So that was a pretty good half #teamusa

Men tend to get lonelier as they age. One reason is that many of their friendships are built around shared interests rather than shared inner lives. There's nothing wrong with golf, fantasy football, or talking about work. But if every conversation stays there, it's possible to spend years surrounded by people and still have nobody you can tell the truth to. I've met countless successful men who can name dozens of colleagues and acquaintances but struggle to identify a single person they could call in a moment of real pain. By middle age, many have become fluent in banter and almost illiterate in confession. The friendships that endure are often built through small acts of courage: asking the deeper question, giving the honest answer, and risking being known. Loneliness rarely arrives all at once. It accumulates quietly, one surface-level conversation at a time.

Sepsis kills more people in American hospitals than heart attacks. 350,000 deaths a year, and the reason is brutally simple: the early warning signs are almost invisible. A slightly elevated heart rate. A small temperature shift. A lab value drifting in the wrong direction. Each one looks like noise on a busy ward. By the time the pattern is obvious to a human, the patient is hours into a cascade toward organ failure, and every hour of delayed antibiotics raises mortality. Tampa General built a system on Palantir's Foundry that watches roughly 1,000 inpatients continuously. Vitals, labs, medication records, clinician notes, all scanned in real time for the pattern no single nurse can see across 12 beds at 3am. When risk crosses a threshold, a rapid response team gets paged. Humans still make every treatment decision. The software just compresses detection from hours to minutes. The results since 2022: overall sepsis mortality cut in half, 48-hour deaths down 68%, length of stay down 30%, roughly 900 lives saved. At one hospital. Now run the national math. There are about 6,100 hospitals in the US. If even the 500 largest matched these numbers, you'd be looking at tens of thousands of lives a year from a single use case. The treatment for sepsis hasn't changed. Antibiotics and fluids, same as decades ago. The entire gain comes from starting them earlier. The hardest problem in medicine was never the cure. It was noticing in time.

Riot Games sent a custom wedding gift to a couple who met through League of Legends nearly 12 years ago and are getting married this weekend 💍 The gift includes a Summoner's Rift plaque featuring the message "We met here" alongside the date they first added each other as friends in-game

A close friend of mine is cancelling his voter registration today. He is convinced Spencer Pratt was robbed of the election. I explained to him that in California we count absentees first (which skew older and more conservative) and election day voters are younger and more Democratic. The slow count is largely because of policies to maximize participation, including postmarking a ballot on Election Day. Regardless, we need to figure out in California how we can get the vote counted faster and results tabulated so it does not drag on. We should make the investments in operational improvements and resources in the wealthiest state in the nation. It is worth spending the resources to get the vast majority of the vote counted within 48 hours. Right now the system is eroding trust and spawning conspiracy theories.

Truth

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921. They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year. Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move. They lost them for two reasons. The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs. In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack. Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet. That fight dragged on for years. The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois. Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting. So now it's all gone. The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything. Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize. Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up. But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works. Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team. And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago. Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes. Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team." There it is. "Billionaire-owned." That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line. Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it. Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return." When you run things this badly, you sell what's left. They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect. Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check. But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires." Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in. Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster. Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

A newly discovered species of goat has been named after T1 Faker, the 'Capra Fakus' 🐐 The researchers chose to honor Faker for his achievements in League of Legends.

Most people think character is something you're born with. It isn't. It's the residue of five decisions you keep making — usually without noticing. 1. What you pay attention to. Attention is the raw material of experience. William James said it a century ago: my experience is what I agree to attend to. The phone in your hand isn't stealing your life. It's revealing what you keep choosing to look at. 2. What you tolerate. The behaviors you don't push back on become the behaviors around you. From your own procrastination to a colleague's interruption — silence reads as consent. 3. What you commit to in writing. A value you haven't put on the calendar is a preference. Timeboxing your day is how you turn intention into identity. Schedule builders, not to-do list makers. 4. Who you spend time with. You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of the people whose discomfort you've learned to share. Pick carefully. 5. What you do with discomfort. This is the one underneath the other four. Every distraction, every broken commitment, every avoided conversation traces back to an unwillingness to sit with a feeling. Time management is pain management. None of these are personality traits. They're decisions. Which means tomorrow you can make different ones.

Matthew McConaughey reveals the difference between a nice guy and a good man "A nice guy gets along. They don't necessarily have discernment or judgment, not sure what they stand for or stand against. It's like yes, yes, yes, sure" "A good man has ideals that they stand for and they stand against. And when they're tested, a good man is not a nice guy" "Being a good man is a lot harder for good reason. Not going to be the most popular. Not going to be always the most affable" "It also doesn't mean you got to be a dick. It just means sometimes you got to go, I believe in this, this is for me, and that is not for me" "A good man's not looking for trouble. But if it comes, and if something he cares about was trespassed on, a good man does what he can to stop that"

The man who produced Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Adele explained why a lot of artists kind of implode in success. He says the artist who screams "I'm the greatest" and the artist who whispers "they're going to find out I'm a fraud" are the exact same person. "A lot of artists kind of implode in success. You think that's the thing that you want, but when you get it, it's not like what you think it is." His mentor Jimmy Levine broke it down to four pitfalls. Drugs. Alcohol. Women. And the one that takes everyone by surprise. "It's really hard to get on stage and have 80,000 people screaming your name. Over time, they just think they're not even human anymore." "One of them gets really boastful, I'm the greatest that ever lived. And the other one is like, oh my God, they're gonna find out I'm a fake." The distance between those two responses is smaller than it looks. "Those are both the same people. They're two sides of the same coin." "Megalomania is a way of hiding the insecurity. It's a brave face. They might not know this. They rarely know it. It's different sides of the same imbalance." PS. We post daily content strictly for dedicated entrepreneurs, so if you’re one of them, make sure to follow us @entreprneursonx for more. Like and repost if you found value in this post:

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right. The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations. Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book. Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy. Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax. There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior. We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid). That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior. America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control. Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be. I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.

Everyone needs to hear this…

Just a reminder : @MarcMerrill once said he wanted/hope the Riot MMO to release before humans land on Mars. Mars is currently targeted for 2028-2030. I’m just saying. 👀

🚨Jensen Huang gifted Faker a one-of-a-kind graphics card personally signed by him. “Only one in the world. This might be worth a million dollars. I might have to keep this now.” The king of AI handing a legendary gift to the king of League. A truly iconic moment.

A new report shows that video gaming remains one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the United States and is no longer just a hobby for kids and teens. - Nearly 70% of Americans play video games for at least one hour every week. - More than 200 million Americans play video games regularly. - The average gamer is around 37 years old, showing that gaming is popular among adults as well as younger players. - Mobile gaming has made video games more accessible, allowing people to play anytime and anywhere. - Many people play games not only for entertainment but also to connect with friends and reduce stress. Gaming has become one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America today.

🚨 WARNING: Criminal-First Agenda in California In the dead of night, California Democrats rammed through AB 2108 — a bill that guts Prop 36 enforcement and puts criminals back on the streets! Prop 36 passed in every single county in the state because Californians are fed up with the chaos. Now Democrats want to create a soft diversion program for all retail theft crimes. This is absolutely ridiculous. We have to lock toothpaste behind glass shields because criminals have a death grip on this state. AB 2108 is a direct slap in the face to the supermajority of Californians who just want safe streets and real accountability. We voted for Prop 36 and now your California legislators are working to undermine it before even funding it.