BEEW Feed is where I think out loud, share trends and tidbits, test half-baked notions and early essay ideas, and offer media recs, links, and other bits of internet ephemera I think you’ll find interesting.
August 2025
2025-08-28
Traditional Hawaiian Practice of Reconciliation and Forgiveness
Ho’oponopono is a traditional Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness that draws on the forces of repentance, gratitude, and love. It means to make right with the ancestors or people with whom you have relationships.
In HBO's excellent new medical drama, The Pitt, Dr. "Robby" Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) helps guide a brother and sister through the harrowing choice to let their elderly father pass peacefully. In the powerful, deeply heartfelt scene (S1E4), Dr Robby introduces the siblings to Ho'oponopono.
There are four simple things we can say in these early stages of loss. They're simple. But I've seen them work.
I'm sorry.
I love you.
Thank you.
Please forgive me. I forgive you.
You simply repeat the four statements over and over.
Here's a great 30 minute video
2025-08-27
How to See What Everyone Else Misses.
If you're solving the problem right in front of you, you're likely solving the wrong problem.
I love this story. In 2017, a British man struggling to sell his £800k country manor came up with a wild idea to raffle it off online for £2 a ticket. He sold nearly 500,000 entries, cleared his debts, and handed the keys to a factory worker who won his lottery.
This reminded me of another great story: In 2009, Stanford professor Tina Seelig gave several teams of students $5 and two hours each to see who could generate the highest ROI.
Most teams played it straight, buying and reselling cheap items. They made a few bucks. A few got clever, skipping the $5 and using the time to sell restaurant reservations or refill bike tires. Better returns, but nothing big.
The winning team flipped the script. They saw the $5 as a distraction and two hours as too little to build a business. They realized the real asset was the presentation time in front of Stanford students which they auctioned to a recruiter eager to reach top talent.
Result: $650 — A Whopping 13,000% return.
Most people follow the obvious path. They assume the rules are fixed. They rarely ask if the problem in front of them is the real problem. They accept the game as framed and wonder why their results look like everyone else’s.
Real leverage comes from questioning the frame because the biggest opportunities often hide where no one is looking.
2025-08-24
We've Become A Nation Of Survivors-in-Waiting
An Essay to Read, a Documentary to Watch.
This weekend I finally got around to reading Paul Crenshaw's much-buzzed about essay, Jeremy Spoke in Class Today. His haunting meditation on guns, MTV, Stephen King, Pearl Jam, and the fragile line between story and blood in America is one of the most powerful things I've read this year.
"The truth is, we're all scared. We're all scarred and broken, and it isn't from the stories we've read or music we've heard, but from what we see on the nightly news. Art imitates life, which makes me wonder what kind of lives we lead, and why anyone would want to imitate them."
-Paul Crenshaw
Afterward, I watched the devastating documentary series, 11 Minutes, on the mass-casualty shooting in Las Vegas at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on October 1, 2017, the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in American history.
Taken together, the essay and documentary form a brutal reckoning. Two works that refuse to let us look away from the blood-soaked reality we've normalized. Crenshaw's words cut deep, but the documentary's raw footage cuts deeper, showing us faces frozen in terror, bodies crumpling, lives ending in real time.
Neither works are abstract meditations on violence. They're mirrors held up to a country that has allowed mass death to become routine by our collective and individual inaction in response to it.
We tell ourselves we're just observers, that it won't happen to us or the ones we love, but that's just the lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. The violence is already here and it's growing. It lives in our hypervigilance at movie theaters, our exit strategies at concerts, the way we flinch at fireworks. We've become a nation of survivors-in-waiting, and the most terrifying part isn't that it keeps happening but how quickly we've learned to expect it.
Read the essay. Watch the documentary. And then sit with Crenshaw's question... what kind of lives are we leading and why would anyone want to imitate them?
2025-08-23
Revisiting Brian Doyle's Beloved Joyas Valodoras
Brian Doyle’s 2012 piece for The American Scholar is one of my all-time favorite essays. It sits easily in my top ten, maybe top five. A ferociously tender and sublime meditation on biology, love, and loss, it’s exquisite, soulful, and unforgettable.
Some memorable quotes and mind-bending stats…
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. 'Joyas voladoras', flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them.
Each [hummingbird] visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest.
Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons.
Mammals and birds have hearts with... four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling.
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart.
Coda: Hat tip to Simon Sarris's Careful Words thesaurus for help with this one.
2025-08-21
Krista Tippett Is A National Treasure.
Tippett's On Being podcast deserves a place on everyone's list.
Enough of us across all of our differences see that we have a world to remake.
We want to orient towards that possibility.
We want to meet what is hard and hurting.
We want to rise to what is beautiful and life-giving.
We want to do that where we live, and we want to do it walking alongside others.
-Krista Tippett
2025-08-19
Quotes From Adam Gopnik's Excellent New Yorker Piece on the History of Gambling in the Big Apple.
The Engines and Empires of New York City Gambling: As plans are laid for a new casino, one can trace, through four figures, a history of rivalry and excess, rife with collisions of character and crime.
"Guessing crazily at the future, the gambler is granted, briefly, the gift of now."
-Adam Gopnik
"If the soul finds no true action for itself, it must make do with agitation."
-Jack Richardson, Memoir of a Gambler (1979), playwright and professional poker player.
"One can trace, over the past century, four chief eras of gambling in New York. Call them, in order, high-stakes gambling, high-hopes gambling, back-room gambling, and big-room gambling. Each has its own protagonist, its own art form, and, this being New York, its own tangle of ethnic and racial conditions and rivalries."
-Adam Gopnik
2025-08-14
Everything Worth Having Lives On The Other Side Of Effort
The quotes below are from an extraordinary piece I read recently.
"Everything worth having lives on the other side of effort. Everything good requires tending. Everything beautiful demands maintenance. The people who understand this most deeply are often the happiest, because they've made peace with the beautiful burden of nurturing."
"We cannot keep buying the fallacy that everything meaningful should feel effortless, including the relationships that make life worth living. We've made "work" synonymous with suffering, when it should be synonymous with building."
"Our cultural obsession with finding passion has obscured a more fundamental truth: discipline matters more than motivation. Motivation is weather: changeable, unpredictable, often absent when you need it most. Discipline is climate: the steady, reliable conditions you create for yourself regardless of how you feel on any given day."
"We owe young people the truth: hard work isn't the tax you pay for living, it's the tuition for a life worth having. Everything good requires work. Discipline trumps motivation. Meaning emerges not from avoiding struggle but from choosing struggle that serves something larger than yourself. The dishes will always need doing. The question is whether you're doing them in service of a life worth living."
2025-08-14
The S&P 490 Flatlines.
The chart below separates the top 10 S&P 500 companies (red) from the other 490 (black). Since 2022, earnings for the bottom 490 have flatlined with no real growth. Meanwhile, the top 10 stocks have rocketshipped.
What this means? When you factor in 'real' inflation, not the fairy tale CPI version ('real' cumulative inflation ~10%+ since 2022 and +25% M2 growth since our 2020's money printing binge) those other 490 companies are, in real terms, actually shrinking.
Our record-breaking, booming market economy is actually 10 companies dragging the corpses of the other 490 behind them.
2025-08-13
New All-Time Favorite Reading List.
Just posted: A Glorious Reading Life, 3,599 Books Later. When Dan Pelzer died at 92, his kids digitized his life's reading list—every one of the 3,599 books he read over sixty years. Browse this wonderful rare artifact here or go full CTRL+F list-nerd with the searchable PDF.
2025-08-10
Didion Wisdom.
Interviewer: There's a certain esthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.
Joan Didion: Well, every day is all there is.
2025-08-03
Two Quotes On The Importance of Humor and Laughter
"A real index of intelligence is humor. It requires great affection for people and the world and the act of being, a forgivingness, and a bemusement. The sure sign of the fanatic is an absence of humor."
-Terence McKenna
“At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter. I find myself completely out of control and wonder how life could surprise me again and again and again, so completely. How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.”
-Norm MacDonald
July 2025
2025-07-30
"Jazz Is The Mathematization Of The Soul"
-Peter Putnam
Last week I dropped a short piece called There Is A Crack In Everything, That's How The Light Gets In where I highlighted two extraordinary pieces of writing.
The first, The Rise of Whatever, is a brilliant, hysterical, deeply insightful piece on the mess that is our current obsession with AI chatbots. I said about the piece: It's easily my favorite essay of 2025, so far.
The second piece, Finding Peter Putnam, by the science writer Amanda Geftor tells the incredible, almost unbelievable, story of the mysterious scientist, janitor, philanthropist, forgotten genius, Peter Putnam.
Below are some quotes from Geftor's piece I wanted to share with you:
Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery. When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe? Eddington suspected that one couldn’t know anything about the fish until one knew the structure of the net. That’s what Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.
That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”
After class they’d (Putnam's students) go to a nearby café, quoting lines of Putnamese. “Jazz is the mathematization of the soul.” “We know things in the act, not in their essence.”
2025-07-26
WTF... Millions v. Billions!?
1 million seconds 🟰 11 days
1 billion seconds 🟰 31 years
2025-07-25
How's This For Cosmic Irony?
On the same day this past week a legendary Norwegian Olympic skier was killed by a lightning strike while skiing. Felix Baumgartner, the man who jumped from the stratosphere and lived, died in a paragliding accident. And the world's oldest marathon runner, 114 years old, was killed by a hit and run driver. Three legends of extreme sport all dying on the same day, not doing the death-defying thing they were famous for, but something relatively… pedestrian.
2025-07-24
Hotline TNT 🔌 Raspberry Fuzz, Shoegaze Buzz
Indie darlings Hotline TNT are back with Raspberry Moon, the record I suspect will launch them into the stratosphere.
Start with "Candle." Warm riffs, slow-burn feels, and a chorus that absolutely sticks the landing with a cathartic exhale that’s sad, sweet, undeniable.
Good luck not singing along…
Never dare
To tell you what to wear
I'm not scared
We'll find new things to shareI wanna try
Get butterfliesThey don't hold a candle to you
Nothing more that I can prove
This is what you wanted to do
Still stuck in my point of view
They don't hold a candle to you
Nothing more that I can prove
This is what you wanted to do
Still stuck in my point of view -Hotline TNT, Candle
2025-07-19
A lot can happen between now and never.
-Ygritte to Jon Snow, Games of Thrones
2025-07-19
Two Of The Best Things I Ever Saw On the Internet About Sons & Dads
What Dad knows....
▪︎ When we're 6 years old dad knows
▪︎ When we're 8 years old dad knows everything
▪︎ When we're 10 years old dad knows a lot of things
▪︎ When we're 12 years old I'm not sure dad knows about this
▪︎ When we're 14 years old maybe dad doesn’t know
▪︎ When we're 16 years old dad doesn’t know
▪︎ When we're 18 years old dad's gone crazy
▪︎ When we're 20 years old can’t take dad seriously
▪︎ When we're 22 years old I know more than dad
▪︎ When we're 24 years old dad seems to know some things
▪︎ When we're 26 years old how does dad know so many things
▪︎ When we're 28 years old dad knows everything
▪︎ When we're 30 years old I need to ask dad about this
▪︎ When we're 35 years old oh that's what dad meant
▪︎ When we're 40 years old how did dad go through all this
▪︎ When we're 45 years old dad was right all along
▪︎ When we're 50 years old I wish I listened more to dad
▪︎ When we're 60 years old if dad was here, I'd be learning a lot.
Relish It All Because It Goes FAST!
2025-07-18
Happy Friday! A Quote, A Word, A Story
A QUOTE: Soul V. Optimization
I get the obsession with optimization. Truly, I do. But somewhere along the way, "optimize" became a religion. Every company, every startup, every institution is constantly, relentlessly tweaking, testing, trimming, tightening. As if the only goal is faster, cheaper, more efficient. But sometimes, what's needed isn't optimization; it's beauty or honesty or risk or soul. Optimize too many things, too much, too often, and soon, you don't just lose the waste; you lose the wonder. Especially when what you're optimizing is a person.
-me
A WORD: Sprezzatura (My Favorite Word)
Sprezzatura is an Italian word that translates to "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it". It is the ability of the courtier to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them." The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “studied carelessness," especially as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature.
A STORY: Gambling & Cowboy Boots
On September 24th, 1980, a man named William Lee Bergstrom (aged 29), known later as "The Suitcase Man," entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. He was wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases . One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline. This meant Bergstrom he was betting against the woman rolling the dice. If she lost, he’d double his money. If she won, he’d lose everything. Scarcely aware of the amount riding on her dice, the woman rolled three times: 6, 9, 7, a win for the Don't Pass bet. “Pay the backline,” said the dealer.
Just like that, Bergstrom won $1,554,000. He calmly filled the empty suitcase with his winnings, exited Binion’s into the desert afternoon, and drove off. Binion's president Jack Binion later confirmed it was the largest amount ever bet on a dice roll in America.
Only in America!
2025-07-17
Extremely Helpful Meditation Technique From Sam Harris
We never know what our next thought will be. I use this reality as one of my favorite ways to meditate. I slow down my breathing, focus on my breath, and when I’m feeling rather calm, I just asked myself. “I wonder what my next thought will be?” That usually creates about a 3 to 7 second period of pure silence in my brain as I just sit and wait and suddenly out of nowhere a thought arises. I note that thought and then I do the same thing over and over. It’s incredibly revealing.
-Sam Harris
2025-07-15
Powerful Quote from Anthony De Mello. Please Read His Incredible Book Awareness: Conversations With The Masters. You Will NOT Regret It!
Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily. Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth: The only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming. Observe all of this from the outside so to speak and see the marvelous change that comes about in you.
-Anthony De Mello, The Way to Love
2025-07-14
Japan Just Changed The Internet Forever!
Japanese researchers have just clocked mind-boggling internet speeds at 1.02 petabits per second. That's downloading Netflix's entire catalog in one second.
This isn't theoretical. They achieved this with existing fiber optic cables. Instead of one light channel, they figured out how to cram 19 separate cores into the same cable size which means it can sustain speeds over 1,800 kilometers with current infrastructure.
The internet just became 1,000 times faster overnight.
Everything changes now. Again.
What this means for us…
- Holographic coworkers materializing in your living room.
- AI conversations as natural as talking to a human (can't wait).
- Smart cities responding to your needs before you know you have them.
- Self-driving cars tapping into a collective AI brain making split-second safety decisions across millions of vehicles.
Ready. Set. Speed.
2025-07-12
The Machine Will See You Now
Have you heard of this medical AI company, OpenEvidence?
I had not.
OpenEvidence is an AI-powered clinical decision platform built for doctors. Launched in 2021 by Daniel Nadler (founder of Kensho) during the COVID-19 pandemic, it's been quietly (but very quickly) transforming how physicians diagnose and treat patients.
Think of it as a specialized "ChatGPT for medicine" but trained exclusively on peer-reviewed research and clinical guidelines. Doctors input symptoms, drug interactions, or treatment questions and receive fast, evidence-backed answers with citations to the original studies. Not guesses or predictions.
OpenEvidence has become so essential so quickly that fully one in three U.S. doctors reach for it ten times daily.
The Machine is already diagnosing patients. In real time. At scale.
Not someday. Now.
2025-07-11
AHHH Quotes of the Week
"No tears in the writer,
no tears in the reader"
-Robert Frost
"Nothing gives you a clearer look into someone than how they misinterpret things. Every misinterpretation is a confession."
-me
2025-07-09
WHAT IF: An Absolutely Insane Fun Fact!
If the Dutch had invested the $24 from their 1626 Manhattan beads deal at 9% investment returns compounded annually for 399 years, what would have happened?
▪︎ Principal: $24
▪︎ Rate: 9% annually
▪︎ Time: 399 years (1626 to 2025)
▪︎ Formula: $24 × (1.09)^399 (calculating: $24 x 2.218 × 10^23 = $5.323 × 10^24)
The result: the Dutch would have $5.3 septillion, a level of wealth so mind-bendingly gobsmacking it begs for perspective:
- $5.3 septillion stacked in $100 bills would be roughly 5.3 billion miles high about 57 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.
- The entire world economy in 2024 is projected to be around $110 trillion, making this septillion figure about 48 million times larger than the entire global economy.
- If you combined all currency, bank deposits, stocks, bonds, and other financial assets globally (estimated at roughly $400-500 trillion), the Dutch would have about 10 million times more money than all the money in the world.
2025-07-05
Three Words of the Week + Commentary:
- Vellichor is the strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
I call it HEAVEN.
- Rubatosis is the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
I call it NERVE-WRACKING.
- Anecdoche is a conversation where everyone is talking, but nobody is listening.
I call it ALL THE FREAKING TIME.
2025-07-04
A Grab Bag Of Ephemera. BOOM! BOOM!
- Humans can't hum while pinching our noses closed.
- Poker is now a global industry worth approximately $100 billion.
- Legally, children of identical twins are first cousins. Genetically, they're half siblings.
- A regular old school pizza is a circle that we eat in triangles that comes in a square box.
- The Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada is the oldest known rock formation on Earth, dating back 4.16 billion years—just 340 million years after the planet itself formed. Imagine if these rocks could talk.
- YouTube now fully favors longer videos. New data shows that ~14 percent of YT watch time is for shorts under 60 seconds, 16 percent is spent watching videos between 1 and 10 minutes long, ~13 percent on videos 10 to 20 minutes long, and ~57 percent on videos over 20 minutes in length. Longer videos are YT's thing these days.
- After the 1970s energy crisis, the U.S. government established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). The SPR is made up of four geological sites in Texas and Louisiana, with 60 subterranean salt caverns with a capacity of ~700 million barrels of petroleum, an amazing feat of engineering. As of May 2025 our reserves stood at 400 million barrels.
- Child care costs skyrocketing. The average cost for child care in the U.S. is $13,128, up nearly 30 percent since 2020, far outpacing inflation. Married couples earning a median wage spend ~10 percent of their earnings on child care, while single parents spend ~35 percent of theirs. Further, two kids cost more than a mortgage in 45 U.S. states and more than rent in 49 U.S. states. Are you FKM!
- Chick-fil-A reached $22.7 billion in 2024 sales. This is incredibly impressive when you consider the chain only has 3,109 stores compared to McDonald's $53.5 billion in 2024 sales with 13,557 locations and Starbucks $30.4 billion with 16,941 locations. This is operational efficiency at its best: Chick-fil-A's average unit volume is an industry-best $7.5 million, significantly higher than McDonald's $4.0 million and Starbucks' $1.8 million per store.
2025-07-03
Religious Affiliation Divergence.
In a global study on religion, 91 percent of adults who were raised in a religion remained within their broad religious category (e.g., Christians remained Christian, Buddhists remained Buddhist); 3 percent switched to another religious category at some point in their adulthood; and 6 percent became disaffiliated with any religion entirely.
Among the religiously affiliated, 99 percent of both Hindus and Muslims remained within their faiths. Christians had a lower retention rate, with 83 percent staying, 2 percent switching to another religion, and 15 percent disaffiliating entirely. Buddhists had the highest rate of disaffiliation, with 19 percent leaving the religion. Among those raised with no religious affiliation, only 7 percent went on to join a religion.
It's striking how much these numbers diverge from my intuitions about religious affiliation over time.
Source: Pew Research Center
2025-07-02
Reflect On This!
Check it. In a world where Earth's entire 4.5-billion-year history is compressed into a single 24-hour day, dinosaurs don't appear until 10:56 p.m. (about 240 million years ago). They rule the planet for just over an hour, until 11:39 p.m. (66 million years ago). And we don't show up until one second before midnight at 11:59:59 p.m.
We have existed on earth for just 0.5% of the time since the last dinosaur took its final breath.
Though our individual lives, plans, and achievements feel monumental, our collective tenure here is but a fleeting, just barely significant moment in Earth’s multi-billion-year symphony. We seem to perpetually misunderstand just how truly ephemeral our presence is within Earth's vast, indifferent story, and how profoundly little our current preoccupations genuinely matter in the cosmic sweep.
2025-07-01
Understanding 'Dukkha'
'Dukkha' is often translated as suffering, but meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein helps us see it more precisely as unsatisfactoriness — the persistent unease of life’s instability and impermanence.
Goldstein describes three types of Dukkha:
The Suffering of Suffering (Dukkha-Dukkha): Physical or mental pain like illness, grief, loss, anything unwanted.
The Suffering of Change (Viparinama-Dukkha): The fleeting nature of pleasure always leaves a residue of dissatisfaction. Even joy fades.
The Suffering of Conditioned Existence (Sankhara-Dukkha): The deepest level of Dukkha. The subtle stress of being alive in a constantly changing, selfless world. Nothing to hold onto. Nothing to become.
He illustrates dukkha with two vivid analogies:
→ The Rope Burn: Cling to a rope being pulled through your hands, and it burns. Let it go and the pain stops.
→ The Monkey Trap: A monkey reaches into a coconut for sweet fruit. When it clenches its fist to grab onto the fruit, it’s trapped. Freedom is one simple act away: open the hand.
He then distills Dukkha for us:
Dukkha is the inevitability of unwanted experiences. Freedom from dukkha doesn’t mean not having preferences; it means not being bound by them. The way out of dukkha is to let go. Not to reject the pleasure, but to release the craving, the clinging, the need to control.
Goldstein reminds us:
"Things are always becoming otherwise."
And our peace of mind lies in remembering that.
June 2025
2025-06-30
Hail Jia Tolentino!
Over the last decade, one of my favorite writers has undoubtedly been Jia Tolentino, the always excellent New Yorker staff writer and author of the incisive book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. (Seriously, read it. You might not love her diagnosis, but you'll certainly recognize and appreciate it.)
Tolentino is a cultural commentator par excellence, widely recognized for her penetrating, critical analysis of contemporary American life, especially through the lens of the internet and social media. Her most recent New Yorker piece, "My Brain Finally Broke," perfectly and hauntingly captures the strangely dissociative experience of navigating the digital age and the mental toll it takes on all of us.
Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. Fake words creeping like kudzu into scientific papers and dating profiles and e-mails and text messages and news outlets and social feeds and job listings and job applications. Fake entities standing guard over chat boxes when we try to dispute a medical bill, waiting sphinxlike for us to crack the code that allows us to talk to a human. The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality — first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.
-Jia Tolentino
Yeah. That about captures it.
2025-06-29
WTF Dream?
Early this morning I was violently yanked awake by a nightmare. Unlike a typical narrative dream, this was a blindingly fast, several-seconds-long plunge into a single terrifying moment.
One second I was asleep; the next, I was inside an active emergency on an airplane violently thrashing about from a furious assault of wind and rain hammering against its metal skin. Loud, frantic emergency alarms shrieking — "EEHHH!.. EEHHH!.. EEHHH!..," the darkened cabin blinking with rapid-fire flashes of red and white, the passengers screaming frenetically as the plane pitched wildly out of control.
In the midst of that visceral terror, a strange, unsettlingly calm and clinical thought surfaced in my mind: "If we make it out of this, I wonder what the chances are that we'll experience another emergency." BAM! Just like that the dream ended, abruptly snapping me back to waking life, my heart pounding in my chest, my breath heavy and gasping.
I've never had a dream like that before. It took several minutes for the physical echoes to subside, for my heart to stop racing, and for a semblance of calm to return. Ahhh safety...
WTF was that about?
2025-06-28
'The Bear' is BACK (S4 HULU)
After watching the first few episodes of the new season, I sent the following text to my daughter and her boyfriend, who also both watch and love the show:
"S4 of The Bear is a bit gimmicky, yes, but it always, every episode, makes me smile. And sometimes it makes me cry, too. The Bear, that is."
In addition to smiles and tears, you can also count on The Bear for some sublime writing:
"Worrying about people and having people worry about us is everything we got."
-Claire to Carmi, The Bear (HULU)
-"What would you tell yourself when you were just starting out?"
-"I would tell myself that I have no idea what I'm doing and therefore I'm invincible."
-conversation between Carmi and Chef Andrea Terry (played with depth, nuance, incredible grace, and meticulous gravitas by the great Olivia Colman)
2025-06-26
Gift from a friend.
My friend Jim read this wonderful literary passage to me the other day. It was from Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He wanted to know what I thought of it, even though I'm pretty sure he already knew.
Midway through the passage comes one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature:
"It's lovely to live on a raft".
We then spent the next 40 minutes talking about the incredible power of these seven words.
Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark — which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two — on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to MAKE so many. Jim said the moon could a LAID them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.
No words...
2025-06-16
Word of the Week: Palindrome
Readers of this blog know I love words, language, beautifully written sentences. Like, a lot. One of my favorite words is palindrome, a wonderfully playful term for a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward, like madam or racecar.
But palindromes aren’t just a language thing. They show up in numbers too. And when they do, the results can be magical.
Here's an example of that magic:
▪︎ 11✖️11 = 121
▪︎ 111✖️111 = 12321
▪︎ 1111✖️1111 = 1234321
▪︎ 11111✖️11111 = 123454321
▪︎ 111111✖️111111 = 12345654321
▪︎ 1111111✖️1111111 = 1234567654321
▪︎ 11111111✖️11111111 = 123456787654321
▪︎ 111111111✖️111111111 = 12345678987654321
This number trick reflects the elegance of base-10 math. Each subsequent multiplication calculation is squaring a number made entirely of 1s (i.e., 11 × 11, 111 × 111, etc.), and the result forms a palindromic number with a sweet symmetrical peak at the middle.
2025-06-07
Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
- Fixed mindset says, "I'm just not good at this."
- Growth mindset asks, "What can I learn from this?"
The way we talk to ourselves matters: one keeps us stuck; the other keeps us growing.
Always Choose:
▪︎ Growth ＞ Fear.
▪︎ Progress ＞Pride.
▪︎ Curiosity ＞ Perfection.
2025-06-06
Rumi's The Guest House (one of my all-time favorite poems)
In The Guest House, the great 13th-century poet and Sufi mystic employs the metaphor of a guest house to articulate a profound model of emotional and spiritual openness. Rumi challenges us to receive our inner states of joy, grief, anger, even despair, not as disruptions to avoid but as meaningful arrivals to witness. These emotions, he suggests, may function as emissaries of transformation, bearing insight from realms of the self not yet understood.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
-Rumi (translation by Coleman Barks)
May 2025
2025-05-29
Best Thing This Week: Carey Mulligan
Carey Mulligan is the defining actress of her generation, and without question, one of the finest performers in the history of the craft.
I made the mistake earlier tonight of thinking I could take a quick 20-minute peak at Mulligan's 2015 turn as the fiercely independent and headstrong Bathsheba Everdene in Far From The Madding Crowd. I sat transfixed for the next two hours. I should know better by now: when Carey Mulligan graces the silver screen, resistance is futile.
Nearly every one of Mulligan's performances is utterly captivating, fully lived-in, emotionally precise, impossible to look away from. There’s an alchemy and quiet intensity to her work that doesn’t feel like acting at all, but something closer to truth. Mulligan vanishes into her roles, illuminating them from the inside out with a range that is nothing short of staggering. From screen to stage, period drama to jet-black comedy, indie heartbreakers to prestige thrillers, she moves with the same emotional precision and quiet power, never hitting a false note.
The numbers speak for themselves: 143 nominations, 81 wins, three Oscar nods, four Golden Globes, a BAFTA — and, just to round things out, a Tony.
Mulligan earned her first Oscar nomination at 24 for An Education, playing a schoolgirl on the brink of adulthood with a quiet, devastating precision. A decade later, she was a whirlwind of fury and grief in Promising Young Woman. Then came Maestro in 2023. Watching Mulligan disappear into Felicia Montealegre with such warmth and wit felt like a resurrection.
She was luminous in the The Great Gatsby, harrowing and devastating in Steve McQueen's erotic drama Shame, and quietly revolutionary as The New York Times journalist Megan Twohey in She Said.
On stage, Mulligan is just as commanding. I didn’t blink once throughout her commanding 2014 performance in Skylight. Though I haven’t seen Girls & Boys for which Mulligan was also nominated for the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress, live cuts available online make it clear she holds live audiences in absolute thrall.
The only two Carey Mulligan movies I haven't seen yet are The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025) and Mudbound (2017). That's the bad news (for me). The good news (also for me) is that these are her two highest rated movies according to this Rotten Tomatoes list.
I look forward to seeing what this future lifetime achievement honoree has in store for us.
2025-05-23
Mused is Unhinged in the Best Possible Way (like Google Earth snorted a line of chaos).
Mused is a wildly ambitious 3D simulation of the entire world where you can type in almost any scenario and watch it play out on a global map in real-time. Type "a T-Rex loose in downtown Tokyo" or "zombie outbreak at the Vatican" and watch the entire planet simulate it on a real, disturbingly plausible 3D globe.
The site is built using real geographic and census data. Urban planners are using it to model traffic, teachers for history lessons, and absolute gremlins (like the rest of us) for seeing what happens when you drop "70s disco party at the North Pole" into a global simulator.
Though still early days, the sheer scale of what this site is attempting is staggering.
2025-05-23
AI Hallucination Cases! I Wish I Was Making This Up. I Really, Really Do.
In keeping with the recent deluge of cautionary posts on this feed about the explosion and impact of AI and the very real potential for civilization-shifting dynamics resulting from said technology, I wanted to share an interesting new resource by Damien Charlotin called AI Hallucination Cases.
Per Charlotin's site…
this is a database that tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content — typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings. While seeking to be exhaustive (112 cases identified so far), this is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.
This is especially scary given reporting at the beginning of 2025 that 41 of the 100 largest law firms in the U.S. say they use generative Al in their work.
2025-05-20
BEEW's first guest post... ISH! Matty Facts breaks down George R.R. Martin's five Game of Throne books.
For years, my nephew Matthew refused to accept any excuse whatsoever for why I'd never seen Game of Thrones. He promised I'd love it. And Matt doesn't take promises lightly. He even offered to watch the series with me, which turned out to be crucial, especially during Season 1, as I was getting my proverbial feet wet in Westeros (and beyond).
I watched it. I loved it. I'm watching it again. I'm loving it again. GoT is an incredible feat of narrative storytelling.
Last week, Matt pinged me to let me know he'd just finished reading all five of George R.R. Martin's GoT books. When I read his sharp, distilled reviews (ranked by personal preference), I asked if I could share them here with y'all. He agreed.
Matty writes:
Just finished the last game of thrones book. What an amazing read the series was. I just hope George actually finishes the book😂 (as of May 2025, GoT fans are still awaiting the release of The Winds of Winter, the sixth installment in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series). My book rankings probably go:
- A Storm of Swords (Book 3) — Red wedding and Joffrey wedding plus battle for the wall, and ends with Jon being made lord commander of nights watch. (Best book I’ve probably ever read)
- A Clash of Kings (Book 2) — The war of 5 Kings is great, Davos chapters are amazing, weakest Daenerys book but her house of the undying chapter is way better than in the show, the battle of blackwater is some of the best writing I’ve ever seen, Tyrion really shines in this book (as does Arya)
- A Game of Thrones (Book 1) — Ned Stark chapters are some of the best in the series, the book is very faithful to season 1 of the series, Daenerys getting her dragons is great.
- A Dance With Dragons (Book 5) — Daenerys and Jon shine in this book as we get lots of Mereen and Nights Watch politics, Theon chapters are amazing and gut wrenching too, Barristan Selmy is my biggest surprise he has way more to do in the books than the show, Cersei walk of atonement is so twisted but a great read.
- A Feast for Crows (Book 4) — Cersei and Jaime shine in this book especially Jaime, Iron Islands and Dorne get much more intricate plots they didn’t in the show, most of what happens in this book was never adapted to the show for some reason.
Overall I loved the book series a lot and am happy I read it after watching the series. I think if I read it first I would’ve been angry at some of the changes and not liked the show as much. It’s an amazing read and George is a pure genius and amazing world builder.
Really makes you wanna read the big fella’s books, not just watch HBO’s deliciously triumphant tv series. Big thanks to Matty Facts.
2025-05-18
More Eye-Bending Stats & Facts For May!
- UK study finds almost half of young people would prefer a world without the internet. Youth truth!
- Moody’s stripped the U.S. of its last triple-A credit rating, citing unchecked debt growth and rising interest costs. The downgrade to Aa1 follows failed efforts by Congress and multiple administrations to contain deficits now running near $2 trillion annually. Moody’s warned that continuing current policies could cause the debt to reach 134% of GDP by 2035. That would be hella bad!
- Inflation expectations are at a 44-year high, with consumers anticipating a 7.3% jump in prices over the next year, the highest since 1981. A significant portion of this concern is attributed to tariffs, with nearly 75% of Americans citing them as a major concern, up from 60% in April, according to the University of Michigan's Consumer Surveys (see below). This rising anxiety has also impacted consumer sentiment, which has decreased by nearly 30% since January. In 2025 consumer sentiment and expectations have fallen like a piano dropping from the sky. Maybe this is the scary kind of financial motivation corporate America needs to finally start pivoting back to a consumer-first regime.
- A great leap forward for American dads. Since the pandemic, dads have been spending more time with their kids. Fathers of children under 10, for example, provide an additional 1.2 hours of care per week compared to pre-COVID-19 days. For millennial dads aged 25 to 44, that increase more than doubles to 2.5 hours weekly. And for dads caring for older relatives, the increase exceeds 7 hours per week. Dads are replacing their leisure time with caretaking, working fewer hours or remotely, and often multitasking with kids in tow. As a dad I can promise you that this extra effort is worth every freaking second.
- A global flourishing study finds that young adults, well, aren't happy. For decades, research showed that happiness followed a U-shaped curve over a person's life: high in youth, dipping in midlife, and rising in older age. But, according to a recent survey of more than 200,000 people in over 20 countries, the happiness curve is flattening. The study measured not just happiness, but physical and mental health, relationships, character, life meaning, and financial security. In the U.S., the generational gap in flourishing is especially "stark," with young adults ages 18 to 29 reporting lower levels of happiness and well-being than before, scoring much lower than older adults. A 2023 Harvard report supports these findings, showing that young adults experience double the rates of anxiety and depression as teens. One of my favorite sayings from the hallowed halls of Alcoholics Anonymous is: “it’s an inside job.” If you want the real goods — true happiness, well-being, sweetness, and love in your life — stop looking out there. We’ll only get back to U-shaped happiness when you start working an inside job on you. PERIOD!
- Eight charts show men are falling behind, from classrooms to careers. By age 5, boys are 16 percentage points less likely than girls to be school-ready. By 2023, girls led boys in high school graduation rates in every U.S. state except Vermont. This gender gap continues through higher education and the workforce. The share of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) grew nearly 3X from 9% in 1970 to 24% today, while the share of men in HEAL jobs (health care, education, administration, and literacy — industries primarily dominated by women) dropped from 31% to 22% in the same period. Between 2023 and 2033, 1.6 million HEAL jobs are expected to be created — 500,000 more than in STEM — with women capturing most of the gains due to fewer men entering these sectors. There’s A LOT more content and related goodies on this hugely important subject coming down the pike. Stay tuned.
- Consumer sentiment fell to 50.8 in May, the second-lowest level ever recorded since tracking began in the late 1970s. Consumer expectations are down 32.4% compared to last year. Frustrated and fearful consumers are bumping travel plans, cancelling summer vacations, and reeling in their household spending as they anticipate rising unemployment and more bad news on the economic front. Time to start putting consumers ahead of stock performance.
2025-05-17
50+ years later these lyrics from Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven are still INSANELY GOOD
There's a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings
In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven
Ooh, it makes me wonder
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now
It's just a spring clean for the May queen
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on
And it makes me wonder
Your head is humming, and it won't go, in case you don't know
The piper's calling you to join him
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow? And did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one, and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll
And she's buying a stairway to Heaven
2025-05-16
One of all time my favorite quotes on writing.
"I spent all morning putting in a comma
and all afternoon taking it out."
These words are often attributed to the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire, but there's no solid evidence he actually said them. The quote has also been attributed to Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, and even Mark Twain.
What's so great about this quote is that people who don’t write must think it deranged, whereas those who do know it’s as sane as pacing around your office at 2 a.m. arguing with a semicolon.
2025-05-15
Eye-bending stats & facts for May
- 48 million adults in the U.S. (one-fifth of American adults) read at or below the third-grade level.
- McDonald’s Corporation recently boasted that 1 in 8 Americans have worked under the Golden Arches.
- An estimated 80,000 people died from overdoses in 2024 down 27% from 110,000 in 2023, according to provisional data from the CDC released last week. This is the single largest one-year drop in overdose deaths in the 45 years since the CDC has been tracking such data. The previous largest one-year drop was 4% in 2018, according to the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics. Still, U.S. annual overdose deaths are higher than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic. In a statement, the CDC noted that overdoses are still the leading cause of death for people 18-44 years old.
2025-05-09
Five quotes on my mind this week:
"Don’t just do things.
Do hard things."
"You deserve a little grace."
-The Pitt (HBO)
"Having a baby is a venture of hope."
-Silo (AppleTV)
"And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life."
-Mary Oliver, Upstream
"For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away."
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
2025-05-07
AI Isn’t Just Big. It’s Civilization-Level Big.
ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer app in history, hitting 100 million users in just two months — far faster than TikTok or Instagram. As of May 2025, it now has over 500 million weekly users, up 25% since February, showing just how deeply it’s embedding into daily life.
This isn’t just another tech trend. With trillions of dollars pouring into AI and its rapid integration across every layer of society — from work and education to politics, media, and war — we’re no longer talking about innovation. We’re talking about transformation. And with transformation this sweeping, we all have a responsibility to understand what’s coming and what could come undone.
The AI 2027 scenario is the first major release from the AI Futures Project, a new nonprofit forecasting the future of AI. This is an excellent resource by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean.
Free PDF version available here.
2025-05-03
Debt Death Spiral: U.S. government interest expense up 2x in the past 5 years. WHOA!
The U.S. is facing what Ray Dalio calls a "Debt Death Spiral" — a critical economic threshold where our government now borrows money just to pay interest on our existing debt, creating a dangerous self-perpetuating cycle. With the U.S. national debt now exceeding $36 trillion and annual interest payments approaching $1 trillion, we've entered the acceleration phase where each dollar borrowed triggers more borrowing. The true danger comes when investors lose confidence and flee government bonds, potentially triggering a bond market collapse that forces a stark choice: either slash the deficit from 7.5% to 3% of GDP through painful austerity measures, or face currency devaluation through money printing. Without decisive action, this spiral threatens to undermine the dollar's global standing, unleash persistent inflation, and potentially trigger an economic crisis that would devastate American households and reverberate throughout the global financial system.
There's a lot going on. So much to prioritize. So many big ticket items to focus on, worry about, address, BUT I argue that if we don't get our insane, outsized federal debt under control, all of our other problems combined will pale in comparison.
2025-05-01
Loved this quote from Jordan Peterson's recent conversation with Peter Thiel:
"When you stop looking up, you start looking around. And when you look around too much, it's not a wisdom of crowds, it’s a madness of crowds."
-Peter Thiel
Thiel talking about the insight of his late mentor, René Girard, that we don't invent our desires, we imitate them. That in the absence of believing in something higher — a divine order, spiritual truth, or even just an ideal beyond material reality — we don't become more rational; we become more mimetic. We look to each other for meaning, and what follows isn't wisdom, it's envy, rivalry, hysteria. The madness of crowds isn't freeing; it's consuming.
April 2025
2025-04-25
OUCH! Consumer Sentiment WAY DOWN!
Source: University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers
2025-04-14
Need To Smile? Wanna Feel Some Good Ju-Ju?
Jungle's Candle Flame will set you straight (the video ain't too shabby either).
2025-04-09
What You See When It’s Not About You?
I’m testing an idea. You tell me if it holds up:
"When it’s not about you, you tend to discover the good in you and them. But when it’s only about you, you tend to conclude the worst in both."
-me
That was the original version that landed in my head late last night. Since then, I’ve been turning it over, rewording, sharpening, stripping it back — and I think some of the riffs, edits, and variations below are better. Have a look.
Which one hits?
Which one misses?
Do you think the core idea rings true?
Or, on closer inspection, does the whole thing fall apart?
"Put them first, find your light.
Put you first, face your shadow."
"When it's not about you, you grow.
When it's only about you, you rot."
"Make it all about them — find your best.
Make it all about you — meet your worst."
"When it's not about you, you learn good things.
When it's only about you, you experience hard ones."
"Focus on others, you'll see things that humble you.
Focus on yourself, you'll see things that haunt you."
2025-04-03
I love this graphic from Ted Gioia's important essay, The State of the Culture
Says so much about where we find ourselves at the quarter mark of the 21st century.
March 2025
2025-03-29
An Idea I'm Exploring For A New Piece Sparked By The Surge Of “Brain Rot” Talk Flooding The Culture Lately.
Writers and cultural critics frequently complain that TikTok memes, mobile phones, and the broader internet are turning our minds to mush. But here’s the catch: to experience brain rot, you first need a brain that's sufficiently engaged to rot in the first place — a crucial step I think we're overlooking at our peril.
The deeper problem isn’t merely the slow decay of overstimulated minds; it's the alarming number of minds these days that never light up at all. Before you can argue if a book is good or bad, you need to read it. To critique a film, you have to watch it. To dissect an idea, you first have to seriously engage with it. To navigate relationships, you have to actively participate in them. Increasingly, though, people — particularly young people — are opting out entirely. They're not engaging, not thinking, not even forming the mental foundation that could one day suffer from "rot."
This disengagement isn't limited to intellectual pursuits but extends broadly to life itself. Many young people today seem increasingly disconnected from the experiences that traditionally made youth thrilling, messy, formative, and fun. They're not spending meaningful time with friends or even attempting to make new ones. They're avoiding social risks altogether — skipping parties, avoiding conversations with strangers, and shying away from potential rejection. They're not road-tripping, getting lost, making questionable decisions, or embracing moments of silliness, play, exploration, and creativity. This isn’t true for every young person, of course, but it represents a concerning trend backed by significant data, especially among men under 30. The Institute for Men and Boys is doing some very interesting work to fight back against these alarming trends.
This well-documented phenomenon isn’t simply about laziness — it's indicative of a growing divide in how young people relate to the world at large. We're witnessing a stark separation between those who engage with life and those who quietly quit, feeling increasingly sidelined. Between those who actively shape their surroundings and those who merely exist passively within them.
It makes me wonder: where has our collective hunger for building interesting, adventurous, and meaningful lives gone? The more we condition ourselves to disengage — to scroll past, dismiss, avoid complexity and spontaneity — the more we erode the potential for personal agency and the possibility of a vibrantly interesting life.
In short, I'm less concerned about minds experiencing "rot" than about the greater issue of minds never activating to begin with.
My favorite recent perspective on this topic is Haley Nahman’s insightful piece: "What is Rotting, If Not Rest? An Anatomy of the Modern Rot."
2025-03-27
A Little Ditty on First Principles Thinking.
First Principles Thinkers rethink the world.
Last Principles Thinkers accept or gnaw on it as it is.
Most people reason by analogy: 'This is how it’s always been done, so it must be right.' First Principles Thinkers ask: 'But does it have to be?' Instead of accepting surface-level explanations, they strip problems down to their fundamental components and rebuild something better — something rooted in logic, not convention.
First Principles Thinkers live in curiosity mode
→ They always ask "why?"
→ They enjoy saying "I don't know"
→ They start with fundamental truths
→ They always have more questions than answers
→ They search for reasons why their answer is wrong
→ They explain ideas so clearly a smart 10-year-old gets it
→ They consistently steelman (not strawman) the other side of the argument
Last Principles Thinkers Live in auto-pilot mode
→ They never ask 'why"?
→ They start with "it's always been that way"
→ They are uncomfortable saying "| don't know"
→ They always have more answers than questions
→ They search for reasons why their answer is right
→ They already have a conclusion, no investigation needed
→ They consistently strawman (not steelman) the other side of the argument
2025-03-26
Best-Worse Analysis (BWA): A Simple Framework For Hard Decisions
I came across the BWA decision-making framework listening to Shawn Ryan's recent podcast interview with Dr. Ben Carson. Carson originally introduced this framework in his 2007 book, Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk.
Carson’s approach to tough decisions is refreshingly simple — just four questions:
- Question 1: What’s the best thing that happens if I do this?
- Question 2: What’s the worst thing that happens if I do this?
- Question 3: What’s the best thing that happens if I don’t do this?
- Question 4: What’s the worst thing that happens if I don’t do this?
See clip Dr. Carson discussing the BWA here.
2025-03-25
Fascinating, Surprising, Slightly Depressing March Stats & Facts!
- 63% of men under 30 identify as single, compared to just 34% of women. What’s going on? Are young men… OK?
- The amount of microplastics in the average American’s brain has surged 45% — from 4.7 grams in 2016 to 6.8 grams in 2024. Yikes.
- By 2033 (just eight years from now) U.S. deaths are expected to outnumber births. A demographic shift with massive implications.
- In 2004, the odds of the average American attending a party on any given weekend were 1 in 16. In 2024? Just 1 in 25. The death of the party — literally.
- In 2020, 1 in 10 Harvard Business School grads were still unemployed three months after graduation. In 2024? It’s 1 in 4. The job market doesn’t care about your Ivy League degree.
- On a ‘perfect day,’ Americans say they’d spend 186 minutes watching television — but just 84 minutes hanging out with friends. Also, the number of ‘perfect days’ the average American had in 2024? Twelve.
2025-03-24
New Essay: The Beautiful Mess We Left Behind (A Love Letter)
For years, I saw people on X claim that if you simply put your writing out into the world, an audience will find you. You'll meet interesting people, have meaningful conversations, and stumble into unexpected opportunities. It made sense, and I believed it — but I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted for myself.
Six months in, I can say with certainty: they were right. And I was wrong. Writing this blog has been a deeply rewarding experience, not just because I love the craft, but more because of the people — many of you — who have engaged with these essays, shared your thoughts, and, in turn, shaped my own thinking. For that, I am truly grateful.
I don't often use this space to announce new essays, but today I'm making an exception. The Beautiful Mess We Left Behind (A Love Letter) is a different kind of piece. It's reflective, nostalgic, at times frustrating, but ultimately an attempt to capture something that has been on my mind for years: the quiet erosion of a world that, while imperfect, had a texture, spontaneity, and humanity that now feels increasingly out of reach.
Much of my writing focuses on the world as it is — how technology, culture, and progress have shaped (and often distorted) our lives, especially for younger generations. This essay takes a step back to consider what came before. A time before we optimized and sanitized everything, before childhood and young adulthood became something entirely different from what they once were.
This theme — our shifting relationship with the world and each other — is one I've explored in many essays, including Enough With The Bullshit, The Age of Spectacle, Doomers, Sentinels & Vanguards In The Age Of Agency and Uncertainty, United We Watched, Divided We Scrolled, and Soon We'll Have Nothing Left to Give Away of Ourselves. But this piece is something else. Less analysis, more reflection. Less diagnosis, more remembrance.
I'm excited to share it with you. Read it here.
2025-03-21
Beautiful quote.
"The world will never starve for want of wonders;
but only for want of wonder."
-G. K. Chesterton
2025-03-19
Enough With the Bullshit is my latest piece on the contagion of bullshit in our current time.
Bullshit operates on an inflationary model. The more there is, the less value each individual unit has. The solution, naturally, is to produce even more. Clickbait begets clickbait. Outrage fuels more outrage. Fake reviews spawn counter-fake reviews. AI-generated slop floods the internet, forcing human writers to imitate AI just to stay relevant. Eventually, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses, and everyone starts choking on the exhaust fumes of their own nonsense. We're right there. -me
2025-03-15
Insane Stat!
Early investors in AirBNB turned every $1,000 into $5M when Airbnb went public at $100 billion for an eye popping 499,900% return.
2025-03-09
AHH the Wisdom of Age!
Jeanie Buss: How bad is it Grandma?
Grandma Buss: Falling apart.
Jeanie Buss: So what do we do?
Grandma Buss: We hold it together.
-Jeanie Buss and her grandmother discussing the fragile early days of Jerry Buss's budding Los Angeles Lakers empire in HBO’s phenomenal Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.
2025-03-02
Long COVID's long nightmare.
Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic first swept across the planet, as many as 20 million Americans and at least 400 million people worldwide suffer from long COVID, a debilitating condition that still has no approved treatment.
Researchers believe that long COVID — which, according to the American Academy of Neurology, is the third-leading neurological disorder in the U.S., behind tension-type headaches and migraines — likely has many subtypes that affect the brain, lungs, heart, kidneys, and digestive system. The disease may manifest differently and respond differently to treatments, making research challenging. Meanwhile, clinical trials have been slow to complete, as patients are often unable to participate because they are homebound, too unwell, or disabled. One novel phase 2 drug trial, launched in 2023, is allowing patients to participate from their own homes, but we won’t be able to fully grasp the long-term consequences of the condition for years to come.
If you want to learn more about long COVID, check out this insightful, free resouce: A Long COVID Definition: A Chronic, Systemic Disease State with Profound Consequences (2024)
February 2025
2025-02-27
I Jump Into The "Enshittification" Game In My New Piece:
Breaking, Rotting, Enshittifying.
I share my perspective on two excellent essays that examine the defining issue of our time: our shifting relationship with the world and with each other which has led to deep, widespread problems that are only now coming into focus.
In the first piece, How Progressives Froze the American Dream, journalist Yoni Appelbaum argues that many of America's current struggles stem from a dramatic, recent decline in geographic mobility. Huh? The essay is adapted from Applebaum's important new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, which explores how America — once the most geographically mobile society on earth — has become a place where people feel trapped. This is a fascinating piece.
Then there's Haley Nahman's excellent What is Rotting, If Not Rest? An Anatomy of the Modern Rot. This is an incredible piece. What it ISN'T is yet another same-ol think piece on 2024’s word of the year — rotting. Nahman pushes beyond the shallow cultural narratives surrounding the term. Instead of treating rotting as a trend, she unpacks the psychological and existential undercurrents behind why people are so drawn to this specific form of escape.
Nahman frames rotting as a spiritual condition rather than just a behavioral one. Where other essayists tend to focus on the aesthetics of the trend (people posting about “rotting in bed” for hours), she interrogates its deeper causes: an intolerance for stillness, a fear of unoccupied mental space, and a culture that encourages constant consumption but rarely genuine pause. The essay ultimately challenges the reader to rethink not just rotting, but what true rest actually looks like — and whether we even know how to access it anymore.
I delve deeper into both pieces in Breaking, Rotting, Enshittifying.
2025-02-23
Legendary song lyric that never ages.
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know,
your stairway lies on the whispering wind
-Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven
2025-02-19
I Discuss The Centrally Critical Importance Of Personal Agency In My New Piece:
Doomers, Sentinels & Vangards.
2025-02-16
Young Men In America Are Falling Behind In Ways That Are Both Alarming And Unsustainable.
Across nearly every social metric — friendships, dating, sex, health, work ethic, views on the future — young men are heading in the wrong direction. The trends are deeply concerning.
More troubling than the crisis itself is how young men are responding: increasingly disengaged, sedentary, and isolated — spending more time in the digital realm betting, gaming, and watching television and pornography to the exclusion of living their real lives. Young men today are working less, playing less, competing less, all while simultaneously holding inflated expectations about life, wealth, and success. The consequences of this crisis are just as dire: worsening health outcomes, higher mortality rates, increased mental health challenges, reduced lifetime earnings, and the risk of derailing the future of the American family.
Over the past year, I’ve been engaging with a growing network of concerned older men who are discussing ways to help younger men move past this crisis point — people including the author Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, professor and podcaster Scott Galloway, and journalist Derek Thompson whose recent piece in The Atlantic, The Anti-Social Century is a must-read. Conversations around this crisis are becoming increasingly organized, with an enriched focus on potential solutions — both entrepreneurial and government-driven. The common denominator among the many ideas and solutions being discussed is how to get more men involved in the lives of younger men, earlier — coaches, teachers, mentors.
Though I plan to highlight the gravity of the problem, including with stats and data, my piece primarily focuses on potential solutions. Today’s young men have unprecedented resources and opportunities to reshape their own futures and the future of humanity. With our support, the key will be to move them from a mindset of passivity and victimhood to one of personal growth, didactic learning, and adaptive reinvention.
2025-02-13
Netflix has a new documentary series on the 30 year old O.J. Simpson case: American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson. It's very good.
The analysis of the case and the cultural climate at the time that likely led to its stunning conclusion is both revelatory and deeply concerning. This one deserves a watch.
Folks, the big fella did it. We all know this. And thankfully, he got his.
But what the series really got me thinking about are the thousands of our fellow citizens rotting away today in U.S. jails for crimes they didn't commit. According to the National Registry of Exonerations as many as one in ten people in U.S. prisons may be innocent. TEN PERCENT! This means that at this very moment, up to 230,000 men and women who committed no crime are locked away in cells, serving time they do not deserve. Tens of thousands will wake up behind bars tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, for no reason.
January 2025
2025-01-28
I came across this cool new show called Sexy Beast (HULU)
While this limited series isn't game-changing, it is surprisingly very good. I love this quote...
(Girl to Boy) "Why do you love me?"
(Boy to Girl) "Because when I'm with you I'm not afraid."
-Sexy Beast (Hulu)
2025-01-19
Tom Holland's absolutely brilliant Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade World is the single best history book I've ever read.
Holland charts the 2,500 year march of Christianity from Babylon, Saint Michael, and Thomas Aquinas to Charles Darwin, the Beatles, and the #MeToo movement, ultimately transforming the world.
It is a spellbinding story and so far as I can tell the greatest grift ever perpetuated on mankind by, well, mankind. Most striking — and deeply unsettling — of all is Holland's account of the horrific, violent, often sexually deviant treatment of women and children in the name of faith. To my horror, as I read Dominion, I was reminded again and again of something the sarcastically charismatic Jamie Lannister says in S3E5 of the ever gigantically brilliant Game of Thrones:
"Maybe it is all cocks in the end."
-Jamie Lannister
You have to give it to GoT's producers for their boldly authentic depictions of history. They obviously did their homework. The modern world may not be a walk in the park, and it is especially not so for disadvantaged groups, but books like Dominion and programs like GoT make it hard to doubt the incredible progress we've made, and will hopefully continue to make into the future and beyond.
2025-01-12
Avicii: I'm Tim is Netflix's wonderful tribute documentary to the game-changing DJ and record producer.
Just yesterday my son shared Avicii's 2015 track Ten More Days with me. It's a beautiful and haunting song I must have missed when it dropped.
I'm torn between my wildest dreams
to satisfy the beast in me
And a grounded love that raises me above
the grabbing hands of cowards and of thieves
-Avicii
2025-01-08
For the last few weeks I've been working on an essay inspired by a conversation with my daughter about what it means to live an interesting life.
Henrik Karlsson has a very cool, very interesting take on interestingness on his Escaping Flatland substack.
The path of maximal interestingness is supposed to feel like fun. Not fun as in 'I feel entertained' but fun as in, 'this is engrossing and self-surprising, life-affirming and a little scary. Interestingness is the compulsion to know, is not a property of an idea; it is a cluster of emotions. You can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly. You have to look for that thing that surges up in you — surges like rage, like laughter, like sadness — when you encounter clues. -Henrik Karlsson
December 2024
2024-12-07
Finally Watching Game of Thrones. The People Were Right: PURE GENIUS.
At the same time, I'm also reading Simon Sebag Montefiore's brilliant biography of the Middle East, Jerusalem: The Biography. What strikes me most about these works are their uncanny similarities. It got me to thinking about the ties that bind us — family, politics, faith — and to ask whether and how much we've actually evolved as a species. We know what Steven Pinker would say, but as I consider the Darwinian scramble and frothy malaise of our current world, I'm not so sure.
Update: After giving further thought to this idea, I wrote this short piece: Jerusalem Meets Westeros: What Game of Thrones and History Reveal About Us.
November 2024
2024-11-22
Long-Term Procrastination Is A Tragedy Of The Commons.
All versions of you — Monday You, Tuesday You, Wednesday You, and so on — abuse "the commons" of your life: time and energy. As the weeks, months, and years pass, your aggressive pursuit of comfort and your relentless accumulation of short-term self-interest yields a tragedy for all versions of you. Heed this warning.
2024-11-18
Technology Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
Answer your phone on the first try, respond to texts within a few minutes, and reply to emails within a few hours or you're the bad guy — rude, irresponsible, disrespectful, impossible to reach. Let me get this straight. They're addicted to the glass and plastic brick of cocaine in their pocket, but because I refuse to be makes me the bad guy?
2024-11-16
The Bravest Luddites.
As we approach the quarter mark of the 21st century, mobile phones are widely regarded as modern-day addiction machines. They've deranged society, reshaped culture in ways no one likes, and eroded our well-being, attention spans, and focus. They separate us from intimacy, close relationships, and undistracted conversation. Yet, despite the near-universal recognition of all the harms of mobile phones, very few appear to care enough to take meaningful action. And the ones that do are the luddites?
2024-11-12
The Riskiest Choice.
In today’s America, that sense of promise, individualism, earthy resolve, and many of the broad freedoms we once took for granted are fast being diluted away by capitalist modernity, the internet-inspired silos we're imprisoned in, and our desire, striving, and addiction for more — more money, more stuff, and more notice. Why over the last 50 years have so many of us exchanged risk, beauty, and intimacy for comfort, convenience, and the notice and applause of complete strangers? This, to me, is the riskiest choice we could have made.
2024-11-08
The Demented, Dead End Narcissism Of Social Media.
After you've settled into a filter bubble that ONLY reflects what you relate to and identify with, blocked and unfollowed people whose worldview you disagree with, and curated your utopia based on your narrow and limited cherished values, a demented narcissism sets in, hardens, and warps your very being. Being unable or unwilling to put yourself in someone else's shoes is the first step in the breakdown of empathy and shared experience.
September 2024
2024-09-28
Smile!
"If there was no such thing as smiles, it's likely there would be no such thing as laughter, and a world without laughter is not a world i'm interested in living in, so thank you for the smiles.
-me
2024-09-21
WTF CNN!?
CNN interviewed the Florida sheriff whose department arrested the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump on Sunday (September 15, 2024) at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Describing the would-be assassin during the arrest the sheriff said the man was, "As calm as a teenage kid getting ready to go to a late night church service." WTF does this actually mean???
2024-09-17
Things I Wrote Down During Ketamine Treatment But Thankfully Never Sent To Anyone…
Listen man, when you're on these psychedelics you see IT ALL — THE WHOLE DAM THING — FOR WHAT IT IS. I'm soaring overhead and watching all the ether below be redeemed for its paltry pettiness and irrational scarcities
You know what's weird. Whenever I'm doin the ketamine I hear this very loud machine noise, just beyond which I can sense children's musicals being played and I can hear carnivals. The kids have to play. We'll fix this here but they must play. Let the kids play but turn off the dam machines.
I'm inside ketamine's Alice in Wonderland checking in from outer Pluto. Theres nothing weirder than seeing way far beyond what we think we know, all the while nowing that we know nothing. Like why does this Willy Wonka-land work for earthbound depression. Trippy-flee trippy-fly. Mankind makes no kind of sense, man. Everything's silly except for the silliness of every silly thing. What are we doing? If we ever finally know what we're likely to never figure out, we'll know that what we thought we knew was nowhere near the truth of what actually is and much much closer to what cannot ever be. And I think it's important y'all know that.
2024-09-14
Discomfort with "UNCOMFORTABILITY"?
Why, I've long-wondered, do so many people butcher this word? They'll say "uncomfortability" (this is not a word) or "uncomfort" (this is also not a word). Very strange.
2024-09-09
1 in 400 Trillion Odds.
The odds of you being born at this specific moment in time, to your specific parents, with your unique combination of genes, are astronomically low — perhaps beyond our ability to calculate precisely. The widely cited '1 in 400 trillion' is more a metaphor for the immense improbability of individual existence than a precise scientific figure. My point: our lives are the product of an unbroken chain of chance encounters, decisions, and events stretching back billions of years. What if one ancestor had turned left instead of right, or one molecule collided differently? Reflecting on this, how might we honor the impossibly intricate web of coincidences that brought us here together to read these words?
2024-09-06
This Quote About Books.
I always sniff books before buying them.
The smell of a book is DECISIVE
-Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland
This Quote About Libraries.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library
-Jorge Luis Borges
August 2024
2024-08-28
You'd Be Surprised How Many People Are Thinking The Same Things You Are.
Years ago, I finally said something in an AA meeting I’d been too afraid to say out loud, afraid it sounded crazy. I said that as much as I miss my brother, and as dark as the pain of his untimely death remains, I don’t want that pain to go away. Losing it would feel like leaving him behind, abandoning him. And that ain't ever gonna happen.
Instead of the confused looks or awkward silences, at least 70% of the room nodded along in agreement as I spoke. A powerful reminder that we’re never as alone or as unique as we think.