It's nice to be important but it's even more important to be nice.
"If I am the wisest man alive, it is for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing"
Major life hack: Don't complain, ever. Nobody likes a complainer. They drain the energy of everyone around them. It's exhausting spending time around someone who constantly complains about things outside their control. If it’s within your control, go do something about it. If it’s not, you’re just wasting energy thinking about it. Complaining gives too much power to the thing. Take back that power.
One of the defining hallmarks of our modern age is that people in charge of good things are willing to make them incrementally worse for a chance to make more money, knowing most people are powerless to stop it.
Kids whose parents read to them as toddlers were still reading for fun by 4th grade. 8 years later.
If you want smarter kids who love books, read to them.
Free advice to parents:
This isn’t about anyone in particular, but keep your kids away from influencers. If they want politics, teach them the classics. If they want entertainment, give them beauty.
Influencers will leave them intellectually, morally, and spiritually broken.
This is a HEAVY quote here that many people need to hear
“If you disappear on a guy when he makes a mistake, I’m not so sure that’s a genuine relationship you built”
Let this sink in
I don't know about you.
But when I take my family out to dinner, I don't bring an iPad to shut the kids up.
Coloring books? Sure. If they get fidgety.
But a screen? No.
Here's the problem:
Parents hand their kids an iPad because they don't want to actually parent in public.
They don't want to:
• Deal with questions
• Manage behavior
• Engage with their kids
So they outsource it to a screen.
And that's a slippery slope.
Because the more you rely on tech to pacify your kids, the less they learn:
• How to sit with boredom
• How to behave in public
• How to have a conversation
You're not making things easier.
You're making them dependent.
And when they can't function without a screen? That's on you.
Your kids don't need constant entertainment.
They need you to actually show up and parent them.
“The real midlife crisis in America isn’t about lifestyle choices or sports cars. It’s about juggling work, finances, family, and health amid weakening social supports,” Infurna said. “The data make this clear.”
Saturday morning quote:
"Take all the energy you spend on worrying about the past, worrying about the future, worrying about what others think, and worrying about if you might fail, and channel that energy into one useful action within your control." - James Clear
nobody talks about the 30s to 40s personality shift where you no longer care to be “impressive” .. you want to be more rested, uninterested, and completely unavailable to anything that’s draining ..
OREN CASS: The real Wall Street problem isn’t just the edge-case fraudsters or looters; it’s the entire exercise.
Private equity, hedge funds, private credit: all these layers atop legitimate markets that create zero real value yet generate massive wealth.
If you’re not creating value but ending up filthy rich, you’re just extracting it from somewhere else.
@oren_cass
The Coming Crypto Apocalypse
By @Nouriel Roubini
The future of money and payments will feature gradual evolution, not the revolution that crypto-grifters promised. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ latest plunge further underscores the highly volatile nature of this pseudo-asset class; one only hopes that policymakers will wake up to the risks before it's too late.
NEW YORK – A year ago, the most pro-crypto president in US history had just returned to power after a campaign of pandering to clueless retail crypto investors, and having received massive financial backing from semi-corrupt crypto insiders. Donald Trump’s second coming was supposed to be a new dawn for crypto, leading various self-dealing evangelists to predict that Bitcoin would become “digital gold,” reaching at least $200,000 by the end of 2025.
As promised, Trump did gut most crypto regulations. He also signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stable Coins (GENIUS) Act; pushed for the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act; profited personally from shady domestic and foreign crypto deals ; promoted his own useless meme coin; pardoned crypto crooks who had allegedly aided terrorist organizations; and hosted private dinners for crypto insiders at the White House.
Moreover, crypto was supposed to benefit from various macro and geopolitical risks, such as the ballooning of US and other advanced economies’ debt and deficits; the debasement of the dollar and other fiat currencies; new trade wars; and growing tensions between the US and Iran, China, and many others. Indeed, the heightened risk environment helps to explain why gold rose by 60% in 2025.
But “digital gold” fell by 7% in 2025. As of this writing, Bitcoin is down 35% from its October peak, below where it was when Trump was elected, and the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins are down 95%. Every time gold has spiked in response to trade or geopolitical ructions over the past year, Bitcoin has fallen sharply. Far from being a hedge, it is a means of leveraging into risk, showing a strong correlation to other risky assets like speculative stocks.
Calling Bitcoin or any other crypto vehicle a “currency” has always been bogus. It is neither a unit of account, a scalable means of payment, nor a stable store of value. Even though El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, it accounts for less than 5% of transactions for goods and services. Crypto isn’t even an asset, because it has no income stream or function, nor any industrial or real-world use (unlike gold and silver).
Seventeen years after Bitcoin’s launch, the one and only “killer app” in crypto is the stablecoin: a digital version of old-fashioned fiat money, which the financial and banking industry already digitalized decades ago. Yes, whether digital money and financial services should be on a blockchain (distributed ledger) or a traditional double-ledger platform remains a question.
But 95% of “blockchain” monies and digital services are blockchain in name only. They are private rather than public, centralized rather than decentralized, permissioned rather than permissionless, and validated by a small group of trusted authenticators (as in traditional digital finance and banking) rather than by decentralized agents in jurisdictions with no rule of law.