Aaron Powell

🧠 MIT recently completed the first brain-scan study on ChatGPT users—and the results are deeply revealing. Rather than boosting brain function, prolonged AI use may be dulling it. Over four months of cognitive data suggest we might be measuring productivity all wrong ⤵️ In MIT’s study, participants had their brains scanned while using ChatGPT. → 83.3% of users couldn’t recall a single sentence they’d written just minutes earlier. → In contrast, those writing without AI had no trouble remembering. Brain connectivity dropped sharply—from 79 to 42 points. → That’s a 47% drop in neural engagement. → The lowest cognitive performance among all user groups. Even after stopping ChatGPT use in later sessions, these users showed continued under-engagement. → Their performance remained lower than those who never used AI. → This suggests more than dependency—it’s cognitive weakening. Beyond the scans, educators flagged the writing itself. → Essays were technically solid, but often called “robotic,” “soulless,” and “lacking depth.” Here’s the paradox: → ChatGPT makes you 60% faster at completing tasks… → But it reduces the mental effort required for learning by 32%. The top-performing group? → Those who began without AI and added it later. → They retained the best memory, brain activity, and overall scores. Using ChatGPT can feel empowering—but it may quietly offload your thinking. → You gain speed, but lose engagement. → You get answers, but stop learning how to think. The takeaway isn’t to avoid AI—but to use it intentionally. → Use it to assist, not replace your mind. → Build cognitive strength—not dependency. MIT’s early study on AI and the brain lays out the stakes. The way we use these tools matters more than ever.

Baking soda prevents getting up in the night to pee in clinical trial. ‣ Decreases night time urination ‣ Improves daytime energy ‣ Massively improves subjective sleep in another human study. 1/2 - 2 tsp dissolved in water is a good range to experiment with. When the urine is highly acidic, it can irritate the sensitive lining of the bladder, triggering the sense of urgency + causing the bladder muscles to spasm. Baking soda corrects it.

Physical activity and the reduction of all-cause mortality, from 2 very large prospective cohorts 1. The relationship is non-linear, suggesting a threshold effect for many types of exercise as seen below

Top 100 podcasts on Spotify in the US: 1. The Joe Rogan Experience 2. This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von 3. The Shawn Ryan Show 4. Crime Junkie 5. The Tucker Carlson Show 6. Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast 7. Good Hang with Amy Poehler 8. The Daily 9. Candace 10. Up First from NPR 11. Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard 12. Bad Friends 13. Pardon My Take 14. Smosh Reads Reddit Stories 15. Morbid 16. The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett 17. Call Her Daddy 18. The Journal. 19. The Tim Dillon Show 20. Dateline NBC 21. The Mel Robbins Podcast 22. SmartLess 23. Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder 24. The Bill Simmons Podcast 25. Distractible 26. Last Podcast On The Left 27. NPR News Now 28. Huberman Lab 29. Billions Club: The Series 30. Rotten Mango 31. Modern Wisdom 32. Rockin' Robin 33. Unseen 34. Pod Save America 35. Spotify Gaming 36. Two Hot Takes 37. MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories 38. CreepCast 39. Giggly Squad 40. 2 Bears, 1 Cave with Tom Segura & Bert Kreischer 41. Today, Explained 42. PBD Podcast 43. All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg 44. Financial Audit 45. KILL TONY 46. Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh 47. The Megyn Kelly Show 48. The Rewatchables 49. The Ben Shapiro Show 50. The Basement Yard 51. Breaking News from Pod Save America 52. ChainsFR On Spotify 53. Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend 54. The Big Picture 55. Funky Friday with Cam Newton 56. Stuff You Should Know 57. The Rest Is History 58. My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark 59. anything goes with emma chamberlain 60. Your Mom's House with Christina P. and Tom Segura 61. Fantasy Footballers - Fantasy Football Podcast 62. This American Life 63. Be better everyday 64. The Matt Walsh Show 65. Science Vs 66. Part Of The Problem 67. Petty POV with Charlotte Dobre 68. Morning Brew Daily 69. The MeidasTouch Podcast 70. We Might Be Drunk 71. New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce 72. 48 Hours 73. 20/20 74. The Ramsey Show 75. Danny Jones Podcast 76. Lex Fridman Podcast 77. The Ezra Klein Show 78. So True with Caleb Hearon 79. Murder With My Husband 80. The Deck 81. The Broski Report with Brittany Broski 82. True Crime with Kimbyr 83. Are You Garbage? Comedy Podcast 84. Behind the Bastards 85. If Books Could Kill 86. American Alchemy with Jesse Michels 87. TRIGGERnometry 88. Soul Boom 89. What Now? with Trevor Noah 90. The Watch 91. Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar 92. Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! 93. The Comment Section with Drew Afualo 94. Morning Wire 95. Rotten Mango Video 96. Whiskey Ginger with Andrew Santino 97. Just Creepy: Scary Stories 98. The President's Daily Brief 99. The MeatEater Podcast 100. The Bulwark Podcast

You are an American because you are allowed to exist as an individual. Most of the world is collective by default. People are born into tribe, sect, class, religion, or party, and they never truly leave it. Loyalty comes before truth, belonging comes before belief. To step outside the collective is seen as betrayal. That is why people dream of America. They are not fleeing poverty alone, they are fleeing absorption. They are fleeing systems where the group owns the person, where deviation is punished, and where the price of security is silence. In America a society built on the idea that you exist before the group does. That your conscience is not leased to a higher collective purpose. Collectivism promises more money, protection, belonging, warmth. But the exchange is never equal. What it takes from you is who you are, your independence of mind, your right to stand alone, your ability to say “no” without being erased or punished. Collective systems can't tolerate that idea. They survive by conformity, not truth. They need people who repeat, not people who think. That is why collectivism moralizes dependency and pathologizes independence. The individual becomes selfish, antisocial, disruptive, anything except sovereign. America was meant to be free, and freedom is cold. It requires responsibility, risk, failure, standing alone without guarantees. That is why collectivist ideologies despise it, and why they constantly try to soften it, dilute it, or replace it with managed dependency. Once you accept that the collective owes you comfort, it will soon decide that you owe it obedience. This is the trade every collectivist system makes. You must fight to remain an individual because once individualism is gone, it never returns peacefully. They want you to abandon the very thing that made you society desirable to the rest of the world, to submit to “community” as a moral authority. But the world does not admire collectives. It escapes them. If America forgets that it was built for individuals, not managed populations, it will become just another place people dream of leaving.

The AI Investment cycle visualized Almost $1 Trillion has been invested into AI so far and that may just be the start

Hear me out, was the entire period since the Great Financial Crisis just an unsustainable artificial debt binge?