Few pieces of advice have aged better for me than this simple one: he who is unafraid of asking the dumb question will grow the fastest.

I’m not one to do religious debates very well, but from what I’ve studied about Jesus Christ, my guess is that minutiae-pinching, fault finding, name calling, and general contention wouldn’t be things He’d be thrilled to find happening on earth, especially in his name.

Want to learn about unconditional love? Have babies. Want to learn about love that provides safety and security while watching miraculous growth? Raise toddlers. Want to learn about how to balance love-as-safety and love-as-accountability? Raise teenagers. Parenting is a masterclass in all types of love.

If you ever want to learn about ruinous empathy, have teenagers.

While not all CEOs are great, the good ones do their job: align the company behind a direction, doggedly pursue the future while pragmatically execute the “now,” and make hard calls. This is one of the few things humans are uniquely capable of doing well. This is like saying the only thing holding back the potential of the river are the banks that direct it.

“The doer alone learneth.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Utah mind could never

Old enough to remember when he cooked BYU in 04.

Your romantic partner is the single highest-dose pharmacological input in your daily environment. Bryan Johnson frames this as poetry. The data is more violent than that. The Harvard Study of Adult Development tracked people for over 80 years. Relationship quality at age 50 predicted physical health at age 80 better than cholesterol, income, or career success. The mechanism is a specific neuroendocrine cascade. A supportive partner triggers oxytocin release, which suppresses cortisol, downregulates HPA axis activation, reduces systemic inflammation, and slows telomere attrition. Your cells literally divide longer before hitting senescence. The person sleeping next to you is either extending or compressing your biological clock at the chromosomal level, every single night. Now run the numbers on the poison side. Married adults in one sample had a telomere T/S ratio of 1.70. Unmarried adults: 1.58. That gap held after controlling for diet, exercise, smoking, obesity, and social support. Divorced men in a Swedish cohort showed 46% higher relative mortality risk. A separate study of 3,526 adults found marital disruption was associated with shorter telomere length even after adjusting for neuroticism and lifetime traumatic events. The inflammatory profile of a high-conflict marriage looks nearly identical to the biomarker signature of chronic work stress or long-term caregiving burden. This is the part people miss. Bryan said “somewhere between medicine and poison.” The pharmacology is more binary than that. Oxytocin from a quality partnership lowers blood pressure, reduces sympathetic nervous system activation, and improves immune surveillance. Chronic cortisol from a bad one drives the same oxidative damage to telomere cap structures that accelerates every major age-related disease. There is no neutral. The dose is always running. A 2003 study found that more frequent partner hugs correlated directly with lower resting blood pressure and heart rate. The cardiovascular system responds to your primary attachment bond the way a tissue responds to a drug. Dose, frequency, duration. “Medicine and poison” is the right frame. But Bryan undersold the dosage. This is the single largest uncontrolled variable in every longevity protocol on Earth, and almost nobody is tracking it.

Now is the 'good ole days'. These are the golden years. Any year spent with most of your health, with loved ones close by, and doing something you can tolerate is a great year.

Yes, it was a disappointing season overall. Yes, we did not figure out a team identity that worked well enough to put the team (or AJ) into the Final Four. But it’s hard to argue that you could have achieved more with that $7M being spent elsewhere.

One of the best stories ever.

The Atlantic has a sobering, first-person look at the ramifications of legalized online sports betting. Here are a few of the more telling passages. 1/5

Self-made billionaire & owner of the Utah Jazz, Larry Miller, on his regrets as a father. Absolutely haunting.

First try at additives to our classic sourdough: cheddar jalapeno. Result: 🤤

Today is the dumbest AI will be for the rest of your life.

One of the reasons I haven't felt existential dread at the wave of AI that's eating software engineering is because I've always considered myself a builder before coder/engineer. It's never been funner (or easier) to be a builder.

Me using Opus 4.6 to select the best emoji for my slack message