I know a lot of folks are worried about their jobs and AI. Another worry folks have is that AI is making them dumber. The things that felt good before: solving puzzling work problems, thinking hard about a project, etc. have vaporized when Claude can do it for you.

It’s easy to fall into this trap. But here’s the thing, this isn’t an unknown place.

So these researchers (Adcock, et al.) wanted to see how your brain reacts to different sized rewards tied to what you’re supposed to learn. They had people do a memory task where scenes were worth either high money ($5) or low money ($0.10) if remembered the next day.

And here’s the thing, this turned out exactly like you think it turns out. The folks in the high money group significantly remembered more 24 hours later. Under an fMRI machine, they could even see the parts of the brain acting stronger before the participants saw what...

Have you given up on your New Year’s resolutions yet?

It’s January. The gym is packed. It’s impossible to even get to a locker through a sea of people in the locker room. Someone was lamenting on Facebook that our gym was too crowded. They were reassured: just give it a couple weeks. The New Year’s resolution crowd will be gone. They’ll give up.

Every morning my daughter and I pull a page from The Worst Case Scenario™ calendar. Yesterday’s was: what to do if the subway power goes out. Tip 1: cover up your belongings.

I get it. It’s dark. You’re blind. It’s a weakness.

But it also reminds me of a movie many of us watch every December: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

There’s the classic scene where Clark Griswold is trying for the umpteenth time to get his outside Christmas lights to turn on. Little does he realize, because he’s an idiot, that the lights are controlled by...

My project was just cancelled. Deprioritized. The stuff I’ve been excited about and working on, right into the trash. How would you feel about that?

Photo by Steve Johnson

My daughter was struggling with some homework last night. There was a concept that was brand new to her and she wasn’t getting it on the first pass. I wanted to show her she could easily write down a couple tests to check if her thinking was right or wrong.

I reached for her notebook. That was her science notebook.

Ok, math notebook then. That was waiting for a grade at school.

Scrap paper? Nothing.

When we finally found something I could use, I realized: The math isn’t what’s tripping her up.

I’d like to get a pair of boots this winter. I have some ginormous, waterproof monsters, but those are a bit awkward as everyday shoes. Yeah I’m comfy in a snow drift, but I’ve also had my car stuck in Forward with a...

You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? It’s a goldfish. You know why? Got a ten second memory. Be a goldfish, Sam.

Jason Sudeikis uses that line at a couple pivotal moments in the first season of Ted Lasso. The lesson: goldfish have a ridiculously short memory. And we all need shorter memories to get through life and face the next challenge.

The problem is Ted Lasso is wrong.

2025 didn’t end great for me. All in all, I’m ok. I’m healthy and have many things I’m thankful for. But I totally ran out of steam on some personal projects and goals that mean a lot to me.

There are excuses I could throw at it. Like the 60 days notice my father and all the residents of his senior community received that their entire building was being shut down. That was a fun project. Also had some very sad stuff happen at the end of the year that continues being sad.

I didn’t accomplish the...

Delivering a presentation? No one is reading your fucking slides.

Running a Zoom meeting with a captive audience to show off how your department is doing? No one is reading your fucking slides.

Wrote a story in Google Slides about how great revenue and churn are because of your team’s heroic efforts to become the greatest thing on the planet? No one is reading your fucking slides.

You even have a doc or notecards next to you with bullet points for your presentation. Jesus. You aren’t reading your fucking slides.

And look, it’s not totally your fault. A lot of these presentations happen over Zoom. While you’re talking, everyone is doing literally anything else besides reading your fucking slides.

Here’s the secret though. This isn’t a tragedy. It’s normal. They’re distracted. Don’t fight this. Embrace it. In every modern meeting, everyone has a little modern Lite-Brite firing new...

Everything I make is garbage

I think people want new things too much. Open up Amazon or McMaster and buy the solution. Email a VC, get a mil, and spend 3–6 months making a brand new thing from scratch.

And then everyone’s unhappy when it actually takes longer. Or isn’t the thing they wanted in the first place.

Turns out they realize they don’t even know what they want.

My daughter wanted to be a cowgirl this Halloween. She’s 11. It’s getting harder and harder to do things with her. Natural of course. She has friends. Wants us around less. The whole independence rite of passage.

So there’s some stakes to trying to figure out how to naturally fit into her vision of Halloween. How can I lean into what she wants? All casual like :)

And I struggled. What on earth can I be? A cow was too obvious. A horse too weird. My brain for a second started to freeze up.

But I went...

Crap. Where did I put my stuff?

Every time I go to the gym, it’s the same thing - a sea of identical lockers. And I have no idea which is mine.

I can’t solve this by picking a favorite, because there’s always a potential naked man standing next to the one I want. This isn’t a big locker room. And I like my space free of other naked people.

(Maybe it’s because of that time in college when I was just trying to find a bathroom in a campus building and accidentally walked into the locker room my chemistry professor used after racquetball. Naked chemistry professor. That image is burned into my brain forever.)

So yeah, there are plenty of times I come back to that locker room and have no idea which locker is mine. I know I’m not the only one. You can see the panic of guys opening locker after locker, trying to find their stuff.

But here’s my secret. I actually do know how to remember...

This week AWS East went down and the internet lost its mind.

Twitter was full of redundancy and failover complaints. Redditors argued about how poorly everything’s architected. Even senators jumped in to say Amazon’s gotta get broken up.

Fine debates to have. But if you’re someone actually building something new, you might have missed the real lesson.

8 Sleep went down with it

I’ve been trying to get my sleep in order lately. Sleep casts. Meditation. Breathe in for 4, hold 7, out for 8. Magnesium. Whatever Ashwagandha is?

And yes, I even got one of those bougie mattress pads — the 8 Sleep Pod. It’s this smart cover that heats, cools, and tracks your sleep with the kind of data you’d expect from NASA.

I thought I was maybe figuring this sleep thing out when two nights ago, I woke up to a 47 sleep score. Out of 100. Grade F.

But it wasn’t because I had a restless night — it was...

I’ve written about this before. Who hasn’t. But sometimes it just feels like everything’s already been done. How can I possibly make another thing about… anything?

It took me 45 minutes, but I finally got my phone streaming to the TV at the Airbnb this Labor Day weekend. What did we watch?

Superman.

I did not want to watch this. But Disney+ wouldn’t work.

Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen it, maybe skip this. Though really, I’m not spoiling much. Just vibes.

I love superhero movies. As a kid, one of my favorite memories was hitting the Osco drugstore, grabbing a comic off the rack — Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, whatever I could get.

So when a new take comes out, I’m curious. But Superman? Ugh. Henry Cavill crushed it. Man of Steel was fantastic. How do you top that? More explosions? Longer plots? Another messy DC crossover?

Still, I had to see how James Gunn...