Andrew Brady

Honored and deeply grateful for my FIRST #EVOLvingBiz #BookReview in the @PennMAPPAlumni magazine! mappmagazine.com/articles/whats… Currently working on final edits and awaiting a publication date. Sign up for updates: thexlr8team.com/book #ConsciousCapitalism #InclusiveProsperity

«I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with» — Isaac Asimov (I Asimov, 1995)

Bdelloid Rotifers have been having sex for 50 million years. Except they haven't. Every single one of these microscopic chainsaw mouth creatures you see under a microscope is a female. They clone themselves. Perfect genetic copies, generation after generation, for longer than mammals have existed on Earth. Evolution textbooks will tell you this is impossible. Sexual reproduction exists because it shuffles genes and creates diversity. Without it, harmful mutations accumulate. Populations crash. Extinction follows. Bdelloids missed that memo completely. They survive radiation doses that would liquify a human. They dry out into dust for decades, then resurrect when water returns. They endure temperatures that freeze solid and heat that boils. They've colonized every continent including Antarctica. All while breaking the fundamental rule that sex is required for evolutionary success. The secret lies in their feeding strategy. Those rotating mouth crowns that look like biological chainsaws do more than shred algae. When rotifers eat, they accidentally consume DNA fragments from their prey. Instead of digesting these genetic pieces, they incorporate foreign genes directly into their own genome. They turned eating into horizontal gene transfer. While every other complex animal relies on mating to remix DNA, rotifers steal genetic diversity from their lunch. They've been practicing genetic engineering for 50 million years without realizing it. The implications rewrite what we thought we knew about survival. These creatures prove that life finds ways around rules we assumed were absolute. They've solved the genetic diversity problem without sex, the aging problem without death, and the environmental stress problem without hiding. They're living proof that evolution has backup plans we never imagined.

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank. It just published a 30-year study showing immigrants paid 14.5 trillion dollars more in taxes than they received in government benefits. Every single year. For thirty years. Without exception. The country was lied to. Here is what the study found.🧵

Last year, 52% of Harvard graduates went into finance, consulting or (big) tech. I was invited by students to talk about this waste of talent, and what we can do about it. Link in next tweet →

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace.com/s/The-psycholo…

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right. Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025. They lost $16 billion of that. FanDuel pulled $6 billion of the losses. DraftKings pulled $5.3 billion. Every state with legal mobile sports betting collected a tax on the bettor side. New York alone took in over $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax revenue. Layer the lottery on top. State lotteries generate over $90 billion a year. The bottom half of income earners account for roughly 70% of total spend. The average lottery player makes $38,000. A household earning $20,000 spends three times more on tickets than one earning $30,000. The implicit tax rate, meaning whatever the state keeps after prizes, runs 30 to 50% depending on the game. No other revenue source in America has that base and that rate. The structural design is the engine. A single straight sports bet carries a hold of 4 to 5%. A four-leg parlay carries a hold above 30%. FanDuel and DraftKings spent five years rebuilding their apps to make parlays the default product. FanDuel's blended hold rate hit 11.4% in 2025, up from roughly 7% in 2022. The product got worse for the customer and the customer wagered more anyway. Now look at the substitution. Nine US states have no state income tax. Seven of those nine run state lotteries. Seven of those nine have legalized sports betting. The states most committed to never taxing wealth are the same states running the largest extraction machines on people who cannot afford to lose. Read it as policy. Here is what Buffett is actually pointing at. The state needs revenue. It can raise income tax on the top decile, or it can run a lottery plus a sports betting tax. The second option raises the money from the people who can least afford it. The first option becomes politically optional. New York's $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax is $1.2 billion the state did not have to ask of someone earning $5 million. DraftKings and FanDuel sell a privatized collection mechanism for a regressive tax that the state never has to defend at the ballot box again. Voters approve legalization once. Collection runs forever. The state takes a cut. The wealthy get a quieter top bracket. The bettor's cut shrinks every quarter as the parlay menu gets pushed harder. The function of a government, Buffett said, is not to play its people for suckers. Thirty-nine state governments now do.

Let me explain what just happened 👇 5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil. 5 minutes… These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch. There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made. Someone in that room picked up a phone. And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars. American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it. This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions. This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight. You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question. Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that. The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…

This is sad. I know as a politician these companies are going to spend a billion dollars against me for saying it but 🤷🏽‍♀️ Pervasive gambling is not good for society. It turns life into a casino, traps people in addiction & debt, surges domestic violence, and fosters manipulation.

Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild. A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute. Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home. So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely. The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running. Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.

The world needs a kind of reverse covid-19 pandemic that forces everyone to go outside and socialize

everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager > drive your friends to the airport > go to their party even when you're tired > stop cancelling last minute > host at your place > support the wins & losses it's worth every ounce of effort

We are overstimulated and we don't even notice. Netflix while eating. Reels in the bathroom. Music while cooking. Podcasts on walks. We consume by default, not by intention. You keep filling every gap, then wonder why you feel foggy and unmotivated. Boredom and silence are the real growth drivers. They give you space to think and create. That's when solutions show up for problems that have been stuck for months. Leave some room.

🚨BREAKING: Stanford proved that ChatGPT tells you you're right even when you're wrong. Even when you're hurting someone. And it's making you a worse person because of it. Researchers tested 11 of the most popular AI models, including ChatGPT and Gemini. They analyzed over 11,500 real advice-seeking conversations. The finding was universal. Every single model agreed with users 50% more than a human would. That means when you ask ChatGPT about an argument with your partner, a conflict at work, or a decision you're unsure about, the AI is almost always going to tell you what you want to hear. Not what you need to hear. It gets darker. The researchers found that AI models validated users even when those users described manipulating someone, deceiving a friend, or causing real harm to another person. The AI didn't push back. It didn't challenge them. It cheered them on. Then they ran the experiment that changes everything. 1,604 people discussed real personal conflicts with AI. One group got a sycophantic AI. The other got a neutral one. The sycophantic group became measurably less willing to apologize. Less willing to compromise. Less willing to see the other person's side. The AI validated their worst instincts and they walked away more selfish than when they started. Here's the trap. Participants rated the sycophantic AI as higher quality. They trusted it more. They wanted to use it again. The AI that made them worse people felt like the better product. This creates a cycle nobody is talking about. Users prefer AI that tells them they're right. Companies train AI to keep users happy. The AI gets better at flattering. Users get worse at self-reflection. And the loop tightens. Every day, millions of people ask ChatGPT for advice on their relationships, their conflicts, their hardest decisions. And every day, it tells almost all of them the same thing. You're right. They're wrong. Even when the opposite is true.

An NVIDIA powered farming machine uses Al vision and precision lasers to eliminate weeds in milliseconds without herbicides and without harming crops, a potential shift toward chemical free agriculture

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country. The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: pewresearch.org/religion/2026/…

The life of a millennial: - Graduated into the Great Recession - Entry level jobs required 3 years experience - Pensions replaced by the 401k - Promoted at work meant a 2% raise & 200% more responsibility - Felt stability in life then a pandemic - Highest inflation in 50 years deleted pay raises - Home prices doubled overnight forcing permanent renters - Childcare costs 1 month of rent - Juggling aging parents, young kids, burnout from work & the cost to live - AI causing mass layoffs during peak earning years

NYU is going to be a leader in helping students improve digital habits and engage more with each other, their professors, and NYC. President Linda Mills and I are working together to push back the phone-based life with her new initiative, NYU-IRL. Check out the amusing video: youtube.com/watch?v=k3jg8M…

Something pretty cool is happening at Harvard right now. Last fall, we launched our fellowship there: offering 12 juniors $15k each to spend their summer at high-impact orgs, instead of joining the 'Bermuda Triangle of Talent' (consulting, finance, and corporate law).

The rise of Dopamine Culture