FOMO, Silence, LLMs & Things Learned

A few of my favorites from an excellent best things learned in 2025 list:

All things being equal, the liquid inside a glass bottle contains more microplastics than the liquid inside a plastic bottle—up to 50X more! This is because plastic-coated metal caps found on glass bottles shed more particles than plastic caps found on plastic bottles.
If you have a son, the chances of your next child being a boy are not 50%, they are actually 57%.
Noise-canceling headphones are causing hearing problems in young people, not because they’re listening with the volume too high, but because blocking ambient noise prevents the brain from learning to filter and process everyday background sound in the real world.
In team sports, women are 13.69 times more likely to be attacked by a fellow teammate than men.
Until very recently, networks didn’t save live television footage because storage costs were too high. The only reason we have access to footage that aired between 1979 and 2012 is because a woman from Philadelphia recorded it and saved it on over 40,000 VHS tapes.
The screens of all laptops in Apple stores are set at an angle of exactly 76 degrees, which is just awkward enough to invite people to tilt them back a bit more, thereby taking the first step toward interacting with the product.
No NFL game has ever ended with a score of 36–23. Across the approximately 17,000 games that have been played in NFL history, this score should have happened 2.68 times by now.
Women are more likely to believe ghosts are real; men are more likely to believe aliens are real.
Coal-burning plants release 100 times as much radiation as nuclear plants per megawatt of power produced.
In 2024, the word “delve” appeared in journal abstracts 28X more frequently than in 2022 because ChatGPT likes the word delve.
The average West Virginian eats more than one hot dog per day.
In Mexico, extending the school day by 3.5 hours led to a 12.6% increase in divorce rates. The extra time made it more likely for women to participate in the labor market, thus increasing their economic independence.
Before 2000, it was common for 10% of Americans to have the same favorite athlete. The 10% threshold was last crossed in 2003, and since 2014, no more than 5% of Americans have had the same favorite athlete. This trend reflects a broader shift away from monocultural sports consumption, where everyone watches the same sports on a few channels, and a shift toward the fragmentation of sports media, where audiences are split across digital platforms and niche interests, preventing any single athlete from dominating the national consciousness.

_____________________________

I conducted dozens of bot challenges based on real things people do with AI, including writing breakup texts and work emails, decoding legal contracts and scientific research, answering tricky research questions, and editing photos and making “art.” Human experts including best-selling authors, reference librarians, a renowned scientist and even a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer judged the results:

For writing and editing – use Claude
For research and quick answers – use Google’s AI Mode
For working with documents – use Claude
For images – use Google’s Gemini

If I could change one thing about today’s AI tools, I’d make them better at asking follow-up questions that could completely change the answer.

When I asked the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California to judge ChatGPT’s responses to real medical questions he said the difference between a bot with access to infinite knowledge and a good human doctor is that the doctor knows how to answer a question with more questions. That’s how you actually solve someone’s problem.

He suggested an AI strategy I now use regularly: Front-load your queries to a chatbot with as many details as you can think of, knowing that the AI might not stop to ask for some of them before trying to answer. Instead of “summarize this lease,” try “summarize this lease for a renter in D.C., flagging clauses about fees, renewal and early termination.”

___________________________

The bill on a steak dinner for four can easily climb to $500. But after accounting for the restaurant’s costs—from the steak to rent—profits from the meal amount to around $25.

___________________________

_____________________________

Warren Buffett always had lunch at the Stage Deli on Seventh Avenue. A friend pointed out there were many good eateries in New York — why not try someplace new? Buffett replied, “If I like the Stage, why eat somewhere else?” The fear of missing out — responsible for a high percentage of foolish speculations — was unknown to him. This character quirk flowed from a subtle insight: People get in trouble far more often from doing and changing too much rather than doing too little.

____________________________

__________________________

Podcasts have devastated my relationship to music, but that is not to say I’ve embraced silence. Whereas I used to listen to music all the time, now I fill every available moment with the sound of people talking.

My change in listening habits comes from a compulsion that many people in my life share: to make every minute of the day as “productive” as possible. By that blinkered calculus, an informative podcast will always trump music. But listening incessantly to podcasts has actually narrowed my interests and shown me just how limiting too much information can be.

I’ve found that trying to make every listening minute count inevitably becomes counterproductive. The internal pressure to optimize free time and always multitask is ultimately exhausting, not enlightening.

___________________________

There were incredible 2025 medicine breakthroughs in:

Metabolic Medicine
Infectious Diseases
Transplant Medicine Firsts
Gene Therapies
Neurological Diseases
Cell Therapies
Cancer Vaccines and Treatments

The Longevity Hack, Exceptional Adults & DNA

My father didn’t meditate, didn’t track his steps or explicitly “exercise,” and never once uttered the word “mindfulness.” Yet he lived to 92, dying at home after a very short bout with brain cancer, having been visited by his children and 11 grandchildren in the 10 days between diagnosis and death. And my mom is still going strong at 92. She still has her sense of humor and her political engagement but no “diseases that will kill her,” as she puts it.

I have spent my professional life studying what makes people live healthier and longer. I have analyzed data sets on longevity the world over and reviewed hundreds of clinical studies. I have heard numerous new claims about supplements, diets and tech devices that are supposed to extend life. But nothing I have read in the scientific literature explains longevity better than the lives of my incorrigibly social parents, Benjamin and Marsha Emanuel.

My father was a pediatrician who spoke five languages and was comfortable talking to anyone and everyone. He routinely talked to strangers, offering suggestions based on his well-honed diagnostic skills.

Whenever we stopped in a restaurant he would start chatting with the people at the next table within five minutes—asking about their jobs, their families, where they were from and what they liked about the place they lived. If no one was at a nearby table, he would strike up a conversation with the waitress.

To a modern eye, this might seem overzealous. But people responded to him. They felt seen, not interrogated. There was no agenda—just my father’s insatiable curiosity about people. One time, a casual chat with another father in a park ended with an invitation for our whole family to dinner at their home.

My mom was also incurably social. Our house was constantly filled with the people she collected. She was great at making our teenage friends feel understood, with warmth and empathy. When her kids went off to college, she finished her training as a therapist and went into practice.

For years, I did not fully appreciate what I was witnessing. To me as a kid, my father’s endless chatter was an embarrassing quirk of his personality. And my mother’s welcoming of strangers into our home just seemed, well, normal. Only after decades as a physician and policymaker did I understand that my father and mother had unintentionally but eagerly adopted one of the most powerful health interventions ever discovered: human connection.

Study after study now confirms what my father and mother intuited long before science caught up. Social relationships, both the deep ones and the fleeting exchanges, reduce stress hormones, lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation, strengthen immune function and make you happier. They may even slow cellular aging.

An analysis by the Health and Retirement Study, which enrolled over 20,000 Americans older than 50, found that over the next eight years, people with the most close friends (an average of 7.8) had a 17% lower risk of depression and a 24% lower risk of dying compared with people who had fewer close friends (an average of 1.6).

Similarly, Harvard University’s Study of Adult Development, which followed people for over 80 years, found that “the people who were happiest, stayed healthiest as they grew old, and who lived the longest were the people who had the warmest connections with other people.” By contrast, social isolation is as dangerous to longevity and cognitive decline as being obese. My father didn’t need PubMed to know that being interested in people kept him not just alive but vibrant and energetic.

Years later, I came to see that impulse—to notice, to care, to connect and help—as the very definition of wellness. My father’s memorial service overflowed with friends, former patients and neighbors, each one with a story about how he’d helped them, laughed with them or simply made them feel less alone. Every Thursday, meanwhile, my mom still has lunch at the deli with “the boys”—friends she has collected over the years.

It has taken me many years to grasp that wellness is inherent in the community we inhabit. My father’s conversations with strangers weren’t just good for him but for the people he engaged with. My mother’s weekly lunch is both good for her and for all her friends. Sharing time with others is beneficial for all involved.

If there is a “longevity hack,” that is it. Forget the cold plunges, red lights and fad-driven supplements. Call a friend. Chat with your neighbor. Ask the Uber driver or grocery checkout clerk how their day is going or how their holidays were. When I think of my father and mother now, I realize that health isn’t something you achieve in isolation. It is something we all create together.

_____________________________

From athletes like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps to scientists like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, identifying exceptional talent is essential in the science of innovation. But how does talent originate? Did the most talented athletes, scientists, and musicians reach peak performance relatively early or late in their career? Did they forgo mastering multiple sports, academic subjects, and musical instruments to reach world-class performance in only one?

An analytical review looked at published research in science, music, chess, and sports and found two patterns: Exceptional young performers reached their peak quickly but narrowly mastered only one interest (e.g., one sport). By contrast, exceptional adults reached peak performance gradually with broader, multidisciplinary practice.

______________________________

Nearly two decades of studies from multiple independent labs suggest that a father’s gametes shuttle more than DNA: Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring. These non-DNA transfers may influence genomic activity that boots up during and after fertilization, exerting some control over the embryo’s development and influencing the adult they will become.

The findings could end up changing the way we think about heredity. They suggest that what we do in this life affects the next generation. What a father eats, drinks, inhales, is stressed by or otherwise experiences in the weeks and months before he conceives a child might be encoded in molecules, packaged into his sperm cells and transmitted to his future kid.

___________________________

The average team valuation by league (in billions):

The top 10 most valuable pro sports teams in the U.S.:

North American sports assets (RASFI) returns vs. other asset classes, and why private credit wants to get more involved in the industry.

The Zodiac’s Cipher, China’s Strength & Social Media

There’s a new theory from an amateur code-breaker, Alex Barber, that links two of America’s most infamous unsolved cases: the 1947 mutilation murder of Elizabeth Short (known as the Black Dahlia) and the late-1960s killings by the Zodiac Killer.

Baber, a 50-year-old self-taught investigator from West Virginia with autism and no formal education beyond high school, claims both crimes were committed by the same person: Marvin Margolis (who later used the alias Marvin Merrill until his death in 1993). Baber says he cracked the Zodiac’s unsolved 13-symbol cipher (Z13) using AI-assisted methods, revealing the name “Marvin Merrill.” He connects this to the Black Dahlia case through circumstantial links, including:

Margolis’s brief living arrangement with Short shortly before her murder.
His Navy medical training explaining the surgical precision in her dismemberment.
A 1992 sketch by Margolis titled “Elizabeth” depicting a mutilated woman with the word “ZODIAC” hidden in the shading.
The possible murder site near a Compton motel called the Zodiac Motel, which Baber suggests inspired the killer’s later moniker.

Retired LAPD detectives (Rick Jackson and Mitzi Roberts) and former NSA codebreakers (Ed Giorgio and Patrick Henry) praise Baber’s work as compelling and “overwhelming” circumstantial evidence, with low probability of coincidence.

_________________________

The 2018 US semiconductor embargo against China changed the world. The age of cooperation and globalization was over.

With the 2018 embargo, the US essentially punched China on the nose. At the time, China had little choice but to take the punch. Take the punch and prepare its own economy for a future in which it would be less vulnerable to further US embargoes.

For seven long years China went on a diet, and went to the CrossFit gym. And as all of China’s savings were captured—through tighter capital controls, the suspension of IPOs, and the concentration of bank lending—and redirected towards China’s industrial supply chains, returns for investors were dreadful.

When Donald Trump came back to power in 2025, China, which had spent the past seven years getting toned, showed up and essentially said: “Gloves off. If you want a fight, let’s go. You tariff me, then I will tariff you. You embargo me, then I will embargo you.

China’s response was to de-Westernize its supply chain, at great cost to its investor base, to economic growth, to domestic consumption and even to its birth rate.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the US did absolutely nothing to de-Sinify its own supply chain. While China hit the gym, the US partied. And partied hard: US budget deficits expanded, but pretty much just funded expansions in social benefits—social security, Medicare and Medicaid. Between 2018 and 2025, US government debt increased from $21 trillion to $38 trillion. However, none of the US $17 trillion in debt went into building new Hoover dams, new Tennessee Valley Authorities, new interstate highways or new railroads.

China’s push to de-Westernize its supply chains came at great cost to the Chinese economy and Chinese society. Would US policymakers countenance such judicial repression?

______________________________________

Readers used to outnumber non-readers 2 to 1. Now non-readers outnumber readers 3 to 1.

____________________________

One third of 8th grade girls spend 7+ hours per day on social media. Meaning: that’s pretty much all they do.

________________________________

The frustrating truth is that we don’t really know for sure what the digital empire of short-form video is doing to our minds. But a systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory.

Several studies in the meta-analysis reported structural and functional differences in the prefrontal cortex and reward circuits among high-frequency users, while others found cognitive flexibility reductions and altered dopaminergic reward responses. None of this proves causation. But taken together, they suggest a plausible mechanism: a daily diet of hyper-rewarding, rapid-fire stimuli may gradually reshape attention and regulatory systems in ways that weaken our attentional control.

________________________________

The probability of men getting married increases with their income.

________________________________

The share of people between 20 and 24 who are not in a job, or seeking work, or in school, or raising a child has nearly doubled in the last quarter-century in both the UK and the U.S.

________________________________

A list of small things you can do, that compound positively over time, from Kevin Dahlstrom (founder of Bolt.health) who just turned 55 and said he feels much healthier now than he did 10+ years ago:

Walk 15+ miles a week, even if you do other exercise.
Eat real food. Not too much.
Stop drinking alcohol, even in moderation.
Explore minimalism (it’s not what you think it is).
Get 8 hours of quality sleep each night.
Invest in experiences, not things.
Stay lean. Men in particular are obsessed with muscle mass these days, but bulk doesn’t age well. The goal is to be strong but lean. The fittest guys in their 50s and beyond aren’t meatheads, they’re lean guys who are serious about a sport.
Stop drinking sodas and sugary energy drinks.
Show up on time, every time. Poor time management limits success more than most people realize.
Find a hobby and pursue mastery. You can’t have a happy life without a passionate pursuit that isn’t your vocation. Your work—even if you enjoy it—isn’t enough.
Try psychedelics. It’s one of those things everyone should do at least once, and it might be the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.
Be a lifelong learner. Your brain is just like a muscle—if you don’t feed and flex it regularly, it will atrophy.
Find your purpose. People with a strong sense of purpose are happier and live longer. Lack of purpose sucks energy and magnifies depression.
Only take advice from people who embody the traits you want to have. Talk is cheap—emulate those who have done it.
The goal is not to retire and do nothing, it’s to build a great day-to-day life that you don’t need to escape. A life of leisure is a slow death.
Have fun! Do frivolous and silly things that make you smile.
Accumulate assets—things that grow in value over time. It’s the #1 habit of rich people, and it can be done in tiny chunks. It becomes addictive (in a good way).
Make your own decisions. We live in an era where most of what society tells us is wrong. Don’t be afraid to break from societal norms.
Go all in on family. Get married, stay married, have kids. Burn the boats. In the end, family is all that matters.
Be ruthless with your time. Money comes and goes. Time only goes. Audit your calendar ruthlessly—cut the trivial, double down on the meaningful, and spend your hours like your life depends on it.

_____________________________

________________________________

Stocks are still the most expensive in the United States, by far, but the rest of the world also became more expensive this year after an enormous rise in global stock prices almost everywhere.

Crypto Casinos & Memecoins

Many young people that are chronically online have been enticed by crypto casinos, an expanding realm of online gambling where longstanding guardrails are often ignored.

The sites have spread across social media, taking advantage of the borderless nature of the internet. They offer hundreds of games, including blackjack, sports betting and flashy online slot machines. They operate with fewer restrictions for gamblers by obtaining licenses in small island nations.

And, although they are not legal in many countries including the United States, the casinos have become gambling havens where teenagers and problem gamblers play and even earn income by promoting the sites.

This flourishing industry has been built by operators willing to deploy an exploitative marketing system. Their strategies encourage reckless wagers, turn social media influencers into casino recruiters and lure in young people, one of the demographics most vulnerable to addiction.

The finances of crypto casinos, private companies licensed outside the United States, are not public. Stake told Forbes it earned $4.7 billion in gaming revenue in 2024, more than MGM reported earning from casino games at all of its Las Vegas properties.

In the United States, Stake started Stake.us, which it says legally operates in most states. It circumvents the need to obtain a gambling license by calling itself a “social casino” where players use virtual currency instead of real money. However, lawsuits argue that Stake.us still functions as a casino by allowing players to purchase the virtual currency and withdraw it as cryptocurrency.

___________________________________

Memecoins exist in a complex world of schemes and double crosses, baffling to outsiders. At the center is an obvious conflict. To lure traders, the coin creators generally promise they’ll sell a fixed number of tokens at a low price. But as soon as the price rises, they have an incentive to dump as many as they can. Common, if not necessarily ethical, tricks for getting people in the door include engineering fake trades to create the appearance of activity, or quietly paying influencers for what looks like organic social media hype. The dumping can also happen surreptitiously, if creators conceal that they’re the people selling. Regardless of how it all plays out, the only consistent winners are insiders who get in early.

No one involved seems particularly squeamish about whether memecoins are legal. A month after Trump’s inauguration, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced it won’t regulate them. Agency staff noted that other fraud laws may still apply—a scam is a scam, whatever the method—but so far other regulators and prosecutors haven’t waded in.

The shadiness of the memecoin market isn’t a big secret. All but the most gullible traders know the deal. But they still think they can profit by getting out before a coin’s inevitable crash. It’s like consensual scamming. The slimy salesmen depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street had to dial all day to trick retirees into buying their penny stocks. Now the suckers are actually seeking out pump-and-dump schemes.

The plans for Trump’s memecoin were hatched only weeks before its debut. His team was rushing to get it out before Inauguration Day. The assumption was that Trump would face stricter scrutiny after that.

The weekend the Trump coin went on the market was the busiest ever for memecoin trading. Its price soared from near zero to as high as $74. When Melania unveiled her coin two days later, it spiked, too, hitting $13. By the next day, though, both coins were crashing. Neither has recovered. As of Dec. 10, Trump’s coin was down 92% since its peak, to $5.90, and Melania’s was down 99%, to 11¢—almost a complete wipeout.

Income Traps, Unhappiness & Magic Internet Money

I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a Basic Needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the “Participation Tickets” required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024. Using conservative, national-average data:

Childcare: $32,773
Housing: $23,267
Food: $14,717
Transportation: $14,828
Healthcare: $10,567
Other essentials: $21,857

Required net income to live: $118,009. Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500.

I then ran the numbers on what happens to a family climbing the ladder toward that break-even number. What I found explains the “vibes” of the economy better than any CPI print.

Our entire safety net is designed to catch people at the very bottom, but it sets a trap for anyone trying to climb out. As income rises from $40,000 to $100,000, benefits disappear faster than wages increase. I call this The Valley of Death. Let’s look at the transition for a family in New Jersey:

1. The View from $35,000 (The “Official” Poor)

At this income, the family is struggling, but the state provides a floor. They qualify for Medicaid (free healthcare). They receive SNAP (food stamps). They receive heavy childcare subsidies. Their deficits are real, but capped.

2. The Cliff at $45,000 (The Healthcare Trap)

The family earns a $10,000 raise. Good news? No. At this level, the parents lose Medicaid eligibility. Suddenly, they must pay premiums and deductibles.

Income Gain: +$10,000
Expense Increase: +$10,567
Net Result: They are poorer than before. The effective tax on this mobility is over 100%.

3. The Cliff at $65,000 (The Childcare Trap)

This is the breaker. The family works harder. They get promoted to $65,000. They are now solidly “Working Class.” But at roughly this level, childcare subsidies vanish. They must now pay the full market rate for daycare.

Income Gain: +$20,000 (from $45k)
Expense Increase: +$28,000 (jumping from co-pays to full tuition)
Net Result: Total collapse.

When you run the net-income numbers, a family earning $100,000 is effectively in a worse monthly financial position than a family earning $40,000. At $40,000, you are drowning, but the state gives you a life vest. At $100,000, you are drowning, but the state says you are a “high earner” and ties an anchor to your ankle called “Market Price.”

In option terms, the government has sold a call option to the poor, but they’ve rigged the gamma. As you move “closer to the money” (self-sufficiency), the delta collapses. For every dollar of effort you put in, the system confiscates 70 to 100 cents.

___________________________

Bitcoin was never the future of money. It was a battering ram in a regulatory war. Now that war is wrapping up, and the capital that built it is quietly leaving. For 17 years we convinced ourselves that Magic Internet Money was the final state of finance. It was not. Bitcoin was a regulatory battering ram, a one purpose siege engine built to smash a specific wall: the state’s refusal to tolerate digital bearer assets.

That job is basically done. Tokenized US stocks are already being issued. Tokenized gold is legal and growing. Tokenized USD has a market cap of several hundred billion dollars. In wartime, a battering ram is priceless. In peacetime, it is a heavy, expensive antique.

Now that the financial rails are being upgraded and legalized, the Gold 2.0 narrative is collapsing back into what we actually wanted in the 1990s: tokenized claims on real assets.

_________________________

There is genuine and widespread despair in the U.S., but the primary reason isn’t economic, rather it is because human fulfillment requires more than material wealth, which in our quest for more stuff, we have forgotten. People need physical communities, and while the US excels at material wealth, it’s achieved it, especially in the last forty years, at the expense of the aesthetic, communal, stable, and personal, and so the bad vibes are justified.

Societies come with strong forces that shape expectations and even shape people’s understanding of a ‘good life.’ That is, society provides citizens playbooks that they are urged to follow which are supposed to end in happily ever after, and ours is that you can become a millionaire on your own terms as long as you hustle hustle hustle — and when that doesn’t happen, it’s very lonely and humiliating, because we as a culture have put all our eggs in that one particular basket. At the expense of community, friendships, and even family.

When you give your citizens a cultural script, built on the material, that promises hard work will lead to success, and then your policy design ensures it doesn’t, people will end up both economically frustrated, as well as spiritually empty, sitting in their living room streaming the latest movie wondering what exactly is the point of life. Or, they will feel they have failed at the material, while also having little else to give them meaning.

_____________________________

In his investment classic Winning the Loser’s Game, Charley Ellis tells a great story about healthcare and simplicity:

“Two of my best friends, who are at the peak of their distinguished careers in medicine and medical research, agree that the two most important discoveries in medical history are penicillin and washing hands (which stopped the spread of infection from one mother to another by the midwives who delivered most babies before 1900). What’s more, my friends counsel, there’s no better advice on how to live longer than to quit smoking and buckle up when driving. “

The Lesson: Advice doesn’t always have to be complicated to be good.

The Baumol Effect, Memory Banks & Short Form Videos

Weird things happen to economies when you have huge bursts of productivity that are concentrated in one industry. Obviously, it’s great for that industry, because when the cost of something falls while its quality rises, we usually find a way to consume way more of that thing – creating a huge number of new jobs and new opportunities in this newly productive area.

But there’s an interesting spillover effect. The more jobs and opportunities created by the productivity boom, the more wages increase in other industries, who at the end of the day all have to compete in the same labor market.

Our explosion of demand for data centers means there’s infinite work for HVAC technicians. So they get paid more (even though they themselves didn’t change), which means they charge more on all jobs (even the ones that have nothing to do with AI). Furthermore, the next generation of plumber apprentices might decide to do HVAC instead; so now plumbing is more expensive too. And so on.

The Baumol Effect; “We’ll spend more on what doesn’t get more productive,” is top of mind right now, as we watch in awe at what is happening with AI Capex spend.

_______________________________

Academics have published new research on the impact that Short Form Videos (SFV) like TikTok, Instagram Reels and Youtube shorts have on cognitive and mental health. The report systematically reviews and analyzes 71 studies involving over 98,000 participants.

If you just read just the findings below it would be indistinguishable from an addiction to a hard drug:

SFV use is linked to poorer cognitive performance, with the strongest deficits in attention and inhibitory control, suggesting users struggle to focus and suppress impulses.
Frequent exposure to fast-paced, highly rewarding SFV content may rewire attention systems, fostering “rapid disengagement” from tasks that are slower or require sustained effort, reducing cognitive endurance over time.
SFV use is associated with poorer overall mental health, with the strongest links to stress and anxiety, indicating consistent emotional strain among heavier users.
Heavy SFV use reinforces impulsive engagement loops driven by dopamine rewards, contributing to compulsive scrolling and difficulty disengaging, patterns resembling behavioral addiction.
Short-form video consumption is associated with poorer sleep quality, especially when used at night, due to overstimulation and blue light disrupting melatonin, which can worsen mood and cognitive functioning.
Higher SFV use correlates with increased loneliness and reduced life satisfaction, as digital interactions replace real-world social connection for some users.
Negative effects occur across both youth and adults, meaning the cognitive and emotional risks of SFV use are not limited to developing brains; adults experience similar declines and mental health associations.

_______________________________

These days, it’s all stocks all the time, with reputable authorities calling on small investors to put everything they have saved into equities. Older investors are reminded of the mantra so common in 1999: “Every penny you don’t have invested in stocks will hurt you.”

More than a generation ago, financial historian Peter Bernstein wrote about investors’ “memory banks,” the market experience that accumulates in their hippocampi over their investing lives and molds their investment strategy. As he put it, looking back on the 1990s: “Most of the new participants in the market had no memory of what a bear market was like.”

And here we are today, almost seventeen years into a great bull market. Rather like 1999, also seventeen years into a long-term bull market, or 1966, once more seventeen years. Or 1873, sixteen years in, or 1837, eighteen years in, or 1893, twenty years in — to name a few of the notable tops over the past two centuries. Just long enough to produce empty memory banks in just enough investors.

A new generation of investors have never personally experienced a long-term bear market. Their memory banks are devoid of the damage wrought by the Grim Reaper of equity risk. Let’s be generous and assume some have read market history and know that stocks can lose money — sometimes, a lot — and take months, if not years, to recover. There’s a difference, though, between being told that markets can fall by more than 50% and having it burned into your memory banks by seeing your net worth halved in real time as the economy careens towards the precipice.

_____________________________________

Historically, valuations have been a useful (though not perfect) indicator of real returns over the following decade. Below, you’ll see historical CAPE readings (in black) for the U.S. market alongside their corresponding forward ten-year real returns (in green). The conclusion is straightforward: when valuations are low, future returns tend to be above average; when valuations are high, forward returns tend to be much more muted.

Right now, the U.S. market sits at a CAPE ratio of around 40. It’s nearly double the long-term average of roughly 20, and the second most expensive in history.

historically, when valuations have climbed to this level, the following decade hasn’t been kind to investors. Not once has a country that ended a year with a CAPE above 40 produced positive real returns over the next ten years. That’s not a personal opinion but what the data shows.

To get a sense of what current valuations might mean going forward, I ran a linear regression using historical CAPE data and forward ten-year real returns. The relationship is remarkably consistent: as valuations rise, future returns fall. At today’s valuation levels, the regression suggests an expected real return of -2.46% for the next decade. From a historical perspective, the last time we were at the CAPE reading we find ourselves in today, the market went on to lose -2.11% per year for the next ten years.

Valuation isn’t the only red flag flashing. Today, about 40% of the market is concentrated in its 10 largest companies. This is the most concentrated the market has ever been.

Concentration itself isn’t a bearish sign. What really matters is how concentration changes going forward. Rising concentration tends to coincide with strong market performance as leading firms continue to gain share and deliver growth. On the other hand, when concentration starts to fall, this means your largest players are underperfoming the rest of your portfolio, and that’s when returns have historically suffered. If the biggest names continue to pull away from the pack, the market could remain strong for a while. But if that leadership falters, history suggests the unwind can be painful.

The Private Bubble, NFL Scoring & Spam Texts

A few highlights from one of the best articles I’ve read this year discussing the private equity/credit bubble:

The golden age of Private Equity – at least from the standpoint of investor returns (FUM and thus fees to sponsors were significantly lower) – was during 1980-2000, and at a slight stretch, to around the time of the Great Financial Crisis in 2008. During this era, PE delivered legitimately good returns – in some cases outstandingly so. What enabled it was that it was still a niche industry where there was a limited amount of capital chasing deals, while the backdrop was conductive.

In contrast to the 1980-2000s, private equity funds from the 2010s began paying a premium to public market valuations for (typically) small, subscale and illiquid businesses. The problem was that the same thing that always happens when too much money floods into an area happened – bidding competition heated up, target prices rose, and the opportunity that previously existed rapidly disappeared (though the vehicles’ high fee structures of course remained firmly intact). Not surprisingly, since the 2010s, and perhaps as far back as 2006, outcomes have dramatically changed, and PE has delivered generally disappointing returns and underperformed listed equities, and the magnitude of that underperformance has significantly worsened since 2022.

Warren Buffett has scrutinized PEs return calculations and found them to be “well, they’re not calculated in a manner that I would regard as honest.” All kinds of tricks can be and are used to inflate apparent relative returns. PE will often lock up commitments from investors years in advance, and only “call” the funds much later after a deal is done. The IRR calculations only include the period during which the funds are working, but investors need to keep cash in reserve as it can be called at any time, meaningfully diluting effective returns to investors.

The much bigger elephant in the room – the PE industry is currently “marking to model” and is sitting on a vast number of assets it is unable to sell – even in a bull market – because the marks are unrealistic. This will be meaningfully inflating claimed trailing returns, which remain mostly unrealized.

If you look at who private equity companies hire, it is typically ex investment bankers. These guys are deal makers and spreadsheet jockeys, not operational people, and there is no reason to believe they have any unique insights on the intricacies of running small, niche businesses, where specialized skills and decades of domain experience generally count for a lot more than general smarts.

Not to mention that as the industry has mushroomed in size, the average quality of the average hire has meaningfully degraded. Investment bankers also generally lack investment acumen. They are deal makers – a different skill set entirely.

Going even a step further – it’s probable that private equity ownership not only fails to deliver operational improvements, but very likely on net makes the operational performance of companies worse, particularly in the long term. The most obvious means by which this occurs is by saddling investees with significant levels of debt, as well as implementing wholesale asset stripping (such selling and leasing back real estate) and cutting operational costs and capital expenditures to the bone. They frequently don’t just cut the fat, but the muscle as well.

If you are apt to under invest and run the business for maximum cash extraction in the near term, jacking up prices, lowering service quality, squeezing employees, alienating customers and opening the door to competitor inroads – it may improve near term cash generation, but it often comes at the cost of long-term value degradation.

PE has now taken over a large portion of Las Vegas, for instance, and visitors routinely complain of high prices, poor customer service, and the removal of perks such as free drinks that previously endeared visitors to the strip. Visitation has been waning, and people complain Vegas has lost its charm, and has become overpriced and soulless, a victim of “corporate greed.”

This is far from the only example. Employees and customers of PE backed hospitals and dental practices often complain of declining service standards, high prices, and a significant increase in unnecessary treatments unethically prescribed to boost near term utilization/billing.

The fair value of the combined $5 trillion of assets held in the US Private Equity/Credit industry is probably worth only about 60% of that in reality – a $2 trillion hole. When that hole is exposed, it will change economic behavior, and likely to a noticeable degree.

Private Equity/Credit: The Bubble & Its Implications

________________________________

Great article from Nate Silver this week on reasons why there is more scoring in the NFL:

(1) The number of 55+ yard field goals has increased by 3x since just 2022:

(2) Between longer field goals and the dynamic kickoff, the field has basically been shortened by 10-15 yards.

(3) Quarterback passer ratings are tied for their highest-ever at 93.6:

(4) For the first time in NFL history, quarterbacks as a collective are gaining enough rushing yards to outweigh the yards they lose from sacks:

(5) Analytics have teams successfully attempting and completing fourth down conversions:

(6) Rushing plays on 4th-and-short are being attempted (and succeeding) at extremely high rates. The tush push effect:

_______________________

If you’ve ever received a spammy text falsely alerting you to an unpaid toll or failed delivery, it might have come from a so-called Phishing-as-a-Service network that Google is now trying to take down. In just 20 days, Google alleges, Lighthouse was used to spin up 200,000 fraudulent websites to attract over a million potential victims. It estimates that somewhere between 12.7 million and 115 million credit cards in the US were compromised by the scam.

In this alleged scheme, the text would link to a spoofed USPS page asking a user to enter their personal and payment details. The page tracks users’ keystrokes, according to the complaint, so the information is compromised even if the user has second thoughts before submitting.

__________________________

When Will We Make God? The key driver of the AI Bubble:

Hyperscalers (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, IBM) believe they might build God within the next few years. That’s one of the main reasons they’re spending billions on AI, soon trillions. They think it will take us just a handful of years to get to AGI—Artificial General Intelligence, the moment when an AI can do nearly all virtual human tasks better than nearly any human.

They think it’s a straight shot from there to super-intelligence—an AI that is so much more intelligent than humans that we can’t even fathom how it thinks. A God. The arguments to claim we’re about to make gods are:

AI expertise is growing inexorably. Threshold after threshold, discipline after discipline, it masters it, and then beats humans at it.
We’re now tackling the PhD level.
In the current trajectory, we should reach AI Researcher levels soon.
Once we do, we can automate AI research and turbo-boost it.
If we do that, super-intelligence should be around the corner.

Loneliness, Doctors & Notes From Books

What afflicts America’s young today can’t be properly called a loneliness crisis. It seems more to me like an absence-of-loneliness crisis. It is a being-constantly-alone-and-not-even-thinking-that’s-a-problem crisis. Americans—and young men, especially—are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them. The problem is not loneliness. The problem is that we’ve forgotten how to feel lonely in the first place.

Since the 1970s, America has over-regulated the physical world and under-regulated the digital space. To open a daycare, build an apartment, or start a factory requires lawyers, permits, and years of compliance. To open a casino app or launch a speculative token requires a credit card and a few clicks. We made it hard to build physical-world communities and easy to build online casinos. The state that once poured concrete for public parks now licenses gambling platforms. The country that regulates a lemonade stand will let an 18-year-old day-trade options on his phone.

In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.

_____________________________

As part of a larger project, an author read 102 books over the past twelve-and-a-half months. Here were some of the insights he took away:

Exercising regularly is probably the single best thing you can do for your health. (Outside of quitting smoking.)
Happiness, not stress, leads to productivity.
Despite our preconceptions, we may be happier at work than at home. People experience more flow at work than in leisure.
Energy, not time, is the limited resource in our ability to be productive.
You can’t beat the market. Nearly everyone is better off simply buying a diversified low-cost index fund. Neither can any fund you invest in. The percentage of funds that beat the market after fees is so low that you can round it to zero.
You can’t time the market. Frequent trades expose you to taxes and whittle away your capital on fees. Buy and hold is better.
If you need an advisor, find someone who charges hourly. Paying a percentage of your assets seems cheaper, but the cost is enormous in the long-run.
We’re overweight because we eat too much. The increase in calories consumed is enough to entirely explain the change in body mass. Successful weight loss requires you to stick to a dietary pattern forever. The weight will always come back the moment you stop.
Loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking cigarettes. The stress of loneliness weakens our immune system.
There are numerous explanations for the increase in time alone, but a simple one is just better entertainment options available.
Sleep serves many important functions. It flushes the brain of metabolic byproducts, consolidates memories, reinforces the immune system and recalibrates synaptic connections.
If you have insomnia, don’t worry, you probably are sleeping enough. If you’re sleep deprived you will fall asleep, so despite feeling cranky and low energy, most insomniacs are not actually sleep deprived.
Asking yourself “what went well?” at the end of the day can give you a big boost to your happiness.
ADHD is about as heritable as height, is not caused by parenting style, doesn’t go away as you age and, despite popular disbelief, medication works pretty well.

102 Lessons From Reading 102 Books

___________________________

Why do doctors now seem so rushed and dismissive? You wait 45 minutes in the exam room when the doctor finally walks in. They seem rushed. A few questions, a quick exam, a glance at the clock and then a rapid-fire plan with little time for discussion – and you leave feeling unheard, hurried and frustrated.

Increasingly, health care organizations and physician groups face intense financial pressures. Many doctors can no longer sustain their private practice due to declining reimbursements, rising costs and increasing administrative burdens; instead, they’ve become employees of larger health care systems. In some cases, their practices have been acquired by private equity groups.

With this shift, doctors have less control over their workloads and the time they get with their patients. More and more, payment models fail to cover the true cost of care. The default solution is often for doctors to see more patients with less time for each, and to squeeze in additional work after hours.

That negative, impolite tone you may have experienced might be because the doctor has many patients waiting and a full evening ahead just to catch up on writing visit notes, reviewing medical records and completing other required documentation. During the work day, they’re often fielding over 100 messages and alerts daily, including referrals and coordinating care, all while trying to focus on the patient in front of them.

________________________________

200 years of data across 56 countries, showing 25-year and 5-year returns from different starting P/E ratios (the price of a stock dividend by its earnings). The takeaway? Even over relatively short periods like five years, valuations matter a lot. If you buy when stocks are expensive they tend to do worse than when you buy them cheap.

Here are the forecasts for different categories of stocks over the coming decade based on their current valuations:

Chatfishing & Poorly Defined Problems

Why Aren’t Smart People Happier?

A good name for problems on tests that determine someone’s level of intelligence is “well-defined.” Well-defined problems can be very difficult, but they aren’t mystical. You can write down instructions for solving them. And you can put them on a test. In fact, standardized tests items must be well-defined problems, because they require indisputable answers. Matching a word to its synonym, finding the area of a trapezoid, putting pictures in the correct order—all common tasks on IQ tests—are well-defined problems.

People differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems, they’re not the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but “poorly defined” problems. Getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitals is not going to help you solve them.

One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem. The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable. The boundaries aren’t clear: literally anything I do could make me more happy or less happy. The problems are not repeatable: what made me happy when I was 21 may not make me happy when I’m 31.

This is why the people who score well on intelligence tests and win lots of chess games are no happier than the people who flunk the tests and lose at chess: well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills. Nobody agrees on the rules, the pieces do whatever they want, and the board covers the whole globe, as well as the inside of your head and possibly several metaphysical planes as well.

Over the last generation, we have solved tons of well-defined problems. We eradicated smallpox and polio. We landed on the moon. We built better cars, refrigerators, and televisions. We even got ~15 IQ points smarter. How much did our happiness improve? None.

We haven’t yet defined the problem of “living a happy life”. We know that if you’re starving, lonely, or in pain, you’ll probably get happier if you get food, friends, and relief. After that, the returns diminish very quickly. You could read all the positive psychology you want, take the online version of The Science of Wellbeing, read posts on hacking the hedonic treadmill, meditate, exercise, and keep a gratitude journal—and after all that, maybe you’ll be a smidge happier. Whatever else you think will put a big, permanent smile on your face, you’re probably wrong.

We fawn over people who are good at solving well-defined problems. They get to be called “professor” and “doctor.” We pay them lots of money to teach us stuff. They get to join exclusive clubs like Mensa and the Prometheus Society.

People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don’t get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test they can take that will spit out a big, honking number that will make everybody respect them.

And that’s a shame. My grandma does not know how to use the “input” button on her TV’s remote control, but she does know how to raise a family full of good people who love each other, how to carry on through a tragedy, and how to make the perfect pumpkin pie.

If you don’t value the ability to solve poorly defined problems, you’ll never get more of it. You won’t seek out people who have that ability and try to learn from them, nor will you listen to them when they have something important to say. You’ll spend your whole life trying to solve problems with cleverness when what you really need is wisdom. And you’ll wonder why it never really seems to work. All of your optimizing, your straining to achieve and advance, your ruthless crusade to eliminate all of the well-defined problems from your life—it doesn’t actually seem make your life any better.

_________________________

‘I realized I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder.

Standing outside the pub, 36-year-old business owner Rachel took a final tug on her vape and steeled herself to meet the man she’d spent the last three weeks opening up to. They’d matched on the dating app Hinge and built a rapport that quickly became something deeper. “From the beginning he was asking very open-ended questions, and that felt refreshing,” says Rachel.

One early message from her match read: “I’ve been reading a bit about attachment styles lately, it’s helped me to understand myself better – and the type of partner I should be looking for. Have you ever looked at yours? Do you know your attachment style?” “It was like he was genuinely trying to get to know me on a deeper level. The questions felt a lot more thoughtful than the usual, ‘How’s your day going?’” she says.

Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left her staring at her phone long after she should have been asleep. “They were like things that you read in self-help books – really personal conversations about who we are and what we want for our lives,” she says.

Which is why the man who greeted her inside the pub – polite, pleasant but oddly flat – felt like a stranger. Gone was the quickfire wit and playful rhythm she’d come to expect from their exchanges. Over pints he stumbled through small talk, checked his phone a little too often, and seemed to wilt under the pressure of her questions. “I felt like I was sitting opposite someone I’d never even spoken to,” she says. “I tried to have the same sort of conversation as we’d been having online, but it was like, ‘Knock, knock, is anyone home?’ – like he knew basically nothing about me. That’s when I suspected he’d been using AI.”

Rachel gave her date the benefit of the doubt. “I thought maybe he was nervous,” she says. But she’d been “Chatfished” before, so when the gap between his real and digital selves failed to close on their second date, she called it off. “I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”

In a landscape where text-based communication plays an outsized role in the search for love, it’s perhaps understandable that some of us reach for AI’s helping hand – not everyone gives good text. Some Chatfishers, though, go to greater extremes, outsourcing entire conversations to ChatGPT, leaving their match in a dystopian hall of mirrors: believing they’re building a genuine connection with another human being when in reality they’re opening up to an algorithm trained to reflect their desires back to them.

_______________________________

Youtube is eating everything:

Offshoring Automation & Meaningful Ordinary Things

Inside a multistory office building in Manila’s financial district, around 60 young men and women monitored and controlled artificial intelligence robots restocking convenience store shelves in distant Japan. Occasionally, when a bot dropped a can, someone would don a virtual-reality headset and use joysticks to help recover it.

The AI robots are designed by Tokyo-based startup Telexistence, and run on Nvidia and Microsoft platforms. Since 2022, the company has deployed the machines in the back rooms of over 300 FamilyMart and Lawson stores in Tokyo. It is also planning to use them soon in 7-Elevens.

The bots are remotely monitored 24/7 in Manila by the employees of Astro Robotics, a robot-workforce startup. Japan faces a worker shortage as its population ages, and the country has been cautious about expanding immigration. Telexistence’s bots offer a workaround, allowing physical labor to be offshored. This lowers costs for companies and increases their scale of operations, he said.

It’s hard to find workers to do stacking in Japan. If you get one who’s willing to do it, it’s going to be very expensive. The minimum wage is quite expensive. It’s easy to get young, tech-savvy Filipinos to operate the robots. Each tele-operator, called a “pilot,” monitors around 50 robots at a time.

The bots are usually autonomous, but occasionally — about 4% of the time — they mess up. Perhaps they drop a bottle, which rolls away. Getting the AI bot to recover it by mimicking the human grip perfectly — the friction, the feel of metal in the hand — is one of the more challenging problems in robotics. That’s when a pilot steps in.

Astro Robotics’ tele-operators are benefiting from an AI- and automation-related boom in IT-service work and tech jobs in the Philippines, even as layoffs hit similar workers in richer countries. Filipino tech workers maneuver industrial robots, drive autonomous vehicles, collaborate with AI on various tasks, or help build “AI agents,” which are computer programs that enable autonomous action.

________________________

Diane has been a death doula for two decades now, meaning she is a companion for people at the end of life. She has sat beside people with no time left to waste and nothing left to prove, continually learning from the profound insights they leave behind. An insight she has gleaned:

What does it really mean to live like you are dying? Go skydiving? Ride a bull? Those may sound fun, but insights from people who are actually dying are often simpler and much deeper.

One client told me, “I just want to sit in my own kitchen one more time, with the people I love and a bowl of warm, fresh pasta with parmesan cheese melting on top.” That was his dream. Not a trip to Bali. Not bungee jumping. Just warm pasta, family, and home.

I used to expect that people would reminisce about big events like weddings, awards, or epic vacations. But over and over, what they actually longed for were the simplest pleasures.

My client Bernice had lived an extravagant life. Her walls were covered with perfectly posed photographs of big events from her life. But in her final months, she said, “I wish I had different pictures on the wall—messy ones. Pajama parties with friends, Sunday night movies with my kids, and neighborhood barbeques.” Those were the memories that stirred her soul.

We spend so much of life chasing big moments, but the dying often remind me that it’s not the grand gestures that matter most in the end. It’s the small, ordinary things. A meaningful life is built in everyday moments. Not in the highlight reel, but in the quiet, ordinary spaces in-between.

The dying know something we seem to have forgotten: Life is happening right now. In the warm pasta. During the neighborhood barbecue. In the sound of your favorite voice calling your name. Big events are wonderful, but in the end, the ordinary is everything.

____________________________________

The decline of local news has all kinds of implications. One that doesn’t get much attention is that the wider the news becomes, the more likely it is to be pessimistic. Two things make that so:

Bad news gets more attention than good news because pessimism is seductive and feels more urgent than optimism.
The odds of a bad news story—a fraud, a corruption, a disaster—occurring in your local town at any given moment is low. When you expand your attention nationally, the odds increase. When they expand globally, the odds of something terrible happening in any given moment are 100 percent.

______________________________________

The top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 account for 40% of the index’s market cap. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, AI-related stocks have registered 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth, and 90% of capital spending growth. Meanwhile, AI investments accounted for nearly 92% of the U.S. GDP growth this year. Without those AI investments growth would be flat. America is now one big bet on AI, and this concentration creates fragility.

Valuations for the Mag 10 — the original group of seven leading tech stocks, plus AMD, Broadcom, and Palantir — are high, but not yet at historic peaks. The 24-month forward P/E ratio of the Mag 10 is 35x. In 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, the top 10 stocks traded at 52x forward earnings. Implicit in these valuations, however, is an assumption that AI will help these companies cut costs, or grow revenues by $1 trillion in the next two years. I believe we’re either going to see a massive destruction in valuations, infecting all U.S. stocks and global markets. Or we’re going to see a massive destruction in employment across industries with the highest concentrations of white-collar workers. Both scenarios are ugly.

_____________________________

Cellphone bans in schools have become a popular policy in recent years in the United States, yet very little is known about their effects on student outcomes. In this study, we try to fill this gap by examining the causal effects of bans using detailed student-level data from Florida and a quasi-experimental research strategy relying upon differences in pre-ban cellphone use by students. Several important findings emerge.

The enforcement of cellphone bans in schools led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the short-term, but disciplinary actions began to dissipate after the first year, potentially suggesting a new steady state after an initial adjustment period.
We find significant improvements in student test scores in the second year of the ban after that initial adjustment period.
The findings suggest that cellphone bans in schools significantly reduce student unexcused absences, an effect that may explain a large fraction of the test score gains.