Anyway, if you’re interested, here’s the link to check it out ahead of next week—and possibly share your answer.

An ode to bureaucracy

I’ve had a lot of jobs. Like, a lot of jobs.

One of them—which seems in retrospect like a not-very-good fit, but it’s funny where life takes you—was “government tax lawyer.”

Yes, I spent years at this, first as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Tax Division in Washington, and then for the IRS Counsel’s office in several cities.

In hindsight, I was a very good lawyer, but the bureaucracy really got me. It just doesn’t fit my personality and values.

But, on Extension Tax Day 2026 (that’s today, for those of us who seem to be on extension every year)—and frankly in the midst of an era in which people seem to go out of their way to hate on government workers—it seems like a chance to acknowledge and reflect that there is value in bureaucracy, even if I’d like to minimize my personal involvement going forward.

I’ve probably known hundreds of government workers. Many were inspiring people dedicated to a lifetime of public service. Others were talented men and women who wanted to get some credibility in their fields before heading to the private sector.

(Of course, some were clock-watching, unmotivated lifers who sucked the life out of everything and dragged everyone else down with them. I try not to think about them too much, but they deserve a mention.)

Anyway, I can think of at least five lessons that the system in which they toil can teach the rest of us.

1. Take the long view.

On my first day of orientation at a federal government job many years ago, a group of workers leading the program went around the room, reciting how many years they’d worked there (and how long they had to go until retirement).

Granted, counting down years isn’t exactly the most motivating way to welcome a bunch of new employees. But if I can look at it positively, it drove home an important point: Careers are long.

And, to quote H.G. Wells, “The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”

2. Work to live.

Sure, some government workers seem as if their jobs are the culmination of a lifelong dream. But more prevalent in my experience were those people who wanted to do a good job, but then go home to be with their families and enjoy other parts of life.

It’s 10 p.m. on a Wednesday evening as I write this, and I admit I could probably learn a little something about work-life balance.

Heck, according to Walter Isaacson’s book, even Steve Jobs didn’t wish at the end that he’d spent more time at the office. So, lesson learned (again).

3. Put process over results (at least sometimes).

One of the hardest things for me personally working for the government was the sense that process mattered more than results.

But, I grew to appreciate this (if not to enjoy it). Suppose you’re applying for a government benefit, or you’re on the receiving end of a government investigation.

The best you can likely hope for is that the government employee assigned will apply a fair process, remove all bias, and work without any preferred outcome in mind.

4. Put fairness first.

Government decisions can sometimes seem capricious. But in terms of how it treats its employees, the government often bends over backward to be more than fair.

In fact, I think that’s why a lot of government workers choose to continue working for the government in the first place.

That’s not a bad lesson to take into any business : Treat employees fairly, and they’ll generally respond better, appreciate work more, and stick around.

5. Sometimes, good enough is, well, good enough.

Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “good enough for government.“ My Constitutional Law professor at the University of Connecticut (a state school) used to say it when he felt like he’d run out of steam trying to lead us in a discussion.

But, I think it’s a good reminder. And, it reminds me of a quote from one government worker in particular, the late General George S. Patton: “A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

Anyway, this October 15, kiss a government worker. (If you dare; it’s better than cursing them). And let me know what you think in the comments.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: Nearly five years into its fight for national survival, Ukraine has entered a moment of intense vulnerability, under growing pressure from both Russia and the United States. A double blow came Wednesday, as Ukraine said that its military, without warning, lost access to a U.S. military version of Starlink that it relies on for battlefield communications. At the same time, Russia unleashed dozens of ballistic missiles in a broad attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, cutting power to 600,000 people in the capital, Kyiv.

• AFP via Yahoo Finance: US consumer inflation was hotter than anticipated in September, government data showed Wednesday, as Washington’s war with Tehran pushed energy costs higher, deepening strains on American households ahead of next month’s midterm elections. The consumer price index rose 3.7 percent year-on-year in September.

• Pew Research: Roughly 60% of Americans say they do not currently have enough income to lead the kind of life they want; 53% say they do not have emergency funds that would cover their expenses for three months; 27% cannot pay some of their monthly bills or can only make partial payments; and 32% say they worry every day or almost every day about the cost of healthcare and the amount of debt they have, according to a new study.

• WaPo via Yahoo | Forbes: An ethics watchdog filed a complaint with the California State Bar Association seeking an investigation into new White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia’s claims that she is an attorney, following reports that she is not licensed to practice law in any state. Zacharia allegedly said in at least 18 TV appearances from February 2025 through October 2026 that she is a lawyer. “The repetition and breadth of these statements weigh heavily in favor of investigation,” the complaint says.

• WSJ: Many of the ingredients needed to cause a fall in U.S. home prices are in place, except for the one that really matters: owners who are desperate to sell. Buyers have gained bargaining power lately, but many owners are delisting their homes in record numbers if they don’t get the prices they want. In September, 6.1% of sellers pulled their property off the market after failing to get an acceptable offer.

• Yahoo News: Social Security and SSI benefits will increase by 3.6% in 2027 for more than 72 million people, the Social Security Administration announced today. The cost-of-living adjustment is the biggest since 2023 and means, on average, retirement benefits will rise by $75 a month.

• NBC News: Joni Mitchell can see both sides of the U.S.-Canada border freely now. The famed Canadian singer-songwriter shared a major milestone with fans on Tuesday, posing with an American flag to reveal she is officially a U.S. citizen. She also shared a clip of her citizenship ceremony in the Instagram post. “A journey that began 62 years ago,” Mitchell’s caption said.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash. Today’s edition was Lower Power Mode, and if you knew that already, I love you. See you in the comments!

Here’s a link to last week’s. If you’ve signed up but have had trouble receiving it, can you reply to this email and let me know? I know I’m still working out a few issues. Thanks!

Killer app

My brother was in town recently for New York Comic Con (part of his job) at the Javits Center. We got to catch up, even if it was too brief.

This brought to mind however, another convention — I wasn’t there, but I have read about it, as you shall see — 47 years ago, in an atmosphere described contemporaneously as “big … crowded .. and not entirely pleasant.”

This was when the co-creators of VisiCalc—the first spreadsheet program designed for a personal computer—unveiled their creation to the world.

This was a really big moment, in retrospect. Sure, VisiCalc is at least three or four spreadsheets du jour ago. Sure, half of my readers will have no idea what it was.

But here’s what Michael Bragitikos of The Wall Street Journal had to say about it in December 1996, a little over equidistant ago:

For the personal computer, the first killer app was a program called VisiCalc.

It was the first electronic spreadsheet, and suddenly legions of business-school graduates, accountants, and others who pushed numbers around for a living for the first time had a reason to own a PC.

VisiCalc only worked on the Apple II at first, and Steve Jobs later credited it with being one of the key things that made that computer a success.

If there had been no VisiCalc, there might well not have been an Apple II.

Then, no Macintosh, no iPhone, no MacBook Air (on which I’m writing this at the moment). No Toy Story or Pixar, for that matter.

No “here watch your iPad” in the back seat on long car drives with kids. We’d all be back to counting out-of-state license plates.

Back ti VisiCalc. Getting there required the work of a 1970s Harvard Business School student named Dan Bricklin, who had an epiphany in the middle of class.

One of his professors was trying to explain a financial calculation on a blackboard. Every time the professor adjusted an input to make a point—change 10% to 12%, for example—he had to manually recalculate every other equation.

It took forever. But, Bricklin had been a programmer before business school.

And as he sat in class, “daydreaming” as he later put it, he got the idea for an electronic spreadsheet—something that seems obvious now, but which was radical for its day.

It was so radical, in fact, that Bricklin had to come up with the idea of using letters to refer to columns, and numbers to refer to rows, just to keep the calculations straight.

Even if you don’t use spreadsheets often, I’ll bet that when I show you this grid, you can pretty quickly tell me what value is in cell B3:

That was all new. Here’s what Bricklin’s reference sheet looked like, as he was trying to work through the user experience:

In fact, when Bricklin had a completed product worthy of a demo, and he and his cofounder unveiled it at the National Computer Conference in 1979, they had to explain three things to a skeptical audience:

• What is a spreadsheet?

• Why does it have to run on a personal computer?

• What is a personal computer?

I guess we can let Jobs explain those last questions. Until VisiCalc, computers were seen as the domain of hobbyists, but with VisiCalc, there was now a business case.

And in 1979, the Apple II was the only personal computer powerful enough to handle VisiCalc. As Jobs put it:

VisiCalc. [T]hat’s what really … propelled the Apple to the success it achieved more than any other single event. … The Apple II could hold up to 48 kilobytes of memory, which today doesn’t seem like much, but at that time was maybe three times as much as its competitors.

And that’s why VisiCalc was written for the Apple II. It was the only computer that could hold it.

Contemporary news stories talk about businesspeople going to computer stores to buy the groundbreaking $100 VisiCalc program, and then buying the Apple II for $2,500, almost as an afterthought.

It was a success, for a short while. More than a million copies of VisiCalc were sold between 1979 and 1983.

But then a former employee launched a spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3, which ran better on IBM’s new computers. Of course, eventually VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 were both ultimately overcome by Microsoft Excel, and Google Sheets.

Now people just open up ChatGPT and say: “Create a spreadsheet that does X, Y, and Z.” (Then, they get frustrated when it transposes Z and Y.)

Anyway, raise a glass to the killer app, without which it’s hard to calculate what life would be like today.

“If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer,” Steve Jobs told his interviewer in 1990, “you’d be interviewing somebody else.”

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Other things worth knowing …

• WSJ: Iran is fortifying its defenses, rallying loyalists, and threatening a wider, harsher response against the U.S. and its Gulf allies. Satellite images show Iran strengthening sensitive locations including nuclear sites and border areas. The government is also preparing Iranians for renewed war, sending paramilitary forces to read war stories to kindergartners, advertising training in firing shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles, and holding rallies. The belligerent tone also serves as a distraction from the deepening economic misery.

• AP: A significant majority of Americans now think Donald Trump is profiting off the presidency in unethical or illegal ways, a new AP-NORC poll finds. About 6 in 10 U.S. adults believe he is either illegally profiting or doing something unethical but not illegal. Only about 2 in 10 think he is doing nothing wrong.

• CNBC: U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle said Tuesday she would resign, shortly after new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia said Guilfoyle was being asked to leave her post. Guilfoyle broadly denied “recent allegations” against her, apparently referring to multiple critical articles in the Wall Street Journal about her conduct before and after becoming an ambassador.

• KHOU: In a horrifying scene witnessed by dozens of park-goers, a man died after being ejected from a car on the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia on Monday. One witness said the falling man was captured on their souvenir picture taken while on the ride. In a statement, Six Flags said they were “deeply saddened by the guest incident.”

• USA Today: A 1988 video-era privacy law will collide with the modern digital age at the Supreme Court today. The Video Privacy Protection Act was enacted in response to the Washington City Paper’s release of a list of 146 movies rented by Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. The legal debate now centers on whether it’s illegal for sites like 247Sports.com to share information about what sports videos people watch with third parties like Meta or Alphabet for ad-targeting purposes.

• NYT: These California boat dwellers fear the worst: life on land. For decades, dozens of people lived rent-free on a bay just north of San Francisco. A few holdouts remained as a deadline loomed to leave the water.

• Business Insider via AOL: Smoking cigarettes is on the rise among AI researchers, according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. Reason: they’re taking up smoking as a sign to colleagues of how vehemently they believe in the power of artificial intelligence. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I’m showing you my chips are all in,” Sankar said, describing the thought process.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash. Today’s edition was Lower Power Mode, and if you knew that already, I love you. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

You had to go to Harvard

Nobody likes Facebook anymore. I’m not going to argue against that for sure — even though I do have to admit it’s the first way my now-wife and I communicated in advance of the college reunion where we actually got together.

So I guess I can’t 100% hate it and wish it never existed.

That said, they say those who don’t learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat them. But what about learning some of the lessons — and maybe even separating them from the source — so you can copy them?

Right, Facebook — which 20 years ago made a bold move that could have cost the company its key advantage, only for it to stand out in retrospect as a milestone on its way to becoming the renamed juggernaut it is today.

Here’s the story. I’ve long maintained — and I’m not alone — that the only reason Facebook had its initial success (compared to so many other social media networks starting at the same time) was that originally you had to be a student at Harvard University to become a member.

From there, they democratized things, barely: by adding Yale University, Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford.

Eventually they branched out to the entire Ivy League and other elite universities, and then to all colleges, and eventually to high school students and employees of certain companies.

Point being: it was a walled garden where the walls kept getting pushed farther and farther out. But, there was still a wall.

In September 2006, however, about 30 months after launch, that all changed. This was the moment when any breathing human being with an email address could create a Facebook account.

“[M]oments ago Facebook removed the restrictions on registration and anyone can now become a member by joining a geographic network,” TechCrunch reported that morning. “They’ve also anticipated backlash from existing users who liked Facebook just fine as an exclusive club, thank you very much.”

So, how did it turn out? That’s mostly rhetorical, since everyone knows darn well how it turned out, but let’s put some numbers on the answer:

“Prior to open registration, new users were joining at a rate of about 20,000 a day. A few weeks after opening up Facebook to everyone, that number had changed to 50,000 a day, and rising.

Growth in Facebook’s user numbers began to look like a hockey stick going only steeply upward.”

That’s from Brian McCullough’s “How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone.” He goes on to point out that over the next year, Facebook hit the 25 million registered user mark with more than 20% of them beyond college age.

Again, I know that Facebook now has a reputation at best for being a stale social network where your grandmother still posts memes.

I mean, if it weren’t for soccer, a couple of local town forums and ski groups that I’m in, I doubt I’d ever open it.

But, back then this was a big deal.

One more bit of context, and then we’ll wrap the lesson up with a bow. The context is that Facebook opened to everyone just three weeks after it first introduced the News Feed.

It’s a fairly uncontroversial feature now that nevertheless led to near-virtual riots at the time.

In fact, concerns over privacy, and the idea that Facebook would broadcast to everyone in your network, led people to see this as a bug not a feature, so to speak.

Anyway, Facebook delayed the open launch as a result.

Now, the lessons. They say there are riches in the niches. I’ve got to imagine that a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg saw quickly that as a Harvard University student he had access to one of the richest niches of them all.

Of course, Facebook is now Meta. And, Meta is now quite a few iterations past what Facebook was doing and expanding to 20 years ago.

Even people who thought it was neat back then flat-out hate it now.

But that decision back in 2006 is still worth remembering.

Sometimes the thing that gets you from zero to successful is exactly the thing you have to be willing to leave behind.

Just maybe separate the teacher from the lesson you learn.

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Sobibor

When I saw months ago that the anniversary of the Sobibor revolt was this week, I knew I wanted to write about it. I also sort of speed-watched the entire Escape From Sobibor movie on YouTube again, and I became interested to learn what happened to some of the real-life characters who had a bit less screen time due to the limitations of a 2-hour movie.

Maybe it’s my Life Story Magic experience, but one chain of results stopped me in my tracks:

• First, Selma Wijnberg and Chaim Engel, inmates from Holland and Poland, who fell in love in that horrible place and were among the few who escaped in 1943. They made it to America and were married for nearly 60 years until Chaim’s death in 2003.

• But second, it turns out that the actors who played Winjnberg and Engel in the movie in 1987 — the Duth actress Ellis van Maarseveen and the Welsh actor Robert Gwilym — met on the set, fell and love, and got married themselves. (In fairness, van Maarseveen and Gwilym’s marriage ended in divorce after 16 years, but they had two children together.)

Obviously, I’m not trying to write a “on the bright side” type of coda to that story. But it is amazing how things like this can come out of horror.

Other things worth knowing …

• Yahoo News: Federal agents raided the Washington home of Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Monday, marking a dramatic escalation in President Trump’s confrontation with the outspoken lawmaker. Fox News reported that the search was linked to a criminal fraud investigation concerning immigration paperwork submitted on behalf of the Somali-born congresswoman by her late father when she was a child.

• Reuters via Yahoo: Elon Musk has spent roughly $366 million on the 2026 midterm elections so far — $276 million just since July — trying to help Republicans retain control of Congress, making him likely the single-biggest political donor in this year’s races. There is a lot at stake for Musk, with House Democrats calling for investigations into his government contracts as SpaceX CEO and his work running the Department of Government Efficiency.

• The Independent: A major cyberattack targeting commercial refrigeration systems across France left more than 150 supermarkets facing millions of euros in damages after hackers remotely altered fridge temperatures overnight. Rather than shutting systems off, the attackers reprogrammed cooling regulators to force a continuous defrost cycle, driving internal temperatures up to 50°C and spoiling vast quantities of fresh produce, meat, dairy, and frozen goods.

• CBS News: British comedian and actor Russell Brand appeared in a London court Monday for the start of his trial on rape and sexual assault charges. Brand, 51, has pleaded not guilty. The charges involve six women and alleged offenses between 1999 and 2009. The trial is expected to last up to 10 weeks.

• The Guardian: Anthropic has barred users from exhibiting “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models, as the company’s leaders continue to ponder machine consciousness. The ban does not apply to common user frustrations, model testing, or “dark creative themes.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said he cannot rule out the possibility that AI systems are conscious.

• CTV News: A passenger who helped avert a catastrophe on a FlyDubai flight after the pilot was stabbed mid-air last month credits a Canadian TV documentary series for knowing how to seize control of the aircraft. The long-running show “Mayday,” which examines real-life air disasters, appears to have given him the knowledge — or at least the courage — not to make things worse. “It’s nice to be associated with a story with a happy ending,” said executive producer Alex Bystram.

• Hollywood Reporter: Coming soon: a Miami Vice reboot — a new movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler as Tubbs and Crockett.

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Plot twist: The company was not Apple; at the time, the world’s largest personal-computer company was Compaq.

Do readers even remember Compaq? Hewlett-Packard acquired it a few years later.

Anyway, Cook changed his mind after just six months and left to join Steve Jobs at Apple, as I think most of us know. In a 2010 speech at his alma mater, Auburn University, he explained his thinking at the time:

Any purely rational consideration of cost and benefits lined up in Compaq’s favor …

But there are times in our lives when the careful consideration of cost and benefits just doesn’t seem like the right way to make a decision.

There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate — when a particular course of action just feels right.

It was obviously a pretty good decision. Of course, Cook became Jobs’s choice to replace him when Jobs’s health deteriorated—ultimately the key to a succession plan that Jobs was able to set it in motion with just a single sentence in a letter to the company’s board, when his health took a turn:

“I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.”

That was late August 2011; earlier this month, 15 years later, was Cook’s last day as CEO.

I can’t imagine anyone in our lifetimes thinking of anyone besides Jobs as the visionary behind Apple. But Apple is a much bigger and more influential company now than it was when Cook took over.

Under his leadership:

• Apple introduced products such as the Apple Watch and AirPods. It moved the Mac onto Apple-designed chips, and now has 1.5 billion paid subscriptions.

• Its revenue grew from roughly $101 billion when Cook took over to $467 billion. Its stock rose 2,296 percent, and the company added $4.32 trillion in market value.

• Today, more than 2.5 billion Apple devices are active around the world.

Cook isn’t actually leaving Apple; he’s now executive chairman. Still, it’s a major milestone, and he wrote an open letter to the entire company marking the occasion.

There’s a lot of good in it, but two things stood out to me.

The first was this nine-word sentence: “This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything.“

We share a belief that what we build matters. …

Apple helps nurture it, but I believe it lived within each of you long before you arrived here.

It is what brought you to this company and what continues to drive the work you do every day.

But I think it’s also a compliment to Cook, and a significant leadership lesson.

Because there’s an organizational size beyond which a leader can’t really lead through individual influence. I’m not sure exactly what the cutoff is, but it’s a tiny fraction of the 166,000 people who work for Apple.

And as a result, as pithy as this sounds, it’s true: A leader’s most powerful tool is the ability to inspire culture.

Put differently (and I think I might have been the person who coined this phrase): “Culture is leadership at scale.”

Anyway, John Ternus is now CEO. And since Cook spent 28 years at Apple, I guess we’ll have to wait another 28 years to answer the real question about what he built.

In 2054, will Apple still reign? Or will it have turned into the Compaq of the middle of the 21st century?

I have a feeling culture will play a very big part.

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: President Trump said U.S. and Iranian officials met on Tuesday, shortly after he threatened in his address to the U.N. General Assembly that he may “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if a deal isn’t reached soon to end the nearly seven-month war. Trump told reporters about the meeting but offered few details about the talks.

• Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: Opposition to data centers continues to mount in the U.S., with some 45 data center projects worth $68 billion blocked or delayed by local pushback between April and June this year, according to research group Data Center Watch. President Trump has dismissed opposition to data centers and concern about advances in AI as a “sick conspiracy,” saying “the only one that is happy about it is China.”

• WaPo via Yahoo: “I am the code”: How President Trump clashed with the White House ballroom architect over safety issues.

• NYT: Princeton’s run atop U.S. News rankings ends after 15 years. MIT pulled ahead on a set of criteria that are as contentious as they are influential.

• The Independent: President David Adeang announced to the United Nations General Assembly that the South Pacific island nation of Nauru is reverting to its traditional name, Naoero. The shift reflects the name used internally by the island’s inhabitants rather than the foreign adaptation.

• International Living: Here are the five cheapest places for people to retire abroad, according to a new report. They’re all in Asia: Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Bali, and Malaysia.

• AP: After a summer spent packing away sockeye salmon, Alaska’s heftiest brown bears are ready to throw their weight around. Online voting began Tuesday for Fat Bear Week, the annual contest that pits the rotund residents of Katmai National Park and Preserve against each other for the title of most oversized ursine.

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The reason, we realized when we finally got close enough: Five Below is around the corner from Costco, where cars were lined up like it was the 1970s oil crisis to get cheaper gas.

Loss leaders

I try to empathize. Not only because it’s a morally good thing to do, but because if you understand people you can better understand the world.

Case in point.

I’m not exactly a car guy. I work from home, I don’t have to commute anywhere, and so when gas prices spike the way they have this year — lucky me — it doesn’t hit me as hard as it hits many of my fellow Americans.

Still, I feel like I can put myself in other people’s shoes on this one, or maybe more aptly, in their driver’s seats, as the cost of filling your tank rises and rises.

In fact, it’s probably the easiest financial thing about which to be empathetic, given that we advertise the price of gas on giant signs outside every gas station in America.

All of which leads me to Costco, which at least according to one recent report tends to sell gasoline at a consistent 9¢ per gallon less than the five largest local competitors, and 24¢ below the state average.

O.K. now, in case you’re like me, and don’t have to pay super-close attention to the cost of a gallon of gas every day: The national average for a gallon was $2.84 in mid-January.

It’s now $4.10, according to the experts over at AAA. (And $5.62 in California!)

CEO Ron Vachris told analysts that fuel volume at Costco hit record levels for the quarter ended May 10. Some warehouses needed multiple fuel deliveries a day, and the final five weeks of the quarter were the busiest fuel-volume weeks in company history.

Now, I have to admit I am not a Costco member, either. Actually, I’m feeling less and less qualified as this newsletter goes on. But, again: empathy.

Because, Costco is the absolute king of the loss leaders.

Shall we count a few of the other ways?

• Hot dog combos: Costco sold 245 million hot dog-and-soda combos at $1.50 each in 2025, same price they’ve been since 1985.

• Rotisserie chickens: I’ve gone on a personal quest to figure out just how long Costco has been selling chickens for $4.99, and it’s at least as far back as 2000 — based on my looking up old newspaper ads on Newspapers.com.

• Gold and platinum: Not what I would have originally thought of buying at Costco, but in August 2023, they started selling one-ounce, 24-karat gold bars at 2 percent above the spot price. In short, it’s basically impossible for ordinary retail purchasers to buy that commodity for 2 percent above spot anywhere else.

Quick digression: If you’d bought gold from Costco in August 2023 and just stuffed it under your bed, you would have more than doubled your money by now — and that’s even after it’s fallen the past few months.

(I did not do this.)

Anyway, of course Costco isn’t selling any of these things for less than the market might otherwise dictate out of pure kindness; instead, it’s all about showing customers one reason after another after another why they might find it prudent to pay their annual membership fees.

And gas might just be the ultimate loss leader.

Members who buy gas visit the warehouse more often, spend more once they’re inside, and renew their memberships at higher rates than members who don’t.

So, let’s do the math on membership:

• $65 for a standard annual Costco membership and $130 for executive level.

• With 85 million members, that’s roughly $4.6 billion in annual membership revenue before selling a single product.

• Also, Costco apparently has about a 95 percent renewal rate.

A business that brings in roughly $4.3 billion in recurring revenue before selling the first hot dog, rotisserie chicken, ounce of gold, or gallon of gas sounds like a pretty good model.

It might be better than your business model.

If so, I empathize.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: Dolly Parton, a rhinestone-studded, rags-to-riches daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music — and much of pop culture — with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals, died on Tuesday in Nashville. She was 80. No cause was provided.

• NBC News: The Trump administration is threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center if courts don’t allow it to go ahead with its plans, including adding President Trump’s name to the building. In a court filing, DOJ attorneys called the center “structurally unsound, fundamentally unsafe, and embarrassing,” and said “President Trump’s efforts and prestige provide the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival, and structural renewal.”

• AP via WPRI: Canada struck back at the United States on Tuesday with retaliatory tariffs on about $20 billion worth of American goods. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly urged Canadians to buy Canadian to protect jobs and launch a “movement of resistance,” adding that Canada selected specific American products to put political pressure on particular U.S. states.

• NYT: Since C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, a haunting question has lingered: just how many N.F.L. players will end up with the degenerative brain disease? New data provides a sobering indication: at least one in four.

• Metro: The high-flying life of brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate is pure bluster and fantasy, manufactured to boost clicks on social media, their lawyers claim, as the brothers launch a long-shot bid to be released from jail on bond. The pair face 59 charges between them, with Andrew facing prosecution for alleged crimes including rape.

• Hollywood Reporter: Rachel Cusk’s controversial new novel Life of M is an intimate, unvarnished character study of an A-list movie star depicted as hollow, immature, cynical, an intellectual poseur and an artist wannabe. The apparent inspiration: Natalie Portman, who selected Cusk’s works for her online book club and hosted her for a 2022 discussion, calling the author “one of my favorite writers.”

• Frommers: A tourist faces a €1,500 fine for taking stones from Pompeii — just one vacation spot where taking stuff may unleash negative consequences.

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

Of all the many people I’ve written about over the years, one who stands out was the former multibillionaire Chuck Feeney.

Feeney made his fortune co-founding an enormous duty-free business (the kind you see in airports), but then later made it his life’s mission to give away almost every last cent of his net worth to charity.

It was Feeney who gathered a group of fellow billionaires like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and Mike Bloomberg to a restaurant in New York City in 2009 and pitched them on the idea of the Giving Pledge, in which ultra high net worth people agreed to leave at least half of their fortunes to charity.

And, he set the example, giving away a total of $8 billion personally before his death three years ago.

I’ve always liked Feeney’s story, and I think for two reasons:

• First, because it shows an example of a very successful person who managed not to become attached to money and let it own him.

• Second, because in order to give away a lot of money like this, you first have to be the kind of person who creates a business that is actually worth that much.

All of which brings us today to Eddie Smith Jr.

In 1968, when Smith was in his 20s, he borrowed some money from his dad to buy a struggling boat-building company called Grady-White Boats in Greenville, N.C.

Over the next almost-60 years, Smith built it into a highly successful company. As many entrepreneurs do, he started thinking about his legacy, and hoped that his son Chris might one day take over the business.

Tragedy struck, however. Smith’s wife Jo Allison passed away in 2020, and the following year Chris died at age 57, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Wondering what to do with the company, Smith hired an investment bank to test the waters for a sale. Appetites were strong, with bids coming in at over $400 million.

But then, he started having second thoughts.

“I’ve had so many friends who sold companies,” Smith told me when I had the chance to interview him recently, “and none of them were happy after the sale with what happened to their companies. They just lost their way. They lost their culture.”

Then, he found another solution, after reading an article in the New York Times about how Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, gave away his company stock to a nonprofit organization that would dedicate Patagonia’s future profits to support causes he cared about.

Credit where it’s due: I first learned about Smith’s story in another Times article, which frankly is also where I first learned about this entire option.

The legal mechanism involves something called a purpose trust, which now holds all the voting shares of Grady-White Boats, combined with a separate nonprofit.

Grady-White continues as a company, bound by Smith’s values, and will likely provide tens of millions of dollars a year in support of causes Smith identifies such as education, health care, and conservation.

“It’s not just a matter of picking the right people with the right character,” explained Natalie Reitman-White, a consultant who helped Smith explore his options and set up the arrangement. “It’s actually a fiduciary duty, they’re duty-bound to ensure the company operates to the values, principles, and outcomes that you put in the trust agreement.”

Things I really like about this outcome:

• First, it protects the culture and values. That was clearly paramount in Smith’s mind.

• Second, it protects employees and other stakeholders.

• Third, I think it lets entrepreneurs continue doing something that many find very satisfying — betting on themselves.

To be clear, it’s still a remarkable thing for someone like Feeney to liquidate his holdings and donate the money outright.

But maybe it’s even more interesting for someone like Smith to decide:

You know … I think I’ve built something here that can endure long beyond me, and continue creating value and supporting things I care about well into the future.

And, I think the things I’ve created can do it better than anyone else I might give the money to and simply trust their judgment.

As Smith put it:

“Grady-White has a soul. Not very many companies that I’m aware of have a soul, and we just want to make darn sure that it continues to be that way. …

I realized I could secure the awesome culture that Grady-White has got, and really lock that down for generations and generations.”

Oh, and I guess there’s one more thing I like about the story.

In order to give away the profits from a company like this, you first have to be the kind of entrepreneur who creates a business that is actually worth that much.

Where have I heard that line before?

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Other things worth knowing …

• CBS News Minnesota: Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on Tuesday announced he is suing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over the extradition of an immigration agent accused of shooting a man in Minneapolis. Christian Castro, the ICE agent, is Castro is charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. Texas Rangers arrested him on May 29 and he has been held at the Cameron County Jail ever since.

• The New York Times: Silicon Valley Executives Are Tech Fans. Just Not for Their Own Kids: At home, moderation and restraint are the rule for tech parents. Boredom is exalted. Maybe they're onto something.

• The Washington Times: Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday announced charges against 14 people in connection to a cocaine-trafficking operation involving primarily college students and two fraternities at Penn State University. Thirteen of the defendants were Penn State students at or around the time of the alleged conduct, in 2023 and 2024, while the 14th defendant is the father of a student.

• Deadline | Showbiz411: I haven’t watched a late-night talk show in a very long time, but I have to say I find it kind of funny that of all the guest hosts they could have come up with for Jimmy Kimmel Live, they recruited Rosie O’Donnell—especially given that ABC filed an unprecedented First Amendment lawsuit against the FCC on Tuesday, claiming that its investigations and regulatory actions are part of a Trump administration “retaliatory campaign” to curb the network’s free speech.

• SFGate: Employers are ghosting college grads and rescinding offers, destroying morale. A June 2026 report from Resume Builder, which included survey responses from 1,000 respondents between the ages of 20 and 28 who graduated with a bachelor’s degree within the last year, said 34% percent reported having had a job offer rescinded right after accepting it.

• New York Post: COVID created a permanent class of young shut-ins, according to a stunning new report. Nearly 10% of Gen Zers said they had zero face-to-face interactions with another person in their daily life, according to an analysis of US Census data by the Financial Times. The dangerous trend was triggered by the COVID pandemic, when millions of young people were kept stuck inside during the years spent developing crucial social skills.

• UPI: A bear wandered through an open front door into a Harlan County, Kentucky home, ate a family's leftover KFC and knocked over a glass table. "I'm a little sad over my KFC," homeowner Kendra North said, adding, "I keep that front door shut good though at night now, and apparently 7 p.m. is bear time now too."

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Thanks for reading. Photo courtesy of Grady-White Boats. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

Let’s talk about airport lounges in 2026. Things like:

• Capital One changing its Venture X policy so that cardholders can no longer bring guests to Capital One or Priority Pass lounges for free.

• Chase capping free guests on its Ritz-Carlton card at two per visit; additional guests now pay $27 each.

• Delta Air Lines imposing annual visit caps on Sky Club access for Amex Reserve cardholders, and United Airlines removing Star Alliance lounge access entirely for cardholders spending under $50,000 a year.

Shorter version: Lounges grew so crowded that the credit card companies that spent years using them as a selling point are now quietly taking them back.

I’ll admit that I follow this stuff more as an observer than an affected party. Frankly, my business travel schedule cratered during the pandemic and never really recovered.

As a result, a day or two at the gate with everyone else isn’t a big deal to me.

Also, I like to joke that I have perfectly comfortable chairs at home, and a bar that goes largely untouched. Spending effort to try to recreate that experience in airports has never felt like much of a win.

But I know I’m in the minority on this. Business travelers—the people flying 50, 80, 100 times a year—care about lounges deeply. The airlines have always known it.

I got curious about where this all came from in the first place. It turns out, the road leads back to American Airlines—twice.

We can probably start in 1939. New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia faced criticism for maintaining large, well-equipped offices at his newly opened airport. His solution was to offer to rent the space out.

American Airlines accepted on the spot, and the world’s first airport lounge was born. It started with just nine members, each personally designated an “Admiral” of the American Airlines fleet by chairman C.R. Smith.

There were no membership fees, and people couldn’t apply. American Airlines invited you, or it didn’t.

The theme was nautical throughout: Receptionists were called skippers, bar staff were stewards.

Drinks were free, but when American opened its second lounge near Washington, D.C., Virginia’s dry county laws prohibited selling alcohol.

So, members stored their own bottles on-site. At one point, the club reportedly held over 9,000 bottles, some labeled with the names of influential politicians.

Other airlines followed in the 1940s and 1950s. Pan Am built its Clipper Club. TWA had its Ambassadors Club. Delta had the Flying Colonels program, and United had its 100,000 Mile Club.

• By the mid-1960s, virtually every major carrier had one. They lost money, but airlines kept them going anyway. Such was the price of keeping business travelers—then, as now, the most valuable passengers an airline had.

• In 1967, after nearly three decades of invitation-only membership, American Airlines made the bold decision to open the Admirals Club to anyone willing to pay $25 a year, or $250 for a lifetime. Other airlines followed again, and the era of the purchasable lounge was underway.

• Then American launched another first: AAdvantage, the first major frequent flyer program, on May 1, 1981. Other airlines followed, and lounge access became a natural perk of elite status within those programs. Fly enough, and the lounge came with it.

Credit card companies figured out that lounge access was something people would pay annual fees to get. Eventually, the sheer number of people who had bought in and wanted to use airport lounges skyrocketed.

The lounge industry is projected to hit $16 billion by 2030, which brings us back to where we started: overcrowding, guest caps, access restrictions, and credit card companies recalibrating perks they oversold.

As someone who sometimes writes about airlines, the entire history feels like a never-ending struggle of a commodity industry trying to do anything it can to convince people it’s not selling a commodity.

Lounges were always partly about comfort, but they were mostly about differentiation—a reason to choose one carrier over another when everything else looked identical.

In this case, it all goes back to something that started with nine invited “admirals” who could put their feet up in New York and store their personal whiskey in a club in Virginia.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NY Post: The USMNT’s loss to Belgium in the World Cup delivered the biggest soccer audience in American television history: 30 million viewers, Fox Sports announced Tuesday. The USMNT fell 4-1 in a loss that looked even worse than the scoreboard suggested. The USMNT has not reached the quarterfinals since 2002, falling in the Round of 16 in each of its last four knockout-stage trips.

• Fox News: Embattled U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner was hit with a second explosive allegation of sexual impropriety only about 24 hours after he was accused of rape — all while a major campaign decision deadline looms. “He would pull condoms off,” his ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield told The Washington Post. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.” Platner must withdraw from the race by 5:00 p.m. on next Monday, July 13, if another Democratic candidate, who would be chosen by the party, is to replace him before the November general election.

• NYT: Mayor Zohran Mamdani said a high-profile housing project under construction near Grand Central Terminal, and at risk of collapse, was still unstable Tuesday afternoon and warned New Yorkers to avoid the area. The building conversion is part of a broader effort to repurpose Midtown’s empty office buildings to help fix the city’s housing shortage, and turn the area from a work district to a vibrant neighborhood.

• The Guardian: Ninety-five percent of Americans believe the U.S. is suffering an affordability crisis, as many report trouble with the rising cost of groceries and gas, according to a new poll. Despite stable employment and record-high stock markets, more Americans believe the overall economy is getting worse (57%) than in February (46%), before the war in the Middle East.

• WaPo: An ICE officer fatally shot a Mexican man in Houston during a traffic stop — the first deadly shooting by federal immigration officers since Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis in January.

• AP: The U.S. military attacked Iran early Wednesday after saying Tehran struck three ships in the Strait of Hormuz, also revoking Iran’s ability to openly sell crude oil on the world market. Iran immediately warned Washington it would “take whatever measures it deems necessary,” raising the risk that the interim agreement halting the war could break down.

• CNN: Copenhagen has taken the No. 1 spot on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual most livable cities list for the second year running. The top U.S. city is Honolulu, at 25th overall; Vancouver came in 9th.

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

I wanted to share a series of articles I’ve written over the past few years that might shed a bit of light on some of the points we’re making today.

They’re included as a .pdf in both mobile and desktop formats so hopefully you can read easily, and broken into three quick sections:

• Section 1: Making it Personal — examples of including just enough personal details to be authentic, without oversharing.

• Section 2: Learning From Bigger Companies — I love stealing from the big ones.

• Section 3: Jobs, Bezos and Buffet — A few observations on three masters at personal branding, even when it didn’t seem like they were trying. (They were).

Free Book Download

Free Book Download (Mobile Format)

Also, I think we’ll wind up talking about Jobs’s return to Apple and the Think Different ad campaign. Here’s an ancient video of him introducing it to the team—and what he says he thinks all great marketing is about.

Nice shorts, by the way.

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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.

I would prefer not to call back later because you claim to be experiencing higher than normal call volume.

I would prefer not to answer a few more questions so you can route my call to the correct person. I would also prefer not to answer the same questions a second time, since my answers were not previously passed along.

I would prefer not to pay you with cash if I don’t have any. But I would also prefer not to not pay you with cash if I happen to have it burning a hole in my pocket.

But most of all, I would prefer not to download your app.

I suspect I’m not alone.

Chicken & coffee

The preceding rant was prompted by the following:

• The fact that Dave’s Hot Chicken bought its way to the top of the Apple app store rankings, driving 343,531 new account sign-ups in a single day, by giving away free chicken sliders.

• The fact that Subway brought back its old Sub Club loyalty program (buy three footlongs, get one free), but made it app-only.

• And the free McDonald’s-for-life and Starbucks-for-life promotions, which once more require you to download an app.

But mostly, it was prompted by the fact that on a Sunday in New York City recently, I really wanted a cup of coffee. I happened by a Luckin Coffee shop—China’s fast-growing, supposed “Starbucks killer” that opened 3,008 stores during the third quarter of this year alone—and having never seen one in the wild, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Then I learned—or maybe remembered—that you cannot simply walk in and buy coffee at Luckin Coffee. Even standing at the counter with a credit card in your hand, you have to download the Luckin app first, create an account and hand over your personal info and payment details.

I wasn’t looking for a long-term relationship, so I left.

But still

I recalled the ice cream shop I went into with my daughter recently in California that was the opposite of Luckin: a cash-only store.

Walk in there with a $5 bill and you can buy one small ice cream. So my daughter got hers, and I went without—which was maybe for the best—but still.

I write about this kind of stuff. I do the math. I understand why all companies want us to download all of their apps.

They lead to very cheap customer acquisition, and the strategy works because enough of us keep playing along. And that’s their prerogative.

But, sometimes I just want to walk into a place and buy something without negotiating the terms of our relationship first.

Meet people where they are

The kicker at the end to all of this was that my Sunday New York City trip was the tail end of a weekend with friends of mine from college.

As a last stop—we did go to a Jesuit university, after all—I opened an app that I once downloaded voluntarily, and found what time there were Catholic masses near Penn Station before I headed home.

So I went, and when it came time for the collection I felt a bit funny that I had no cash.

But, unlike Luckin Coffee and random California ice cream shops, this church was willing to accept my donation any way I wanted to give it: a website and QR codes posted in the pews, along with volunteers collecting cash using those old-fashioned baskets on the end of a stick.

I chose Venmo.

Meet people where they are, somebody once said. I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson in there.

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7 other things

• The U.S. military has seized an oil tanker off of Venezuela’s coast, President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday as his administration continues to escalate the U.S. military presence in the region. Trump did not provide details on the matter but said that it was an “interesting day.” Oil prices began steadily rising as reports of the seizure circulated throughout the day. (NBC News)

• In a long, late-night social media post, Trump raged about stories in The New York Times and elsewhere questioning his health, calling them “seditious, perhaps even treasonous, and adding: “There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me! My hours are the longest, and my results are among the best.” (AFP)

• Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, along with email addresses from the last decade, and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children. (NYT)

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the U.S. State Department to use Times New Roman for all official government documents, apparently becuase the current typeface being used, Calibri, is too woke. (Gizmodo)

• Madeleine Wickham, known for writing the bestselling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic under her pen name Sophie Kinsella after feeling aghast at the size of her credit card bill 25 years ago, has died aged 55. Wickham wrote more than 30 books, which have sold more than 45 million copies. In April 2024, she announced that she had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer. (The Guardian)

• A driverless Waymo vehicle turned into a temporary birthing center when a woman gave birth to a baby inside the car before she reached a hospital, according to the autonomous vehicle company. The pregnant woman was apparently in labor and attempting to reach a University of California San Francisco hospital when the baby arrived. The mother and her new baby arrived safely in the Waymo at the hospital, according to the company. (KRON)

• A symphony of woofs: 2,397 golden retrievers gather in a park in Argentina. (ABC News)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Rami Al-zayat on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!

Sometimes, people wrestle for a long time with a very difficult decision—and then they have to make a choice quickly.

That’s what happened at McDonald’s 35 years ago this week, when the company announced its “abrupt decision,” in the words of contemporary news accounts, to get rid the foam plastic clamshell boxes in which it had long-sold the Big Mac and other sandwiches.

As the New York Times put it at the time:

“As recently as a week ago, McDonald’s was preparing to respond to public pressure for a cleaner environment by announcing that it would extend its limited plastics-recycling program …

“But ‘our customers just don’t feel good about it,’ said Edward H. Rensi, the president of McDonald’s U.S.A. ‘So we’re changing.’”

Looking at this now, through the eyes of American customers in 2025, the whole thing seems anachronistic.

However, the packages really were among the best-known symbols in America at the time. How much of an icon were they? The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History includes an exhibit on them.

Featured specifically: the McDonald’s Double Clam Shell Container—a twice-the-size package designed to keep hot and cold parts of a burger separate (and thus staying closer to the intended temperature) until the customer was ready to eat them.

McDonald’s had faced mounting consumer pressure over its foam packaging. However, it resisted changes, in part because of concerns that sandwiches would get cold faster.

Its plan: to roll out a $100 million recycling program, and also maintained that its approach was environmentally sound. Yet, just days before the company was set to announce that it was keeping the packaging but adding the program, the Environmental Defense Fund objected, big time.

At this point, we can go to a day-by-day chronology that shows just how fast the company acted:

• October 25: Frederic Krupp, head of the EDF, called Rensi, the head of McDonald’s U.S., to object strenuously.

• October 26: Rensi: “When I got back in the office on Friday, I called Shelby Yastrow, who heads our environmental work, and told him to get some people together and study whether we should get rid of foam and switch to paper.”

• October 31: By Halloween, reporters had figured it out and were scooping McDonald’s ahead of its plan to make the switch—which began in December.

The EDF says it made a big difference:

“Over the next decade, McDonald’s eliminated more than 300 million pounds of packaging including the polystyrene clamshells, recycled 1 million tons of corrugated boxes and reduced restaurant waste by 30 percent.”

McDonald’s said it had spent a lot of time studying what it would be like to get rid of foam packaging. So, during that roughly 72-hour period when the company made the momentous change, it already had data it felt pretty good about to inform the decision.

Since then, most food companies and restaurants that were using foam packaging have moved on, even though the environmental aspect is a bit more complex than public pressure might have indicated at the time.

Today, McDonald’s faces even greater packaging challenges, particularly overseas. Case in point: a French law that says any fast-food restaurant with more than 20 seats has to use reusable packaging for dine-in customers.

It’s challenging, I’m sure. But isn’t that part of the fun?

Now something many of us grew up seeing everywhere is a long-forgotten anachronism.

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7 other things

• Can children and teenagers be forced off social media en masse? Australia is about to find out. More than 1 million social media accounts held by users under 16 are set to be deactivated in Australia on Wednesday in a divisive world-first ban that has inflamed a culture war and is being closely watched in the United States and elsewhere. (NBC News)

• A fertility start-up that promises to screen embryos to give would-be parents their “best baby” has come under fire for a “misuse of science” and “eugenics.” Nucleus Genomics, founded in 2021 by a college dropout and funded in part by Peter Thiel, describes its mission as “IVF for genetic optimisation,” offering advanced embryo testing that allows parents to screen diseases, autism, IQ, and eye color. The company has plastered signs reading “Have your best baby” and “Height is 80% genetic” in New York City subway stations. (The Times)

• Three Russian soldiers were sentenced to up to 12 years in prison on Monday for torturing and killing Russell Bentley, a 63-year-old US national who had volunteered to fight for Russia against Ukraine. A photograph published in some Russian media on Monday showed Bentley sitting on a bed next to an assault rifle, with a pro-Russian flag, a souvenir from Texas and a bust of Vladimir Lenin. (The Guardian)

• A new Realtor.com analysis of metro areas seeing the most departures from September 2024 through August 2025 has revealed which cities homeowners are fleeing in droves: Kansas City, San Antonio, and Indianapolis tied for having the highest turnover rate, with home 45 sales per 1,000 units, the report found. Shockingly, all six of the California metros included in the Realtor.com study saw turnover rates lower than the national average (29.7), suggesting that people are not leaving the state as much as is widely believed. (Daily Mail)

• Everything from air fryers to TVs now suck up our personal data. Here’s how to give gadgets that respect privacy this Xmas. (The Conversation)

• Young Daters Confront a Relationship Killer: the ‘Swag Gap.’ Gen Z has strong feelings about the stylistic imbalance that can doom a courtship; ‘It felt like a smack in the face.’ (WSJ)

• Have you seen this (AI-generated) man? Police swap suspect sketches for AI. (The Washington Post)

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Thanks for reading. Photo fair use. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!

• Schadenfreude (German): taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune.

• Lagom (Swedish): just the right amount—not too much, not too little.

• Tartle (Scots): that awkward moment when you’re about to introduce someone and realize you’ve forgotten their name.

The fact that these concepts are encapsulated in a single word says something about the values and experiences of the cultures that coined them.

Recently I learned another foreign word in this category—one that stops you cold:

• Karoshi (Japanese) – death from overwork.

It’s a legally recognized phenomenon in Japan, severe enough that there are laws governing excessive work hours and employer responsibility.

Which is part of why Japan erupted recently when its new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, held a three-hour staff meeting that began at 3 a.m.

The fax heard ’round the country

Takaichi had a 9 a.m. appearance before the Diet. As she explained it, she needed to rewrite briefing materials—and the fax machine at her home jammed, which forced her to go to the prime minister’s official residence to rework everything with staff.

(For the idea file: Wait, Japan still uses fax machines?)

So she walked out at 3 a.m. and convened her aides in the middle of the night. The optics were immediate and intense.

The backlash

Critics said she pushed staff into the same unhealthy patterns the country has been trying to move away from—patterns tied directly to karoshi. A former prime minister called her timing “crazy,” saying that during his tenure, they started at 6 or 7 a.m., not in the dead of night.

Supporters defended her. Some said she was simply doing what the job required. Others blamed opposition lawmakers for submitting questions too late.

Takaichi acknowledged the “inconvenience” but stood by the decision.

Whatever side you take, the moment fits into a much larger conversation.

Have you heard of Elon Musk?

Think of Tesla, where Elon Musk has held 1 a.m. company-wide meetings, including a Sunday all-hands during the Model 3 “production hell” years.

Employees have described being summoned with almost no notice—and expected to show up because the CEO was awake and wanted answers.

In 2025, Tesla did it again: Staff got a surprise late-night meeting announcement that left people scrambling.

Going past Tesla, in the AI and tech world, we’re seeing a U.S. adaptation of 996 culture—the 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six-days-a-week schedule that became so extreme in China that courts eventually barred employers from requiring it.

U.S. startups now openly advertise 70- to 80-hour weeks. Some founders brag on social media about 90-hour stretches. Hacker-house teams work, sleep, and brainstorm together so they can whiteboard at 1 a.m. without calling it overtime.

The framing is always the same: This is what it takes.

But Is It?

• Is a 3 a.m. prep session truly unavoidable?

• Is a 1 a.m. all-hands meeting the only way to solve a problem?

• Is a 72-hour week the price of admission for innovation?

Or are these simply habits get normalized—not because they’re necessary, but because intensity gets mistaken for competence, or urgency for strategy, or exhaustion for commitment?

Or maybe even for ego? “You’re probably wondering why I’ve called you all to this meeting in the middle of the night. It’s because I can.”

We don’t have a single English word that captures that entire dynamic. Not one I am willing to put in a newsletter that my mom will probably read, anyway.

Five letters, starts with H

Since we started with untranslatable words, let’s end with one from the opposite end of the spectrum:

• Hygge (Danish) – a warm, cozy feeling from simple comforts—soft light, good company, calm.

A lot less dramatic than a 3 a.m. meeting, and, frankly, a lot healthier.

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7 other things

• Ukraine’s president spoke optimistically Monday about the progress of revising the Trump administration’s peace plan, saying “it looks better” and the work will continue during talks on how to end Russia’s nearly four-year war. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke after meeting with France’s president, the latest in discussions aimed at brokering the terms for a potential ceasefire in the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II. (AP)

• Costco joined a fast-growing list of businesses suing the Trump administration to ensure eligibility for refunds if the US Supreme Court strikes down the president’s signature global tariffs policy. During arguments before the Supreme Court last month, key justices appeared skeptical of Trump’s tariffs, which have generated tens of billions of dollars a month. (Bloomberg)

• Back to the office at Meta: Instagram chief Adam Mosseri is ordering most US staff in his organization in-office five days a week starting February 2. Earlier this year, Amazon told many corporate employees to return to the office five days a week. Other tech giants such as Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft have taken a slightly softer approach, generally requiring staff to be in the office at least three days a week. (Insider)

• India’s Department of Telecommunications is giving phone manufacturers 90 days to comply with an order to pre-install a state-owned app on new phones and push it to existing phones through software updates. In August, Russia issued a similar order requiring phone manufacturers to preload a state-backed messenger app, Max. (Verge)

• For years it has seemed no sticker price was too high for American car buyers. Even as average new car prices approached $50,000 this year, dealers fretted more over depleted inventories than losing customers to sticker shock. Those days are coming to an end. Increasingly stretched consumers are starting to draw the line on what they will pay for a new car, according to dealers, analysts and industry data. (WSJ)

• Criminals who modify vehicles to smuggle people, drugs and weapons into the UK face five years behind bars under new laws. Under legislation expected to get Royal Assent this week, it will be a criminal offense to create concealed spaces for traffickers to use. The new laws also make it an offense to possess or supply templates for making 3D-printed firearms components, pill pressers and pill encapsulators – used to make drugs like MDMA. (The Mirror)

• A widow and widower fell in love during water aerobics. They wed in the pool. “We just don’t take life seriously,” said Marlene Parsons, 78. “I mean, life’s too short.” (The Washington Post)

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

Five years ago on the eve of Thanksgiving, I asked readers of this newsletter share what they were thankful for.

Their replies were inspiring, and they got me thinking on a deep, philosophical level about gratitude, and how to practice it.

And, I came up with the list of seven “gratitude prompts” you’ll find below. Here’s how it begins.

1. Are you grateful that you’re alive?

Start with this one: You’re alive! Right now! How cool is that?

Can you imagine all of the highly unlikely things that had to happen in order for you to even have been born?

So, be grateful that your parents met. Be grateful that their parents met. Be grateful for whatever strange, against-all-odds things had to happen.

Imagine, not only did we get to be born, but we were born in the 20th or 21st centuries!

We speak the world’s most common language, and we’re walking around with small devices in our pockets that can connect us to almost the entire history of human knowledge.

I mean, the timing is pretty great.

Even though there are more than seven billion people alive on the planet, that doesn’t make this gift of life less unique. The gift of life is worth being very thankful for.

2. Are you grateful for pain and longing?

Wait, what? What kind of list is this?

Absolutely, yes. Learn to be grateful for the pain and longing in your life. Do it for two main reasons.

First, because good relationships are what make us happiest and most fulfilled, and all good relationships depend on understanding. If you’d never experienced pain and longing, you’d never be able to understand anyone else.

Pain and longing lead to growth.

Also, how would you know the absence of pain and longing if you didn’t know what it was like to feel them to begin with?

3. Are you grateful for your needs?

First, be grateful for your needs that are being met.

Do you have a home? Food? Shelter? Protection from the elements?

Congratulations. The base level of Maslow’s hierarchy is taken care of. That’s fairly easy to be grateful for, even if we sometimes forget.

The trickier part? Being grateful for unmet needs — frankly, the kinds of things that lead to pain and longing sometimes (see above).

These are the fires that get lit under us. They’re what motivate us to exercise creativity.

They’re what get us out of bed in the morning on the days when we’d really rather sleep in.

No needs? No necessities? Then no inventions. (Necessity is their mother.)

Be grateful for progress, and in turn, be grateful for the needs that make them possible.

4. Are you grateful for forgiveness?

We all mess up. We all have to ask for forgiveness sometimes. We all have reason to be thankful when it’s given.

Here’s a twist though: How about exploring gratitude for your own ability to forgive?

Because you’re human; you’ve been hurt by other people. You’ve probably even been hurt by people you care about. Maybe deeply.

I’ve written before that I think people who look for business partners should look first to people they’ve done other projects with before. The reason is that you don’t want the first argument you have to be over something important, like the direction of your company.

But you will have arguments. Some of them might get heated.

The ability to forgive and move on keeps you from throwing out these kinds of good, valuable relationships. They wouldn’t be tenable otherwise.

That makes your ability to forgive a gift, and something else to be grateful for.

5. Are you grateful for your failures?

This is a good one, right? Failures. I’ve sure had my share of them.

Done right, however, failures are a sign of ambition. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that.

They’re also learning opportunities–not just a chance to learn from your mistakes, or the times you fall short–but a chance to learn how to fail.

You learn what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of. You learn sometimes that there’s nothing really to be afraid of–that we all get second acts in America.

And third ones, and fourth ones, as long as we keep going.

Fall short, sure, but realize it almost never has to be the end of the story.

Be grateful for your ability to write that next chapter, but also for the experiences–even the failures–that brought you to the blank page once more.

6. Are you grateful for your people?

Our lives are largely the sum total of our relationships. So train yourself to be grateful for the people in your life.

People like your family, your friends, your co-workers.

And your classmates. Your acquaintances.

It’s hard sometimes, but I’d go so far as to say: Learn to be grateful for your rivals — even your enemies, if you have such people — the ones who hurt you or bring out the worst in you.

You get knowledge from even those relationships. You get understanding. You get things worth being grateful for.

And while we’re at it, I’d put the animals in your life in this category too: pets if you have them. Those relationships are important. And they’re worthy of gratitude too.

7. Are you grateful for hope and faith?

Was this year a difficult one? I’m sorry to hear it, and I hope experiencing that difficulty brings you hope.

How? Because, by definition, if this year was especially difficult, then other years must be better.

That’s not to minimize the very big challenges and pain that some people have faced in the last 12 months. It’s just to recognize that hope is many things, but it’s partly the sense that bad times prove the existence of better times.

Locked up with it: faith.

I’m not going to evangelize here; I’ve been wrong about the details on enough things in my life that I have a hard time telling anyone else, “This is what you should believe.”

But hope and faith go hand in hand. They’re prerequisites to optimism. And optimistic people are the ones who achieve the greatest success and happiness in life.

So learn to be grateful for both of them. And feel a bit better about next year.

Gratitude as a habit

I think you’ll come up with other, even better examples of “gratitude prompts” to add to this list. I hope you’ll share them.

Again, it was hearing what readers had to say about gratitude back in 2020 (of all years!) that got me thinking deeply about it to begin with.

Are you up for it again? I’d love to hear things you’re grateful for in the comments. And let me start it off by saying thank you very much for being here and reading Understandably. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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7 other things

• Don’t plan to cook on Thanksgiving? Here are the restaurants and fast food places that are scheduled to be open. (Yahoo News)

• Move aside Tokyo, the world has a new largest city: With an estimated population of nearly 42 million residents, Indonesia’s capital Jakarta soared from 33rd place to surpass Japan’s Tokyo, according to a new United Nations report. (NBC News)

• H. Rap Brown, one of the most vocal leaders of the Black Power movement, has died in a prison hospital while serving a life sentence for the killing of a Georgia sheriff’s deputy. He was 82. Brown maintained his innocence but was convicted in 2002. (AP)

• Campbell’s is insisting that its soups aren’t made with lab-grown chicken, or bioengineered meat. The food giant issued the explanation on its website after leaked audio allegedly captured Campbell’s vice president of information technology saying the company’s meat “came from a 3D printer.” (The Verge)

• They relied on marijuana to get through the day. But then days felt impossible without it. (AP)

• This Thanksgiving, your turkey might thank you for nothing: a wave of AI‑slop recipes has swooped in, offering bogus cooking advice, bizarre measurements, and photos that may look right but taste wrong. Real food bloggers are seeing their clicks vanish while algorithms churn out disastrously unappetizing dinner ideas. (Boing Boing)

• Son dresses as dead mother in ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ ruse to claim her pension: An Italian pensioner had been deceased for three years when family member was caught impersonating her while trying to renew her ID card. (The Telegraph)

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

Think The Hangover meets Derry Girls; it’s about three Americans who meet while on a semester in Ireland.

Anyway, it started with a scene that went like this:

At the packed JFK departure terminal, 21-year-old Jenny — nervous, broke, and about to start her study-abroad semester in Ireland — learns at the check-in counter that her suitcase is ten pounds overweight and the airline wants a $140 fee she can’t spare.

In a desperate burst of logic and chaos, she unzips the bag in front of everyone, frantically shifting clothes, then begins layering them on: sweaters, hoodies, even multiple bras, transforming into a human laundry pile. The crowd stares as she shoves the bag back on the scale — exactly 50.0 pounds.

Victorious but sweating, she lumbers off toward security like a padded, determined marshmallow, perfectly setting the tone for the misadventures to come.

Honestly, it was a darn good script. But it also means I’ve always got a weather eye open for amusing stories about airlines and luggage limits.

And that’s what tuned me in, on the eve of the busiest travel day of the year, to the latest news from American Airlines.

Au revoir, metal cage of judgment

American announced recently that it’s removing metal bag-sizers—you know, the rigid frames that sit at boarding gates like mechanical judges—from gate areas.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of using one of these things, let me paint the picture:

• You’re at the gate, your bag looks like it might be a little too big, and a gate agent gestures toward the metal frame.

• You hoist your luggage, trying to angle it just right. Sometimes it slides in. Sometimes it doesn’t.

• And sometimes—most awkwardly—it sort of fits, leading to an uncomfortable negotiation about whether those extra two inches really matter.

Starting now, however, instead of making passengers prove their carry-on fits by wrestling them into an unforgiving template, gate agents will simply eyeball whether a bag looks too large for the overhead bin.

“As we further simplify the boarding experience for our customers and team members, American will soon remove bag sizers from the gate area,” the airline said.

A judgment call

Agents are being told to err on the side of the traveler if they’re unsure.

The official size limits aren’t changing. Carry-ons still can’t exceed 22 x 14 x 9 inches (including handles and wheels), and personal items max out at 18 x 14 x 8 inches.

And, if you really want to verify your bag meets the requirements, the sizers will still be available at check-in counters.

Just not at the gate, where they’ve long been a source of last-minute stress and occasional confrontation.

Now, will this lead to chaos?

Maybe! After all, if you remove the objective standard, maybe more people will show up with oversized bags, confident they can talk their way past a sympathetic gate agent? Won’t the overhead bins fill up faster, leading to more gate checks overall.

But let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume that the vast majority of passengers aren’t trying to game the system.

They’re just trying to get through the airport without the kind of desperate, sweater-layering theatrics fictional Jenny had to resort to.

So—and here’s a fairly rare statement—good for American Airlines.

And, good for those of you who are traveling today. Maybe it will make your trip a little less chaotic.

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7 other things

• How Trump’s 28-point plan for Ukraine shocked the world. (Axios)

• Robert F Kennedy Jr once dumped a dead bear in New York’s Central Park, sawed the head off a whale, claimed that a worm ate part of his brain and has peddled multiple conspiracy theories. But 71-year-old US health secretary, scion of the Kennedy political dynasty, has now been swept up in a sex scandal involving his alleged lover, Olivia Nuzzi, 32, a former journalist with New York Magazine that, even by his standards of eccentricity, is eye-catching. (The Telegraph)

• The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a controversial team of federal cost-cutters previously led by Elon Musk, is no more. As of early November, DOGE “doesn’t exist,” according to Scott Kupor, the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which serves as the federal government’s human resources department. (TechCrunch)

• “Praise your kid 462 times a day?” The viral advice trend that’s making parents do the math. (Motherly)

• Soaring electricity prices are triggering a wave of power shutoffs due to nonpayment nationwide, leaving more Americans in the dark. Data from select utilities in 11 states show that disconnections have risen in at least eight of them since last year. In some areas, such as New York City, the surge has been dramatic — with residential shutoffs in August up fivefold from a year ago. (The Washington Post)

• The U.S. Department of Transportation is launching what it’s calling a “civility campaign” to promote good behavior on flights and at airports, as the busy holiday travel season gets underway. The department is naming the campaign “The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” and announced the effort in a press release last week. (NPR)

• A federal judge is hotter than a newly brewed pot of coffee over the failure of Peter Coker Sr. and his son, Peter Coker Jr., to pay millions of dollars in restitution for their leading roles in the notorious $100 million New Jersey deli stock fraud. The Coker convicts owe a total of $5.56 million to victims of their scam, which involved illegally inflating the stock prices of two publicly traded companies to make them attractive candidates for mergers. The scheme led to one of the companies, then-known as Hometown International, having a market capitalization of more than $100 million despite owning only one small, money-losing delicatessen in the hardscrabble south Jersey town of Paulsboro. (CNBC)

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

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

So, let’s talk about an extremely unreasonable man: John Harrison, inventor of the “sea watch,” or the “marine chronometer.”

Harrison spent nearly 50 years of his life on his invention, which solved one of the great technological challenges of his time: how to accurately calculate longitude while at sea.

Inaccurate navigation led to calamitous shipwrecks, because calculating longitude required keeping precise track of time, and the watches and clocks of the pre-Harrison era simply couldn’t keep accurate time during long sea voyages.

This was a massive challenge, so important that in 1714, the British Parliament established a £28,000 prize for anyone who could come up with a solution (equivalent of several million dollars today).

996

Harrison wasn’t sufficiently famous during his lifetime for others to chronicle him, which now seems rather ironic, since his entire life was devoted to timekeeping.

As his biographer Dava Sobel summarizes, during one 19-year stretch, “he did nothing but work ... to the detriment of his health and family, since the project kept him from pursuing most other gainful employment.”

Some of you might remember that I wrote about Harris a long time ago on these digital pages—more than four years ago, in fact.

I bring him up today because of “996,” which is having a moment, and which is the colloquial term borrowed from China for the 72-hour work week, better known as 996; the idea of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

Now, it’s catching on in the U.S., particularly among AI startups racing to be first to market.

‘Excited!’

According to the New York Times, some companies are noting their expectation for 70-hour-plus workweeks right in their job descriptions. More anecdata:

• AI startup Rilla tells candidates right on their application page not to apply unless they’re “excited” about working “70 hrs/week in person.”

• Ramp, a “financial operations start-up,” said it observed more corporate credit card transactions happening in San Francisco on Saturdays, suggesting people really are working weekends.

• Cognition’s CEO Scott Wu posted on X that the company “routinely” works through weekends and does some of its best work “late into the night.”

• Marty Kausas, 28, CEO of AI startup Pylon, posted on LinkedIn that he worked 92 hours a week for three weeks in a row.

‘slaves with no life’

Tech has always had intense work cultures, dating back to the 1960s semiconductor days, as historian Margaret O’Mara told the Times—legendary perks at companies such as Google 20 years ago notwithstanding.

There’s also a sense that to at least some of the 996-ers—or at least the CEOs of the companies they’re working for—work doesn’t feel like work.

“Most of the stuff people count as work I don’t,” Magnus Müller, the 24-year-old CEO of AI startup Browser Use, told The Washington Post. (He lives in a “hacker house” with five teammates, so they can whiteboard at 1 a.m.)

Still, when Müller’s co-founder Gregor Zunic posted about an opening, it got 53,000 views and plenty of criticism.

“996 = slaves with no life,” one person commented.

They want “people who are really obsessed,” as Müller put it, and they want everyone else to self-select out.

To not being one

Look, I’ve worked in startups, and I’ve put in long hours. I’ve also described myself as a “workaholic” many times in this column over the years.

I’ve never invented a clock of any kind, and I doubt I’m going to be an AI pioneer. (Although there’s still time!)

Still, Shaw knew what he was writing about.

Whether “996” sounds brilliant or insane to you probably depends on how you feel about that quote.

Here’s to the unreasonable people around us. And also maybe, to not being one.

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7 other things

• Both houses of Congress on Tuesday almost unanimously passed a bill to compel the Justice Department to release all files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a stunning reversal, President Trump has said he would sign the bill, but it’s still unclear anything will be released. Reason: Trump has recently demanded an investigation of Epstein’s ties to former President Clinton and other Democrats, and DOJ can withhold information that it says could interfere with that (or any) investigation. (Axios)

• Texas cannot use its new congressional map for the 2026 election and will instead need to stick with the lines passed in 2021, a three-judge panel ruled Tuesday. The decision is a major blow for Republicans. Attorney General Ken Paxton said he will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but time is short: Candidates only have until Dec. 8 to file for the upcoming election. (Texas Tribune)

• President Trump played down the murder of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi as he rolled out the red carpet for Saudi Arabian leader Mohammed bin Salman at the White House, saying “things happen” and admonishing reporters for embarrassing the Saudi prince. (Sydney Morning Herald)

• Meta won its high-profile antitrust case against the Federal Trade Commission, which had accused the company of holding a monopoly in social networking. The case, initially filed by the FTC five years ago, centered on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. “Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” the judge wrote. The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so.” (CNBC)

• How baby boomers got so rich and why their kids are unlikely to catch up. (The Washington Post)

• The U.K. plans to pass one of the world’s most sweeping anti-ticket-scalping measures, banning the resale of music, comedy, theater and sports tickets for profit. Fans will still be able to sell tickets to shows they can’t attend, just not at any meaningful markup. (LA Times)

• This one is for my daughter. “Wicked: For Good review: This ‘emotionally soaring’ sequel is ‘more captivating’ than the first film.” (BBC)

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

Speaking of which, a United Airlines flight heading from Washington to Rome had to turn around recently. The cause? A passenger’s laptop somehow fell down the sidewall of the Boeing 767 and into the cargo area.

“We don’t know the status of it, we can’t access it, we can’t see it,” the United Airlines captain told air traffic control, in a recording that has been saved and uploaded to YouTube. “So our decision is to return to Dulles and find this laptop before we can continue over the ocean.”

This is one of those odd stories for which there are few details, and yet I crave more. I’ve asked United Airlines for comment beyond what has been reported elsewhere, but have yet to hear back.

Because words like “lost,” “laptop,” and “airport” in the same sentence rekindle a heck of a memory for me.

Thank you, whoever you are

A few years ago, I lost my laptop on the sidewalk outside Logan Airport in Boston.

We were loading our car at the arrivals area I somehow left it behind. When I realized an hour later what had happened, I can hardly describe the feelings of anxiety and panic.

There was a happy ending: A good Samaritan found my bag and turned it in. But, the logistics meant I had to make a seven-hour round trip drive to recover it. However, I did get it back.

Heck, I even got a good story out of the whole thing. I also got something else—yet another life experience that helps me try to see the world through other people’s eyes.

Cases in point …

The captain

First, the United Airlines captain. I can’t imagine he enjoyed having to make this decision. That’s why he gets four stripes on his shoulders.

I say “he” because it’s a man’s voice on the ATC recording. Speaking of which:

This is just out of an abundance of caution and just precautionary, you know, due to the lithium battery in the cargo area where it’s not even near the suppression system that we have for fires down there. So this is just a safety precaution.

Honestly, who can complain when the captain of an airliner makes a decision and justifies it like that?

The laptop passenger

There’s not much information about this person, and so I don’t know if he or she handled the whole thing well or not.

However, I imagine someone like me and maybe you, trying to get last-minute work done on the eve of an Italian vacation—only to have your laptop slip out of your hands and somehow get swallowed by the plane itself.

If this person is anything like me, I imagine two competing sources of anxiety:

Embarrassment at the idea of being the source of an entire airliner having to turn around, thus delaying the plans of likely hundreds of people to get to Rome.

Panic, thinking about whether the laptop and its contents are now going to be lost forever—along with whatever digital memories they contained.

Without looking, when was the last time your computer was backed up?

The rest of passengers

Of course, it’s important to consider everyone else on the plane. A United Airlines Boeing 767 can hold between 167 and 231 passengers.

That means at least scores or even hundreds of other people who were inconvenienced by the fact that the flight took off, turned around, landed, and had to regroup. Then, apparently it took off again at 3:24 a.m.— three hours after its original departure.

I feel for them as well.

Everyone else’s battles

Sitting crammed together in a metal tube at 30,000 feet, simultaneously anonymously and yet oddly intimately, is something everyone can relate to.

And this whole episode reminds me of a quote that I’ve seen paraphrased and attributed to people ranging from Plato to Tim Ferriss:

“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”

In the end, whether you’re the captain making a tough call, the mortified passenger, or one of the hundreds inconveniently delayed, everyone is just trying to get where they’re going safely.

There but for the grace of God go any of us.

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7 other things

• President Trump pardoned a woman convicted of threatening to shoot FBI agents, and also issued a second pardon for a Jan. 6 defendant, Daniel Edwin Wilson of Kentucky, who had remained behind bars because of a separate conviction possessing firearms, something he was prohibited from doing because of his earlier felony convictions. Wilson, who had been scheduled to remain in prison until 2028, was released Friday evening. (Associated Press)

• A group of victims of Jeffrey Epstein in a new ad calls for Congress to pass a measure to force the Department of Justice to release investigative files about the notorious sex offender, following months of resistance to that by the Trump administration. On Sunday night, in a major reversal, President Trump urged House Republicans to vote in favor of the measure. Trump last week pressured congressional Republicans not to support a petition that forced the vote. (CNBC)

• An AI podcasting machine is churning out 3,000 episodes a week -- and people are listening. With its small eight-person team, it takes a day to go from an idea to a complete episode. With each episode only needing 20 listeners to turn a profit, it’s no wonder Inception Point prioritizes quantity. (The Wrap)

• Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the world’s wealthiest people, is throwing his money and time into an artificial intelligence start-up that he will help manage as its co-chief executive. The company, called Project Prometheus, is coming out of the gates with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Mr. Bezos, making it one of the most well-financed early-stage start-ups in the world. (NYT)

• Bangladesh’s former prime minister has been sentenced to death after being convicted of crimes against humanity over her crackdown on student-led protests which led to her ousting.

  Sheikh Hasina was found guilty of allowing lethal force to be used against protesters, 1,400 of whom died during the unrest last year. Hasina, 78, was tried in absentia by the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) in Bangladesh, having been exiled in India since she was forced from power in July 2024. (BBC)

• Thanksgiving 2025 is shaping up to be one of the priciest yet for American families. New survey data reports that the average person celebrating the holiday will spend close to $1,000 when all expenses are tallied, yet more than a third of Americans are slashing their budgets compared to previous years as they navigate financial pressures during what’s become an entire season of celebrations. (Study Finds)

• With lasagna and burritos, neighbors feed one another as food prices soar. (Business Insider)

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

Here’s a fun, instructive, and ultimately very relevant rabbit hole. Spend a minute or two perusing some of the classic “supposedly expert people who were wildly skeptical about the concept of the Internet” moments from just before it took over everything.

Examples:

• The anchors of NBC’s TODAY, completely bewildered by email addresses.

• Bill Gates, trying to explain the concept of the Internet to a confounded and dismissive David Letterman.

• Or else, this story from a print version of Newsweek in 1995: Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana.

Actually, let’s just quote from that one for a minute:

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

We can laugh about those responses today. But I find myself wondering if skeptics about how artificial intelligence is changing the world today might be doing something very similar.

‘Literally every job’

Reason for bringing this up: A series of timely interviews with Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who runs America’s largest private employer, and who just gave some of the most direct assessments we’ve heard yet from a major CEO about AI’s impact on employment.

“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” he told executives at Walmart’s Arkansas headquarters during a workforce conference, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. “Maybe there’s a job in the world that AI won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it.”

Literally every job.

‘Getting plussed up’

In a separate interview with the Associated Press, McMilllon laid out what he thinks this means in practice:

“I think the best way to think about it is getting ‘plussed up.’ So how can I lean in the role that I have, regardless what that role is, to adopt new tools, leverage them and make things better than they would’ve otherwise been?”

By and large, McMillon said it’s his goal is to keep Walmart’s 2.1 million headcount at the same level at least over the next three years. But the mix of those jobs will change dramatically.

“We’ve got to do our homework, and so we don’t have those answers,” Donna Morris, Walmart’s chief people officer, said at the same conference.

Of course, McMillon isn’t alone:

• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a memo that he expects the company to reduce its corporate workforce in the coming years as it rolls out more AI tools. With about 1.5 million employees worldwide, Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the U.S.

• Ford CEO Jim Farley predicted that AI will eliminate about half of all white-collar jobs in the U.S., telling an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival: “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”

• JPMorgan Chase’s consumer banking chief told investors that operations staff would fall by at least 10 percent as the bank deploys its AI platform — a system that can create a five-page investment banking presentation in 30 seconds.

‘Default to AI’

Oh, and as my colleague Justin Bariso adroitly examined recently, at Opendoor, the real estate technology company, new CEO Kaz Nejatian sent a companywide memo establishing in which he said “Default to AI” as the first line in everyone’s job expectation.

And:

• “Starting with the next performance review, in addition to asking how much impact each employee delivered, we will also ask ourselves how frequently does each person default to AI.”

• “If you reach for Google Docs or Sheets before you reach for an AI tool, you are not defaulting to AI.”

• “If the prototype for a project is not built in Cursor or Claude Code, you are not defaulting to AI.”

• “If you have not used chat.opendoor.com and started thinking about how you can build your own agents and save your prompts, you are not defaulting to AI.”

This is anxiety-inducing stuff. So what should leaders actually do, so that years from now people aren’t trotting out your anachronistic and skeptical reaction to the dawn of AI?

Reassure the people you work with — but be honest.

In short, transparency beats terror.

McMillon put it well: “Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side.” Talk to your team “real time about what we’re learning and what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” as he told the AP.

Recognize that if you’re not optimizing, your competitors are.

Nearly half of technology leaders say AI is “fully integrated” into their companies’ core business strategy. This train has left the station.

The question isn’t whether to adopt AI — it’s how quickly and how well.

Remember what AI cannot do.

At least for now, that includes genuine human relationships. McMillon made this point when he noted that companies have recently pitched robot workers to Walmart.

His response? “Until we’re serving humanoid robots and they have the ability to spend money, we’re serving people. We are going to put people in front of people.”

That’s the sweet spot: Using AI to handle the tasks it’s good at so humans can focus on what they’re uniquely good at.

The bottom line

Change is coming. Actually, scratch that — change is here.

The CEOs running the world’s largest companies aren’t sugarcoating it anymore. They’re telling us exactly what they see: AI is going to reshape every job, eliminate some positions, create others, and fundamentally change how we work.

The good news? We still have time to get ahead of this.

But less time than we did yesterday.

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7 other things worth knowing

• On cue after today’s main newsletter story: Walmart is forming a partnership with OpenAI to let shoppers buy its products directly within ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence chatbot. It is a signal by the biggest U.S. retailer that online shopping is going to become a totally different experience from the retail websites we are all used to. Within the next few months, U.S.-based ChatGPT users will be able to instantly buy Walmart products directly in ChatGPT. The products will include nearly everything available on Walmart’s website, except for fresh food. And Walmart+ members will still get their benefits such as free shipping when making purchases through ChatGPT. (WSJ)

• So much has happened in the Middle East since we last published on Friday. Monday brought tears of joy and of pain in Israel and Gaza, as all of the living Israeli hostages and four of those who died in captivity were handed over by Hamas in exchange for the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners held by Israel. But as the ceasefire brokered by President Trump held on Tuesday, there were a number of unresolved issues testing his plan to turn it into a sustainable peace. (CBS News)

• Late night talk show hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, often critics of President Trump, praised the president over the recent Gaza peace deal this week. “There is some good news out there, because today, thanks to Trump’s newly brokered ceasefire in Gaza, all living Israeli hostages and almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners have been released,” Colbert said Monday on CBS’s “The Late Show.” Trump on Monday visited the Middle East, where he met with Israeli hostage families and spoke at the Knesset in Jerusalem. He then traveled to Egypt for a peace deal signing ceremony. (The Hill)

• At the two-week mark, Republicans and Democrats are bracing for a long government shutdown, with both parties seeing more upside in persisting with their conflicting demands. As a result, neither side is willing to give an inch in the standoff, now the fifth-longest shutdown in the country’s history. (NBC News)

• Pete Hegseth‘s Defense Department has threatened to revoke press credentials of news organization that do not agree to restrictive new coverage rules. Now, more than three dozen news orgs have said they are refusing to sign on to. In a joint statement Tuesday, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, NBC News, and Fox News (where Hegseth worked until January) — said they were not agreeing to the new rules. Previously, the New York Times, AP, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Politico, along with conservative-leaning outlets like Newsmax and the Washington Examiner, all said they would refuse the restrictions. (Variety)

• For the first time, the average price paid for a new car in the United States is over $50,000. Prices rose 2.1% between August and September, and are up 3.6% year over year, the largest gain in two years. Meanwhile, the once-common $20,000 car is essentially gone from dealership lots. Many budget-focused Americans have shifted toward used vehicles or have chosen to keep existing cars longer. Data from S&P Global shows the average age of cars on American roads exceeds 12 years. (Yahoo Finance)

• Remembering Diane Keaton, the iconic star of ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘The Godfather.’ (NPR)

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It was a time, in her eyes, during which people had no style, their hairstyles were terrible, they wore round glasses, and “iPhones and iPads hadn’t even been invented yet.”

I didn’t know whether to be offended or nostalgic. But you know what? Sometimes I miss it.

Some of you might recall I had the odd out-of-the-blue chance to interview Michael Eisner a few months back—the former Disney CEO. He was talking about his book about summer camp, specifically the place he spent his childhood summers called Keewaydin in Vermont, where kids do overnight canoe trips and spend most of their time outdoors.

No electronics. No iPods. No cell phones, not even as cameras. They lock them in the camp safe on arrival.

“Do they do this for adults?” I asked him.

He laughed, but I was serious.

Which brings me to Fred Ramsdell.

I have 200 text messages

Ramsdell is a 64-year-old cancer researcher. He was parked at a campground in Montana on Monday afternoon after weeks of camping and hiking across the Rocky Mountains when his wife, Laura O’Neill, suddenly started shouting.

He first thought maybe she’d seen a bear. Instead, she’d regained cellular service and seen a flood of text messages. “You just won the Nobel Prize!” she yelled.

“No, I didn’t,” Ramsdell said. His phone had been on airplane mode. But his wife insisted: “I have 200 text messages saying that you did!”

They had missed a 2 a.m. call from the Nobel committee announcing that Ramsdell and two others had been awarded the 2025 prize for medicine for their research into the immune system. His lab later said he “was living his best life and was off the grid on a preplanned hiking trip.”

Ramsdell was offline, as he usually is while on vacation. His wife, on the other hand, preferred to stay connected.

“I certainly didn’t expect to win the Nobel Prize,” he told the NYT from a hotel in Montana. “It never crossed my mind.”

Three weeks in the Rockies

The stop in Montana near Yellowstone was nearly the end of a three-week vacation that crossed the mountain ranges of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Ramsdell, O’Neill, and two dogs -- a Gordon setter and rescue husky mix -- had set off from Seattle in their Toyota 4Runner with a small teardrop trailer in the back.

A teardrop trailer. Two dogs. Three weeks in the Rockies. This is a man who won the Nobel Prize and vacations like a retired park ranger.

(Note to my wife who reads this newsletter; I think a trip like this will be in our future, someday.)

When he got to the hotel in Livingston, Montana, on Monday night, Ramsdell finally spoke with Thomas Perlmann, the secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly—about 20 hours after Perlmann first tried to call him.

Perlmann said in an interview that it had never been this difficult to reach a laureate since he assumed the role in 2016. (Someone call Guinness.)

How do you think we pay the mortgage?

As much as I like to say I’m not addicted to my phone and other screens, I am. My daughter says maybe I need a screen time limitation app, like we use for her.

(Counterpoint, Darling Daughter: How do you think we pay the mortgage? Yes, with things I do on screens.)

Still, I’ve tried unplugging. I last maybe three hours before I convince myself I need to “just check one thing.”

But Ramsdell did it for three weeks , and the Nobel Prize waited. He set a boundary.

The research waited. The interviews waited. The congratulatory phone calls waited.

And when he finally came back online, the world was still there.

The Nobel Prize didn’t go away. It didn’t get rescinded. The Committee didn’t say, “Well, he didn’t answer, so we’re giving it to someone else.”

Almost everything can wait.

On Tuesday, Ramsdell planned to drive the six hours left on his trip to get to his fall and winter home near Whitefish, Montana. “I was just grateful and humbled by getting the award, super happy for the recognition of the work in general and just looking forward to sharing this with my colleagues, as well,” he said.

And then, presumably, he got back in his 4Runner with his two dogs and drove six more hours.

Maybe there’s hope for the rest of us yet.

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7 other things worth knowing

• The FAA is bracing for nationwide air traffic disruptions as a result of the shutdown. On Tuesday night, staffing shortages hit several major control centers: Chicago, Nashville, Houston and Las Vegas. Also, Hollywood Burbank Airport in California went without any air traffic controllers on duty for nearly 6 hours, as their duties were handed off to San Diego. (Fox Business)

• The White House’s Budget Office says government workers aren’t guaranteed compensation during a shutdown, and President Trump opened the door to blocking back pay: “It really depends on who you’re talking about, but for the most part, we’re going to take care of our people,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of.” (Bloomberg)

• The Treasury Department said it is working on a $1 coin featuring Trump’s image to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence next year. “No fake news here. These first drafts honoring America’s 250th Birthday and @POTUS are real,” U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach wrote in a social media post. (CBS News)

• Food Network star and longtime Sonoma County resident Guy Fieri said the 2024 heist of $1 million of his company’s tequila “hurt bad.” The celebrity chef recounted the devastating incident in an interview with “60 Minutes.” (Press Democrat)

• Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams, has asked people to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her father. “Please, just stop,” Zelda Williams posted on her Instagram stories. “Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t. … If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me.” (BBC)

• Buckle up, the smart glasses backlash is coming. (Gizmodo)

• Wait a sec, that’s Colonel Umberg! I came across this story: California legislators passed a law to mandate that the noise level of commercials is at the same level as the movie or TV series being streamed. [T]he bill, had been shepherded by Sen. Thomas Umberg (D-Santa Ana) through the legislative process. Lo and behold, Senator Umberg was my old commanding officer in the Army Reserve in the days just after 9/11, back when I was Lieutenant Murphy. Glad to hear he turned out O.K. (Hollywood Reporter)

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

These moments reveal something important about workplace culture that Harvard researchers say we’ve been getting wrong.

The Misunderstood Buzzword

“Psychological safety” has become one of those phrases that gets thrown around in corporate settings like “synergy” or “thought leader”—everyone talks about it, but fewer people seem to understand what it actually means.

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Amy C. Edmondson of Harvard Business School and Michaela Kerrissey of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health identify key misconceptions about psychological safety and how to actually build environments where people feel empowered to contribute their best thinking.

Here’s what they say most people get wrong, and what actually works.

What Psychological Safety Is NOT

Actually, they came up with five misconceptions:

1. It’s not about being “nice” all the time. Safety and comfort aren’t the same thing. Real psychological safety means you can have honest, sometimes uncomfortable conversations. When “being nice” becomes code for never saying what you really think, organizations end up, as the researchers put it, “producing ignorance and mediocrity.”

2. It’s not about always getting your way. Psychological safety doesn’t mean every idea gets implemented or that everyone leaves every meeting feeling validated. Disagreement and constructive conflict are normal and necessary.

3. It’s not about job security at all costs. While no one should be punished for offering a well-intentioned idea, psychological safety isn’t a shield against accountability or consequences for actual performance issues.

4. It’s not an excuse for poor performance. The entire point is to create an environment where people feel empowered to express ideas that might *improve* performance. As the researchers note, extensive research shows that when people don’t feel safe, they hide information to save face or be agreeable, and teams fall into groupthink.

5. You can’t mandate it from the top. Psychological safety has to be built by everyone, at all levels of an organization. Leadership support matters, but it requires buy-in across the board.

What Actually Works

If you want to help create psychological safety in your workplace—whether you’re in leadership or not—Edmondson and Kerrissey say there are three key approaches:

1. Focus on shared goals, not on the concept itself. Talk about what you’re all trying to achieve together. When everyone understands and cares about the mission, it becomes easier to have honest conversations about how to get there.

2. Improve the quality of conversations. This means asking good questions, listening intently, and working toward decisions rather than letting discussions drift. High-quality conversations both create and result from psychological safety. You can practice this in any meeting or discussion you’re part of.

3. Create structures for reflection and progress-tracking. Simple practices like regular check-ins, weekly reviews of learnings and insights, or creating time for team members to talk directly with each other can make a huge difference. These don’t require executive authority—often a team can implement them on their own.

The Bottom Line

Creating psychological safety is hard to quantify, but the payoff is real: teams that can speak honestly, challenge ideas constructively, and learn from mistakes consistently outperform those that can’t.

And perhaps most importantly, you don’t need to be in charge to start contributing to this kind of culture. Anyone can ask better questions, listen more carefully, and help create the conditions where good ideas can surface—no matter where they come from.

Which, ironically, is exactly the kind of thing you should feel comfortable saying out loud at work.

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7 other things worth knowing

• Officials from Israel and Hamas were in an Egyptian resort on Monday to launch talks that the U.S. hopes will bring a halt to the war in Gaza and a release of hostages, despite contentious issues such as disarmament of the Palestinian militant group. The negotiations on President Donald Trump’s plan were set to begin on the eve of the second anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the war, when fighters killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. (Reuters)

• The Supreme Court’s new term opens Monday and is poised to deliver President Trump and conservatives a string of victories. Here are some of the biggest cases to watch: Legal challenges over Trump’s tariffs, his attempts to fire an FTC commissioner and his firing of a Fed governor; a case brought by Vice President JD Vance when he was still in Congress in which the court will consider reversing a precedent that limits coordination between campaigns and political parties; and two cases about whether states can bar trans athletes from participating in women’s sports. (Axios)

• One case the court won’t take: an appeal from Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein. On the first day of their new term, the justices declined to take up a case that would have drawn renewed attention to the sordid sexual-abuse saga after President Donald Trump’s administration sought to tamp down criticism over its refusal to publicly release more investigative files from Epstein’s case. (Associated Press)

• Bari Weiss announced on Monday that she is officially editor-in-chief of CBS News and her outlet, The Free Press, is joining Paramount. “We’re a news organization, so I’ll get right to it: This morning, The Free Press is joining Paramount,” Weiss wrote in an email to readers. The purchase price for The Free Press was $150 million in cash and Paramount stock, according to reports. (Fox News)

• A trio of scientists — two Americans and one Japanese — have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries concerning “peripheral immune tolerance,” a mechanism by which the body helps prevent itself from attacking its own tissues instead of foreign invaders. Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi will share the prize for discoveries that “launched the field of peripheral tolerance, spurring the development of medical treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases,” the Nobel Assembly said in a news release. (NBC News)

• Voters under 50 are the least open to electing a female president, and four in 10 Americans personally know someone who would not elect a woman to the White House, a new poll finds. The American University poll, shared first with POLITICO, says a majority supports electing more women to office, yet female politicians face persistent headwinds over trust on key issues like national security. They also run up against double standards, with voters saying a female president must be both “tough” and “likable.” (Politico)

• Walmart says it’s removing artificial dyes and 30 other ingredients typically found in ultraprocessed foods from its store brands by January 2027, calling the move “one of the largest private brand reformulations in retail history.” Consumers are paying closer attention to ingredient lists as they increasingly prioritize health and wellness. The Trump administration has put additional pressure on companies to reformulate, asking the food industry to eliminate artificial colors by the end of next year. (Food Dive)

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I was definitely an AOL dial-up customer back in the day. We all were, really. At its peak, AOL had more than 20 million users—which in the late 1990s basically meant everyone who was anyone online.

You remember the sound. That drowning-robot cacophony of computerized tones as the modem tried to connect through your phone line. And then, if you were lucky and nobody picked up the landline downstairs, you’d hear it: “Welcome! You’ve Got Mail!”

That chipper, vaguely mechanical voice became so iconic it inspired a Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan romantic comedy.

Imagine Netflix greenlighting a movie today called “Push Notification.”

My brother lived with me during the dial-up years, and his outgoing voicemail message used to say, “We’re either on the phone, or on the Intanet.”

The Intanet.

I used to tease him for that accent; we’re from Rhode Island but we don’t usually drop our R’s like that. But, honestly? He wasn’t wrong. We really were either on the phone or on the Intanet, because you genuinely couldn’t do both at the same time.

Here’s a fun bit of trivia: Cyber Monday exists because of AOL-style dial-up.

After Black Friday, all those people whose only access to high-speed internet was at work would return to their offices the following Monday and finally be able to shop online without waiting 45 minutes for a single page to load. Thus, a shopping holiday was born.

Now dial-up has gone the way of 8-track tapes and actual film in cameras—relics of a bygone era that younger people will never experience firsthand.

AOL itself merged with Time Warner in 2000 in what was then the largest corporate deal in history, valued at $350 billion.

By 2021, it sold for $5 billion. I’m not going to claim to be the best businessperson ever, but I don’t think that’s good.

But here’s my favorite part of the AOL story: the original cancel culture.

Long before that term meant something else entirely, in 2006, a guy named Vincent Ferrari called AOL to cancel his service.

He was subjected to a Kafkaesque nightmare of a customer service rep refusing to let him go. The rep kept asking why he wanted to cancel, what he didn’t like, what AOL could do differently—everything except actually canceling the account.

Vincent recorded the whole thing and it went viral. (If you enable images, you should be able to see the link below this line.)

According to recent Census data, about 163,000 people in the U.S. still rely on dial-up internet, mostly in rural or remote areas where broadband isn’t available or is prohibitively expensive. But only a few thousand of those were still AOL customers.

Which brings me to my final thought: Somewhere out there, I wonder if there’s someone who was unable to cancel their dialup, and who finally succeeded—because AOL dial-up simply ceased to exist.

Congratulations, whoever you are. You’re finally free.

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7 other things worth knowing

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slammed “fat generals” and diversity initiatives during a rare gathering of top U.S. military commanders, and warned that they should resign if they do not support his agenda. Afterward, President Trump floated the idea of using deployments to U.S. cities as “training grounds for our military.” The remarks by Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, and Trump, a former reality television star, had a made-for-TV element to them after nearly all U.S. generals and admirals were summoned on short notice to the event. (Reuters)

• The White House declared an imminent government shutdown as of 12:01 a.m. this morning, after the Senate failed to pass a spending bill to keep federal agencies funded through Nov. 21. Democrats and Republicans each blamed the other. (Fox News)

• About 22 million Americans who get health insurance via the Affordable Care Act marketplace will see their premiums more than double (114%) in 2026, according to an analysis published Tuesday by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group, because government subsidies are set to expire. Democrats say this is the main issue holding up a deal to avert or end the government shutdown. (CNBC)

• House Republican leaders refused to swear in a Democrat from Arizona who won a special election, and who would become the 218th and final “yes” vote needed to force a vote on releasing the “Epstein files.” Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva won in a landslide in the race to replace her father, who had held the seat but died earlier this year. (The Hill)

• American comedians are defending their decisions to play in Saudi Arabia. “So what, they have slaves?” asked Tim Dillon in a podcast segment that led to his firing from the festival. “They’re paying me enough money to look the other way.” Pete Davidson offered a similar take, acknowledging that people have asked him why, given his father’s death on 9/11, he would take a paycheck from the Saudi government. (The Guardian)

• Charlie Javice, 33, the founder of a startup company called “Frank” that promised to revolutionize the way college students apply for financial aid, was sentenced Monday to more than seven years in prison for cheating JPMorgan Chase out of $175 million by greatly exaggerating how many students it served. Javice made false records that made it seem like Frank had over 4 million customers when it had fewer than 300,000. (CNN)

• The skateboard that Tony Hawk used to make history in 1999 has sold for a record-breaking $1.15 million, according to a statement from Julien’s Auctions. The deck, called the Birdhouse “Falcon 2,” was used by Hawk to land the first-ever 900 trick — a 2-and-a-half-turn trick few skateboarders dare to try — at the 1999 San Francisco X Games. (Mississippi Daily Journal)

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• Some say it was Mark Twain.

• Others say Abraham Lincoln.

• Still others say that neither actually said it, but that it parallels a passage from the book of Proverbs in the Bible (Proverbs 17:28, to be exact).

Regardless of where it comes from, it’s good advice — and something that people with high emotional intelligence take to heart.

It’s also something that a United Airlines pilot reportedly ought to have kept in mind before posting recently on social media.

“They are all a dime a dozen!!!”

Let’s set the stage. United Airlines flight attendants have gone without an updated contract for the past several years. Their union negotiated a deal with United — a pay raise of almost 27 percent, along with retroactive pay that would have averaged $21,500 per flight attendant — only to have the union membership vote overwhelmingly not to ratify it.

It’s quite possible that this was a shortsighted move, that this was the best deal the union was going to get, and that union members might regret not having taken it down the road.

But, I don’t know that for sure, so you’ll notice that I’m couching my language here — which is something the United Airlines pilot allegedly did not do.

Instead, according to media reports, screenshots, and even a Change.org petition calling for him to be disciplined, the pilot chimed in on a social media report of the contract rejection with the following:

Love it, now they will get nothing.

They all want pilot pay!!! [United Airlines CEO Scott] Kirby should go to a local university where they are all a dime a dozen!!!

“Oh, he needs a potty break?”

I suppose the ill-advisedness of this is clear, but let’s break it down into three key themes:

Schadenfreude: It’s unclear how any airline pilot would benefit from the flight attendants not getting a contract. The sentiment here is more “joy derived from the misfortune of others.”

Defensiveness and jealousy: Some flight attendants replied to the part about “want[ing] pilot pay” by saying they understand that it takes a lot longer to be qualified as a commercial pilot than it does to become a flight attendant, and they don’t expect pay parity.

Devaluing colleagues: Those last seven words are a killer when it comes to leadership. Imagine how the flight attendants on this pilot’s next flight — or any flight, for that matter — will react.

Actually, we don’t have to imagine, assuming some of the people who commented on his social media post as flight attendants actually are who they claim to be:

• “Hopefully, he brings his food from home.”

• “Just like that, I forgot to cook his meal. Oh, he needs a potty break? Sorry, service is running late, and the entire cabin is in line to use the [forward] lavatory. Maybe later.”

• And, after the pilot apparently removed or hid the comment: “Aww, Mr. Captain deleted his comment. Guess he couldn’t handle the smoke! I hope no one ever warms his bread up ever again.”

Does this need to be said by me now?

There are 28,000 United Airlines flight attendants, and while we live in a divided time, it’s hard to imagine a significant divergence of opinion on this one.

Just under 2,800 people signed a petition asking United Airlines to investigate the comment and “address [it] in accordance with our disciplinary procedures.”

I asked both United Airlines and the flight attendants’ union for comment on this story. United declined, and I have yet to hear back from the union. Most airline industry media experts seem to think it’s unlikely the pilot would face any real disciplinary risk.

That said, as Matthew Klint pointed out on Live and Let’s Fly, if the pilot has “lost his credibility with the flight crews he must work with” to the point that it becomes “fair to wonder whether he can safely work with flight attendants in case of an emergency,” that might be something else for United to consider.

For now, I’m left thinking about what comedian Craig Ferguson called the three-question rule — which my colleague and friend Justin Bariso often cites in his work.

In short, before saying just about anything, you’re encouraged to ask yourself three questions:

• Does this need to be said?

• Does this need to be said by me?

• Does this need to be said by me now?

Let’s apply that here:

• Um, no.

• And … no.

• Also, no.

No matter where that original quote about staying silent comes from, it’s pretty clear that this is all a lesson in what not to do.

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7 other things worth knowing

• The Trump administration expects a government shutdown will start Wednesday, but was scheduled to meet with Democrats Monday to try to find a settlement. Previously, the White House had said it would refuse to negotiate and instead just place all the blame on the other side. Trump “read all the sh*t they’re asking for,” a senior White House official told Reuters over the weekend, and he said, ‘on second thought, go f*ck yourself.’” (USA Today, Politico)

• With a potential shutdown looming, thousands of workers could be furloughed and operations could be disrupted at many agencies. But not all government programs would come to a halt. Here is how some government functions would be affected. (NYT)

• Almost every senior U.S. military leader -- hundreds of generals and admirals -- will gather for an unprecedented in-person meeting in Virginia today with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Trump now says he plans to attend: “I want to tell the generals that we love them, they’re cherished leaders, to be strong, be tough and be smart and be compassionate.” (Reuters)

• Dozens of federal agents took individuals into custody in Chicago, and a top U.S. Border Patrol official told a reporter that they were choosing who to arrest in part based on “how they look.” Full quote from commander Gregory Bovino to a white, middle-aged, male reporter: “There’s many different factors that go into something like that. It would be agent experience, intelligence that indicates there’s illegal aliens in a particular place or location. Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” (Chicago Sun-Times)

• The new tax law will allow millions more Americans to pay nothing in federal income tax. We are going to show you some plausible paths to zero, using examples of a married couple earning $100,000 with two children; a single waitress with one child; and a senior couple with several sources of income. (WSJ)

• If her supporters are to be believed, actress Tilly Norwood is on the verge of Hollywood superstardom. The London-based girl-next-door starlet, they say, is preparing to sign with a major talent agency. But Tilly is manufactured by artificial intelligence, and so is completely fake. She, or it, is poised to be the first AI actress to be signed by a real-life talent agency that normally works with humans, according to Tilly’s creator. (The Telegraph)

• How Finland continues its reign as the happiest country on Earth. (CBS News)

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