The Best Paragraph I've Read:

"By turning childhood into a thing that can be measured,adults have managed to impose their greatest fears of failure onto the youngest among us. Each child who strays from our standards becomes a potential medical mystery to be solved, with more tests to take, more metrics to assess. The onlything that seems to consistently evade the detectives is the world around that child — the one made by the grown-ups."

This article comes from the New York Times. The title is: "Are Schools a Problem?" The author is Sam Sifton. You can read the full article here.

Zac & Don are joined by their good friend Dave McKay. The three discuss whether schools and their system of standards should be blamed for the rise in childhood anxiety. They wonder if it is possible phones are being unfairly blamed.

Don tells Zac whether he needs to stop or keep thinking about the following issues:

Robots taking Jobs

The Southern Cone Thesis

China's Growing Aircraft Carrier Collection

Greenland's Subsidized Population

The Dollars Declining Value

The Best Paragraph this week comes from Kent Hendrick's Blog Post on 52 Things I Learned in 2025. You can read the entire blog here.

Zac and Don discuss their favorite facts and statistics that Mr. Hendricks shares in his article.

The Best Paragraph I've Read comes from the new book by Chuck Klosterman, "Football."

Zac & Don discuss the first half of the book. They wonder about why so few people play the game, if it's the perfect TV product, whether the game is applied track, and more!

The Best Paragraph I've Read:

"With home affordability increasingly out of reach, many young adults are making choices that are reshaping the economy — and mostly for the worse — a new research paper says. They don’t think they’ll ever be homeowners. So they stop trying, and focus on the here and now.

That’s the interpretation put forth by economists Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo — doctoral candidates at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago,respectively — who built a mathematical model of consumer behavior. When people conclude that they will never be able to afford a home, they put less effort into their jobs, tend to spend more on luxuries and do less long-term saving, and are more likely to invest in riskier assets such as cryptocurrencies, the economists’ findings suggested."

This paragraph comes from the Washington Post. The article is titled: "Abandoning home ownership may be changing how people behave at work and home." The author is Julie Zauzmer Weil. You can read the full article here.

Zac and Don discuss whether it is a big deal if younger adults have given up on home buying. They wonder if it's better to spend disposable income on eating out more and purchasing crypto instead of saving for a house. They also wonder if eventually younger home buyers will come into the market just later in life.

The Best Paragraph I've Read:

"Money is a source of mystery to children. They sense its power, so they ask questions, lots of them, over many years. Why isn’t our house as big as my cousin’s? Why can’t I have a carnivorous plant terrarium? Why should I respect my teachers if they earn only $60,000 per year? (Real question!) Are we poor? Why didn’t you give money to the man who asked you for some? If my sister can have Hello-Kitty-themed Beats by Dre headphones, why won’t you get me the Bluetooth-enabled Lego Mindstorms set? (It’s only $349, and it’s educational, Mom!) We adults, however, tend to do a miserable job of answering. We push our children’s money questions aside, sometimes telling them that their queries are impolite, or perhaps worrying that they will call out our own financial hypocrisy and errors. Sometimes we respond defensively and viscerally, barking back, “None of your business,” unintentionally teaching our children that thetopic is off limits despite its obvious importance. Others want to protect their children from a topic many of us find stressful or baffling: Can’t we keep them innocent of all of this money stuff for just a little bit longer? But shielding children from the realities of everyday financial life makes little sense anymore, given the responsibilities their generation will face, startingwith the outsize college tuitions they will encounter while still in high school."

This paragraph comes from the New York Times. The article is titled: "Why You Should Tell Your Children How Much You Make." The author is Ron Lieber. You can read the full article here.

Zac & Don discuss whether it is a good idea to tell your children how much money you make. They wonder what the benefits are and if there are any problems with the issue. They also reference the following Wall Street Journal article about No Swipe November.

The Best Paragraph I've Read:

"The power line starts in a remote desert in northwestChina, where vast arrays of solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity on a monumental scale. It snakes southeast, following an ancient river betweenmountain ranges before reaching Anhui Province near Shanghai, home to 61 million people and some of China’s most successful electric car and robot manufacturers.

That’s a single power line. China has 41 others. Each iscapable of carrying more electricity than any utility transmission line in the United States. That’s partly because China is using technology that makes its lines far more efficient than almost anywhere else in the world. The feat isowed to China’s ambitious national energy policies and the fact that few residents along the path of these lines dare object — even though the lines cause small electric shocks that local people said they could feel when holding a metal fishing pole."

This paragraph comes from the New York Times. The article is titled "How China Powers Its Electric Cars and High-Speed Trains." The author is Keith Bradsher. You can read the full article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.html

Zac & Don discuss China and some of its latest engineering achievements. At the same time they discuss some of its potential problems such as 200 million gig workers. They then make connections to the Abundance movement in America and wonder what the future holds for both nations.

Zac & Don also reference the following articles:

China has a surplus of electric cars and is cutting prices.

China has 200 million gig workers.

China is the nation of engineers while America is a nation of lawyers.

The Best Paragraph I've Read

If civilization is accelerating down a freeway that’s taking us away from our shared humanity—not to mention destroying the ecosystems we depend on—at whatexit do we get off? Artificial intelligence, new medical interventions, and other modern marvels allow us some choice about which natural limits we accept, and which we decide to blow past. According to Kingsnorth, each person must make individual decisions about where to begin “drawing a line, and saying ‘no further.’”

Will you watch television shows written by large language models? Will you let the machines craft your emails, your college essays, obituaries for your loved ones? Will you get an AI-enabled virtual girlfriend? Will you let AI into your life knowing that data centers are metastasizing, while already-parched deserts are drained dry to cool them, while contentmoderators in Africa labor in quasi-slave conditions, sorting through images of beheadings and child abuse? Will you draw the line at letting algorithms design your baby? When the time comes, will you get your chip? Your brain-computer interface? Will you upload your consciousness to the cloud?"

This paragraph comes from the Atlantic. The article is titled: "What A Cranky New Book About Progress Gets Right." The author is Tyler Austin Harper. You can read the full article here.

Zac & Don discuss whether we are living in a limitless society and culture. They wonder if humans without limits is a problem or if it's as it has always been.

The Best Paragraph I've Read comes from an article in The Athletic. The article is titled: "Looking for the world's biggest stadiums? Why American College Football has most of them." The author is Seth Emerson. You can read the full article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6736868/2025/10/23/college-football-biggest-stadiums-world/

Zac & Don are joined by their good friend Kevin Kopec. The three discuss why college football happens to claim most of the largest football stadiums in the world. They discuss some of their favorite stadiums and wonder why no other college has tried to build anything larger than Michigan Stadium.

The Best Paragraph I've Read comes from the Washington Post. The article is titled: "An investor called $140,000 the new poverty line. Experts disagreed but said he had a point." The article is written by Julie Zauzmer Weil. You can read the full article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/29/poverty-line-green/

Zac & Don discuss whether America's new poverty line is $140,000 or why such a number can trigger such debate. They discuss what the poverty line is but also wonder why so many people can "feel" a number four times bigger is accurate.