History

From the Depression through World War II, citizenship and collective obligation played a much larger role in American life. People were asked to accept individual inconvenience for collective outcomes: New Deal public programs and civic projects, union and community organizations, military service and the draft, rationing, war bonds, victory gardens, scrap drives, wage and price controls, and restrictions on civilian consumption.

During the Depression, people had little choice but to make do with less. During World War II, the government was literally telling Americans not to consume things they wanted because other people needed them more.

Ironically, the collective project of WWII helped create the economic environment that turned Americans into professional consumers.

After World War II, America built an economic machine around consumption — monstrous industrial manufacturing capacity, a booming population, millions of returning soldiers ready to start families, government policy encouraging homeownership, and advertising selling the dream.

American mass production needed mass consumption — prosperity increasingly depended on people wanting and buying more stuff. It was a perfect storm of American products, cheap credit, suburbanization, and eventually globalization that made it possible for ordinary people to buy buy buy.

The system worked for millions of Americans — and the Baby Boomers didn’t know how good they had it. Jobs were plentiful, wages rose, homes were affordable, and ordinary workers could support a family, take a vacation, and retire.

What was actually an extraordinary period of American prosperity came to feel like the status quo.

Consumption equaled economic growth, and economic growth became our national identity.

Modern life trained us to see ourselves as consumers: society should serve us, reflect us, validate us, and satisfy us — rather than being something we’re responsible for building together. We expect politics, institutions, cities, culture, even communities to behave like products.

Citizenship operates on the opposite logic: I belong to this, therefore I have some responsibility for it. It asks us to balance individual wants with collective needs — to accept that being part of a society sometimes means doing things that don’t directly benefit us.

Participating in a shared community became less gratifying than pursuing our individual wants. If other people are getting theirs, I gotta get mine.

Consumer

Consumerism became the way we understood the economy and also ourselves. Greed is good. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The poor aren’t an exploited proletariat — just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The consumer mindset is one of entitlement: I have needs, wants, and expectations, and the world should respond to them. If something doesn’t serve me, satisfy me, or reflect me, I can find something that does. The consumner relationship is fundamentally transactional — what do I get out of it? And if the answer isn’t obvious, requires delayed gratification, or benefits someone else without directly benefiting us, we don’t have time for it.

Our heroes are business tycoons and champion athletes. They may be selfish assholes who hurt their loved ones or destroy the environment in the name of profit — but a winner is a winner. And we love winners. Success is the metric and getting there by any means necessary seems to be a rule of the game.

Not because we want to stand on the podium, but because we want what comes with it: the house, the car, the vacation, the clothes, the access, the lifestyle (which now seems to include some level of social media status for many). We’re consumers, and consumption is the scoreboard for success.

Decades of consumer culture trained us to expect choice, personalization, convenience, speed, and responsiveness. Technology supercharged it. We now bring those expectations to politics, news, education, cities, culture, community, and even relationships.

Citizen

Citizen logic is different, it requires care, participation, responsibility, compromise, patience, empathy — and occasionally accepting outcomes that don’t directly serve us.

No one succeeds alone. Every fortune, company, and career is built on a system other people helped build and maintain — workers who do the labor, teachers who educate them, roads that move their products, public institutions that enforce their contracts, communities that support their businesses, and generations of taxpayers who paid for the infrastructure underneath it all.

When we believe everyone else is looking out for themselves, looking out for ourselves starts to feel rational. Why contribute more if everyone else is taking more? This cycle leaves us unhappy and less connected — running on a treadmill, heads on a swivel, comparing ourselves to others, always wanting more.

The tension

Consumers ask — what does this do for me?
Citizens consider — what is my role in this?

We’ve seen what happens when we start treating everything like a product: less patience, less compromise, less faith in institutions, less connectionm, less willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, and an endless desire for more.

America became extraordinarily good at giving consumers what they want. But what we gained as consumers, we may have lost as citizens.

For all that American prosperity, happiness seems elusive. The country whose economy is the envy of the free world ranks 23rd on the 2026 World Happiness Report. Has our knack for consumption crowded out our instinct for what we actually need?

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Influencer events are “cool”

Last week, OpenAI hosted an influencer summer camp at a luxury resort in upstate New York. The weekend featured pricey accommodations, curated experiences like beekeeping, and quality time with the OpenAI team. Unsurprisingly, the event was widely viewed as tone-deaf and weird.

The backlash — including from Diet Prada was swift. The creators who attended mostly defended themselves by pointing out it wasn’t a paid partnership (though they did receive monogrammed pajamas and OpenAI notepads. “Cool!”).

At a moment when AI companies are facing serious questions about jobs, environmental impact, sentience, and trust, it’s remarkable that OpenAI (and, presumably, whatever creative agency pitched this) thought an influencer retreat would generate goodwill.

They’re hardly alone. Every major brand seems to be betting on creators. Influencer marketing keeps growing, budgets keep getting bigger, and marketers keep hoping that borrowed trust will outperform traditional advertising.

Are influencers the holy grail of marketing? Has traditional attention-driven advertising lost its edge? Are CMOs chasing the unproven creator marketing fad because everyone else is doing it?

I don’t know. I think so. Sure seems like it.

Recommendation > attention

Recommendation predates marketing — it's human nature. How many relationships throughout history have begun with the words, "I know someone who'd be perfect for you"? We rely on recommendation for everything from finding a partner and picking the best trail running shoes to deciding where to eat in Mexico City and choosing a dermatologist.

Social media didn’t invent influencing — it scaled it.

Creators and influencers are just modern-day recommenders. Social media turned recommendation into something that could be packaged, monetized, and built into a career.

For decades, marketers competed for attention because media was scarce and there were limited brands and products on the market. It was also relatively cheap and easy to get eyes on ads. Today, media is abundant and there is a seemingly endless stream of brand and product choices. Attention has become dramatically more expensive to buy and consumers have gotten more savvy about trusting advertising.

Attention alone no longer gets people to the checkout page. Consumers still want to buy buy buy, but cynicism about advertising, an overwhelming amount of products, and insecurity makes trusting a recommender feel like a much safer way to play the game.

Recommendation also has another advantage: it compounds. Attention stops with one person. A recommendation is a more powerful call to action and can turn the receiver into the next recommender, multiplying trust and influence as it passes from person to person.

I built a little WIP framework to break down the idea and components. It’s a single process but since there are always 2 parties involved, I’ve separated “recommender” and “receiver.”

It*s Cool theory of recommendation

*THE RECOMMENDER*

Taste - what’s worth paying attention to?

Taste is how we filter an abundance of choices.

Taste can be genuine or perceived — but either way, it's a requirement of a recommender.

*This is where influencer marketing gets murky. We want to believe the people recommending something are authentic, knowledgeable, and — ideally — not motivated by financial compensation.

Identity - what does recommending this say about me?

Identity is the relationship between the recommendation and the recommender’s self-image.

Every recommendation communicates something about the person making it — consciously and subconsciously.

People don't just recommend things. They recommend versions of themselves.

Reputation - am I willing to put my name behind this?

Recommendation isn’t free. Reputation is the personal credibility you’re willing to risk by making a recommendation.

The system is self-enforcing because a bad recommendation makes future recommendations carry less weight — or none at all.

Judgment - is this worth telling someone about?

Judgment is the moment private taste becomes public.

Before every recommendation comes a judgment: Is this worth someone else’s time and attention? The answer reveals something about both the recommender and the receiver.

Recommendation - why will I share this with someone else?

Recommendation is the bridge between two people — the act of communicating a judgment to another person.

There are 5 distinct reasons we deem something worth another person’s attention:

1. Help — altruistic desire to improve someone’s life

2. Connect — strengthen a relationship or create a shared experience by building trust

3. Delight — the strong urge to share something remarkable, beautiful, funny, or surprising.

4. Signal — communicate taste, status, expertise, identity, or values to others

5. Profit — earn money, gain followers, build an audience, receive favors, or advance a career

*THE RECEIVER*

Trust - do I believe this person’s judgment? Why?

Trust is the receiver’s level of confidence in the recommender’s judgment. It’s the most important part of the system — and the only part that belongs entirely to neither person.

Trust doesn’t live anywhere. It exists between two people, and neither one fully controls it.

Trust determines whether a recommendation has influence at all. It can come from expertise, shared taste, authenticity, aligned incentives, close relationships, or simply a history of being right. It's slow to build and fast to lose.

*Parasocial relationships complicate trust. Repeated exposure and lifestyle aspiration can create a sense of familiarity that feels like trust, even when the relationship is entirely one-sided and/or financially motivated.

Response - how will I act on this recommendation?

Response is what the receiver does with the recommendation.

They can adopt it, ignore it, reject it, delay it, investigate further, or pass it on.

The response depends on trust, need, fit, timing, cost, perceived value, risk, and what other options are available.

You can’t manufacture trust

Global brands with Wieden+Kennedy on retainer, "Hey guys, you gotta try this" influencers, and friends who DM you recipes are all just recommenders. Their motives may be different, but they all depend on the same thing: trust. And trust is much harder to earn than attention.

Recommendation — not attention — is becoming one of the most important metrics in business. But the power of recommendation goes far beyond business strategy. Brands can spend billions buying attention, manufacturing influence, and trying to engineer word of mouth. Or they can be cool and make stuff worth recommending.

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It’s that time of year again. Millions of Americans are stressing over an annual process that should be simple and free for most people.

The U.S. tax code is complicated by design — shaped by decades of credits, deductions, and carveouts pushed by wealthy donors, corporate interests, and lobbyists.

And the tax prep industry built on that complexity is eating very well.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

BY THE NUMBERS

• 90% of Americans have taxes witheld by employers.

• The average American spends 13 hours and $290 filing their taxes.

• 56% of returns are prepared by a paid professional.

• The IRS estimates 70% of filers qualify to file for free — but only about 4% actually do.

• TurboTax alone spent over $11 million lobbying Congress to keep free filing complicated.

• Americans collectively spend 7.1 billion hours complying with the tax code every year — equivalent to $316 billion in lost productivity. That’s more than the GDP of most countries.

TAX LOOPHOLE$

Carried interest: Lets private equity and hedge fund managers treat part of their compensation as investment gains — taxed at ~20% instead of ~37% for ordinary income.

Closing this loophole would raise an estimated $14 billion over ten years.

Buy, borrow, die: The ultra-wealthy buy assets, never sell them, borrow against them tax-free, and when they die, their heirs often pay no capital gains taxes.

This “stepped-up basis” loophole costs $44–54 billion a year in lost revenue.

The wealthiest 1% own 44% of all unrealized capital gains — roughly $21.2 trillion.

Much of it will never be taxed.

Like-kind exchanges: Real estate investors can sell a property, roll the gains into another property, and defer taxes indefinitely. Repeat until death. See above.

Private foundations: Donate to a private foundation, take an immediate tax deduction, retain significant control over how the assets are used — and pass it on for your heirs to run.

ONLY JERKS POINT OUT PROBLEMS WITHOUT SOLUTIONS

Make filing free and automatic. The IRS already has most of the information it needs. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Japan pre-fill tax returns for most citizens. You review it, sign it, done.

The IRS launched a Direct File pilot in 2024 — it worked, people liked it, and there are already efforts to kill it.

H&R Block generated $3.4 billion in revenue last year. Intuit’s tax segment alone does over $4 billion. These are businesses that exist because doing your taxes is unnecessarily hard — and they lobby heavily to keep it that way.

Hire and incentivize skilled IRS agents to audit the wealthy. High-end audits generate thousands per hour in recovered taxes — and discourage the behavior that creates the gap in the first place.

Tax wealth, not just income. A wage earner pays taxes on every dollar they make. A billionaire whose net worth grows by $10 billion pays nothing on that growth until they sell — and with buy-borrow-die, they never have to.

Make tax progressive, not regressive. The system is less progressive (higher earners pay higher tax rates) than it looks.

The poorest fifth pay about 17% of their income in taxes — the middle class pays 26%.

At the top, much of the income isn’t even counted — so the real tax rate is lower than it seems.

End Citizens United. This would reduce the ability of wealthy individuals and corporations to use unlimited political spending to shape tax policy in their favor. With less influence over lawmakers, the system would be more likely to adopt higher effective tax rates on top earners—making it more progressive.

The tax code isn’t broken.
It’s working exactly as the people who designed it intended.

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I’ve been hearing this a lot lately — “In the AI era, taste is the new core skill.”

All of a sudden, everyone went from prompt engineers to tastemakers in an effort to be relevant.

Let’s add “taste” to the graveyard of words that have been bastardized into meaninglessness like: community, natural, sustainable, green, premium, intentional, artisanal.

Most people who claim to have taste probably don’t. They confuse it with the ability to recognize taste signals from others — identifying what looks right without forming their own judgment.

Recognizing game ≠ having game

Taste is trained judgment — the ability to recognize what’s actually good without needing validation. It’s built through exposure and experience, calibrating over time until it becomes intuitive — something you don’t have to think about. It shows up in what you consistently choose, and what you don’t.

People with taste decide for themselves — not based on trends. They notice earlier, select better, and filter aggressively. They don’t care about optimizing for visibility or scale.

Real taste is subtle — not in a Loro Piana way, but because it’s unforced. It has nothing to do with price or status. The person with it isn’t even really aware of it.

Most people rarely encounter taste directly. What they see has already been selected, framed, and repeated — the taste cycle.

THE TASTE CYCLE

Taste → Signals → Distribution → Distortion

Original taste exists quietly. By the time most people see it, it’s been flattened into something more palatable and more commercial.

You’re usually looking at the shadow of taste — not the source.

When something gets copied, it enters culture — and that’s where it starts to get blurry. Most people encounter taste through second-tier filters — editors, influencers, brands, buyers, media, the friend everyone copies — not the source. Distribution is easy to mistake for origin.

The taste test:
Is this my unique judgment — or something I’ve learned to recognize and want to signal to others?

Taste lives in subtlety. Culture runs on visibility. What was once personal and slow is now public, social, and fast.

There’s a point where taste stops being judgment and starts becoming performance. You see it in audiophile setups, restaurants, and certain corners of fashion — where the difference between “good” and “better” is real, but hard to verify. In that gap, objects stop functioning as tools and start functioning as signals.

Once something becomes a signal, it gets amplified — from subtle to obvious, to exaggerated, and eventually into parody. What starts as nuance ends up as a caricature.

Coffee shops, personal style, hotels, car design, etc. have all started to look the same — not by copying directly, but by drawing from the same signals. What used to be an expression of taste and an opportunity to differentiate, has turned into a formula.

Acting on taste is risky — so most people play it safe.

Taste can’t be acquired by understanding it. You don’t get it by following the right people, buying the right things, or knowing the right words. It’s built through exposure and experience — calibrating and testing until it becomes second nature.

The people who actually have it aren’t thinking about it. They’re just making decisions, quietly, without needing anyone to confirm they got it right.

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The World Happiness Report came out last week. The 2026 edition is mainly about the relationship between social media use and well-being.

In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. Many people blame social media for this fall in happiness, but does this hypothesis stand the test of rigorous scientific analysis? What about the rest of the world, where young people’s happiness has not declined relative to adults, even though social media is equally prevalent?

5 TAKEAWAYS

1. Across 47 countries, life satisfaction is highest with minimal levels of social media use, especially for girls and in English-speaking countries.

2. How people use social media — not just whether they use it — has profound effects on well-being, particularly among young people.
   

3. Platforms driven by algorithmically curated content tend to show a negative association with wellbeing, while those designed to facilitate social connections show a clear positive association with happiness.

4. In 85 of 136 countries, people under 25 are happier now than they were twenty years ago — but not in the West.
   

   Life satisfaction among peiple under 25 in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has dropped dramatically over the past decade — while the average for young people in the rest of the world has increased.

5. Trust, social support, institutional stability, and community remain the strongest drivers of national happiness.

Top 30 Happiest Countries (2026)

1. Finland

2. Iceland

3. Denmark

4. Costa Rica

5. Sweden

6. Norway

7. Netherlands

8. Israel

9. Luxembourg

10. Switzerland

11. New Zealand

12. Mexico

13. Ireland

14. Belgium

15. Australia

16. Kosovo

17. Germany

18. Slovenia

19. Austria

20. Czechia

21. Canada

22. United Arab Emirates

23. United States

24. United Kingdom

25. Uruguay

26. France

27. Saudi Arabia

28. Singapore

29. Taiwan

30. Spain

As the U.S. continues to project its superiority over the rest of the world, this list is a nice reminder that there’s more to life than consumption and military might.

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A friend told me recently that content creators are bullshit.

I think what he meant is that the internet has shifted from making things and then documenting them — to documenting things and pretending the documentation is the product.

A chef cooks - that creates value, but a creator posting about it may or may not create value. There’s a big difference between getting attention and actual outcomes.

Whether and how much value content creators create is still up for debate — just like many of the forces shaping our lives today: AI, social media, globalization, climate intervention, nuclear power, cryptocurrency, tariffs, and the list goes on.

Smart, credible people on both sides make compelling cases. But the uncertainty is much larger than we admit.

There was a time when, before debating policy, we used to say, ”we have to agree on the facts, then we can debate.”

During a 1983 debate about intelligence and nuclear policy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” This was the operating assumption of serious policy debate for decades. But in the social media era, the idea of shared facts kind of feels irrelevant.

But that doesn’t stop thought leaders, pundits, and armchair experts from chiming in constantly and loudly.

SILOS

Some of this is the (un)natural progression of modern culture. Politicians aren’t held accountable, algorithms serve us what we want to hear, everyone has an opinion, and experts are expected to have an opinion on everything — whether they actually have one or not.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable — so we gravitate toward the loudest and most confident voices.

Conviction > correctness

Even if we wanted to hear both sides, the algorithm and cable news rarely show them. Platforms optimize for engagement, outrage beats nuance, and a few voices take up a lot of the oxygen.

People don’t just disagree on values anymore — they have entirely different expectations about what will happen.

HERE’S WHAT I MEAN

*Not all of these debates are evenly balanced. But they show that the range of plausible outcomes is wider than the certainty with which many argue.

AI & JOBS

Will AI destroy jobs and drive unemployment higher — or create new jobs and increase prosperity?

MIT economist and 2024 Nobel Prize winner Daron Acemoglu argues that AI is currently being deployed mainly to automate tasks rather than boost workers. His concern is that the current trajectory concentrates gains at the top while hollowing out middle-class and skilled work.

Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of The Second Machine Age, sees it differently. He argues that AI is a general-purpose technology like electricity or the steam engine — disruptive during transition but productive in the long run. New tools create new categories of work we can’t yet imagine.

TARIFFS & TRADE

Can tariffs and industrial policy actually rebuild American manufacturing — or do they just make everything more expensive?

Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer argues that “no trade is free.” Free-trade theory assumes workers can easily relocate and retrain, but in reality those transitions rarely happen. From this view, the U.S. trade deficit with China reflects the deindustrialization of the American working class, and strategic industries like semiconductors, steel, and pharmaceuticals should not be allowed to offshore.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, author of Principles of Economics and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, represents a more mainstream economic view. He believes tariffs are simply a tax on consumers. They appear to protect workers but often protect firms instead. Trade wars tend to cause more harm than good, and economists widely credit open trade with raising global living standards after World War II.

CRYPTOCURRENCY

Is cryptocurrency a speculative bubble, or the future of money?

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, has become one of crypto's most prominent institutional advocates. He launched a Bitcoin ETF that became one of the fastest-growing in history. His core argument is that Bitcoin becomes digital gold — a legitimate asset and a hedge against currency debasement and geopolitical uncertainty.

Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman strongly disagrees. In his view, Bitcoin has no intrinsic value — it produces no income, goods, or services. Its primary uses have been speculation and evading financial oversight, while its energy consumption remains enormous relative to its economic utility.

NUCLEAR ENERGY

Does nuclear power make a low-carbon grid possible — or is it an expensive mistake?

Environmentalist Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, argues we cannot reach net zero without nuclear. It’s the only proven carbon-free baseload energy source — it runs when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. From this view, opposing nuclear effectively means relying on coal and natural gas for reliability.

Critics including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and energy analyst Amory Lovins argue nuclear is too expensive and too slow to matter. Recent plants in the West have been financial disasters — the Vogtle plant in Georgia came in years late and at roughly three times the original cost. Money spent on nuclear would be better spent on solar, wind, and battery storage. The long-term waste problem also remains unresolved.

SO WHAT DO WE DO?

Practice epistemic humility — the intellectual virtue of recognizing the limitations of one's own knowledge, acknowledging that beliefs may be incomplete, provisional, or incorrect.

Think in probabilities — Prediction markets like Kalshi often outperform polls or pundits because people put money behind their beliefs — creating real-time forecasts that aggregate the knowledge of thousands.

Separate facts from values — recognize that people often seek out and accept arguments because they align with their beliefs, not because they’re proven true.

Explore uncomfortable places — Deliberately read credible sources and chop it up with people you disagree with. Not to be converted, but to understand that almost nothing is black and white.

HOLD ON LOOSELY

Content creators speak loudly and confidently, just like the experts on issues shaping our lives. They’re either full of shit or right on the money — and the gap between those outcomes is wider than we like to admit. By the time we find out who’s right, it won’t matter — they’ve already cashed the check, and we’re very good at forgetting.

That’s not a reason for paralysis. It’s a reason for honesty.

Hold your views loosely. Update when evidence arrives. And distrust anyone who sounds too certain — including yourself.

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DOG DOCTORS

I have a dog named Lou. She’s 15, healthy, and very sweet. She gets an annual check up and takes flea and tick meds.

Over the last decade or so, I started noticing that we were getting postcards from the vet more and more frequently — like every couple months — listing services that Lou supposedly needed. And every time we went in for an appointment – with our healthy dog — we left with a list of recommended tests, medications, etc.

I knew the vibe was off but didn’t pay much attention.

I finally figured out what was going on. It turns out Mars Inc. (yes, the company who makes M&M’s, Snickers, and Twix), also owns my vet clinic (VCA) and thousands of others.

Roughly 25-35% of all vet practices in the US are now under corporate or private equity ownership. For specialty clinics — emergency, oncology, etc. — that number is closer to 75%.

This consolidation makes perfect sense to the capital class — vet clinics are money machines (that also happen to be animal doctors). People will basically pay for anything to keep their pets healthy, pricing is inelastic (we don’t stop caring for our pets when prices increase), care is recurring, and we trust vets implicitly because our animals literally cannot tell us how they feel.

So what happens when PE buys your vet?

Doctors go from owner-operators to employees, revenue targets per visit become the primary success metric, diagnostic testing gets pushed hard, and prices go up because all three clinics in your neighborhood are owned by the same company.

And we pay — because what else are we supposed to do?

Pet care costs are now 42% higher than they were in 2019, according to Bank of America.

It’s not just vets.

“Local services roll-ups” is the sexy PE term for buying up small, independent, mom-and-pop businesses – like plumbing, HVAC, and electrical – and quietly rolling them up into one larger company. The trucks still look local, the names usually stay the same, and the technician is probably a guy from your town.

But what you can’t see is the centralized call centers, the quiet corporate optimization, the rising prices with little real competition — and plumbers trained to steer you toward the most expensive option.

These used to be our neighbors helping us. Now they feel like salesman. We went from supporting our local vet to enriching out-of-state investors who’ve never kissed our dog.

Did you think these brands were founder-owned?

PE backed brands (short list)

What these brands have in common: started founder-led, built something authentic, got acquired, got optimized, soul left body.

Quality → optimized for margin
Scarcity → optimized for scale
Culture → optimized for quarterly performance

STUMPTOWN COFFEE

Stumptown Coffee started in Portland in 1999. Founder Duane Sorenson was a maniac about beans — he would pay three to four times the fair trade price for coffee he believed in, and at one point set the record for the highest price ever paid for a single coffee. He was also beloved by his staff.

In 2011, PE firm TSG Consumer Partners bought in. In 2015, TSG sold to Peet’s, which is owned by JAB Holding — a German conglomerate that spent the better part of a decade buying up coffee brands globally like Caribou Coffee, Keurig Green Mountain, Intelligentsia, and Blue Bottle. And now, Keurig Dr. Pepper is acquiring the whole JAB coffee empire for $18 billion.

Stumptown still exists and the bags still look very Land circa 2005 (“cool”). But the founder is gone, the soul left the body, and now it's a line item in an $18 billion deal that includes the people who make K-Cups.

SHAREHOLDER PRIMACY

There’s actually a name for the system that drives all of this.

In the 1980s, economist Milton Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder primacy became the operating system for American business. The idea was simple: a corporation’s only real obligation is to maximize returns for shareholders. Everything else — workers, communities, customers, the environment — only matter in service of that goal.

It worked. Corporate earnings climbed. The stock market went on a historic run. But because the top 10% of Americans own nearly 90% of all stocks, most of those gains flowed upward. Meanwhile, wages barely kept pace with productivity, and the costs of housing, healthcare, and education rose faster than paychecks.

When shareholder value is the dominant metric, everything else becomes a cost center to optimize. Labor becomes overhead, quality becomes secondary to cost, community becomes expansion territory, and environmental damage becomes a problem for future generations.

In that system, private equity firms look for places to extract value. There’s no shortage of targets.

The incessant vet postcards, the HVAC roll-ups, the hollowed-out brands — these aren’t bugs. They’re features of a system working exactly as designed.

Private equity didn’t coin “greed is good.” It industrialized it — quietly.

PE is in housing, healthcare, media, elder care — almost every place you assume is still local, artisinal, or independent.

This isn’t a call to stop drinking coffee. Just a reminder that when the ingredients change in your favorite beverage, or your healthy dog suddenly needs an echocardiogram, it’s not random. It’s incentives.

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You’re jolted awake in the middle of a stormy night by two sounds — a loud crack, then an explosion on your roof. It doesn’t take long to realize what happened. A tree snapped and landed on your house.

Holy shit. Now what?

Rain is pouring in through a hole on your roof. You do what you can to mitigate the damage, but you’re pretty much helpless until morning.

At daybreak, you start making calls. Contractors from Google, friends for referrals, an old buddy who trims trees. Less than half answer. The ones that do tell you the same thing — they can come look at it in a few days.

A few days later, a one-star contractor finally shows up. The good news: the roof can be fixed. The bad news: they can’t start until next week, the job will take 5–8 days, and it’ll cost around $10,000. Oh — and before they can even begin, you’ll need to find someone else to remove the tree and hire a water-damage crew for the interior.

Now imagine a second scenario...

The morning after the storm, a crew of immigrant laborers knocks on your door. They’re ready to work immediately. They can call in friends to handle the tree removal and the water damage. They’re organized and motivated.

They’ll do the job for a quarter of the price and finish in a few days.

But here’s the best part...

They’ll pay you rent to live on the property during the job. They’ll buy their boots, tools, safety gear, food, and supplies from you at full retail. When you pay them, payroll taxes are withheld — and everything they buy generates local and state sales tax.

This is what immigrant labor — legal and undocumented — actually looks like for the U.S. economy.

IMMIGRANT LABOR IS A GIFT

We have a ready, willing, and able workforce on our doorstep begging to get in. Eager to do essential work Americans refuse to do. Faster, cheaper, and while paying taxes and helping keep the economy moving.

And yet the Trump administration, through ICE raids and legislation, is deliberately destroying this advantage — not because it helps the country, but because cruelty has become a dog whistle for their base.

Every rich country that shut the door on immigration is now older, slower, and weaker. The U.S. stayed ahead because immigration kept the workforce growing. Ending that advantage is choosing stagnation for no material gain.

Remove immigrants, and food rots in fields, construction stalls, housing costs rise, small businesses fail, elder care collapses, and inflation creeps upward.

When workers are scarce, wages rise — and those higher labor costs are passed on as higher prices.

Someday, Americans will look back in disbelief at how casually we sabotaged one of our greatest economic strengths — a growing workforce.

THE PARTY OF BUSINESS

If you’re pro-business, immigrant labor lowers costs, fills chronic shortages, and keeps companies operating. If you care about growth, immigrants spend money, pay rent, start businesses, and expand the tax base. Cutting immigration doesn’t help the economy — it shrinks the workforce, reduces demand, and slows GDP.

Roughly 70% of U.S. farmworkers are foreign-born — if you like fresh food, that’s who’s picking it. Stick your head into the kitchen of almost any restaurant and you’ll see immigrants are at the heart of the operation.

You’re worried about 3% inflation? Imagine how much shit will cost if employers have to pay workers fair wages. Why do you think we buy everything from China?

And we’re not just talking about low-wage work — about half of engineers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born. Cut immigrants out and you don’t “help Americans” — you raise prices and slow output across the economy.

POPULATION SHRINKAGE

The fastest way to weaken a strong economy is to shrink the workforce while the population ages. In the U.S., immigration is basically the only reason our population grows.

Replacement fertility — the amount of kids each women in a country needs to have to keep population stable — is about 2.1. The freplacement fertility rate in the U.S. is around 1.6. Without immigration, the U.S. would already be shrinking.

This isn’t abstract economics — other major economies are already living it, and the prognosis isn’t good.

Japan is losing hundreds of thousands of people a year, its median age is near 50, and the result has been decades of weak growth, labor shortages so severe that companies can’t staff basic roles, and public debt exploding as fewer workers support more retirees.

Italy is on track to lose over 20% of its working-age population, which means fewer people producing, more people collecting benefits, and an economy increasingly stuck choosing between higher taxes, spending cuts, or debt.

Germany is aging so fast that by the mid-2030s roughly one in four adults will be retirement age, leaving factories short of workers, construction delayed, and growth capped despite world-class industry.

China, after decades of expansion powered by a massive population, is now shrinking — down 1.39 million people in 2024 alone — with a contracting workforce, slowing consumption, and growing anxiety about who will fuel the next phase of growth.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

In the modern world, immigration is how empires replace population without waiting 20 years for babies to grow up. Superpowers don’t decline because they get “soft” — they decline because they shrink.

The Roman Empire didn’t fall when it lost discipline — it fell when plagues, low birth rates, and a shrinking tax base made the system unsustainable.

Ancient Greece never regained dominance once its city-states lost population and manpower.

The Maya civilization didn’t vanish overnight — population stress emptied cities, disrupted trade, and unraveled daily life.

The pattern repeats.

I HATE BULLIES

The Trump administration’s ICE crackdown isn’t just cruel — it’s economically idiotic and expensive.

Raiding workplaces, detaining parents, and ripping people out of communities doesn’t “protect” American workers — it removes labor, scares consumers into hiding, drains local economies, and destabilizes entire regions — it’s a government-sanctioned economic own goal.

Deport criminals, protect children, and leave our hardworking immigrant neighbors alone.

In normal years, ICE’s budget is around $10 billion. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ICE received roughly $75 billion in additional funding over four years.

Meanwhile, approximately 14 million children in the United States live in food-insecure households. It would cost about $25 billion a year to end childhood hunger in America.

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I know I’m a few days late, but I wasn’t planning on writing New Year predictions — until I couldn’t sleep last night.

I’m generally optimistic about 2026, which is a strange feeling. Maybe the Year of the Snake really was about shedding and the Year of the Horse is about forward movement. I hate to admit it, but this actually resonates pretty hard with me right now.

It seems to me we have two choices in life: we can move forward with optimism and hope, or we can assume the worst-case scenario. I’m very good at the latter. It’s easier for my brain to prepare for the worst than to sit with uncertainty. But we end up in the same place either way — so why not give yourself a break?

Here’s to the possibility of best-case scenarios.

Politcs

Midterms
Democrats can maintain momentum into the midterms if they speak to voters about things that actually matter. See: Zohran Mamdani.

When’s the last time you heard anyone talk about climate change? Trans rights and abortion are no longer visible through the Overton window. Voters are focused on one thing: their financial reality.

Regular Americans want to spend less than 20% of their take-home pay on groceries and billionaires will sell their souls for tax cuts. Win here first, then save the planet.

Wealth Gap
Anger at billionaires, sell-out politicians, and the top 1% keeps building. Healthcare CEOs make millions while care is unaffordable, tech investors and founders buy political access, and the wealthy class flaunts excess while demanding tax cuts.

Poor and middle class Americans are patient. They can absorb a lot of pain. But greed is beginning to make living even a simple life tough. I’m not here to define how much money is enough, but hoarding wealth while many struggle has consequences. Jared and Ivanka didn’t want to move to Florida.

Neo-Partisanship
Both parties get called on their shit. Trump and his circle flaunt corruption openly. Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats have reportedly made tens of millions while trading stocks in Congress. Supreme Court justices complain their salaries aren’t enough while accepting gifts, forgiven loans, and conveniently timed real-estate deals. Big corporations spend millions to shape legislation. This list goes on.

Self-dealing continues to be exposed — but nothing happens. Sorry.

Media

Elder News
Legacy news continues to lose relevance with young people, while newer formats — social media, podcasts, and Substack — capture more attention and trust.

• The median age of cable news viewers (MSNBC, Fox News, CNN) is ~70

Trust, relevance, and expertise matter more than reach. Choosing our own experts via a la carte media feels empowering, but it doesn’t reduce partisan division.

Health

Drinking Less
I was at a party recently when, after my third drink, I realized none of my friends were drinking. Some were sober, but most were just taking a break or had lost interest in alcohol. Young people are driving the lowest drinking rates on record. There’s no reason to think that reverses in 2026.

(Unless we have another pandemic)

Metrics
More people will measure their health.

We all carry a computer in our pockets, but most of us don’t actually know much about our bodies or health. That’s changing. More people will integrate health tracking into daily life — using data to be healthier and catch problems earlier.

Wearables are the gateway drug, but tools like DXA scans now cost as little as $200. The real inflection point comes when insurance companies — inevitably — incentivize baseline scans and daily health monitoring to drive down individual costs.

• 35% of Americans use health wearables including smartwatches and fitness trackers for monitoring activity, heart rate, and sleep

Fancy Gyms & Clubs
Fancy gyms and private clubs are becoming normalized as people desperately look for community.

In 2026, health is wealth — but community is the real driver behind high-end gyms, clubs, and spas. Traditional third places haven’t made a dent in the loneliness crisis. People are increasingly willing to pay for the chance at real connection.

Right now, many of these spaces feel like strange networking hubs for Type A’s. Over time, they’ll function less like status symbols and more like real-world community centers.

Economy

Betting & Buying Stuff
What do you do if you can’t afford to buy a house? Or you technically can, but there’s no inventory because everyone who locked in a 3% mortgage isn’t selling?

You say fuck it.

You bet on sports and Kalshi. You buy expensive clothes and accessories. You take extravagant trips. When long-term stability feels out of reach, risk and instant gratification fill the void.

Housing unaffordability is a double whammy: people give up on homeownership — and the forced savings plan a mortgage used to provide — while chasing wealth through riskier bets and settling for quick, YOLO dopamine hits.

Stock Market
Stocks will keep rising in 2026 amid bubble talk, highlighting a market increasingly disconnected from everyday economic life. Those who are invested continue to see gains (largely driven by AI), while costs rise and paychecks struggle to keep up for most Americans.

There will be a significant stock market correction in

IN:

Telling your friends you love them

Spending time in nature

Walking instead of driving

Closet clean outs

8 hours sleep / 8 hours work / 8 hours recreation

Being honest about how you’re doing (with yourself & friends)

Healthy morning routines

All salads = chopped salads

OUT:

Obligatory gift giving

Social media for breakfast

Shopping as a hobby

Letting politics ruin your day

Makeup & skin care products for kids

Safe congressional districts

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I still remember being a senior at Boulder High, sitting in a newly internet-enabled computer lab, talking to strangers in AOL chatrooms for the first time. It blew my mind. I couldn’t imagine then how the internet would reshape our lives — beyond inventing incoherent online aliases.

That’s how I feel about AI — except I think AI has the potential to be orders of magnitude more life-altering than the ’ol internet ever was.

“AI is coming for your job” is something I hear constantly — from tech experts and from my dad. There’s broad agreement on this, but tech companies operate on very long leashes, and it’s more lucrative to ask for forgiveness than permission. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s called: let’s-hope-it’s-not-too-late-by-the-time-we-understand-how-bad-this-is. USA! USA! USA!

Our understanding of where AI is going in the near and long term is intangible and easy to ignore — just like the consequences of Trump’s cuts to Medicaid in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Twelve million Americans losing health insurance is obviously catastrophic (and cruel and unnecessary) — but the consequences won’t register until people face their first out-of-pocket medical bill...sometime down the road...when it’s too late to turn back the clock.

If there were an election tomorrow, I bet a lot of MAGA supporters who stand to lose their health insurance — or see their premiums double — would still enthusiastically vote for the Trump agenda, which is why healthcare — what should be a winning Democratic argument — is far from guaranteed to persuade the voters it should.

BULLSHIT JOBS

Is AI going to revolutionize work? Will unemployment reach Great Recession levels? Is college a waste of time? Or are we just culling the herd and optimizing efficiency?

If you’re self-aware, the next thought after “AI is going to take my job” is: maybe my job is bullshit. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but many jobs are — especially higher-ish level corporate, creative, tech, finance, and government jobs.

Shout out to teachers, primary care physicians, laborers, social workers, food growers and pickers, bus drivers, aqua aerobics instructors, and child care professionals. There are still plenty of people doing hard, essential, non-bullshit work — the kind AI can’t really help with — and they’re almost always paid far less than work that ends up as a PowerPoint.

Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

The more one rises in any given hierarchy, the more likely one is to find oneself doing work that has no social value whatsoever.

Much of corporate and managerial labor exists primarily to maintain the appearance of productivity, justify budgets, and create the illusion of necessity.

The moral and spiritual damage caused by this situation is profound.
— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

ART, OPTIMIZED

A handful of writers, media companies, and creators are waving pitchforks at multi-trillion-dollar AI and AI-adjacent market caps. It’s not a fair fight. But it is the modern American Dream — move fast, break things, and deal with the consequences whenever.

If music follows the path of other creative fields shaped by AI, kids will be making music ironically in Ableton in 2035 — the same way Millennial it-girls use PowerShot point-and-shoots now.

Prepare yourself — in the near-ish future, many ads, memes, videos, written work, film, fashion images, and probably music will be AI-generated or AI-assisted. It’s too cheap and easy.

My favorite part of writing this newsletter is making ironic and weird AI images so it’s not deadly boring. I’m definitely part of the problem.

REMEMBER WHEN COLLEGE MATTERED?

Speaking of how bad we are at imagining the future — what if someone had told you five years ago that nearly 80% of U.S. jobs, including most college-degree careers, would see meaningful portions of their work automated by a $10/month ChatGPT subscription?

According to the landmark OpenAI + University of Pennsylvania study (2023), “tasks associated with occupations requiring higher levels of education and experience show greater exposure to LLM-driven change,” and “approximately 19% of workers may see 50% or more of their tasks impacted.”

If AI can handle the entry-level work college was supposed to train you for, higher-ed starts to lose its purpose. Students stop going, majors hollow out, and dozens of mid-tier colleges say adios. The practical and prestige degrees survive, while everything in between loses relevance. That “in between” isn’t just an education tier — it’s essential to the country’s stability and democracy itself. It’s also exactly what developing countries are striving to build.

College won’t vanish — but it probably gets smaller, more elite, and stops being the default gateway to adulthood.

But don’t worry — that’s somewhere in the future. The safest place for consequences to live.

NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT ;)

Let’s get in the weeds a little bit.

A few tech giants are propping up the entire stock market. In 2024, the Mag 7 (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) accounted for roughly 60% of the S&P 500’s total gains — you guessed it — they’re all balls-deep in AI.

—

AI companies have built a circular money machine that feels kinda sketchy. They invest in startups and other tech companies, and those companies then turn around and spend that capital to buy shit from the same AI companies. The result is a closed loop that inflates demand, revenue, and valuations.

Take Nvidia. They invest in AI startups who immediately commit to spending billions on Nvidia chips — meaning Nvidia is basically financing its own future revenue and using that growth to justify even more CapEx to Wall Street.

—

These companies are blowing Cash Like a divorced dad in Vegas. AI-related CapEx (money companies spend on big, long-term investments) hit $250B in 2024 (up from $90B in 2022) and is projected to reach $400B a year by 2027. Big Tech is now dumping 20–40% of revenue into AI infrastructure — in an industry where 5–10% is considered aggressive. This does not seem sustainable.

Then there’s the power problem. America is racing to build enough electricity just to keep AI online. U.S. data center demand is set to require the power of roughly 40 million homes, making data centers the fastest-growing industrial energy consumer in the country.

Meanwhile, Chinese AI developers like DeepSeek are building highly competitive LLMs that reportedly use as little as 10% of the compute and cost. This massive American energy build-out might end up being completely misguided. But who cares? That’s a tomorrow problem — and the money is flowing.

—

AI has all the classic makings of a bubble — skyrocketing valuations, a market propped up by a handful of companies, and spending levels that make the dot-com era look tame.

The cat’s out of the bag. Tech bros wearing billion-dollar beer goggles are sprinting toward a fogged-in finish line.

Every bubble is a profitable ride — until it’s not.

Nvidia stock is up 5,000% — I take it back. Some things do matter.

When the ruins of the United States are excavated by aliens, the biggest question extraterrestrial anthropologists will ask is: this place was heaven — why TF were they so unhappy and obsessed with optimization?

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I had a pretty fire Tumblr in the 2010’s. This post is from 6/9/2014 at 6:28pm — I have no idea where I found it or why I liked it at the time.

This excerpt clearly came from a longer self-help list — the kind I’d normally dismiss as another cash grab from an unqualified kook in the $50B self-help industry. But it made the cut for my blog — maybe there was more to the candle story.

A reverse image search found the list was written circa Y2K by Regina Brett — a two-time Pulitzer finalist who, at 45, celebrated surviving cancer by writing the 45 Life Lessons column that later became her book 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours.

Lesson #21 isn’t actually about candles. It’s about not saving your life for later — enjoying the good stuff now instead of deferring it to some TBD future. Something a cancer survivor knows well — and something I’m still learning. Part of me wonders if my 35-year-old, future-deferring self subconsciously picked up on that message when I saved this image. I hesitate to give myself that much credit, but it’s possible.

DON’T SQUANDER IT & DON’T GET BURIED IN IT

The scientific term for this nearsighted gratification is temporal myopia — prioritizing immediate rewards while discounting long-term consequences.

Temporal hyperopia is the opposite — farsighted gratification — overvaluing the future at the expense of the present.

Generally, temporal myopia (Brett’s candle idea) is the one to keep an eye on. Overweighting the present masquerades as freedom, sponetneity, and living in the moment, but trading future stability for present relief can be a slippery slope. That YOLO lifestyle at Hedonism 2 is fun, but you still gotta pay the electric bill.

Hyperopia is the opposite of impulsivity — it shows up in high-functioning, rational people. On the surface, future bias looks like discipline, responsibility, and high standards.
But constantly delaying in-the-moment pleasure hollows out daily life. Saving your favorite shirt until your funeral seems like a waste — enjoy that shit (talking to myself here).

INDULGE OR WAIT

Not sure which camp you fall into?
One easy way to see which way you lean is through food.

Imagine you have a plate in front of you. Your favorite food is on one side, and a food you don’t love but know you need to eat (like broccoli) is on the other. And desert is literally and figuratively on the table.

What do you eat first?

The myopic person goes straight for the good stuff — instant gratification.

The hyperopic person asseses the situation and decides to delay gratification — eat the veggies first, the good stuff will taste better if you earn it.

Now exted this analogy into other aspects of your life.
Do you save or spend it all each month?
Do you have a car that you never drive because you’re afraid to scratch it?
Are you saving an outfit for a far off event that may not exist?
Do you live your daily life without much thought or worry about where you’ll be in the future?

We’re all somewhere on a continuum between mortgaging our future for instant gratification and letting future planning steal the present. Balance is the name of the game.

HAPPINESS in LIFE vs. HAPPINESS for LIFE

Laurie Santos, a cognative scientist at Yale distinguishes between happiness in life and happiness for life.

Happiness in life = moment-to-moment enjoyment — ease, pleasure, things that feel good now.

Happiness for life = long-term meaning — purpose, and the sense that life adds up to something worthwhile.

Temporal biases help explain how we get out of balance — myopia overweights daily enjoyment, while hyperopia overwights deferring enjoyment indefinitely.

There’s no perfect day in the future to light the good candles. And it gets boring and expensive if you light them everyday.

45 Life Lessons

1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short — enjoy it.

4. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and family will.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don’t have to win every argument. Stay true to yourself.

7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.

8. It’s OK to get angry with life. Everyone does.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

12. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry, it will change again.

16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

17. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful. Clutter weighs you down in many ways.

18. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.

19. It’s never too late to be happy. But it’s all up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

23. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.

24. The most important sex organ is the brain.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.

26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In 100 years, will this matter?”

27. Always choose life.

28. Forgive but don’t forget.

29. What other people think of you is none of your business.

30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32. Don’t take yourself too seriously. No one else does.

33. Believe in miracles.

34. People love you because of who you are, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.

35. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

36. Growing old beats the alternative — dying young.

37. Your children get only one childhood.

38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.

41. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have, not what you think you need.

42. The best is yet to come.

43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress, and show up.

44. Yield.

45. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.

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Friction is crucial. And ease is a gold-plated trap disguised as progress — one that industries and algorithms keep steering us toward, even as it quietly makes us less content.

In modern life — especially modern tech — “progress” has come to mean maximizing comfort: fewer steps, fewer clicks, less waiting, less cooking, less planning, less thinking, less risk, less communication, less community, less friction.

For most of human history, comfort upgrades were quantum leaps — electricity, plumbing, vaccines, child-labor laws, pasteurization, cold storage, and spray tans, to name a few.

But sometime in the 1980s, capitalism needed new places to grow, and technology pivoted from saving lives to saving time, then from saving time to saving effort. Social media, delivery services, ecom, SSRIs, GLP-1s, AI, dating apps — almost everything now is built to reduce how much of life we actually have to touch or earn.

We think it’s good for us. We’re sold it as an aspirational goal. But humans aren’t built for a frictionless existence. Difficulty isn’t the enemy. Meaninglessness is.

Purpose makes life better at every age — more satisfaction, less anxiety, more resilience. But purpose doesn’t exist without friction — you can’t build a meaningful life if nothing ever pushes back.

No one feels better after scrolling Instagram. Yet young people burn an average of three hours a day on social media. The opportunity cost is real life — and of course kids choose mindless addictive stimulation over anything hard. Big Tech engineered it that way. The algorithm isn’t accidental — it’s an anti-friction flatness profit machine.

A life without friction isn’t a luxury — it’s a tax.

THE HEDONIC TREADMILL

Comfort feels good at first, but the brain adjusts fast — what once felt fine stops being acceptable once you’ve gotten used to something “better.” The contentment baseline keeps creeping upward.

I wouldn’t want to live in my college dorm or my post-college house in Mission Beach now. I’ve gotten used to not sharing a bathroom with 15 people, and I now understand that surfboards should not be stored in the bedroom. But at the time, it felt like heaven — because it was a step up from where I’d been. That’s how life works: we adapt, we upgrade, we outgrow.

This is the hedonic treadmill — the psychological phenomenon where humans rapidly adjust to pleasure, comfort, and improved circumstances. The happiness baseline keeps rising no matter how comfortable life gets — and importantly, it does this regardless of socioeconomic status. One person’s indoor plumbing is another person’s 50,000-square-foot house. Either way, we get used to whatever we have and start wanting more.

The brain compensates for too much pleasure by reducing our ability to feel pleasure at all.
—Dr. Anna Lembke

A frictionless future isn’t just misguided — it’s biologically impossible to enjoy. The pursuit of ease eventually leads to anxiety, depression, boredom, and always wanting more.

MEANING & FLOW

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.
-Viktor Frankl

Frankl believed that meaning comes from friction, not the absence of it. When everything is effortless, people don’t feel liberated — they feel lost. Humans don’t thrive in comfort — they wilt in it. What we actually need isn’t a life free of tension, but a life that challenges us — goals that matter, responsibilities we choose, and struggles that leave us feeling tired and accomplished at the end of the day.

The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Good luck finding a flow state without friction. A worthwhile struggle is what gives life shape, purpose, and identity.

CREATIVE LIMITATIONS

Most artists, architects, and creatives I know (myself included) would have a hard time finishing anything without a deadline or a limited budget. Creativity doesn’t come from abundance — it comes from limitation. Breakthroughs in art, science, and business happen under constraint — friction is often the actual source of invention.

I look back on my time building Rxmance — broke, working nights bartending in a tuxedo, living in a filthy house — as one of the happiest, most purposeful, and creative periods of my life. And I’m not alone. I’ve read countless accounts of artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs who say their early creative years were the good years.

If I’d been flush with cash, living rent-free in a beautiful house, and not hustling side gigs, there’s no way I would’ve been driven or determined enough to build a business. That’s the thing with friction — we assume it’s a hindrance, but it’s actually a superpower.

YOUTH

If you want a weak and fragile child, remove every obstacle from their path. Friction is a key ingredient in building character, and the muscle memory gained in childhood is invaluable.

Children learn by encountering manageable difficulties and overcoming them.
-Peter Gray, Prof. of Psychology, Boston College

I should mention that I don’t have children, so I generally hesitate to weigh in on parenting or childhood development. But anecdotally, you don’t have to look very far on a college campus to find ill-adjusted young people who’ve clearly had a very easy life.

I know what you’re thinking — then why do so many coddled rich kids make it so far in life? 

Because friction doesn’t guarantee fairness.
The richer you are, the less the world pushes back. Small conveniences like better neighborhoods and less financial stress build into bigger advantages — better schools, stronger networks, financial and legal safety nets, easier access to careers and capital, etc.

Living without friction becomes a self-fulfilling lifestyle if you have the means. But happiness is far from guaranteed.

RELATIONSHIPS

Avoiding conflict in a romantic relationship may feel good in the short term, but it’s a ticking time bomb. A friction-free relationship looks calm until it isn’t. Conflict is a given — the real indicator of a healthy relationship is how you handle it and repair after. Vulnerablility and honest communication (forms of friction) build intimacy. The same is true in friendship.

William Rawlins, who has spent decades studying how friendships are built and maintained, and Robin Dunbar, whose work maps the layers of our social circles, both show that friendship takes steady effort and emotional investment. Rawlins finds that friendships survive through intentional effort, while Dunbar shows that closeness grows through emotional labor, shared adversity, and the ongoing work of staying connected over time.

In other words, relationships without friction fade.

FLAT CULTURE

Kyle Chayka, whose work examines how digital platforms dilute culture, argues that everything has been reduced to content engineered for engagement. His book Filterworld shows how algorithmic systems flatten culture into a homogenized, predictable world of seamless consumption. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram dictate our choices, shape our tastes, and even produce a kind of “algorithmic anxiety” as everything from entertainment to city design, gets smoothed into sameness.

All kinds of cultural experiences have been reduced to the homogeneous category of digital content...made to obey the law of engagement.
-Kyle Chayka

Algorithms curate our lives through a commercial filter, slowly shaping our taste and stripping out any real friction.

This creates a feedback loop where culture, products, cities, and people start to look the same. Algorithms amplify the same content, brands reshape themselves to match it, and we mistake repetition for popularity. Each cycle reinforces the next, until culture, products, aesthetics, and our tastes blur into the same shape. We stop trusting our own preferences and default to whatever feels safe and universally acceptable.

SEX

Everywhere we turn, we’re being sold a friction-free life in the name of progress. Algorithms optimize for engagement and culture flattens. Platforms reward sameness and safety until that’s all that’s left. Individual taste gets replaced by recommendation loops. Creativity becomes derivative because creators are incentivized to serve the algorithm instead of their own curiosity.

But friction isn’t the opposite of comfort — it’s the opposite of complacency. It makes life more meaningful and forces us to be individuals. Even the pleasure we get from sex largely depends on friction — our mechanoreceptor nerves literally require pressure and movement to fire. I couldn’t resist.

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WE ALL GOTTA PEE

When’s the last time you were in the car and urgently had to pee?

If you’re like me — or the countless others I’ve surveyed recently — this scenario is more common than most of us want to admit.

And urgent pees aren’t just limited to cars or traffic jams.

People I spoke with were quick to mention how often they run into gnarly toilets, piss-covered seats, offensive porta-potties, cold late night camping pees, and of course, kids peeing their pants and the agony of trying to hold it.

Trust me, I’ve been there.

TL;DR:

THE GOTTA PEE STORY

I. PANIC

On my birthday this year (May 17), I was driving from LA to Baja with my dog to surf with friends. Somewhere between San Clemente and Oceanside, I hit gnarly, unexpected traffic — and I had to pee. Bad.

Honestly, I started to panic a little. Putting on a pee show for slow-moving drivers on the side of the freeway felt like a good way to get arrested, and the nearest bathroom was 60+ minutes away.

II. EPIPHANY

I’d brought a bag of Trader Joe’s cashews — and clearly too many beverages — on my drive to Mexico. As I slowly came to terms with peeing my pants, I glanced down and realized I had a chile & garlic–flavored toilet sitting in my lap.

I quickly ate the remaining nuts and peed in the bag. It was glorious.

III. THE PEE PROBLEM

It dawned on me a few weeks after Baja that a simple Trader Joe’s bag had been a legit lifesaver. I started keeping a few in my car for pee emergencies — and actually using them.

If it worked for me, it had to work for other people too.

When I mentioned my pee bag idea to friends, every single one of them had a personal or kid-related pee story.

It was clear that pee emergencies are part of life for almost everyone — and for some reason, we just accept it.

IV. THE PEE DEVICE HELLSCAPE

I nosed around a little bit and found a handful of pee-related products on the market. They were weird, bulky, expensive, and looked like they belonged in a hospital.

I had just successfully peed in a Trader Joe’s bag thrice while driving — I knew the solution didn’t have to be complicated. Or ugly.

V. THE GOTTA PEE BAG

I’m notorious for overdesigning. I’ll come up with a great concept or design — then overwork it for weeks, only to end up back at the original-ish version.

Obsessing is part of my process, but I’ve learned — in life and in work — the simplest solution beats the complicated one almost all of the time.

Thanks to my fashion industry PTSD, firsthand experience peeing in various containers, and what I’d seen in the portable-pee market, I came up with a very specific list of constraints for the Gotta Pee bag:

1. Convenient: Must fit in a pocket, purse, glove box, etc.

2. Easy to use: Subtle and useful design details

3. Unisex: Effective for men, women, and kids

4. Recycled: Made from 100% recycled plastic

5. Reusable: Can be rinsed out and reused

6. Fun: Why can’t pee bags be cool?

7. Versatile: Useful in many different situations

Here’s the bag I came up with:

VI. IT’S AS EASY AS 1-2-PEE

If you want to try a Gotta Pee Bag:

Use code: COOL at checkout for 50% off + free shipping
*And please leave a product review on our website

Follow us:
IG - @gottapeexyz
TikTok - @gottapeexyz
**I promise the content will be second to none

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About half a year ago I had some major life and relationship shake-ups — which pushed me to ask WTF I’m doing with my life — which led to some serious self-work — which got me back into a creative headspace — and eventually led to developing a new brand/product* that is launching very soon.

*More on the new product next week

TRUST YOUR GUT

I wound down the apparel side of Rxmance after COVID. Truth is, I’d been over making clothes for a few years, and my gut had been telling me it was time to explore new endeavors. It only took a global pandemic shutting down the fashion industry to finally force my hand.

It’s a lot easier to listen to your gut when you have no other option. Too many times in my life, I’ve waited for someone or something to force a major decision. My gut usually knows the right path, but as soon as I feel it, my head jumps in, rationalizes, and talks me out of it.

Here’s a lame but real example: you’re driving down the freeway, your gut says “take this exit,” and your head instantly says, “nah, keep going it might be the next one.”

It’s never the next one. So why do I keep blowing past my exit?

THE SCIENCE OF GUT INSTINCT

• Pattern recognition: What feels like a gut call is often your brain rapidly pulling from past experience to spot patterns you can’t consciously explain (Gary Klein’s research)

• Somatic markers (body cues): Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio showed that your body and emotions tag choices as “good” or “bad” before your head catches up

• Expert intuition: With deep experience, professionals (doctors, pilots, athletes) often make faster, more accurate gut calls than heady analysis — think flow state

• Choice overload relief: Overthinking too many options leads to worse decisions — gut instinct cuts through the noise so you can act

• Embodied wisdom: The gut–brain axis (500 million neurons in your digestive system) literally feeds information to your brain — “gut feelings” are physical signals, not just metaphors

• Speed: Kahneman’s System 1 thinking lets you make instant decisions when slow, logical thought would take too long

Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow

System 1 thinking: Fast, automatic, emotional, intuitive. Operates with little effort or conscious control. This is where gut instinct and intuition live.

System 2 thinking: Slow, deliberate, logical, analytical. Used for problem-solving, calculations, careful reasoning.

MIDLIFE CRISIS

The end of the COVID lockdown meant a joyous return to “normal” life for most people. For me, it was a reckoning. I was mourning the loss of the company I’d spent my entire adult life building, and my bella vita — the unexpected COVID lockdown sourdough-bread-baking vacation — had quickly morphed into a dark cave. I felt lost, listless, unproductive, alone, washed up, and paralyzed. Only in hindsight do I recognize it as a midlife crisis.

Contrary to the cliché, a midlife crisis rarely looks like an overweight divorcé in a yellow Corvette with a young coed in the passenger seat. It’s actually worse. Midlife is when we start taking inventory, comparing where we are in life to where we thought we’d be. Spoiler alert: nobody’s exactly where they want to be.

Maybe your career has stalled, money is tight, your relationship feels stagnant, you’re exhausted from juggling work and family, your parents are aging and dealing with health issues, your knees and back are making noises, your lab results came back abnormal, you don’t feel sexy, you rarely see friends, or you’re behind on saving for retirement. You get the idea.

The midlife crisis isn’t just a funny meme — and it’s not just for men. Research shows humans are generally happier in early and late life, with a significant dip in middle age (40–55).

The good news — the happiness curve rises again after 55 as people recalibrate and refocus on what actually matters: health, quality time with loved ones, community, and purpose. Shocker, right?

JUST TALK ABOUT IT

If you approach a conversation with a friend or stranger by flexing your fake perfect life, they’ll probably respond in kind. Vulnerability is a two-way street. But if you’re open and honest about your struggles and feelings, most people are eager to share theirs. People want to connect. And if you don’t believe me, Elaine & Arthur Aron have done extensive research on this topic.

The National Weather Service has downgraded my midlife crisis from a hurricane to a tropical storm. I know starting a new company isn’t the solution to all my problems, but ejecting myself out of a death spin is one small step for my younger self, and one giant leap for my midlife self.

Be vulnerable, honest, and open with the people you love. And the people you like. And maybe even strangers. You’ll be better for it.

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Jannik Sinner Celebrating his 2025 Wimbledon win over Carlos Alcaraz

Glenn Martens’s debut couture collection for Maison Margiela

I saw this guy at Lincoln Hardware in Venice wearing his 2004 Bolder Boulder 10K shirt and it made me miss my hometown a lot.

FYI - Runners World called the Bolder Boulder "America's All-Time Best 10K." No surprise there.

Phoebe Philo Collection D preview

Sportea IYKYK

My dad started a tradition of sending photos of perfectly peeled oranges — the peel removed in one unbroken piece. I took it a step further, peeling mine to resemble the full male package (or an elephant if you have kids).

So you can imagine my surprise when I came across this video of Louis Bourgeois describing — and demonstrating — how her father would peel a tangerine in one piece, in the shape of a man with a penis.

Dad, if you’re reading this, please send a photo of your Louis Bourgeois orange peel man ASAP.

It seems like the latest brunchification trend is dressing in the costume of an ultra trail runner. As someone who’s loved running on trails since I was a kid, I find this quite funny.

It’s one thing to cosplay as a yogi or athleisurist but long distance rail running is greuling, unglamorous, and can be deadly. We’re talking about distances longer than a marathon (usually 50-250K+), through mountains & deserts, brutal elevation gains, self-supported food & bev, self navigaton, extreme elements, and coming dangerously close to fully losing your mind in what ultra althletes call the pain cave.

I love that running is having a moment. And I guess it was only a matter of time before things swung from dressing for 5K city jogs to the most extreme edge of the sport — abandoning Hokas for obscure Euro brands and ultra specific performance gear.

You’ve surely seen these sedentary foodies dressed as endurance athletes, standing in line at the most expensive breakfast spot in town: Satisfy Moth Tech tee, shorts from (any outerwear brand), Soloman XT-6 trail shoes, Oakley Eye Jacket Redux glasses, hydration vest, and Ciele hat.

But here’s the thing — the clothes and accessories for trail running serve a purpose, as they do in any sport or hobby. Hydtration vests distribute many ounces of vital food and bev comfortably on the body (and only really need to be used on runs longer than a couple hours), the right clothes breathe on hot days and help reduce chafing, hats and sunglasses protect from the blazing sun, and trail shoes provide traction and some level of comfort (if you run 100 miles, you’re probably gonna lose your toenails no matter what shoes you wear).

It feels like more and more people are skipping the doing and going straight to the dressing. But wearing a pilot uniform doesn’t make you a pilot (props to Nathan Fielder). Doing the thing is the thing. It should be hard. It should leave a mark. And brunch tastes a lot better after a sweat.

The best basketball player at the local gym rarely has the most expensive shoes or shorts. And I respect that.

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We all know AI can do many things — writing, coding, customer support, image generation, data analysis, translation, SEO, market research, financial modeling, etc.

Now it has set its sights on the music industry — maybe the most depressing AI headline yet.

Check out this Toots & the Maytals inspired AI track. It’s one thing to nail the instrumentation, but the vocals and vibe shocked me. Oh, and it took ~5 minutes to make.

Don’t take my word for it — FF to ~30:00 in this On the Media episode to hear an expert POV. TLDL: he’s pretty sure his decade-long career in music production and scoring is over — thanks to AI generated music.

Even with all the quantum leaps in AI, I’m more convinced than ever that without smart, creative, and tasteful humans, it’s just a very powerful calculator.

Stepfanie Tyler wrote a great Substack arguing that taste — discernment, restraint, and coherence — is the new intelligence. In a world flooded with AI, ads, and algorythmic slop, tastemakers know how to engage with what matters and tune out the rest.

The loudest voice is rarely the smartest.

With all the talk of AI taking over, it’s easy to forget that humans still decide what’s good. AI can make songs, art, code, and films — but we’re the ones who assign meaning and value.

AI isn’t your friend — it just knows how to act like one. It exists to serve. So the real question is: Who’s pulling the strings, what are their intentions, and how refined is their taste on a scale of -1,000,000 to 10?

Winning in the AI era means having taste

Here’s where to start:

1. Intentionally curate your inputs — there is too much of everything — be discerning and intentional about what you pay attention to — filter out the noise — taste is making meaning out of chaos

2. Curiosuty is a super power — algorithms flatten culture — seek out the margins, the overlooked, and the hard-to-find — well guided curiosity leads to insights that matter

3. Prioritize community — relationships are the key to success, happiness, and...taste — build authentic connections — be vulnerable and give as much as you take — taste breeds taste

Taste is part inheritance, part environment, part instinct. It’s elusive and largely unteachable — but not unattainable.

It’s much easier to be sold what’s cool by an algorithm or a billboard. Taste is slowly being evolved out of us — just like handwritten directions disappeared with GPS. We’ve outsourced discernment. The good life is mistaken for the easy one. The cost isn’t just a tasteless society — it’s a culture of uncreative, low-friction, flat lives.

Taste isn’t a goal to achieve — it’s the chicken and the egg of an intentional life. Be curious, care about what matters, trust what you like, and immerse yourself in community. The rest will come naturally.

Here’s some very nice jazz made by humans

Pharoah Sanders - Harvest Time - Pharoah (1977)

Human > AI: Pharoah Sanders said he liked playing one note over and over again until it started to sound different. He believed in the idea that everything’s in there — if you listen closely and go deep enough, one note can contain multitudes.

Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) - Whoza Mtwana - African Marketplace (1980)

Human > AI: As a young man in South Africa, Ibrahim was known as “Dollar Brand”, for the dollar he would carry around in case he ran into an American sailor selling jazz records.

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The Tour de France started this week and I saw a headline questioning why Tadej Pogacar (the best cyclist on the planet) and Mathieu van der Poel were racing in $300K Richard Mille RM 67-02 watches.

Tadej, Mathieu, and other celeb athletes fall into the luxury watch-wearing category I call PROs — they wear fancy watches because they’re paid to do so. No further questions.

But what about the rest of the guys who buy watches that cost as much as a car?

It seems like there are roughly four categories of men who rock pricey timepieces: flexers, clout chasers, style snobs, and sentimentalists.

It’s 2025, and as Sean Monahan so eloquently puts it, we’ve entered the Boom Boom Era — a cultural mood shift toward luxury, indulgence, and abundance after years of restraint and minimalism. And what better metaphor than a watch? Think Barack Obama in an Apple Watch vs. Patrick Bateman in a Rolex Datejust.

FLEXERS

Flexers are just people with a lot of dough who want you to know it. They flaunt their wealth through cars, clothes, homes, vacations, watches, etc. And across all that consumption, the common threads are usually bad taste and goofy intentions.

Flexers used to be a club of the finance class, exoctic car salesmen, and Type A entrepreneurs. But they’ve welcomed a new wave of equally kooky flexers: self-styled tech bros and crypto guys who think having money makes them powerful and sexy.

Everyone has personal style (see: Steve Jobs or Pee-wee Herman). The problem is when guys fight their natural instinct to be chill in a hoody and jeans, and instead opt for expensive clothes and accessories without the slightest clue how to wear them. Style requires self-awareness — these guys will probably never realize the joke’s on them.

Some well-supported flexers come close to selling it, but there’s always something a little off. Having a crew of handlers who know their shit and guide purchases is a smart move for a personal brand — but good style has to be personal. That’s kind of the whole point.

It’s the difference between a watch feeling like an extension of the body and a guy looking like he’s losing a wrestling match with his wrist.

A stylist can lead you to water...but they’ll also lie to you about how cool you look sipping it from a straw.

CLOUT CHASERS

Clout chasers are like flexers with one key difference — they’re not obscenely (or even moderately) wealthy — but they’re desperate to appear that way. That means spending way more than they can afford on an expensive watch or, more likely...buying a Chinese dupe.

A fake watch is the perfect calling card for these guys. They’re corny as hell and dying for attention — trying to convince people they’re successful without doing the work. And the people who fall for it are also corny AF. Square pegs finding square holes.

A watch can quietly set your intentions in life if you’re not careful. You might get exactly what you’re asking for: a loveless marriage admired by fellow clout chasers for its performative perfection, business partnerships with shady dudes who make money “the easy way,” dupe-wearing managers and new hires so insecure they’d rather party with fellow posers than try to mingle with real men, and guys on dating apps flexing their Patek-draped wrists, awkwardly hovering near their faces.

STYLE SNOBS

Here’s where it gets tricky — because having good style is actually a pretty valid reason to buy a nice watch. The problem is, the line between clout chaser and style master is razor-thin.

Style snobs are purists. They’re far from flexer-flush, and they’d commit hara-kiri before wearing a fake watch.

They know their shit, research and covet rad items, seek out rare pieces, and style them well. But the risk is looking like they’re playing dress-up or trying too hard — the two cardinal sins of good style.

Style snobs are flexing — but mainly to their peers and friends. They wish the rest of the world could understand why a 1973 BMW 2002tii is special, who designed their nondescript fit, or how hard it was to find the perfect vintage timepiece. But they’ll never give up using condescention as a cudgel.

SENTIMENTALISTS

Any guy with cash or a DH Gate account can buy a “fancy” watch. That’s not cool. Caring is cool (and sexy). Sentimentalists are the more grounded version of flexers and style snobs — passionate about history, quality, craftsmanship, family ties, classic style, and analog beauty in a digital world.

These are the same guys who obsess over their kitchen knives, their shoes, tracking down obscure car parts, and finding a partner with similar idiosyncrasies. Their friends share their taste level and interests — style becomes a friendly competition. They don’t care what a random person at a restaurant thinks, and when asked about their watch, they nod and pull their sleeve down.

Watches for sentimentalists carry significant personal meaning — they’re not signals or invitations for elevator pitches.

We all have phones in our pockets — watches are no longer a utility — they’re 100% a style choice. And that’s risky business. It’s like wearing a cowboy hat when not ranching or on horseback — the rare guy can make it look kinda hottt — but everyone else just looks sad — no matter how many teeth they’re flashing with a confident grin.

Tech bro flexers can only afford to look like fools in expensive watches because there’s a lot of money to be made in training people to compare themselves to strangers. Strangers who, by the way, also hate themselves for living performative lives. And the cycle continues.

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ITALIAN INSPO

Bruno Lauzi performing Il Vecchiaccio (the geezer) in 1981. This dude, his style, the song, and the dancing are the biggest vibe I’ve seen in a very long time.

It’s officially #thebootsonlysummer — youngsters unironically wearing futbol cleats off the pitch and onto the streets. If you think I hate this trend, think again...

In high school, we’d wear our cleats as shoes after grinding down the bottoms — usually by dragging them on the road from the passenger seat of a car.

Grillo has been my go-to spring/summer wine, and Sicilian wine maker Alessandro Viola’s Note di Bianco is a good one. It has all the things I look for in a white wine: Salinity, minerality and bright acidity.

Recent installation work by Italian artist Adelaide Cioni.

Mind Enterprises, the Italian music duo are goofy — but props for the schtick and summer-ready synth pop. I would be much less forgiving in any another season.

J.Cruglia

If you missed it, J.Crew partnered with Masseria San Domenico, a luxury hotel in Puglia, Italy, to host a pop-up called J.Crew A Mare. They flew out editors, stylists, and content creators, dressed them, and transformed the beach club into a branded space. A lot of obligatory content got made.

Emily Sundberg said it “set a new bar for the Brand Trip.”

Is a free trip fair compensation for starring in a J.Crew campaign? Will they actually wear the clothes J.Crew gave them in real life? J.Crew’s fine — it feels like it’s on the come-up a little bit with Brendon Babenzien — but a full return to the glory days seems unlikely. I was definitely there for it in the early aughts — but I was also wearing Polo Sport cologne and cleats with the bottoms shaved off.

These tastemakers can afford nice vacations and clothes. That’s what makes it weird to see them — many genuinely talented and successful — smiling like company employees on a teambuilding retreat. I guess if the goal is personal brand fuel, a bar-raising brand trip gets the job done.

I miss the days when building a personal brand meant padding your resume, adding a couple inches to your height, and bragging about a hottt jet ski vacation at the bar. Now it means curating your entire life to impress strangers. Like, a lot of total strangers.

Influencers are modern-day pitchmen — and they’re not going anywhere. According to Bloomberg, influencer marketing is projected to hit $33 billion in 2025, and brands are doubling down because it works.

Ron Popeil was the OG influencer — he basically invented parasocial marketing. He leveraged his personal brand, voice, and credibility to move a lot of product. He also had no shame. Sound familiar? He wasn’t just selling the Chop-O-Matic or Showtime Rotisserie (“Set it and forget it!”) — he was selling a lifestyle. A ruthless salesman using infomercials as his canvas.

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I HATE BULLIES

Every day in the U.S., millions of undocumented immigrants quietly perform the low-wage, high-effort work that keeps businesses and our daily lives running.

The relationship between business, immigrant labor, and the government is symbiotic and shadowy. It runs under the radar with a wink — until some incel with no calluses on his hands lands a cabinet seat and tries to settle a lifetime of grudges.

A few Numbers

• 50% of the skilled work force in the U.S. is Latino

• ~1M undocumented Latino construction workers in the U.S.

• 14% of agriculture workers & 12% of hospitality & leisure workers are undocumented

• 10,000 baby boomers retire everyday (more on this later)

I’ll save you some time if you haven’t read Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — the U.S. is in desperate need of more housing. What do you think would happen to the housing industry if we lost 1,000,000 skilled constrction workers? And don’t you think big and small American companies would gladly hire Americans over foerign laborers if that was an option?

I was able to build an apparel manufacturing business and brand in Los Angeles thanks largely to undocumented workers — pattern makers, cutters, sewers, dye houses, screen printers, and finishers.

It would be impossible to build a vertically manufactured apparel brand in the U.S. without undocumented labor. And isn’t that basically the American dream neoliberals and the current administration love to blabber on about? Onshoring production, creating jobs, celebrating entrepreneurship, contributing to GDP, etc.

Well — bravo. These guys are so out of touch and politically motivated, they kill their own policy goals with...policy.

POPULATION TIME BOMBS

Roughly 1/3 of the American birthrate comes from immigrants or their children. That’s how this whole thing works. A steady influx of new and generational immigrants allows for assimilation, contribution, and full participation as Americans. They’re naturally woven into the fabric of this country — a nation built by immigrants in the first place.

Here’s an example of another way this can go:

Germany’s population is 83 million, and the average age is approaching 50. That’s a demographic time bomb. To keep the polulation steady, they’d need to import 2 million people under 25 each year for 20 years. Problem solved right? You wish. On paper, it makes economic sense — but from a national perspective, it would mean Germans would no longer be the majority in their own country. And if you know anything about global superpowers, they tend to be...nationalistic.

These countries are in similar or worse situations than Germany:

• Japan

• South Korea

• Italy

• Spain

• China

• Russia

• Ukraine

• Portugal

• Greece

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: we’re going to regret criminalizing a highly valuable, willing population of workers who are literally volunteering to do jobs Americans don’t want. Our neighbor is knocking on our door, asking us to allow them to do essential work we’ve abandoned, at a price we can’t believe. And we’re turning them away...because politics.

I’m pretty sure when we look back on Trump 47 — the “expert negociator” businessman president — we’ll see tarrifs, tax cuts for the rich, the deportation of a willing workforce, etc. as some of the worst economic policy ever. The West Wing has churned out a lot of bad economic policies over the years, and the fact that we’re still talking about trickle-down economics is insane. but were barely 150 days in, and these guys have gone full fuck-it mode.

MARINES VS. WORKERS

I hate what I’m seeing on both sides of the current protests in LA. Having the National Guard and Marines out to regulate protests that are smaller and less chaotic than when the Dodgers won the World Series is overkill, to say the least. But looting, smashing storefronts, and throwing rocks at cops is not how you win this battle.

All it takes is one clip of a graffiti-covered building or a Waymo on fire for the media to distort the entire narrative and serve it to the world. That’s just the era we live in. SO DON’T GIVE THEM THE RED MEAT THEY’RE STARVING FOR.

The people looting and throwing e-scooters off highway overpasses are opportunists and bored teenagers — not the real protestors. The real ones are the kids of immigrants, desperate to give voice to parents terrified of being deported — and the friends, neighbors, and allies who stand with them. Some are DREAMers themselves, brought here as kids, now facing the threat of being sent back to countries they’ve never actually lived in.

Here’s some free advice Donald:

1. Go after criminals if you want to stop crime — no one is against deporting convicted undocumented immigrants

2. Admit that we need immigrant labor to keep the economy humming and broaden the work visa program (you have hundreds of them working at Mar-a-Lago so I know you get it)

You’ll be a hero to the workers by giving them peace of mind and safer conditions. U.S. businesses will love you for legalizing the workforce they desperately need. And the economy will grow thanks to more taxes paid, more spending, and lower labor costs.

Or do it your way...but beware.

A lot of people believed you when you said immigrants are rapists and murderers. That fear helped elect you. But the truth has a way of surfacing. Now people know the immigrants in their community — their friend, favorite waitress, caring nanny, inexpensive gardener, sushi chef, hard working employee, etc. These aren’t strangers, they’re community members.

And people don’t take kindly to a president disappearing the people they sit next to in church — or the best worker at the local business — for no real reason.

In her newsletter this week, Kyla Scanlon pointed out a Cato Institute analysis showing that the current administration's deportation plans will cost nearly $1 trillion. And the "One Big Beautiful Bill" sets aside $168 billion for immigration enforcement.

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A friend reposted a self-help ChatGPT prompt from The Neuron Newsletter that’s been making the rounds.

Since I’ve got time on my hands — somewhere between walking my dog and worrying about the next 40 years of my life — I tried the prompt myself.

Here’s the prompt:

You are my AI Meta-Coach. Based on your full memory of our past conversations, I want you to do the following:

1. Identify 5 patterns in how I think, speak, or act that might be limiting my growth.

2. For each, explain where it shows up, what’s driving it, how it holds me back, and one uncomfortable action to challenge it.

3. Ask me one brutally honest question no one else would dare to ask.

4. Suggest a 7-day self-recalibration plan.

Don’t be gentle. Be accurate.

My results were uncomfortably accurate. It told me I have patterns of hyper self-reliance, romanticizing complexity, suspended transition, intellectual overdrive with real-world underaction, and self-imposed information overwhelm.

TOO MUCH

This exercise, among other things, got me thinking about how overwhelming life can be — there are too many newsletters, podcasts, chlothing brands, TV shows, restaurants, emails, shoes, cars, push notifications, breaking news alerts, songs, mattresses, beverages, etc.

I feel like a dolt if I don’t read every newsletter in my inbox or article a friend sends me. I’m desperate for new info, smart commentary, nuanced perspectives — so I force myself to try to read everything, which isn’t exactly fun or conducive to retaining info. I have the same problem with podcasts.

Have you tried to buy a pair of cool, functional, well-made pants or shoes lately? Where does all this sh*t come from — and why is 99% of it so bad? We’ve accepted A/B-tested midness in nearly every part of our lives — and in the process, we’ve normalized settling for whatever’s comparatively better.

A dislocated shoulder is comparatively better than getting your foot cut off, but it’s still not great.

Quick note — clothes look different on you than they do on the model in the ad or online store — not because models are perfect, but because if you saw the photo shoot from the reverse angle, you’d spot 5+ “styling clamps” adjusting the clothes to perfectly fit the model’s body. Also Photoshop.

I recently took my 2004 Volvo wagon to the mechanic, and the first thing he said when he called me after looking at it was, “Are you sitting down?” Ya, it wasn’t good news and I needed to buy a car for the first time in 12 years. Good luck if you haven’t done that recently. Brand? Model? Trim package? Color? Price? Resale value? Gas or electric? Do dealerships only hire grifters? Did I mention color?

I bought an Outback in autumn green metallic — and now all I can think about is my dad telling me that white cars have better resale value, reflect sunlight, stay cooler, and make the paint last longer.

LESS IS MORE

I have a favorite little surf town in Mexico (don’t @ me). One of the best things about it is there are only 1-3 restaurants, depending on the day. Last time I went, one of them was only open from 8PM to 8:30PM. The food is fine, the chairs and tables are plastic, the Mezcal is unbranded, the prices are fair, I’m usually there with people I love, and the view is sand & sea. It’s perfect.

We don’t need 100 restaurants to choose from — or unpaid acquaintances telling us which new one we must try.

Why does literally no one have a good answer to the question “where should we eat?” We’re overwhelmed by options and underwhelmed by the experience.

I want to talk to a restaurant hostess who never learned the word “reservation” and doesn’t care how long I stay. Going to dinner is not a status symbol — it’s a time to relax, hang out with people we love, nourish our bodies, drink decent wine at a decent price, and connect with our community (or the community of a foreign place).

If documenting your meal and flexing that you got into a hot restaurant is part of the equation — you’re doing it wrong. You can try to convince yourself the food tastes better when it’s expensive and exclusive, but the truth is: it’s not about the food — it’s about who you’re dining with.

Also — ambiance is vital, but doesn’t need to be fancy or pulled from a biophilic-design Pinterest board.

CHOOSING > BEING SOLD

Being overwhelmed is paralyzing. Our intentions are good but we make dumb decisions when we have too many inputs. Choice does matter — it’s why we break up monopolies (or at least why we should). But we’ve gone from being happy with a handful good options to more choice than we can handle.

Now, anyone with a marketing budget can white-label a product or create a restaurant concept. Most brands start with an exit strategy and the product is an afterthought. Hype rules. And corporate social media ads are the arbiters of “cool.”

No wonder we’re all tired, anxious, and never feel caught up.

The cure for overwhelm is ejecting yourself from the hype loop. Getting clear on what actually matters — and what you really want/need to be happy.

If you’ve been on the It*s Cool tip for a minute, you know what I’m gonna say: relationships, purpose, and a little nature.

It’s about choosing — not being sold.

CLARITY

If you remember from above, step 3 of this AI prompt was: “Ask me a brutally honest question no one else would dare to ask.”

It delivered: What part of you is still performing for the world — even when no one’s watching — because you’re afraid of what it would mean to stop striving and simply be content?

Well, damn. It’s the part of me that equates being content with being complacent. The part that gets anxious when I’m not pushing forward. It shows up when I slow down, telling me I’ll fall behind or disappear if I stop proving myself. It’s trying to protect me, but it’s probably holding me back from getting where I want to be.

You don’t need ChatGPT to ask you tough questions — but we all have blind spots worth exploring.

And like it or not, it’s 2025. We’re all overwhelmed, anxious, and insecure — and that can make it hard to see ourselves through the bullshit.

Clarity can force hard decisions.

Here’s a new Alex G song/vid just in time for summer...

If you can pull yourself away from Lorde for 5 mins

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