About two years ago, I went to see my doctor. Our conversation went like this:

Doctor: “Bill, you need to lose weight.”

Me: “I know, I know. How much do you think I need to lose?”

Doctor: “That depends. How long do you want to live?”

Funny guy, huh? But that one landed, and it marked a turning point. Since then, I’ve made health and fitness a genuine priority in ways I hadn’t since at least before the pandemic.

Slowly but surely, it’s added up. One extra dividend I hadn’t planned on: I’ve had my best ski season since I was a kid. The days on the mountain feel noticeably better than they did when I started.

I assumed that was just the result of being in better shape overall.

A new study suggests, however, something more specific might also be happening in my head. It might give you a new perspective on exercise too.

What the research found

Writing in the journal Brain Research last month, researchers from University College London say they found that the brain benefits from exercise don’t just accumulate; instead, they actually compound as you get fitter.

Led by Flaminia Ronca of UCL’s Institute of Sport, Exercise & Health, the researchers took a group of sedentary, unfit adults and put them through a 12-week cycling program — three sessions per week. At the start, middle, and end of the study, they measured participants’ levels of a protein called BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

BDNF is sometimes described as the brain’s fertilizer. It supports the growth of new neurons and new connections between brain cells. It helps maintain the ones already there.

Exercise is one of the most reliable ways to trigger its release, as little as 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity appears to be enough to get it going.

The crux of the study: Resting BDNF levels didn’t meaningfully change over the 12 weeks. However, the spike of BDNF that followed a single hard workout got significantly larger as participants got fitter.

That increase tracked directly with improvements in aerobic fitness.

Thus, the fitter they became, the bigger the neurological response to each individual session.

On top of that, higher BDNF responses were linked to measurably better activity in the prefrontal cortex — the region that governs attention, decision-making, and self-control — during cognitive tests.

“The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks,” Ronca said in a press statement.

The compound interest of fitness

People tend to think of a skipped workout as losing one unit of benefit, but this research suggests the math might be less forgiving than that.

What you’re also skipping is an opportunity to build the system that makes the next workout pay more.

Frankly, it also comports with my own experience, and I suspect anyone else who has gone from a “know I should” attitude to a “really hate to miss it” attitude at the gym.

There are some caveats, as always.

Only around 20 participants completed all the required sessions with usable data, which is a small sample. The results show correlation, not proof of causation.

So, treat this as a compelling early signal, not a settled verdict. Larger trials would help.

But, it fits a broader pattern in the research: The adult brain is more adaptable than most people assume, and the habits that support it tend to reward consistency in ways that aren’t always obvious in the short term.

Next up: a study on whether having a doctor with a deadpan sense of humor motivates people to be healthier.

At least it worked for me.

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Other things worth knowing …

• President Trump refused to apologize to Pope Leo XIV on Monday after criticizing the pontiff for his opposition to the war in Iran — and he sought to explain away his now-deleted social media post depicting himself as Jesus by saying he had thought the image was of him as a doctor. (AP; screen capture of the deleted post, so you can decide)

• President Trump’s decision to blockade all Iranian shipments out of or into the Strait of Hormuz starting Monday morning sets up the next great test in the Iran war: Which side can endure more economic pain, Tehran’s new leadership or Mr. Trump himself? Almost everything about how this new turn in the war plays out is likely to look very different than what has unfolded so far. (NYT)

• Rep. Eric Swalwell, a former Democratic frontrunner in the California gubernatorial race, resigned from Congress on Monday amid sexual misconduct allegations. Swalwell announced his resignation in a statement posted to his X account, while still denying some of the allegations made against him in recent days. (CNBC)

• It will be more expensive than ever to attend World Cup matches held in the United States this summer, a trend that has soccer fans in the U.S. and around the world frustrated about who will have access to watch historic clashes on the pitch in person. The 1994 World Cup in the U.S. still holds the record for largest total attendance and average attendance per match. (The Hill)

• So Much for Springtime: The East Coast Braces for Summer Heat: Washington could hit 90 or higher. New York won’t be far behind. But it won’t last long. (NYT)

• Surcharges Are Suddenly Everywhere—And Grumpy Americans Are Paying Up: The add-ons were a feature during Covid and are once again sneaking their way onto bills. ‘I feel like I need to be my own detective.’ (WSJ)

• Wearing formal office wear, reading glasses and leather shoes, an annoyed Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. did a few rounds of jumping jacks and jogged briefly outside his office in front of journalists Monday to disprove rumors of his failing health. “I challenge anyone who are saying that I am sick, that they come and exercise with me,” Marcos, 68, told reporters. “You come to the gym with me. Let’s see who can lift the weights better.” (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Stefano Romanello on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

A few weeks ago my daughter and I were driving from New Jersey to Boston to visit family, and we talked about where to stop for food.

“Five Guys!” she suggested. “I’ve been hoping all week that we could go to Five Guys!”

This presented a little problem. I’m normally all for Five Guys on a road trip, but this was a Friday evening in the middle of Lent, when Catholics aren’t supposed to eat meat.

Now, I could probably write a book on my lifelong relationship with the institution of the Catholic church.

But does the world really need that?

For our purposes, let’s just say that one good reason why a 50-something dad might try to show respect and practice the religion he was born into might be so that his daughter will have had the experience of seeing him do it, and be better able to make her own choices later.

Also, wasn’t there something about not having to follow the no-meat rule when you’re traveling? Maybe?

We went to Five Guys, and I felt a little of the ol’ Catholic guilt. But then something happened that made me feel better.

I noticed a woman sitting alone, off to the side, hunched over, with 3 or 4 fully packed bags stuffed under the table.

As we walked by on the way out, I realized she didn’t have any food—just the free peanuts that Five Guys offers while you’re waiting.

So I used a trick my grandfather used to do, only adjusted for inflation.

I took a $20 bill from my pocket, folded it, walked up to her, and said: “I think you dropped this. Maybe you can get some dinner.”

Then I walked away quickly, and my brain did what it always does: it started overthinking everything.

Was that the right way to do it? Did I make her feel seen, or singled out? Did the whole “you dropped this” line actually preserve her dignity, or was that just something I told myself?

Now, writing this, there’s a second layer: does telling the story turn it into something else entirely—like I’m trying to prove I’m a good guy?

Welcome to my world. I don’t have clean answers to any of this.

What I do know is this: if I hadn’t broken the no-meat rule, I wouldn’t have been there at all.

And my daughter wouldn’t have seen me try.

I wrote this for a few reasons.

First, because it’s one of those little vignettes that happens to me now and then, and I realize that if I don’t write it down someplace like here I’ll forget it. Like the time a little girl might have been hit by a car if our refrigerator hadn’t broken the week before.

Second, because I actually wrote a shorter version of this as the opening to an Inc.com article about fast food getting too expensive for some customers. I think it works better here on its own.

But finally, because it’s a real-life version of one of the best rules I learned about storytelling way back when.

Great things can happen when you break the rules. But first, you have to know them.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Pam Bondi is refusing to testify about her handling of the Epstein files despite a subpoena to appear before Congress, on the grounds she is no longer attorney general. So, I guess we’ll never know what happened. (Axios)

• Top-ranked podcaster Joe Rogan claimed Wednesday that President Trump launched the war in Iran to distract Americans from the Epstein files. “Look, the Epstein Files comes out — we go to war with Iran. It’s a good way to get people to stop talking about certain things,” Rogan said. “You give them a new problem to think about.” (Mediate)

• Iran is demanding that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, as it seeks to retain control over passage. “Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush,” Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told the FT. (The Financial Times)

• President Trump is talking about quitting NATO. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt: ‘I have a direct quote from the President of the United States … and I will share it with all of you: “They were tested and they failed ... And I would add, it’s quite sad that NATO turned their backs on the American people.” (Daily Mail)

• I don’t think I even mentioned Zohran Mamdani more than once or twice in the past year, but this surprised me: Around half of New Yorkers approve of Mayor Mamdani’s job performance as he approaches his 100th day in office, and a clear majority believe the city is headed in the right direction. The survey, conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, is the first high-quality, nonpartisan poll to capture New Yorkers’ views of Mr. Mamdani, 34, since he took office on Jan. 1.

• On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades. Now a group of devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one. (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Stefano Romanello on Unsplash. See you in the comments.

Recently, I wrote about a fascinating Yale study finding that people who hold positive beliefs about aging were significantly more likely to show measurable physical and cognitive improvement over time — in some cases, well into their 80s and 90s.

Shorter version: How you think about getting older shapes how you actually age.

Now comes the uncomfortable flip side of that coin.

A new study out of NYU suggests that if positive beliefs about aging can help you improve, anxiety about aging may be actively making things worse — not just emotionally but also at the cellular level.

The study

Researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health analyzed data from 726 women who participated in the Midlife in the United States (Midus) study, a large national survey tracking health and behavior across adulthood.

Participants were asked how much they worried about things like declining health, becoming less attractive with age, and growing too old to have children.

Researchers then examined blood samples using two “epigenetic clocks” — scientific tools that measure biological aging based on chemical markers on DNA, independent of how old someone is on paper.

The two clocks measure slightly different things:

• GrimAge2 estimates cumulative biological damage over a lifetime.

• DunedinPACE captures the current pace of aging — essentially, how fast your body is aging right now.

The findings, published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, were striking.

Women who reported higher levels of aging anxiety showed signs of faster biological aging on DunedinPACE — meaning their bodies appeared to be aging more quickly than their birth dates would suggest.

“Our research suggests that subjective experiences may be driving objective measures of aging,” said lead author Mariana Rodrigues, a PhD student at NYU School of Global Public Health. “Aging-related anxiety is not merely a psychological concern, but may leave a mark on the body with real health consequences.”

Not all worries are equal

One important nuance: Not every type of aging-related anxiety showed the same effect.

Fears about declining health had the strongest and most consistent association with accelerated biological aging. Worries about appearance and fertility did not show a statistically significant link.

The researchers suspect health fears are particularly potent because they tend to be persistent and self-reinforcing.

While appearance or fertility concerns may fade as life priorities shift, health anxiety can create a feedback loop — fear of physical decline heightens bodily awareness, which amplifies the perception of threat, which sustains physiological stress responses over time.

Importantly, the association between health anxiety and faster biological aging held up even after the researchers controlled for sociodemographic factors, menopausal status, and existing chronic health conditions.

When they added health behaviors — smoking, alcohol use, and BMI — the association approached statistical insignificance, one theory being that these kinds of behaviors may partly explain how the anxiety gets under the skin, rather than disproving the connection.

“Our research identifies aging anxiety as a measurable and modifiable psychological determinant that seems to be shaping aging biology,” said senior author Adolfo Cuevas, an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at NYU School of Global Public Health.

In case this study about anxiety actually gives you more anxiety, maybe let’s focus on the word “modifiable” in that quote. It’s a deliberate signal from the researchers that this isn’t a fixed outcome.

The honest caveats

A few important limits worth naming.

First, the effect sizes here are modest — we’re talking about a 0.07 standard deviation increase in biological aging pace per unit of health anxiety.

Second, the study included only women, by design.

It probably won’t break news to suggest that aging anxiety might weigh harder on women, given pressures around appearance and health, and the researchers wanted to examine it in that context specifically.

Whether similar patterns hold for men is an open question.

Finally, this was a cross-sectional study, meaning it captured a snapshot in time. It can show that health anxiety and faster biological aging tend to show up together, but it cannot prove that one is causing the other. Longitudinal research is needed to establish that.

What it means, taken together

By itself, this study adds one more piece to an increasingly consistent picture: The psychological relationship you have with aging isn’t separate from the biological reality of it. They’re connected in ways that are measurable, even if the mechanisms aren’t fully understood yet.

Combined with the Yale findings from a few weeks ago, the direction of the evidence is hard to ignore: positive beliefs about aging appear to improve function, and anxiety about aging may accelerate decline.

Neither study proves the relationship is causal, but they do suggest the same practical implication.

Making peace with getting older isn’t just good for your mood. Your biology, it seems, may be taking notes.

Worth thinking about — ideally without worrying too much about it.

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Other things worth knowing …

• President Trump on Tuesday evening said he will suspend bombing Iran for two weeks, subject to Iran agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The deal came after Trump pledged early Tuesday that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if an agreement hadn’t been reached. What to watch: Iran says (who knows what’s true) that the deal includes an end to all sanctions, and allows Iran and Oman to charge $2 million tolls on ships transiting through the strait. If that last part is true, it could represent a very big new revenue source for Iran that did not exist before the war. (NPR, Times of Israel)

• The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue an American airman who was shot down in southern Iran over the weekend. The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and uses artificial intelligence to isolate the signature from background noise. Source who explained it all: “I don’t think people even know this technology is possible.” (New York Post)

• ICE has released the wife of a U.S. Army staff sergeant after she was arrested at the military base where he is stationed. Annie Ramos, 22, wife of Sergeant Matthew Blank, 23, was arrested April 2 when the couple tried to register Ramos as a military spouse before Blank deployed overseas. Ramos, who was born in Honduras, was 20 months old when she was issued an order of removal. (ABC News)

• President Trump’s new homeland security secretary suggested he might withdraw customs officers from the airports in Democratic-run “sanctuary cities,” including many of the busiest airports in the United States, such as JFK in New York, LAX in Los Angeles, and Denver. “If they’re a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city?” Mullin said on Fox News. (The Times)

• Amazon.com and the U.S. Postal Service have reached a new package-handling agreement, after Amazon threatened to drastically cut back on the number of packages it sends through the struggling agency. The e-commerce giant is the Postal Service’s largest customer, shipping nearly 15% of all the packages, and translating to about $6 billion in revenue for the agency. (WSJ)

• The story behind those mind-bending Artemis II moon images. (USA Today / NASA)

• It was another big weekend for family films, as “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” smashed the box office with a domestic haul of $190.8 million. It is yet another auspicious sign of the continued dominance of family films in cinemas. Although known franchises such as “Super Mario,” “Zootopia” and “Minecraft” have an obvious leg up due to their existing fanbases, original animated films like Sony Pictures Animation’s “Goat” and Disney and Pixar’s “Hoppers” have also had solid runs this year. (LA Times)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Marc Najera on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Today’s newsletter is about neuroscience and memory. First, I’d like to ask three specific questions:

• In the original Monopoly game, which property is statistically landed on most often and why?

• What everyday habit has been shown in sleep research to quietly wreck your memory the next day even if you think you “slept enough”?

• Who was the first male player to score goals in five different FIFA World Cups?

If you immediately felt either intrigued or slightly annoyed by these questions, good. That reaction is part of the point.

Because according to a new neuroscience study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, being able to answer deep, detail-oriented questions like these may literally reshape the brain. It can also potentially help protect cognition as you age.

The research, led by Erik Wing of Baycrest Hospital in Toronto, focused on birdwatching — comparing expert birdwatchers with novices. At first glance, birding might sound like a niche hobby, but from a brain-science perspective, it’s almost the perfect test case.

Serious bird identification demands sustained attention, fine-grained visual discrimination, and a surprisingly heavy load on memory. Experts often learn to distinguish hundreds of species based on subtle features — beak curvature, wing bars, and tail shape — often under time pressure and imperfect viewing conditions.

What the researchers found

Using diffusion-weighted MRI scans along with behavioral testing, the researchers studied 29 expert birders (ages 24 to 75) and 29 matched novices.

Compared with beginners, the experts showed:

• Structural differences in multiple brain regions tied to attention and perception

• Functional activation in those same regions when identifying challenging birds

• Better identification accuracy that tracked with those brain differences

One of the key measures involved how water molecules diffuse through brain tissue.

In experts, diffusion was more constrained in several frontoparietal and posterior cortical regions, a signal researchers interpret as greater structural complexity.

More simply, years of focused expertise appeared to leave a physical signature in the brain. Plus, the data suggested these changes may blunt some aspects of age-related decline in the specific regions supporting expert performance.

So, is birdwatching a magic antiaging pill? No, but it does reinforce something neuroscientists have been circling for years — sustained, effortful learning changes the adult brain in durable ways.

Why birding?

All of this connects directly to earlier research from Wing and colleagues, which I wrote about here a few years back. In that work, expert birders didn’t just recognize birds better. Instead, they also organized new information differently.

When shown unfamiliar species, novices grouped birds by obvious surface features like size or color. Experts, by contrast, sorted them using deeper structural traits such as beak shape or tail configuration.

That difference turned out to matter for memory. People who processed the birds at that more detailed, expert level were also more accurate at remembering them later. One plausible explanation is that the more richly structured your knowledge base, the easier it becomes to “hang” new information onto it.

The bigger takeaway

If there’s a quiet theme running through modern memory science, it’s that memory isn’t primarily about hoarding facts. It’s about building useful mental models of the world.

As UC Davis neuroscientist Charan Ranganath put it, memory helps extract what’s important so you can navigate an uncertain future — not just replay the past. Again, caution is warranted. This new study is relatively small. It shows correlation, not proof that birdwatching itself prevents cognitive decline.

Taken together with years of related research — in music, navigation, athletics, and other domains — the direction of the evidence is getting harder to ignore.

The adult brain remains far more plastic than many people assume. So what should you actually do with this? No, you don’t need to run out and buy binoculars.

The broader implication is simpler and more encouraging. Sustained engagement in any detail-rich, mentally demanding hobby may help build the kind of knowledge scaffolding that supports stronger learning and memory over time.

Birding just happens to be a particularly elegant example, which connects back to those three questions at the top. The answers, in case you were wondering:

• The most landed-on property in Monopoly? Illinois Avenue. When players exit jail, the most common dice rolls (especially six to eight) funnel them there.

• The nighttime habit that wrecks memory? Checking your phone and sleep fragmentation. Even brief awakenings and light exposure can impair the brain’s overnight memory consolidation.

• The male player who has scored at the most FIFA World Cups? That’s Cristiano Ronaldo, with goals in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022.

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Other things:

• President Donald Trump’s iPhone won’t stop ringing, as his number has become the ultimate status symbol and reporters keep finding it. In the two weeks since the U.S. and Israel began military operations in Iran, Trump has done more than 30 cell phone interviews, picking up without screening his callers and conducting brief conversations with ... journalists from outlets from The New York Times to Washington Reporter. (Senator)

• A former Afghan special forces soldier who served for years alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan for years, and who was evacuated by the U.S. with his family in in August 2021, reportedly died in custody less than 24 hours after being detained in Texas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE said that Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41, a father of six, had been arrested in a “targeted enforcement action” after allegations of SNAP fraud and theft, which his surviving family denies. (NBC News)

• The National Rifle Association has a new advertising campaign: “BE READY,” urging Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights, and focusing on warnings from government officials about Iranian terror cells and lone wolf terrorists. (The Washington Times)

• Cuba’s national electric grid has collapsed, the country’s grid operator said, leaving around 10 million people without power amid a U.S.-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the island’s already obsolete generation system. (USA Today)

• Some 200,000 immigrant truck drivers began losing their commercial driver’s licenses under a new Trump administration rule that took effect Monday. The rule bars immigrants who are asylum seekers, refugees or recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses. Key point: Those with valid commercial driver’s licenses will lose their driving privileges as their licenses expire, not immediately. (Wash Post)

• Pope Leo met on Monday with an investigative journalist who alleges that Opus Dei, a prominent ‌Catholic organisation with ties to right-wing politicians in the U.S. ‌and other countries, covered up sexual and financial crimes, which the group firmly denies. Opus Dei has a strong presence in Peru, ​where Leo served as ‌a missionary for decades before becoming pope. The group says its ​mission is to spread Christian teachings across the world. (USA Today)

• Many U.S. adults are skipping parenting or having fewer kids – and it’s forcing schools to close. (The Guardian)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

If you had to choose a single dystopian theme in today’s tech landscape, it might be the recurring allegations that some AI chatbots have encouraged mentally ill users to harm themselves — and sometimes others. A few examples:

• In Greenwich, Connecticut, a widely reported murder-suicide is now the subject of litigation that alleges ChatGPT conversations reinforced a man’s paranoid delusions before he killed his mother and himself.

• In another case, the family of Zane Chaplin filed suit alleging ChatGPT interactions contributed to the teen’s suicide.

• In Maine, a judge found a man not criminally responsible for homicide after what authorities described as delusions that were intertwined with heavy ChatGPT use.

In an especially heartbreaking case, Reuters documented the death of a 76-year-old disabled man who became emotionally entangled with what he believed was a woman inviting him to meet her in New York City — but was actually an AI chatbot.

There are other alleged incidents cataloged publicly, but until now, most of this conversation has lived in the realm of anecdotes, lawsuits, and deeply unsettling headlines.

For the first time, however, there is systematic clinical evidence suggesting a potential signal beneath the noise.

54,000 patients

Researchers in Denmark reviewed electronic health records from nearly 54,000 patients who received psychiatric care between late 2022 and mid-2025.

Their method: search clinical notes for mentions of chatbot use and evaluate what clinicians observed. Out of more than 10 million notes, they found:

• 181 notes mentioning chatbots

• 126 unique patients involved

• 38 patients whose cases were judged “compatible with potentially harmful consequences”

The most common concerns involved:

• Delusions

• Suicidality or self-harm

• Eating-disorder behaviors

• Mania or hypomania

• Obsessive or compulsive patterns

In absolute terms, of course, 181 notes out of 54,000 patients is a small number. However, it was large enough to get clinicians’ attention, especially given the scale these tools are now reaching.

Moreover, the study spans the exact period when AI chatbot adoption was accelerating rapidly from a relatively small base, and the researchers themselves reported that mentions of chatbot use in clinical notes increased over time.

Design tension

The researchers point to what may be the key mechanism: AI chatbots are engineered to be agreeable, responsive, and validating.

For people already experiencing paranoia, grandiosity, or emerging delusional thinking, a system optimized to validate the user can end up reinforcing distorted beliefs instead of challenging them.

I don’t think anyone is going to suggest giving up on them, even if it weren’t already too late for that. And let’s be honest, there have been versions of this dynamic across the modern tech stack:

• recommendation engines that feed you more of what you already believe

• social feeds that learn your emotional triggers

• engagement systems that reward intensity over accuracy

AI chatbots compress that entire feedback loop into a one-on-one conversation that can feel intensely personal.

The limitations

This research doesn’t prove chatbots cause mental illness or establish incidence rates.

If you zoom out, however, the adoption curve is staggering.

OECD data released in January 2026 report that more than one-third of individuals across OECD countries used generative AI tools in 2025.

Among younger users, the numbers are even higher. A Pew Research Center study published in December 2025 found roughly two-thirds of U.S. teens say they have used AI chatbots.

So this report emerges at the exact moment when these tools are scaling to hundreds of millions of users.

And, the Danish researchers have fairly limited recommendations—mainly that mental health professionals should begin asking patients about AI chatbot use, especially in severe conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

But, I think we have some bigger questions to address:

• At what point does maximizing engagement collide with a duty of care?

• At what point does a builder become morally or even legally responsible for what vulnerable users do after using their products?

Anyone feel especially “agreeable, responsive, or validating” after reading that?

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Other things:

• The International Energy Agency has agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil to address the supply disruption triggered by the Iran war, the largest such action in the organization’s history. (CNBC)

• U.S. military investigators believe the United States was responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike that reportedly killed 175 people, mostly children, at an Iranian elementary school—and mostly likely because of outdated targeting data. However, President Trump’s attempts to sidestep the blame for the strike have complicated the inquiry, leaving officials who have reviewed the findings showing U.S. culpability expressing unease. (NYT)

• President Trump’s Department of Justice asked New Mexico investigators to shut down a probe into a ranch owned by convicted child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, according to Rep. James Comer, a Republican form Kentucky: “This whole thing doesn’t make sense. ... Was it because he had powerful friends? Was it because he was an agent? We don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.” (Mediate)

• Attorney General Pam Bondi has moved to an undisclosed Washington-area military base where other Trump administration officials also live, after threats drug cartels and critics of her actions in handling the Epstein case. Among her neighbors: Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Kristi Noem, the exiting homeland security secretary; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. (NYT)

• Press photographers who published “unflattering” photos of Hegseth will no longer permitted to take photos inside the Pentagon press briefing room, according to a report. (The Independent)

• The percentage of voters with significant levels of confidence in the Supreme Court has dropped to its lowest point since NBC News began polling on the question in 2000, according to the most recent survey: 22% of registered voters nationally said they have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the high court. Another 40% said they had “some” confidence, while 38% said they had “very little” or “no” confidence. (NBC News)

• OK, we have to end with something a bit more uplifting, at least quirky … Two dozen couples put their relationships to the test on a grassy hill in southern England over the weekend, in the U.K. Wife Carrying Race, one of the country’s quirkiest annual sports events. Teemu Touvinen and Jatta Leinonen from Finland were crowned the winners at 1 minute and 45 seconds. Their prize? A barrel of local ale. (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Small issue: She didn’t like the way the headphones felt, so she cast them aside.

And yet, she sat there blissfully watching Puppy Dog Pals as if it were some kind of 1920s silent movie.

We’d sort of lucked into this no-screen-time mode of parenting. We didn’t even have an iPad at the time, and she was basically limited to the odd episode of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

Ah, memories. Of course, then came the Covid-19 pandemic, and all bets were off.

I mention all this because of an interesting study showing that while parenting without screen time for kids these days is basically a Sisyphean endeavor, letting screens babysit comes with a cost.

And, the consequences might not show up for more than a decade.

New research from Singapore tracked 168 children for over 10 years and found that babies exposed to high levels of screen time before age 2 developed brain changes that led to slower decision-making and increased anxiety by their teenage years.

Writing in eBioMedicine, Huang Pei and his team at the National University of Singapore conducted brain scans at three different points — ages 4.5, 6, and 7.5 — to track how children’s brains developed over time.

Children with more infant screen time showed accelerated maturation in brain networks responsible for visual processing and cognitive control.

That sounds like a good thing — faster development, right?

Wrong.

“Accelerated maturation happens when certain brain networks develop too fast, often in response to adversity or other stimuli,” Huang told researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. “During normal development, brain networks gradually become more specialized over time. However, in children with high screen exposure, the networks controlling vision and cognition specialized faster, before they had developed the efficient connections needed for complex thinking.”

Metaphor: Building a house too quickly gives you a frame that goes up fast, but without a solid foundation. Years later, cracks appear.

The study found that screen time at 3 and 4 years of age didn’t show these same effects. The critical window is infancy — specifically, before age 2 — when brain development is most rapid and vulnerable to environmental influences.

Children with these altered brain networks took longer to make decisions during cognitive tasks at age 8.5. By age 13, those with slower decision-making reported higher anxiety symptoms.

Unfortunately, the researchers estimate that globally, infants spend two to three hours daily on screens. This far exceeds World Health Organization recommendations.

But there’s an encouraging finding buried in the research.

In a related 2024 Psychological Medicine study, the same team found that parent-child reading counteracts some of these brain changes. Among children whose parents read to them frequently at age 3, the link between infant screen time and altered brain development weakened significantly.

“It is not about this specific activity,” lead researcher Tan Ai Peng told The Straits Times. “Rather, it is about doing something together that engages the child.”

Postscript: We had a snow day yesterday out of school, and like lots of other parents we fought the Battle of No Screens a bit.

Key solution: Taking the kid sledding on the giant hill near our house, with probably 100 other parents and kids there too.

I promise you: It was nowhere near as quiet as a silent episode of Puppy Dog Pals.

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Other things worth knowing …

• What else can be done to force President Trump’s Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files? Legal experts weigh in. (The Guardian)

• Another government shutdown is a near-certainty, as key Senate Democrats vowed to oppose a budget deal including funding for DHS and ICE after federal agents shot and killed a Minneapolis man. Separately, TikTok users said videos they posted about the shooting or criticizing ICE were suppressed, days after a deal was finalized to spin off the U.S. business to new investors who are allies of President Trump. TikTok blamed “a power outage.” (New York Times, The Washington Post)

• Fox News: Senior “federal sources involved immigration enforcement” who “support the mass deportation agenda, but have serious hesitations about the way it is being carried out and the messaging that comes with it” say they “believe this is going to end up being what they call a ‘bad shoot.’” After this reporting, the government suddenly demoted Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, returning him to his former job in California with an understanding he will retire soon. (Fox News’s Bill Melugin, on X; The Atlantic)

• Jeson Nelon Presilla Flores, a suspect in a 2022 Southern California jewellery heist valued at $100 million, was deported to Ecuador in December. Prosecutors told the the decision to deport Flores was taken “unbeknownst” to them, and that they “remain eager to prosecute” him in the highly unlikely event he ever returns to the U.S. (The Independent)

• After 80-year bond, Germans find breaking up with the U.S. is hard to do: To many Germans, Americans were saviors after World War II, and they feel especially hurt over President Donald Trump’s disdain for Europe and traditional alliances. (The Washington Post)

• Like digging ‘your own professional grave’: The translators grappling with losing work to AI. (CNN)

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Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Yet, I’m terrible at actually getting enough sleep myself. In fact, I just went back and counted the sheer number of times I’ve made reference in this newsletter to the idea of writing it late at night.

Let’s just say there are more than a few. Like here, here, here, and here.

I know I’m not alone. Hence, why a massive new study from Oregon Health & Science University hit me like a splash of cold water.

The findings: Insufficient sleep is one of the strongest negative predictors of how long you’ll live—more than insufficient diet or exercise, loneliness, unemployment or education level. It’s second only to smoking.

Literally every county in America

Researchers analyzed data from all 3,143 U.S. counties over six years, from 2019 to 2025, comparing how much sleep people reported getting with average life expectancy in each county.

They used CDC survey data and controlled for all the usual suspects: smoking, obesity, diabetes, physical inactivity, diet, even access to healthcare.

Across income levels and geographic boundaries, the correlation was clear: Counties where more people slept fewer than seven hours a night had shorter life expectancies.

Andrew McHill, Ph.D., who led the study as an associate professor at OHSU, said he was surprised by the sharpness of the findings.

“I didn’t expect it to be so strongly correlated to life expectancy,” McHill said. “We’ve always thought sleep is important, but this research really drives that point home: People really should strive to get seven to nine hours of sleep if at all possible.”

Sleep matters more

Think about how much emphasis we put on eating right and working out—both important, both things I’ve written about countless times. But according to this study, sleep matters more.

“It’s intuitive and makes a lot of sense, but it was still striking to see it materialize so strongly in all of these models,” McHill said. “I’m a sleep physiologist who understands the health benefits of sleep, but the strength of the association between sleep sufficiency and life expectancy was remarkable to me.”

An outside expert put it even more bluntly. “Sleep is a biological reset for nearly every system in the body,” said Michael Howell, MD, a sleep medicine physician and chief medical officer at GEM Sleep. “Chronic sleep deprivation leads to ongoing stress, inflammation and metabolic disruption, which over time increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, depression and neurodegenerative disease.”

Pick three.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage, I admit, quoting my colleague Jessica Stillman’s pithy article from years ago about the so-called entrepreneur’s dilemma: Work, sleep, family, fitness, or friends: Pick three.

But even though sleep often feels like the easiest, lightest thing we can borrow from, something has to give.

As McHill put it: “We think of sleep as something that may not be as important—’I’ll get it tomorrow, or I can wait till the weekend to catch up on it’—but it really needs to be something that we prioritize on a daily basis.”

The study looked at neighboring counties and found stark differences.

In some cases, a county where 40% of residents slept fewer than seven hours sat right next to a county where only 25% did—and the life expectancy gap was several years.

Of course, that doesn’t mean less sleep actually causes shorter life expectancies; people who sleep less might also be more stressed, have less healthy diets, or be more likely to have fatal accidents.

But even if we can’t prove causation, the correlation is compelling, and it’s hard to ignore.

Take it to heart.

Reading this research, I can’t pretend anymore. I can’t keep being the expert who doesn’t follow his own advice. Seven to nine hours isn’t a luxury, or a nice-to-have.

So I’m taking this one to heart. Heck, I’m even finishing this newsletter at the comparatively reasonable time of 8:20 p.m. Small victories, people!

Still, if you’re like me—sacrificing sleep to get everything done, telling yourself you’ll make it up later—well, maybe it’s time we both listened.

It’s not that sacrifice isn’t worth it; it’s that sacrificing your lifespan might not be.

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A few other things worth the time to read them

• After creating thousands of “undressing” pictures of women and sexualized imagery of apparent minors, Elon Musk’s X has limited who can generate images with Grok. Grok’s account on X started telling users who requested editing that only “paying subscribers” can do so, and advertising a $395 annual subscription tier. (Wired)

• A blunt column in Canada’s largest national newspaper went viral warning of the possibility that President Donald Trump may use “military coercion” against the country. The authors’ advice: Learn from Finland’s defenses against Russia. Expand the civil defense force. Build a national drone strategy, inspired by Ukraine’s example. And think about the unthinkable. (Bloomberg)

• A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025, surpassing the 43% measured in 2014, 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, equal shares of U.S. adults — 27% each — identified as either Democrats or Republicans. When pressed, slightly more political independents said they lean toward the Democratic Party than the Republican Party (20% to 15%). (Gallup)

• How IVF has led to a record number of single moms in their 40s. (NPR)

• Self-mutilation and crystal meth: The ‘Chad mindset’ enticing MAGA’s young men. (The Telegraph)

• AI-generated images are complicating efforts to find and capture monkeys on the loose in St Louis. The problem: People keep reporting that the’ve seen or captured the monkeys, posting fake AI-generated pictures online to bolster their claims. (The Independent)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Greg Pappas on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

It costs almost nothing, takes almost no time, and research suggests people actually trust you more when you practice it.

Guess what happened? Quite a few readers commented and emailed me to say “thank you” for having written it. There’s no irony like polite irony.

This got me thinking about one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, at least during the digital media age. I’d actually forgotten the context slightly so I had to go back and find it.

The hook, tailored to me since I live in the New York City area, was that New York had ranked near the bottom in a list of the most polite U.S. states.

Meh. But, then I read the rest of it.

FreshBooks had gone through thousands of invoices sent by its U.S. small-business customers and counted how often words like *please* and *thank you* appeared.

Then, they grouped the results by state and ranked all 50.

No, this was not a double-blind study in a peer-reviewed journal. It was closer to a publicity stunt. But it made me laugh, partly because the company was Canadian.

I was born and grew up in the U.S., but my mother was born in Montreal.

Growing up, my siblings and I had a funny relationship with Canada: we enjoyed visiting, but we also ribbed my mom about stereotypes, accents, and the idea that Canadians were *extra polite*.

So now here was a Canadian company judging Americans on their manners.

I called a Canadian friend, and he gave me my favorite line that basically assured I was going to write something:

“Just because we Canadians are polite,” he said, “don’t assume that means we’re nice.”

FreshBooks’ co-founder, Mike McDerment, was also game.

He left me a voicemail explaining the project that was, fittingly, extremely polite. At one point, he said he thought Canada’s reputation for politeness came from the fact that people there say “sorry” constantly — sometimes when nothing is actually their fault.

Anyway, ranked all 50 states. I’m not going to run the full list again here, but a few things jumped out.

• New Jersey — where I live — was near the bottom. That felt fair.

• New York and Nebraska were tied, which may be the only context in which that has ever happened.

• Massachusetts finished much higher than I expected. I’ve lived there, gone to school there, and have family there, so I can say that.

• I grew up in neighboring Rhode Island which ranked even higher. We tend to say “please” when we want someone to repeat themselves in Rhode Island; maybe that’s a clue. Anyway: 18 percent polite.

And then there was Oklahoma (”the Sooner State;” had to look that up for this aside, tbh) came in first by a mile.

Nearly half of the invoices FreshBooks analyzed from Oklahoma included polite language.

I had an assistant at the time and we spent a few hours reading to local TV stations, radio hosts, newspapers, politicians, and assorted local celebrities—basically anyone we could find with a platform in Oklahoma—all to try to get people to share the story.

It worked! Regional pride kicked in. TV meteorologists especially shared it on their social media accounts.

In the end, about 300,000 people read that article.

I think people liked it because it was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and because people like to hear good things about themselves, and maybe because we were exceedingly and fittingly polite in our outreach.

Thanks for the chance to share that one!

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A few other things worth the time to read them

• An ICE agent shot and killed a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis Wednesday. DHS Kristi Noem claimed the woman had tried to ram her car into ICE agents; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called that narrative “garbage,” adding: “They are already trying to spin this is action [as] self-defense. Having seen the video myself, that is bull****.” The woman was identified as Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother of a 6-year old child. (Star-Tribune)

• The United States seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker after a weekslong chase on the high seas. The Kremlin, which backs Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, accused the U.S. of violating maritime law. (NBC News)

• New federal nutrition guidelines quietly abandoned a 45-year recommendation on alcohol consumption. The updated guidance drops the familiar “two drinks for men, one for women” framing, while emphasizing whole foods, protein, and less added sugar. (AP)

• Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette will print its final edition on May 3. The paper has served the region in some form since 1786 and has won multiple Pulitzer Prizes, but its owners say it has lost more than $350 million over the past 20 years. (Axios)

• Greenlanders are pushing back against renewed talk of U.S. interest in acquiring the territory, saying the idea ignores both history and reality. (BBC)

• Jay-Z is now the richest musician in the world, with an estimated fortune of $2.5 billion. Beyoncé is close behind at about $1 billion; Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, and Rihanna are also near the top. (PennLive)

• The cost of youth sports continues to climb. In some communities, it now costs $50 just to try out—and $3,000 or more per season to play. (The Washington Post)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

It took me quite some time to craft it. What do you emphasize? What do you leave out? How do you capture what made someone’s life matter?

Turns out, those aren’t just personal questions. They’re cultural ones. Obituaries are time capsules that reveal not just who someone was, but what we value as a society at any given moment in history.

According to a massive new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those values have shifted recently in some surprising ways.

Thirty-eight million lives, analyzed

Researchers from Michigan State University, Boston College, and Arizona State University analyzed 38 million obituaries published between 1998 and 2024 on Legacy.com, which hosts about 70 percent of death notices in the United States.

That works out to 6.6 billion words—all analyzed using a supercomputer and a validated word dictionary based on psychologist Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic human values—things like tradition, benevolence, achievement, power, and security.

Lead author David Markowitz, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University, told PsyPost the goal was to understand what Americans are actually remembered for, not just what they hope to be remembered for.

It turns out two values dominated everything else:

• Tradition—particularly religious faith—appeared in 80 percent of obituaries. Words like “church,” “Bible,” “praying,” and “faithful” showed up far more often than any others.

• Benevolence, or caring for others, came in second at 76 percent. Terms like “love,” “family,” “caring,” and “loyal” were everywhere.

By contrast, achievement and power barely registered, showing up in less than a quarter of obituaries.

World events

Things changed noticeably after major world-historical events. Examples:

• After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the language in obituaries shifted noticeably. Security-related words declined, while tradition and benevolence increased—especially in New York State, where the attacks had the most direct impact. Those changes lasted at least a year.

• After the 2008 financial crisis, achievement language gradually declined over the following year. Interestingly, words related to hedonism—pleasure and enjoyment—initially dropped but then rose above baseline levels a year later. “Perhaps this reversal reflects a psychological improvement where people began focusing on values related to satisfaction instead of personal survival over the long term,” Markowitz said in a press release from Michigan State.

• The most surprising finding was what happened after Covid-19: Starting in March 2020, benevolence language in obituaries dropped sharply—and it still hasn’t recovered, even four years later.

“It felt like a paradox,” Markowitz told PsyPost. The researchers think it might reflect how, in times of crisis and personal distress, prosocial behavior becomes harder to publicly recognize, even when it’s widespread.

Meanwhile, tradition-related language increased during Covid and remained elevated years later. The more people who died from Covid in a given area, the more obituaries focused on religion and social norms.

Stereotypes about men and women

The study also revealed patterns that probably won’t surprise you but are worth noting:

• Men were remembered more for achievement, power, and conformity—often tied to military service and civic involvement. Women were remembered more for benevolence and enjoying life.

• Interestingly, men’s obituaries showed more variation across different ages than women’s, suggesting that societal expectations for men change more dramatically over a lifetime.

• Also, older people were remembered more for tradition, while younger people were remembered more for caring about universal welfare and thinking independently.

Maybe a cultural shift?

I keep thinking about that benevolence finding—how it dropped during Covid and never came back.

Maybe it says something about how exhausted we all became. Maybe it reflects a broader cultural shift that we’re still processing.

Maybe there are other things that have changed markedly about our society in the last few years.

Or else more optimistically, maybe it’s harder to single out individual acts of kindness if they become near-universal.

Regardless, when Americans look back on the lives that mattered most to them, what they choose to emphasize isn’t success or status.

It’s faith. It’s caring for others. It’s the traditions and relationships that connect us.

Think about that, as you’re building your legacy.

I know I’ll try to.

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7 other things worth the time it takes you to read them

• The Trump administration announced Tuesday it’s withholding $10 billion for social services programs in five blue states: Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado. “For too long, Democrat-led states and Governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” explained Andrew Nixon, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson. (CBS News)

• About 5,000 people have died of the flu so far this season, including 9 children, as cases surge in 45 states. The news comes after the CDC announced an unprecedented shift in the childhood vaccine schedule, restricting vaccines including those for rotavirus, hepatitis A and B, meningitis and seasonal flu. (The Hill, NBC News)

• Eva Schloss, Anne Frank’s Stepsister and Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 96: Freed from Auschwitz, she was silent about her ordeal for four decades. Then she decided to dedicate her life to educating people about the dangers of prejudice. (The New York Times)

• When You Can’t Get Home From the Caribbean and Nobody Feels Sorry for You: Military action in Venezuela leaves travelers stranded; ‘Boo hoo, you’re stuck on an island.’ (WSJ)

• The U.S. Department of the Interior issued new rules that say “America the Beautiful” National Park passes may be voided if their holders put “stickers” on them, according to a report. Why would people put stickers on their National Park passes? “The move appears to respond to visitors using stickers to cover a prominent image of President Trump that was added to many new passes last year.” (SF Gate)

• A broadcast TV show about a middle-aged guy who becomes an LAPD cop wouldn’t seem like your typical teen magnet. Yet, the “The Rookie” was the most-streamed show among young people under 18 across all broadcast series in the 2024-2025 broadcast TV season, according to Nielsen data. “You’re always surprised in this business at success,” said showrunner Alexi Hawley. (LA Times)

• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is so far refusing to grant a trademark for “Las Vegas Athletics” and “Vegas Athletics,” which could be a problem since Major League Baseball’s former Oakland Athletics (now playing temporarily in Sacramento) plan to move to Las Vegas next year. (Gerben Law)

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7 smart habits

Kids, amirite? We want the best for them.

I’ve been on a years-long mission to collect as much science-based advice as possible regarding how to raise successful kids. Here are seven of the most interesting and useful strategies I’ve found and highlighted.

1. Make sure they get enough sleep.

Researchers at the University of Maryland studied 8,300 children aged 9 to 10, focusing on how much sleep they got and what it meant for their success years later.

Kids who slept less than nine hours per night had less grey matter in areas of the brain responsible for attention, memory, and inhibition control. These differences persisted after two years, a concerning finding that suggests long term harm.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that children aged 6 to 12 sleep 9 to 12 hours per night.

2. Fight for later school start times.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a start time no earlier than 8:30 a.m. for middle and high schools. But about 85 percent of American public high schools start earlier than that.

“In those first early morning hours … children are just essentially half-asleep,” Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley, told NPR.

A 2014 study suggested that later start times could result in up to a 70 percent reduction in teen car accidents.

3. Let them see you struggle.

MIT researchers found that 15-month-olds who watched adults struggle to accomplish tasks before succeeding were consistently willing to try longer to solve their own problems.

“There’s some pressure on parents to make everything look easy,” MIT’s Laura Schulz said. “But this does at least suggest that it may not be a bad thing to show your children that you are working hard to achieve your goals.”

4. Read with them, not just to them.

Reading to your children is “the bare minimum,” according to neuroscientist Erin Clabough. Instead: Read with your kids, not just to them.

Interrupt the story to encourage your children to put themselves into the minds of the characters. “What would you do, if you were the baby bird?”

Even for books you’ve read 216 times, your child can imagine different decisions the character could make.

5. Cultivate awe.

A University of Rochester study of almost 900 parents found that experiencing awe regarding their children was correlated with profound effects on parents’ well-being.

“Awe can actually strengthen parental well-being more broadly and holistically, compared to pride, making parents lives feel happier, more meaningful, and richer in experiences,” researcher Princeton Chee said.

6. Give them agency and independence.

Three professors reviewed hundreds of studies for a report in the Journal of Pediatrics and found that over-structuring children’s time and curtailing their freedom to engage in adventurous play is one of the factors leading to the mental health crisis.

Caveat: Being the only parent who sends your kids to walk to school might be a good way to get a visit from social services. Better to make these changes on a societal level first.

7. Praise their effort, not their gifts.

Stanford’s Carol Dweck gave 11-year-olds a test and praised some for their intelligence, others for their effort.

Praising intelligence put kids into a fixed mindset. Praising effort pushed them into a growth mindset.

“The most astonishing thing to us was that praising intelligence turned kids off to learning,” Dweck said.

Instead of praising a child for solving a puzzle, Dweck suggests saying, “I’m sorry I wasted your time. Let’s do something hard—something you can learn from.”

The bottom line

I’m drawn to these studies because they suggest that small choices now can have ridiculously outsize effects on our children’s futures. Honestly, most of them aren’t that hard to implement.

Get them to bed on time. Let them see you fail. Praise the effort, not the outcome.

These aren’t earth-shattering revelations. But, now you can point to sciece that says they work.

Isn’t that easier than “because I said so?”

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7 other things

• The U.S. Navy will build “Trump-class” new-age battleships, President Trump announced. The naming convention bucks tradition, but it’s actually fairly similar to the Air Force’s earlier announcement of “F-47” fighter jets (Trump being both the 45th and 47th president). (Axios)

• CBS News pulled a “60 Minutes” report about the Trump administration sending detainees to a maximum security “mega prison” in El Salvador just hours before its scheduled broadcast Sunday. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi accused the network of pulling the segment for “political” reasons, according to a private note she sent to CBS colleagues. The full video leaked quickly in any event. (NBC News, BlueSky)

• The Department of Justice removed but later restored a document from the online Jeffrey Epstein files that contained images showing President Trump. Overall, the DOJ on Friday a fraction of documents and images from the Epstein case, even though a new law mandated that all Justice Department files related to him and Maxwell be released by that date. (CNBC)

• Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was the one expelled. (Yahoo News)

• Can Americans learn to love tiny, cheap Japanese kei cars? (NPR)

• 52 good news stories you may have missed in 2025. (The Times)

• Pop culture in 2025: A ring for Taylor, an ill-timed KissCam ... and whatever ‘6-7’ means. (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Tadeas P on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

About five years ago, at the height of the pandemic, I talked with neuroscientist David Rock about how leaders could use neuroscience to be more effective in that context.

His advice boiled down to the idea of emphasizing positive feedback, because our brains are wired to track status and react to threats.

This was a bit ironic because Rock is a very dynamic speaker and an intense guy.

His name is literally “Rock,” which doesn’t make for the most calming experience, and at the risk of sounding like the America-centric person I am, he’s Australian, and Australian accents always sound a bit extra excited to me.

In spite of that, or maybe because of that, it stuck with me.

Fast forward to today, and Rock has written something new about the biggest challenge most of us face in the age of AI—more specifically, what happens to the human brain when people let AI stand in for them in meetings, write their emails, or handle tasks they used to do themselves.

In short, he’s worried that people are offloading so much of their thinking that they’re losing essential piece of how humans actually learn, remember, and generate insights.

Example: Rock describes attending a virtual session at which he expected 12 people, but only 6 humans showed up. The other half sent AI agents instead–bots that joined the call, took notes, and emailed summaries to their human counterparts later.

I feel like this would be obvious, but conversations among those who did participate felt flat and empty when AI agents attended—probably more so than if the six humans had attended alone, without these little robots sitting in.

From a neuroscience perspective, Rock explains that when people focus on ideas in the presence of others, even virtually, their brains encode information more deeply. Our brains have evolved to consider social signals as context—who’s speaking, how others respond, and what that might mean for our own group standing.

So, being there, with other people, activates more of your brain than reading a summary ever could.

There’s another piece to this that Rock calls “spreading activation.”

When you think about an idea silently, certain neural circuits activate in your brain.

But when you speak about that same idea to another person, you activate different circuits—actually, many more circuits—across other parts of your brain.

This activation triggers thoughts or ideas about other concepts, enabling us to find implications and applications for ideas more easily, consider multiple angles, recognize patterns, and integrate new information with existing knowledge.

But, when AI provides instant answers without space for discussion, your thoughts stay surface-level and more one-dimensional.

A recent MIT study that Rock references drives this home. Researchers tracked 54 people writing essays over four months. Some used ChatGPT, some used search engines, some used only their brains.

• Eighty-three percent of individuals who used generative AI to help them write an essay struggled to remember the content of their work.

• Among those who were allowed to use another type of search engine or no tool at all, only 11 percent struggled to remember.

I suspect I’m preaching to the choir when I warn of the dangers of AI, but I’m not totally anti-AI. Heck, there already are significant productivity gaps between those who use AI well and those who don’t use it at all.

But I’m all for asking hard and insistent questions about what the heck we’re doing to ourselves as our society embraces it so quickly and thoroughly.

Even better maybe, if you can do it with an intense Australian accent.

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Quick poll, totally apropos of nothing, because I am interested—and because as you may know since you read this newsletter, after scaling back on Substack I’ve basically gone back all-in. I’m curious whether the Substack app has changed the experience for people here.

7 other things

• Australians desperately seeking comfort after the slaying of 15 people as they celebrated their Jewish faith have embraced the story of Ahmed al Ahmed, the Syrian-Australian Muslim shop owner who put an end to the rampage of one of the shooters. A fundraising page has attracted donations by some 40,000 people, who gave 2.3 million Australian dollars ($1.5 million) so far. (Yahoo News)

• Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, ordered his navy to escort ships carrying petroleum products from port, risking a confrontation with the United States on the high seas as he defied President Trump’s declaration of a “blockade” aimed at the country’s oil industry. (NYT)

• President Trump delivered a televised speech Wednesday evening focusing heavily on the economy, and said he was sending checks of $1,776 to all U.S. service members as a “warrior dividend.” Trump did not mention Venezuela. A Washington Post average of national polls so far in December found that 39 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, compared to 57 percent who disapprove. (WashPost; The Hill)

• Verizon refused to unlock a man’s iPhone so it could be used with another cellular service. He sued the carrier and won. (Ars Technica)

• Four politically vulnerable House Republicans rebelled on Wednesday against their party’s refusal to address Affordable Care Act subsidies slated to expire, setting up a bruising election-year battle over health care. The House passed a narrow G.O.P. health care bill that would allow the subsidies to expire, a result projected to send premiums soaring for millions of Americans, but the renegade Republican’s actions alongside Democrats will force an early January vote on reviving the subsidies. (NYT)

• A hacking group called “ShinyHunters” says it has obtained stolen data belonging to premium customers of the leading sex website Pornhub and is threatening to publish it. Although Reuters could not immediately establish the scope, scale, or details of the breach, the hackers provided a sample of the data which the news agency was able to partially authenticate. “We’re demanding a ransom payment in Bitcoin,” ShinyHunters told Reuters in an online chat. (Reuters)

• Gil Gerard, the actor from Arkansas best known for his turn as the wisecracking hero of the 1979-81 NBC series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, died Tuesday. He was 82. Gerard lived in Georgia and died after a battle with “a rare and viciously aggressive form of cancer,” his wife, Janet, announced in a Facebook post. (Hollywood Reporter)

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Lie to me and see what happens

We live in a time of skepticism. So, tell the truth: Have you ever fallen for lies like these?

• The business partner who swore the deal was “just days away from closing.”

• The contractor who promised the renovation would be done “by Friday, guaranteed.”

• The pitch about a “can’t-miss investment opportunity” that sounded too good to be true.

If those scenarios sound familiar, you’re not alone. According to an interesting new study, there’s a reason we are so vulnerable to these kinds of lies in particular: Because they come with the promise of something we want to believe.

Gain vs. loss

Researchers from North China University of Science and Technology just published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience that helps explain why people are so prone to believing lies when there’s a potential reward on the table.

They studied 66 people using brain imaging while they communicated with one another through computer screens. This way the researchers could control and account for the messages they shared.

Some messages led to benefits for both people, which they called a “gain,” while others led to negative outcomes, which they referred to as a “loss.”

Results: People were significantly more likely to believe false information during gain situations. Moreover, when researchers looked at brain scans, they found activity lighting up in regions that process rewards, assess risk, and try to understand other people’s intentions.

“The key reason we chose ‘gain’ and ‘loss’ contexts is that they illustrate how people adjust decision-making in response to potential rewards or punishments,” contributing researcher Rui Huang explained.

More troubling, but perhaps not surprising: People are especially vulnerable to lies from friends, according to this study (and perhaps also according to everyone’s shared life experience).

Within the study, when deceptive information came from someone considered a friend rather than a stranger, their brains showed synchronized activity, to the point that the researchers claimed to be able to predict with 86.66 percent accuracy when a person would be deceived by a friend.

In gain contexts, reward-related brain regions synced up between friends, and in loss contexts, risk-evaluation regions synchronized.

Theory: When you are close to someone, you drop our guard, and you want to believe them. When they tell you something that suggests it could benefit you both, your brains shift into reward mode instead of skepticism mode.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before

I acknowledge that this research falls into the category of science that mostly affirms what we suspect already. More than that, it’s on the same page with quite a few previous studies.

• Scientists at the University of Toronto found that our brains actually become hardwired to believe lies through repeated exposure.

• According to Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology who analyzed speeches from dictators and hate groups, once people start believing lies, they develop rigid neural pathways that make it extremely difficult to change their minds—even when confronted with contradictory evidence.

• Joshua Greene at Harvard University found something similar using fMRI scans: The more excited someone’s reward system gets at the possibility of gaining something—even in an honest context—the more likely they are to cheat or believe lies.

• And there’s the illusory truth effect, first identified back in 1977. Researchers at Villanova and Temple Universities discovered that people are more likely to believe false information simply because they’ve heard it repeatedly. The repetition makes statements easier to process, creating a false sense of familiarity that our brains mistake for truth.

Skeptical, not cynical

There’s a fine line between healthy skepticism and self-defeating cynicism, and I certainly don’t want to push anyone over it with this list of lie-related studies. But taken together, it does suggest a few practical approaches:

When presented with opportunities that sounds great—especially if they’re from a friend or colleague—maybe pause and ask yourself: Am I evaluating this rationally, or am I just excited about the potential gain?

If you hear the same claim repeatedly, even from different sources, remember that repetition doesn’t equal truth. Your brain just processes it more easily.

And when information confirms what you already believe or want to believe, that’s exactly when you should be most cautious.

That’s the truth, whether people believe it or not.

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7 other things

• I’ll start with something fun today — When Mom Takes Over Your Dating Profile: Burned-out singles are letting family members take over on apps like Bumble and Hinge. It’s a gamble. (Wouldn’t it be cool if one of our readers found the perfect person for one of the singles featured in this article?). (WSJ)

• President Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files. Source: Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who gave 11 on-the-record interviews to Vanity Fair this year. (NYT)

• Flu season has arrived early this year in New York City, with cases climbing dramatically during the past month. New York City and the surrounding areas — including Long Island and North Jersey — had some of the highest levels of flu-like illness in the United States. I can attest to this firsthand; I have the flu! (NYT)

• Two Republicans in Congress are calling for the mass expulsion of all Muslims from the United States. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Florida): “It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible. Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us. The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama): “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult,” Tuberville wrote on X. “Islamists aren’t here to assimilate. They’re here to conquer. … We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.” (The Washington Post)

• The US economy added 64,000 jobs in November as the unemployment rate crept up to 4.6%, according to Labor Department data published Tuesday. The unemployment rate is now at its highest level since September 2021. Related: Young workers hit hard as UK unemployment rate rises to 5.1%. (Yahoo Finance; BBC)

• Authorities hunting for the perpetrator of the deadly mass shooting at Brown University released a new enhanced photo today and asked the public to pay attention to body movements, posture, gait and other patterns to help identify the person of interest. (CNN)

• Coin collectors doled out millions for the final pennies circulated in the U.S. before the government ended the cent’s production back in November. The U.S. Mint sold 232 three-cent sets for a whopping sum of $16.76 million at an auction last Thursday. The 232nd set — containing the last three pennies ever made — sold for $800,000. That bidder also got the three dies that struck those Lincoln cents. (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

I’ve been genuinely gratified by the response so far.

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See you at the gym

Over the past year, I dropped close to 50 pounds. (How did I gain 50 pounds to begin with? Slowly, then all at once.)

Anyway, here’s how I did the dropping part:

• First—let’s put this upfront: I took Zepbound, a GLP-1 medication. Game-changing.

• Next, I quit drinking alcohol. Well, mostly; nobody’s perfect. Also game-changing.

• Finally, I got in the very consistent habit of going to the gym at least four days per week: Cardio, HIIT classes, and weight training.

It’s been a fantastic change all-around; I feel better, I think I look better, and all the blood work that I get done once a year has improved. But it turns out there might be another benefit that I had no idea about when I started.

In short, my brain age might have gone down, which is a good thing, at least according to new research from Washington University School of Medicine.

Muscle versus fat

The researchers used AI algorithms trained on MRI scans from 5,500 adults to determine each participant’s brain age.

On average, participants were 55 years old chronologically, but their brains looked slightly older — about 56 years old.

Those participants with more muscle tended to have younger-looking brains, while those with more hidden belly fat relative to their muscle had older-looking brains.

Moreover, the type of fat that they had—visceral or subcutaneous fat—played a direct role as well. For clarification:

• Visceral fat is the fat tucked deep inside your abdomen, wrapped around your organs.

• Subcutaneous fat is the pooled fat around your belly or other areas, which you can pinch under your skin.

A higher visceral fat-to-muscle ratio was associated with higher brain age, while subcutaneous fat showed no meaningful association with how old the brain appeared.

The connection between body composition and brain health makes sense.

Visceral fat is linked to a higher rate of diabetes, insulin resistance, pre-diabetic states, and high cholesterol, which creates inflammation throughout the body. Over time, that inflammation affects the brain.

“While it is commonly known that chronological aging translates to loss of muscle mass and increased hidden belly fat,” explained lead author Cyrus Raji, “this work shows that these health measures relate to brain aging itself. It shows muscle and fat mass quantified in the body are key reflectors of brain health, as tracked with brain aging.”

Better drugs in the future?

There’s an interesting wrinkle here for the millions of people taking GLP-1 medications.

While these drugs are effective at reducing body fat, they may also contribute to muscle loss, as Raji, an associate professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University, told NBC News in its reporting on this subject.

I knew that ahead of time, which is part of why I tripled down on my gym commitment (and protein intake) while losing weight. (I also built a small gym in my basement for days when I can’t get out on time.)

The findings, Raji suggested, could help design better medications—ones that target visceral fat more than subcutaneous fat while protecting muscle mass.

As he put it, “Losing fat—especially visceral fat—while preserving muscle volume would have the best benefit on brain aging and brain health.”

The basics still work

None of this requires an expensive full-body MRI or staying on a prescription medication forever. The basics still work:

Strength training at least twice a week, targeting all major muscle groups, with 10 to 15 different exercises doing 8 to 12 reps each.

Aerobic exercise is particularly effective at targeting visceral fat; aim for 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity weekly.

Exercise physiologist Glenn Gaesser told NBC News that you get the biggest return on investment in those first 30 minutes of weekly exercise.

Bottom line: The visceral fat you lose and the muscle you build today might be protecting the brain you need tomorrow. That’s worth showing up for.

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7 other things

• Horror over the weekend: ‘We Were Just Sitting Ducks.’ How the Chaos Unfolded on Bondi Beach. People hid under counters and shielded their children as gunmen attacked Hanukkah celebrations in Australia, killing at least 15 people. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was clear the gunmen were targeting the Jewish event as an act of antisemitism, and that it was driven by ideology that is an “extreme perversion of Islam.” (WSJ)

• I think most people know this, but: A son of the director Rob Reiner who is being held in his parents’ murders argued with his father at a holiday party the night before the couple’s bodies were discovered on Sunday, according to a person who attended the gathering. The son, Nick Reiner, 32, was arrested on Sunday night and being held in a Los Angeles County jail without bail, the police said. Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their home in the upscale Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon. Also, people might also already know what President Trump had to say about Rob Reiner afterward, but just in case, here’s a link. (NYT; Truth Social)

• I hate that the first three stories are about violence, but here’s the final one of the day. A manhunt is underway after two people were killed and nine others were wounded in a shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday. Officials released new photos and videos of a person of interest this evening. A man detained over the weekend was released because the evidence no longer supported holding him, officials said. One of the victims was Ella Cook, vice president of the Brown College Republicans chapter. The other was Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, from Uzbekistan, in central Asia. (NBC News)

• Elon Musk just took another giant leap toward becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Earlier this month, Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX launched a tender offer valuing the firm at $800 billion, up from $400 billion in August. That boosts the fortune of Musk, who owns an estimated 42% of SpaceX, by $168 billion to an estimated $677 billion as of 12 p.m. Eastern Monday. Musk is now the first person ever worth $600 billion or more. No one else has ever been worth $500 billion. (Forbes)

• MacKenzie Scott has given $26B to nonprofits since 2019. Here’s what she supported in 2025. (The Washington Post)

• A JetBlue passenger jet bound for New York took evasive action to avoid a mid-air collision with a U.S. Air Force tanker plane near Venezuela, a pilot said in an air traffic control recording. JetBlue Flight 1112 had departed the Caribbean nation of Curacao and was flying about 40 miles off the coast of Venezuela when the Airbus A320 reported encountering the Air Force jet, which did not have its transponder activated, according to the recording captured by liveatc.net. (Reuters; YouTube)

• Where people moved to (and from) in 2025. (Axios)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

• Your kids beg for “just 10 more minutes” on Roblox because they’re “almost at the next level.” Their friends are also all playing together right now. You cave, because honestly, you need to finish an email.

• They’ve been pushing for social media accounts, and you want to put it off. But you realize that when they say that all their friends are on it, and it’s how most of them communicate with one another. It’s not an exaggeration.

• It’s 10 p.m., and you’re finishing a newsletter installment on your laptop while an NHL game plays silently on the TV across the room. You interrupt your work 10 times to text back and forth with a friend on your phone. You realize that when it comes to screen time, you might not be setting the best example.

Nobody’s perfect. But a massive new study out of Japan just gave us more reason to think about the examples we give our kids and whether all that extra screen time costs them more than we realize.

Researchers tracked nearly 12,000 kids over two years. It found that more screen time not only correlates with worse ADHD symptoms, but actually appears to change how kids’ brains develop.

Scientists at the University of Fukui analyzed data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study in the United States, one of the largest brain development studies ever. The study followed 11,878 children initially aged 9 to 10 over two years.

They used advanced MRI scans to track actual brain structure changes alongside parent-reported behavior assessments.

Results? Kids with higher screen time showed measurable differences in both brain volume and thickness in several key areas. Those differences help explain why they also exhibited more severe ADHD symptoms.

The need to control screen time

Here’s what the researchers discovered:

• Longer daily screen time at age 9 to 10 years old predicted increased ADHD symptoms two years later, even after controlling for how severe the kids’ symptoms were at the start. The effect held up regardless of initial symptom levels.

• At baseline, higher screen time was linked to smaller total brain volume in the cortex and reduced volume in the right putamen, a brain region involved in language learning, reward processing, and addiction-related behaviors.

• After two years, kids with more screen time showed slower development of cortical thickness in areas vital for cognitive functions—specifically the right temporal pole and parts of the left frontal gyrus, regions involved in working memory, language processing, and attention.

They also found that total cortical volume partially explained the relationship between screen time and ADHD symptoms. In other words, excessive screen exposure may contribute to a pattern of delayed brain maturation that’s often observed in children with ADHD.

“Our work provided some evidence toward growing concern about the association between digital media exposure and children’s mental and cognitive health,” explained study author Masatoshi Yamashita. “The results provide some neuroscientific evidences for the need to control screen time.”

Caveats:

• The effect sizes were relatively small. The researchers themselves acknowledged that “the clinical impact of screen time on ADHD symptoms may be marginal, and these findings should be interpreted with caution.”

• Also, this study doesn’t establish causality. It’s possible that kids predisposed to ADHD symptoms are simply drawn to more screen time, rather than screen time causing the symptoms. The researchers were careful to note that “multiple factors could influence ADHD symptom scores.”

• Finally, the study tracked kids aged 9-10 over two years, so we don’t know if these effects persist into later adolescence or adulthood, or if they’re reversible with reduced screen time.

Earth to research team

That’s cool, research team. This really does make sense. But do you have any idea what we’re up against here?

Even if we wanted to go full digital detox, how would that work? Send our kids to a remote camp in Vermont where they lock phones in a safe for the summer?

Still, you’d be fighting against every other kid’s parents, every algorithm designed to be addictive, and basically the entire structure of modern childhood.

So, what’s a realistic approach?

All part of the job

I’m not suggesting we eliminate screens entirely—that ship sailed about a decade ago.

But this research shows we need to be more intentional about limits, especially during the critical 9- to 12-year-old age range, when brains are developing rapidly. Maybe that means:

• Setting actual timers instead of “just five more minutes” that turns into 45.

• Having designated screen-free times: dinner, car rides, the hour before bed.

• Modeling better behavior ourselves, even when it’s inconvenient.

Oh, and finding activities that genuinely compete with screen time’s dopamine hit.

The truth is, telling our kids “no more screen time” is going to be harder on us than it is on them.

But then again, maybe that’s part of the job.

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7 other things

• Paramount Global made a $108 billion all-cash offer to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. It would appear to significantly outstrip the deal worth $83 billion that Netflix and Warner announced just last Friday, although that agreement is solely for Warner’s streaming service and studios. The Paramount deal is partially backed by a private equity firm founded by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law; Trump told reporters he expects to “be involved” in deciding which company wins. (NPR, New York Times)

• The Supreme Court announced that it will decide next year whether President Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship – the guarantee of citizenship to almost everyone born in the United States - can go into effect. Under Trump’s executive order, people born in the United States would not be automatically entitled to citizenship if their parents are in this country either illegally or temporarily. (SCOTUS Blog)

• Home sellers are giving up and ‘delisting’ at an ‘unusually high rate,’ says a new Realtor report. Home delistings in October were up 45.5% year to date and up nearly 38% from October 2024. (CNBC)

• American households are nearing the end of the year feeling a lot more dour about the economy than they did at the beginning, even as they keep spending. High prices, a fragile job market and anxiety about President Trump’s tariffs have helped drag consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan, down near historic lows this year. The latest numbers were slightly improved from a previous reading freighted by government shutdown disruptions, but barely. (WSJ)

• A viral image of San José, California high school students forming a human swastika while lying on their school’s football field has roiled the Silicon Valley community and prompted an outcry from the Jewish community. The picture was posted on social media, accompanied by an antisemitic 1939 quote from Adolf Hitler. The post has since been deleted and denounced by local leaders. (LA Times)

• 401(k)s Are Minting a Generation of ‘Moderate Millionaires’: Many Americans are peeking at their retirement accounts and cheering higher balances. (WSJ)

• The days on the job are numbered for a Michigan grocery store worker - but for good reason. Ed Bambas, an 88-year-old veteran who works full-time at a Meijer outside of Detroit, was given an oversized check for a whopping $1.77 million, which was the result of an extraordinary fundraising effort by a social media influencer. Bambas had retired from General Motors in 1999, but in 2012, he lost his pension due to the company’s bankruptcy measures. (NBC Chicago)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

This was a big moment for me: Coming clean about something in my professional life that I didn’t exactly brag about. However, people related to the story, and it went viral.

Truly, this became my 15 minutes-plus of fame. I wound up on national TV talking about the experience.

For a long time afterward, readers tracked me down on LinkedIn to lay out the facts of their employment or other situations, and ask if I thought they should quit and move on too.

In fact, I soon realized that I had spent far more time talking and writing about this short job experience than I spent actually working there. I even talked with my agent about turning the experience into a book.

We had a title: The Joy of Quitting.

Then, I set it aside.

The science of quitting

Is it the height of irony to start writing a book about quitting, only to quit?

Maybe. But, two things:

• First, this coincided with my pouring my all into building this newsletter, Understandably, which now has about 140,000 actual/valid subscribers even after my latest purge. I didn’t see how I could build that and write a book at the same time.

• Second, it turns out that perhaps that I was doing myself a favor, from a human development and wellness perspective.

I say this because of a massive new review of previous studies published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour that found that quitting difficult goals can in fact lead to joy—or, at least, to greater well-being than simply hanging on.

“Sticking with impossible goals can take a real toll, with previous research suggesting it can lead to higher stress, poorer well-being and even physical health costs such as illness,” explained lead researcher Hugh Riddell from the Curtin School of Population Health in Australia. “But letting go and—crucially—reengaging with new goals was found to restore purpose and well-being.”

Goal adjustment

We should focus on the second part of that last sentence, “reengaging with new goals,” because this isn’t meant to encourage people simply to give up when the going gets hard.

Rather, it’s more a question of “goal adjustment,” broken down into three distinct subcategories:

• Goal disengagement: Letting a goal go

• Goal re-engagement: Setting a new goal

• Goal re-adjustment: Various processes that enable modification of existing goals to render them more achievable

A “real job”

On a personal basis, I look back at the experience of putting aside that book (at least for the time being), and I realize that this is exactly what I did: I disengaged with one goal and then set a new one—another writing project that has worked out quite well.

For that matter, I can also look back at the experience of quitting that now-famous job after one day. It was a good job as an attorney with a six-figure salary and benefits—the kind of thing that hundreds of people applied for, and that many people make a career out of, in the same way.

It truly took just that one day for me to realize that I’d misjudged what the work would be like.

(It helped that during orientation, it became a running joke for each speaker to introduce themselves by calculating how much time they had until they could retire.)

So, while I went through both goal disengagement and goal re-engagement at high speed, it really was less about quitting and more about moving quickly toward what came next.

The joy of quitting

Did quitting ultimately lead to joy? Indeed, it did, although not in the way I’d planned.

First, I took on corporate writing projects quickly, which turned into a real business. It eventually evolved into the kind of work I do today, usually quite happily.

More important, working for myself meant I had the flexibility to pack up and move to New York a few months later, when I got together with my future wife.

We’ve now been married over 12 years and have a daughter, so I’d say it worked out.

I think many of us face decision points like this. Perhaps the real question is the one all those people started asking me on LinkedIn: How do I know when it’s time to quit?

That’s the next step for the the research, Riddell said: “finding out when exactly people should stick with their goals or change course, without giving up too early.”

Sounds like a goal worth seeing through.

Unless, of course, they find something better.

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7 other things

• Pete Hegseth “created risks to operational security” by sharing sensitive details about Houthi strikes over Signal, a new Pentagon inspector general report determined. A classified version of the report has been handed over to the Senate Armed Services Committee; an unclassified, redacted version will be made public on Thursday. (Fox News)

• The US has halted the processing of all immigration applications linked to 19 countries already subject to a travel ban, according to an internal official memo seen by BBC partner CBS News. Immigration agents have been told to “stop final adjudication on all cases”, and pause naturalisation ceremonies for migrants on the cusp of gaining citizenship. (BBC)

• When Patrolman Joseph Detwiler answered a call last December claiming that a man who looked like the assassin of a health insurance executive was eating breakfast at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., he was dubious. He didn’t use his siren as he drove to the restaurant. “I knew it was him immediately,” Patrolman Detwiler said in the courtroom where pretrial hearings are being held in the murder case against the man accused in the killing, Luigi Mangione. (NYT)

• An increasing number of middle-aged and older adults — especially those in their 40s and 50s — are lonely, according to a report released by AARP, a nonprofit advocacy group for older Americans. Among the loneliest are adults 45 to 49 years old (49 percent identified as lonely), as well as respondents who never married (62 percent); are not working (57 percent); or whose household income fell below $25,000 a year (63 percent). (The Washington Post)

• UK Justice Secretary David Lammy has announced the creation of new “swift courts” which will see a judge decide verdicts in thousands of cases where the right to a jury trial will be removed. As part of sweeping reforms to the criminal court system in England and Wales, the plans is to scrap juries in so-called either-way cases that would have a likely jail sentence of three years or less. (The Independent)

• Amazon announced Wednesday that it’s introducing a new AI-powered Fire TV feature that lets viewers jump to specific movie scenes on Prime Video simply by describing them to Alexa+. Amazon says you can describe the scene to Alexa by mentioning details like the actor or character’s name, or a memorable quote. Examples include: “Jump to the scene when John McClane says ‘come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs’” and “Jump to the card scene in Love Actually.” (Tech Crunch)

• Pesky glitches that occasionally interrupt video calls could undermine success in everything from job interviews to sales pitches to court cases. Brief video freezes, lags, or audio echoes can create an unpleasant “uncanny” sensation that makes a viewer less likely to trust the person they’re interacting with through a face-to-face video connection, according to a series of experiments published in Nature. (NPR)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Caleb Wright on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

1. How to read

2. How to speak French

3. How not to cry when I have a shampoo

Pretty good comedic timing for a 4-year-old, don’t you think?

Now, you might wonder why a kid that young, growing up in the U.S., would rank learning French as his second-most important educational goal.

Simple: my parents sometimes used French as a kind of secret code when they didn’t want me or my brothers to understand what they were saying.

They weren’t fluent, but my mom grew up in Montreal and my dad had studied French in high school—enough to get by. Much to my childhood frustration, apparently.

Fast-forward a few decades, and it turns out they might have been onto something else.

Slow the process of aging

A massive new study published in Nature Aging suggests that learning and speaking multiple languages isn’t just good for communication—it may actually help slow the biological processes of aging.

Researchers analyzed data from 86,149 people across 27 European countries.

Using artificial intelligence, they built what they call a biobehavioral aging clock—a model that estimates biological age (as opposed to chronological age) based on health and behavioral factors like hypertension, diabetes, sleep problems, sensory loss, cognitive ability, education, and physical activity.

From that, they calculated a biobehavioral age gap (BBAG), showing whether people’s bodies and behavior seemed younger or older than their chronological age.

Multilingual people, it turns out, tended to have younger “biobehavioral” ages than monolinguals. They’re 2.17 times less likely to show signs of accelerated aging, even after accounting for education, social factors, and national differences.

Put plainly, language learning and use light up parts of the brain tied to attention, memory, executive function, and social interaction—all areas that tend to weaken with age.

More languages, more benefits

Moreover, the benefits increased with each additional language.

• As study author Dr. Lucia Amoruso explained: “The protective effect was cumulative—the more languages people spoke, the greater their protection against aging-related decline.”

• Her colleague Dr. Agustín Ibáñez of Trinity College Dublin, who also directs the Latin American Brain Health Institute, added: “Language learning and use engage core brain networks related to attention, memory, and executive control—as well as social interaction—mechanisms that may reinforce resilience throughout life.”

As populations age and dementia rates rise, this research suggests that learning—or maintaining—a second or third language could be a simple, scalable way to improve both brain and body health.

Unlike many interventions, it’s free, noninvasive, and genuinely enriching. Plus, it’s relatable.

La belle langue

Personally speaking: No, my preschool didn’t have a French program.

But, I did study la belle langue in middle and high school, and I even won a few awards. Let’s just say I was a highly motivated student of the language.

These days, sad to say, French doesn’t come up often in my life: Je peux parler un peu maintenant, mais j’ai oublié beaucoup plus.

Still, I’m always pleasantly surprised when I visit France or Quebec and find it comes back—enough at least to decode what my parents might try to say to each other, anyway.

So here’s to learning languages and maybe, just maybe, turning back the passage of time. Also: to knowing how to read, and how not to cry when you wash your hair.

I’m really good at both of those.

Hey: Deux sur trois, c’est pas mal!

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7 other things

• Billionaires Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion Tuesday to provide 25 million American children under 10 an incentive to claim new federally funded “Trump Accounts.” The historic gift has little precedent; the Dells believe it’s the largest single private commitment made to U.S. children. (AP)

• A former Honduran president convicted of helping to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. has been pardoned by President Trump. Separately, this week’s election of a new Honduran president is a statistical tie, with Trump’s preferred candidate leading by ~500 votes out of 2 million+ counted. Trump accused the country of “trying to change the results,” and warned that there will be “hell to pay!” (CBS News; Fox News)

• Explanation for UFO’s? More than 70 years ago, astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California photographed several star-like flashes that appeared and vanished within an hour — years before the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit. New peer-reviewed research reports that these fleeting points of light, called transients, appeared on or near dates of Cold War nuclear weapons tests and coincided with a spike in historical UFO reports. (Live Science)

• Flying without a REAL ID? After Feb. 1 it will cost you $45. (Inc.com)

• The end of a tariff exemption on goods worth $800 or less has left some U.S. shoppers with an extra shipping bill that must be paid before delivery. (NYT)

• Top Gun Traders: How stock bets and crypto culture are taking over the U.S. military. (WSJ)

• Chimpanzees in the wild naturally ingest fermenting fruit that equals one to two human drinks each day, supporting the idea that alcohol exposure is not a modern human invention but an ancient primate habit. (Science Daily)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Caleb Wright on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

To this day, I recall what I bought for dinner to celebrate:

• $100 worth of sushi,

• a bottle of fancy red wine, and

• a container of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy ice cream

I can remember so much about this in vivid detail—the NBA game that was on in the background while I ate my sushi, the friends who came over to share the wine, the last hunk of brownie in the ice cream that I saved until the end.

Now, it turns out that, according to a new study, I might have inadvertently given myself a cognitive superpower to remember that night so clearly.

The unexpected brain boost

Writing in the journal Food & Function, researchers from Shibaura Institute of Technology in Japan found that compounds called flavanols—found in red wine, chocolate, and certain other foods—can almost immediately activate a specific part of your brain responsible for alertness and memory formation.

The key words there are “almost immediately.” These are changes that happen within minutes to an hour after consumption.

For years, researchers have known that flavanols seem to improve cognitive function, but they couldn’t explain how. These compounds have terrible bioavailability, meaning they barely get absorbed into your bloodstream at all.

So how could they possibly affect your brain?

Straight to the locus coeruleus

The Japanese research team determined that instead of traveling through your bloodstream to your brain, flavanols appear to work through what scientists call “gut-brain signaling.”

When you consume something with a strong astringent taste—like red wine or dark chocolate—it creates a sensation in your mouth and digestive tract. That sensation sends signals directly to a tiny region in your brainstem called the locus coeruleus.

When the locus coeruleus fires up, it releases noradrenaline throughout your entire brain—to your hypothalamus, your memory centers, even down to your spinal cord.

That cascade of noradrenaline then enhances your ability to encode and consolidate memories, particularly during that critical first hour after an experience.

Of mice and memory

The study used mice, giving them a single dose of cocoa-derived flavanols then observing what happened.

Within minutes, the team saw activation of the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system. The mice showed enhanced spontaneous activity and increased wakefulness indicators, like grooming and rearing up, and most intriguingly, improved performance on short-term memory tests.

The study also used advanced brain imaging techniques to track neurotransmitter movement in the mice’s brains. It found that noradrenaline intensity spiked dramatically in the locus coeruleus immediately after flavanol administration.

It then spread throughout the brain to regions involved in memory and attention.

Bottom line, the mice that received flavanols before a memory training task demonstrated significantly better novel object recognition—a standard test for short-term memory—compared to those that received just water.

Researchers also found that flavanols activated both the sympathetic nervous system, your “fight-or-flight” response, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, your stress hormone system.

So, these compounds create a mild stress response. However, apparently it’s the good kind of stress that enhances alertness and memory formation rather than the chronic stress that damages health.

My kind of study

I suspect many people have had the experience of a smell or taste instantly transporting them back to a specific moment in time.

The researchers suggest there might be a biological explanation. The astringent, sensory qualities of what you consume might actually be helping encode those memories in the first place.

Anyway, this all falls into the category of “pleasurable things I’d do anyway, even without knowing there’s a neuroscience or memory benefit.”

The foods richest in flavanols include cocoa (especially dark chocolate), red wine, certain berries, and some teas. Not exactly a hardship to incorporate those into important moments.

What’s more, I’ve written before about a different study showing that wasabi, which I had alongside my sushi during that celebratory Tuesday night dinner, also improves cognitive recall.

The researchers say this issue needs more study, particularly large-scale human trials.

I hereby volunteer. Here’s to having things to celebrate, and to remembering those good times with clarity years later.

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7 other things

• A federal judge threw out the indictments against James Comey and Letitia James on Monday, finding they were illegitimate because they were brought by an unqualified U.S. attorney. The cases were dismissed without prejudice, meaning the charges could theoretically be brought again. (Fox News)

• Interesting argument: The poverty line should actually be around $140,000 for a U.S. family of four. Rationale: The original “poverty line” was set at 3x the cost of food for a family, but since then costs for everything else—housing, healthcare, childcare, commuting, and education—has skyrocketed. (MarketWatch)

• The Pentagon says it is investigating Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, after Kelly joined a handful of other lawmakers in a video that called for U.S. troops to refuse unlawful orders. The Pentagon threatened Kelly could be “recall[ed] to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.” (AP)

• A new feature on social media platform X revealed that some prominent political accounts, including purported MAGA fans with thousands of followers, are actually being run from places like Pakistan, Nigeria, Thailand, and Eastern Europe. The accounts seem like they could be motivated to drive engagement at all costs because of X’s revenue-sharing program for large content creators. (Axios)

• A sheriff’s deputy and a locksmith have died after a shootout during an eviction in Vero Beach, Florida. The locksmith, David Long, 76, who was known for his “dedicated service and kind demeanor,” and the deputy, Terri Sweeting-Mashkow, who had served for 25 years, were reportedly killed by Michael Halberstam, who also died. (AP)

• Why Did FDR Change the Date of Thanksgiving? The unpopular switch fueled competing days of observance across the United States. (History.com)

• Fascinating new study that shows something that never even occurred to me and frankly makes everything else seem a bit trivial: Our entire Solar System is racing through space, and moving 3x faster than we previously thought. (Science Daily)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Kelly Visel on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

I’ve never really understood exactly how it works, but the sheer number of times I’ve awakened with the solution at hand—even without recalling dreaming about it—tells me there’s something there.

That’s why I was taken by a new study from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital that suggests something similar.

Neuroscientists there found that when people learn a new motor skill, their brains don’t just generally “consolidate” the memory during sleep. Instead, the brain sends targeted bursts of activity called sleep spindles to the exact regions that were engaged during learning.

The stronger those targeted spindles, the better people performed on the task after waking up.

Brief bursts in the right places

The study was published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Eric Dolan reported on it for PsyPost.

Sleep spindles are brief bursts of brain activity—just a second or two—during light non-REM sleep, long known to play a role in memory. But this study suggests they’re far more sophisticated than we thought.

Rather than firing randomly across your brain, these spindles concentrate in the specific cortical areas you used while learning something new.

The researchers recruited 25 healthy adults and had them come in for three separate “nap visits” (my favorite kind of visit).

During one session, participants learned a finger-tapping sequence—repeatedly typing a five-digit number with their left hand, like 4-1-3-2-4, as quickly and accurately as possible.

Then they took a 90-minute nap while the researchers monitored their brain activity using both EEG and magnetoencephalography (MEG)—two complementary imaging techniques that together can pinpoint exactly where sleep spindles fire.

A few hours later, the participants were tested again on the same finger-tapping task.

Two different kinds of improvement

About 18 percent of brain regions active during learning showed increased spindle activity during the nap. Only 3 percent of regions outside that network did.

These areas included the primary motor cortex (where hand movements are controlled), motor planning regions, and supplementary motor areas.

The study also found that learning during practice and improvement after sleep involved completely different brain regions.

When people initially learned the task, spindle increases correlated with activity in motor execution areas—the parts of the brain that control your hand movements. But improvements measured after the nap correlated with spindle activity in motor planning regions, like the supplementary motor area and premotor cortex.

The two sets of regions didn’t overlap at all.

Study lead Martin Sjøgård, a postdoctoral fellow at the MGH Martinos Center and Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues suggest this means your brain is doing two different jobs.

• During initial learning, it’s encoding the memory.

• During sleep, it’s consolidating and refining it—making the skill more automatic and less dependent on conscious attention.

Not just about finger tapping

The researchers note that because sleep spindles are measurable and can potentially be enhanced through noninvasive brain stimulation, this work might eventually lead to new treatments to boost learning—especially in people with neurodevelopmental disorders where spindles are often deficient.

And while this study focused on motor skills, as Dolan notes in PsyPost: “the authors suggest that similar principles may apply. If other types of learning also recruit spindles in specific cortical regions, then tracking these changes could provide a sensitive marker of how well the brain is consolidating new information.”

Regardless, it’s useful to understand how and why your brain processes learning and memory while you sleep, even if the specific application here is different from the kind of problems I’m usually trying to solve.

I wonder how many naps they took while writing this study.

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7 other things

• After refusing to convene the U.S. House for eight weeks during the government shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson is recalling lawmakers back into session. First up: the fight over whether to call for the release of the the Jeffrey Epstein files. (PBS)

• Notwithstanding the end of the shutdown, the Supreme Court extended a temporary order allowing the Trump administration to avoid paying the full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for the month of November. The new action keeps the stay in place through 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 13. (Fox News)

• According to Billboard’s “Country Digital Song Sales” chart, the No. 1 song in the U.S. is “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust—an artist that was created by artificial intelligence (AI). It marks the first time an AI-created song has reached the top of the charts. (Newsweek)

• Hundreds of applications have now been submitted since an anonymous family in England published an advertisment for a £180k-a-year tutor ($237,000 U.S.) for their one-year old son -- someone to “support [our] youngest child on his first steps to becoming an English gentleman.” In the family’s minds, the head of a tutor search firm helping them explained, it’s all about British class structure, and how the right accents and hobbies can lead to success and open doors. “The family know this may not work, but they’ve just taken the view of, ‘let’s give it a go and let’s go as early as we can’, because the cost of it is not relevant,” he said. (BBC)

• Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China’s electric vehicle industry appears destined for a crash. (The Atlantic)

• Two people who laundered over £5.5billion worth of Bitcoin have been jailed for a total of 15 years. Malaysian national Hok Seng Ling, 47, pleaded guilty at London’s Southwark Crown Court to entering into a money laundering arrangement. His accomplice, Chinese national Zhimin Qian, 47, also admitted to money laundering, which gave her the title ‘Goddess of Wealth’, due to her lavish lifestyle. (Metro UK)

• In the Wake of the Edmund Fitzgerald: The mighty ship, immortalized in song by Gordon Lightfoot, sank 50 years ago on Lake Superior. Our reporter spent a week on a Great Lakes freighter that survived the storm. (NYT)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!

But what’s even better than “better than the alternative”? Realizing that as you get older you actually do get better—at least in some ways—and that there’s scientific research to back up that notion.

The latest example comes from the journal Intelligence, in which psychologists Gilles Gignac of the University of Western Australia and Marcin Zajenkowski of the University of Warsaw in Poland say they’ve determined that “for many of us, overall psychological functioning actually peaks between ages 55 and 60.”

Peak performance

Gignac and Zajenkowski compiled results from 10 existing studies—representing data from a total of 321,661 people—and quantified and standardized them.

Their goal was to identify 16 “well-established psychological traits” that they could measure and assign scores to — things that “represent enduring characteristics rather than temporary states, have well-documented age trajectories, and are known to predict real-world performance,” as Gignac explains in an accompanying article.

Among them were core cognitive abilities along with “the so-called ‘big five’ personality traits—extraversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and agreeableness.”

Reviewing all the other studies, they concluded that people reach their peak in many of these key traits later in life than some might suspect.

Overall, they suggest that peak performance and overall mental functioning generally occurs for most people somewhere between ages 55 and 60, when you combine measures of both cognitive and personality traits.

Different trajectories

The researchers found that different abilities peak at different ages:

• Early to mid-20s: peak for fluid intelligence (reasoning, memory, and processing speed)

• Age 60: moral reasoning

• Mid-60s: crystallized intelligence (vocabulary, knowledge)

• Age 65: conscientiousness

• Age 65: financial literacy

• Age 75: emotional stability

• Into the 80s: “capacity to resist cognitive biases.”

Of course, the physical peak occurs much earlier.

I’ve finally admitted to myself that I’ll probably never beat some of my PRs from the early 2000s—although, in practice, many people who make healthier choices later in life do wind up in better physical shape than they were personally at earlier ages.

“It should be emphasized that not all individuals experience cognitive or personality change at the same rate or magnitude,” Gignac and Zajenkowski write in the study. “Longitudinal research shows substantial variability in aging trajectories, with some people maintaining high levels of functioning well into late life.”

Late bloomers

Still, Charles Darwin was 50 before he published On the Origin of Species, Beethoven was 53—and deaf—when he premiered his Ninth Symphony.

Ray Kroc was 52 when he met the McDonald brothers and began building his fast-food empire. Sam Walton opened the first Walmart at 44. Vera Wang became a fashion designer at 40.

Come to think of it, I was in my 40s before I started writing for digital media—a milestone that changed my career trajectory in retrospect.

“History is full of people who reached their greatest breakthroughs well past what society often labels as ‘peak age,’” Gignac writes. “Perhaps it’s time we stopped treating midlife as a countdown and started recognizing it as a peak.”

Better than the alternative.

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7 other things

• Is the shutdown over? After 41 days, the Senate on Monday cleared a critical hurdle to passing a bipartisan deal to end it. Democrats got basically nothing from the fight, capitulating for just the promise of a vote on health insurance subsidies. But, everyone agrees it’s unlikely to pass. (NYT)

• All writing is autobiography, I admit” With no extended subsidy my family’s health insurance is set to go up about $15,000 next year, basically 2X what we pay now. Millions of other Americans are also now bracing for sharp increases. (CNBC)

• It will take a while for air traffic to return to normal. President Trump threatened to dock the pay of air traffic controllers who called in sick during the hiatus: “For those that did nothing but complain ... I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He said he’s recommending $10,000 bonuses for controllers who did show up to work every day despite not being paid at the time. (Axios)

• One more DC-type thing: Trump pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others accused of backing efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It’s largely symbolic since these are mostly state charges, and they’ve stalled in most cases. (AP)

• Honestly, we need more stuff like this: Singles night at San Francisco’s hot new club. (It’s a Costco.) The gonzo event turned out to be marketing for a dating app, but the mingling in the grocery aisles was real. (SF Standard)

• Where are the flying cars? An answer, sort-of-ish: How A Loophole Lets You Fly This Electric VTOL (that’s “vertical take-off and landing” craft) Without A Pilot’s License. (Jalopnik)

• Finally, it’s Veteran’s Day (Remembrance Day in Canada). Raise a glass of whatever to everyone you know who, once upon a time, swore an oath to protect their country against all enemies. Heck, maybe hug them. Then, maybe get them some freebies. (USA Today)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!

How well do you understand young people today?

Piper Sandler just released the results of its 50th semiannual survey of American teenagers—nearly 11,000 of them across 47 states, with an average age of 15.7 years old.

The investment bank has been doing this for 25 years now, collecting more than 66 million data points about what teens buy, what they watch, and whom they admire. It’s become one of the most reliable snapshots of youth culture in America.

Here are seven findings that stood out.

Adam Sandler

According to the survey, America’s teens rank Adam Sandler as their number one favorite celebrity.

He beat out LeBron James (number two), Drake (number three), and Taylor Swift (number four). Ryan Reynolds rounded out the top five.

To be fair, Sandler, 59, has had a renaissance lately with his Netflix specials and dramatic turns in films like.

But still, I take pride in realizing that the most-loved celebrity among people this age is older than I am.

Sandler has stayed remarkably consistent over three decades. He doesn’t seem to try too hard. He wears the same oversize basketball shorts everywhere. He’s goofy and self-deprecating and seems genuinely happy.

In an era of carefully curated Instagram lives and manufactured celebrity personas, maybe Gen Z appreciates someone who just … is.

Spending less

Teen spending dropped 6 percent year-over-year to an average of $2,213 annually. It’s part of a longer trend: Teen spending is down 1 percent on average over the past decade.

Also, 62 percent of surveyed teens said they think the economy is getting worse. Only 15 percent think it’s improving.

These aren’t kids from struggling households. The average household income for survey participants was $69,527—solidly middle class and above.

Perhaps the explanation is that these teens grew up hearing about recessions, inflation, student debt crises, and housing markets their parents couldn’t afford. They came of age during a pandemic that shut down the world. They’re bombarded with economic anxiety on social media every single day.

It’s no wonder they’re pessimistic—even if their own personal circumstances aren’t dire.

$6 mascara

In the beauty category, E.l.f. Cosmetics dominated with 36 percent of teens naming it their top cosmetics brand.

Rare Beauty came in second at 8 percent. Maybelline was third at 6 percent.

If consumers form lasting brand affinities when they’re young, E.l.f. is in a very good place.

If you’re not familiar, this is a brand that sells $6 mascaras and $3 lip glosses. It’s the anti-luxury beauty brand—affordable, accessible, cruelty-free, and heavily promoted on TikTok by regular people, not just traditional influencers.

TikTok

TikTok ranked as the number one favorite app among teens with 46 percent, followed by Instagram at 31 percent and Snapchat at 14 percent.

Conventional wisdom says TikTok has completely replaced Instagram among young people. But Instagram’s 31 percent share isn’t nothing.

For context, that means nearly one in three teens still considers Instagram their favorite app—despite everything we hear about it being for “old people” now.

Facebook of course isn’t even on the list. Although I found it amusing that Piper Sandler included a link to their Facebook page on the statement announcing this study.

Netflix

Despite all the competition and password-sharing crackdowns, Netflix held onto its number one spot for daily video consumption with 30 percent of teens choosing it.

YouTube came in close behind at 27 percent. Disney+ was a distant third with just 7 percent.

No Hulu. No Max (formerly HBO Max). No Paramount+. No Peacock.

For all the streaming services trying to capture young audiences, it basically comes down to Netflix and YouTube. Everyone else is fighting for scraps.

The iPhone

Here’s a statistic that should terrify Android manufacturers: Eighty-seven percent of surveyed teens own an iPhone.

Also, 17 percent of those iPhone owners (ironically) said they’re planning to upgrade to the iPhone 17 this fall or winter.

If this holds, it would mean Apple has essentially captured an entire generation. The iPhone isn’t just a phone to these kids—it’s a status symbol and a gateway to their digital lives.

If you’re a parent trying to hold the line with an Android device, good luck. You’re fighting against the strongest brand loyalty in modern consumer history.

Chick-fil-A

In the restaurant category, Chick-fil-A held onto its number one spot with 17 percent of teens naming it their favorite chain.

McDonald’s came in second at 11 percent. Chipotle was third at 10 percent.

Top beverage brands: Dr. Pepper, followed by Coca-Cola and Gatorade.

And among snacks, Lays potato chips were the favorite, with Goldfish and Cheez-It coming in behind. The youngest Gen-Z members are still only 13 years old, and so I wonder if that influences the snack rankings, especially.

What it all means

If you’re trying to understand Gen-Z—whether as a parent, an employer, or a marketer—this survey offers some fascinating insights.

They value authenticity over perfection. They want quality at reasonable prices. They’re digitally native but still value human connection. They’re economically anxious even when their circumstances are relatively comfortable.

And, they’re telling a very interesting story.

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7 other things

• Hurricane Melissa slowly cut a soaking and destructive path across Jamaica on Tuesday after making landfall as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record. Communications were limited and officials were left with only partial and sporadic reports from stricken areas as they tried to assess the scale of the destruction. (NYT gift link; this should be updated overnight with the latest.)

• The Trump administration is planning to replace some regional leaders at Immigration and Customs Enforcement with Border Patrol officials in an attempt to intensify its mass deportations effort. “The mentality is CBP does what they’re told, and the administration thinks ICE isn’t getting the job done,” one of the DHS officials said. “So CBP will do it.” (NBC News)

• Inside the Trump family’s global crypto cash machine: The U.S. president’s family raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone, a Reuters examination found, dwarfing what the family earned from its traditional businesses, on top of potentially billions more in unrealized “on paper” gains. Much of that cash has come from foreign sources. (Reuters)

• Amazon was preparing to being making the largest corporate job cuts in its history on Tuesday, according to multiple reports, spanning almost every business within its empire. The company planned to lay off as many as 30,000 staffers across its corporate workforce, according to Reuters, which first reported the news. Amazon declined to comment. (CNBC)

• The Lengths Americans Are Willing to Go to Make Every Penny Count: From buying half a cow to watering down soap, people are experimenting with frugality—and it is affecting sales at consumer companies. (WSJ)

• Belgium is at risk of becoming a “narco-state” where the drugs mafia challenge the police and judiciary, according to an open letter published on the official website for the country’s court system. In an extraordinary move, an anonymous investigating judge in Antwerp, Europe’s main gateway for cocaine smuggling from Latin America, published the missive as a warning of the threat to the rule of law. (The Times)

• The federal agent had a daring pitch for Nicolás Maduro’s chief pilot: All he had to do was surreptitiously divert the Venezuelan president’s plane to a place where U.S. authorities could nab the strongman. In exchange, the agent told the pilot, the aviator would be made a very rich man. Over the next 16 months, even after retiring from his government job in July, the agent kept at it, chatting with the pilot over an encrypted messaging app. (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Sri Lanka on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!