Chloe Rae

Your proposed solution is politically clean, but analytically shallow. The real question is: where are the bottlenecks? Family sets conditions. The environment/economy shapes incentives. Schools either correct or compound the gaps. Policy measures the fallout. If California wants real change, stop playing the blame game because it’s every layer. Identify the bottlenecks and solve from the first principles of learning: Capacity → Capability → Content Because if the strategy starts and ends with schools, it’s already constrained. This dated framing assumes the problem lives only inside the school system. It doesn’t. Upstream — where conditions are set: Family: early language exposure and vocabulary density biological readiness — sleep, sunlight, nutrition, movement, stress regulation household bandwidth, time, and structure Environment/economy: attention fragmentation in a high-stimulus, incentive-driven landscape chronic cognitive load before a child ever opens a book reduced friction for distraction and increased friction for sustained effort Middle layer — where conditions are shaped: Schools/teachers: instructional quality, literacy sequencing, and curriculum alignment management of attention and cognitive load in the classroom whether they build or bypass foundational skills: reading, writing, numeracy Downstream — where we measure it: test scores grade-level benchmarks school performance teacher accountability We keep trying to fix downstream metrics while ignoring upstream constraints—and overestimating what schools alone can correct. That’s why every “reform” feels different but produces the same result. This is what policymakers consistently miss: The environment has already shifted. And we’re raising kids in an economy that competes for their attention at scale while expecting schools to rebuild focus, discipline, and literacy on the back end. That’s not just a school variable. It’s a systems variable. If California actually wants to move the needle, the focus has to shift from: “Fix the schools” to “Build the human inputs feeding the system—and align schools with how those inputs are upgraded.” Capacity: energy, attention, nervous system regulation Capability: the ability to process, apply, and adapt Content: curriculum, standards, academic knowledge Right now, we’re trying to scale content on top of unstable capacity—and asking schools to compensate for conditions everyone created. That doesn’t work. Anything else is just a tighter version of the same playbook.

Who has questions for @Jason?! We're going to be shooting an "Ask Jason" later this week, and we wanna hear from you! Let us know, and you may be featured on the pod!

After listening to the recent “Why Gen Z Hates AI” episode, I think the boos toward AI at graduation speeches are largely misdiagnosing the transition itself. The real contention is no longer technology. It’s between institutional education systems and emerging economic reality. The economy is rapidly reorganizing around: AI, autonomy, adaptability, and leverage. Meanwhile, much of education still operates as though the transition can be paused, regulated, or morally negotiated away. It can’t. At this point, the “ban AI” conversation feels increasingly performative. Students publicly criticize AI while privately relying on it to navigate school. Professors condemn AI while simultaneously integrating it into their own human-centered workflows. Meanwhile, enterprise is actively redesigning organizations around AI-native workflows, leaner teams, and higher-output individuals. Reality has already voted. So the important question is no longer: “Should students use AI in school?” The real question is: What becomes economically valuable when information becomes infinite and execution becomes increasingly automated? That changes the equation entirely. Because once information abundance becomes universal, the scarce variable shifts upstream: judgment, reasoning, attention, adaptability, and self-reliance. In other words: the human operating system. Which is why I think schools like Alpha are being interpreted too narrowly. The takeaway is not simply: AI-driven personalization = better outcomes. It’s that autonomous AI-driven systems appear to disproportionately reward students who already possess enough upstream cognitive infrastructure to utilize freedom productively. That introduces a much bigger conversation around literacy capital. Because literacy is not merely reading proficiency. A student can test below grade level on standardized metrics while still possessing high-leverage upstream assets: • attentional stability • conversational depth • executive-function development • emotional regulation • intrinsic curiosity • low cognitive fragmentation • reinforcement around learning at home AI appears to amplify existing cognitive architecture more than replace it. High-capacity students + AI → leverage Low-capacity students + AI → leakage That changes the education equation entirely. Traditional schools optimize compliance. AI schools optimize content throughput. But both risk missing the real bottleneck: the human system interacting with the technology. Which is why I increasingly think the future of education must move upstream: Capacity → Capability → Content Capacity: biological and neurological readiness: energy, sleep, stress regulation, movement, metabolic stability, attention regulation. Capability: the cognitive architecture built on top of that foundation: literacy, reasoning, executive function, adaptability, and cognitive endurance. Content: knowledge, curriculum, AI tools, personalization, and technical specialization. Because education is external. Learning is internal. And the second half of that equation is what the school system has largely neglected. We’ve entered a new frontier. A digital frontier. And much like the early American frontier, success inside rapidly changing environments increasingly depends on self-reliance: the ability to navigate uncertainty, adapt quickly, learn continuously, and direct yourself without constant external structure. In modern terms: agency. The danger is not the presence of technology. It’s the absence of agency. But agency can be built.

Set a timer right now for 50 minutes. When it goes off, stand up. Walk to get water. Do 10 squats. Take 5 slow deep breaths through your nose. Then sit back down and reset the timer. That is it. Two minutes of movement per hour. It lowers blood sugar, improves circulation, and reduces the metabolic damage of prolonged sitting. Your body was not built to sit still all day. Give it what it needs.

I'm a dad of 4 girls, and one of the biggest things I've learned is that nature is king. However, the best lever you can pull as a parent is to be a conduit for your kids to explore the things they are naturally interested in and curious about. That is everything. One of my girls is really interested in weather/meteorology, so I've sold out to that. Everything else (reading, math, science) can be learned within, and as a result of, the meteorology interest. Another girl is really into animals. Same thing. Almost everything can be learned through that. You're essentially leveraging their own interests to learn everything that is needed. Give them the room to be curious in pretty much any field, and a lot of the rest solves itself.

This.

Your brain is not shaped by a single decision. It is shaped by thousands of exposures accumulating across decades. Every night of poor sleep. Every chronic stress cycle. Every city you lived in. Every relationship. Every hormone fluctuation. Every period of cognitive overload. Neuroscience now refers to this as the exposome. The total environmental and biological load acting on your brain across your lifespan. What most people experience as “intuition” or “mental sharpness” is often the visible output of invisible exposures interacting with neural architecture for decades before the moment arrives. Your cognitive performance did not emerge in isolation. It was built.

Unpopular opinion: Bell-to-bell instruction often creates “distracted busyness.” Sure, students look on task, and it seems like learning is happening. But there’s a better way: let students go all in on one focused task, give it their best effort, no distractions. Then play a game. Or take a walk. Focused effort followed by movement is the best method for deep, focused work.

When someone teaches you something you didn't ask to learn, your brain reacts like it's in physical pain. UCLA scientists watched it happen on brain scans in 2003. The same wiring that fires when you stub your toe also fires when someone treats you like you need fixing. Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman ran the study and published it in Science. The brain region is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is just the fancy name for your main pain alarm. It doesn't care whether the threat is a hot stove or a friend telling you how to live. A neuroscientist named David Rock built a framework around this in 2008. Five things make the brain feel safe in social moments: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Take away any of those and the alarm fires. Rock wrote that one of the easiest ways to dent someone's status is to give them advice they didn't ask for. Even hinting that they're doing something wrong is enough. When people are told what to do, they often do the opposite, even when the advice was good. The psychologist Jack Brehm noticed this in 1966, and sixty years of follow-up have confirmed it. The brain is trying to keep your life feeling like your own. Close friends cut each other off with unsolicited advice in about 70% of supportive conversations, often before the friend has even finished explaining the problem. That number comes from a 2016 study by Bo Feng and Eran Magen in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The closer the friendship, the worse it gets. And the advice tends to make them more stressed, more depressed, and more lonely, not less. Giving advice gives the giver a sense of power, even when nobody asked for it. Michael Schaerer and his co-authors, working across Harvard, Duke, INSEAD, USC, and Singapore Management, published this in 2018 after four experiments with about 700 people. People who chase power volunteer advice more often than others. Whether the student actually improves is a side effect, if it happens at all. So when you feel the urge to teach somebody who never asked, that urge is mostly about you. You walk away feeling a little more powerful. They walk away feeling like they were just told they can't run their own life. Most uninvited teaching is one person's ego dressed up as kindness.

Every system in the body is adapting all the time. You are in control

@Jason Political corruption is the root variable… Fix incentive alignment and you improve: - the economy - inflation - cost of living Everything downstream reflects the quality of governance upstream.

Why Do We Like the Music We Like? | Samuel H. Markind & MD, Psychology Today Per predictive coding, learning and culture form musical preferences. Key points - Per the predictive coding model, learning and culture are the major determinants of musical preferences. - Liking or disliking certain music also requires intact connection between auditory and limbic brain regions. - Music exercises the brain’s ability to make predictions, an essential skill for survival. --- Consider this question: Why do we like the music we like? Were we born with musical preferences, or did we develop them over time through life experiences? This post, Part 2 of a 3-Part series, explores a theory that emphasizes the latter possibility. Known as predictive coding, this model argues that musical preferences are largely learned. Next month, we will look at a contrasting notion that stresses innate musical tendencies. Both approaches lean into the concept of embodiment, the overall theme of this series. How does the brain turn the basic elements of music into sentiments (emotions and feelings)? How do rhythm and melody – timing and frequency patterns of sound waves – become experiences of joy, sadness, excitement, or comfort? According to predictive coding, the musical qualities we learn to value inform a certain brain system which musical elements to reward. This system, located in the limbic region of the brain, is called the reward prediction error system (RPE), or simply the reward system.1 The RPE responds to predictions about the musical features we anticipate for two key reasons. First, the auditory cortex and the reward system are highly connected to one another.2 Second, a key role of the human brain is to forecast what will happen next; its ability to predict the next musical note is an expression of this function. As we listen to music, the auditory regions of the brain make predictions about upcoming sounds and share those predictions with the reward system. The RPE becomes active when the actual music differs from what was anticipated. This mismatch generates emotions and feelings. Robert Zatorre, Ph.D., a professor at McGill University, is one of the world’s leading music neuroscientists and a major proponent of the predictive coding model. He notes that the brain’s auditory system analyzes musical patterns and makes predictions about them. The reward system then evaluates the results of those predictions, creating positive or negative emotional responses depending on whether expectations are met, not met, or exceeded.3 Zatorre also notes that every musical style follows its own set of rules, or syntax, which the auditory system can begin to understand even in infancy. The brain’s ability to make predictions also appears very early in life.4 Our general understanding of the music we hear is then complemented by personal taste, which develops through our experiences over time. As a result, the brain’s analyses and predictions about music are grounded in learning—through both broad knowledge and individual life experience.5 How do these subconscious predictions become the sentiments about music that enter our awareness? The auditory and reward systems are closely connected.6 After forming predictions, the auditory system signals to the RPE which musical features to reward. When rewarding features are recognized, the RPE stimulates the release of a suite of neurotransmitters, especially dopamine, the chemical most closely associated with pleasure. We cannot consciously experience the release of dopamine itself. Instead, dopamine triggers physical reactions throughout the body, such as speeding up the pulse and causing the skin hairs to stand on end. Using its map of the body,7 the brain then becomes aware of these physical changes—the flutter of the heart, goose bumps on the skin—by truly feeling them. This is what is meant by the embodiment of our response to music. In this case, the response is pleasure, which encourages us to seek out and listen to more of the music we enjoy.8 The predictive coding model generates two major critiques. First, it is a “top-down” model wherein musical preferences arise mainly from activity on the brain’s surface (cortex), the outer layer associated with higher-order thinking.9 According to this theory, musical preferences are learned rather than innate, shaped more by culture and experience than by biology.10 If this is true, then people could potentially be taught not only to understand, but also to enjoy, any musical system. Second, predictive coding argues that emotional responses to music come from mismatches between expectation and reality; the brain predicts one thing, but the music delivers another. This explanation makes sense the first time we hear a song, or maybe even the tenth time. But what about the hundredth time? By then, the music is completely familiar, and there are no surprises left. Yet we may still love the song just as much as ever. If there are no more prediction errors, how does the emotional response remain so powerful? psychologytoday.com/us/blog/music-…

When I talk to parents, I suggest something simple: have your child read from a book for at least 20 minutes every night. The question I usually get back is, “Will this help my child’s grade?” My answer is honest: not necessarily. A 7th-grade classroom grade, in the long run, doesn’t matter much. But building a habit of reading will shape how your child thinks, focuses, and understands the world. The daily habit of reading books is one of the most valuable goals you can set for your child.

NEW: Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman says his OpenClaw AI agent watches him through a home camera to make sure he drinks enough water.

Biology is not just chemistry, it is code

Exercise that helps children improve concentration and thinking skills.

US teens getting less sleep than ever, new report finds | Marina Dunbar, The Guardian A new study from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health shows that today’s teenagers are sleeping less than ever before. The findings, which appeared in Pediatrics, showed a consistent decline in sleep across every age category. The latest figures revealed record-low sleep levels for all groups, with only 22% of older adolescents saying they slept at least seven hours each night. “Some barriers to sleep faced by teens have existed across generations, such as the increased homework and extracurricular demands that come with high school, social pressures to stay up late with peers, and jobs,” said Rachel Widome, lead author on the study and a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “Other issues, though, are new in recent years, such as increasingly ever-present screens and social media as well as recent society-wide stressors such as the pandemic, social unrest or militarized policing,” she added. The study also reported growing gaps in sleep outcomes. Black and Latino teens, along with adolescents whose parents have lower levels of education, are becoming increasingly less likely to get adequate sleep compared with other groups. The greatest impact was seen among older adolescents. Sleep time steadily declines as teens age, while both sleep duration and feelings of getting enough rest drop significantly from early adolescence to later teen years. For the study, researchers analyzed data from Monitoring the Future, a long-running national survey representing more than 400,000 US students in grades eight, 10 and 12 from 1991 through 2023. Participants responded to two primary questions: how often they slept at least seven hours per night and how often they believed they were getting enough rest. Insufficient sleep contributes to everyday exhaustion and inhibited functioning, while also being linked to longer-term issues such as mental health problems, struggles in school and chronic illnesses later in adulthood. While surging screen time may seem like the obvious culprit, the root cause may point to deeper feelings of social isolation and burnout. Recent high school student-led research from Aim Ideas Lab showed that roughly two-thirds of California teens reported experiencing burnout and anxiety. The same research suggested that around a quarter of students believe they only have enough time to meet basic needs, such as sleep, eating and hygiene, two days a week or less. Jolie Delja, executive director of Aim Youth Mental Health, said that the respondents “connected this directly to relentless academic pressure”. “They asked for time to slow down, and the chance to learn and practice coping skills like breathing and mindfulness during calm moments, not just crisis ones,” Delja said. “Schools and communities do not need to invent entirely new solutions. They need to give students more time and space for the people, activities and coping tools that already help them manage stress, including getting more sleep.” Studies have also shown that teens who go to bed earlier and sleep for longer than their peers tend to have sharper mental skills and score better on cognitive tests. Although researchers say there is no single nationwide fix, they point to broader structural approaches that could help large groups of adolescents. One approach that the researchers suggest is to delay high school start times to 8.30am or later. “Earlier starts are in direct conflict with preset rhythms of adolescent circadian biology,” Widome said. “A nation of sleep-deprived adolescents is not inevitable,” she added. “We should embrace a culture of sleep, where sleep is actually valued and where we commit to enacting policies and other interventions that promote healthy sleep for everyone.” theguardian.com/us-news/2026/m…

@APompliano AGENCY

In my experience, any young person who is ambitious and acts with urgency has a significant advantage over their peers. A lot of young people walking around with their brains fried from TikTok.

athlete by morning. entrepreneur by day. artist by night.

Americans top four concerns are… very concerning!