Olajide Sobande

The city of Andernach, Germany planted 101 varieties of tomatoes in the town center and told everyone to take whatever they wanted. It was such a hit they did beans the next year, then added onions, fruit trees, lettuce, zucchini, berries, and herbs. All free to the public and maintained by the city. Andernach is now known as the "edible city." Philadelphia has been doing a version of this since 2007. The Philadelphia Orchard Project has helped establish 67 sites across the city with thousands of food-bearing trees. Baltimore is planting fruit trees on sidewalks. Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Asheville all have public urban orchards. A mature apple tree produces 400-500 pounds of fruit per year. A mature pear tree can produce for 75 years. We've decided our cities should have trees. We just haven't decided those trees should feed people. Would you support urban fruit trees and vegetables in your city?

This 2 hour Stanford lecture on AI careers will teach you more about winning in the AI race than every piece of AI content you have scrolled past this year. Bookmark this & give it 2 hours, no matter what. It'll be the most productive thing you could do this weekend.

If your goal is fat loss, the gym bros have been misleading you. Lifting weights is essential for health, but if you believe it is the best way to lose fat, especially visceral (belly) fat, you have fallen for a marketing myth. The Evidence (The STRRIDE Trial & Beyond): One of the most comprehensive studies on this (Duke University) compared aerobic training, resistance training, and a combination. The results were clear: 🔸Aerobic Training led to significantly more fat loss and a greater reduction in visceral fat than weight training. 🔸Resistance Training is great for building lean mass, but it had zero significant impact on decreasing fat mass or total body weight when used alone. 🔸Visceral Fat: Runners consistently show lower levels of internal organ fat, which is the most dangerous type for metabolic health. The Harsh Reality: You can "chase the pump" for years and still carry a stubborn belly. Why is it so? Because the calorie expenditure of a heavy lifting session is often overcompensated for by increased appetite and decreased movement throughout the rest of the day. Meanwhile, regular runners/cardio enthusiasts: ✔Burn more calories per minute of effort. ✔Experience better lipid oxidation (fat burning). ✔Accumulate significantly less visceral fat as they age. Why won’t the fitness industry tell you this? 🔸"Lift heavy to get shredded" is a sexier sell. It sells supplements, gym memberships, and expensive coaching programs. 🔸"Go for a 45-minute run 4 times a week" is free, simple, and effective, but it doesn’t move product. Reality Check: ✅Strength Training: Builds the "engine" (muscle) and preserves bone density. ✅Running/Cardio: Actually burns the "fuel" (fat). If fat loss is your #1 goal: 1. Prioritize Zone 2 & Aerobic sessions. This is your primary fat-loss tool. 2. Use Weights as the Support. 2–3 days a week is enough to maintain muscle while the cardio does the heavy lifting for fat loss. Bottom Line: The "Cardio kills gains" era is over. If you are skipping the track and wondering why your waistline is not budging despite hitting PRs on the bench press...You are playing the wrong game. Dr Sudhir Kumar X:@hyderabaddoctor (Disclaimer: Information provided here is general in nature. Discuss individual exercise regimen with your fitness trainer and physician.)

A lot of religious people don't know God or His voice, and they always claim God spoke to them when making serious life decisions. The term "God said..." then becomes an excuse for not seeing red flags or paying attention to all the signs that they would naturally see if they had not dulled their senses with a blinder, which they believe is faith. A young single lady approached a pastor asking for prayers against spiritual forces contending against her marital destiny. At twenty-eight, this young woman had never had a suitor, not even an admirer. In a world where parents were cautioning their children to dress properly and shun waywardness, the young lady's parents had taken drastic steps to help her catch a husband, a sugar daddy, or a friend with benefits or even a married man to impregnate her by changing her wardrobe and advising her to change her church, friends, and recreational locations where they felt she should hang out in order to meet men. According to her mother, if she couldn't get a husband, she should get a baby. The young lady's parents were unbelievers who saw and treated life the way wild olive trees do. The young lady, however, was a religious Christian who gave her life to Jesus while in the boarding school, and she didn't want to live her life the way her parents lived theirs. Her mother had taken her to several spiritualists, and she had been diagnosed with "spirit husband affliction". She had done a "spiritual divorce" in three shrines and spent a lot of money on deliverance services. While all these claims were being pushed as the reason no man would look at her, the truth was far more obvious. Women in the lady's family do not get married because of how they were raised. They were raised to see men as wild beasts that must be tamed, and as a result of this, the daughters were all given certain incisions in their privates as soon as they hit puberty. The duty of this incision is to give them domineering power over any man who shows any form of affection towards them. The other families on Lagos Island, from which this family hailed, all knew this and cautioned their sons from marrying into this particular family. The few females from the family who travelled far to get husbands who knew nothing of their family tradition, suddenly discovered that the fortunes of their husbands spiralled downwards after the marriage. The husbands either die or run as far away from them as possible. The ones that stayed became emasculated lackeys with nothing of note to offer. This pattern had been in the family for several generations, and as a result, the women in the family resorted to getting pregnant with strangers and giving the children they bore their family name. Seven generations have done this. The less educated among the women would have several children with different fathers, while the more educated ones would have one or two using the same design. This young lady wanted a marriage. She believed that giving her life to Jesus should have rid her of the curse of truncated marital destiny and saved her from the fate that befell her sisters, aunties, and cousins. The funny thing is, almost all the male children in the family end up married with a family, just like her parents. These men, however, leave all the raising and the provisioning to their wives. They chase skirts, have a vibrant social life, and whatever money they make, they spend on chasing pleasure. Their wives were essentially single mothers Her two older brothers got married and live exactly this way, while her two older sisters had embraced the pattern that had become the norm in the family. In their family, when adults want to talk about their daughters, they do not say "When is she getting married?", they say "When is she bringing us a child?". She grew up wondering why until she became wiser and saw that this is the way of her people. She liked the pastor, and she told him everything about herself and the challenge of getting a husband and breaking this curse for her and her unborn children. She was a medical doctor, quite accomplished for her age, and the young pastor felt she would be a "catch" for him. A proper altar spec who can stand beside him at any social event, and people would just respect him for marrying such a successful woman. He prayed with her that day and assured her that God had answered her prayers. After she left, he did a sum of all he had heard and seen in his heart. He was 30 years old, struggling to feed and pay rent as a preacher. The person who referred the lady to him had tacitly told him that he should consider her as his ticket out of chronic poverty by marrying her. He decided to pray and fast about it On the seventh day of the fast, the lady was the one who called him just as he was about to break his fast. He considered this a sure sign that God wanted him to marry her, and he told her so. She replied by saying, "Oh my God. Oh my God! I woke up this morning with my left eye twitching, and that usually is how God makes me know something good is about to happen in my life. I called to share this good omen with you so that I can seek your insight and ask you to pray for me for the good thing to manifest quickly. I didn't know it was you. God is indeed marvellous." They got married, and the marriage was hell for the pastor from day one. He did not consider the fact that the woman he married was not raised in a family where there was a traditional culture of a "husband and a wife". She had no model or training in that guise. Her mother was married, but she was a single mother who controlled the purse strings and made all the decisions while her husband just coasted along. This was the way she was raised, and it was what she knew. Moreover, she was making the majority of the money and literally providing for him just as her mother provided for her father and the whole family. The pastor grew up in a totally different setting with a different worldview and mindset. The husband was supposed to be the head of the family. Who earns more than the other should not even be an issue or a reason for him to no longer be the head of the marriage. His wife didn't see it that way She was paying the rent, fueling the car, buying the appliances, paying for food, vacations, hospital bills, and so on. She gets to lead whether her husband likes it or not. Three months into their marriage, her husband returned home from the church and saw that she had changed the furniture, beddings, and every other thing in the house without carrying him along. It was her modus operandi, and he had complained about it several times. He told her he thought he wanted the material things before they got married, but the price she was asking him to pay for whatever she had to offer was too steep. That day, he went to sleep in the church. His wife thought he would get over it and return home after dealing with his bruised ego. He didn't. Days stretched into weeks. Whenever she would go to the church to see him, she would be told he had gone off to a mountain top for a prayer retreat. Months went by. She eventually went crying to the General Overseer of the church. How could a husband abandon his wife of three months for two months in the name of a prayer retreat without informing the wife of his whereabouts or checking in? The General Overseer placed a call to the husband, and the husband explained that his wife liked the idea of being married but did not really want to practise what it means to be truly married, and he was tired of the strife he was having with her. The wife said she didn't see herself being married to someone whom she has to take permission from to do whatever she desired to do to make her life, career, home, or marriage better. "Why should I ask my husband if it is okay to travel abroad for a few days to clear my head? Is it not my money? Did I ask him for a dime? I mean..." He complained that I brought company over to the house without informing him. "Sir, I paid the rent. I can bring a live bear over if I want. Even if he paid the rent, it is my damn right to live free. Marriage has not made me a slave to him. If not for marriage, can he address me in public? Are we of the same level? He needs to soak his ego in some cold water. Poor people are always so proud for nothing!" It was a mess. The General Overseer asked the pastor if he hadn't paid attention to the worldview and mindset of his wife before they got married. He said he only prayed and got a conviction that she was the one. The General Overseer asked the doctor if she hadn't paid attention to the worldview and mindset of her husband. She said, "My eyes twitched that morning, and I called him, and he said he had prayed and God had revealed to him that I am his wife". The marriage never worked. They were officially divorced two years later, but were only married vitally for three months. PS: Who raised your spouse? What manner of household did he or she come from? What is the philosophy of her mother? What is the philosophy of his father? What is their culture as a family? Rachael stole an idol despite being so loved by Jacob; family culture, tradition, and religious beliefs matter a lot. Abraham said a wife should not be chosen for his son from people of a particular culture, he knew that if his son would come to know His God, he must do so without the seducing influence of the idols of his father's house coming to his wife. Speaking in tongues is not a criterion for a good marriage, nor is prophesying or preaching good sermons. "God said" is not the right way to pick a life partner. Marriage shouldn't be a black market unless you want it to be. Do your investigations. Check those digital footprints. Call old friends. Meet his siblings and best friends. Those who know him or her long before you met him or her may not say anything to you about him or her directly, but body language does not lie. You can't see the body language if you don't get close enough to them to observe them during a meal or a social event. Don't marry a stranger only to complain of his or her strange mannerisms, attitude, behaviour, and mindset. Find a wife and prepare yourself to be found by your husband. -GSW-

Someone posted a single sentence in an online forum about MIT OpenCourseWare that I haven't been able to forget. They wrote: "I want people to know: there is no catch. Sharing is the point." That sentence was written by a physics graduate student in Portugal who discovered MIT's entire course library as a teenager and credits it with changing how he understood what a university is supposed to be. He is not alone, and the stories buried inside MIT OpenCourseWare's own site are some of the most remarkable things I have read this year. Here is what MIT actually built, and why it matters more than most people realize. Over 2,500 MIT courses undergraduate and graduate level are available completely free, with no registration, no application, and no tuition. Lecture videos, problem sets, exams, course notes, and full syllabi, all sitting there publicly because MIT made a deliberate decision that knowledge should not live only inside a campus. The breadth is almost impossible to absorb. You can study deep learning taught by MIT professors, quantum physics with the same materials used in MIT classrooms, algorithms, finance, cognitive science, urban planning, and hundreds of other subjects at a level that rivals what students pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to access. But the stories of who actually uses it are what stopped me completely. A 14-year-old in Spain with no access to advanced physics courses used MIT OpenCourseWare to teach herself quantum mechanics, eventually winning a scholarship to study particle physics at a major university. A Sudanese woman displaced by civil war used it to rebuild her career in data science while navigating refugee status in Egypt. A high school student in Canada discovered it through a public speaking lecture and has since used it to tutor his classmates. A researcher who grew up in Serbia credits a single Python course from MIT with setting the direction of her entire career. None of them were MIT students. None of them had any special access. They just found it, and it worked. The student from Portugal said it best when he described what MIT OpenCourseWare changed for him: "The point of a university is not to keep knowledge inside of it, but to spread it." One of the most elite institutions on earth decided to give away its curriculum to anyone on earth with an internet connection, and most people have no idea it exists. Everything you need to teach yourself at a graduate level is already free. It has been for years.

The 3 supplements worth actually taking: - Magnesium glycinate (sleep, recovery, stress) - Vitamin D3 + K2 (hormones, immunity, bone health) - Omega-3s (inflammation, brain, metabolism) Everything else is secondary until these are locked in.

Simple truth: Most supplements are optional. These three are foundational. Magnesium glycinate → sleep, calm, recovery Vitamin D3 + K2 → hormones, immunity, bone health Omega-3s → brain, inflammation, heart health Fix lifestyle first, then add supplements not the other way around.

I watched the Next Gen Chef on Netflix a few days ago From the show, the best cook was Courtney Evans. She stood out by a mile with her flavours and unrivaled ability to make a magical meal The second-best cook was Joaquin Cariaso, a Filipino who migrated to the USA at the age of two. He had a unique understanding of crusines and a relaxed leadership ability Neither of them won the show, however, because they both failed when it came to the leadership test. At a point during the show, they were told to nominate a leader for the Brigade assignment, and everybody nominated Courtney because at that point, she was the only one who had won three pins of excellence among her peers. There is, however, a big difference between doing things by yourself and leading others to produce results. When it came to leadership, Courtney's easy-going nature and "I don't want to offend anybody" approach prevented her from delegating duties and being firm. She was forewarned that there would be a lot of curveballs throughout the assignment. She, however, didn't prepare for them, and this led to a monumental failure on her part. She chose an all-girl team based on sentiment rather than picking an efficient team that would help her to achieve her aim. Ilke made the same mistake when she qualified for the finals. She chose Abby, the weakest and slowest chef of the lot, as one of her assistants when she could have chosen Khan, who was more reliable. Even the judges were shocked. They asked her why she chose Abby, and she said: "I like the fact that she pays attention to details." A few hours later, after a lot of hard work, Abby set the oven at an extreme temperature when it was time to bake, and she ruined Ilke's first meal presentation because the meal burnt beyond redemption. That meal cost her the competition. Andrew Sargent, by contrast, was not an exceptional cook, but he understood how to run a kitchen. During his interview for the Brigade assignment, he complained tacitly that Courtney had no idea how to organize a kitchen and delegate assignments, while he had worked in a kitchen where assignments were delegated before, and knew his onions The opportunity came for us to see what he could do during the finals when he had to run a kitchen. He didn't do sentiment. He was very pragmatic as he chose London Chase and Sidney. It was not about being sentimental or emotional; it was about results. His choices changed the texture of the competition as they delivered on every task without a complaint. I learnt a lot watching the show. As a Christian leader, I had always desired to have 12 Pauls instead of the mix bag Jesus had in his days. I wanted people who are so committed to the course of the gospel that they would literally give their lives without reservation, as opposed to those who have serious reservations and whose motivations are self-serving. Apostle Paul, on his first missionary journey, had Barnabas, Luke, and John Mark with him. When the journey became perilous, John Mark abandoned the mission and returned home to Jerusalem. Barnabbas, who was an elder, and Luke, who was an accomplished physician, stayed the course, but John Mark, who was young and vibrant, left the team at their most vulnerable moment. During Apostle Paul's second missionary journey, John Mark, Barnabas, Timothy, Luke, and Silas hopped on the ship to travel with him, but Apostle Paul refused to travel with John Mark because he had proven to be unreliable. Barnabbas pleaded on his behalf, and so did others, but Apostle Paul stood his ground, and John Mark had to leave. Barnabbas, who was a son of encouragement, also left with John Mark, so as to encourage him, leaving Apostle Paul with Timothy, Luke, and Silas. The second journey was a success, but remarkably, none of the co-travellers abandoned the ship and caused the apostle to worry endlessly about their safety, which would have been a huge distraction for him. When it comes to the work of ministry, your team matters a lot. The caliber of people you surround yourself with, their commitment, mentality, determination, mindset, motivation, conviction, and dedication. If indeed God called you and you are fulfilling a divine mandate, you must remember that those who joined you because you can multiply bread will do you no good. Jesus was almost made a king once, by those who ate the free bread he multiplied in the wilderness. He saw through the hype and sent them away. After their departure, he asked his disciples if they would not also leave. Peter replied, "To whom shall we go? You have the words of life." When a minister whom I have trained tells me he wants to leave, I do not receive it with pain, sadness, or disappointment. I see it as an opportunity for others to grow and also an opportunity for such a minister to develop beyond my limited scope and become established by his or her own right in Christ. Those who choose to stay with me, I do not hold to any oath or have any form of insecurity about their conviction. However, I believe that they should grow in their knowledge of Christ to the point where I begin to learn from them, or to the point where they push me to dig deeper and farther in my walk with the Lord. If you are not inspiring your team to succeed and your team is not inspiring you to succeed, what then are you a team for? A team is always as strong as its weakest link. Judas was the weakest link in Jesus' team, and Peter was the second weakest. When push comes to shove, Jesus prayed for Peter and left Judas to fulfill his destiny as written of him. You will find this to be true in your ministry as a leader. Many who call you a man of God today are doing so because of their own bellies and ambitions. The earlier you know this, the better for you. Do not be moved by the whims and caprices of people. The right love can be both soft and tough. Always remember this -GSW=

Went down the rabbit hole on this. A Nobel Prize-winning immunologist noticed in 1907 that Bulgarian peasants were living past 100 at unusually high rates. His explanation: they ate yogurt every day. His name was Élie Metchnikoff, and he ran the Pasteur Institute in Paris. His lecture made front-page news. Parisians lined up to buy Bulgarian curdled milk. Drugstores across Europe and the US started selling Lactobacilline tablets, basically the world’s first probiotics. But his original theory was partially wrong. The specific bacteria in yogurt (Lactobacillus bulgaricus) don’t actually survive in the human gut. A Yale researcher proved that in 1921. Should’ve been case closed. It wasn’t. In 2021, Stanford ran a clinical trial published in Cell with 36 healthy adults over 10 weeks. One group ate about 6 daily servings of fermented foods (yogurt, kefir, kimchi, kombucha). The other ate high-fiber foods. The fermented food group saw their gut bacterial diversity increase, which is one of the strongest predictors of overall health, and 19 inflammatory proteins in their blood dropped. Including interleukin-6, a protein tied to Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and chronic stress. The high-fiber group? Zero of those 19 proteins decreased. That same year, a Keio University and Broad Institute team studied 160 Japanese centenarians (average age: 107) and published in Nature. These centenarians had gut bacteria producing a bile acid called isoallolithocholic acid, basically a natural antibiotic so new to science it had never been described. It kills drug-resistant bacteria, including C. difficile, a gut infection that hits roughly 500,000 Americans a year. A 2023 Nature Aging study of 1,575 people in China, 297 of them centenarians, found the oldest participants had gut microbiomes that looked younger than people decades below them. More bacterial diversity, more beneficial species, fewer harmful ones. The yogurt meta-analysis data across 12 cohort studies: each additional daily serving is linked to 7% lower all-cause mortality and 14% lower risk of dying from heart disease. Metchnikoff called it 119 years ago. Fermented foods reshape your entire gut ecosystem, increasing the diversity of bacteria living in your intestines, lowering chronic inflammation, and building a biochemical environment where your body fights off disease on its own.

This is my new video on YouTube about how Nigeria went from having 24 international merchant ships in 1964 to none by 2026. The decline was largely driven by corruption and embezzlement. Many of the ships were eventually seized in foreign ports due to unpaid debts. Here’s the link: youtu.be/errSZ8pZoA8 I really wish this video will go viral. If this comes across your timeline, please share.

"She saved a stranger’s child with $15. Decades later, she discovered why he had been searching for her. In 1982, a Kenyan boy named Chris Mburu stood on the brink of losing everything. He was the brightest student in his rural district, studying by lamplight inside an earthen house without electricity. But his family could not afford his school fees. Without help, his education would end — along with any chance of escaping a life spent picking coffee in the fields. Meanwhile, across the world in Sweden, an 80-year-old kindergarten teacher named Hilde Back came across a notice for a child sponsorship program. She chose a name from a list: Chris Mburu, Kenya. She began sending $15 every school term. There was no recognition, no expectation of gratitude — just a quiet decision to help a child she believed she would never meet. That small amount changed everything. Chris stayed in school. Over time, he and Hilde exchanged letters. She asked about his teachers, his studies, and his dreams. Through her words, he realized she wasn’t just part of an organization. She was a real person who believed in him. And he never forgot her. Chris eventually graduated at the top of his law class at the University of Nairobi. He later earned a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard. He went on to become a United Nations human rights lawyer, helping prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity around the world. Yet one thing always weighed on his heart. He had never properly thanked the woman who made his journey possible. In truth, he barely knew who she was. In 2001, Chris founded a scholarship program for children like himself — talented students from poor families whose potential might otherwise be lost. He asked the Swedish Ambassador in Kenya to help him locate his mysterious sponsor so he could name the foundation after her. They found her. Hilde Back. Still alive. Still living quietly in Sweden. Chris traveled to meet her for the first time. He expected to meet a wealthy philanthropist. Instead, he found a humble, warm woman living simply — genuinely surprised that anyone considered her actions remarkable. Then filmmaker Jennifer Arnold began documenting their reunion. During her research, she uncovered something Hilde had never told Chris. Hilde Back had not been born in Sweden. She was born in Nazi Germany in 1922 to a Jewish family. At sixteen, when Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws banned Jewish children from attending school, strangers helped smuggle her to Sweden. Her parents stayed behind because Sweden’s refugee policies did not allow older Jews to enter. Both were later sent to concentration camps. Her father died there. Her mother disappeared, never to be heard from again. Hilde survived the Holocaust because strangers helped her escape. She lost her own education because of who she was. Fifty years later, she quietly paid for the education of a child across the world — a child who would grow up to fight the same hatred that destroyed her family. When Chris learned her story, he wept. Hilde, meanwhile, had no idea that the boy she sponsored had devoted his life to prosecuting genocide. In 2003, Hilde traveled to Kenya for the inauguration of the Hilde Back Education Fund. The entire village welcomed her as an honorary elder. In 2012, she returned again to celebrate her 90th birthday, surrounded by hundreds of children whose futures had been transformed through her generosity. Hilde Back passed away on January 13, 2021, at the age of 98. Today, the Hilde Back Education Fund has supported nearly 1,000 Kenyan children in continuing their education. Many have graduated from universities around the world. Many now give back — mentoring younger students and contributing monthly donations to support the next generation. One woman. Fifteen dollars. One child. That child created a foundation. That foundation changed hundreds of lives. And those lives continue to change others.

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

I saw this post and it stopped me because this is something I’ve been teaching for a long time. The data isn’t surprising to me. Structure improves relationships. We’ve seen it over and over again with the families we work with at Tensai. But here’s what I want to add to the conversation. The reason most parents struggle with structure isn’t because they don’t believe in it. It’s because structure requires something from them first. Whatever standard you set for your child, you have to keep it yourself. That’s where it falls apart for a lot of families. You tell your child “no cursing” but they hear you curse. You tell them “put the phone down” but you’re scrolling through yours at dinner. You set a bedtime for them but you have no discipline around your own sleep. Children are watching. And when they spot the gap between what you say and what you do, they stop taking the rules seriously. Not because they’re rebellious. Because they’re honest. They see the hypocrisy and they call it out. And most parents aren’t ready for that conversation. So the first step to building structure for your child is building it for yourself. Now here’s the part that connects to what I teach daily. A lot of parents come to us wanting their child to perform better academically. “My child doesn’t want to read.” “My child can’t focus.” “My child hates studying.” But when we look at the home, there’s no structure supporting that outcome. No dedicated study time. No screen limits. No homework routine. The child has unfettered access to devices, entertainment, distractions. Everything in the environment is working against the very thing the parent is asking for. You can’t demand academic performance in a home that’s structured for entertainment. Structure is what makes everything else possible. The bond. The discipline. The academic results. It all falls to the level of structure you have in place. And yes, I agree with the original post. High warmth plus high structure is the winning formula. You can absolutely have a deep, loving bond with your child while maintaining firm boundaries. Those two things aren’t in conflict. They strengthen each other. But I’ll add one thing. Structure alone doesn’t build a child who wants to learn. It creates the environment where learning can happen. The desire comes from something else. It comes from how the child feels when they study. From what happens after the effort. From whether the experience is rewarding or punishing. That’s a whole other conversation. And I’ll share more on that soon.

We now have evidence that gentle parenting doesn’t work. Here’s an uncomfortable truth about parenting no one wants to say out loud: The data is not kind to gentle parenting. According to teenagers, strict curfews. strict bedtimes, screen limits, device drop off times, dedicated homework blocks, and sleepover restrictions IMPROVE higher relationship quality. And yes, parenting difficulty goes up. Of course it does. Leadership is harder than appeasement. For the past decade we have been sold a watered down, Instagram friendly version of “gentle parenting” that often collapses into boundary avoidance, endless negotiation and emotional processing without enforcement. Parents terrified of saying no because they do not want to rupture connection. But connection without authority is not connection. It is dependency. When parents impose structure, the relationship improves. Teenagers report better parent child relationship quality in homes with curfews and rules. Younger kids report better relationships in homes with screen limits and bedtimes. Even device drop off times correlate positively. Why? Because structure is not cruelty. Structure is love made visible. A bedtime says: your brain matters more than your entertainment. A screen limit says: your dopamine system is not fully developed and I will guard it until it is. A curfew says: your safety matters more than your social standing. That is not authoritarianism. That is caring. Boundaries create friction. Friction creates growth. The parent absorbs the short term discomfort so the child does not pay the long term cost. Children do not experience well calibrated limits as rejection. They experience them as stability. The human brain craves predictability. Predictability reduces anxiety. Reduced anxiety strengthens attachment. That is why relationship quality goes up. Notice something else in the data. The strongest effects are around time structure. Bedtime. Homework. Devices. Outside play. These are environmental constraints. They scaffold executive function. The winning formula is not tyranny. It is high warmth plus high structure. The modern failure mode is high warmth plus low structure. That is just abdication of responsibility wrapped in empathy. Children need leadership, not negotiation. They need adults who can tolerate their anger. They need boundaries that do not move every time emotions spike. They need someone whose prefrontal cortex is fully myelinated. The harder path produces the stronger bond. Because when a child feels that someone is strong enough to hold the line, they relax. And relaxed nervous systems build durable relationships.

One of our recent articles published in Frontiers in Pharmacology just reached a new impact milestone. Here is the link if you would like to read our research: frontiersin.org/article/168612…

We are all definitely better paying attention to the rise of AI and rightly positioning ourselves for the new world order of a sort. Building, learning and pivoting to solve the next sets of problems AI will create and those AI will never solve. Selah!

Every human being that’s born into this world has two destinies, a natural destiny and a divine destiny. Your natural destiny is based on your parentage, nationality, education, peers, environment, and everything that’s natural to this world. All of these can affect you and determine the course of your life. For example, there are some who are rich, not by virtue of anything that they’ve done, but because of the family in which or to which they’re born. That’s natural destiny at work. Some people suffer, not because they were responsible for the problem, but because they just happened to live in a particular place. There are certain places that are filled with crime and violence, and those who live there are victims of the lawlessness. That’s natural destiny. However, there’s the divine destiny, which is based on God’s choice. Two things affect divine destiny. The first one is the choice that God makes for the sake of other men. For example, the Bible says God delivered Israel from Egypt by a prophet, and by a prophet, Israel was preserved. God chose Moses to deliver other men. Then secondly, and more importantly, is the divine destiny that begins when Jesus becomes the Lord of your life. When you declare the Lordship of Jesus over your life, God has the right to alter the circumstances of your life to align with His perfect will. That’s when He becomes your Father and starts leading you. That’s when He sends His Holy Spirit to live in you and to guide you. You’re thus separated and distinguished from the rest of the world Being born again, the Lord’s mark is on you; His seal designating you a child of divine destiny; His treasured and favoured possession. You’re not of this world, and therefore can’t and shouldn’t be affected by the natural courses of life; the corruption, evil, and decadence prevalent in this world of darkness. Now your journey in life is one direction only: from glory to glory; upward and forward, as you walk in His Word daily.

I love this approach - started this 3 years ago after a major life event but seeing that there is a name to it makes it interesting. 💖

If, as Christians, we desire to make the world a better place, we must realistically not leave money in the hands of the wicked The Epstein files have been in the news for a few days Even now, in these modern times, we see clearly what some wicked people who are rich did with their money They killed, they raped, they destroyed several lives, and ruined several destinies