millennials have at least one tattoo. 
  • The state of Wyoming only has 2 escalators.
  • Being born blind completely abolishes the risk of developing schizophrenia.
  • Why do women’s shirts button from the left, while men’s button from the right? When buttons first appeared in the 17th century, they were only for the wealthy. Women were dressed by (right-handed) servants. Placing buttons on the left made it easier for them.
  • There’s a hedge fund that buys and sells Hermes Birkin and Kelly bags on the secondary market and makes a 40.6% return with plans to grow in 2026.
  • If Paul Revere took his midnight ride this year, he could stop at 7 Dunkin locations.
  • LeBron James has played against over 35% of all players in NBA history.
  • Erik Spoelstra is now the most tenured coach across the four major sports leagues (NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL). He was hired in 2008.
  • Only 15% of Generation Alpha, the incoming cohort of teens, enjoys watching sports.
  • The second fastest growing sector in America in terms of GDP growth from 2019-2024 was gambling. In 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion on sports. In 2025, it was over $160 billion.
  • 40% of Americans did not read a single book in 2025.
  • For only the third time ever, there are more women employed in the U.S. than men.
  • The Eagles have the highest selling album of all time.