Children, NFL Games, Peptides & Net Worth

What’s the biggest status symbol for the 1%? What if it’s having a third kid?

Is this about a third kid becoming a new cultural symbol for the 1%? A third kid isn’t new for them; what’s new is that it has become rarer for everyone else.

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From Time magazine: The Peptide Rush Has Begun

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) essentially banned peptides in 2023 because of safety concerns. But an FDA committee met in July to review the evidence on peptides and recommend whether or not to take the highly unusual step of allowing pharmacies to dispense them absent scientific review.

It recommended allowing specialty pharmacies to dispense six peptides, despite FDA staff advising against the move. The peptides listed in Appendix A were BPC-157, Epitalon, KPV, MOTS-c, Semax, and TB-500.

Shortly after the new notice was published, a number of telehealth websites were already marketing the six peptides, each for a price of anywhere from $199 to $249 a month.

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How, exactly, do antidepressants work?

For decades, the public understanding of antidepressants has been stuck in a narrative popularized by pharmaceutical advertising in the 1990s: that they work by correcting a chemical deficiency in the brain.

But evidence from research studies has been clear since at least the early 2000s, if not earlier, that this is not how antidepressants work. Doctors prescribe the drugs because decades of study data and patient reports show they can relieve people’s mental health problems. But doctors and scientists don’t have a clear understanding of how they do that. That may be surprising, but it’s the case for many kinds of medications, such as acetaminophen and general anesthetics.

Chemical Imbalance

Let’s start with the grain of truth in the chemical imbalance story. Antidepressants such as S.S.R.I.s (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and others do increase levels of certain brain chemicals called neurotransmitters. But as far as we can tell, they aren’t correcting a chemical deficiency. Instead, their beneficial effects seem to arise from a cascade of changes they set off within the nerve cells that then alter the activity of brain circuits and our thought patterns.

Depression and anxiety appear to involve a shift in how a person processes emotionally significant information. Neutral facial expressions take on a more disapproving and critical vibe. Negative memories are recalled more readily than positive ones. Rewards feel muted, while criticism feels overly painful. It is common for people with depression or anxiety to feel stuck in a persistent loop of negativity.

Antidepressants shift this negative emotional information processing in a positive direction. This effect becomes evident fairly quickly after a person starts taking antidepressants — within days, sometimes after a single dose.

But this change in how emotional information is processed isn’t enough to lift people out of a state of depression or anxiety. What follows is typically a period during which people relearn how to see themselves and the world. Once they are no longer filtering everything through negative lenses, their brains can gradually accumulate more neutral or positive experiences of themselves and the world around them.

Environment

The environment of a medicated person plays a crucial role in this relearning. People with more social support and positive interpersonal relationships, including psychotherapy, tend to gain more from the medications.

Neuroplasticity

Another way in which antidepressants may work involves the enhancement of neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to reorganize its structure and connections. Continued treatment with antidepressants may bolster brain chemicals and processes that promote neuroplasticity. (Psychedelics are thought to work as a treatment for depression and anxiety, in part, for a similar reason.) The hypothesis is that the drugs open a “window” of plasticity through which the brain has a renewed ability to change the way it is wired. Patients treated with antidepressants often feel more mentally malleable and better able to move away from unhelpful thinking patterns. We should think about antidepressants as relieving a kind of cognitive constipation.

Blunting Emotions

Antidepressants can flatten emotions as a side effect. Some argue that this emotional blunting is how antidepressants work, and that the drugs don’t treat mental health problems so much as dampen feelings, both positive and negative.

Placebo Effect

Any discussion of how antidepressants work also needs to acknowledge that research shows factors such as optimism about treatment, expectancy of relief, a positive relationship with the doctor, the passage of time and regular contact with medical staff contribute to a substantial proportion of people’s improvement. While antidepressants do outperform placebos and have specific effects, the difference from placebo for the average patient is modest. Good clinicians are aware of this and pay attention to how they prescribe the drugs. They gain the trust of their patients, work collaboratively, encourage realistic hope, proactively address possible concerns and communicate frequently and empathetically during treatment.

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The average NFL game has been 3 hours 11 minutes, or 7 minutes longer than the last several years. By comparison, Major League Baseball games this year typically took 2 hours 45 minutes, a dramatic improvement since it introduced the pitch clock to address its pace-of-play crisis in 2023.

The NFL has historically maintained a tight grip on game duration and kept them brisker than college contests. The six college football games between two top-25 teams last weekend averaged 3 hours 26 minutes.

Back in 2017, after two seasons in which NFL games were 3 hours 10 minutes or longer, the league reduced its number of commercial breaks per game and saw the action speed up again. Other innovations, such as expedited reviews, have also helped move proceedings along.

But as game length returns to those levels, one possible explanation is the yellow laundry littering fields everywhere. This season, there have been 15 penalties per game, which would be the most in a season in the Super Bowl era. While the frequency of flags tend to decline deeper into a season, certain holding calls shouldn’t necessarily be whistled when they’re away from the ball and not affecting play.

Games can take longer for the right reasons, too. During the closing stages of a nail-biter, teams call timeouts, run out of bounds and do everything they can to stop the clock. And this season, games have been about as tight as ever with an average margin of victory of 9.8 points per game.

Already this season, 31 games have seen game-winning scores in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime, the most through six weeks in NFL history. Fifty-seven out of 93 games, meanwhile, have been decided by one score, tied for the most ever. There have also been eight overtime games so far, which puts this season on an unusually high pace.

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The graph below shows the median net worth by age, based on the Federal Reserve’s recently released 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances:

For the typical household 35 and older, home equity makes up between 55% and 70% of their net worth. The graph below shows the median net worth by age, both with and without home equity:

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The percentage of US adults who say they drink alcohol has plummeted to 54%, the lowest in the history of a Gallup poll that goes back nearly 90 years.

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Four families own 69% of the Korean stock market.

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A great visual of the “home country bias” below, which is the tendency of investors to put most of their money into stocks from their own country instead of diversifying globally.

In many other countries it is their own country + the U.S. as their dominant combined position, largely because the U.S. stock market has performed much better than other countries around the world over the last 17 years.

That brings in “recency bias,” where people give more importance and weight to recent experience than to older or historical data.

The Everywhere Millionaires, Parenting & Psychedelics

On every measure of life success ever studied (income, education, longevity, marital stability, mental health), four inputs from parents swamp almost everything else:

Do you give your kid deep love and warmth?
Do you have a loving relationship with your partner?
Did you read to your kid when they were young?
Do you try to be healthy?

If you can answer yes to those four, your kid is in the top 1%.

Is it possible that the right school takes your kid from the 99th percentile to the 99.8th? Maybe. But many parents treat education like it’s 30%, instead of the 0.8% it actually is.

It’s all the rage among the wealthy to get their children into elite kindergarten programs. In reality, these schools spend an inordinate amount of time screening out the kids whose parents replied “No” to the four items listed above (love, marriage, reading, health).

These kids then go on to an elite K-12 school and college, and the schools are given all the credit. It’s like hand-picking a roster of All-Star baseball players, then attributing every victory entirely to the coaches.

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The authors of the new book, The Everywhere Millionaire, finished an enormous project for the government where they did specialized research on how much tax American business owners pay. Because of this, they were able to provide insight into the wealth of the upper class and the super-rich.

They focused on households with a net worth above $5 million (the top 4%), but the average net worth in their data is $25 million. This provided an incredible glimpse into what they call America’s “Main Street Millionaires.”

This group almost always owns their own business and uses pass-through entities (like LLCs and S-corps). The top industries are:

Law Firm Partnerships
Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Hedge Funds
Independently Owned Auto Dealerships
Professional and Technical Services and Management Consulting
Oil and Gas Extraction
Offices of Physicians
Residential and Nonresidential Builders
Real Estate Activities
Restaurants
Accounting and Bookkeeping

There are a few things to note about these industries. First, these businesses exist across the nation. You might need a lawyer, a car, or a consultant whether you’re in Nebraska or New York. Second, these industries aren’t dominated by a few mega-firms. There’s no Amazon or Walmart of law firms or auto dealers. Instead, each has thousands of independently owned businesses that tend to make their owners wealthy.

Who Are They?

The typical main street millionaire is older, male, married, and White. Men are twice as likely to start a business as women, and Asian and White individuals are 7x and 5x more likely than Black individuals. 90% of business owners with over $10 million are married, and their median age is 62.

80% of business owners with over $10 million (decamillionaires) have a college degree, and 40% have a postgraduate degree. They’re twice as likely to attend college and postgraduate school as the general population.

How Did They Start?

Even when gifts and other family transfers are counted, the overall inheritance rate for their businesses is only about 25%. In other words, the vast majority of these businesses (75%) were not inherited.

But not inheriting a business isn’t the same as starting from zero. Statistically, founders are more likely to come from wealthy families. People from families in the top 1% of income are 2.4 times more likely to found a firm than those from families at the 90th percentile, and 4.1 times more likely than those at the median. Yet most founders don’t come from wealthy families. 70% come from families outside the top 10% of income, and a third come from families in the bottom half. How so? There are far more people in the bottom 90% than the top 10%. So while coming from a wealthy family increases the odds of starting a business, most founders are not from the wealthiest families.

If your first job is in an industry that produces more entrepreneurs, then you’re more likely to become an entrepreneur. And if your first job is more entrepreneurial in nature (e.g., computer systems design, accounting, building equipment contracting), then you’re more likely to succeed as an entrepreneur. That’s because your first job teaches you how an industry works and can help you develop a professional network that is valuable when starting a business.

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Found naturally in more than 200 species of mushrooms, psilocybin has been used for centuries by Indigenous peoples in Mexico, and Central and South America for healing, spiritual and ceremonial purposes.

More than 300 human studies of psilocybin are in the works, according to the government database where clinical trials must be registered. Researchers are testing it for a striking range of conditions: anxiety, depression, anorexia, alcohol, cannabis, opioid and cocaine addiction, borderline personality disorder, OCD, PTSD, ALS and Parkinson’s disease.

Other psychedelics (including MDMA, LSD and ibogaine) are undergoing their own transformation into potential treatments. But many scientists have identified psilocybin, which is considered safer than many of the alternatives when used under controlled conditions, as the leading candidate for mainstream medicine.

That prospect is especially alluring because psychedelics promise something conventional psychiatric drugs often cannot: speed. Their effects can emerge within hours rather than weeks, and some studies suggest the benefits can persist long after the drug has worn off. For conditions affecting millions of Americans, that raises the possibility of a radical departure from taking a pill every day.

Scientists know that psilocybin acts on serotonin receptors involved in perception, mood and cognition. What happens next has been harder to explain.

The first wave of brain-imaging studies between 2012 and 2014 seemed to show something resembling disorder. The brain is organized into roughly 10 to 14 major networks (visual, auditory and others) that ordinarily maintain relatively stable patterns of activity.

Under the influence of psilocybin, some of that organization appears to loosen. A collection of regions associated with our sense of self and internally directed thought becomes less synchronized, while parts of the brain that do not ordinarily communicate as much begin talking to one another.

Then, this summer, researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, complicated that picture. Using machine learning to analyze brain scans in greater detail, they found a previously hidden structure within the apparent disorder. As established networks loosened, other patterns of brain activity emerged.

This is important because in people suffering from mental struggles, a pattern of thinking can become so deeply worn that the mind keeps traveling down the same path, like getting stuck in a trench. Researchers say that can happen in the case of depression, for example.

Now imagine that trench inside a snow globe. Shaking the globe unsettles the entire landscape. When the snow settles, it does not necessarily fall back into exactly the same grooves.

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There’s newly popular college drinking trend; BORGs. Prevalent in the drinking culture at many U.S. colleges and universities since around 2020, BORGs are one-gallon plastic jugs filled with alcohol and a choice of mixings and flavorings.

Preparation for a BORG event, which is often a daytime gathering such as a tailgate or festival, typically involves decorating one’s personal BORG with a clever phrase or social-media-ready pun–for example, “It’s BORG o’clock somewhere” or “BORG to be wild.”

The gallon-sized drink can contain up to a fifth of liquor, or about 17 standard drinks. Nearly one third of respondents said they experienced a blackout from a BORG event.

BORG use was fueled on social media during the pandemic as a way to reduce virus transmission and drink contamination, but BORG use has remained popular at special events, day drinking parties, or tailgating before sporting games.

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Mahatma Gandhi’s seven deadly sins:

Wealth Without Work
Pleasure Without Conscience
Knowledge Without Character
Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics)
Science Without Humanity
Religion Without Sacrifice
Politics Without Principle

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The scientific way to predict which way interest rates will move. Kevin Warsh is 6’1” which is not a good sign.

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.

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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

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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.

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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:

Anti-Social, Bubbles & Walking

Derek Thompson wrote a great article this week called The Anti-Social Century: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. He also released a podcast episode discussing the article.

Men who watch television now spend 7 hours in front of the TV for every 1 hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home.
The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.
From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45%, then it got worse. Between the early 2000s and the latest data, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32%.
A 5-percentage-point increase in alone time is associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10% lower household income.
From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained 6 weekly hours in leisure time. They funneled almost all of it into one activity: watching TV.
In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent.
The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s.
Today’s adults spend an additional 99 minutes inside their homes on any given day, compared with 2003.
The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends outside the home on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years.
Restaurants used to be the ultimate “social” business. But today, just one-quarter of restaurant traffic is “on-premises”—that is, sitting, ordering, talking with people at a table. With the rise and rise of delivery 74% of all restaurant traffic now comes from “off premises” customers—takeout and delivery. And solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The top reason given? The need for more “me time.”

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Gen Z spends an average of 109 days per year looking at a screen. Eighty percent of our waking hours are spent consuming information, up from 40% in 1980.

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Do You Even Maxx Bro? Chewing-gum workouts for sharper jawlines. Specialty products for feathered bangs. So. Much. Cologne. Exploring the extreme self-care trends shaping a generation of young men.

In the past, I might have tuned out a very online trend like looksmaxxing, but I regret to inform you that we can’t skip this one. Because looksmaxxing might be the key to understanding Gen Z and Gen Alpha behavior, knowing where they’re headed, and, frankly, answering a larger question you’ve definitely thought about: Are young men okay?

Someone unexpected has emerged as an unlikely Gen Alpha role model: American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, the yoked killer from the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel, memorably played by Christian Bale (and his cheekbones) in the film. In forums on Reddit , looksmaxxers have coalesced around Bateman, whose well-moisturized face has become an extremely popular profile pic for self-described “sigmas,” a Gen Alpha term for independent men who prioritize power, class, and self-control, known to attract beautiful women aroused by their bank accounts.

As Bateman says in the film: “You can always be thinner…look better.” For many, that starts with “mewing,” a non-medical technique that involves pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth to reshape your jawline. Men now receive ads for Jawliner gum, part of a new category of fitness chewing gums, which is 10 times harder to chew than a standard piece and is designed to tone the masseter muscles in their face. Terms like brotox have made their way into professional conversations, and more men have been seeking jawline-enhancing procedures.

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Great newsletter from Howard Markets this month discussing bubbles and valuations in the market using historical examples from his decades of experience in the financial industry (started in 1969). Some highlights:

In bubbles, investors treat the leading companies—and pay for their stocks—as though the firms are sure to remain leaders for decades. Some do and some don’t, but change seems to be more the rule than persistence.

My early brush with a genuine bubble caused me to formulate some guiding principles that carried me through the next 50-odd years:

It’s not what you buy, it’s what you pay that counts.
Good investing doesn’t come from buying good things, but from buying things well.
There’s no asset so good that it can’t become overpriced and thus dangerous, and there are few assets so bad that they can’t get cheap enough to be a bargain.

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Studies continue to show that any type of movement (even just taking a simple walk) can be extremely beneficial for mental health.

Researchers analyzed 33 studies examining the movements of nearly 100,000 adults using smartphones, pedometers and other fitness trackers. Those who clocked more daily steps were less likely to report depressive symptoms or be diagnosed with the condition than those who walked less.
Participants ranged in age from 18 to 91 years old and lived in 13 different countries. Those who logged at least 5,000 or more daily steps were less likely to experience depressive symptoms, with the greatest effect coming for those who logged more than 7,500 steps a day — they were 42% less likely to suffer depressive symptoms.
A subset of studies included in the meta-analysis found that for every 1,000 daily step increase, adults reduced their risk of developing depression by 9%.
The message is very consistent: more is better, and some is better than none.

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An in-depth report from Reuters on the origins of OnlyFans and how it turned into one of the most profitable businesses in the world.

Created in 2016, OnlyFans has paid out over $20 billion to its creators, who now number 4.1 million. The company takes a 20% cut of creators’ revenue.
In 2023 alone, content creators generated $6.6 billion on the platform that has over 300 million users
Its dividend payout of $472 million to the owner was more than Ralph Lauren earned from the fashion company he founded, and Nike co-founder Phil Knight earned from the sportswear giant – combined.

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While no one is ever going to feel bad for someone that co-founded a company and sold it for $975 million, Vinay Hiremath wrote a blog post this week titled: “I Am Rich & Have No Idea What To Do With Myself.” After selling the company he found himself lost, depressed and breaking up with what sounds like an amazing girlfriend that loved him. He just booked a ticket to Hawaii to do some soul searching (again, no one is going to feel bad for him), and is asking himself:

Why couldn’t I just leave Loom and say “I don’t know what I want to do next”?
Why do I feel the need to only be on a journey if it’s grand?
What is wrong with being insignificant?

It’s an introspective look into someone’s open, honest mind providing another example that money solves a lot of problems, but it can’t solve all of them. Most of the time people seem to end up less happy at the destination than they were along the journey to get there.

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