Born Fabulous Podcast

My beautiful, smart, and exceptional daughter. She is my sunshine, my only sunshine. Happy World Down Syndrome Day everyone!

Ant Edwards. President Barack Obama. It began at Team USA Training camp and turned into a game of one-on-one we didn’t know we needed.

Bob Mueller was my law partner. He was among the best men this nation has ever produced. May he rest in peace.

I'm still so amazed by the people you can follow on 𝕏. Two of my favorites deserve 10x more followers: • longest-serving NASA Administrator in history (@dansgoldin) — 2.3k followers • historian and author of Freedom's Forge (@ArthurLHerman) — 5.9k followers

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

@_lei_la_ni_ She is beautiful! While she is school age - inclusion always. 100%. In pre-school. K-12. In life (worship, lessons like dance, etc). That is the only way to have high expectations.

@PodcastBorn How did you raise her? Any tips? I love to learn from people who have more experience! I have one and she is five!

Happy World Down Syndrome Day everyone! This is my beautiful 25 year old "baby". Remember, no one ever rose to low expectations!

Glad we took a chance on the local kid

One of the rarest and most critically endangered primates in the world. With fewer than 70 remaining in the wild, the Cat Ba langur are born bright orange and then turn black. Found in Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay, they have the remarkable ability to drink salt water☺️

Some personal news: After nearly eight fantastic years, today is my last day at @WSJ. Next month I'm starting with @nytimes to cover cybersecurity, intelligence, and more. I'm thrilled to be joining such an excellent team, and can't wait to get started.

Very sad news. My "home" for 25 years at @CBSNews, CBS News Radio, is shutting down. Feeling bad for all my colleagues who are losing their positions at CBS today.

RIP Chick Norris: FACTS about Chuck Norris: 1. Chuck Norris doesn’t do push-ups… He pushes the Earth down. ⸻ 2.When Chuck Norris enters a room, he doesn’t turn the lights on — he turns the dark off. ⸻ 3.Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice. ⸻ 4.Death once had a near-Chuck Norris experience. ⸻ 5.Chuck Norris can divide by zero. ⸻ 6.There is no theory of evolution… just a list of creatures Chuck Norris allows to live. ⸻ 7.Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep. He waits. ⸻ 8.When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris. ⸻ 9.Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door. ⸻ 10.The dinosaurs looked at Chuck Norris the wrong way once. You know what happened to them.

RIP Chuck Norris, who just passed at age 86, and who fought Bruce Lee in one of the BEST movie fight scenes of all time, in "Way of the Dragon."

🚨 Do you understand what happened in the last 12 hours? > Goldman Sachs said $450 billion in AI investment contributed "basically zero" to US economic growth.. the Chief Economist said it on record.. > Uber dropped $1.25 billion on Rivian to build 50,000 robotaxis.. the drivers who built the company are about to be replaced by the cars.. > Jeff Bezos started raising $100 billion to buy manufacturing companies and automate them with AI.. he's not building factories.. he's buying them to empty them.. > DoorDash launched an app that pays people to film themselves doing chores.. not for content.. for AI training data.. so robots can learn to replace them.. > OpenAI bought Astral.. the open source Python tools that millions of developers loved.. bolted it onto their coding agent.. the community is furious.. > Cursor dropped Composer 2.. their own AI model that beats Claude on coding benchmarks.. a 50-person startup outperformed a $30 billion lab.. > Hollywood resurrected Val Kilmer with AI to star in a new movie.. he died of cancer.. never filmed a single scene.. they built a digital version of him.. > HSBC is planning deep job cuts using AI to gut their middle and back offices.. > UK unemployment hit 5.2%.. AI hasn't even started firing people yet.. > Fortune 500 updated the AI price tag to $4.5 trillion.. 93% of US jobs vulnerable to disruption.. > Nvidia GTC is happening right now.. Jensen closed his keynote with singing robots and a digital clone of himself.. the man selling the shovels is also selling the future.. all of this happened in ONE day.. a single Thursday.. if you're not following me you're finding out about this 48 hours late from someone who read my post..

My wife and I have been married for 30 years. I’m 63 this year and worked as a financial analyst at JPMorgan Chase. During my retirement party, my daughter told me she wanted to learn about investing, so I started writing a simple investment guide for her. My wife suggested that I share this guide for free on Threads. If you’re interested in investing, please like and follow. Hope this guide can be useful to you.

Meet Harvard genetics professor and the world's leading anti-aging scientist: David Sinclair. His message? Aging is a disease we could prevent and fix. Here are his top 7 health rules for slowing aging and living longer:🧵

Iowa produces the most GMO corn in the US. Iowa uses more pesticide than any other state except one. Iowa has the 2nd greatest incidence of cancer in the US. Some Iowa countries have cancer rates 50% higher than the national average. But it can’t be the chemicals…

SHE HAS A NAME!!!!!!! Eva Ramón Gallegos successfully eliminates HPV

This is the most important video I’ve posted. Please take two minutes to watch.

Beautiful story of quiet generosity from Kirk Douglas, shared by Jeffrey Katzenberg. During a lunch break on set, Katzenberg knocked on Kirk’s trailer—and saw a group of contractors and engineers walking out with blueprints. He asked what was going on. Kirk said, “My wife and I rebuild playgrounds at public schools in Los Angeles every year. They never have the budget—it’s always the first thing that gets cut.” Katzenberg replied, “I’ve never heard about that.” Kirk smiled: “We keep it quiet.” For 20 years, they rebuilt 10–20 playgrounds a year. When asked why, Kirk gave an answer Katzenberg never forgot: “You don’t know how to live… until you know how to give.”

My dad was so fly! #Bears @walterpayton