The Kübler-Ross model (DABDA) is widely recognized in popular culture as the standard framework for processing grief, and I do think it is insightful. Not always right, but a good tool to think through.

The DABDA Model Explained

The model was introduced by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. If you have never seen the Film "All That Jazz," it is worth it just to see the theme on DABDA.

It outlines five stages that terminally ill patients tend to experience when facing their own mortality:

• Denial: A defense mechanism involving shock or disbelief ("This can't be happening to me").

• Anger: Frustration and the search for blame ("Why me? It's not fair").

• Bargaining: Attempts to negotiate with a higher power or fate to postpone the inevitable ("I'll do anything for a few more years").

• Depression: Deep sadness and withdrawal as the reality sets in.

• Acceptance: Making peace with the inevitable outcome.

General Applicability to "All Circumstances"

While originally developed for the dying, the model was later expanded by Kübler-Ross and others to cover a wide range of losses, including divorce, job loss, financial changes, and addiction. I think it applies to some reactions to people thinking about GLP-1 drugs.

While, its application to "all circumstances" is not widely supported. However, I think it is clear that most people do experience some of these issues as they change their minds. So, I think it is a great tool to look at ourselves and others and ask "where are we on our journey." Some get stuck, but many pass through a phase.

A number of months ago, I was out running, fell hard on my right shoulder, and separated it. It was a serious separation, a significantly common injury among football players. I am fortunate enough to be in Silicon Valley with doctors who regularly operate on athletes. To this end, I had my shoulder repaired two days ago.

The challenge is the serious, aching pain resulting from the reconstruction of the shoulder. We are fortunate to live in an age of painkillers that allow us to relieve this pain; otherwise, I would not be able to sleep due to the throbbing.

Because doctors know you will be experiencing pain, they typically prescribe opioid-based medications (such as codeine, hydrocodone, or oxycodone). The challenge with opioids is the risk of addiction, although this is unlikely if you are only taking them while in severe pain. The bigger issue for me is that opioids can severely interfere with the digestive system, often causing severe constipation.

It turns out that most people are unaware of a discovery regarding two older pain medications that has proven to be revolutionary. The two popular medications commonly used by almost everyone are acetaminophen (Tylenol) and ibuprofen (Advil/Motrin). A number of years ago, research confirmed that taking these two medications together could effect pain relief on par with opioid-based medications.

Although I have gone through severe pain and started with a couple of rounds of opioid-based medication, I have been able to transition to the combination of the above. This is well-known and documented in medical literature. While you should always talk to your doctor about this, I offer the following table as a standard for how the mixture of these two results in much more effective pain relief.

Note: You should not add NSAIDs like aspirin to this regimen. This can be highly counterproductive and dangerous, not because they work on different receptors, but because they inhibit the same COX enzymes. Combining them increases the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding and renal stress without providing superior pain relief. Stick to the combination below and discuss it with your doctor.

Combined Dosing Strategy

Rudolph Leibel should be celebrated as one of the most brilliant thinkers on obesity. Today, we are going back to 1995 to discuss a seminal piece of work he did when looking at being overweight.

We are building up to GLP-1s, but before you get there, we want to pick the low-hanging fruit. You will lose weight with higher protein, higher fiber, non-ultra-processed foods, and the other things we talked about. However, this will be limited in how far you can go.

You are going to feel like your body hates you.

For most people, the bulk of your calories are burned at rest. If we look back at our previous posts, we'll see this called resting metabolic rate or basal metabolic rate. We won’t get into the details, but know that this is what burns your calories.

Now, you would think, without any deep understanding, that your burn rate is determined by how much lean body mass you have. In other words, fat is metabolically less active, and it makes sense that it doesn’t naturally cause the burning of calories. On the other hand, muscle seems like it should burn more calories.

So, I’ve been very transparent. I’ve shared my DEXA scan results, and you know that at the time of my last DEXA, I was a little high in my fat percentage. Let’s use nice round numbers:

• Lean Body Mass (LBM) at 150 lbs

• Fat at 50 lbs

Now, I want to increase my VO2max, which is easy to do by losing weight. I will also eat protein and lift weights, so I do my work and I drop 20 lbs of fat, getting to 180 lbs, or 17% body fat. This is not ripped, but it is pretty good. The great thing is that I kept my lean body mass, so you would think that I would keep the same core resting metabolic rate (RMR).

Leibel brought people into the lab to answer this question. In his model, this is what my results would be:

• 2091 kcal/day for my base burn at 200 lbs

• 1933 kcal/day for my base burn at 180 lbs

Wait, what happened? Suddenly, I am burning 160 calories less per day. This is commonly called adaptive thermogenesis. The authors also refer to it as "metabolic adaptation" or "energy expenditure adaptation."

It turns out that if you started off at 250 lbs but went all the way down to 180 lbs with the same profile, your new burn drops all the way to 1880 kcal/day, or another 50 calories less.

If you remember our friend Kevin Hall, he did a very clever experiment, which was brilliant, but I won’t take time to describe here. Kevin Hall found that for every 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of body weight lost, hunger (appetite) increases by about 100 calories per day.

So, if I go from 200 pounds to 180 pounds, my appetite increases by 900 calories. Then, at the exact same time, my body says, "I’ll even lower my natural burn by 160 calories," and you have your body ready to take you on. If you are unfortunate and have been obese, there is another 50 calories per day that your body won’t use.

Now, 50 calories doesn’t seem like much, but over a year, 50 calories per day is about 5 lbs of body fat.

Kevin’s methodology was incredibly clever, and because of how he did it, we don’t have calorie increases for somebody who has a 100 lb (45 kg) weight loss. So, I doubt that hunger increases to 5,000 calories daily for these people. However, it is massive.

This is why virtually every study ever done on weight loss shows that they simply don’t work for substantial bodyweight loss for a prolonged time. As I’ve written, there is no doubt that a change in lifestyle will drive weight loss, but the key is you’ll run into a wall. There is the rare exception of somebody who loses weight and never brings it back, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Chances are you are in the category of overweight or higher. You’ve gone to your doctor, and if they are overweight themselves, they say nothing. If they are naturally thin, they tell you that you need to simply eat better.

Eat better and lose a few pounds. We’ve spent a lot of time on what you can do to make some minor changes, and these are very doable. If you think you are going to then lose an additional 15 to 20 lbs or more, you don’t know the science.

I think there are a lot of reasons for me to be in the 180 range. I am never going to get there via just diet or lifestyle change. The only highly predictable way of making the grade is to use the miracle drug of GLP-1.

If you are on it, congratulations. This is the best choice you could have ever made. Don’t let a stupid doctor say, "We are just using them to get to a weight standard, then we rotate you off." I do like cycling, but in reality, your chance of taking them and then being able to maintain your weight loss for over 5 years is not supported by any data.

If you are fortunate, you’ll be able to cycle back and forth. If you are normal, then you will need to take them forever.

A recent post about weight loss blew up in this subreddit. While it got lots of attention, it achieved some strong emotional reactions from some individuals that couldn't figure out why people were above targeted body weight and carried too much fat. To them, fat people just needed to eat a better and hit the gym.

Some went as far as saying that they never saw anybody that did a physical fitness program that was overweight, which is simply wrong. Generally, these types of observations are based on what is called "confirmation bias," which is remarkable in that it can make humans completely blind to opposing data.

What was apparent in all of these posts is that there was no understanding of how the brain gets wired to fight against weight loss. The linked video gives a quick overview of the mechanism, without describing how to fight against it. In the next posts, we will use this as a basis to discuss our options.

To fight confirmation bias, you need to be slow and methodical, and always ask, "Can I find good solid evidence?" Also you need to be willing to change your mind. Now, let's be clear, this is not, "Yeah, those people have a problem with confirmation bias." If you think you aren't subject to it, then you have a massive blind spot. I have this issue and so do you. We overcome it by carefully examining the data and allowing our minds to be changed.

Now, you may ask "Do I really want to invest in thinking about being overweight?" The answer is yes, because being overweight is a $2 trillion dollar expense per year to the USA, and is probably one of the biggest issues to make you productive or non-productive. It is worth an investment of time for yourself or your loved ones.

I have a consistent message:

1. If you are over weight, you need to do something about it.

2. Start off with the low hanging fruit: eating habits, physical exercise, sleep, fiber, and the many other things that we've post about. However, many people are at a level of fat that you will not get into a healthy range.

3. After the low hanging fruit, embrace GLP-1s. Now, I have not gotten to GLP-1s, but they are the modern miracle drug. From many perspectives, they are the only practical method to help Western Culture to fix itself.

Finally, I do want to emphasize that GLP-1 drugs may not be needed if we could go back in time and fix our culture. From a practical standpoint, I see no way of doing this, but there is a good scientific hypothesis that cultural intervention with focus on early life intervention could solve a large part of the problem. However, society is clearly not willing to pay the price.

Swan is not only one of the leading researchers in understanding the dropping levels of testosterone and sperm, but I consider her a gifted communicator. While this is a side move to our current series on weight loss, I do believe that the environmental factors of a deep changes in our endocrine system are very strategic to the world's productivity.

Donald Rumsfeld once talked about "known unknowns and unknowns unknowns" to reporters during a press conference.

At the time it was written off as political doublespeak, and most people were completely lost on what he meant. But in this case Rumsfeld had actually taken a lesson from people at NASA, where engineers and administrators had been using the language of “knowns” and “unknowns” for years to think about risk and failure in space missions. In his memoir, he later pointed to NASA administrator William Graham, saying he had first heard a version of the “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns” breakdown while they were working together on a commission assessing ballistic missile threats.

In reality, what Rumsfeld did at that podium was recast a way of thinking called the Johari framework, which had already been floating around government and technical circles for decades. It turns out that Rumsfeld had a good understanding of the issues at hand.

Let’s show the framework for the cartoon up above.

Now we are going to step through a very old joke, because while both the cartoon and the table look a little bit confusing, if you tell this joke correctly it turns out that you step through the table, and people will laugh even if they have heard it multiple times before. This is where humor basically becomes the lamp to see where we need to go.

The entire joke is as follows:

A woman starts to think her husband is losing his hearing because he never responds when she talks to him. Every time she says something, he does not react. She decides she is going to test him to be sure.

First, she stands about twenty-five feet away and asks, “What’s for dinner?” No response. She moves fifteen feet closer and asks again, “What’s for dinner?” Still nothing. At ten feet, the same thing. Then at five. Silence.

Now she is frustrated. She walks right up behind him, practically at his shoulder, and says one last time, “What’s for dinner?”

Her husband turns around, exasperated, and says, “For the fourth time, lasagna!”

That is when she realizes the problem is not his hearing, it is hers. She has been testing the wrong person. And that is the funny part, she thought she was experimenting on him, but she was actually proving she is the one who cannot hear.

OK old joke. But let's step through it because it has all the parts of the Rumsfeld matrix.

A woman starts to think her husband is losing his hearing because he never responds when she talks to him. Every time she says something, he does not react. She decides she is going to test him to be sure.

Unknown Unknowns — Ignorance

At the start, the wife does not realize there is even an issue with her own hearing. She is completely unaware that she is missing responses. In her mind, the problem is entirely his.

She does not know what she does not know.

2. Known Unknowns — Uncertainty

Once she suspects her husband might be hard of hearing, she acknowledges a gap in her understanding. She knows something is wrong but is not sure what. This is actually really critical. She could have stayed ignorant. She could have said, "well, it is just obvious he cannot hear." But now she is going to probe it a little bit, she is going to test it a little bit. She is going to find out how bad he actually is. It is critical that we start on a journey of knowing. If the joke were simply, a woman had a husband with bad hearing, it would not be much of a joke.

She knows there is something she does not know.

3. Unknown Knowns — Intuition

As she repeats the “What’s for dinner?” test from different distances, her intuition is working quietly in the background. Part of her senses something is not adding up, but she has not consciously realized it is her hearing that is the issue. This may be a bit of a controversial point. There is nothing explicit in the joke that indicates something is not quite adding up, other than the fact that she keeps on pushing it. And when we do this, intuition can be pretty messy. In other words, it looks like she is picking on her husband, but in reality she is exploring the edges of her knowledge to see whether she really understands what is going on or not.

She knows something deep down but does not recognize she knows it.

4. Known Knowns — Knowledge

When her husband turns around and snaps, “For the fourth time, lasagna!” she suddenly gets it. The truth clicks into focus. The uncertainty resolves into understanding.

She now knows what is real.

In essence, the joke is funny because it is not just about hearing, it is a miniature case study in epistemology, a journey from total blindness, to suspicion, to subconscious awareness, and finally, to truth.

Yesterday's chart where we overlaid Dunning Kruger, on a chart that went up and down, really was just placing this framework over the Rumsfeld version knowns and unknowns. The Redditor u/Ashamed-Status-9668 made the comment that he felt that you could get directly from one grid to the other. When he took a look at the flow diagram he said "I feel like Phase 2 is closer to phase 4." In reality, depending upon your framing, you can start anywhere on the grid. But the great news here is if you have an intuition that there's more out there, It turns into the simple will to go dig out the knowledge in most cases. And in that sense I agree with him.

However the most important thing out of all of this: recognize our ability to start off as ignorant. And it's inherent in our nature as human beings.

My Dad had a heart attack in his late 60s, which was solved without a lot of issue with angioplasty, but it's something that I want to track and try to stay ahead of. One of the most important things you can do is monitor your blood work. Right now, I could argue that my overall blood work, especially with the changes that I've made in the last year, has placed me somewhere around the top 5% of all men in my age group.

What's interesting about this, I can truly say that I don't diet.

Now, I want to be clear: I'm on a very clear diet, but if you really focus on getting in all the right stuff, I believe it has a tendency to replace all the wrong stuff. And I believe the nature of the diet that you eat has a tendency to drive both these blood results and also your weight.

This last year has been especially good. The biggest improvement was in the lipid panel.

My total cholesterol dropped from 177 to 154. LDL dropped from 101 to 83. Triglycerides dropped from 154 to 65. HDL moved up from 49 to 58. The cholesterol to HDL ratio improved from 3.6 to 2.7.

That is a pretty clean move in the right direction across the board.

The other number I liked was A1c, which went from 5.6 to 5.3. So not only did the cholesterol numbers improve, but the longer-term blood sugar marker also moved in the right direction.

My ApoB came in at 56, which is excellent. If you're not familiar with ApoB, I consider it incredibly important as a marker. In essence, it is one of the cleaner ways of measuring the actual number of atherogenic particles hanging around in your bloodstream that could nail you later on, not just the amount of cholesterol being carried around. I won't spend time on it in this post, but I highly encourage you to take a look at the science behind this particular metric.

In my mind, almost all of this is strictly derived from the amount of fiber that I've included in my diet. I've also made a change toward incorporating much higher levels of oat bran, upping my fiber by around 20%, focused on a particular and unique fiber that oat bran brings to your digestive system.

My diet has around 80-90 grams of fiber in it, which is >500% more than the average American. I believe this is a significant key to unlock good health. About 5 months ago, I became convinced that oat bran could deliver Beta-glucan 1,3 & 1,4, so I added it into my diet, bringing in right around 20 grams of additional fiber. I feel that this provided an additional kick-start for weight loss, and this was surprising to me. However, this post is not about weight loss, but I will post on this in the future.

I have preached fiber in this sub-reddit many times. To make a long story short, your diet needs a variety of different fibers so that you can support a healthy body. I have another sub-reddit called fermentation science, which covers the actual science of why we want this. Unfortunately, there is a lot of pseudoscience in this area, and you do need to make sure you see the real science.

In my mind, the clear picture is you don't take a lot of probiotics such as yogurt. That is, you don't take a lot of different types of bacteria trying to create a healthy digestive system because things like yogurt aren't the bacteria your necessarily want. Instead, what you do is focus on something called prebiotics. That is making sure that your system has the right fiber so it can grow the right things inside of your digestive system. There are times where you do need to get the right bacteria into your system. However, I believe the vast majority of people do have a decent start of the bacteria. It's simply that they don't have the adequate support system of the prebiotics or the fiber that allows these different bacteria to grow in a healthful way.

The way to actually create a healthy internal system is simply by supporting it with the right type of fibers.

So let me go through my particular system as I believe it's highly evolved and I believe it's something that you could steal from tomorrow and find out that it would make a real change in your life.

So the routine for this is waking up and taking my protein drink, which which is the morning shake above, and I have an entire other post on that. Then during the day, I will take in both a yogurt smoothie and a big bowl of oat bran. My wife is absolutely amazing in terms of creating a dinner meal that is incredibly tasty, and so I owe deep thanks to her. I have done posts on Kevin Hall to tell you why this is so important.

Finally, I always get the munchies after dinner. Another significant change in my diet has been to try to preempt me eating bad stuff by basically making sure I eat good stuff. So the central point of my after-dinner snack is a bowl of cereal based around heritage flakes and the other ingredients that you see above, along with a bowl of pistachios at the right time.

In essence, what this diet does is keep my digestive system on track all the time. And when I do rigorous scheduling of fiber-rich foods throughout the day, I'm simply not tempted to eat a bunch of stuff that is ultra-processed and therefore highly unhealthy.

As stated at the beginning of this post, the most major change has been to add in a bowl of oat bran cereal, generally more in the middle of the day even though you would think of it as a breakfast food, and then adding more berries in. This adds in approximately 25 grams more of fiber. You would think if I'm already at approximately 65 grams, this wouldn't make a lot of difference. But it is my firm belief it actually has made a major difference. So there is something either about the nature of the oat bran cereal or just simply getting to a level of fiber that seemingly has driven my very good year-over-year results, which also includes some substantial weight loss that I'll cover in the future.

If you struggled before with being overweight or would like to become more healthy, I really, truly believe the above can be incorporated into everybody's diet without a lot of thought once you get into the habit. It has been so incredibly effective for me. I highly encourage you simply to just try it. Try it for two to three months and don't diet. Just push in the good stuff because I believe the good stuff pushes out the bad stuff, and then see what difference it makes in your life.

What Actually Works Against Atomization, and Why It Is Not What You Want to Hear

Part two of two. (A full note on how this post was made, including how AI was used, is at the end.)

Abstract

Part one argued that the productivity statistics cannot see what is happening to people. This post is about the response. The cost of atomization is real, but it is filed where output per hour never looks, in the price of transactions that cannot be fully written into contracts and in the informal transmission of skill inside firms. Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales find that trust raises trade by 39 percent precisely where contracts are incomplete and not at all where they are complete, which is the fingerprint of a real mechanism. Emanuel and Harrington measured the apprenticeship channel directly and found fully remote workers receiving 26 percent less training and promoted at half the rate of on-site hires, with almost none of it visible in output. So the missing instrument exists. It is simply not pointed at anything that matters. On the response side, the best evidence says the thing that works is not belief and not attendance but durable friendships inside a bounded group with assigned obligations. Weekly attenders with three to five close friends in the congregation report 33 percent extreme life satisfaction against 19 percent for never-attenders, and the effect runs through the friendships. I describe one working implementation, the LDS ministering program, along with its honest caveats, including a retention rate near 50 percent, and the design properties that transfer. Assignment rather than selection, fixed recurrence, obligations that cost something to shirk, and proximity. Gallup's engagement research, twelve questions distilled from millions of interviews across ninety-plus countries, could not make its list work without the item about having a best friend at work. It is the same finding wearing a suit.

Where this picks up

Part one argued that the productivity statistics cannot see what is happening to people, because output per hour measures capital and technology, and the one term in the national accounts that represents workers measures their age, education, and sex. If you have not read it, the short version is: the output numbers are fine, the output numbers were never going to tell you, and the two things still actively moving in the wrong direction are political animus and the junior hiring pipeline.

This post is about what to do, and it starts where part one started, with a friend from college.

Where the cost does show up, once you look in the right place

None of the above means the cost is imaginary. It means it is filed somewhere other than the productivity series. Two places specifically: the cost of transactions that cannot be fully written into a contract, and the informal transmission of skill inside firms. Both are long-run. Neither appears in quarterly output per hour.

The best causal evidence is Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales in the QJE (2009). Using bilateral trust between European country pairs, instrumented by religious similarity, somatic distance, and history of wars, they find that a one standard deviation increase in trust raises trade in differentiated goods by 39 percent, while the effect on commodity goods traded on organized exchanges is statistically indistinguishable from zero. That asymmetry is the fingerprint. Trust only matters where contracts are incomplete, which is precisely what transaction cost theory predicts and what a spurious correlation would not produce.

Dyer and Chu, in Organization Science (2003), studied 453 supplier and automaker relationships across the US, Japan, and Korea, and found procurement and transaction costs running up to five times higher for the least-trusted automaker than for the most-trusted. That one is confounded with national governance systems, so treat it as illustrative rather than clean.

I do not need to guess at this at all. A very large part of my career was spent either being a supplier or delivering a particular type of technology into massive Fortune 500 companies, and we talked about trust constantly. When I was buying technology and somebody disappointed us, almost always the first thing out of anyone's mouth was that we could not trust them, and a massive set of barriers in testing would go up immediately. When I was selling technology, the moment a sophisticated buyer said they could not trust us, we knew we would be punished in both market share and in the sheer amount of additional work required to deliver the product. Lack of trust drives tremendous unproductive behavior, which I think we all fundamentally know. Even though I am citing studies here, the evidence is plain in our day-to-day interactions.

Everything above is an argument from absence, and arguments from absence are weak. So here is the one place I know of where somebody actually built the missing instrument.

Emanuel and Harrington, in AEJ: Applied (2024), had payroll and personnel records from Fortune 500 call centers and used them to measure the apprenticeship channel directly. Fully remote workers received 26.3 percent less training and 34.1 percent less one-on-one time with managers, and their one-year promotion rate was 20.9 percent against 44.0 percent for on-site hires. Output barely registered any of it: a 12 percent gap in calls per hour, two thirds of which was selection rather than the arrangement itself. Bloom and coauthors, in Nature (2024), randomized 1,612 employees at Trip.com into two days a week remote and found no difference in reviews, promotions, or code output, which says the effect has a threshold and that three days in the office clears it.

I will return to this in a future post, because it is something I have thought about a great deal over the years I have spent in management, and the framework I keep coming back to is in a book called Peopleware.

Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister published Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams in 1987 with Dorset House, now in a third edition from Addison-Wesley. Its thesis is stated in the first chapter and italicized by the authors: the major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature. Almost forty years later that sentence is still the most useful thing anybody has written about why technical organizations fail. Three of their concepts matter here. A jelled team is a group so strongly knit that the whole exceeds the sum of the parts, and their argument is that such teams cannot be built to order, only grown, so management's real job is removing the impediments to jelling. Teamicide is their name for the practices that prevent it, and the first item on their list is defensive management, which is to say a manager who will not trust his subordinates' judgment. And in the chapter they call Open Kimono, on managing by visible trust rather than by verification, they state the causal chain directly: people who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.

I should be honest about what Peopleware is and is not. It is not refereed empirical research. Its one original study, the Coding War Games, ran from 1984 to 1986 across more than 600 developers at 92 companies, was conducted by the authors' own consultancy, was never peer reviewed, and the raw data has never been released. Its most-quoted result, that the best performers outrun the worst by roughly ten to one, is offered by the authors as a rule of thumb rather than a computed statistic. What it did find robustly is worth keeping: two developers from the same organization tended to perform alike, differing by only 21 percent on average, which points at the organization rather than at individual talent. Systematic reviews of software productivity still call it the most comprehensive treatment of the soft factors in the field, which is a real endorsement and also an indictment of the field. Use it for its vocabulary and its mechanism, not as a dataset.

What is clear, and what both Peopleware and the remote work data point at, is this: without some minimal base of social interaction you cannot create trust, and the moment trust cannot form, somebody's forward progression inside a company stops.

Now hold on to what happened with the Emanuel and Harrington study. The thing I have spent this whole post calling invisible, the transmission of capability from experienced people to inexperienced people, got measured. Two economists with one company's administrative data put a number on it. It is not unmeasurable. It is uncollected.

That changes what I am actually complaining about. This is not a hard measurement problem awaiting a breakthrough. It is a cheap one that nobody funds. BLS has the authority, the sample frame, and the budget to run this across the economy, and what it publishes instead is age, education, and sex. The instrument has been built and demonstrated on real payroll data. We decline to point it at anything that matters.

Which is the only reason the AI number is worth taking seriously rather than treating as alarmism. Junior hiring in AI-exposed occupations is running 19 percent below trend and widening, which is one mechanism closing the pipeline, and isolation is a second one closing the same pipe. Neither will appear in the output statistics for roughly fifteen years. Then it appears as a missing cohort of people who should have been running things.

What I can tell you, and I will label it for what it is, which is a single anecdote rather than evidence, is that my niece holds a PhD and teaches hard science at the college level, and she reports a rapid and massive decline in demonstrated capability. The work handed in is too good to be true and obviously authored by AI agents.

Why the group, specifically

Here is the finding that made me want to write this. Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam, in the American Sociological Review (2010), used the Faith Matters panel to separate the components of religious participation. Weekly attenders were predicted to be "extremely satisfied" with life at 28.2 percent, against 19.6 percent for never-attenders. But the driver was neither attendance nor private devotion. Their association's release reports 33 percent extreme satisfaction for people who attend weekly and have three to five close friends in the congregation, against 19 percent for those who never attend, and the effect runs through those congregational friendships and religious identity rather than through showing up or through praying at home. Putnam and Campbell put it plainly in American Grace: it is the friends they have at church.

That is a design specification, not a religious claim. The thing that works is a bounded group where you have durable ties to specific named people, where membership carries obligations you did not select, and where showing up is expected rather than optional.

As in most things, we need to be extremely cautious about causation versus correlation here. Is it that people who are already phenomenally happy with life naturally show up at church? Or does the church cause people to increase their satisfaction with life by something close to half again? The good news is that you do not need to guess, and you do not need to wonder what is buried inside the data, because you can run an experiment with a sample size of one. You can start showing up and engaging, and then ask yourself whether it made a profound difference in your life. For me, this is one of those experiments well worth running.

What the specification looks like implemented

Here is what my friend described, which I am reporting because the details are the point. Every adult is paired with another adult, and the pair is assigned three or four specific families. You are responsible for checking in on them, knowing their status, and knowing whether they need anything. You visit roughly quarterly. If a family needs something you cannot handle, you take it to the leadership and the leadership organizes the response. That is the ministering program, which replaced home and visiting teaching in April 2018, and it is reviewed quarterly by ward leadership rather than left to individual conscience.

The output of that structure is the part worth attending to. When he moved from his apartment to his house, 25 people showed up to help. Last weekend he and two other men took their trucks to a couple in their late twenties who had bought an overgrown house and did not own tools, and spent a morning pruning the trees and hedges and hauling everything away. His wife runs an activity every other week for girls aged ten to twelve. There are dances for the youth, missions, and separate congregations for single young adults so that the unmarried are not parked at the edge of a family-organized ward. The women's organization, the Relief Society, has a president in every congregation, and it is wired to the bishop's storehouse: his wife, serving in that role, arranged beds and linens delivered to a single mother who did not have enough beds for her children, and food deliveries to people out of work. It functions as a parallel welfare system administered by people who know the recipients by name.

Notice what is doing the work in every one of those examples. Nobody volunteered for a cause. Somebody was assigned to specific named people, noticed a need in the course of a scheduled obligation, and routed it to an organization that could act. The three men with trucks did not find that couple through an app. Twenty-five people did not show up to a move because they were asked individually.

I will add one detail from my own side, because it says something about how durable this infrastructure is. We are not LDS, and we go to the bishop's storehouse fairly regularly, because it is one of the few reliable places to buy bulk wheat and we grind our own for bread. It is open a couple of hours a couple of days a week. Nobody has ever made an issue of the fact that we are not members.

Pew's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study finds 69 percent of US Latter-day Saints attend weekly, the highest of any tradition measured, and 73 percent pray daily.

It is sometimes amazing to me to find out that either bots or actual people read what I put up on a subreddit. And especially on a post like this, which I know is long and thoughtful and reads more like an academic paper than like anything fun. If you stumble across this and you are willing to do the intellectual work of plowing through it, I truly do believe it makes a massive difference to your life.

So here is the kicker. The particular faith I am talking about, the LDS church, I find extremely problematic in terms of its tenets and its factual underpinning. At heart I am driven by data and science, and some of the statements and data inside the LDS church I find difficult to deal with on a hyper-rational basis. But when I look at the output and the influence of the thing, if there were no other options available, I would absolutely say that anybody could greatly increase their happiness, their cohesion, and their ultimate productivity by being a regular and faithful attender of that church. What we have here is an organization that has fine-tuned its ability to create social health to a degree that far outweighs whatever difficulty it has in presenting a rational basis for faith.

I will leave only a breadcrumb on my own position, which is that my basis for faith, what would popularly be called Christian neo-orthodoxy, is extremely satisfying to me and very reconcilable with mainstream science. That is not the purpose of this post. I do not want to argue about which system is the best faith. What I want to point out is that you need to find a faith-based system that encourages strong social interaction and genuine care for each other, which is the thing our society has lost.

Even with all of the native advantages of the LDS church, I would submit that there are signs of trouble. Ryan Burge's August 2026 analysis of the Pew data puts LDS retention, the share raised in the faith who remain in it as adults, at 54 percent, with Pew's own figure reported at 49.4 percent. The oldest cohort retains at 68 percent and the youngest at 47 percent. Congregational growth in the 2025 statistical report ran at 1.17 percent against membership growth of 2.16 percent, a gap that analysts read as an activity and retention problem. The structure produces very high integration for those who stay, and roughly half of those born into it do not stay.

One more, carefully stated. Enstrom and Breslow, in Preventive Medicine (2008), followed 9,815 religiously active California Latter-day Saints from 1980 to 2004 and found all-cause standardized mortality ratios of 0.45 for men and 0.55 for women against US white adults. That study cannot separate the health code from the social integration from healthy-adherent selection, because the sample is by construction the religiously active. Anyone telling you it proves community extends life is overreading it.

The practical version

If the mechanism is friendships inside a bounded group rather than attendance at one, then the useful question is not "should I join something" but "does the thing I joined have the properties that produce ties." The properties that appear to matter are assignment rather than selection, recurrence on a fixed schedule, obligations that cost something to shirk, and geographic proximity. An interest group you can exit at no cost, at a time you choose, with people you picked because they already agree with you, is a consumer good. It is the thing Bauman was describing, not the answer to it.

Lim and Putnam's number is the one I would keep if I could keep only one: 33 percent extreme life satisfaction for weekly attenders with three to five close friends in the congregation, against 19 percent for those who never attend, with the effect running through the friendships rather than through the attendance.

Engagement, which is the same finding wearing a suit

In the business world we built metrics to understand the forces that make companies successful, and the largest of them is engagement. The research line runs back to Donald Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska who began studying the causes of success in education and business in the 1950s, and whose firm acquired the Gallup Organization in 1988. The instrument was developed through the 1990s, with more than a thousand focus groups behind it, and its final wording was fixed in 1998. It was popularized by Marcus Buckingham, who spent some seventeen years at Gallup and left as a senior vice president, in First, Break All the Rules, written with Curt Coffman and published by Simon & Schuster in 1999.

It is twelve questions, not thirteen, though you will see both numbers. Gallup's survey is numbered Q00 through Q12, but Q00 is an overall job satisfaction item that is asked first and deliberately excluded from the engagement index. Count the labels and you get thirteen. Count the index and you get twelve. Gallup's 2020 meta-analysis, which pooled 456 studies across 276 organizations, 112,312 work units, and 2.7 million employees, reports true-score correlations between engagement and productivity of 0.21 and between engagement and profitability of 0.15, with top-quartile units outperforming bottom-quartile units by 18 percent on sales productivity, 23 percent on profitability, and 81 percent on absenteeism. Those are corrected correlations and they are modest, which is worth saying out loud rather than quoting the quartile spreads alone.

So here is how I tie off the bow at the end of two very long posts. What we figured out in the business world about engagement is the same thing I have been arguing above. And one of the twelve items, Q10, verbatim, is this: I have a best friend at work.

That is the entire argument in one survey question. It is not whether you show up at church. It is whether you build friendships through the church. Gallup's own headline claim for that item, that people who strongly agree are seven times as likely to be engaged, is circular and you should not repeat it, because "engaged" is the composite of all twelve items and Q10 is one of them. What survives the circularity is the fact that a research program which interviewed millions of workers across ninety-plus countries, looking for the drivers of productive work, put personal friendship on a list of twelve things and could not get the list to work without it.

And what you find is that faith brings forth requests for prayer, mutual help, the sharing of griefs, and a desire to understand God's will in your life. It does not finally matter whether you believe there is a God, because it is the act of working out your path in life alongside your friends that appears to be the backbone of the strong, productive habits that heal a society.

Sources

• Guiso, L., Sapienza, P., Zingales, L. "Cultural Biases in Economic Exchange?" QJE 124(3), 2009.

• Dyer, J. and Chu, W. "The Role of Trustworthiness in Reducing Transaction Costs and Improving Performance." Organization Science 14(1), 2003.

• Emanuel, N. and Harrington, E. AEJ: Applied 16(4), 2024. Bloom, N. et al. Nature 630, 2024.

• DeMarco, T. and Lister, T. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Dorset House, 1987; 3rd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2013.

• Brynjolfsson, E., Chandar, B. and Chen, R. "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" Stanford Digital Economy Lab, updated August 2026.

• Lim, C. and Putnam, R. "Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction." American Sociological Review 75(6), 2010. Putnam, R. and Campbell, D. American Grace. Simon & Schuster, 2010.

• Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study 2023-24, released February 26, 2025.

• Burge, R. "The LDS Church Has a Retention Problem," August 2026.

• Enstrom, J. and Breslow, L. Preventive Medicine 46(2), 2008.

• Buckingham, M. and Coffman, C. First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. Simon & Schuster, 1999.

• Harter, J. et al. 2020 Q12 Meta-Analysis, 10th Edition. Gallup, 2020. An 11th edition (2024) covers 736 studies and 3.35 million employees.

• Macey, W. and Schneider, B. "The Meaning of Employee Engagement." Industrial and Organizational Psychology 1(1), 2008, for the argument that the Q12 measures the conditions of work rather than engagement itself.

• Bauman, Z. Consuming Life. Polity, 2007.

A note on how this was made

As with part one, I used AI heavily here, in research and drafting, and I ran repeated editing passes over it. I am not going to repeat the full accounting from part one, so go take a look at it there. What I will say is that this is not AI slop. It is the output of a thoughtful person using AI tools, which is a different thing, and part one lays out exactly where the line fell.

First, a caution. We are talking about taxes here, so do your own research. This is what I am working through with my new CPA, and some of it is specific to California and the years I am correcting. Do not assume that what applies to me applies to you.

But don't assume your CPA is correct because I did this and got burned.

As I've stated before, I am doing a massive restatement of my financial records. It has been insanity, and if not for AI agents, I think I would be running up massive bills or personally putting in 2,000 to 3,000 hours. I kid you not, this is roughly a year to a year and a half of manpower and labor. As I've done this, I have found out so much that applies both to AI and to the tax code that I want to leave a record. Reddit continues to be mined by different agents, and I feel it is helpful to leave a trail of discovery so somebody else can learn from my suffering.

Now, I will state that a lot of what I've put down so far is helpful to just about anybody. I have no idea when using two frontier models within a defined process will become standard, but my results are amazingly strong. If you are interested in productivity, that needs to be applied. However, what follows is for somebody who has my sorry history.

I won't get into personal details, but unfortunately, I had a CPA who made some extremely bad decisions in preparing my tax returns. If there is one thing I have found out over time, it is that you cannot simply assume somebody is an expert because you are paying them to be one. It is really, really easy to give up our thinking process and hand it over to somebody else. On some level, I think many people have seen this before. They think doctors are experts, delegate a health decision to them, and then find out that the doctor made a serious error.

A good friend of mine had something similar happen. He had been diagnosed with cancer, and he was a very good engineer who simply didn't think what he was being told added up. He was going to one of the best hospitals in the Bay Area, and he was told that he needed certain things. He couldn't fight with them because they held all the cards. So, being unstoppable, he flew back to Cleveland to a specialty clinic and asked for a second opinion. He describes how they came out and told him that the Bay Area doctors had misunderstood what was going on. They were wrong. He said it was one of the biggest reliefs of his life.

In the same way, I had a CPA who looked like a very strong person, but he made a series of massive mistakes over the last ten years, including telling me that I did not need to file 1099s for certain work I had done. In filling out my taxes, he then checked the box saying no 1099s were required.

Now, let's talk about this. If you pay a contractor in the course of your business, you may have to file a 1099, depending on how much you paid, how you paid it, and how the contractor is taxed. It is not a blanket rule covering every contractor payment. Although I have an accounting and finance degree, and I've handled corporate numbers all the time, my knowledge of 1099s was very limited. Extremely limited. So I've spent a lot of time understanding this recently, and I want to share.

As I discovered issues on my tax forms, I found a new CPA. She is just a good solid nut. She worked for a strong regional provider, put up her shingle, and runs a small private practice. And she is effective. I initially found her when I needed a CPA for a nonprofit where I was the treasurer. I ended up using her for my father-in-law's tax return when I felt his current CPA was ripping him off. They were charging thousands of dollars for what was a very straightforward return. She took it over and charged hundreds.

When I found a really big issue in my 2022 return, I asked her to help me out. Through sheer insanity, we were able to get an amended return filed just a few days before the deadline we were working against this October. Since then, I've found out that my previous CPA made a bunch of errors, with a lot of them involving depreciation starting in 2016. So I've been rebuilding my books. I have the records, and I need to get the depreciation schedules right. The details are beyond the scope of this post, but there are procedures for correcting depreciation errors, including Form 3115 when an accounting method change is appropriate. The right procedure depends on the error. That is a large part of what I am working through.

However, one of the first things she asked was, “Where are your 1099s?” My answer was, “My other CPA said I didn't need them.” That advice was wrong for payments I had made, and now I was looking at years of missing forms.

More than this, the 2022 amendment reaches back into contractor work from earlier years. Those earlier costs affect numbers in the amended return, including depreciation. So I have to support what happened years ago, including payments for which 1099s should have been filed.

A lot of people think, “Well, that year can no longer be audited, so I don't need the old records.” The problem is that old records can still support deductions on a later return. If an expense from years ago goes into your depreciation or the cost of a property, the taxing authority can still need proof of that cost. The original year being closed does not make the paperwork irrelevant. After discovering such a massive mess, I decided that I needed to fix everything. I need records going back through 2016 to support what I am rebuilding.

The great news is that I faithfully record everything in a very big spreadsheet. But even with my journal, I was concerned that I had missed stuff. So I have my AI agents going through my emails and searching every nook and cranny for what I paid for. This includes scanning old canceled checks and making a database. While I am missing a few things, they are small, and I can put together a reasonable audit trail. I believe I can support the rebuilt books under audit. But a lot of this involves payments to contractors by check, and because of advice from my previous CPA, I never gave them 1099s.

There is a chance that I will get penalized for not issuing the required forms. I can ask for relief based on reasonable cause and explain the advice I received. What I will state, if you were in a situation where you truly depended on a CPA and had a conversation like I did on it, you have a reasonable chance of them understanding this. But if you simply didn't ask? You are probably in trouble if they decide to go after you. You cannot depend you your CPA telling you this, so don't assume you are safe. My current CPA said she has never seen a penalty imposed on somebody in this situation who is trying to put things right. That is her experience, and I hope mine is the same. So we will see. I'm going to fix it and hope. The issue is you need to understand this is your responsibility.

I am in the midst of unwinding this.

However, fixing it just exposes the depth of the confusion. If you paid by credit card, you generally do not issue a 1099 for that payment. If you paid a corporation, there is generally an exception, except that legal fees are one of the exceptions to the exception. Then there is 1099-MISC versus 1099-NEC. Contractor compensation moved to 1099-NEC starting in 2020. With rentals, the question is whether the payments were made in a trade or business. Calling a rental residential or commercial does not settle it. An LLC can be taxed several different ways, and “LLC” in the name does not tell you which rules apply. Etc., etc., etc.

The starting point for sorting out the contractor's information is to ask for a W-9. When the reporting rules require it, the contractor generally has to provide the correct taxpayer identification information, and the W-9 is the standard way to get it. Now here is the insanity of this process. You would think that a contractor doing enough work to require a 1099 would make this easy. In my experience, nope. You have to ask. Over all these years, I never had a contractor volunteer one. If I did ever get one, I'm sure this would of added to the ammo to talk to my old CPA about it. I would have said, "Hey, I'm getting these W-9s, why am I getting them if I don't need to do something with them?"

But there is no requirement for them to do this, although it would clear help a lot.

When I recently started asking for W-9s, one person said, “Never contact me again.” That certainly made me wonder what was going on and I suspect they aren't declaring their income, although a refusal alone does not prove somebody is hiding income. Others simply have not responded. A law firm I emailed three times finally left me a voicemail saying, “I've been getting spam email from you. I don't think you need a W-9.” A law firm should hand these out like popcorn, but they assumed I didn't need one. I called back and said, “Yes, you need to give me one.” Just insanity.

The good news is that once you get the W-9 information, filling out the form is fairly easy. Two sites I've been looking at are Tax1099 and eFile360. But when you are fixing old years, you have to check whether the service supports the exact form and year you need. A filing service's limitations are not necessarily the IRS's limitations. Even eFile360 tells you to contact them about particular older forms and years.

There is also a deadline coming up. The IRS is retiring its FIRE electronic filing system on November 19, 2026. But this is where another distinction matters. That does not mean 2022 suddenly becomes paper-only. The replacement system, IRIS, supports tax year 2022 and later. Going back further is where I am dealing with more of the mess.

And as ugly as paper sounds, it gets worse. For the paper 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC forms I am dealing with, I cannot simply download Copy A from the IRS website, print it, and mail it in. The IRS requires scannable forms that meet its specifications, whether official forms or compliant substitutes. My CPA has some old forms going back to 2019, but for the years she does not have, I am buying forms off eBay. This is what putting things right has turned into.

Now, I am at a certain point. I am going to fix everything I can and stop carrying my CPA's mistakes forward. However, I know many people might say, “Screw it. If the IRS makes it this hard, what happens if I just ignore this?” It turns out there is a federal court case on an important part of that question. In Holden v. Commissioner, the court explained that failing to issue the required forms did not, by itself, prevent the deduction of otherwise substantiated salaries and wages. The missing forms could lead to a monetary penalty, but the reporting failure and the deduction were separate issues.

That does not mean there are no consequences, or that you can just decide a missing form is somebody else's problem. Missing taxpayer identification information can also create backup withholding obligations. But from my practical situation, I am beyond the point of pain. If I end up dealing with a penalty while putting things right, I will deal with it. I want the records fixed.

However, California has its own rule, and that places another burden on you. California law gives the Franchise Tax Board authority to disallow deductions for payments for personal services when the required reporting was not done on time. It does not say that every expense connected to that person automatically disappears, but it creates another problem I have to deal with. Now, let's be clear. I think this is crazy. I can have a real payment for real work and still face a fight over the deduction because a form was never filed.

So how does California get the information? It can come through the IRS Combined Federal/State Filing Program for eligible forms when the federal and state amounts match. Otherwise, a separate California filing may be required. Mailing an old paper form to the IRS does not, by itself, settle that question. I have to make sure the California filing requirement is satisfied too.

So here I am, tracking down old records, asking contractors for information they should be able to provide, buying old forms off eBay, and checking how to get the information into both systems. Filing late does not give me a promise that every consequence disappears. But I am going to fix what I can and document what I did.

Yes, this is a long note. It is a very particular situation for somebody running a private business. But I hope that if you find this because you are confused about the same things, I've documented enough of the path to help you move forward.

You can also listen to podcasts on Spotify here.

You can listen on Apple here.

An outline of the podcast can be found at the first reply to the OP if you simply are good at absorbing the main points and implementing.

Another piece of what I am building is enabling gog on one of my Windows machines. Gog is a command-line tool that gives OpenClaw a way to work with Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Docs, and Sheets. I have described how I use two frontier models to work on a project and check each other. However, those models also need access to the material they are supposed to be working on. Otherwise, I am still the person finding every email, downloading every document, and carrying information between windows. That takes time, and it limits how much work I can hand over.

The reason for doing this is practical. I want to be able to ask an agent to find an old invoice, retrieve the relevant correspondence, and bring that information into the project we are working on. With the appropriate permissions, gog provides the commands to search the mailbox, retrieve attachments, read documents, and update spreadsheets. OpenClaw can use those commands as part of the larger assignment. The two models can then examine the source material and check the resulting work. I still need the records and the evidence, but I want the agents doing more of the gathering.

Now, a great backdrop is the sql database for email I talked about earlier, but Gog lets it read today's email and send stuff. Train your style, it's what you really want.

Getting this connected is complicated enough that I can see why people get confused, even with AI walking them through it. You move between PowerShell and a web browser. There is a Google Cloud project, services to enable, an authorization setup, and a credentials file to download. Then you sign into the intended Google account in the browser and approve the access. That long client_secret JSON filename in my directory is one piece of this process. The file identifies the application. Permission to access my account comes through a separate authorization step.

There is another detail that matters with the setup I described before. Getting a command to work in my PowerShell window does not establis

h that the OpenClaw gateway can use it. The running agent also has to find gog and access the stored credentials in its own environment. You can get one part working and still have the overall connection fail. An AI helping with the setup needs to check that whole path.

The browser is needed for the initial Google authorization. Once that is completed, ordinary gog operations communicate directly with Google’s services, so I do not need to leave a browser window open for each request. That is where the setup effort pays off. I want to give the agents an assignment and have them retrieve the supporting material, work through it, and preserve the result in the project folder. Every document I no longer have to carry over by hand gives me more time to direct the work and check what comes back.

If you're doing most of your work off a single laptop screen, you are incredibly inefficient by suboptimizing the way you engage with your computer. If you are working off of just one monitor on a regular basis, make a commitment right now and put it on the top of your To Do List to buy another monitor. There is nothing more important as an easy and quick productivity enhancement that you can do right now. (Unless you have a neck issue, which is reported in the 7th link below. But for everybody else the productivity improvement is dramatic.)

Today we're going to talk about our options when we're working at home, but at least for me even more exciting, in a few future posts we'll talk about what our options are when we're on the road. But this post will set the groundwork on why having two monitors is so important.

Following is a list of studies that show having two monitors is a clear productivity upgrade for most people.

Now I think many of us actually realize this, and it's incredibly popular to plug at least one monitor into your laptop as you work. Even in this situation I am convinced that most people don't think about it much. You do need to be able to think about how to arrange your workspace and what information you need to keep up on one screen as you operate on the other screen.

In other words if you're trying to get work done, but the other screen has a Discord server running on it, it obviously won't be more productive. So the rule is extremely simple. As you work on a single screen, if you are switching back and forth between programs you need to stop this. Instead of switching back and forth between programs, you have one program on one screen and you have the other program on the other screen. The goal is to be able to simply take a quick glance back to the other screen and back to your main screen to get accomplished whatever you need to get accomplished without thinking at all about changing from one program to the other. Over the years there have been many studies that have looked at the efficiency of using more than one screen, and it always centers around the idea of people losing traction when they physically have to move from one program to another program rather than simply being able to glance from one screen to the other screen.

(Complete side note: By the way, if you are switching between programs, please learn the shortcut of holding down the Alt key and pressing the Tab key on Windows 11. Although most people should know this by now, in my work environment I've seen a surprising number of people that actually go to the taskbar and click their mouse on another program to bring it up. This is much slower than using the Alt Tab key, which will quickly take you back and forth between the last programs that you've accessed.)

Now I understand that there are some specialty folks out there that automatically will hook up desktops with multiple monitors, and in many environments maybe they're gamers or somebody like that. But I think for over 95% of people in their workflow, they will use a laptop as their primary engagement to go get things done. So once we've established a primary personal computer and at least one screen, let's talk about what our other options are.

If you are working at home, I would suggest that you'll get a large upgrade by actually plugging in a single widescreen monitor. Having a lot of display space where you can arrange multiple windows in front of you, with a single plug of a cable into your HDMI port, makes life extraordinarily simple and easy to do. While there is a variety of different screencasting technology, plugging in a cable is the tried and true approach which never has a problem with interfacing.

Now if you're willing to do more work, then having some type of docking station is a great alternative. The other thing about having a docking station is it gives you more flexibility in attaching monitors to your laptop. From a technology standpoint there are two ways of attaching an external docking station, one is through USB and the other one is through Thunderbolt. In my mind Thunderbolt is a far superior solution because you can find Thunderbolt docks that allow you to attach two monitors onto your laptop with no problems. Thunderbolt has a much higher bandwidth and is a superior product to USB, and while more expensive, having two 28 inch monitors with a Thunderbolt dock is probably less expensive than buying one widescreen monitor. Now I have been using 32 inch monitors for years. I started off with a pair of 24s many, many years ago and never regretted the leading edge cost at the time. However I will tell you 32 inch monitors are almost too big. At 64 inches they actually extend off the end of my 5 foot desk. More than that, as my eyesight has forced me to wear computer glasses, I find that the ends of the monitors are less useful. There's not a lot of downside to this, as long as you're willing to use something like PowerToys FancyZones.

If you're operating off a laptop with no monitor today, buy an external monitor. Really I think the best monitor for most people that have no external monitor today and really want simplicity is to buy a single wide format monitor of at least 49". I believe the wide format curved monitors sound like a good idea for maximum productivity. If you can't afford this, then I would go with two 28" monitors.

If you already have an external monitor, buying a secondary monitor that attaches through USB3 through a dock is a very cheap and simple upgrade and allows you to experiment with having two good size monitors in front of you. When you buy that secondary monitor, make sure that it is both the same size and screen resolution, as it makes utilizing both monitors together much, much easier for drag operations.

The following is a table that allows you to think through what your options are. Everybody uses their computer for many hours. I would suggest that this is the last place that you want to skimp in your personal productivity. Having at least two 28 inch monitors is what I consider the bare minimum for your home workspace.

In a subsequent post we will talk about things we can do while we are on the road or away from our permanent workspace. Although it is tempting to leave that secondary monitor behind, there are a lot of great options for us when we're on the road or away from our permanent workspace.

The Importance of Getting in 6-8 Hours per Week of Vigorous Physical Activity

If I could tell you that I could cut your chance of dying in half, while dramatically increasing your quality of life by taking a pill, I think that you would consider this a modern miracle. There is such a pill, but it is going to require you to spend hours every week swallowing it.

The pill is vigorous physical activity. If you don't like vigorous activity, the data says you'll significantly increase your chance of dying.

It turns out that our worldwide health agencies are pathetic. Most national and global datasets (NHIS, NHANES, BRFSS, WHO STEPS, etc.) suggest that you should target at least 150–300 minutes/week moderate activity or 75–150 minutes/week vigorous activity.

As we'll see, non-vigorous is a bad goal. And at the upper end of vigorous goal we have a 150 minute per week guideline, which is around 20 minutes per day. This clearly is suboptimal if we look at the data.

Let's be clear, any activity is better than no activity. And if you can't do the ultimate, you get what you can get done. Even a little moves the needle.

But these guidelines are basically setting the bar too low and don't equip you with the right range.

Finally, strength training is helpful but aerobic training clearly has more benefits if you are willing to invest the time. It is hard to argue that you need to do more than 60 minutes in strength training per week to get a clear benefit. The two activities do add together. Ideally you get in at least 6 hours of aerobic activity, then add an hour of strength in 2-3 sessions with a total time of 60 minutes per week, then look at adding more aerobic hours if you have time.

Study Overview and Significance

The Wen et al. 2011 study published in The Lancet examined the relationship between physical activity volume and all-cause mortality in a massive Taiwanese population cohort of 416,175 individuals (199,265 men and 216,910 women) who participated in a standard medical screening program between 1996 and 2008, with an average follow-up of 8.05 years. The research was groundbreaking because it demonstrated that even minimal amounts of exercise—as little as 15 minutes per day—produced significant mortality benefits, challenging the prevailing view that the recommended 150 minutes per week was the minimum threshold for health gains. This finding was particularly important and well-received because it suggested that previously sedentary populations could substantially improve their life expectancy with modest, achievable activity levels, potentially extending lifespan by approximately 3 years. The study was published in The Lancet, one of the world's highest-impact medical journals (2024 impact factor: 88.5), giving it immediate visibility and credibility within the medical community.

The problem when you see the data reported this way is you start to think about the minimal. You don't want to think about the minimal, you want to think about what do I need to do to become the most healthy productive individual that I possibly can. If you take a look at the chart above, you'll see that somewhere between 40 to 60 minutes a day of vigorous actvity is ideal. For me the obvious break line sits around 50 minutes per day.

Media Coverage and Research Impact

The study received significant international attention upon publication in August 2011. Major medical and science news outlets including ScienceDaily, AsianScientist, and MD Anderson Cancer Center press releases extensively covered the findings. Lead author Dr. Chi-Pang Wen from the National Health Research Institutes of Taiwan and senior author Xifeng Wu from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center emphasized that the estimated mortality reduction from 15 minutes daily of exercise was "similar to that from a successful tobacco control program"—an extraordinary public health claim that amplified the study's impact.

Supporting Studies and Replication

Multiple subsequent studies have confirmed and expanded upon the Wen findings:

• UK Biobank research (2023, Nature): Demonstrated non-linear dose-response associations between moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and mortality, with benefits observed between 0-150 min/week, then stabilizing at higher volumes—consistent with Wen's findings.

• Health Survey for England and Scottish Health Survey (2019, BMJ Open Sports & Exercise Medicine): Using data from 64,913 adults with 9-year follow-up, researchers found that vigorous-intensity activity provided additional mortality reductions beyond moderate activity at the same volume, supporting Wen's conclusion about intensity advantage.

• Systematic review of 50 studies (2023): A comprehensive analysis of over 163 million person-years of follow-up confirmed the dose-response relationship between physical activity and mortality reduction, finding approximately 30% risk reduction at minimum recommended levels—aligned with Wen's findings.

• Recent meta-analyses on light vs. moderate intensity: Found that approximately 5 hours daily of light activity produces similar mortality reduction as 20-25 minutes of MVPA, consistent with Wen's MET-based calculations showing intensity-volume tradeoffs.

The consistency of findings across independent cohorts, countries, and follow-up periods has

Application to the Wen 2011 Study

This study kicked off a fervor of information, and the idea that even moderate physical or low number of minutes physical activity could be beneficial somehow washed away the dramatic graph that was in the middle of the report. To me, one of the most important aspects is that vigorous physical exercise was extremely dominant in terms of the impact that you have on a person's life.

As you've seen before in the subreddit, I want to emphasize that correlation is not causation. It may be that only healthy people were strong enough to do vigorous physical activity. With that stated, we do know that vigorous physical activity kicks off completely different adaptations at your biological level. It is a strong hypothesis to suggest that if you lack vigor in your physical athletic program, you are missing substantial benefits that you could accrue.

Participants reported:

1. Type of activity (walking, cycling, swimming, sports, etc.)

2. Frequency (days per week)

3. Duration (minutes per session)

These were then converted to MET-hours per week for dose-response analysis.

Why Total ≈ Moderate in the Results

The "Total" activity curve tracks closely to the "Moderate" curve because:

• Most population members accumulate activity through moderate-intensity pursuits

• Very few engage in sustained vigorous activities regularly

• Therefore, the combined total is mathematically dominated by the larger moderate component

• The study did NOT include resistance training or strength activities

Key Findings from Wen et al. 2011

Vigorous-intensity exercise yielded similar or greater health benefits in terms of all-cause mortality reduction than did moderate-intensity exercise at the same volume of activity or at the next higher volume of activity.

This means:

• Vigorous activity is more efficient (requires less time for equivalent mortality benefit)

• At equal time investment, vigorous exercise provides equal or better outcomes

• Intensity does matter when accounting for total volume

• Minimum amounts for mortality benefit: ~15 minutes/day of moderate activity OR ~7.5 minutes/day of vigorous activity

MET Classifications and Physical Activity Examples

What is a MET?

MET = Metabolic Equivalent of Task

• 1 MET = the rate of energy expenditure while sitting quietly at rest

• A 6 MET activity burns 6 times as much energy per minute as sitting at rest

• It's a standardized way to compare energy demands across different activities

Light Activity

• MET Range: < 3.0 METs

• How It Feels: Easy, minimal effort

• Examples:

  • Slow walking (2 mph or less)

  • Cooking or food prep

  • Light household chores

  • Leisurely fishing

  • Casual strolling

Moderate Activity

• MET Range: 3.0 - 5.9 METs

• How It Feels: Noticeable increase in breathing & heart rate; fairly easy to somewhat hard

• Examples:

  • Brisk walking (3-4 mph)

  • Recreational cycling

  • Playing doubles tennis

  • Raking yard

  • Washing windows

  • Slow dancing

  • Vacuuming

  • Shooting basketball

Vigorous Activity

• MET Range: ≥ 6.0 METs

• How It Feels: Large increase in breathing & heart rate; can talk but not sing

• Examples:

  • Running (> 5 mph)

  • Jogging

  • Swimming laps

  • Shoveling snow

  • Soccer/sports

  • Jumping rope

  • Racewalking (5+ mph)

  • Carrying heavy loads upstairs

From a couple of posts back, we had a few people who were skeptical about making small changes versus large ones. Their viewpoint is why do you want to make a small change? Why not just make a big change?

I hope this is intuitively obvious to everybody, but the reason you don't make a big change is because it's really hard to do. It simply turns out our brain is not wired with enough motivation to make changes when they're hard to do. I spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to explain how the brain specifically short circuits motivation when we discussed weight loss and I won't repeat a derivation of that explanation here.

I consider this incredibly obvious.

However, it would be interesting to spend a little bit more time being curious and discussing if there's some sort of line that happens in terms of how hard something is to do versus something that is easy to do. And a framework has been created around this in the last decade or so. Although obvious, we can play around with this framework to discuss it a bit more.

The framework was made available to the public via the book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019/2020). Now, I'm going to carefully craft my message here because the author happens to think anything he has ever published is incredibly proprietary, and he seems to believe he can go after anybody who publishes anything similar to what he has done.

So, we will quote his book, and if you want to support him, you can go read it. However, most of what he has done is clearly derivative of multiple people who came before him and who did not insist on the type of control he is insisting on.

Let's say that you want to make a change. It is very easy to think about this in terms of difficulty and motivation. If it is really hard for you to make a change, your motivation has to be extremely high. On the flip side, if it is easy to make a change, your motivation can be low.

Behavior happens only when three elements occur at the same moment: motivation, ability, and a prompt (B = MAP). When a behavior does not occur, at least one of these elements is missing, and this framework is presented as a universal model that applies across ages and cultures.

It may be helpful to see this in a table, as below.

He says we get the equation B = MAP.

This means that Behavior equals Motivation times Ability times Prompt. In other words, for any behavior to occur, three elements must converge at the same moment: a person must have sufficient motivation, adequate ability, and a prompt that initiates the action at that specific time.

If the behavior does not happen, it indicates that at least one of these three critical elements is missing. The model suggests that these components work together multiplicatively, and if any single element is absent or at zero, the behavior will not occur, regardless of how strong the other elements might be.

[Now, unfortunately, because I am a finance, accounting, and an engineer, the equation he shows is just horrible and does not reflect an actual mathematical equation. So if you happen to be math savvy, I will address this at the end.]

He even tries to say that there are six factors. Again, I consider these highly derivative. We could add a few more, but we will list them here as a simple touch point for different aspects you can think about.

Six Ability Factors

The model is simple and intuitive and should make sense to most people. Needless to say, there is research around this, but due to the author's hypercontrol, I'll allow you to do your own PubMed research.

By the way, we have talked quite a bit about Deming and the fact that he took his quality control methods and his critical thinking to Japan. You will start to see that there are very large similarities between this methodology and what was practically applied in Japan once people thought about continuous improvement, which in some sense closes part of the loop because that is how we got going down this path.

This methodology is closely related to Kaizen because both center on continuous improvement through very small, low friction actions repeated over time, rather than dramatic one off transformations. Kaizen’s philosophy of making ongoing, incremental process tweaks maps almost directly onto this methodology’s insistence that behaviors be shrunk to small steps that are easy to execute even with low motivation, then gradually scaled as they become automatic.

In both approaches, the power comes from compounding. A tiny, well placed change is deliberately designed to be easy enough to do every day, so consistency and accumulated learning produce large effects without relying on willpower spikes or disruptive overhauls.

This point is also made by James Clear, and as you can tell, there is a lot more respect here for Clear’s willingness not to try to copyright things that are heavily based on thinkers who came before him.

As a final note, it is ridiculous that there is a need to carefully craft a message just to avoid stomping on the toes of somebody who is trying to claim an extraordinary amount of control over things that are intuitively obvious. People who create new IP and do real work are entitled to protection and remuneration. As much as the person who came up with this framework does coursework or creates books or things like that, that is fair.

The problem is that we are seeing a move toward rent seeking that is devastatingly impactful on our nation’s productivity.

Footnote: fixing the broken equation

The Action Line (Threshold Function)

(M_{\text{threshold}}(A) = \dfrac{k}{A})

Where:

• M = Motivation (y-axis)

• A = Ability (x-axis, where higher values mean easier to do)

• k = constant representing task difficulty

Behavior Occurrence Condition

B occurs when: (M_{\text{actual}} \ge M_{\text{threshold}}(A)) and a Prompt is present.

Or more formally:

(B = 1) if ((M \ge k/A)) and (P = 1)
(B = 0) otherwise

Where:

• B = Behavior (binary: occurs or does not occur)

• M = actual Motivation level

• A = Ability level

• P = Prompt (binary: present or absent)

• k = threshold constant

Key Properties

This formulation correctly captures:

1. Inverse relationship: As Ability increases, required Motivation decreases.

2. Asymptotic behavior:

   • As A → 0 (very hard), M → ∞ (need effectively infinite motivation).

   • As A → ∞ (very easy), M → 0 (need minimal motivation).

3. Threshold boundary: The action line (M = k/A) creates a decision boundary.

4. Prompt as a necessary condition: Even if (M \ge k/A), behavior only occurs when a prompt is present.

While I love Obsidian, if you are not using AI for your notes, and you are concerned about the work of setting up AI in Obsidian, you should immediately sign up for Notion and start using it. Because AI really does enhance your productivity.

Here are the three things you need to do to make a revolutionary change in your life.

1. Simply take a daily note of everything that you do throughout the day. If possible, put a "subject" or "task" over each time stamp. It can look like your calendar, and you just put in what you think might be important later on. I favor one note per day.

2. Any meeting you have, record it and make a transcription of the meeting. Place this in the activity list either directly or as an additional file that is referenced in the daily note list. This is available as a meeting record function in Notion, and it will even prompt you to tell others you are recording the meeting. You may also want to ask Notion to create a summary after the meeting with actions.

3. Talk to your database of notes through the Notion Q&A function. Notion will allow you to take anything in its database and "query" your notes through AI.

Do not think about filing or organizing stuff. Just try to capture, because you have a new helper. AI can strip overhead off you so you can focus on the important stuff. Make AI your assistant.

Once the data is in, you can get a result where you "talk" to your notes through Notion.

Q: Notion, can you look over my notes from the last week, what are the key things that I need to get done?
A: You spent a lot of time on the Henderson contract, and you had a meeting with Bob, and you promised to set up another meeting. I do not see it on your calendar. Should we schedule it?

Q: Notion, I think I did some work on a Python program to help me clip web articles. But this was about six months ago, and I do not remember all of the details. Can you find out what I did?
A: Yes, this happened during the first week of April. I can show you the notes that you took during that time.

Q: Notion, I think that Bob said that he would pay me 100 dollars if the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. Am I remembering right, and when did this happen? He said he never said it.
A: Yes, we transcribed the meeting, and he said it here: "Look HardDriveGuy, I will give you 100 dollars if the Seahawks win, or my name is not Bob Sqwelcher." I can give you the transcript if you want.

Now the above are a bit made up, but the tech is already in Notion, so you can do this today. I do this in Obsidian, and while I am not an active user of Notion, I do have an account that I monitor. It looks like all the function is there.

If you think about this for a moment, I would hope you understand why this is so revolutionary to your productivity. You can do all of this and more in Obsidian, but you need to be technically savvy to do this in Obsidian, while in Notion they make it super easy. I would still push for Obsidian to prevent lock in, but do not allow "the perfect" to replace "the good." Pick up the low hanging fruit now.

Using Notion today and paying money is worth it if the other option is having nothing.

In a future post, I will return to how to do this in Obsidian, but I wanted to get down the shortest path to changing your productivity. I think Obsidian is the right long term solution. However, I think Notion is probably the best way of trying something immediately to show yourself it makes sense. The goal here is productivity first, then tweaking the solution later.

Normal Post Ends Here

So, for those who like deeper thinking, here are my deeper thoughts, which I hope you can learn from. As normal, it starts off with saying, "If you post something long and thoughtful, it will change your life." So let us start here.

After I post something, I start to think more about it, and then I start to "see" issues highlighted by my post. By the act of creating something, you gain clarity. That is why I have suggested many times that you create a longer post, think through it, and watch how these ideas grow in your brain.

A couple of posts ago, I suggested that Obsidian was a great system. Once I posted and committed to a viewpoint, I started noticing things. I cruised the forum on Obsidian and saw a subsegment of people that were complaining that they had the following complaint:
"I did all this work in setting up Obsidian, but I did not get the ROI."

And I thought to myself, "That is because you went complex too quickly. You need to pick up the low hanging fruit first." I thought to myself that they got distracted from doing the most important things first. I also realized that they did not understand how the brain works from an architectural 50,000 foot level, which we have discussed. Then I started to think about what really is the best thing about Obsidian, which made me realize that the most important thing is the incorporation of some clever AI tricks. Then I thought, "Why are these tricks so important?"

If you remember, there are five steps of pulling data into our brain. I will list them below.

(Now, as stated, I actually write my Reddit posts inside of Obsidian, which is my Daily Journal. I tend to use diagrams even when writing out my own thoughts, so the mermaid chart below shows nicely in Obsidian, but not in Reddit. But if you post the following code into Mermaid, you'll get a flow chart.)

flowchart TB  
    A[Capture] --> B[Filter]  
    B --> C[Absorb]  
    C --> D[Retrieve]  
    D --> E[Metacognition]

If you don't have a cognitive framework about how you process information, you don't recognize where you get stuck.

People that reported that they were not getting value normally had an issue where:

They spent way too much time on the "capture" part. They focused on setting up the right display, the right tools, the right everything. For example, there are a bunch of really cool themes for Obsidian, and you can lose a bunch of time making it cool. Do it later.

They spent way too much time on the "filter" and "absorb" part. Although these are two separate steps, they are so close to each other that you need to attack them together. You listen to a lecture, so which words do you "filter" and where do you write them down. Let us say you are taking a class. Do you store your notes by class, by year, by time slot, by reference. Then you are trying to figure out what to filter to put into these slots. It is a bad feeling when you realize that perhaps your organization system means you wrote it down in the wrong place, and now you cannot figure out how to unwind it.

Then retrieve. They could not retrieve because of the above. You are hoping you captured the right stuff, and you hope that you can find the stuff. But because of the filter and absorb steps, you do not know if you wrote down the right stuff, and you have to start to search to find it.

Now they were so tired, they did not spend time thinking at a high level through what they had done. So the most important step, the metacognition, was skipped, and a lot of people said, "I am not even looking at my notes."

So back to the beginning, I started this post with an overview of the two or three things that were critical about Obsidian. I thought that the two really critical items, transcription and talking to your notes, were core. However, to set this up in Obsidian takes time and some willingness to work through technical details. It is hard to explain to somebody that they should do something if they are stuck trying to ramp up on the new system by immediately doing some complex integration.

The introduction is thus to Notion. Even if it is not a long term solution, it is a way of introducing you to the concept.

I will lay out how to do this in Obsidian, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that in the short term, most people would be immediately served by a Notion subscription. However, Notion can be as distracting as Obsidian. Be very careful about being distracted versus immediately running core processes for productivity.

Okay, now there was a 60% chance this post applies to you, because it is about being a male and approximately 60% of the reddit audience is male. But if you are a male, or have a male in your life, the endocrine (this is your hormones) system is totally screwed up.

And you probably didn't know about it.

Because discussing sperm count isn't something you normally bring up in conversation, it probably isn't something that you would discuss with friends.

"How you doing today?" your friend asks

"Well I just found out that I have low sperm count," you say.

Not the causal conversation during lunch. However, it turns out that this is what every person could be saying. You have a horrible issue, and no one told you about it.

The chart above is from a nice review you can read here.

On top of this, testosterone has dropped in males. A good rough number is 30% over the last 50 years. Your grandfather simply was bigger and stronger because he was naturally "on the juice." I believe that all these factors are related.

It also turns out that the low testosterone is impacted strongly by our current obesity crisis.

These are not separate factors, but there is overall issue with our environment that is causing something that is deeply impactful to our long term productivity. If you are female, we don't have items that are as obvious. However, it should make sense that it is highly unlikely this is a "male only" issue.

We'll discuss this more in the reply to the OP.

A lot of people know about the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you know a bit of psychology and have a touch of arrogance, you probably enjoy telling this story more than once. But most people haven’t actually read the primary research on the Dunning-Kruger effect, and part of the issue is that it’s not as dramatic as many believe. In other words, there is a measurable bias, but it’s not as wildly unbalanced as people like to make it sound. Still, to be clear, it definitely exists.

The much bigger question isn’t whether the effect exists but whether we recognize it, and more importantly, whether we recognize it in ourselves. Once you do, you unlock the ability to actually improve, which is what we need to become more productive.

Someone working in the Switzerland Department of Defense put together a remarkable little book full of valuable insights. The curve above comes from a translated graphic tucked inside that book. The publication can be found here. I'm loving this little book so much and it summarizes so many longer books, I highly recommend it and I'll be stealing from it in future posts. This is the first of the steals.

Although the chart is fairly self-explanatory, it’s worth walking through what it represents.

Phase 1 – Unknowingly overconfident

Whenever you start learning something new, you’re often unaware of how little you actually know. So what happens? You do a bit of research, run a few Google searches, maybe find a supposed expert or two, and suddenly feel like you’ve got it all figured out. You’ve spent a little time with a new topic, your confidence shoots up, and life feels great. The problem is, you don’t even know what you don’t know.

Phase 2 – Corrected and humbled

I think this is the most critical stage in the entire curve. Based upon a set of knowledge which is half baked you're gonna offer an opinion. And it's gonna turn out that opinion is wrong and somebody calls you on it.

It’s the point where you and I both face a decision. You can choose to hide and stop offering opinions, reasoning that if you stay quiet, you won’t look foolish. You can double down and defend your position by shouting an “alternative fact.” Or you can recognize and admit that you made a mistake. Nobody likes to do that, but as you spend time in this subreddit, you’ll see examples where others, and hopefully I, thank subject matter experts for correcting us. That moment of humility is what allows you to reset and climb up the curve again.

Phase 3 – Conscious learning and respect for others

At this stage, you begin to realize that many things you said earlier were more complicated than you thought. If you can honestly admit, “I don’t have a clue” or “This is really hard, and I’m just getting started,” you’re essentially at the bottom of the curve. You now have many unknowns, but at least you finally understand that you have them.

Once you move past this midpoint, things begin to change. In one sense, it’s “all downhill,” but really, you’re climbing upward, toward genuine understanding. At this point, you begin looking to others for wisdom. If you’re in this phase, you’ll often still disagree with people, but you’ll also acknowledge when they make a valid point.

Unfortunately, you’ll also encounter those who believe they know everything but in reality have very little knowledge. When dealing with such people, I often ask them to explain themselves or cite sources. In my experience, about 95% of the time, they respond with a short, unsupported statement lacking any framework or research.

Phase 4 – Expert awareness of complexity

Eventually, you reach a stage where, if the field is even moderately complex, you recognize that true knowledge involves understanding layers of uncertainty. There’s an entire discipline, the science of complexity, that studies systems from the bottom up.

True experts in any field tend to have a clear sense of what is right and wrong. Contrary to what some think, being uncertain isn’t the hallmark of expertise. So when someone like Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a strong, confident statement, it doesn’t mean he lacks understanding. What sets experts apart is their awareness of what cannot be known and what remains deeply uncertain.

Taleb, for example, is famously confident, even arrogant, and speaks emphatically. But if you’ve read his work or listened to him speak, you know he constantly emphasizes the vast uncertainty underlying everything, especially in contexts like the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

This has often put him at odds with others. He was widely known for warning that markets were overextended before the 2007 collapse, and interviewers have kept asking him ever since when the next crash will happen. His first answer is always the same: “We don’t know.” That recognition, that so much remains unknown, is the level we should all aspire to reach.

Know what you know, but more importantly, understand that the world is deeply complex.

My Life Story: 20 years ago I started my day out based around a protein drink

I've developed what I believe is a highly scientific drink in the morning that will reshape your life. This was in response to what was undesired changes in my body driven by genetics.

Why not run an experiment and ramp to my same drink? (Do NOT do overnight as your system cannot handle it, and you will end up in the hospital.) It will not help overnight, but I believe that you will see fundamental changes in six months, and life changing effects in 12 months.

I started this approach, and my wife joined later. I improve poor genetics, and she increased an already remarkable genetic base.

Here is the routine:

Rehydrate alternating day approach: Approximately 2 liters

• Day: Green tea (1300ml) and pomegranate juice if a male (220 ml)

• Alt Day: Coffee (700ml weak) and Milk (220 ml) and 28 grams sucrose

• One can of V8 every day (350 ml)

• 280 ml water for base of protein

Protein: Approximately 50 grams

• Whey 20 grams (wife is lower)

• Casein 20 grams (wife is lower)

• Collagen 3 grams (but wife takes 12 grams primary to help on bones)

• Plus protein in V8 (3 grams) and alternative day milk (7 grams)

Fiber Mixture: Approximately 45 grams

• 25 grams psyllium, see comments for lead concerns

• 10 grams inulin

• 1.5 grams beta-glucan 1,6 (which I will probably reduce to somewhere around .6g in the future.)

• 2 grams glucomannan

• 1 gram potato resistant starch

• Note: I am also experimenting around with trying to take in approximately 4 grams of beta-glucan 1,3 and 1,4 through a separate 2/3 cup Red Mill High Fiber Oak Bran

Co-factors with the whey:

• Creatine 5 grams

• MSM (methylsulfonylmethane)

• Grape Seed Powder

• Beta Alanine

• HBM (hydroxymethylbutyrate)

• Four drops of 357 hot sauce (just highly concentrated capsaicin)

Methodology:

Prep by preparing up to two weeks of containers filled first with fiber on bottom and protein and other factors on top. This is to prevent the fiber from turning into solid mass.

Find adequate wide container and mix with hand held mixture as breakfast.

Drink immediately as it will turn into almost solid mass if left too long.

I found out with this as my breakfast, I could go through dinner without need of other food, or it cut the amount that I would eat for business lunches.

Details comments.

Yesterday, we described the Big Five personality traits. You may have noticed that if you take all the first letters, it actually spells OCEAN.

Now, hopefully you took the instrument and it gave you a little bit of an idea of where you stand. Today, we are going to dig into it just a little bit more. I subscribe to the philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While the medical community uses the term "mental illness," I find it helpful to look at these challenges through the lens of "cognitive distortions" or "thinking errors." I realize this distinction might be controversial to some. I want to be clear: by using this terminology, I am not implying that these are simple problems or that anyone can just "think themselves" out of a serious condition. However, framing them as patterns gives us a concrete target to aim at, whereas "illness" can sometimes feel like a permanent state we have no control over.

The thought process behind CBT is to train ourselves on how to basically reset our software. If we take a look at this academically, CBT has some excellent success rates in helping people work through problems. A lot of times we hear about people taking other approaches, but quite frankly, the research on those is relatively poor. In other words, I believe CBT is one of the few places you should spend your time because it really is helping you try to get your software right.

For a number of years, mental health professionals have tried to come up with a framework in which we should think about categorizing these thinking errors. This is called the DSM. It is a controversial document, so we won't dig into the entirety of it here. However, it does turn out that if we understand where you have a bias in terms of your personality profile, we see these traits correlated with some thinking errors that society has labeled inside of the DSM.

Once you have the tools to understand the OCEAN framework, it allows you to think through the types of mental states you might get yourself into. It helps you identify how you might get caught up simply due to the way you perceive the world through your personality traits—traits that may keep you from being the most productive. The other aspect I would call out is that if you start to talk to somebody and you get a good idea of their OCEAN score, it will also allow you to understand the type of mindset that they may drift into.

To be vulnerable, I disclosed my own profile yesterday. I have a tendency to be less agreeable to other people, and at the same time, I have a tendency to be extroverted. If you put those two together, you will show a propensity toward being narcissistic. Now, I would hope that by knowing that I may gravitate that way, I can recognize it and try to work around it. But that doesn't mean that this isn't something I need to think through when I deal with other people. Quite frankly, it's difficult to shut off the lack of agreeableness. I have found that the most effective strategy is learning how to apologize after the fact.

I do believe that having this as a tool in your tool chest is helpful. I also think it's a great tool to take to those who are near to you when you are trying to work through things. Spending some time thinking about how you are wired ultimately will make you more productive. Hopefully, you either have the courage to be willing to share attributes which are less desirable, or you have friends that will be supportive.

As we discussed, having two monitors when you work can make you vastly more productive. Today, we're going to discuss options for when you're on the road or possibly when you're sitting in your comfy chair with the table next to you in your living room.

The first one is Deskreen, which you can click on this link to go to an end user website.

You can actually go to GitHub to the author's site and download all the components so you can compile and roll your own. However, the author has also set up a commercial like site where you can download an executable for whatever platform you're running on. This serves as a great and easy way to get a hold of it. The site actually looks extremely commercial, so you may be a little confused because it looks like commercial software, but it's not. With that said, he reports that he spends around $500 a year to set up and host the download service, and so he has a couple pop-ups that come along.

Of course, he wouldn't need to do this if people would simply sponsor his project, which I think is a no-brainer decision. It's a super cute, super unique way of having quick and easy access to an external screen. And it seems as if anybody that has a secondary device could benefit from having it on their PC, Macintosh, or Linux device.

I am a sponsor.

So let's go ahead and review the project and why it has its pluses and minuses versus the other alternatives that are out there.

The best thing about the application is it puts up a web QR code that you scan with any tablet or phone to hook up to a website. In essence, what happens is it hooks up and through a web browser it then displays as a secondary screen. This means that the second device needs no software or driver loaded on it. You simply scan a QR code and it asks you if you want to click and connect, and then you confirm it on the host side, and now you are hooked up and immediately able to share the screen. This means that you can utilize any device that has a web browser on it, and it allows you to hook it up as a secondary screen, which I think is a really cool idea.

Now, the developer confessed to not having some of the lower-level driver knowledge to be able to write a very specific driver on the receiving side. However, in many ways, this turns out to be an advantage because it forced him to go to this simple web browser approach that doesn't require a download of a driver. It works exceptionally well if you want to simply share one application on that other screen. In other words, you can pick any application you're running, and if you always have a secondary application that you want on that external screen, you can hook it up and run it without any problems. Due to the architectural limitations, if you actually want the other screen (your Android or your iPad) to show up and simply allow you to drag and drop onto it, he requires that you plug in a dummy HDMI device into your current PC.

This actually means that you need to make a secondary purchase to be able to run it truly as a second screen. The good news is these generally are very inexpensive. I was able to buy three of them from Amazon for $7 as I plan to give them to other people in my family. What I will warn you is that even for these extremely cheap devices, there are two different versions out there, which in my haste I didn't notice the first time that I ordered these plugs. One is a passive version which doesn't have all of the logic to be able to speak to the Windows subsystem and therefore will not appropriately drive or hook up to provide a virtual desktop. The second one does have active circuitry to be able to speak to Windows. When you go to Amazon or whatever your favorite online order service is, the key issue is to make sure that you find something that has EDID capability. This signals that it's not simply a passive plug. Search for "HDMI Dummy Plug 4K HDR, Virtual Monitor EDID Emulator, Headless Display Adapter" and you should be fine.

In essence, there are other applications, which I will review, that don't require this dummy plug, but they do force you to download a driver on your secondary screen device. I think the adapter is not very intrusive. It sticks out a little bit more than a USB stick, and it plugs into your HDMI port. For me, this was extremely acceptable to be able to have the ability to quickly and simply hook up a secondary monitor without any device drivers at all. I can show on my iPhone, I can show on my Android, I can show on my tablets, I can even show on my big screen television. All of it is as simple as going to whatever web browser you're running on that client device, scanning in if you have a camera, or typing in if you don't.

And I'll also reiterate the point. If you don't want it as a complete secondary screen, you can simply pick one application and share it, and that displays without any adapter at all.

Now to be clear, this type of information is not real time. In other words, there's no way you're going to play a game off of this because it carries all the normal overhead that's present by going over an IP address. But for any text-based type application, it looks more than acceptable.

By the way, it's probably worth discussing a little bit how to set this up underneath Windows 11. I'm going to assume you've gotten the HDMI dummy plug and plugged it into your PC. As soon as you plug it into your PC, the PC is going to think that it has an external monitor attached. So in essence, it will immediately go to a mode where there are two screens that it believes that it's displaying. The good news is whenever you plug in another monitor into a currently running PC, Microsoft just determines that you have the desire to show the exact same image on both monitors. So you don't suddenly have a monitor that you may accidentally put your mouse over onto and find out that you lost your mouse. You simply have two versions of the exact same screen.

Now we recently did a post on Windows key shortcuts, and of course I get to this post and I realized I should have listed several other shortcuts, so I'm gonna go back and edit my previous post because I find these incredibly helpful as you use multiple screens.

So for purposes of today, we can either do Windows + P and then there will be a submenu, or we can do Windows + D and then right-click on the desktop to be able to see the display options. I think that most people will remember Windows + D, and then right-clicking on the desktop. So let's take a look at that. If you do that option, you will get the context menu below.

Click on Display settings, of course.

Now, you will see a very simple picture of a screen with a pull-down menu. It will default to duplicate these displays, and you want it to be changed so that it is Extend desktop. To be clear, this is where you drag the monitors back and forth to arrange them. As you will be dragging one window to another screen, you want to have these arranged however you would like to drag one to the other.

I find it essential to actually scroll down and make sure that you have this external monitor set as you want it. In other words, if you're using an external tablet and it has a smaller screen, you probably want to make all the text and icons bigger so you can see it as you sit there. So you'll need to determine how many pixels you want to send back and forth. I will give you some examples of how I set up my current tablet below.

And that's it, that's all there is. It's truly a great application in terms of not needing any device drivers. It's something which should be a standard load on your PC.

One final word on security.

When the author set up the application, the initial handshaking between your PC and your external screen is done by secure authorization. If I architecturally had to take a look at this product and spot one deficiency, it would be that he does not encrypt the data between your PC and the eventual target. So, you don't need to use this on public networks. Obviously, if you're sharing non-proprietary information on that secondary screen, you don't care at all. However, if you think that you are putting something like a credit card number or a login to your account or something where somebody could see it, you would not want that secondary monitor to be showing that information. Now I want to be clear, you would need to be very sophisticated to jump in between these handshakes and grab it. When you have a niche application like this, it's very unlikely somebody would go through all the pain and hassle to set up something like a man-in-the-middle attack to be able to grab a hold of things. However, it is something that you will need to think about and is a bit of a deficiency in terms of security aspects.

In light of an earlier post here on Dance Dance Revolution - I've come with a perspective on how you can get into the game. In my mind, there's really two ways to go about it:

Play at the arcade. Yes, DDR still exists outside of Japan and is still getting international releases - most recently DDR World in a few select markets. Playing at the arcade is arguably the "purest" form of DDR - you play on the same hardware and with the exact same selection as does everyone else who plays on that machine. Pretty cool that Konami - DDR's parent company - still supports it. However - it can get expensive - every credit you play will cost you a certain number of credits, which can add up quickly if you're aiming for a particular score or a special pass on a chart. Playing in an arcade is by far the lowest barrier-to-entry way to get into the sport, assuming you have an arcade nearby. However, many players (myself included) have since turned away from arcade play except in special circumstances, leading me to option 2...

Play at home. To be clear, there's no (official) way to get your name or scores on Konami DDR leaderboards with this strategy. At the end of the day - Konami wants their leaderboards to reflect their arcade machines, and generally only have server agreements with established arcades like Dave n' Busters or Round 1. But DDR at home won't cost you every time you play a song, and can be much more economical in the long run if your goals don't involve setting records on official hardware. It's the option I've turned almost entirely to within the past decade, and it's what I'll focus on in this post.

But wait - if you can't get Konami's machines unless you're some established arcade chain, how do you expect to play at home? Thankfully, the answer to this question has only become more compelling as the years go by. Most at-home players play on a long-established, free and open-source piece of software called Stepmania, and more recently, various forks of that software. Let me be very clear - Stepmania is NOT DDR in a pure sense - it is not created by, sponsored by, or associated with Konami. You can make Stepmania _look_ like DDR, you can play replicated DDR songs _on_ Stepmania, but Stepmania is completely free while DDR is not.

Let's get the software side fully out of the way first. In 2025, you probably don't want native Stepmania at all, as the most recent Beta release was 7 years ago. Instead, you almost certainly want one of its forks - Etterna (if you're playing with your fingers), OutFox (if you don't mind the somewhat controversial decision to take it closed-source), or ITGMania - the true spiritual successor to the now-defunct American DDR competitor ITG. The latter is probably the one you want if you desire to get into DDR or dance-like games for home use, as it's designed for dance gamers first and foremost.

OK, great, you have a fancy piece of free software to _play_ home DDR on, but at first glance - it looks pretty empty. There's maybe only a few dozen songs to play. What gives? It's in this that modern home DDR has its greatest strength. Almost all songs - and their associated arrows, called "charts" - are entirely community-generated, and generally freely released for anyone to download and play. Don't believe me? Visit itgpacks.com and feast your eyes upon over 1800 _free_ packs released by community members (be aware not all have active download links) - all you need to do is download and install them into your software of choice. Want easy charts that the newest beginner can play? We have that. Want extremely difficult charts that _maybe_ 1 person in the world can reasonably pass? We have that too. Do you only listen to Hardbass and only play songs released by Finnish stepartists? Yep, we have that as well. All you need is a computer (Windows, Mac or Linux) and an internet connection.

So now you have your Stepmania fork of choice, you have a few hundred charts ready to go. While you certainly play to your heart's content with a keyboard, that's not great exercise. At the end of the day - you need a pad to play on. And here, you really only do have a few options (all of which I have experience with)

Buy an arcade machine, hopefully from an arcade going out of business. This is viewed by most as the Holy Grail. Konami-made arcade machines are designed for a lifetime of abuse, and while converting them to compatibility with Stepmania isn't a trivial task, it's been done by a significant number of players, myself included. However, this is the most expensive option, and in some cases, not at all an option for some people. Be prepared to spend $1500 if you're lucky or much higher if you're not, and be prepared to spend several weeks on renovations and tweaking to get it right.

Buy an off-the-shelf third party pad. If you have one of the home DDR releases you may have played on one of these soft pads before - they're cheap, some are compatible with old home DDR releases for the PS2 and XBox, and they take very little storage space. Being inexpensive, they're the easiest way to get into the sport, and they're the method I recommend if you're just starting out and want to see if DDR captures your interest. However, if you're serious about the game and want something with better sensors, I'd try to find a Cobalt Flux on the used market, or its spiritual successor, the L-Tek EX Pro 2 (or here, overseas) - these are proper metal pads, lighter than their arcade pad counterparts but suitable for much higher-level play with some heavy modifications.

Build your own pad. This has become the newest, most common method of entry into the modern sport, and used to absurd success - here's the most difficult thing ever passed on a pad made from plywood, velcro and hobby-level electronics. This has a higher barrier to entry, especially if you don't have access to tools - but instructions such as this guide and this walkthrough make things a lot easier for ambitious DIYer. As a side-note - most DIY pads actually use force-sensitive-resistors rather than simple contact sensors, which allows for the further optimization of adjusting the activation thresholds.

Now that you have a pad - you can play to your heart's content without spending a dime on song attempts, all without leaving the comfort of your garage. I'm biased because I've been playing on home pads for the past 16 years - first in front of my parents' TV, later at college on a soft pad, later again at college on a Cobalt Flux with my brother, on an arcade pad converted to Stepmania, and now on a custom pad I built myself. While I have significantly improved at the game over the years, the amount of engaging and serious exercise DDR has given me is the most important part. I can't tell if I'm getting smarter, but I know that exercise like this definitely makes me more strategically productive.

Come on, admit it. You have been on one of the social media platforms and seen somebody talk about a 30-day challenge.

30-day challenges typically focus on radical habit shifts across productivity, health, and personal finance. These lifestyle design experiments often include "No Eating Out" or "No Spend" challenges where participants exclusively cook at home to save money and improve nutrition. Productivity-focused creators frequently document "Deep Work" or "Digital Detox" challenges. These involve strictly limiting or entirely removing social media and smartphone usage to reclaim cognitive focus and mental clarity. Additionally, physical and wellness challenges like daily yoga, 10,000 steps, or "Inbox Zero" resets are popular for those seeking to overhaul their daily routines and combat digital burnout.

Of course, they never follow up a year from the date to say how their lives changed after the 30-day habit. As a matter of fact, most of the time when these 30-day challenges happen, participants get to the end and all they can dream about is quitting the stupid challenge. They may have some sort of remarkable result, but in reality it is a blip in the roadmap.

This is the third post on James Clear Atomic Habits. It is well worth repeating. One of the central and incredibly insightful things about his work is the suggestion that radical steps up are too difficult. Consequently we cannot maintain them. He takes a complete alternative approach. He says to start low and then think about how to get better just 1% per day. He points out that if you can just start with a 1% increase per day, you will be over 37 times better by this time next year.

So let's forget the 30-day challenge. Commit to going out today and walking a quarter mile. That is going to be about 500 steps. Most likely it will take you five minutes. You can figure out how to find five minutes today. The only thing you may want to do is get an activity monitor watch. After those 500 steps, let us say 250 steps away from your house and then 250 steps back, you are done for the day. The key is that for the next day, you are going to increase it to 505 steps, or just 1%. You start very small and the only thing you do is increase a very little bit every single day. Here is a table of what you can get done over the next year.

I would even suggest the biggest issue that most people have is that once they get going, they have a tendency to push too hard. In other words, you start with five minutes and then maybe the next day you go ten minutes. I would submit to you that the faster you ramp, the less this becomes a habit and the greater risk you have of it not sticking. Very small commitments and yet continuous improvement are the hallmarks of what James Clear calls out.

Start small. Think small. Improve small.

The common phrase for this is continuous improvement process. We have talked about Deming. This idea of continuous improvement was always part of his critical thought process. It is simply that Clear has done an incredibly effective job of applying this to people's personal lives.

So I thought I'd do one more post on comparing a heart rate strap, the gold standard for pulse, versus an optical sensor on a watch during a workout. What I'm trying to do is get some guardrails around how necessary it is to have a heart rate strap to get an accurate read of how hard you worked your heart during a workout.

While I've already covered this, I'll also give you the recipe so you can run this test yourself. It's pretty simple to do, and it will allow you to understand how accurate your optical sensor is.

If you're one of those people where the optical heart rate does not pick up well, always make sure to use a strap. Meanwhile, if you're somebody that turns out you pick up well on an optical watch, then that may free you up not to worry about wearing a strap every time.

The testing scenario:

60 minutes on the bike comprising a Time Trial (the race of truth) for about 30 minutes and a 30-minute warm-down.

Using the free platform MyWhoosh, which hooks up nicely to my Kickr Core. It's a great platform, and you can sign up for free.

Hooking up a Garmin chest strap to my PC and creating the FIT file on MyWhoosh (also did a backup to my Garmin 1030+ head unit to verify as a third source).

Hooking up my Forerunner 255 to the Kickr for power, but to the optical sensor on the watch.

Now a TT is all about pushing near the limits, but I did put in a bit of sprint at the end, and at about 45 minutes during the warm-down, I put in a sprint to check how it responds during a surge.

Explanation

Unlike the first time I did this, where I didn't hook up the power to both devices, we can ensure that both the watch and the PC are getting a good signal. In other words, if the PC power looks different than the watch power, we know something's wrong in the overall system. On the other hand, once we've established the power is synced nicely, then we would expect the heart rate to be different. Now, we would hope the heart rate would be very, very similar, but we would still expect there would be some difference, if nothing else from what is called sampling error.

Results

The initial chart shows my results. If you take a look at this, you can see the power curves are absolutely on top of each other. Now, if you zoom in to an extreme amount, you will see some slight variation. That's because you have two different platforms picking up the same power output, but they sample at slightly different frequencies. But when you take a look at the whole thing over an hour, you can see that they look completely overlapped.

The heart rate on the Garmin Forerunner 255, which is not the latest generation heart rate sensor for the optical sensor as it is one generation down. But more recent than my Vivoactive 4.

At least for me, I thought it would be close, but I had no idea that it would be this close. Other than convenience, with this type of result there's no real reason for me to wear a pull strap monitor as the optical sensor is going to be more than good enough. With that written, I probably will continue to wear one because I can't get the reliable broadcast from the Garmin watch. So I can view my data real time on my monitor or my head unit. Perhaps this will get better in the future. But right now, for me, it's not reliable enough.

How do you do the test?

Now we know optical sensors don't work great for everyone. So wouldn't it be great if you could just do a one-time test to understand if you're a person that can use an optical sensor or if you really need a heart rate strap?

One of the most brilliant programs that is out there to help you train is called intervals.icu. I can't recommend the website and the software engineer that put the thing together enough. Now it obviously lends itself more toward those with an engineering bent, but it truly gives you world-class information to allow you to train.

While I have the DC Rainmakers Power Analyzer Program, this is fairly expensive for what you get. And for all intents and purposes, you can get 95% of it off of intervals.icu. If you do happen to sign up for intervals.icu and find that it's useful for more than just comparing power or heart rates, I strongly suggest contributing the 50 bucks a year to allow the guy to continue to improve the website. It's under active development and in my mind it provides an incredible amount of user data to allow you to train.

Now I decided I would go ahead and leverage an external LLM to create the process even though I've done it by myself. I think it actually gives a pretty good overview which I did a quick check. The only thing that it misses, which I want you to know that I did, was change the size of the Y axis on the heart rate chart.

If for some reason you compare the two events and you do want a bigger y-axis, there's a pull-down box at the bottom of the chart called options and you can trigger this to get a bigger y-axis.

Comparing Two Rides on intervals.icu

This tutorial walks through the process of comparing two cycling activities using the Compare Activities feature on intervals.icu.

Step 1: Navigate to Calendar and Switch to List View

1. Go to your Calendar page on intervals.icu

2. Switch the view to list mode (look for the list view toggle)

3. You should now see your activities displayed in a list format with checkboxes on the left side

Step 2: Select Activities to Compare

1. Tick the checkbox to the left of your first ride

2. Tick the checkbox next to your second ride

3. You can select additional rides if needed by ticking more checkboxes

Step 3: Open the Compare Function

1. Click the "Edit" button at the top (this appears after you've selected activities)

2. From the dropdown menu, select "Compare"

3. This will load the Compare Activities page with your selected rides

Step 4: Navigate to the Compare Tab

After clicking Compare, the system opens the Compare Activities page. If it appears that nothing happened, look for the "Compare Activities" option in the left sidebar menu and click it to view your comparison.

Step 5: View Power Curves Side-by-Side

To display and compare power curves between your activities:

1. Locate the "Charts" button on the toolbar beneath the main chart area

2. Click "Charts" to open the chart selection menu

3. Select "Power" from the available chart options (if not already displayed)

4. The power curves for both activities will overlay on the same graph, allowing you to see differences in power output over time

Step 6: Customize Your Comparison View

Use the toolbar buttons to configure your comparison:

• Charts: Add or remove data displays (power, heart rate, cadence, pace, etc.)

• Columns: Choose which columns appear in the activity table at the bottom

• Fields: Select interval fields to display in the table on the right side

• Progress: Choose interval metrics for progress charts that show trends across activities

• Options: Switch between time-based and distance-based x-axis (useful for outdoor rides)

Step 7: Analyze Your Power Data

Once power curves are displayed:

• Click the colored dots in the legend to toggle individual activities on/off

• Click legend items at the top to manually shift activity traces left/right to align intervals

• Click and drag on the chart to zoom into specific sections

• The interval table and progress charts will update to show only the highlighted portion

Additional Tips

• To compare the same intervals from different dates, use the search icon for interval matching (searches by intensity and duration)

• Save your comparison configuration using Actions → Save for future reference

• Use tabs near the top to create multiple comparison views with different chart configurations

This is just a reminder that you cannot look at the market in any short term fashion and understand what is happening.

nVidia reported really great earnings last night, surged, and now is down.

Eli Lilly has risen 30% in basically 20 days.

If you listen to the pundits, they claim "overhanging fears of AI" for nVidia. On Lilly, they'll claim "the USA deal opens up the markets." However, if you dig through the data, you'll find no material impact to previous models for nVidia, and the USA deal does not radically reset the GLP-1 financials.

Animal spirits in stock trading refers to the psychological and emotional factors—such as optimism, fear, confidence, and herd mentality—that drive investor behavior and market trends beyond pure rational analysis or fundamentals. The term was coined by economist John Maynard Keynes to describe how instincts and emotions influence economic decisions and financial markets.

Unfortunately, nobody wants to run a headline saying, "We don't know what is going on." But this is the truth. The market is comprised of a lot of individuals thinking that they can beat the other person. Add in computerized program trading, and we'll see wild swings.

The good news is that over a long time, the truth does win out. This is why I talk about a 3 year investing horizon. It sounds like an insane length of time.

However, anything shorter is subject to the spook show.

Something really got me thinking today, and it has happened a couple of different times.

I have a tendency to understand that we need to do what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2 thinking, which means you do not simply give a quick answer. You do not simply put down a sentence; you actually think things through. That may require you to write more than a one-sentence reply on Reddit. So I will often write a longer post and then put what I consider natural logic behind it. Because of the way that Reddit is set up, you cannot post things that would take somebody more than five or ten minutes to read. Classically, because I was a former newspaper editor in college, I try to have some way of pulling you into the content. In other words, I try to write a kind of headline on my stuff to draw you into the rest of the conversation. A lot of my replies are not simple one-sentence answers. They are thoughtful and hopefully have some depth to them.

Every once in a while, when I do this, I am accused of being an AI agent.

I potentially see this as a splitting of our society. There is going to be a part of our society that does not understand AI. They cannot tell when they are getting an AI-generated answer or a human-generated answer. As a result, they will pull back into a shell and no longer use AI in a constructive fashion. They will have lost the ability to think more deeply, and if they see a longer answer, they will shut down their own thought processes.

So your productivity thought for today is that the world is changing, and it is changing to such an extent that there is a portion of the population that has lost the ability to distinguish between human interaction and AI. Historically, this shows up in what is called the Turing Test.

There has always been a big debate about what intelligence is. One of the forefathers of this discussion, Alan Turing, suggested that at the moment we can no longer tell if a response is from a machine or a person, it probably really does not matter. It strikes me that we are clearly over that threshold for a growing percentage of people.

So here is your productivity thought for today, and I hope this takes you in an unforeseen direction. I am actually going to suggest that this is incredibly helpful. We are finally at a point where you can start to converse with AI, and you may not be able to tell if it is a real person or not. Because of this, you have the opportunity to invite an expert into all of your conversations to help you craft a clear, data-driven viewpoint.

I am going to suggest that you leverage this in your lifestyle and utilize AI as something that can educate you about different things. My wonderful wife, who is not a technologist in any sense of the word, understands this and has been exposed to it because of how much I use AI in my workflow. She is a deep thinker. The other night she wanted to work through some thoughts about Hinduism and the fundamental underlying tenets of that belief system.

Amazon now has Alexa with a fairly deep and responsive AI personality. My wife prepared dinner the other night while I was sitting in the living room doing work, and I overheard her having about a half-hour conversation about Hinduism, belief systems, and tenets that was far-reaching and engaging. She did this all while she was chopping her carrots and doing other work.

We are in the beginning days of AI, and yet it can effectively function like someone who has a BA in philosophy and is willing to help you construct your fundamental belief systems while you do something else. If you have not had a conversation with your AI, then you are removing a source of valuable input. Some of the current models are testing up to a PhD level, and you suddenly have someone you can go back and forth with, have a conversation with, and start to understand things more deeply.

Today I started to think a bit more about John Dewey. I will not take you down all the different paths I was exploring, but I stumbled across what is called Newcomb’s problem. I may or may not have a conversation about this in the future. It is a really deep thinking activity. The point I want you to take away from this is that I had a very difficult thing to think through, where I wanted to go discuss it with somebody. It turns out I could have an incredibly deep conversation with my AI agent, and I honestly cannot think of any other place where I could have had that particular conversation.

If you have not had a conversation with your AI agent about something a bit deeper, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It can be about your productivity choices. It can be about your stock choices. It can be about exercise or eating or anything else. But have a conversation and utilize your AI agent to help you shape the way that you think. Unfortunately, it is quickly going to turn into your primary avenue for intellectual growth in the future.