“You can never think your way to a good life, you have to live it, and virtues will be formed by habit.”
Ben Sasse, facing a terminal diagnosis, offers five life habits at St. John’s College Santa Fe commencement.
High cortisol is aging you faster than alcohol or endless scrolling.
Wrinkles. Poor sleep. Slow recovery. Low libido.
Here are 7 natural ways to lower cortisol and stay youthful:
1. Sunlight on skin in the first 30 minutes.
A Stanford neuroscientist warns high cortisol wrecks memory, enlarges your fear center, and make your brain feel broken.
If I wanted to fix it naturally, I'd do these 8 things every day:
1. Walk barefoot on grass for 5–7 minutes.
A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT.
He knows his time is running out.
So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour.
He died 5 months later.
This is that lecture.
The most important hour you'll watch this week. 👇
Bookmark it for later
Instead of watching an hour of Netflix, watch this 2 hour hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers.
Helen Roseveare, a missionary who faced intense suffering and persecution during her 20 years of service in the Congo, shares one of the times that she saw God answer prayer in a most unexpected way:
"I went to have prayers with our orphanage children as I did every day, and any of the children wanted gathered around me for prayer time, and I'd give them different things to pray about. And this particular day, I told the children of this tiny baby and asked them to pray for the nurses that they would stay awake all night to keep that baby warm. If the baby got cold, it would die. I mentioned that the baby had a 2-year-old sister who was crying because her mommy had died. I mentioned the burst hot water bottle.
During prayer time, different children prayed for different things, and then one little 10-year-old girl, Ruth, she prayed in the usual blunt way of our African children, 'Please, God, send us a hot water bottle. Now, God, it'll be no good tomorrow. Send it this afternoon. Now, if it comes tomorrow, the baby will be dead.'
I'm sort of swallowing hard, and she said, 'While you're about it, God, would you send a dolly for the little 2-year-old sister, so she'll know that Jesus really loves her?'
And that afternoon, the parcel came. It was the first parcel I ever, I've been out there four years, I'd never had a parcel from home. And despite the fact I live on the equator, somebody packing that parcel had been prompted by God to put in a hot water bottle, and a child from my Bible class at home had put in a dolly for a little girl.
And it came that afternoon in answer to a 10 year-old child's prayer, and the amazing thing was, you know, that parcel had been on the way five months to get to us. It had left England in July, and it came that afternoon, cause a child prayed."
Jesus rose from the dead and the first person He went to was His brother who thought He was crazy.
Not Peter. Not John. Not the twelve.
James.
His kid brother. The one who grew up sharing a room with God and didn’t know it.
Think about James for a second. His older brother is Jesus. Not “Jesus the Christ.” Not “Jesus the Savior.” Jesus the guy who worked in the carpenter shop and came home smelling like sawdust and sweat. Jesus who snored. Jesus who ate too fast. Jesus who their mother treated different and James never understood why.
Because Mary kept her mouth shut.
Luke 2:19. She kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. Angels showed up at His birth. Shepherds fell on their faces. Wise men brought gold. And Mary told nobody. She just watched her firstborn grow up in a ghetto in Nazareth and kept the secret in her chest like a coal she couldn’t put down.
James didn’t know his brother was God.
He knew his brother was weird.
He knew his mother looked at Jesus different. He knew Joseph moved the whole family to Egypt when they were little and never fully explained why. He knew that one time his parents lost Jesus at the temple and found Him three days later arguing with rabbis like He owned the place. Twelve years old. Already gone.
Then Jesus grew up. Worked the shop. Paid the bills.
Because Joseph died — the Bible doesn’t say when but Joseph disappears from the story — and in Jewish custom the eldest son takes over. So Jesus wasn’t posing for paintings in that carpenter shop. He was feeding His family. Putting bread on the table for His mom and His brothers and sisters in a town so poor Nathanael said “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Then one day He left.
Walked away from the shop. Walked away from the family. Left James holding the hammer and the bills and the responsibility for a widowed mother.
James was pissed.
Mark 3:21. His own family went to collect Him because they said He was out of His mind. That’s James. That’s the brothers. Showing up to bring the crazy one home before He embarrasses the family worse.
John 7:5. His brethren did not believe in Him.
His own blood. Ate dinner with Him for thirty years. Didn’t believe.
Then Wednesday happened.
The brother James thought was insane got arrested at night by temple guards. Got beaten until His face swelled shut. Got whipped until His back looked like raw meat. Got nailed to wood and hung up on a garbage hill outside the city.
And James had to stand somewhere — maybe in the crowd, maybe at home, maybe hearing it secondhand — and process the fact that the brother he called crazy just died like a criminal.
Three days and nights of silence.
Three days of James sitting with the guilt of every eye roll. Every argument. Every time he told people “I don’t know what’s wrong with Him.” Every time he showed up to drag Jesus home because He was embarrassing the family name.
Then Sunday morning.
Jesus rose. Conquered death. Walked out of the tomb.
And He went to James.
1 Corinthians 15:7. He appeared to James.
Not in a crowd. Not at a distance. He went to His brother. The one who didn’t believe. The one who thought He was crazy. The one who was pissed that He left the family behind.
He showed up and let James see the holes in His hands.
Matthew 28:10. Go tell my brethren. Not my servants. Not my followers. My brethren.
John 20:17. My Father and your Father. My God and your God.
He rose to the highest position in the universe and His vocabulary didn’t change.
Most men get a promotion and stop returning phone calls. Jesus conquered death and called the brother who doubted Him family.
James went from “He’s out of His mind” to leading the church in Jerusalem.
James went from trying to drag Jesus home to writing a book of the Bible.
James went from skeptic to martyr. They threw him off the temple wall and when he survived the fall they beat him to death with a club. He died for the brother he once thought was insane.
That’s what happened when Jesus showed up after the resurrection and said brother.
One word changed everything.
He’s not calling you servant today.
He’s not calling you subject.
He’s calling you what He called James.
Brother.
The same James who didn’t believe. Who rolled his eyes. Who showed up to take Him home. Who sat in the dark for three days choking on regret.
He went to THAT guy first.
If He went to James, He’ll come to you.
🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.
Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.
Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.
They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.
The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.
Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.
Then it got worse.
The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.
It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.
One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.
Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.
Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.
That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.
Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.
This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.
If you read just ONE article this weekend, make it this.
A 5-minute read could genuinely change your career trajectory.
While everyone else panics about AI job losses, this is the blueprint to ensure you thrive.
I wrote this for friends & family first - now it's public:
Virginia Giuffre on Ghislaine Maxwell: “She is a monster. She’s worse than Epstein. She did things even worse than Epstein did. She was vicious. She was evil. Ghislaine was much more conniving and smart than Epstein ever was.”
In 2016, we had the privilege to interview the very special Steve Albin. Sadly, he passed away a few days ago. I share his story in his memory.
https://t.co/Q85YlqPAeW