Childhood Amnesia, Testosterone & Blue Zones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mimetic Desire, Move 37 & Magic Mushrooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ovarian Cancer, Padel & Shorting Stocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Padel is the new pickleball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two main reasons for this.

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

Countries with more women:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closure Compulsion & Charts

From Oliver Burkeman:

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

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

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

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

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

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Monthly market share for the top LLMs:

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

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2025 Returns:

2026 Returns:

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

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

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

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

Retail investors have poured into stock options in 2026:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q3 2026 Global Stock Market Valuations By Country

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

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

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

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

Source: The Idea Farm

Polymarket Fakes, Eighth Graders & Reliable Cars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Random Facts From The First Half Of 2026

From The Idea Farm:

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

Healthmaxxing, Marriage & Stock Valuations

At its best, having an Oura ring makes you fitter, happier, and, sure, even more productive. You may walk more, lift more, sleep more, and drink less. You will be hard-pressed to find a physician who thinks there’s anything amiss in the previous sentence.

However, the obsession with winning the measurable games of health can encroach on the less measurable games of life. The best way to sleep more is to see fewer friends in the evening. The best way to lift more during the week is to eliminate social lunches to protect your midday gym time. To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating your less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness.

The ring can improve your life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls you away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

The share of people who drink hit an all-time low last year, according to Gallup, whose data go back to 1939.  While many social changes happen slowly, the attitude shift against alcohol has been quite sudden. The decline of drinking is one part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the rise of the Enhanced Self.

The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides, and the continued growth of supplements.

More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what is not wrong with them. At the layer of leisure, the tendrils of the Enhanced Self touch the white-hot rise of fitness in American life.

At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism.

At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization. While running clubs and morning workouts are booming, nightclubs are closing and parties are withering. Young Americans spend about 35 percent less time socializing and 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the century.

The age of the Enhanced Self is different from health movements of the past, not only because many of its elements are distinctly of the 2020s, including peptide shots, social media, and biometric scanners, but also because it does not particularly seek to build anything outside of the self.

For a long time, abstinence was associated with religion or personal histories, such as addiction recovery or pregnancy. But in the new health culture, abstinence is not about faith or addiction; it is about bodily perfection. On health podcasts and videos, influencers and science communicators talk about alcohol’s association with sleep scores, skin clarity, energy levels, cardiometabolic biometrics, and executive function.

The fruits of the Enhanced Self movement will include fitter people, with less disease, who live longer lives. But what are the costs? Young people, who are seeing the highest increases in exercise time, also say they have fewer friends than any cohort ever; that they spend more time alone than any generation on record; and that they are more anxious and depressed than previous groups. 

Our bodies want us to be social. Research finds that “super-agers” (individuals over 80 with the cognitive function of people decades younger) shared little in common except for an unusually robust history of friendship and other social connections. A 2025 analysis of 500,000 participants in the UK reported that living with a partner and frequently visiting family had roughly the same relationship with longevity as exercise.

While the pursuit of health does not have to cleave us away from others, the project of delaying mortality is often a solitary undertaking.

Adam Mastroianni notes that over the past few decades, high schoolers have steadily drunk less, smoked less, and fought less. In the same period, serial killers have all but vanished, blockbusters have grown less original, design has grown less distinctive, and cars have gone monochrome. Mastroianni ties these together with a theory he calls “the decline of deviance.” As people get richer and the world gets safer, deviance falls, because “life is worth more now.” When people think that they might live to be 100, the strategy for every life-game is the same: play it safe.

Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives, but when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic, many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

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In general, women tend to live longer and healthier lives than men for a variety of reasons, including greater health consciousness and a tendency to avoid risky behaviors, but also genetic and hormonal factors. At 65 years old, U.S. women are expected to live for an additional 19 to 21 years, while for U.S. men, this number only stood at around 16 to 18.5 years. 

However, married men aged 65 gain almost 2.5 years of life expectancy over their unmarried counterparts of the same age, boosting their outlook on life significantly. The role women play in marriages as planners and facilitators of medical care as well as advocates for healthy habits becomes clear when looking at divorced and widowed men’s life expectancy. 

Married and never-married women, on the other hand, have a more similar expected lifespan. But even if a women is divorced or widowed, her life expectancy is still somewhat above that of a never-married woman, highlighting how women benefit from the overall advantages of marriage rather than just their spouse. These come in the form of so-called marriage protections, like adopting better habits, better mental health outcomes and better social connectedness. They are also often explained by so-called marriage selection, the idea that those individuals who manage to get married are already starting out with a better outlook on life.

Of course, this data depends on the quality of a marriage. A poor marriage has the opposite effect on lifespans due to increased stress and burdens.

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Some insights about the wealthy, from 20 years working in wealth management with high-net-worth clients:

  • Money doesn’t really change people. It magnifies what’s already there. Anxious people become more anxious. Generous people become philanthropists. Spenders ramp up spending on a never-ending hedonic treadmill of delights. Sibling disputes become expensive multi-year legal battles.
  • The children of successful, wealthy families often internalize enormous pressure to excel and perform at high levels. They know they have no excuse to fail and every opportunity to succeed. They also learn that no one will ever extend them a lick of sympathy.
  • Wealthy people aren’t better at managing money. They struggle to save; they get scammed; they don’t stick to a budget or know how much they spend. They have no special investing prowess.
  • They still worry about money – about running out, about spoiling their kids, about making the wrong investments, about not making the most of it. Wealth does not alleviate money anxiety; in fact it can exacerbate it.
  • They are very susceptible to peer pressure and groupthink. This applies to lifestyle choices and investing trends. The most popular conversations and think pieces were inevitably along the lines of “what our other clients are doing.”
  • Rich people mostly own the same ETFs and index funds as the rest of us. There are no inside investing secrets. They don’t time the market or trade actively – if they listen to their advisors. Some love a flashy PE fund or venture capital stake to talk about on the golf course, but alternatives are generally more status flex than return enhancement.
  • Wealthy parents worry unnecessarily about hammering a “strong work ethic” into their kids. Whether childhood is rough or smooth, some people develop it, and others just don’t. Similarly, some kids have a tendency to over-save, while others spend or give too much. This happens in poor and rich families alike.

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Almost every metric of U.S. stock valuations are at or above their 2000 bubble high peak:

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The price to earnings ratio of emerging market stocks were over 100% higher than U.S. stocks in 2006-2007. Today emerging market p/e ratios are almost 50% lower than the U.S.

The MSCI Emerging Markets Index captures large and mid-cap representation across 24 emerging-markets countries, with roughly 1,200 constituents, and covers about 85% of the free-float-adjusted market capitalization in each country. The country roster includes places like China, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and South Africa, among others.

It’s “free-float-adjusted market-cap weighted,” meaning constituents are weighted by the share value actually available to public investors, and larger companies carry more weight.

Korea and Taiwan now account for nearly half of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, roughly double their 2020 weight, making the index increasingly sensitive to U.S. tech dynamics. As a result, EM equities have become more correlated with the U.S. AI cycle, diminishing their role as a portfolio diversifier.

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AI summaries are the likely driver of search’s decline as an online traffic source and the recent uptick in zero-click searches.

An increasing share of searches ends in no links being clicked.

Temporal Chauvinism, Attractiveness & Germs

It’s difficult to escape “temporal chauvinism,” which is the feeling that the time we’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever, simply because it’s the one we happen to be around to experience.

Everything about our situation as humans pushes us to overrate the importance of our own era. Apart from anything else, present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns (every prior prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong) while future ones haven’t occurred to us yet. 

It is very, very, very, very unlikely that the literal apocalypse is coming anytime soon. We’re almost certainly not living at the end of human civilization. Frankly, it’s pretty unlikely we’re even on the cusp of unprecedented levels of disruptive change. The truth is that we’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal.

The point is not that life is safer and more secure than the heralds of the apocalypse would have us believe. It’s the opposite: that human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others.

Yet there’s a stunning bit of good news hiding in all this, because if radical insecurity about the future is just how life is, then by definition, we’re already coping with it. Look back at your life to date, and you might even conclude that, so far, you’re handling it all rather brilliantly.

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The graph below shows what people say they want or what is important to them in a partner (red line). The “X” marks show how much each trait correlated with people’s actual romantic evaluations or how important it was in real life.

The biggest discrepancies were in (1) being attractive, (2) being a good lover, (3) being sexy, (4) having a nice body, and (5) smelling good. Perhaps people are simpler than we realized once we look beyond surveys.

The discrepancies run the other way too. Being (1) a good listener, (2) patient, and (3) calm and emotionally stable were all overrated in stated preferences.

It’s a little confusing that the red line rises from left to right, suggesting increasing importance, but since these are rankings, a higher number actually means less important (1 = most important).

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Research has consistently shown that younger siblings fare worse than firstborns on lifetime earnings, educational achievement, mental health and, for women, teen pregnancy. The later the birth order, the worse the stats get. Why?

(1) Less Quality Time with Parents

First-born children average 20 to 30 more quality minutes each day with parents compared with a second-born child of the same age. The deficit amounts to about 3,000 fewer hours spent on reading, playing, talking or other activities with at least one parent for younger siblings. That’s roughly comparable to more than a year of schooling between the ages of 4 and 13.

The gap only widens as more kids enter the picture. That means the youngest siblings get far less quality time overall because whatever is available gets split among more children.

(2) Germs

Studies find that the tiniest organisms have a profound impact on a child’s future. Exposure to respiratory viruses before a baby’s first birthday, when immune systems are immature and before most childhood vaccinations, consistently predict reduced earnings, education and health decades later.

Researchers estimate that half or more of the gap in life outcomes between older and younger siblings can be attributed to pathogens inadvertently brought home by older siblings.

The disparity is stark: Younger siblings are two to three times more likely to be hospitalized for acute respiratory conditions than their older siblings during their first year of life. After that, when younger children generally begin attending group child care, the hospitalization gap disappears. Older siblings, the data suggested, bring home viruses to vulnerable infants with no other significant sources of exposure.

To show that higher disease exposure causes harm later in life required more work for researchers. They had to control for parental income, education and employment across municipalities with higher and lower infection rates. Yet the pattern was clear: earnings, education and mental health outcomes all declined as community disease exposure rose.

In the first months of life, roughly 85 percent of an infant’s calorie intake goes toward neural development. A serious infection can reduce how much a baby eats and divert calories away building a brain. If a child is very ill during that time, it might impact brain development by diverting biological resources to fighting an illness.

RSV was singled out as a key pathogen. It caused roughly one-third of all respiratory hospitalizations among second-born children with no protective immunity from first-year exposure against RSV hospitalization during later childhood.

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Attraction, Losers’ Games & Land

Money is less of a factor in attraction than people think. What matters more is your ambition. The academic literature on evolutionary biology supports this. In a study across 37 cultures, evolutionary psychologist David Buss found that, on average, potential partners valued “ambition and industriousness” more than “good financial prospects” when choosing a mate.

In evolutionary terms, this is known as Resource Holding Potential (RHP), or your ability to acquire resources in the future. A husband signals high RHP while working, but signals low RHP if he retires early, gets high and plays video games with friends all day; even if he worked unbelievably hard to get to that point. Why is ambition more attractive than money?

Because money says, “I was useful,” while ambition says, “I am useful.”

People care about the future. People care about the genes they pass on to their offspring. And they want to pass on traits like industriousness because those traits will help their children acquire future resources, and so on. Having money makes you more attractive. But it’s not the money that’s actually appealing, only how you acquired it. The potential to collect more resources is the draw from potential mates.

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Wise Words From Charley Ellis:

On Winning By Not Losing

A loser’s game is any game, contest, or activity in which the ultimate victor is determined by the actions of the loser. These contests are not won; they are lost.

In tennis, pros can be aggressive. They have the skill, precision, and experience to place shots just outside their opponent’s reach. They play a winner’s game. The match goes to the player who earns the most wins. Amateurs, however, often lose by trying to play like the pros, because it leads to unforced errors. It’s a loser’s game. Amateurs win in tennis by volleying until their opponent hits it into the net or out of bounds. They win by not losing.

There are two different games being played in the stock market. The game the experts play differs from the game the amateurs play. The game amateurs should play, and many experts too, is built on a foundation of avoiding errors. Essentially, not losing. Fewer errors lead to better results.

Luck

Every investor should recognize the powerful potential impact of luck — not good luck, but bad luck. We can all live through good luck. But bad luck — the apparently random occurrence of adversity — is equally prevalent, and its consequences can be far greater.

Getting Excitement Out of the Market

Go to a continuous-process factory sometime — a chemical plant, a cookie manufacturer, a place that makes toothpaste. Everything is perfectly repetitive, automated, exactly in place. If you find anything interesting, you’ve found something wrong.

Investing is a continuous process too; it isn’t supposed to be interesting. It’s a responsibility. If you go to the stock market because you want excitement, then sooner or later you will lose. Everyone who thinks the stock market is a game loses — everyone, to the last man, woman, and child. So, the purpose of an investment policy is simply to ensure that your continuous process never breaks down.

On Over-Confidence

A rapidly rising market makes you forget that those whom the gods would destroy, they first make confident. The more you know, the higher the odds that you’ll make a serious mistake. That’s why it’s not the beginners who tend to die at skydiving and why most car accidents happen within a few miles of home. There’s a saying in the British Royal Air Force that investors need to remember: “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

As human beings, particularly if we are successful in other parts of our lives, we are notoriously unable to accept the obvious reality that, on average, we are average, and that our normal experiences will usually be about average because we are, as a group, captives of the normal distribution of the bell curve. Studies all the time show we think we are above-average drivers, above-average parents — and above-average investors. And we do tend to take it personally when our stocks go way up or go way down, even though, as Adam Smith admonishes, “The stock doesn’t know you own it.”

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Land Appreciates. Homes Depreciate.

The value of a home (excluding land) declines over time unless it is updated to break even. Think of it in the context of not updating the home for 30 years, which makes the concept much easier to understand. The house will slowly fall apart. Meanwhile, in most housing markets, land values eventually rise over a 30-year period, and the cash-poor homeowner can sell for more than their original purchase price.

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Social media has become less social.

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State level reading scores have dropped dramatically over the last 10 years.

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Based on an average the average of the valuation metrics below, the U.S. stock market has now become more expensive than both the 1929 and 2000 bubble peaks:

  • Trailing (P/E) Price to Earnings
  • Forward (P/E) Price To Earnings
  • Cyclically Adjusted Price To Earnings (CAPE)
  • Price to Book (P/B)
  • Price to Sales (P/S)
  • Enterprise Value (EV) to Earnings Before Interest Depreciation & Amortization (EBITA)
  • Market Value to Replacement Cost Of Physical Assets (Q Ratio)
  • Market Cap to GDP

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U.S. households are far more invested in stocks relative to the rest of the world: