Removing Burden, Parent Goals & Happiness

The British-born Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett said her teaching style wasn’t to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. I had a full-body reaction the first time I encountered that. To me, the phrase meant this: you can slog through life trying to ‘get on top of things’, trying to reach the point at which you feel like you know what you’re doing, trying to fix your flaws, or make yourself emotionally invulnerable… All of that is an attempt to ‘lighten the burden’, and there are a thousand self-help gurus on standby, promising to aid you in the effort.

But making the burden heavier? That means seeing that as a finite human you’ll never get on top of everything, never fully understand what makes others tick, never immunize yourself from distress. The burden of reaching that goal is an impossibly heavy one. And so you put it down. You let your shoulders drop and your muscles unclench. And then – crucially – you’re free to actually be here, actually do stuff, actually show up. You get to climb life’s mountains without lugging a huge rucksack full of steel ingots on your back the whole way, which is both easier and much more fun.

The spiritual writer Michael Singer points out: reality doesn’t need you to help operate it. It gets along just fine without your worrying.

Who knew? I don’t think of myself as an obscenely self-centered narcissist, yet I have to admit that when I heard those words, I suddenly perceived the subtle sense in which my thoughts and actions – and especially the background muscular tension I instinctively bring to them – were indeed somehow premised on the notion that reality itself would be badly affected were I to relax my guard.

I seem to imagine that my worrying is effective – that there’s something about the very act of fretting about the future that helps keep everything on track. This is, rather obviously, false. All I really need to do is to show up for what’s happening, appreciate the spectacle of it, and go with the flow.

Life is not a problem to be solved. Or else that life is nothing but a never-ending stream of problems to be solved, which in fact amounts to the same thing. Grasping this is both an enormous relief and tremendously energizing – because now you get to pour your finite time and energy into something infinitely more absorbing than trying to keep life under control, which is actually living it.

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I had a conversation with a guy a few months ago whose immigrant parents came to America and worked tirelessly in low-wage jobs to make ends meet. Those kids are now adults, and this guy felt a sense of shame that as a college-educated white-collar worker he would not have to suffer the same way his parents did for him. His parents instilled in him the lessons of frugality and grit. Would his own children learn the same from him if they watched their father live a comparatively easy life?

He gave an example: when he was a kid, all books were borrowed from the library. Now his young daughter demands (and gets) to purchase $15 Taylor Swift books that pile up in her room.

My response was that if we talked to his immigrant parents, I would bet they would say: that was the goal. To put it differently: The goal of some parents is to work so hard that their kids and grandkids get to live a life that appears spoiled by the standards of previous generations.

What’s common to miss here is that when one generation’s life becomes comparatively easier than before, their life does not become objectively easy; they just move on to worrying about higher-order problems that were previously deemed not urgent enough to worry about.

I hope my kids and grandkids won’t have to worry about cancer in the ways we do. I hope they have incredible technology that makes their jobs easier than ours. I hope that everyday frictions we deal with today disappear. I hope their energy is so abundant they consider it unlimited.

Is that spoiled? I suppose, but when you frame it like that you might think of a different word – perhaps “lucky,” or, “fortunate.” Or perhaps, “beneficiaries of the accumulated hard work of those who came before them in a way that leaves them able to spend their days solving new problems.” Which is what you and I are today.

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Mark Manson reviewed over 2,600 studies to rank 19 of the most common self-improvement techniques based on their effectiveness. He sorted them into four tiers: (1) legitimately works, (2) works sometimes, (3) probably not helping, and (4) straight up bullshit. Here were the results:

TIER 4: STRAIGHT UP BULLSHIT (AND MAY ACTUALLY HURT YOU):

19. Suppressing Negative Thoughts — The “ironic process” means trying not to think about something makes you think about it more. It can work for very smart people in very short-term, high-pressure moments, but the rebound effect makes things worse over time for everyone.

18. Microdosing Psychedelics — No consistent measurable benefit beyond mood improvement (i.e., you’re just getting a little high). Studies show a decline in cognitive function and executive reasoning, and long-term microdosing may carry adverse health effects from chronic exposure to psychoactive compounds.

17. Intuitive Decision-Making (“Trust Your Gut”) — Your gut doesn’t make better decisions; it just makes you feel better about your decisions. The exception is domain experts with decades of pattern-matching experience, but for most life choices, it’s self-serving and often detached from reality.

16. Catharsis / Venting Anger — Screaming into a pillow or punching a wall doesn’t release anger — it trains you to indulge it. The small effect sizes that exist are negative, meaning it makes you angrier more often.

TIER 3: PROBABLY NOT HELPING

15. Crystal Healing — Pure placebo effect. If you believe it works, you might get a small something, but there’s essentially zero evidence of any mechanism. Mostly it just harms your bank account.

14. Willpower / Ego Depletion — The concept of willpower as a finite tank you drain throughout the day is highly contested and probably not real. Believing you have limited willpower tends to make you underperform, and productivity problems are usually emotional problems in disguise.

13. Power Posing — Any mood boost is extremely transient, and the early hormonal claims (testosterone increases) have been debunked. It’s essentially a tiny placebo triggered by becoming momentarily aware of your posture.

12. Learning Styles (Visual/Auditory/Kinesthetic) — Over 90% of U.S. teachers still believe in this, but research consistently shows no real effect. The benefit people report is simply from having a choice in how they learn, not from matching a “style.”

11. Positive Affirmations — A “win more” strategy: people who already feel good get a small boost, but people with low self-esteem often feel worse because it highlights the gap between the affirmation and their actual beliefs.

10. Morning Routines — Extremely personality-dependent and mostly a placebo driven by a sense of control. Forcing a routine that mismatches your chronotype or becoming rigidly dependent on it can actually backfire.

TIER 2: WORKS SOMETIMES (MAYBE/DEPENDS):

9. Positive Visualization — Works well for physical/athletic performance and when paired with concrete planning. Without a plan, it’s just daydreaming — and pure outcome-based visualization actually decreases motivation.

8. Energy Healing — Surprisingly landed in the top half with a medium effect size (0.53), though only 56% of studies found any effect. The benefit likely comes from human touch, the ritual, and a strong placebo/expectancy effect rather than anything metaphysical.

7. Cold Water Immersion (for Mental Health) — Fairly consistent mood and stress benefits, likely driven by a big dopamine release. However, it’s a “win more” strategy — helpful if you’re already mentally healthy, potentially destabilizing if you’re fragile.

6. Speed Reading — You can realistically go from ~200 to 300–400 words per minute, which is meaningful, but the 1,000 wpm promises are nonsense. The trade-off is reduced retention, and much of reading speed turns out to be genetic.

TIER 1: LEGITIMATELY WORKS

5. Gratitude Interventions — The most consistent finding in the entire list: 98% of 166 studies showed a positive effect. The effect size is small, though, and compared to other positive interventions like acts of kindness, the unique “gratitude mechanism” mostly disappears.

4. Meditation — Consistently effective for stress and anxiety reduction, roughly equivalent to SSRIs for depression in some studies. The deeper benefit is knowing your own mind better, though compared to other active positive interventions, the unique advantage narrows.

3. Eat the Frog (Hardest Task First) — 95% of the benefit comes from the prioritization process itself, not the timing. Figuring out what matters most creates clarity and reduces anxiety, and ending the day on easier tasks boosts self-efficacy.

2. Bibliotherapy (Reading Self-Help Books) — 93% of 188 studies found positive effects, with a decent effect size approaching some therapy modalities. The key is the right book at the right time, and structured recommendations from a therapist boost the hit rate significantly.

1.Behavioral Activation (“Do Something”) — The most robust finding across all 19 techniques. Simply taking action, even small action, generates motivation rather than waiting for motivation to strike. It’s on par with CBT for depression and costs nothing.

Full Discussion Here: Self Help, Solved

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From the World Happiness Report (2026 was just released). The country rankings below are based on three-year averages, so the 2023 result captures responses from 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Q2 2026 Global Stock Market Valuations By Country

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

  • United States Stock Market: 36
  • Average of Foreign Developed Stock Markets: 22
  • Average of Foreign Emerging Stock Markets: 18

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

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

Source: The Idea Farm

Brain Hemispheres, Meaning & The Placebo Effect

We are living at a time of profound unhappiness.

But here’s the really weird part: The ones suffering most are not just the down-and-out types—the addicts, the impoverished, the failsons. Those for whom there are obvious things gone wrong in their lives. On the contrary, it is also those who seem to have everything going right for them—in other words, our young and most successful strivers.

I’ve spent my life surrounded by that very group. As a longtime college professor, I have been privileged to teach hundreds of wonderful students—ambitious strivers just starting out on what promised to be terrific careers and lives. I have met countless young people who were so inspired by ideas, so purpose-driven, and so enthusiastic.

But in 2009, I left academia to run a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. And when I returned to campus a decade later, the atmosphere was dark. Larger and larger percentages of students were suffering from depression and anxiety. At some schools, more than half of students were receiving mental health treatment. My office hours were more like counseling sessions than tutoring. Hope and optimism had been replaced by anger and sadness.

Most of the younger generation is online a lot: scrolling social media, watching videos. To simulate a social life, they spend hours listening to podcasts of other people having interesting conversations. You could call it “social pornography.” Most of the time, there’s nothing better to do. They crave a big, meaningful project and immersing themselves in it. But they can’t come up with any ideas for what that project might be . . . so it’s back online.

They don’t fit the traditional résumé of unhappy people. They’re not addicted to drugs, nor struggling financially. In fact, their life looks enviable from the outside. But like so many young people I’ve spoken to over the years, they feel empty.

What these young strivers describe to me is something akin to waiting in an airport terminal for a delayed flight that never leaves. They try to stay occupied to keep themselves from going mad, always in the hope that boarding will finally be called and the flight will take off. And their distraction tactics—which invariably involve technology—keep them from thinking too much but make their sense of emptiness worse.

One of the young strivers I talked to was telling me about his virtual job, dating apps, social media friends, and video gaming. Then, out of the blue, he said something fundamental.

“I feel like I’m living in a simulation.”

Others said the same thing. Life felt unreal: full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible.

Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless. Or that they didn’t know what they were meant to do in work and life. And it’s worse for the strivers than anyone else: The richer, more technologically advanced the country, the greater the percentage of the population that answers “no” to the question “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?”

Here’s why: Strivers are great at solving technical problems and answering specific, hard questions. They have been educated and trained to believe that, while the world is incredibly complicated, with enough knowledge and hard work, every problem can be solved.

The truth is, many big, complicated problems can be solved with sheer intellectual horsepower. But meaning is not one of them. “What is the meaning of my life?” is a question that cannot be answered like “How do I build an app for finding concert tickets?” or “How do I create an effective six-month weight-loss program?” Meaning is a question that must be lived, not solved with a Google search or simulated using artificial intelligence. It requires deep contemplation and a commitment to living a real life, full of unsolvable secrets, puzzling riddles, unexplainable bliss, and terrible suffering.

But in all their technical excellence, strivers trivialize their humanness by reducing life’s magnificent inscrutability to a series of complicated but solvable problems. They aren’t just living in a simulation; they are also creating the simulation they are living in.

In his 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Ian McGilchrist argued our brains have two hemispheres that deal with everything, but they do so in consistently different ways. The right side of the brain is the “master,” which asks big, transcendent questions such as “Why am I alive?” The left side—which he calls the “emissary”—addresses such practical questions as “How do I get food so I can keep being alive?”

In other words, in the right hemisphere we ask the lofty why questions about life. On the left side, we ask, earthbound, what to do now and how to do it.

Hemispheric lateralization explains the acute crisis of meaning today. In our increasingly complicated, technology-dominated, and endlessly distracting world, people are shoved to the left side of their brains. They are stuck in a complicated simulation where there is a lot going on, but which is bereft of mystery and meaning.

Older people remember the before times, when meeting a potential mate for the first time involved a real-life conversation, and a big question of life’s meaning couldn’t be reduced to a Google search. But most young adults today have never known any domain other than Left Brain Land. And this is especially true for the strivers. They know every complicated nook and cranny of that technical dystopia, but the mysterious realm of meaning seems mythical, like the lost kingdom of Atlantis.

Stuck outside the realm of the numinous right hemisphere, life becomes just an endless loop of complicated left-brain routines and habits—a simulation of a life that is deep, mysterious, and authentic. It’s frustrating and empty.

Worse: It’s boring. And humans absolutely despise boredom. 

Why are we so bored? Because life feels repetitive and meaningless, and even a minute here or there with nothing to do feels like an hour. So out comes the phone, every few minutes, all day long, changing our brain chemistry in dangerous ways.

And what side of our brains are we on as we do all this? The mundane left, of course, not the mysterious right. The remedy we’ve created to avoid the boredom of modern life—this app, that video—reinforces our inability to ponder the abstractions necessary to formulate any concept of our lives’ meaning.

This asymmetry explains why we’re bombarded with ingenious solutions to age-old problems but never seem to make progress toward greater happiness. In fact, it’s the reverse: We are losing our sense of life’s meaning faster and faster.

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The famous origin story of Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, is that Andrew Carnegie commissioned Hill in 1908 to interview 500 successful people over 20 years.

That origin story is fabrication.

In reality, in 1908 Hill was fleeing police in Alabama under a fake name after committing fraud, facing domestic violence accusations, and abandoning his family. The book’s real author was his wife. She took Hill’s rambling, failed manuscripts and refined them into Think and Grow Rich.

The book contains a mix of genuinely good advice:

  • Specific goal-setting with deadlines
  • Persistence and grit
  • The “mastermind” concept of surrounding yourself with sharp people
  • The value of specialized knowledge

It also contains psuedoscienctific nonsense like:

  • “Sex transmutation” or redirecting sexual energy toward business
  • The idea that brains communicate through vibrations
  • A “sixth sense” chapter about receiving messages from infinite intelligence

If Think & Grow Rich is a fabrication from a con man, how has it sold over 100 million copies and helped millions of people since it was published?

The answer lies in the placebo effect.

Most of the advice from self-help gurus works not because it’s scientifically accurate, but because believing in it changes people’s behavior, which then changes their outcomes. Believing they can accomplish something makes them more likely to try it and then more likely to try hard and persist.

Is his book Useful, Not True, Derek Sivers says most things are hard to know for certain, so you might as well believe whatever is most helpful for you and others. The criticism that self-help is pseudoscience misses the point. Due to the placebo effect, even if something is not scientifically true, it can be useful for many people.

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Key findings from chapter 3 of the 2026 World Happiness Report: Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level:

Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents? We call this the “product safety question”, and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the answer is no.

The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments; and 7) findings from natural experiments.

We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as sextortion and cyberbullying), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression and anxiety). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level.

We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent wellbeing and mental health, they can help answer a second question: was the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid 2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question”. We draw on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes”.

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The graph below shows the percentage of each country’s total stock market cap made up by its top 10 largest stocks. While people worry about the concentration of the largest stocks in the U.S., it is a global phenomenon.

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Is this finally the moment when the jaws begin to close and U.S. value stocks (red line) outperform growth (blue line)?

Private Equity, Mushrooms & Pawn Shops

Life insurance companies manage huge pools of money. When you buy a life insurance policy or annuity, they take your premiums and invest them so they can pay you (or your family) decades later. These are long-term promises, so it really matters that the money is managed safely.

Unlike banks, which are regulated by powerful federal agencies, insurance companies are regulated state by state. Each state has its own rules and a much smaller budget. Some states (like Vermont) offer very lenient rules to attract business. The result is that insurers can shop around for the weakest oversight — and state regulators are simply outgunned compared to the companies they’re supposed to watch.

Insurance companies used to be boring and conservative. But in recent years, big private equity (PE) firms have bought up many of them. The PE firm is like a slaughterhouse that now owns the sausage factory. Instead of stuffing the sausage with quality meat (safe, plain bonds), they’re tempted to dump in their own leftover scraps (risky, hard-to-sell private credit deals) — because they control both sides of the transaction.

The PE firm originates risky loans, then has its own insurance company buy those loans. The PE firm collects fees and gets a guaranteed buyer for its products. But if those investments go bad, it’s not the PE firm that loses — it’s the insurance policyholders whose money was backing those investments.

The Hidden Risks:

  • Maturity Mismatch: Insurers are using shorter-term money to fund long-term, hard-to-sell investments. That works until people want their money back all at once.
  • Captive Reinsurance: Insurers are shuffling liabilities to affiliated shell companies (sometimes offshore) that don’t actually have enough real capital behind them. This makes the insurer look healthier on paper than it really is.

The economy and credit markets have been strong. When times are good, risky bets don’t look risky. But cracks are forming — defaults are rising, and some funds have already started blocking investors from withdrawing money.

The nightmare scenario is that if a recession hits, those risky private credit investments start defaulting, investors rush for the exits, and the illiquid assets have to be sold at fire-sale prices. The people left holding the bag would be ordinary insurance policyholders.

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Why daylight saving time is worse for your body than standard time: An animated story explaining how spring and fall time changes affect your body.

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A new “magic mushroom” drug could treat depression without psychedelic hallucinations: Scientists are exploring a new way to harness the medical promise of psychedelic compounds without the mind-bending side effects.

Researchers created modified versions of psilocin — the active form of psilocybin from “magic mushrooms” — that still target key serotonin pathways linked to depression and other brain disorders but appear to cause far fewer psychedelic-like effects.

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When pawn shops outperform financials, history shows the broader market environment tends to be messy. They have broken above their all-time high and are making new decade highs relative to financials.

Reality Filtered On Beliefs, ATMs & Environment

We don’t see reality clearly. We all think we perceive reality as it is. And the truth is, that’s just not the case. The brain can’t see reality as it is; it predicts reality. Right now, your brain is absorbing 11 million bits of information—the light entering your eyes, the sound of my voice, the ambient temperature of the room.

That’s the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. However, your conscious attention can only process 50 bits. That’s one sentence per second. You are only consciously aware of 0.000045% of reality entering your brain.

How does the brain make sense of all this? It predicts reality. We all live in a simulation inside our own minds. Our reality is filtered based on our beliefs. Study after study shows how people can observe the exact same event and see something completely different.

If you’re on a diet, you see food as larger. If you’re afraid of heights, you see distances as further. Watch a football game: the ref makes a call, and fans of one team see it as absolutely correct, fans of the other team see it as ridiculous. Think about geopolitics: people committed to the belief that one side is right see every event through that lens. We do not see reality clearly. We do not see people clearly. We see others as we believe they are.

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People often cite that the invention of the ATM did not reduce bank teller employment, which actually increased steadily until the late 2000s. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did – the iPhone.

Labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage: the relevant question for labor impacts is not whether AI can do the tasks that humans can do, but rather whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone. 

Given the vast number of frictions and bottlenecks that exist in any human domain—domains that are, after all, defined around human labor in all its warts and eccentricities, with workflows designed around humans in mind—we should expect to see a serious gap between the incredible power of the technology and its impacts on economic life.

That gap will probably close faster than previous gaps did: AI is not “like” electricity or the steam engine; an AI system is literally a machine that can think and do things itself. But the gap exists, and will exist even as the technology continues to amaze us with what it can now accomplish.

The true force of a technology is felt not with the substitution of tasks, but the invention of new paradigms. When a technology automates some of what a human does within an existing paradigm, even the vast majority of what a human does within it, it’s quite rare for it to actually get rid of the human, because the definition of the paradigm around human-shaped roles creates all sorts of bottlenecks and frictions that demand human involvement.

It’s only when we see the construction of entirely new paradigms that the full power of a technology can be realized. The ATM machine substituted tasks; but the iPhone made them irrelevant.

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Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilization. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. 

I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.

Consider a simple observation. The same person who cannot get through a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The same teenager who supposedly lacks attention span can maintain game focus for hours while parsing a complex narrative across multiple story lines, coordinating with teammates, adapting strategy in real time. That’s not inferior cognition. It’s different cognition. And the difference isn’t the screen. It’s the environment.

Peer-reviewed research demonstrates that social media platforms exploit variable reward schedules, the same psychological mechanisms that make gambling addictive. Users don’t know what they’ll find when they open an app; they might see hundreds of likes or nothing at all. This unpredictability acts as a powerful reinforcement signal (often discussed via dopamine ‘reward prediction error’ mechanisms), keeping people checking habitually. This isn’t because screens are inherently attention-destroying. It’s because the dominant platforms have been deliberately engineered to fragment attention in service of advertising revenue.

We have been here before. Not just once, but repeatedly, in a pattern so consistent it reveals something essential about how cultural elites respond to changes in how knowledge moves through society.

  • Ancient Greece – Socrates worried that writing itself would produce forgetfulness
  • 1533 – Thomas More denounced Protestant texts as deadly poisons threatening to infect readers.
  • 17th–18th Centuries – People considered literacy spread to the general population as corrupting
  • Late 18th/Early 19th Century – Novel-reading was treated as an existential threat
  • Mid-To-Late Victorian Era – Penny Dreadfuls were condemned as morally corrupting
  • 20th Century – Comic books, radio, and television

I used to believe, as I was taught, that literacy was primarily about decoding text. But watching how people actually learn and think has convinced me that literacy is about something deeper: the capacity to construct and navigate environments where understanding becomes possible.

Consider those who flourish with audio books but struggle with printed text. For years, educators told them they had learning disabilities, by which they meant: disabilities that prevented learning through the one true method we recognize. But they don’t have learning disabilities. The instruction has a disability – it can’t accommodate different neurological architectures. Give them the same text as audio, and suddenly the ‘disability’ vanishes.

The pattern I observe repeatedly: people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes. 

We haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels. Your brain now routinely performs feats that would have seemed impossible to your grandparents. You parse information simultaneously across text, image, sound and motion. You navigate conversations that jump between platforms and formats. You synthesize understanding from fragments scattered across a dozen different sources.

The real problem isn’t mode but habitat. We don’t struggle with video versus books. We struggle with feeds versus focus. One happens in an ecosystem designed for contemplation, the other in a casino designed for endless pull-to-refresh.

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A.I. should allow medical schools to rethink whether 4 years is still necessary. If students can focus more on clinical practice and less on memorizing the Krebs cycle and molecular bio, many programs could eliminate a year, reducing both costs and physician shortages.

Drexel joins roughly 20% of med schools with or are developing 3-year programs for certain specialties, like family and internal medicine and pediatrics. The accelerated path can make these historically hard-to-staff specialties more appealing to students.

Nobody Knows Anything & CT Scan Pills

“Nobody knows anything,” the author and screenwriter William Goldman once wrote of the movie business. Goldman was talking about Hollywood’s famous inability to predict future hits. Surrounded by false confidence, Goldman counseled humility.

Today his motto applies forcefully to the discourse around artificial intelligence. I am lucky to have participated in conversations about the future of AI with executives and builders at frontier labs, economists at AI conferences, AI investors, and other bigwigs at off-the-record dinners where important truths can theoretically be bandied about without risk. And if I had to pick three words to summarize this collective expert view of the future, I could not in a million years, or with a trillion tokens, find three words more suitable than these: Nobody knows anything.

I do not mean that AI architects are stupid. I do not mean that their speculation is absurd or worthless. I certainly do not mean that they don’t have access to narrow truths, such as rising adoption of AI in general and autonomous “agents,” in particular. What I mean is that the frontier labs don’t really know what they’re building exactly, and economists don’t know how to model the thing that they claim they’re building. As a result, nobody really knows what is going to happen with AI this year, or next year, or the year after. There is no secret cigar-filled room of elites who have unique access to some authentic postcard from the future. When you drill down underneath the bluster, the boosterism, the fear, and the anxiety, what’s present at the bottom of it all is a genuine uncertainty, a vacuum into which storytelling is flooding.

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One day soon, a doctor might prescribe a pill that doesn’t just deliver medicine but also reports back on what it finds inside you—and then takes actions based on its findings.

Instead of scheduling an endoscopy or CT scan, you’d swallow an electronic capsule smaller than a multivitamin. As it travels through your digestive system, it could check tissue health, look for cancerous changes, and send data to your doctor. It could even release drugs exactly where they’re needed or snip a tiny biopsy sample before passing harmlessly out of your body.

This dream of a do-it-all pill is driving a surge of research into ingestible electronics: smart capsules designed to monitor and even treat disease from inside the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The stakes are high. GI diseases affect tens of millions of people worldwide, including such ailments as inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Diagnosis often involves a frustrating maze of blood tests, imaging, and invasive endoscopy. Treatments, meanwhile, can bring serious side effects because drugs affect the whole body, not just the troubled gut.

If capsules could handle much of that work—streamlining diagnosis, delivering targeted therapies, and sparing patients repeated invasive procedures—they could transform care. Over the past 20 years, researchers have built a growing tool kit of ingestible devices, some already in clinical use. These capsule-shaped devices typically contain sensors, circuitry, a power source, and sometimes a communication module, all enclosed in a biocompatible shell. But the next leap forward is still in development: autonomous capsules that can both sense and act, releasing a drug or taking a tissue sample.

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86% of babies born in 2026 will be born in Asia or Africa:

Aliveness, Discretionary Time & Strike Zones

There is an anxious, stomach-clenching feeling that the world is changing very fast, and that you’ll need to struggle very hard to keep up. The furious scramble to a place of psychological safety, to avoid being condemned to disaster and cast into the void………….

You don’t, actually, have to live like that. It won’t make you happier. It probably won’t even aid your career.

It’s worth briefly noting that of course there’s a mundane sense in which keeping up with changing times is a good idea. If you work in a job you’d like to retain, it’s wise to keep your skills fresh. If you see ways that a software tool might genuinely enhance what you do, you’d be foolish to refuse on principle to experiment with it. But that’s not the existential desperation I’m talking about here – that feeling of needing to claw your way to safety, so as not to tumble backwards into the abyss. Instead, you’re just making the sober judgment that, because a certain outcome matters to you, it makes sense to do certain things to try to obtain it.

The stomach-clench of anxiety isn’t anything like that. Rather, it emerges from the feeling that reality poses a fundamental threat to your security, so that hypervigilance and constant effort will be required to forestall annihilation. It implies that it’ll be very difficult indeed to make it to safety (with the corollary that if you fail, it’ll be because you didn’t try hard enough).

But this is one of those cases where the agony arises, in a sense, not from getting things out of proportion, but from not taking them far enough. Because for finite humans, it’s not “very difficult” to reach a place of safety from the onrush of events. It’s impossible. The moment of invulnerability never arrives. Even if you were to find a way to feel like a winner, technology-wise, by 2027, there’d be 2028 to worry about. Even if you felt completely secure in your career, there’d be your health, and the health of those you love, to worry about. And even if you and your family were the healthiest people alive, you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. Uncertainty is our basic state of existence, not something to be got through to the certainty beyond.

The reason “you’re not ready for what’s coming next”, in other words, is that we’re never ready for what’s coming next. 

I’m not suggesting that when you grasp this insight you’ll immediately cease worrying about the future and be free of anxiety forever. (That hasn’t been my experience.) But it can free you up sufficiently to notice a different way of approaching life: not by anxiously bracing against impending doom, but by taking a deep breath and settling down a bit into the basic uncertainty of it all. And then, in that tremulous and vulnerable state, to navigate from one day to the next by choosing, from the paths available to you, whatever seems to lead in the direction of more aliveness.

There’s no reason this can’t involve immersing yourself in all manner of digital tools. But you’ll be relegating them to their proper role as tools, useful in some contexts and too limited to be useful in others, as opposed to gods you must appease, regardless of the cost to your experience of life.

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“Discretionary Hours” refers to time beyond sleep, meals, and hygiene. They are available for work, leisure, and other activities. “Work Hours” includes paid work, travel time to and from work, and household chores. The balance between work and leisure has shifted over time, particularly in the 20th century, due to factors like technological advancements and increased productivity

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A bit of positive news. In the past 12 months, we’ve seen:

  • the largest decline in US murder rate ever recorded
  • huge declines in traffic fatalities and drug overdoses
  • a surprising (and largely unreported) decline in teen anxiety and despair, coinciding with ongoing declines in suicide
  • continued advances in GLP-1 medicines that seem to reduce obesity, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, and other illnesses that are currently under study

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Baseball umpires have improved dramatically. The heat maps below show the evolution of the MLB strike zone from 2007 to 2025. The zone has changed dramatically, going from vibes to nearly matching the rule book definition perfectly.

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The truth about millionaires in America:

-Half have less than $2 million in net worth (and less than $340,000 in liquid assets)
-Most are NOT business owners
-Almost all are house/401k rich but cash poor

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About 90% of all outstanding bonds in the world yield lower than 5%:

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The falling number of public companies/stocks available to buy is a global phenomenon:

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After the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the P/E ratio for US stocks was similar to that of the rest of the world, but the surge in tech valuations has now pushed the US P/E ratio 40% higher:

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What software companies are in more danger vs. more safe from the relentless A.I. disruption:

🔴 High danger — “Search layer” companies: Companies whose main value is making publicly available data easier to search through a fancy interface. This includes financial data terminals built on licensed exchange data, legal research platforms built on public court records, and patent search tools. Many have already lost 40–60% of their value.

🟡 Medium danger — “Mixed portfolio” companies: Companies that have some proprietary assets but also rely on repackaging public information. The key question is: what percentage of their revenue comes from things AI can’t replace? (Think S&P Global — their credit ratings are safe, but their data analytics tools are exposed.)

🟢 Safer companies have one or more of these shields:

  • They own data nobody else can get — Bloomberg’s real-time trading desk data, S&P’s credit ratings, Dun & Bradstreet’s business credit files. AI actually makes this more valuable since every AI agent needs it.
  • They’re protected by regulations — Epic (hospital software) is shielded by HIPAA rules and FDA certifications. AI doesn’t change those requirements.
  • They’re embedded in money flows — If your software processes payments or settles trades (like Stripe), AI sits on top of you, not instead of you.
  • They have network effects — Bloomberg’s chat system works because everyone on Wall Street is on it. AI doesn’t change that.

China, Value, & Something Big That’s Happening

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT).

These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely. And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech.

The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first… because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That’s why they did it first.

And now they’re moving on to everything else.

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. 

AI is now intelligent enough to meaningfully contribute to its own improvement. It’s now building itself. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says AI is now writing “much of the code” at his company, and that the feedback loop between current AI and next-generation AI is “gathering steam month by month.” He says we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. 

This is different from every previous wave of automation. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.

Nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.

Eventually, robots will handle physical work too.

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In 2007, John Arnold became the youngest American billionaire, and he now focuses on philanthropy. He recently visited China and posted some of his thoughts:

  • The speed to add manufacturing capacity is stunning. Permitting takes weeks. A factory making sophisticated equipment is built in 12 months. An auto plant took 16 months from groundbreaking to first production. Slack in labor market makes it easy to staff and flex employment.
  • The US and China have significantly decoupled since early 2020. The # of flights between the two countries is down roughly 70%. Two long-term residents I spoke with said the # of American expats is down 50-75% from the peak. The # of Americans studying in China is down ≈90%.
  • Universities and government research labs are at least as tightly woven into the startup ecosystem as in the US, and in many cases more so. Their mission and incentive structures explicitly include commercialization, not just research.
  • China awards 1.3 million engineering undergraduate degrees each year vs 130,000 in the US.
  • Intense competition leads to widespread overcapacity and low profitability across many industries. Once an industry is deemed strategic, provincial governments deploy subsidies and other supports as they compete to turn local firms into hubs and capture the associated jobs.
  • I don’t know if Chinese manufacturers will ever make money but I came away not wanting to invest in any manufacturing business in the rest of the world.
  • You see American fast food everywhere. There are 12k KFCs (vs 4k in the US), 6k McDonalds, 7k Starbucks, 4k Pizza Huts.
  • Tier 2-4 cities are very quiet. Few cars on the road. Don’t see many people. Factory workers live in dorms on campus. Other workers are in gated compounds that are self-contained neighborhoods. Food delivery and e-commerce have replaced dining out and shopping.
  • China is one of only handful of countries with highly educated workforce, robust access to capital, and strong entrepreneurial culture. Only the US and China meet those conditions and have scale.
  • As industries become more complex, scale matters more than ever. Large countries can fund frontier R&D, support dense talent markets, amortize infrastructure, and create robust supply chains. Few countries can be cost competitive in high value-add manufacturing.
  • While the supply chain on transmission and grid infrastructure is backed up in the US, there is spare capacity in China.
  • A security check including bag x-ray is required to enter subway stations, at least in major cities. It’s interesting that most Western countries that are more dangerous do not do this, presumably for speed and cost.
  • There were fewer cranes than I expected, presumably reflecting the collapse of China’s real estate market.
  • Lower density cities still had most housing in high-rise residential buildings, usually built in complexes of 10-50 identical buildings. I guess it’s the most practical way to house people in a city growing quickly but the aesthetic damage is real.
  • Robotic coffee shops are taking off in China first even though wages are much higher in the US.

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The Yale model, investing in private companies, worked in the ’80s and ’90s for one simple reason — there wasn’t a tidal wave of capital chasing deals. Buyouts were done at reasonable entry prices.

Today, small and mid-size businesses are being acquired at sky-high valuations, often with little margin for error. High entry prices make outsized returns harder to achieve (even with leverage, even with financial engineering).

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Europe and Emerging Market countries have not embraced stock buybacks, yet.

Market concentration for the largest stocks is everywhere in the world, not just the United States:

U.S. valuations are still well above the rest of the world, even as the rest of the world outperformed the U.S. in 2025:

The CAPE ratio of the U.S. vs. the rest of the world:

Most emerging market countries are still extremely cheap, but some have moved into the more expensive red zone:

Within the United States, it’s the large cap stocks that are extremely expensive:

Another valuation metric in historical comparison:

Bowling Alone, Happiness & Pulling The Goalie

Statistically, if you’re down by two goals in hockey, you should be pulling the goalie with something like eight minutes left, not with a minute and a half. But if you do that and the other team scores two empty-netters, you look like an idiot. Right now, they pull with 90 seconds left, and if they lose, everyone says, ‘Well, you had to try.’ You pull with five minutes left and lose 5–1 and the announcers say, ‘What the hell is this guy doing?’ These hockey coaches, when they wait too long to pull the goalie and lose the game, they are choosing to be wrong rather than look wrong.

Max Greyserman is ranked No. 33 in the world, not a star but tantalizingly close. In his rookie season of 2024, his average score over 18 holes was 69.998; if he had improved that by .085 — or less than one-tenth of a stroke per round — he would have passed Rory McIlroy and cracked the top five on the tour. It’s not a perfect comparison; McIlroy played some harder courses. But it’s an indicator of how scarily slim the margins are in pro golf — in both directions.

All it takes to slip back into the middle of the pack, maybe even to lose your tour card, is a string of small errors made under pressure, plus some bad luck. Success in golf rides on physical skill, of course, but the closer you get to the top, the more it becomes about intangibles, like the ability to deal with these hairsplitting variations in performance and not lose your grip on probabilities.

That’s why I became interested in Max and ended up out there at Pebble Beach talking to his dad about pulling the goalie. What sounded at first like a digression turned out to be more of a nudge: This is how to watch sports. Don’t get stuck on outcomes. Avoid the knee-jerk determination of good or bad. Look for the patterns, the process, the decision-making, the mind-set, the systems for dealing with risk. This is how sports can actually reveal something to you about human nature.

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Douglas MacArthur was the American general who commanded Allied forces in the Pacific during World War II and later ran occupied Japan. William Manchester, in his biography of MacArthur, mentioned how in 1950, when MacArthur was in Tokyo, he read exactly five newspapers every morning. What’s unusual was that these newspapers were all at least three days old. His staff thought he was losing it. Why would the Supreme Commander want stale news when fresh news arrived by the hour?

MacArthur’s reasoning was simple. Three days gave the initial panic time to settle. It let him see which stories actually stuck around and which ones everyone had already forgotten about. For him, this delay acted as a filter because it cut out all noise and what remained, if anything, was a signal.

Nassim Taleb once wrote: “To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

This is such a powerful thought. Most of what passes for urgent news has zero shelf life. Even if you read it a week later, you’ll see how little of it actually mattered. Taleb was talking about newspapers, but the principle applies even more to social media, where information decays not in weeks but in hours.

Our brains aren’t good at sorting the flood of information in real time. Every piece of information, regardless of quality, takes up mental real estate. It doesn’t matter if it’s valuable or garbage, it still occupies space in your head.

Most investment mistakes aren’t failures of information. They’re failures of judgment. You had the information, like everyone did. But you misjudged what it meant because you were processing it in a rush, surrounded by other people’s opinions.

You do need to stay informed about the businesses you own and the industries you follow. The question is: what’s the minimum effective dose of information? For most investors, that ratio is way lower than they think. You probably need about 10% of the information you’re currently consuming. Maybe less. The rest is entertainment dressed up as education.

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It’s tempting to believe that smartphones and social media were introduced to an ideal society and ruined everything. But the social problems we face today — while linked to contemporary digital technologies — are deeper and more nuanced than that. They originated from 20th century technological and cultural forces that also brought extraordinary benefits.

Starting in the 1950s, America underwent a wave of changes that looked like unalloyed progress. The 1956 Federal Highway Act funded 41,000 miles of interstate, opening up a suburban frontier where families could afford their own homes with yards, driveways, and privacy. Women entered the workforce en masse, expanding freedom and equality and adding to household incomes. The television — which provided cheap, effortless entertainment — was adopted faster than any technology in history, from 10% of homes in 1950 to 90% by 1959, according to Putnam. Air conditioning made homes comfortable year-round. Shopping migrated from Main Street to climate-controlled malls with better prices and wider selection.

These changes were widely embraced because they made life better for millions of people in countless ways. But they quietly eroded community, shifting American life toward comfort, privacy, and control, and away from the places and habits that had held communities together.

Suburbs scattered neighbors across cul-de-sacs designed for privacy over casual interaction. The front porch — where you might wave to a neighbor and end up talking for an hour — gave way to the private backyard deck and the two-car garage. Television privatized entertainment, moving what once happened in theaters, dance halls, and community centers into living rooms where, by the 1990s, the average American adult was watching almost four hours a day, and, Putnam tells us, half of adults usually watched alone. Dual incomes often meant neither parent had time for the PTA meeting or volunteer shift. Local shops on main street closed because they couldn’t compete with the mall.

Generation by generation, the habits of connection weakened while the scope of everyday comfort, privacy, and control grew. Then came the digital revolution — with the internet and smartphones — and these isolating forces accelerated.

Digital technology extends the logic of suburban sprawl: it allows us to live not just physically apart, but entirely in parallel. In the past decade, e-commerce jumped from 7% to 16% of retail while physical stores shuttered. Online grocery sales are growing 28% year over year. Home exercise has surged in popularity. Twenty-eight percent of Americans work from home, up from just 8% in 2019. Across every sphere — shopping, working, exercising, socializing — we’re choosing staying in over going out because we enjoy the privacy and convenience.

Meanwhile productivity technologies are dissolving the boundaries between work and personal life. While work used to have clear boundaries, today, for knowledge workers in particular, a laptop and Wi-Fi mean the office never closes. Work bleeds into every hour, every room. When you can always be earning, social commitments become harder to justify.

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In what’s now known as the Easterlin paradox, wealthier individuals report greater happiness at any given moment, but average happiness does not rise as societies get richer.

Our long-held belief that money can’t buy happiness appeared to be validated by research suggesting happiness plateaued around $75,000 a year. Further research found something more nuanced: happiness rose with income up to about $100,000 — and then leveled off. For others, happiness continued to rise. And for the happiest group, it even accelerated.

If you become rich, you’re still the same you but just richer. Wealth can offer many blessings, but it can’t exorcise any demons. I imagine it like arriving at a tropical getaway only to discover you can’t take off your winter coat — sealed tight by past experiences, trauma or misplaced expectations.

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Life expectancy in the U.S. reached a record high in 2024, according to figures released by the federal government this week.

Heart disease, cancer and unintentional injuries remained the top-three leading causes of deaths. Drug overdose deaths decreased by more than 26% between 2023 and 2024, marking the largest year-to-year drop in those types of fatalities recorded by the federal government.

The Hidden Private Equity Losses In Life Insurance Companies

Whitney Baker at Totem Macro penned an excellent thread this week discussing where the losses are hidden in Private Equity. I asked Claude to summarize the thread and provide additional information where needed:

Private equity (PE) firms have been buying up about 10% of US life insurance companies since 2020. They’re then using the insurance companies’ money (called the “float” – money from premiums that hasn’t been paid out yet) to make risky loans to struggling businesses.

They’re using a private ratings agency to label these risky loans as safer than they actually are. This fake safety rating lets them:

  • Hold less cash in reserve (normally you need more reserves for risky investments)
  • Legally invest in things they otherwise couldn’t

Many of these loans are going bad – about 10% are already defaulting. The companies that borrowed the money are often unprofitable startups (especially software companies) that can’t actually pay back their debts. Some are even “zombie companies” kept alive artificially.

How the Fed raising rates in 2023 amplified this problem:

  1. Fed Raises Rates → Government Borrowing Costs Go Up
    • When the Fed raised interest rates, it became more expensive for the US government to borrow money
    • The government pays interest on its debt, so higher rates mean higher interest payments
    • This caused the government’s budget deficit to balloon by 3% of GDP in 2023
  2. Bigger Deficit → More Treasury Bonds Issued
    • To cover this bigger deficit, the government had to issue more Treasury bonds
    • These bonds became “fresh collateral” – basically, new assets that could be used as backing for loans
  3. The RRP Money Gets Unlocked
    • There was $2.5 trillion sitting in something called the Fed’s “Reverse Repo Program” (RRP) – think of it as a parking lot for cash
    • Normally this money just sits there safely
    • But with all these new Treasury bonds available, financial institutions could use them to borrow against in “repo markets” (short-term lending markets)
  4. PE Firms Borrow This Money
    • The private equity firms and their various entities (the “layers of the leverage cake”) were able to tap into this massive pool of money
    • They used it to fund more and more risky loans through the insurance companies

Instead of letting the economy cool down (which is what rate hikes are supposed to do), the Fed accidentally created a situation where trillions of dollars flowed into this problematic private equity scheme.

Who Gets Hurt: Foreign banks and insurance companies:

  1. Foreign Institutions Bought the Debt
    • These PE firms and BDCs (Business Development Companies – investment funds that make these risky loans) didn’t just use insurance company money
    • They also borrowed money from banks and sold bonds/securities to investors
    • Foreign banks and insurance companies in countries like Japan and Germany were major buyers of these securities
  2. Why Foreign Buyers?
    • Japanese and German institutions are from “surplus creditor nations” – countries that save a lot and invest globally
    • They’re always looking for places to invest their money
    • US securities seemed attractive, especially ones with good (fake) credit ratings
  3. They’re Holding the Bad Loans
    • When these loans start defaulting (which the author says is already happening at 10%+), the value of those securities plummets
    • The foreign banks and insurers who bought them will take massive losses
  4. They Don’t Know Yet
    • Stocks of these foreign financial institutions are “at all time highs”
    • Meanwhile, US-listed PE firms and BDCs have already collapsed in value
    • This suggests the foreign institutions haven’t realized their investments are worthless yet – the losses are hidden in complex financial structures

Foreign banks and insurers thought they were buying safe, well-rated US investments. Instead, they’re holding bags of loans to failing startups and zombie companies. When they finally discover this (mark their books to reality), their stock prices will crash too. It’s like they bought what they thought were AAA-rated bonds, but they’re actually subprime loans in disguise.

In Summary: This is as a massive, ticking time bomb of bad debt hidden inside insurance companies, enabled by sketchy ratings and Fed policy.