Tag: wellness

Parenting, Meditation, Stimulants & Yoga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What happened to Yoga?

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

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

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

Childhood Amnesia, Testosterone & Blue Zones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ovarian Cancer, Padel & Shorting Stocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Padel is the new pickleball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two main reasons for this.

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

Countries with more women:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memories, Cash Flow & The Happiness Crash

Your hippocampus doesn’t encode days that feel identical. If this Tuesday looks like last Tuesday, your brain files them as a single compressed memory. The second day never gets its own folder.

This is why decades feel like they disappeared. The hippocampus uses novelty as its filter for “worth storing.” Repetitive routines trigger temporal compression. Same commute, same desk, same dinner, same bedtime: the brain deduplicates the whole sequence into one entry. You lived 365 days. You filed 40.

As people move through continuous experience, the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex fire in discrete bursts at moments the brain flags as “something changed.” Each burst becomes a retrievable memory later. In stretches with no boundaries, the bursts flatten. Participants with more boundaries in a given period remembered more of it afterward. Segmentation literally builds memory.

Sleep is the second mechanism. During slow-wave sleep, the hippocampus replays the day’s episodes and transfers them to the neocortex for long-term storage. This is when memory actually gets filed. Cut sleep short and encoding efficiency drops. Chronic sleep debt means experiences you had never complete the transfer. The memory existed. It just never made it to disk.

The third mechanism is where dopamine meets attention. Novel stimuli trigger the ventral tegmental area to release dopamine into the hippocampus, which gates what gets encoded. Mind-wandering does the opposite. When your default mode network takes over (phone scrolling, rumination, email during dinner), the hippocampus stops tagging the present. You were at the wedding. Your hippocampus was in your inbox.

The fix comes straight out of the mechanism. New locations, new food, new people, new routes home. The brain needs boundaries to build memories. Go to bed earlier so replay actually runs. Put the phone down when something is happening so the dopamine signal can fire.

The more forgettable the day, the shorter the decade.

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Traditional valuation metrics like the Shiller CAPE (price-to-earnings) ratio have been screaming “overvalued” for most of this century, but there has been almost no mean reversion since 2008 for U.S. stocks:

Why?

When you swap earnings for free cash flow (sales minus input costs, labor, taxes, and capex — basically what’s actually available to pay owners), the picture changes dramatically. Until recently, the price-to-free-cash-flow ratio bounced around but had no long-term upward drift:

Two structural shifts explain the divergence:

  1. Labor share has declined ~8 percentage points of GDP since 1980. Less of the pie goes to workers, more goes to firm owners. This boosted earnings.
  2. Capex has been relatively weak as a share of firm value. Firms (especially big tech) generated massive earnings without heavy reinvestment, so cash flow grew even faster than earnings.

However, that clean free-cash-flow story is under pressure right now. Some of these companies have gone from huge positive FCF to zero or negative FCF, taking on debt to fund it. Big tech has flipped from cash-generating machines to massive spenders on AI data centers, chips, and energy infrastructure.

The chart below is the same as above, but extends the data adding the last few years:

Bullish case: This is 1-2 years of heavy investment that will produce a new plateau of even higher cash flows, and AI further reduces labor share.

Bearish case: AI isn’t “free money” — even adopter firms (not just the hyperscalers) will need serious capex to implement it, and the payoff is uncertain.

Full podcast discussion on this topic on an episode of Odd Lots this week.

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There was a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. 

This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. 

The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy.

Sleep, Forecasting & Life Stages

Life can be divided into three stages:

  • Stage 1: Youth – You have time and health, but not much money (unless you have a trust fund).
  • Stage 2: Mid-Life – You have money and health, but little time, career/family consume most of it.
  • Stage 3: Old Age – You have time and money (hopefully), but your health begins to deteriorate.

But there’s a magical stage between Stage 2 and Stage 3 where you have all three: time, health, and money. Some people extend Stage 2 for too long, chasing promotions, accumulating wealth, and missing this precious window to live fully and intentionally.

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Six common sleep myths:

  • “You need 8 hours of sleep every night” (7 hours is ideal)
  • “We sleep to rest our bodies” (Sleep restores your brain much more than your body)
  • “Waking up in the middle of the night is bad”
  • “Light and sound will ruin your sleep”
  • “Sleeping pills will help you”
  • “You need to time your sleep cycles to leverage REM”

There are two ways sleep helps the brain:

(1) Sleep helps us learn and remember important things. When we’re awake, our memories seem to go into a sort of short-term bank. Then, when we’re in certain stages of sleep, our brain culls through these memories. It puts the most important memories in long-term storage and deletes the useless ones.

(2) Sleep “cleans” our brain. The brain is like an engine that does a lot of work during the day. Engines emit smog—in the case of the brain, this smog is called “metabolites.” But because our brain is tightly sealed off, it can’t seem to get rid of these metabolites as it’s up and running while we’re awake.

Picture this as a car running idle in a garage. But pretend the car’s engine can’t run with the garage door open. So across the day, the engine runs in the closed garage, and smog builds and builds in the brain. Run the engine too long with the garage door closed, and you get a dangerous smog buildup. As we sleep, it’s like the engine turns down and the garage door opens. During certain sleep phases, some areas of our brain expand by 60 percent, which allows the previous day’s metabolites to clear. This also lets in enzymes that repair and rejuvenate receptors in the brain. Sort of like having a mechanic come in to tune the engine while the garage is open and the engine is “off.”

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When Do People Want Their Inheritance (And When Do They Get It)? When you ask people whether they would prefer $250,000 at age 30, $500,000 at age 40, or $1 million at age 50, people overwhelmingly wanted the lower amount earlier in life. 70% of respondents who answered this question chose $250,000 at age 30.

The average age at which someone receives an inheritance has been increasing over time. In 1989, the average age of inheritance was 41 and today it’s around 51.

You can provide up to $19,000 per year to each of your children tax-free (as of 2025). While the IRS allows you to gift $19,000 per child per year tax-free, technically you can gift far more than this without paying federal taxes. The catch is that any gift above $19,000 counts against your lifetime gift limit, which is $13.99 million (as of 2025). In other words, you can give away $13.99 million across your lifetime without having to pay the federal gift tax.

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Why Macro Forecasting Is Impossible. Think about global trade — large, complex interrelated economies, driven by everything from policy to consumer sentiment, geography, innovation, employment, inflation, natural resources, etc. Besides all of those massive complexities, everything affects everything else. You have initial acts, second-order effects, 3rd, 4th, 5th order effects, reflexivity, and dynamic interactions. It quickly scales up to billions of incalculable odds.

This is why forecasting market prices or macroeconomic data is so challenging: There are simply too many variables, each dependent on and reflecting even more variables, to pretend we truly know what will happen next.

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Modern-day cannabis is simply not the same as the plant used in the 1960s through the 1980s or even as recently as 10 years ago. New strains of cannabis are highly potent, making them more addictive and potentially more dangerous, and we are still trying to understand what the drug does to developing adolescent brains.

All cannabis products contain a mix of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the intoxicating component of the cannabis plant, and cannabidiol (CBD), which may have anxiety-reducing properties. In the 1990s the marijuana in a typical joint contained about 5 percent THC.

But genetic modification has drastically increased THC potency; from 1995 to 2022 its content in the average cannabis plant increased by 307 percent. And it’s not just joints or pot brownies; with the expanding legalization and commercialization of cannabis, there are few limits on the levels of THC in products such as fast-acting vape pens and edibles. What teens can buy today is nothing like what their parents used in college.

Higher-potency THC, marijuana use starting at a young age and more frequent use all increase the risk of psychosis.

College, Cancer & Wages

The share of elite MBA grads still looking for work 3+ months after graduation is up sharply at practically every high-ranking school. The traditional elite-MBA absorption process—1) Get degree; 2) Glide path to Big Tech/Consulting—seems disrupted.

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Gen Z is the most money-centric generation we’ve seen yet.

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The face of cancer in the U.S. is getting younger—and more feminine. Cancer rates for women in the U.S. have risen over the past half-century, particularly among women under age 65 diagnosed with breast cancer. For decades, the cancer burden in the U.S. was higher for men, who started smoking en masse in the 20th century. Their rates of lung-cancer cases and deaths soared. Lung cancer remains the biggest cancer killer for men in the U.S., but case and death rates have dropped, after smoking rates declined. 

Women started smoking heavily later than men and have been slower to quit, so their lung-cancer decline started later and hasn’t been as steep. That has had a significant impact: Lung cancer incidence among women under 65 was greater than among men for the first time in 2021. Women are also more likely to get diagnosed with lung cancer as nonsmokers. 

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We rank nine major U.S. airlines on seven equally weighted operations metrics: on-time arrivals, flight cancellations, delays of 45 minutes or more, baggage handling, tarmac delays, involuntary bumping and what the Transportation Department calls passenger submissions (which are mostly complaints).

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Parlays, the tough-to-win multipart wagers with tantalizing payouts, are bringing in casual and newbie gamblers, and betting companies are making a killing. FanDuel said 90% of its same-game parlays, or bets on multiple developments within one event, have a wager of $30 or less, while 60% are $5 or less. About 20% of all money spent by DraftKings on national TV advertising last year hyped parlays, compared with 11% in 2022.

Parlays accounted for about 27% of the money wagered on all sports bets last year through October in Illinois, New Jersey and Colorado, states in which gambling regulators report data by bet type. That’s up from 22% of all sports bets in 2021. The multi-leg bets delivered about 56% of sports-betting revenue after payouts for companies in the three states during that period, up from 50% in the same stretch of 2021. 

Multi-leg bets are so lucrative that FanDuel parent company Flutter Entertainment recently increased its expectation for total online gambling revenues in the U.S. to $63 billion by 2030, up from its estimate of $40 billion two years ago, driven in part by parlays, the company said.

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People are usually surprised when they see how Japan has grown its dividends at a 6.9% annual clip over the last 20 years, outpacing the 6.7% growth pace of the S&P 500. Japan trades for 13.5x forward earnings, or a 37% discount to the S&P’s P/E of 21.3.

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A massive wage arbitrage has opened between the US and its competitors. The overwhelming majority of people in the US have no idea just how much more money they make than the Japanese, French, British, etc.

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Of the stock market’s 10 largest companies, there are more that trade for a P/E > 30 than there were on Dec. 31, 1999. With the exception of maybe AT&T, every single one of 1999’s top dogs were considered unstoppable, dominant, kings, never to be unseated. Until they were.

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US stocks are expensive relative to the rest of the world, even if you excludes big tech:

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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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