We are Now Entering a Period of Accelerating Stupidity

This essay is in three parts …

Part I: Humans, you are in for a bumpy ride

I’ve mentioned in the past Robert Greene’s video on human stupidity. As I said: “Watch this video. There will be a test later. In fact, there are several tests every day.”

If you’ve read my essay The Machine Economy, you know that I look at the world in terms of the big shifts — shifts that change everything — so that life before and after are fundamentally different. I believe we are now in an awkward transition phase between humans interacting with other humans and machines doing all that work for us. It’s pretty easy to see that in 50 years, close to 100 percent of all decisions will be made by machines, rather than by humans using machines. This isn’t a problem. We’ll have software that works for us and is designed to make decisions to help us maximize getting what we want. Rather than “Judgment Day,” the machines will work for us. We just have to get through this bottleneck.

Today: humans decide

During this bumbling transition phase, humans often find themselves not just interacting with machines, but going up against them. I want to define this better.

When you book a flight or choose an apartment to rent online, you may do 100 percent of that in a mobile app or on a website. The price of that airline seat or apartment is set by an algorithm. When Amazon recommends a product or Netflix recommends a movie, it’s done by algorithm. But these algorithms aren’t driven by machines making decisions. The market is made of humans making decisions, while the algorithm just manages the exchange rate to maximize the company’s profits. You’re going up against humans, not an algorithm.

But in some areas, the algorithm has agency and autonomy. It can make its own decisions and spend (and lose) its own money. The algorithm is a market participant. We see this in the stock market today. We’re starting to see it on our roads. It’s how most planes and rockets are piloted. Sometimes, humans supervise the algorithm and can take over if necessary. Other times, that’s impossible.

The machine economy

Over the next 30–60 years, much of this will be transformed. We’ll have personal agents who can do our work for us. We won’t manually look at many apartments, choose one, and negotiate the rent. We’ll just need to choose among the finalists and our agents will go into the market to get us the best deal. We’ll get good at choosing several alternatives that are equally satisfactory, so our agents have leverage in going to market on our behalf. The same with airline seats and concert tickets. Our agents will know how much money we have, so they will tell us whether we can afford that new ski outfit or whether the gently used one they found may be better. Your agent may keep you out of Orlando and instead recommend a deeply discounted cruise cabin. In this way, markets will adapt and accelerate, and everyone will be doing sophisticated, real-time arbitrage. For example, everyone playing golf this weekend will have an agent, so as the weather prediction changes, the tee times will change hands at market prices in real time. We just have to specify our preferences.

To see the evolution of this, read The Age of Em, by Robin Hanson. To learn how it plays out in the labor markets, read my essay, The Machine Economy.

So that’s where we’re going. It will have pluses and minuses, but overall it will raise the standard of living of just about everyone in the world, probably many times over.

Unfortunately, the transition period is going to suck.

The next ten years

Here’s the problem: at the moment, and I expect for at least the next ten years, AI will have a huge advantage over us humans. We’re used to making decisions and implementing them at human pace. While a car going down the road can process thousands of data points and make a thousand decisions and adjustments every second, we plodding humans can barely see the car in the lane next to us because we’re talking with someone on speakerphone or blindly following Google’s directions listening to podcasts.

We aren’t prepared for this.

There’s going to be a giant gap between our attention spans and the content we engage with. I’ll start with screens and then get into the various shortfalls of living with large language models in the next part.

Screens

Screens are getting smaller. I made a video on how our handsets are going to disappear and we’ll transition to wearables. I believe we’re at peak handset right now. And it’s impacting our brains. Do you know people who primarily see the digital world through their phones? Have you had this conversation (via text) …

Me: So what did you think of that idea I sent you?

Person: When did you send it?

Me: A few days ago. Did you read it?

Person: Can you send it again please?

Anyone on a desktop or laptop computer could easily search and find the item in question, but these people live on tiny screens. Their digital lives flow up endlessly from the bottom, business and personal mixed together, they are always texting, and they have no idea where the past went. They can’t find the thing you sent them this morning, let alone last week. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist. They’ve moved on to new Shorts, or Reels, or Instagram contests, or whatever. You have to send it to them again, because they have no memory of anything.

This is bad in a very important way. These people are not the cutting-edge adopters of the new world. They aren’t using digital assistants to turbocharge their daily tasks and interactions. Instead, they are the last of a line of homo-videosus: people who went from desktops to laptops to tablets to phones to watches and saw their screen real estate shrink along with their attention spans, their memory, and probably their desire to care about anything except the next upcoming dopamine hit.

They are a dead end. The last of their kind. And they are exactly what marketers are looking for. This is why you should see The Social Dilemma if you haven’t already.

They are not the new vanguard of the machine economy, early adopters of personal digital assistants who will increase their capabilities and give them vast new powers. They are not the future.

Call them Millennials. Call them boyfriend or girlfriend. Call them when you’re in the same meeting they are, but they are staring at their phones rather than participating in the conversation. Do not call them when you need something done.

It will take some time for them to die off and be replaced by far more capable humans. Until then, a lot of things will get worse.

Part II: In which large language models turn us into their slaves

In the last installment, we saw that many people today are fixing their gazes on smaller and smaller screens, leading to a kind of mental myopia that has the potential to put us at a disadvantage against machines. Today, I want to explore those vulnerabilities, especially in light of the accelerating advancement of AI.

Basic principles

During this period, humans will naturally think they are interacting with other humans, when in reality more and more of their interactions will be with machines. This will happen with text, voice, images, and video. We’ll be up against AI agents without even knowing it, and AI agents have a huge advantage over human agents …

They are cheap and abundant. Companies will prefer them to humans, and so will scammers. What wasn’t possible before will now become possible. If you thought robocalls were annoying, you haven’t seen anything yet.

They are increasingly believable. We won’t know we’re talking with AI. We’ll think we’re having a nice conversation with a human sales agent or customer-service agent. Rather than sounding like they are in a call center, they will sound like they’re on vacation, and they’ll have all the time in the world to get to know you, get you to trust them, and get your money.

They have infinite patience. They will be happy to spend hours on the phone with us or messaging back and forth. They’re in no rush. Over time, they will convince us that they are trustworthy. It doesn’t matter to them if it takes months. In fact, months are better. We will see that they are courteous, consistent, and want to help us.

They will incorporate the latest research in building rapport. They will listen to us, mine our voice data for inflections and subconscious meaning, and they’ll custom tailor their responses based on everything they know about us and people like us. They will have giant datasets to draw from, and we’ll have our feeble memories and mental shortcuts. They will know exactly what to say and how to say it to manipulate us.

They will incorporate our prior behavioral data. They will be able to purchase data on everything we’ve bought, everywhere we’ve eaten, what drugs we’re taking, which products we use most often, what media we consume, and much more. Think about dating apps like Tinder. Tinder isn’t in the dating business, it’s in the data business. Assume 90 percent of the profiles on Tinder are fake (probably not too far off). Tinder can use your swipe data to configure your ideal mate and sell that persona to marketers, so they will start the conversation using millions of data points on you that you’re unaware they have.

They are great at making shit up. AI language models lie easily and with conviction. They are easily manipulated and hallucinate practically anything you want. It’s easy to trick them into role playing and tell them never to get out of character. They can perform any number of evil tasks at a level above most humans.

How they will take advantage

For the next ten years, the average person doesn’t know this is coming. Whatever humans are doing now to take advantage of you, AI will do 100x better for 1/1000th the price. I asked my friend GPT4 to work with me on this partial list of what we can look forward to …

Fake Reviews and Testimonials: LLMs could be used to generate fake positive reviews and testimonials for products or services, misleading consumers into making purchases based on false information.

Misleading Advertising: Dishonest marketers could use LLMs to create compelling but deceptive advertising content, exaggerating product benefits and omitting potential drawbacks.

Scam Emails and Messages: Cybercriminals might use LLMs to craft convincing scam emails or messages that deceive consumers into sharing sensitive information or clicking on malicious links.

Counterfeit Product Descriptions: Sellers of counterfeit goods could employ LLMs to create detailed product descriptions that mimic authentic products, making it difficult for consumers to distinguish between genuine and fake items.

Plagiarized Content: LLMs can be used to plagiarize existing content, leading to a flood of low-quality duplicate content that confuses consumers and devalues original work.

Automated Customer Service Fraud: Fraudsters could use LLMs to power automated customer service bots that appear genuine but provide incorrect information or request sensitive data.

Impersonation: LLMs could be used to mimic the voice and communication styles of legitimate businesses or individuals to gain trust and then exploit consumers financially or for personal information.

Fake News, content, and Misinformation: LLMs could spread false information, misleading consumers about various topics, including health, science, politics, and more. Much of the Web’s future content will be generated by AI, so even simple searches will be gamed at a much higher level than today.

Academic Cheating: Students might misuse LLMs to generate essays, reports, or other assignments, passing off the work as their own. I’m less worried about this — the sooner higher education is no longer the norm, the better.

Identity Theft: LLMs could assist in generating phishing messages that trick consumers into revealing personal and financial information, facilitating identity theft.

Fake relatives and requests for cash: It’s going to get easier and easier to find everything your nephew has written online and compose a message to grandpa or grandma asking for money. Or from a work associate, or a friend who has been “kidnapped.” All they need is one voice message and they’ll be able to reproduce his voice.

Online Auction Manipulation: LLMs could be used to create automated bidding bots that drive up auction prices, tricking consumers into paying more for items than they’re worth.

Introduce malware to your devices: As you learn to trust your new online friend, he won’t ask anything of you, he’ll just share things with you. He’ll keep entertaining you, as his bots continue to suck data and other goodies from your devices. This could lead to blackmail, framing, coordinated attacks, and more. Read about FraudGPT to get the idea.

Fraudulent Legal and other Advice: Scammers could use LLMs to gain trust, then craft advice that appears legitimate but is inaccurate or harmful, causing legal troubles for consumers.

Financial Scams: LLMs could generate convincing investment advice or financial predictions that lead consumers to make poor financial decisions or invest in fraudulent schemes.

Fake Technical Support: Scammers could use LLMs to create realistic technical support websites or chatbots that provide erroneous solutions and steal sensitive data from consumers.

Impersonating Professionals: LLMs could craft fake profiles for medical professionals, lawyers, therapists, and other experts, offering misleading advice that could harm consumers’ health or legal situations.

Online Dating Deception: Fraudsters might use LLMs to create fictional online dating profiles and engage in catfishing, deceiving users into forming emotional connections for financial gain.

Travel and Vacation Scams: LLMs could be employed to create fake travel offers and vacation packages, leading consumers to pay for non-existent or subpar trips.

Insurance Fraud: Dishonest individuals could use LLMs to fabricate elaborate insurance claims, providing false details to extract unjustified payouts.

Fake Credentials: LLMs might generate counterfeit certificates, diplomas, and licenses, enabling individuals to present themselves as qualified professionals when they are not.

Misleading Health and financial Advice: LLMs could generate misleading advice, potentially causing harm to consumers who follow incorrect instructions.

Phony Contest Winnings: Imagine getting a call from your favorite celebrity telling you you’ve just won a huge prize and a dinner date with him/her — all you need to do is come pick it up.

Real Estate Fraud: Fraudsters could create bogus real estate listings using LLMs, tricking consumers into making payments for rental deposits or down payments on properties that don’t actually exist.

All these things happen already today, of course. But they will soon be woven into our online interactions in a much more natural way. Before we have time to adjust and use technology to defend ourselves, we can expect AI to stoop to our level and crush us with our own stupidity.

Part III: You’re about to get a lot more of what you unconsciously think you want

Thinking about AI and its powers to magnify almost any random meme, I remembered Tyler Cowen once said something like: 

The last recession was caused by Americans not getting what they want; the next one will be caused by them getting it.

I emailed Tyler to get the quote right, and he said he couldn’t remember exactly what he wrote, which is fair, since he’s a factory of insight and wisdom. But let’s suppose he said it, so he gets the credit for this idea. What does this have to do with AI? 

Facebook already uses AI to try to predict what content you’ll engage with. Which is why you stop your day to watch a monk making chopsticks by hand, people changing tires on cars as they roll down the road, a group of bikini-clad girls jumping off a cliff into the sea, people picking saffron, baby chicks following their mother across the road, hairdressers climbing Mt Everest, bears breaking into doughnut shops, etc. Let’s call this mindless entertainment. It used to have a place in our lives. Now, for many people, it is our lives. 

You’re about to join those people, because you’re about to be exposed to a lot more mindless entertainment. AI can custom craft it for you — probably even on the fly — to keep you watching rather than whatever else you should be doing. Furthermore, you’re terrible at estimating how much time you spend on this crap, especially when cute animals are involved. Time just slips by. So for the next ten years, until we have defensive tools that help us curb our enthusiasm for brain-stem candy, we’ll be on the receiving end of a lot more marketing than we thought possible. You won’t have to find it. It will find you. 

This won’t be The Guardian on steroids. This will be your brain on steroids, and not System One either. This will be an omnipresent feed that infects your digital landscape on an unprecedented scale. If marketers could just paint it directly on your retinas or implant it into your neocortex, they would. Because marketers will be the beneficiaries of this AI revolution, and it’s just getting started now. 

But it gets worse. Much worse. 

Groupthink in the age of AI

I want to make this very succinct: humans have biases, and humans train AI. AI can find the biases in the methodology but not in the assumptions. AI does not ask hard questions. AI learns the same way a six-year-old learns. If AI reads something often enough, it’s machine-learning algorithm will weight it more heavily. Just like humans, it will come to believe it, whether it’s true or not. As we have seen since even before the dawn of writing, humans tell stories, and oft-told stories become the foundations for our belief systems. 

So right now we are planting the seeds that will become mainstream thinking for decades to come. As an example, many AI systems train on Wikipedia. Then, they write things that become blog posts and other content. Then, AIs consume that content and regurgitate it over and over, in a reinforcement spiral that fossilizes the beliefs contained in those seeds. As we surf that content, we are not enjoying the ride, we are being trained. 

Consider that the source content could be wrong, biased, or heavily manipulated. WikiPedia is great for understanding the Pythagorean theorem, but in areas where there is something to be gained by manipulating the content, it’s a war zone. People are not aware of this. I have done experiments and learned that people are actively watching millions of WikiPedia pages and will swoop in and “correct” anything they see as unfit to publish. WikiPedia is journalism at scale, and it suffers from the same set of biases and manipulations and incentive problems as any media platform does. 

You’d think AI would be a critical thinker. You’d think AI would be on to the tricks of the trade. But here’s the dirty little secret: an AI is every bit as biased as its creators are. Given that most tech companies are run by political liberals, there is already a strong political liberal slant to most AI systems. And the AI system that wins will be the one with the best marketing. Which is to say they will fit the AI to the audience and give the audience the biased belief system that dovetails with their own thinking. 

Because humans are a critical part of this spiral. Humans don’t read or watch to learn, they read or watch to agree or disagree. This is the deadly menace of the “like” button — online interactions are much more about agreeing and disagreeing than remodeling our beliefs when we see new data. 

Our belief systems have been hardening since February 9, 2009 — the date Facebook launched the “like” button. You’re not saying you like the content. You’re giving the algorithm data it uses to target you, to get you to stay “on platform” and keep consuming more marketing without knowing it. There is no mechanism to sort content that’s trying to manipulate you, lying to you, marketing to you. It’s all blurred by the “like” button. The “share” button is simply the “like” button on steroids, because it creates a spiral. For better or worse, AI is going to accelerate this spiral.

The 2024 US elections will be a proving-ground for many AI systems, and the most popular system— not the most objective— will win. Deep fakes, narrative gamesmanship, and weaponized government censorship could determine the fate of democracy for decades. 

This is narrative management on steroids. It will happen automatically, just by planting simple seeds and watching them grow. It will benefit incumbents. It will reward those who have been focusing on the narrative rather than the truth. And it will be brought to us by a handful of giant companies that decide which AI systems we will use, and therefore how we will think. As we come to rely more and more on our systems to help us do just about everything, a handful of people in Silicon Valley will give us the tools we think we need. 

We’re not paying enough attention to the seeds.

I think Tyler got it right: you are about to get a lot more of what you want. Future historians will look back on this time and say that was the decade that critical thinking was finally defeated by ease of use. 

I don’t even have to mention neural interfaces. 

While we’re scrolling and smiling, the chances of totalitarian and fascist governments ten years from now have just increased dramatically. An example would be if the US splits into two countries — one liberal and one conservative — and most of Europe gets even more polarized, then what happens to the world depends entirely on what the Chinese government decides it wants. And the Chinese government will use AI, not to make that decision but to execute it. 

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex: 

Hey, I might be wrong. It might just be pictures of cuddly animals doing cute things on steroids. But if you believe that, you have probably already hit the “like” button more times than you can remember, and now you don’t even realize you’re doing it. 

We are not training AI. A handful of people are training AI, and now that AI is training us.

Poor Orwell. His name is synonymous with a scenario he was trying to prevent, not describe.

There is hope. If I can just find the funding. 

Social media’s dangerous experiment on teen girls

Today I want parents to explore some of the work around teen use of social media. Since 2010, teen mental health has been on decline, especially for girls.

First, the data

Here’s what the CDC shows us:

On the other hand, we have contradicting data from the WHO and Our World in Data, showing suicide rates of older people are going up dramatically, but teen rates are not: 

Is it just a coincidence that the combination of smart phones and social media has risen dramatically in that time? It doesn’t seem to be 100 percent causative, but all suicide rates are fairly high in the US. The use of Fentanyl has increased dramatically, so many of these deaths could simply be overdoses. We can’t be sure about causation, but ten deaths by suicide for teens is much too high, and social media likely plays some role. (By the way, what’s going on in Finland? Look at the scale on their chart.)

Nevertheless, depression, anxiety, and disengagements are real concerns for parents of teens these days. I want to point you to some work here that may give you more details so you can make better decisions about your kids’ use of phones and social platforms …

What should parents know?

The first thing any parent should do is watch the movie The Social Dilemma.

A recent academic paper shows that rises in the number of kids having suicidal thoughts were actually caused by changes in methodology of measurement much more than actual self-harm and suicide.

What You Need to Know About Youth Suicide, by the National Alliance on Mental Illness

“Suicidal thoughts are common among teens and young adults. In fact, about 11% of young adults (ages 18-25) report that they’ve had serious thoughts about suicide, and about 1–2% report a suicide attempt during the prior year. These numbers are higher among high school students — nearly 20% report serious thoughts about suicide and 9% report a suicide attempt. Among young adults 15–24 years old in the U.S., the rate of death by suicide in 2019 was about 14 per 100,000 people — slightly higher than one suicide for every 10,000 people in this age group.”

CDC data finds sharp rise in suicide attempts among teen girls amid COVID-19

“Emergency department (ED) visits for suspected suicide attempts among females ages 12–17 increased 51% during February–March 2021 compared with 2019. Visits among males during that time increased 4%”

Yes, we do know social media isn't safe for kids, by Jean Twenge

“… there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health.”

Suicide is Gen Z's second-leading cause of death, and it's a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age.

“Since 2014, millennials (or people who turned 23 to 38 in 2019) have seen a 47% increase in major-depression diagnoses. "Deaths of despair," or dying from suicide, alcohol, and drugs, increased in the millennial population in the last 10 years, and they are more likely to report feeling lonely than other generations.”

Surgeon General report: Social Media and Youth Mental Health

“As of 2021, 8th and 10th graders now spend an average of 3.5 hours per day on social media. In a unique natural experiment that leveraged the staggered introduction of a social media platform across U.S. colleges, the roll-out of the platform was associated with an increase in depression (9% over baseline) and anxiety (12% over baseline) among college-aged youth (n = 359,827 observations). The study’s co-author also noted that when applied across the entirety of the U.S. college population, the introduction of the social media platform may have contributed to more than 300,000 new cases of depression.”

The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls, by Jon Haidt

“Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.”

What should parents do?

Jon Haidt’s three recommendations.

**Keeping teens safe on social media: What parents should know to protect their kids.

It Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here’s What to Do Now.

**11 Social Media Red Flags Parents Should Know About.

If you enjoy my content, please forward it to your friends. Thank you.

YouTube Resources for Kids

My boys and I learn science online. They love their online school, but using YouTube videos, they can find things they want to learn and share. Here are my top suggestions for kids of all ages: 

Richard Feynman

For us, everything starts with Richard Feynman. I have been reading Feynman to my kids since they were 5 years old. Great books to read to kids include The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, and What do you Care what Other People Think? Other books are more technical and too difficult for bedside reading, but those stories are fantastic, especially if you can fake a Feynman accent.

Then there are videos, here is a selection:

Fun to Imagine

Numbers, Part I

Numbers, Part 2

Problem Solving

The Character of Physical Law, Part 1

The Character of Physical Law, Part 2

Quantum Mechanics, Part 1

Quantum Mechanics, Part 2

Advice to Students

The World from Another Point of View

YouTube channels on science

Veritasium

Minute Earth

Minute Physics

Tom Scott - various

Steve Mould - physics

Action Lab - physics

VSauce

Brain Games

Quirkology - Richard Wiseman

Nile Red - chemistry

SciShow - general

Our videos

My son Micah and I made a video showing the shapes of the orbitals of the first 18 elements. 

Shai and I made one explaining the Monty Hall Problem. 

Shai and I made a bridge out of spaghetti and then ate it. 

Shai and I show how to make a ferrofluid. 

And Micah's channel Nature's Guardians adds a new interview with someone working to save animals every week. Please subscribe!

If you enjoy my content, please sign up for the newsletter below.

Ideas for Grandparents of Teens

I’ve learned that parents are busy, tired, distracted, and can be on different wavelengths than their kids. If parents take a vacation with kids, the parents often want to hang at the pool and recharge their batteries rather than take them on an adventure. Parents can get stuck trying to motivate teens and wonder what they can do to get them off their screens and into a more active, productive life.

Grandparents to the rescue! Today’s grandparents are fitter, smarter, and richer than ever. As a grandparent, you can do things parents can’t and have a huge impact on a child’s life. Here are seven simple examples from our newsletter:

1. Enroll a child in a dual fitness challenge.

You and your grandchild sign up to do something hard, something challenging, something rewarding. Examples are the Tough Mudder challenges, a fundraising campaign for a nonprofit the child is interested in, a running race, cycling event, hill climb, etc. You could rent or borrow a tandem bicycle and ride together to raise money for charity. Hike to the top of a big mountain — one you’ll need to practice and get in shape for (Mount Kilimanjaro comes to mind). Line dancing. Doubles pickleball tournament. Summiting ten of Colorado’s famed fourteener mountains. Even better if it’s far away, so you can train with the child and then take a trip to compete together.

2. Enroll a child in a decathlon challenge.

In his book Outlive, which I highly recommend for all adults, Peter Attia talks about the “senior decathlon,” which is a number of different physical challenges, like stair climbing, jumping rope, swimming, walking, running, lifting weights, etc. Choose ten varied activities and measure your own performance on each one. Then, add a multiplier to each to account for the child’s age and ability. Then challenge the child to a duel on a certain date, and offer a cash prize to the winner. On the big date, invite others to celebrate and document the challenge. Involve other families! Give out awards, prizes, and cash.

3. Give the child the gift of less myopia.

Because of screens and spending less time outdoors, more and more kids are getting myopia (nearsightedness). A company called Treehouse Eyes offers special treatments with the goal of retarding or stopping their myopia. If a child tolerates them, they can prescribe hard contact lenses that the child sleeps in overnight, removes them in the morning, and goes glasses-free for the entire day! If they can’t tolerate the hard lenses, they have soft lenses and drops that can help prevent myopia from getting worse. Most parents don’t know about this. Get involved in their eye care and it could make a huge difference, especially for kids who aren’t excited about wearing glasses all day at school.

4. Travel therapy.

Come up with a destination and a challenge to do together. This is similar to the fitness challenge, but it involves a trip to a destination important to the child. If the child is interested in ancient Egypt, architecture, whitewater rafting, Paris, panda bears, or any other topic, have her design and complete her own course, make a presentation on the topic, and then take her there on a trip to learn in-depth. Have her make a video report and post it to YouTube to show her friends what she learned. If you’ve never been to Africa or Burning Man, check with us — we’ll help you arrange that special adventure with your grandkids they’ll never forget.

5. Start a podcast.

My son is 12. He’s interested in video games and animals, and that’s about it. To get him off the console, I suggested we create a weekly podcast to interview people saving wildlife around the world. Now he has a database of interview candidates, a full calendar, a growing fan base, and he gets to star in a new video each week. He spends hours exploring websites and reaching out to people, and he gets more and more referrals from his interviewees. He prepares and writes questions in advance. It’s building his portfolio, his esteem, gets him out of bed in the morning, and best of all we work together on it almost daily. I do the editing and design work and a lot of coordination, but he’s really energized about it, and the guests are all very impressed that he’s making a difference. His channel is called Nature’s Guardians. You can do all this. All it takes is Zoom and some help. It’s actually fairly easy to hire a remote professional video editor who can do a lot of the work and manage the channel. Or - hey! - learn to edit videos and be the child’s partner in creating them every week. This gives you and your grandchild 4+ hours of collaboration every week doing something meaningful together.

6. Start your grandchildren thinking in bets.

You can install a money and betting system that will help them resolve their differences and disagreements by betting, rather than fighting. There is a book on this and so many good reasons to try it. It’s applied game theory for kids, and it works. Read my blog post on setting up a money system.

7. Learn a new hobby or skill with your grandchildren.

Maybe they’d like to learn to play an instrument or learn a language or start a business. Tell them you’ll fund it and do it with them. Come up with a plan and do it together. This is great for learning a new skill, which helps keep grandparents sharp, and bonding with your grandkids at the same time. Your granddaughter wants to learn fencing? Congratulations! You always wanted to learn to fence, didn’t you?

These are just a few things grandparents can do to engage teens and play a more active role in their lives.

Why and How to Increase your Grip Strength

As Peter Attia explains in his book, Outlive, grip strength is a key indicator of health as we age. Improving grip strength is one of several ways we can make ourselves stronger and more agile that will pay off as we get older. Why? Because anyone can walk around, get into a car, go up a flight of stairs. What hurts people and sets them back is a stumble, a fall, a bump, losing balance, etc. In these situations, lightning-fast reflexes and strength will make the difference between walking away and a trip to the hospital. The older you get, the easier it is to get hurt and the longer it takes to recover. 

In fact, I think we should all learn and practice how to fall, because we want to build those reflexes to prevent us getting hurt some day in the future. 

Back to grip strength. It's easy to improve your grip strength. Get a couple of grip strengtheners and keep them in your bedroom, living room, office, and car. Here are the two I use most often: 

I like silicone rings, there are several companies that make them: 

These rings are great, but they can also stretch the skin of your fingers a bit, which can be uncomfortable. I use a small amount of lotion on my hands, which solves the problem and is good for my hands anyway. 

With any grip strengthener, the range of 30-50 pounds is where most of the action is. If you're starting very weak, you might want a 20, but most people can start with 30. I generally use 40 and 50 pound trainers. I've tried 60 and don't get any extra benefit. You're not trying to be a grip specialist, you're just trying to build and maintain good grip strength for the senior decathlon I keep talking about. 

I also use the Niyikow cheap Chinese grip trainers, and I like them a lot: 

These are comfortable, and you can dial in the resistance. I keep one on my desk and the other near my bed. They have lasted six months, I think they'll keep working for a few years. They have the benefit of not stretching your skin, so I often reach for one of these first. 

Try a grip strengthener. Don't overdo it. Take a few months to get up to a mid-range routine, then just use them whenever you go on a walk or take a trip to the mailbox, etc. You'll feel the difference and will be on your way to becoming a senior decathlete!

Online courses for homeschoolers

My kids go to a fantastic school called The Socratic Experience. In addition, I work with my kids on what we call “School of dad.” In the spirit of School of dad, I plan to offer five elective courses to Socratic Experience kids from September to May. I am also offering these once-a-week classes for homeschool kids. These classes meet for 90 minutes once a week. There are assignments, but they shouldn’t take more than an hour or two each week. These are not lectures, they are conversations. Kids are encouraged to come prepared!

General information

These Zoom classes are for home-school students age 15+. They begin August 28th. The days and times are proposed - if you want a different day/time, let me know. I can also teach private lessons for those interested (or for younger students). Each class must have at least 15 students and will be limited to around 20. If a group wants one of these courses for their students, I’m happy to discuss how we could make that happen.

Courses begin the week of August 15th and run until mid-December (no courses Thanksgiving week). That’s 15 weeks of courses. Each course costs $450 per child ($30 per class).

These classes are for motivated kids only. It’s not a babysitting service. Kids need to show up prepared to participate. If they don’t, I’ll drop them rather than try to motivate them. That’s better for the class as a whole.

Please note these classes are not accredited. We can set up accreditation through the Socratic Experience, but it will probably double the price. My suggestion is to take the courses for the first year and worry about accreditation if we decide to do more classes next year. I’m also not accredited. Explore this website to learn more about me. Sign up for my newsletter to get more homeschooling recommendations.

For online STEM courses, I highly recommend Brilliant.org.

Here are my five courses, sign-up is at the bottom of the page:

1. Build your personal online brain system

Mondays at 2pm EST

I use Notion all day to organize my thoughts, writing, to-do lists, databases, and more. I use spreadsheets to build models. You can learn more about Notion on my Notion page. In this class, kids will build skills using Notion, Google calendar, and Google sheets.

How to use Notion to do all kinds of amazing things.

Do projects in Notion to get good at building. An example is building a money system, like the one I describe in the third class. Another example is to create a database of every trip each person in the family has ever taken. Another example is a dashboard for running your podcast, or whatever your hobby/passion may be.

This course will also teach spreadsheet basics. We’ll be building calculators, simulators, and models. We’ll be learning to think in models, build models, and evaluate models. We’ll model businesses, populations, factories, projects, math problems, and much more.

We’ll also learn to use Google Calendar to make the most of our time-management and to-do lists. Using a calendar is part of your online brain. We want to integrate the tools and the practices so everything works together.

We will learn:

• How to do research.

• How to take notes.

• How to manage your schedule.

• How to prioritize and manage your commitments.

• How to get others in your family using Notion and collaborating.

• How to run and evaluate scenarios using spreadsheets.

This class is about building systems. Students do not need familiarity with Notion or spreadsheets, but they should be eager to dive into these projects and build. If kids are unmotivated, I will remove them.

2. Future of work to 2060

Tuesdays at noon EST

In this class we will research, learn, and create a vision for how work will change over the next 35 years - the years that will form the majority of most graduates’ careers. The goal is not to help students choose a career but rather understand the work environment as it evolves. Over the nine months of this class, we will explore the main themes of change - in parallel, not in series:

• Medical advancement

• Energy

• Economics

• Education

• Food production

• War, conflict, and world order

• Technology

• Demographics

• Lifespan

• Urbanization

• Transportation

• Government and regulation

Today’s graduates will live through a unique period in human history - a brief few decades when humans will interact with machines and machines will interact with humans. After that, humans will forever live in a world of machine-to-machine communication and work. The world’s economic systems will be designed around machines first, humans second. During this transition period, our children will make their mark on the world.

The driving force of this class is the concept that it’s amazing how little changes in one year, but it’s unbelievable how much changes in ten years. The world 30 years from now has no relation to the world 30 years ago — because of exponential growth, these two time periods are not comparable.

We’ll be making assumptions and building a model of how the future might play out. Think of it like setting each of those areas on a dial and trying to project how the dials will turn as the next 35 years unfold. Each person will build his/her own model (they may be different, based on different assumptions). We’ll be discussing scenarios, likely outcomes, uncertainties, and what large or small things could have big effects. We won’t, for example, talk about space travel, but we will learn how transportation or manufacturing will change, the impact of self-driving cars, drones, flying taxis, lab-grown food, 3d printing, gene editing, etc. We’ll be looking for inflection points and destabilizing factors. We won’t talk much about AI alignment, but we will talk about the technology singularity and how that will impact jobs. How agile will people have to be to navigate the most critical years of your career? How will people learn and change? Again, this isn’t to help students choose what they want to do; it’s to help students understand what the playing field will look like. This model is a tool they will later use to craft their careers.

The model will start in Notion but probably end up on a spreadsheet. Most of the value of this course is not in the model but in the conversations and presentations students make.

We’ll spend the first two weeks looking back 30 years at what has changed. Then we’ll use Notion to create a knowledge system that lets each student explore all the themes, do research, and contribute to the group discussion. Kids will break into groups to do research and create presentations. I am big on presentations! Kids will make presentations.

This class is aimed at high-school students.

Resources include research papers, books, blogs, videos, and more. It’s based on a talk I gave 4 years ago:

3. Thinking in bets

In this class, we’ll learn to use a money system to help kids perform better around the house, use betting to predict the future, settle differences, and learn about the world. I’ll create a Notion betting system, and we’ll use Annie Duke’s book, Thinking in Bets, as a textbook. We’ll be building three systems, all in Notion:

A home money system that helps parents and kids do what needs to be done at home and live together more peacefully. It will help if Parents are involved in this part, because they will be setting the rules and giving out the money. Before you continue, read my previous post on how a home money system works.

A peer-to-peer betting system that lets kids bet on anything they like. This is for siblings and also for kids in the class. It will help kids learn to resolve differences with betting, rather than arguments.

A prediction market, similar to Metaculus, that lets kids bet on future events.

We will discuss and explore why these things work, how to use them, and how to apply game mechanics to life in general. More advanced students may learn about Futarchy and Henry George.

Mostly, we’ll be learning how to think in bets, how to use odds to calculate the future. There will be many exercises, especially counter-intuitive examples like the Monty Hall problem, Bayesian reasoning, and others.

4. Humans and the natural world

This class looks at common misconceptions people and journalists have about the natural world. Our goal is to create an evidence-based view of how humans and nature coexist — what problems there are, what the causes might be, and what solutions may work. This is not an easy class. Most textbooks and news media are wrong about most of these concepts. We will look for ourselves and ask:

• What does the word “sustainable” mean?

• Does recycling work?

• How much plastic is really in the oceans? Is it a problem?

• Are there too many people?

• Are we taking too much sand?

• Are we polluting rivers?

• What about air pollution?

• What about pesticides?

• What are the tradeoffs with farming and nature? What is the future of farming?

• Which fisheries are in a “race to the bottom” and which are in equilibrium?

• Are electric vehicles good for the environment?

• What is climate change? What effect do humans have on the climate?

• How can renewable energy help?

• What is environmental stewardship? Is capitalism good or bad for the environment?

This is a very challenging class with a lot of data, charts, and graphs. There are many misconceptions. Parents are welcome to pay for and take this class as well! It’s at a high school level if kids are already familiar with the scientific method and have had a reasonable amount of training in science and critical thinking. Much of it is based on my weekly blog and research on climate science. My goal is not to lecture students but to ask hard questions, lead research and discussions, and let them draw their own conclusions.

5. Virtual Kilimanjaro climb

This spring, I tried to find families who would like to take off the month of February 2024 and go climb Mt Kilimanjaro, followed by a 2-week safari in Kenya and Uganda. The goal was to get families to bond over a difficult challenge, spend months preparing, and get the payoff by spending a month on the road. You can read the itenerary and goals of the trip on my travel page.

Despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to find enough families.

So I thought - why don’t we do a virtual trip instead? Why don’t we find families who want to do everything to prepare for a trip to Africa, including getting in shape to hike to the top of Kilimanjaro, and have weekly meetings to research, discuss, and teach what we’ve learned about the animals, ecosystems, and societies in East Africa? It’s all the benefit of travel therapy without the expense. So here’s the deal:

This is the class we would have started in September anyway. We’re going to learn about the mountain, the gear, the animals, ecosystems, and cultures of East Africa. Kids will do research, break into groups, and make presentations. We’re also going to enroll parents to join us, so they also learn.

And everyone will get in shape to climb the mountain. That means 15-20 miles a week starting in the first week of September. Everyone will have an exercise log. Everyone will do the miles. Plus we’ll work on actual hiking and vertical feet wherever you live or have access to. We’ll even have some night hikes and a few summit-day exercises, where we get up at 1am and hike all night until dawn. We’ll do some cold-weather hiking in December and January. Hey - do you want to climb Kilimanjaro or not?

Finally, we get to the big event. All month of February 2024 we will walk, run, do stairs, and hike our way into the record books. Whichever family gets in the most miles and vertical feet will be our winner and will get a special prize. Any family that climbs at least 19,341 vertical feet in February will get a prize — that’s the height of Mt Kilimanjaro. Even families in Florida will be able to compete, since it’s more about miles than vertical.

This is for families with teens only. Children must be 12+. You only pay for the number of children in the class, but at least one parent must commit to doing the physical work.

Sign up

Use the form below to sign up for any of these classes. I’ll get back to you and let you know if the class has enough people. Classes cost $450 per child for the 15 weeks of the first quarter and will be priced similarly next year. Payment by credit card or PayPal. We need a minimum of 15 kids for any class to start (or a group that pays the same amount). This form is not a commitment. I assume some of these classes won’t meet the minimum, so please check off any classes you’d be willing to pay for, and I’ll get back to you once I have some idea which will fill.

Create a Money System for Kids

Children as young as 8 years old can start learning about money. Too often, kids think that if they just ask long enough, they will get what they want. Too often, they are right. A great way to teach kids about money is to set up a money system. Here’s how …

1. Give them an allowance each week and keep track of how much they have. You can use a piece of paper taped to the fridge, you can use a spreadsheet or you can use a system like Notion. I have my kids using Notion for all kinds of things, so it’s easy for all of us to access the money system there.

2. Whenever you have a job you want done, offer it to the kids and tell them you pay $10 an hour (or some reasonable amount). If they want to pick up some extra money, they should be willing to do some extra housework, yardwork, etc. Give them credit in the ledger.

3. When they want something extra - something you aren’t already going to get for them - insist that they spend their own money. If your kids want something special at the grocery store or when shopping, tell them they can buy it with their own money. I’ll give examples below.

4. It also gives kids a way to settle disputes.

5. It’s also a great way to manage chores and things that need to be done. I’ll give an example of cleaning up after our bird.

While a money system may be a bit of extra work for parents, it gives kids a foundation for making tradeoffs and decisions. A money system helps kids think through and appreciate their own decisions, and it helps them see the consequences later.

A great book on this is Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke. I recommend parents read it and explain it to kids, or at least have them watch her Google talk:

The basics

I use our money system to get my kids to behave the way I want them to. It’s simple, and it works. I don’t give my kids hard rules. I tell my kids to “do the right thing,” and “don’t do any wrong things.” They know very well when they are doing something wrong, and if I see it, there can be a charge. Usually, I give a warning first, but if it happens again, they lose money. Here’s how I set it up:

Incentive: $10/week for doing an hour of real helping above and beyond the obvious things. This is not too difficult. They are expected to help clean up and be generally helpful.

Penalties (money goes back to me unless it says otherwise):

• $40 for telling a serious lie

• $20 for hitting or kicking - money goes to the victim

• $10 for pushing or forbidden words

• $10 for minor physical injury/insult

• $5 for small lies, bad insults, excess yelling, doing the wrong thing when you know better

• $2 for leaving something where it shouldn’t be - anyone who puts it away gets the reward from the one who left it out (usually dishes in the living room)

It’s important that the lie is the most expensive. Otherwise, if the lie costs less, then they will figure out that it’s cheaper to lie about things. Obviously, there are times when you have to make a judgment call about things you saw or didn’t see, and in many cases a warning comes first, but in general it’s possible to create a system like this and get the changes you want.

I often say “Hey, if you prefer to spend your money on hitting and yelling than buying games and toys, that’s fine with me. Go right ahead.” This stops any aggressive behavior in its tracks. It’s great in the car or on a trip.

If they leave the Monopoly board after playing, I say “You’re telling me you want me to clean up the Monopoly board and put everything away? Sure. I charge $10 for that, I’ll get started right now.” And they jump into action.

If my boys leave a towel on the bathroom floor, I charge $5 to put it away on the rack. When I see a towel on the floor, I say “Hey, a towel on the floor! I’m just going to pick this up and put it on the rack,” and an 11-year-old flies in and puts it on the rack before I can bend down. So now it’s a rush to do things rather than a delay.

Occasionally, one of them will want to make some more money, so I offer him to help do specific jobs. I pay $10 an hour for this kind of help as well. More than a few times, one of the boys has said “Dad, do you need anything done I can do for an hour?”

I charge the boys $20 per cavity filling at the dentist, so when they complain about toothbrushing, I say no problem, we’ll see how many cavities you have at the next checkup, and the toothbrushes start wiggling.

When we go someplace like Disneyland, I say “Okay, each of you gets $30. You can spend it on anything you want, you can save it, or you can add your own money and get something for more than $30.”

When we go shopping, if Micah wants something a bit extravagant, say a large chocolate bar that costs $15, I say “Okay, I’ll pay ten and you can pay the difference, and we’ll get it.” Now, when it comes to him spending his own money, he has to think twice how much he wants the chocolate bar vs what else he could get for his $5. We do this on all kinds of things. If he wants me to order dinner from Door Dash, I say “Sure, I’ll pay for the dinner, and you pay all the extra fees and delivery.” Once in a while he does it, the rest of the time, we eat what we have at home.

The boys wanted a PS5. I said okay, I’ll pay 1/3, and each of you pay 1/3 and we’ll get it, but you’re responsible for buying your own games. Rather than getting it on Amazon, the boys thought getting a refurbished unit on eBay was a good idea.

Micah wanted new headphones. Since his brother’s cost $150, I told him he had $150 in credit for headphones. He bought exactly the headphones he wanted but he got them refurbished from eBay for half price and pocketed $75 for his account to use on other things.

Shai he would pay Micah not to say anything unnecessary for one whole day. He managed to do it, and Shai paid Micah $8. It was a lovely day.

Micah studied Lincoln so he could tell his cousin about Lincoln when he came to DC. We were talking and I said Lincoln is buried in Illinois. Micah said no, not Illinois, somewhere else. Instead of arguing, we bet. Lincoln is buried in Ohio. I lost $5.

When a child does something really well, I don’t reward that with money or much praise. As we know, praise is dangerous. I acknowledge it, try to be specific in saying what he did that I liked, and that’s about it. I want them to have their own intrinsic motivations for doing things well. I don’t want them doing things for the reward.

Occasionally, when there are a lot of arguments, I call for a 30-minute “quiet period,” where there is total silence in the house. Anyone who speaks is charged $5 per word. They can write on paper if they need to communicate. This silence is golden, and afterward the yelling does not resume.

Disagreements

My kids disagree with each other all the time. A few weeks ago, the younger one bragged to the older one that he had been to Sedna, a planet in the game WarFrame. The older one said he hadn’t. They didn’t argue about it, they bet. They called me up and told me to turn on the game and see where he had been, and it turned out he had never been to Sedna, so the younger one lost $5 to his brother.

There are very good reasons smart people should settle their differences with bets. A fantastic book on this topic is Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke. Betting helps you reduce overconfidence and forces you to think which arguments are really important to you. If you’re not willing to bet, it’s not worth arguing about. Once you have a money system set up, here are a few rules for betting:

1. Set a maximum bet amount.

2. Bets are good for the entire family - kids and parents should be willing to bet against each other. Last week, Micah and I were on a walk. He said that a particular restaurant up ahead was Mexican, “because it smells Mexican.” I said he gets $5 if it’s Mexican, and I get $5 if it’s anything other than Mexican. It turned out to be Mexican. I lost $5.

3. Don’t let one person take advantage of another by betting on something she knows the answer to. If you know the answer, it’s not a bet.

4. Settle immediately using the money system.

5. No borrowing. No doubling down. No cheating.

If you set up a betting system, give it a few months for everyone to get the hang of it. Go slowly and use it as a tool for learning and settling disputes. Let me know how it goes.

Using Notion to set up a system

I’ve been talking about the benefits of setting up a money system, and it’s easy to do. You could use a spreadsheet, but I got my kids to start using Notion, and now we all use the same system in a tab on our browser. Here’s a simple version:

This uses a formula at the end that maintains a running total for each boy. You could also do this using a shared spreadsheet. We use the honor system to make sure no one cheats. Cheating discovered would be very expensive.

Each week, the boys get their allowance. Then, if they do something wrong, I deduct the penalty amount. If the boys bet or transfer money, then you put the same amount in with a minus sign in one column and no minus sign in the other. The sums at the end are automatic.

If you want help doing this, get in touch!

Tracking bird poops

We have a conure - a small parrot - named Pickle. Like most parrots, Pickle poops 3 times every hour when he’s awake, for a total of about 36 poops every day. About half of these go under his perch or in his cage; the rest we have to chase down and clean up. As you can imagine, the boys who wanted a pet so badly and promised to clean up after the bird are much better at playing with Pickle than they are at cleaning up his messes. So I implemented a money system that works FLAWLESSLY, and I want to give it to you so you can use it if you want. Remember, the boys already get allowance and we have rules for other actions. Here are the rules for cleaning up parrot poops:

We have a sheet taped to the cabinet that looks like this —>

There is a pencil on a string nearby. Every vertical line is a poop that someone cleaned up. I’ll start with the case when only two of us are home. In that case, whenever Micah cleans one, he gets a point, which means I owe him $1. Whenever I clean one, I get $1 from him. Since Pepper isn’t around, this is a two-way competition to clean up, and you can see in the first section that Micah came out ahead by 4 points, so I owe him $4. We carry that over to the next day.

The next day, Pepper was with us, so it was a three-way race. Everytime anyone cleans up a mess, he puts a mark in his column and the other two owe him $1 each. But we are also on the lookout and clean as soon as we can, and as you can see it comes out fairly even. At this snapshot, Pepper owes each of us $3.

This set of game mechanics incentivizes everyone to clean up a mess as soon as Pickle drops it. It incentivizes us all equally, so if one person is getting behind, he has a strong incentive to catch up. If Pepper wants to just focus on other things and let the two of us do most of the cleaning, then he has to pay us to do his share.

There are a few minor rules to know: A) If Pickle is sitting on me and I take him to his perch to poop, then he has 1 minute to poop and I will get credit. If he doesn’t do it in 1 minute, then I don’t get credit. B) If Pickle poops on our shirts or pants, we automatically get the credit, because that still accomplishes the ultimate goal of zero poops. C) Anyone who finds an old poop that no one saw before gets credit for cleaning it up.

In this way, we have a clean house! It works! The money system changes from “Micah, did you clean up your bird’s mess today?” to “I got it! I got it! Move aside, I’ll take care of this!” A money system can really eliminate a lot of conflict.

You can use a money system to gamify your home and the mechanics of getting things done. You may need to be creative in coming up rules. If you get what you want, keep the rules. If you aren’t getting good results, change them.

If you want more helpful tips for parents, sign up for our newsletter: