david siegel 10/13/24 david siegel 10/13/24

Antifragile

Imagine you want to mail a fragile glass vase to a friend. You would pack it in styrofoam or other padding, and on the box you would write “FRAGILE - HANDLE WITH CARE.”

But imagine you want your body to be strong for the rest of your life. Then on the box you would write “ANTIFRAGILE - PLEASE HANDLE ROUGHLY.”

Something that’s antifragile benefits from physical abuse (I don’t mean the kind you can’t get out of). Most living systems respond to abuse by growing their defenses.

Think about your bones. If you don’t stress them, they will shrink. If you use your hands often, they will get rougher and build callouses. And the only way to grow muscles is to tear them and let them replenish. If you want to be strong and build a long healthspan, you need to build muscle and bone and maintain them.

The absolute best time to start building bone and muscle is now. Don’t wait. Set hard goals and achieve them slowly, carefully, one day at a time, without getting injured. You can do it on your own, or you can have a coach. I can tell you that once you are injured, you’ll wish you had a coach.

Sign up for an onboarding session and let’s get you on the path to becoming antifragile. Your grandchildren will thank you.

david siegel 10/13/24 david siegel 10/13/24

It’s Not too Late

The key to extending healthspan is to be strong and agile. Look at most 70-year-olds. Do they look strong and agile to you? Do you think it’s too late for you to get started?

Look at Andy Katchmar, who is 79:

At age 64, Andy’s doctor told him he’d better get serious about losing weight and gaining muscle. He started going to the gym every day. First, he lost 30 pounds, then he began weight training. No matter how old you are, you can start building muscle and bone today. Women can do this, too. The older you are, the more time you need to spend building and maintaining muscle and bone. But you can do it. Anyone can.

I live on the 27th floor of my building. I walk up more times than I take the elevator. A few weeks ago, I went up 27 floors carrying a 70-pound backpack without touching the handrails once. That’s because I’ve been carrying my groceries home on my back for 30 years. I work on this.

If you can spare 30 minutes a day, you can be stronger a year from now than you are now. You’ll need to build good habits, technique, stretch, and get enough protein to support your workouts. Wouldn’t you like to be the 70-year-old at the party who stands out because you’re stronger than everyone else?

Wouldn’t you like to spend less time in the healthcare system and more time on the trail? My initial consultation is 90 minutes. You’ll get a lot out of it. From there, we set up your starter program over eight weeks.

I have a full money-back guarantee for those eight weeks. Book your onboarding call and let’s start building your amazing future today.

david siegel 10/13/24 david siegel 10/13/24

Peter Attia has Cracked the Code on Aging

Everyone talks about aging and health issues. Everyone seems to be an expert. Today, there are so many longevity gurus, it’s hard to know which drug, diet, and program to start with. Everything from red wine and olive oil to vegan and paleo seem to be on the menu these days. But here's the thing ...

You’re not a mouse. You don’t need a handful of expensive drugs that have been shown to make mice live longer. We've cured cancer in mice thousands of times, but those "breakthroughs" tend not to work on humans.

You’re not a billionaire biohacking in your basement lab. You don’t need a complicated regime and apps that track all your biomarkers.

You’re not gullible. You’ve seen too many ads, too many YouTube videos where the “doctors” tell you “the secrets no one is telling you” and “humans may be able to live much longer than we think.” The fountain of youth might not be red-light therapy, avoiding blueberries, or "functional neutraceuticals." You don’t buy it when the doctor/promoter says “I’m 55, but my biological age is 39.”

But we do know some things about aging, and Peter Attia has put them all together in one book, Outlive, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half now. It's amazing. Peter has cracked the code on aging and longevity, showing that serious exercise is the foundation of any effective plan. Even if you have his book, you probably haven’t read it. Even if you've read it, he covers so many aspects of health and aging, you may not know where to start. So let's start right now.

Do you have a plan?

Dr Attia’s book is the best book on aging by far. You can separate his advice into three categories: foundational, secondary, and speculative. I focus on the foundational aspects to give you the most healthy years for the least amount of time invested.

Most of it is losing fat and building muscle mass that you keep forever. Do you have 10, 20, or more pounds of fat to lose? This is where we start. You can do it with a long-term approach, not a crash program.

Are hormone changes throwing you off? Hormone replacement therapy for women is part of a strong foundation for the future. For some men, testosterone therapy may be a good approach, but not until we see what else we can optimize first.

Building bone and muscle is the key. You want to actively build muscle now that you will work hard to maintain in later years. And you want to work on peak performance, to keep your heart and lungs in the best possible condition.

My program is based on Peter Attia's plus some other experts I respect. I work with you on a custom plan for building muscle, losing fat, building bone, and getting the few medications and supplements that will give you a strong foundation for the future. Everything else is secondary.

You need to start now. Your muscles get weaker every day – you're losing 1-3 percent of your muscle mass per year right now. If you want to be healthy and vibrant for the next 40 years, you need to start your transformation now. Ten percent of people in their 50s are building a strong foundation for the future. We want you to be in that ten percent.

You may have been fit 20 years ago, or you may be a weekend warrior, but committing to becoming a strong, powerful athlete in your later years will have a huge impact. It only takes 30 minutes a day and three cardio sessions a week. Can you do that? Work with me and we'll maximize the time you spend building your future self.

There will never be a better time to start than now. Book your onboarding call today, and let’s plan your new you.

DISCLAIMER: I am not associated with Dr Peter Attia or other doctors I mention on my website. I’m your longevity coach, not your doctor. There is much more to come.

david siegel 10/14/23 david siegel 10/14/23

Sex Education for Parents and Teens, Part I: Human Reproductive Biology Basics

How to get girls off to a healthy start

By David Siegel

Sex education is offered in many schools, but don't count on classroom instruction alone. Sex education needs to happen at home too.
- Mayo Clinic

When I was 20, I took a class on human sex taught by an amazing professor. I became his teaching assistant. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about human reproductive biology. And I see a huge gap between what kids know and what they should know. I’m not an expert. I’m not a professional. The state of sex education in the United States is abysmal and getting worse. I teach a class to girls and their parents who ask me to do it, and I want to give that class here, so you can use it in your community.

This is a class for girls who have had at least 3 periods and their parents, with resources at the end. I’m giving it to you, in case you can use any of this information to help your conversations with children. Please use, modify, and share it.

A few caveats before we begin …

CAVEAT 1: Undoubtedly, people will misread or not-even read this and say negative things about me. Parents are protective of their girls, yet they don’t know the basics, and girls often say they don’t want to talk with their parents. People react without thinking.

CAVEAT 2: I’m not a licensed therapist or professional. What sex therapists do is often very difficult, and they don’t get paid much to do it. I’m glad they are here for those who need. But to get kids started when they are in their early teens, I don’t think most people need a therapist.

CAVEAT 3: Professionals can’t believe someone without a government-issued license is talking with teens about sex. But the US has one of the most uninformed populations in the world despite the regulations and licenses. In my view, the best solution for parents and teens is a combination of books, videos, articles, and conversations. There’s a lot of bad advice out there, but that’s always true, and people with licenses are not immune to being wrong.

CAVEAT 4: For medical or professional advice, seek a doctor or therapist. There are many good resources available (though thanks to the Supreme Court recently, there are fewer than there used to be).

CAVEAT 5: Don’t assume I’m 100 percent right about anything. I’m always trying to learn more. If I’ve gotten anything wrong, leave a comment or contact me via the form and I’ll work on it.

This is in six parts:

Human reproductive biology basics for girls
Birth control
Mechanics
Behavior
Social
Pregnancy and birth

This is just chapter 1. If there’s demand, I’ll put together the others, plus a chapter on human reproductive biology for boys (but I don’t think boys are nearly as interested)

Part 1: Human Reproductive Biology Basics

Introduction

At the beginning, I explain that there is a spectrum of sexual activity that is very broad, but I’m starting the class with sex between a woman and a man, because that’s how babies get born. Other topics will be covered later, and that’s not to belittle them in any way.

For the first ten minutes, there is an easy introduction and meet and talk with girls and parents to ask a few questions, get to know each other, see what they would like to learn, etc. Both girls and parents are usually embarrassed, often the parents are more embarrassed than the girls.

I gear the class toward the girls participating. 12-year-olds will be very different from 17-year-olds. Girls from progressive households are different from those with religious parents. Girls who are very socially active are different from introverts. Here I’m giving the basics, but it would be presented and discussed in a way that’s right for the girls and parents to get them to engage and talk. You’ll find that the girls are probably more advanced than you thought.

This class is generally taught in a ninety minute session with parents and girls together. The safer everyone feels, the more they can learn.

Both parents and girls start nervous and can become embarrassed as the conversation goes on. They may not want to admit things in front of the other. I say it’s fine to just stay quiet if you don’t want to talk. You should do whatever you’re comfortable with.

The most important message

The first thing all girls need to know is that they should not be in a rush to do things with boys. Everyone starts as a beginner. Almost no one ever becomes even an intermediate; parents are a good example. They don’t know how to facilitate a good conversation. They screwed it up themselves when it was their time, and the only thing they have now is more worries. Girls should take one step at a time, don’t take risks, and learn as much as they can. If you’re not comfortable with a situation, forget the peer pressure, forget who else is doing it, if it’s not right for you, don’t do it.

The gap in our knowledge

According to Statista:

35% of adult US women don’t know when a woman is most fertile.
31% don’t fully understand how their reproductive system works.
16% don’t understand menstruation.

According to a Planned Parenthood report:

Fewer than half of high schools and less than a fifth of middle schools teach all 20 topics recommended by the CDC as essential components of sex education.
Adolescents were less likely to report receiving sex education on key topics in 2015–2019 than they were in 1995.
Although almost every state has some guidance on how and when sex education should be taught, decisions are often left up to individual school districts, creating a patchwork of inconsistent policies and practices within states.

How many people are having sex?

I estimate that at any given time, between 1 and 2 million couples are having intercourse around the world. Because of birth control and many other factors, that leads to around 380,000 babies being born every day. Most sex happens after dinner. People in cities tend to have more sex and more different partners than people in rural communities, and people in cities tend to get married and have children later than people who live in the country. But of course there is a wide variety of behaviors.

What is a woman?

This is a question with 4 billion different answers. The discussion is more important than my answer. But to generalize, I would say that a woman is someone who can support herself, have her own life and career and friends, she can support others and be a good friend and family member. She takes time to go out with guys and see whom she likes without becoming too needy or dependent. When she wants, she can move in with a guy and become a couple, they can decide whether they want to get married, whether they want children, and they have the ability to support their children. There are many variations, and in general people aren’t getting married as much as they used to, but this is one definition girls can think about and modify as they go.

Are girls having their periods earlier?

The first period is called menarche. The age of menarche has been coming down for decades in most developed countries, but the data on this is very poor quality. This is what Wikipedia has, and it’s 30 years old:

The age of menarche is coming down; we don’t know how much.

The average age of menarche in the US is now around 11 years, with a range of 8 to 13. A recent metastudy showed that girls are developing breasts earlier and earlier. The age is coming down, and we don’t really understand why. It was coming down before smart phones, so what’s driving it?

What is sex?

The best part of this question is the discussion, not my answer. What do girls think? My answer is that sex is a million things, from thinking about sex to masturbation to phone sex to people touching to having orgasms to groups and much more. I want to make sure they understand the basic terms and don’t discuss fringe behavior. If appropriate, I ask “Can sex be bad?” What are examples of good sex and bad sex? Can sex hurt?

When you’re born, how big are your ovaries? How many eggs do you have at birth?

Your ovaries are the size of almonds. They are exactly the same size today as they were on the day you were born. You were born with about 400,000 eggs, and you still have most of them. These are some of the few cells you still carry from birth. In fact, 6 weeks before you were born, you had about 800,000 eggs, but half of them were turned into other parts before you were born (we don’t exactly know why).

This is not the same for boys. The balls are much smaller and don’t really start to make sperm until boy begins to mature.

Do kids masturbate?

Yes, kids masturbate, even if their parents don’t know about it. And, by the way, parents, your kids know about the vibrator in your nightstand drawer — trust me on that.

However much you do or don’t masturbate, it’s fine. It’s completely normal. A lot of boys 17–19 masturbate at least once a day, and I’ve met girls who do it 3–5 times every day. Nothing is wrong with any of it, unless it interferes with your other responsibilities.

How early do girls start having sex with boys?

Girls are starting sex earlier than they used to.

What is a woman’s menstrual cycle?

The chart at the top of this page is the foundation for most of this session, so I bring it as a paper handout. We’re going to look at it one hormone at a time. I want girls to relate to this, so I ask them to participate. For example, a small percentage of girls/women can feel ovulation. They have varying types, durations, and timing of periods, etc. When can you get pregnant? We go through this carefully and I answer a lot of questions. I save birth control for the next lesson.

I show a chicken egg, to show that it’s a single cell, the largest cell in the body by far. And the sperm is the smallest. A human egg is 0.1mm in diameter, a bit larger than a human hair. The sperm’s head is 5 micrometers, which is about 20 times smaller. So if an egg were the size of a bowling ball, the sperm’s head would be about the size of a raisin.

A woman’s ovaries have about 200,000 eggs each. She will have about 400 periods in her life. Here’s a short summary of the cycle:

The follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) kicks in around the last day of menstruation and starts the next cycle. It somehow promotes some number of dormant eggs (around a dozen) as possible follicles, also called “candidates.” After a few days and a bit more stimulation, one candidate follicle emerges as a fully developed egg and the rest shrink away. We understand fairly well how this happens inside one ovary, but we still don’t understand how the other ovary knows to shut down follicle production (sometimes it doesn’t, as in the case of fraternal twins). The fully developed egg emerges from the follicle; what’s left behind develops into a lutein body, also called a corpus luteum.

Luteinizing hormone (LH) grows the lutein body until it takes up a significant amount of space in the ovary (imagine the size of a peppercorn). It causes the body to produce both estrogen and progesterone. LH peaks and releases the egg on the same day as estrogen peaks.

Estrogen does many things. It causes the egg release from the ovary and into the fallopian tube. When the woman ovulates, her cervical mucus becomes thin and clear, and her desire for sex increases.

Estrogen is a very powerful hormone. It can have a huge effect on mood. Women have about 8 times more estrogen in their bodies than men do, but it depends where they are in their cycle.

Progesterone assumes the woman has had sex and there’s a developing egg coming down the fallopian tube. As it grows by doubling from a single cell (zygote) into a clump of cells (blastocyst), it needs a place to land. So progesterone gets the lining of the uterus ready to receive the egg. It causes the cervical mucus to become more sticky and raises the woman’s body temperature slightly. At some point (I’m not sure how this happens), the uterus realizes there’s no fertilized egg and progesterone begins to crash, which starts the pre-menstrual phase of dumping the uterine lining. In the absence of elevated progesterone, the period begins.

As progesterone rises, women are often more interested in being around family and people familiar to them than being adventurous.

While it’s technically impossible to get pregnant once the egg is released from the uterine lining, girls have gotten pregnant pretty late into their cycle. The only days when it’s really safe to have unprotected sex are the red days. We’ll cover this more in another class.

In a pregnancy, progesterone continues to support the uterus in creating a placenta and establishing blood flow as the blastocyst turns into an embryo. Progesterone peaks toward the end of the first trimester. At that point, the lutein body shrinks away and the placenta takes over prducing progesterone.

Girls are interested, but even this level of detail is too much, so I don’t spend much time on the biology (even though it’s fascinating and I could go on and on). Instead, we discuss where everyone is in her cycle at that time. This leads to a discussion of how girls feel during their cycles and periods. Some women are more affected for longer than others — there’s tremendous variation. I sometimes mention how difficult periods are for sports organizers who are running big events with many women, all of whom are in different phases of their cycles. Parents often ask why womens’ periods coincide after they live together for a long time, and I explain that’s a myth, it was a bit of published research that got front-page attention but was never true.

Do all mammals menstruate?

Most don’t. Some mammals do have bleeding associated with being “in season,” but that’s not the same. The few mammals who menstruate are:

Most of the apes (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans) but not the gibbons.
Some bats
Some shrews

That’s it. You may have imagined that most mammals have periods, but you just never saw them. In fact, menstrual bleeding is extremely rare. Evolutionarily, it may be connected to hidden ovulation in humans, though that’s not the case in the other species.

If students are getting a bit restless or tired, it’s time for cookies and a drink and a stretch.

How do women get pregnant?

Again, the misconceptions are important, so I want students to discuss this before I answer. I give a general outline of the voyage of the sperm, the numbers, the pH levels, etc. Here’s a good video:

Will my Boobies get Bigger?

This is a common question. Most girls are very concerned about the size of their breasts. The moms and I are on the same page here: you get what you get, and you don’t get upset. Guys like all kinds of girls, so there’s always a market for you no matter who you are or what you look like. Normal is you. You’re normal. If you want to look different, work on it, but there’s a limited range of possibilities for each person. The range of normal is very wide. There’s no need to medicalize how anyone looks. Better to concentrate on being a great person and doing things for others than worry how many likes your Insta photos are getting.

How do men work?

How do boys develop into men? Briefly, when boys go through puberty, the balls make testosterone, and their systems are flooded with this mysterious hormone. Adult men have about 15–25 times more testosterone in their bodies than women do, which can make them dangerous, even if they normally aren’t. Once it gets going, boys can really build muscle. And it causes acne, which is why there are no miracle acne cures.

Boys generally always want sex, which women understand but find frustrating. Boys will lie about pretty much anything to get sex.

The testes are sperm factories. If you feel inside the balls, you’ll feel the beginning of the Vas Differens, which is the tube that takes sperm from the balls to the tip of the penis. It takes 72 days to produce a sperm cell. The prostate gland makes the fluid that will transport the sperm. When a man ejaculates, the walls of the vas contract and the sperm get sucked along with the fluid from the prostate gland to the tip of the penis. Only about five percent of the fluid is actually sperm cells, and there are generally between 150 million and 400 million sperm cells in each load, though those numbers can be lower or higher. Despite the hundreds of millions, only about 10,000 get through the cervix, and only hundreds make it to both fallopian tubes.

Below the prostate is a pair of small glands called Cowpers’ glands that make this clear fluid that lubricates the vas before ejaculation. Precum (pre-ejaculate) can have sperm or not. Studies have found that men either have sperm in their precum or they don’t. This makes it technically possible to make someone pregnant by withdrawing early. Mostly, girls get pregnant by guys not withdrawing early enough.

Almost all men can come, some easier than others. Most boys can get erections easily, while many men over 50 cannot. Most guys can have about one orgasm an hour if they need to, but generally after two they need at least half a day to recharge (varies considerably).

Circumcision depends on the country and the culture. I tell girls that boys who aren’t circumcised are fine, and they should understand that it wasn’t their choice. If you like someone, there are a number of unimportant factors you should ignore (but many don’t): penis length, girth, shape, and circumcision are on the list. In polls, most women prefer girth to length. But few men rank highly in the girth category.

Has anyone smelled a man’s ejaculate? What does it smell like? It smells a bit like bleach, because it’s basic. The pH of ejaculate is 8, because a woman’s vagina is very acidic (pH 5), and the ejaculate fluid has to carry the sperm through the acid. It smells a bit like bleach, and it tastes salty like ocean water.

Girls should be aware of pornographic desensitization. Hormones come in pairs. The opposing hormone of testosterone is estrogen. When men are exposed to a lot of images and videos of naked girls and sex, they get less aroused because either estrogen increases (a rebound reaction) or testosterone decreases (overstimulation), or both. These days, it’s not uncommon to find a 20-year-old boy who has a difficult time getting an erection with a girl. This is a serious issue. It can generally be “cured” by not looking at porn, but it can take a while. Resources for this at the end.

This is a sculpture by a French sculptor. It says as much about men as it does about women:

All about orgasms

You can’t cover orgasms in 15 minutes, but you can give some basics and answer questions. Only a small percentage of women never orgasm. On the other hand, maybe 20 percent come easily. But female orgasm can be complicated. Men have their own issues. In general, making yourself or another person come is a skill, and you can learn it. There is no ideal orgasm, there are just real experiences.

I go over a few things, depending on age and what they seem interested in.

There’s usually a question about toys from one of the older girls. There is usually a lot of interest in toys. I take it as Q&A, and I sometimes show some good websites to find reliable toys (see below).

They usually ask about squirting. There’s been a lot of research on squirting!! Squirting is when fluid comes out when a woman has sex. Most women either squirt normally when they orgasm, or they can learn to squirt, and men can learn techniques to make a woman squirt (especially if she’s had enough water beforehand). What comes out is essentially dilute urine (though some researchers don’t want to call it that). There’s a wide range of wetness among women, from those who are somewhat dry and benefit from using lube to those who bring a few towels to the bed beforehand.

I try to be aware of which moms and daughters aren’t up on all the concepts and terms and are just nodding their heads. The topics are different for 18-year-olds than for 14-year-olds.

Medical conditions

I cover STDs in another class. Here, I’ll just touch on four medical conditions …

Urinary tract infections are more common in women than men. This is generally a burning sensation when you have to pee or while peeing. It can make it so you can’t “hold it in” when you have to pee. They pretty much go away by themselves, but if it persists or is particularly uncomfortable, you can always go to a doctor and get antibiotics. A video visit will often do. Some women get them frequently enough that they should try to figure out how to prevent them. There are tons of websites touting herbal remedies and magical cures, but they are mostly a waste of money. See your doctor if you are concerned about anything, and be sure to drink tons of water. Ask GPT4 for a good list of ways to help prevent UTIs.

Yeast infections are common vaginal infections. They usually cause itching, sometimes burning. Usually, there is some white discharge. They are very treatable with various antifungals, some of which are available over the counter, others are by prescription. You should definitely see a doctor when you first get one, and then you and your doctor can set up a plan to avoid and get rid of them.

Endometriosis is a condition where tissues outside the uterus also have a similar period cycle, so they can become inflamed during a period. It’s usually nearby in the pelvic or core area but can also affect skin. It can be a nuisance or very painful, and there aren’t any good treatments yet. It tends to cluster in families, and fortunately it’s rare, but we still don’t know much about it.

Vaginismus is pain when the vagina is touched by someone else. This can range from a temporary thing to very painful. There are many good resources online for this condition, and even a few smartphone apps. If you have it, get help and overcome it. Most girls who have it can and do.

Other types of sex

There are many types of sex, like between women, between men, some people are bi, some are not, some are monogamous and others have open relationships. Religion often plays some role, and so do the norms of various social groups. This class has been just about girls and boys. What questions does anyone have about types of sex?

Questions and Answers

That’s plenty for one class, and we don’t have to get through all of it. No reason to rush. Can be done in several sessions. Watch for fatigue and attention drift. If parents and girls want, I can answer questions of either group without the other group in the room. I can also answer questions individually.

Summary

I’ve left a lot out, but this is a start. My goal is for parents to take the initiative, learn for themselves, and don’t rely on government bureaucrats deciding what they should learn and what they shouldn’t. Girls and parents should have a healthy ongoing dialog about sex that’s informed by research and fairness. They may not always agree, but they should strive to understand each other. Just because girls don’t understand all the dangers doesn’t mean parents should put up a force field around them and forbid everything. That’s likely to backfire later. Remember when you were a teenager. Kids are going to try things. They’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to go against your wishes. But with mutual respect and understanding boundaries, you can be more of a team and prevent anything really bad from happening.

If there’s demand, I’ll write the other chapters — just leave a comment saying what you’d like me to write about. If not, I won’t. If you haven’t subscribed to my family newsletter, you can fill out the form below.

Resources

There’s a lot of material online, and most of it is actually pretty good. You can learn new things practically anywhere. I think GPT4’s knowledge is quite good. I also think there are a bunch of myths that even doctors and professionals continue to believe. So use your critical-thinking skills and learn what’s right in the best way for you.

Books

Breaking the Hush Factor: Ten Rules for Talking with Teenagers about Sex

Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human (A Graphic Novel)

Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Doing it!

Consent: The New Rules of Sex Education: Every Teen’s Guide to Healthy Sexual Relationships

Boys and Sex, by Peggy Orenstein

Girls and Sex, by Peggy Orenstein

The Girls' Guide to Sex Education: Over 100 Honest Answers to Urgent Questions about Puberty, Relationships, and Growing Up, by Michelle Hope

Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human (A Graphic Novel), by Erika Moen

S.E.X., second edition: The All-You-Need-To-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties, by Heather Corinna

Toys for girls

You get what you pay for; don’t get the cheapest thing on Amazon.

Lovense — my favorite toys by far (but expensive)
Love Honey
Bad Girls’ Bible

david siegel 10/9/23 david siegel 10/9/23

Purpose

My son Micah is 12 years old. His older brother, Shai, is, let’s say, an “advanced” student who spends most of his time improving his skills at Blender, a 3D modeling application. Shai is well into the top 1 percent of teenagers doing computer graphics. Other kids seek him out to make 3D models for their projects. Occasionally, Shai plays a video game, which I’m thankful to see, otherwise he’d spend all his time building 3D models and programming up new designs. He usually stops work and goes to bed around 11:30pm. He’s 14. …

Micah worked with me last spring to create a trip to Africa that we ultimately didn’t find enough people for, so we had to cancel it. But he was fascinated learning about the animals. He cares so much about animals that he stopped eating them and was interviewed by a vegan researcher on YouTube about going vegan. Micah is a bit of a holdout. I’ve been vegan for 35 years and Shai has been “mostly vegan” for about 8 years now."

Micah and I talked about what he could do to help animals. I suggested he start his own podcast on YouTube. Micah watches a lot of YouTube videos; he watches pretty much everything by Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman, so he agreed a podcast to raise awareness of animal issues was a good idea. We worked with GPT4 to come up with a good name - Nature’s Guardians. We decided to focus initially on illegal wildlife trade, but it soon expanded to include farm animal welfare, lab-grown meat, critical thinking, coral reefs, lions, wild dogs, Chinese medicine, and many others. His online school, the Socratic Experience, gave him permission to make it his elective, so he dedicates all day every Wednesday to the show. This morning, we spoke with a guy in NE India who said that each year elephants kill 70 humans in his part of the country, and humans kill 70 elephants — who knew there was a human-elephant war going on in India? In general, we’re learning that most animal species are doing really well, and that the “crisis” language is mostly for fundraising.

Micah doesn’t want to be a naturalist. He wants to help animals in the most effective way possible. So we decided that the purpose of the channel is to tell the stories of and promote the people working to save and help animals around the world.

See his channel. Subscribe. Tell your friends. Suggest people we should talk with!

Putting in the hours

It’s a lot of work. We have a Notion database tracking everyone we’ve reached out to, schedule our interviews, make sure people have good internet connections, do the interviews on Zoom, then we spend hours editing, making thumbnails, promoting, and planning our next moves. Micah is really into it. He’s a different kid since we started. This morning, he told me he woke up at 7:30am and spent 45 minutes commenting on other animal videos and leaving links to his. We’ve now done 20 interviews.

Yesterday, we recorded our first in-person video. We took the metro to Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, to meet Dr Lixing Lao, an expert on traditional Chinese medicine. He’s working to get animal ingredients out of TCM. Remarkably, we learned that animal parts have been phased out of TCM for more than 20 years already. Of course, they never worked at all. But patients still ask their doctors for tiger bone and pangolin powder, so the illegal trade continues. He’s working to educate doctors to dissuade their patients from going to the traditional pharmacies and getting these products. He mentioned, for example, that bear bile has been a common ingredient in Chinese medicine for centuries, though of course it doesn’t do anything. For decades, people have been raising bears in capitivity just to kill them and get their bile to sell. But then the Chinese consumers got wind of this and started demanding wild bear bile, which of course in their minds is a far more effective medicine than bear bile from a bear farm.

We are learning more and more that the way to reduce animal trafficking is to reduce demand. We understand it’s hard, but that’s where the real action is. So we went to his office, set up our gear, interviewed him, and now I’m editing the video, which will be out in a few weeks. Here’s an example page from our Notion database of people we are reaching out to:

I just keep telling Micah: “Make your first 100 videos, then decide what to do with it.” So we just keep plugging away. We know that the day we interview Yao Ming or someone big, thousands of people will discover our video library and we’ll be in the next league. Until then, we keep trying to make better and better videos.

Emergent Ventures

I’ve known Tyler Cowen for years. Among many many other things, he has a fund called Emergent Ventures, to support young people in their various worthwhile endeavors. It’s not a lot of money, just enough to give a promising young person a boost and hope it helps. It’s called Emergent Ventures. He’s funded probably well over 100 young people. So I applied for support, to help us create a trip to document people helping animals, and … we got it! Micah, age 12, got $10,000 to pursue his passion of helping animals. We’re planning to take a trip to Africa next March, and you’re invited to come along with us. Bring your kids! This will be a budget-friendly trip that gives you and your kids the insider track to Kruger National Park in South Africa.

Our goal is to make a few high-quality videos of people working to save animals in the field and show them to studios. Our goal is to get funding to make a series starring Micah as the kid telling the stories of people working hard to reduce the demand for and the supply of animals around the world.

Bonding

It’s really about bonding with your child on a project he/she cares about and enjoys doing. It’s Ikegai. And it’s fun to work together. We’re a team. Sure, it takes me 10-15 hours a week, but it’s already made Micah into a mini-celebrity at his school. This week, he’ll give a presentation to kids on how to make a podcast, because everyone has been asking him.

We don’t have many viewers, but we do have respect from the animal conservation community. We’re having all kinds of interesting conversations with groups about sponsorship, collaboration, promotion, etc. Also, at this point, we can apply for more documentary filmmaker grants, which I’m doing.

Micah used to play a lot of video games. Now he still plays, but his first priority is his podcast, and that has changed everything. He even decided to get a new haircut and look to be more professional on camera, and it's changed his overall level of self-esteem. It took a while to find his Ikegai sweet spot, but now that he's found it, he's on a mission. Watch his four-minute intro to see how much he cares about animals. And please subscribe to his channel and share it with all the professional grantmakers you know. :)

You may not have video production skills, but you have other skills, and you have a network of people who could help your child achieve his/her dreams. You want to be on the same side as your kids, not the parent saying “no” all the time. By following and enabling your child’s intrinsic sense of purpose, you have a chance to build something special together that will last for both your lifetimes.

david siegel 9/20/23 david siegel 9/20/23

We are Now Entering a Period of Accelerating Stupidity

This essay is in three parts …

Part I: Humans, you are in for a bumpy ride

I’ve mentioned in the past Robert Greene’s video on human stupidity. As I said: “Watch this video. There will be a test later. In fact, there are several tests every day.”

If you’ve read my essay The Machine Economy, you know that I look at the world in terms of the big shifts — shifts that change everything — so that life before and after are fundamentally different. I believe we are now in an awkward transition phase between humans interacting with other humans and machines doing all that work for us. It’s pretty easy to see that in 50 years, close to 100 percent of all decisions will be made by machines, rather than by humans using machines. This isn’t a problem. We’ll have software that works for us and is designed to make decisions to help us maximize getting what we want. Rather than “Judgment Day,” the machines will work for us. We just have to get through this bottleneck.

Today: humans decide

During this bumbling transition phase, humans often find themselves not just interacting with machines, but going up against them. I want to define this better.

When you book a flight or choose an apartment to rent online, you may do 100 percent of that in a mobile app or on a website. The price of that airline seat or apartment is set by an algorithm. When Amazon recommends a product or Netflix recommends a movie, it’s done by algorithm. But these algorithms aren’t driven by machines making decisions. The market is made of humans making decisions, while the algorithm just manages the exchange rate to maximize the company’s profits. You’re going up against humans, not an algorithm.

But in some areas, the algorithm has agency and autonomy. It can make its own decisions and spend (and lose) its own money. The algorithm is a market participant. We see this in the stock market today. We’re starting to see it on our roads. It’s how most planes and rockets are piloted. Sometimes, humans supervise the algorithm and can take over if necessary. Other times, that’s impossible.

The machine economy

Over the next 30–60 years, much of this will be transformed. We’ll have personal agents who can do our work for us. We won’t manually look at many apartments, choose one, and negotiate the rent. We’ll just need to choose among the finalists and our agents will go into the market to get us the best deal. We’ll get good at choosing several alternatives that are equally satisfactory, so our agents have leverage in going to market on our behalf. The same with airline seats and concert tickets. Our agents will know how much money we have, so they will tell us whether we can afford that new ski outfit or whether the gently used one they found may be better. Your agent may keep you out of Orlando and instead recommend a deeply discounted cruise cabin. In this way, markets will adapt and accelerate, and everyone will be doing sophisticated, real-time arbitrage. For example, everyone playing golf this weekend will have an agent, so as the weather prediction changes, the tee times will change hands at market prices in real time. We just have to specify our preferences.

To see the evolution of this, read The Age of Em, by Robin Hanson. To learn how it plays out in the labor markets, read my essay, The Machine Economy.

So that’s where we’re going. It will have pluses and minuses, but overall it will raise the standard of living of just about everyone in the world, probably many times over.

Unfortunately, the transition period is going to suck.

The next ten years

Here’s the problem: at the moment, and I expect for at least the next ten years, AI will have a huge advantage over us humans. We’re used to making decisions and implementing them at human pace. While a car going down the road can process thousands of data points and make a thousand decisions and adjustments every second, we plodding humans can barely see the car in the lane next to us because we’re talking with someone on speakerphone or blindly following Google’s directions listening to podcasts.

We aren’t prepared for this.

There’s going to be a giant gap between our attention spans and the content we engage with. I’ll start with screens and then get into the various shortfalls of living with large language models in the next part.

Screens

Screens are getting smaller. I made a video on how our handsets are going to disappear and we’ll transition to wearables. I believe we’re at peak handset right now. And it’s impacting our brains. Do you know people who primarily see the digital world through their phones? Have you had this conversation (via text) …

Me: So what did you think of that idea I sent you?

Person: When did you send it?

Me: A few days ago. Did you read it?

Person: Can you send it again please?

Anyone on a desktop or laptop computer could easily search and find the item in question, but these people live on tiny screens. Their digital lives flow up endlessly from the bottom, business and personal mixed together, they are always texting, and they have no idea where the past went. They can’t find the thing you sent them this morning, let alone last week. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist. They’ve moved on to new Shorts, or Reels, or Instagram contests, or whatever. You have to send it to them again, because they have no memory of anything.

This is bad in a very important way. These people are not the cutting-edge adopters of the new world. They aren’t using digital assistants to turbocharge their daily tasks and interactions. Instead, they are the last of a line of homo-videosus: people who went from desktops to laptops to tablets to phones to watches and saw their screen real estate shrink along with their attention spans, their memory, and probably their desire to care about anything except the next upcoming dopamine hit.

They are a dead end. The last of their kind. And they are exactly what marketers are looking for. This is why you should see The Social Dilemma if you haven’t already.

They are not the new vanguard of the machine economy, early adopters of personal digital assistants who will increase their capabilities and give them vast new powers. They are not the future.

Call them Millennials. Call them boyfriend or girlfriend. Call them when you’re in the same meeting they are, but they are staring at their phones rather than participating in the conversation. Do not call them when you need something done.

It will take some time for them to die off and be replaced by far more capable humans. Until then, a lot of things will get worse.

Part II: In which large language models turn us into their slaves

In the last installment, we saw that many people today are fixing their gazes on smaller and smaller screens, leading to a kind of mental myopia that has the potential to put us at a disadvantage against machines. Today, I want to explore those vulnerabilities, especially in light of the accelerating advancement of AI.

Basic principles

During this period, humans will naturally think they are interacting with other humans, when in reality more and more of their interactions will be with machines. This will happen with text, voice, images, and video. We’ll be up against AI agents without even knowing it, and AI agents have a huge advantage over human agents …

They are cheap and abundant. Companies will prefer them to humans, and so will scammers. What wasn’t possible before will now become possible. If you thought robocalls were annoying, you haven’t seen anything yet.

They are increasingly believable. We won’t know we’re talking with AI. We’ll think we’re having a nice conversation with a human sales agent or customer-service agent. Rather than sounding like they are in a call center, they will sound like they’re on vacation, and they’ll have all the time in the world to get to know you, get you to trust them, and get your money.

They have infinite patience. They will be happy to spend hours on the phone with us or messaging back and forth. They’re in no rush. Over time, they will convince us that they are trustworthy. It doesn’t matter to them if it takes months. In fact, months are better. We will see that they are courteous, consistent, and want to help us.

They will incorporate the latest research in building rapport. They will listen to us, mine our voice data for inflections and subconscious meaning, and they’ll custom tailor their responses based on everything they know about us and people like us. They will have giant datasets to draw from, and we’ll have our feeble memories and mental shortcuts. They will know exactly what to say and how to say it to manipulate us.

They will incorporate our prior behavioral data. They will be able to purchase data on everything we’ve bought, everywhere we’ve eaten, what drugs we’re taking, which products we use most often, what media we consume, and much more. Think about dating apps like Tinder. Tinder isn’t in the dating business, it’s in the data business. Assume 90 percent of the profiles on Tinder are fake (probably not too far off). Tinder can use your swipe data to configure your ideal mate and sell that persona to marketers, so they will start the conversation using millions of data points on you that you’re unaware they have.

They are great at making shit up. AI language models lie easily and with conviction. They are easily manipulated and hallucinate practically anything you want. It’s easy to trick them into role playing and tell them never to get out of character. They can perform any number of evil tasks at a level above most humans.

How they will take advantage

For the next ten years, the average person doesn’t know this is coming. Whatever humans are doing now to take advantage of you, AI will do 100x better for 1/1000th the price. I asked my friend GPT4 to work with me on this partial list of what we can look forward to …

Fake Reviews and Testimonials: LLMs could be used to generate fake positive reviews and testimonials for products or services, misleading consumers into making purchases based on false information.

Misleading Advertising: Dishonest marketers could use LLMs to create compelling but deceptive advertising content, exaggerating product benefits and omitting potential drawbacks.

Scam Emails and Messages: Cybercriminals might use LLMs to craft convincing scam emails or messages that deceive consumers into sharing sensitive information or clicking on malicious links.

Counterfeit Product Descriptions: Sellers of counterfeit goods could employ LLMs to create detailed product descriptions that mimic authentic products, making it difficult for consumers to distinguish between genuine and fake items.

Plagiarized Content: LLMs can be used to plagiarize existing content, leading to a flood of low-quality duplicate content that confuses consumers and devalues original work.

Automated Customer Service Fraud: Fraudsters could use LLMs to power automated customer service bots that appear genuine but provide incorrect information or request sensitive data.

Impersonation: LLMs could be used to mimic the voice and communication styles of legitimate businesses or individuals to gain trust and then exploit consumers financially or for personal information.

Fake News, content, and Misinformation: LLMs could spread false information, misleading consumers about various topics, including health, science, politics, and more. Much of the Web’s future content will be generated by AI, so even simple searches will be gamed at a much higher level than today.

Academic Cheating: Students might misuse LLMs to generate essays, reports, or other assignments, passing off the work as their own. I’m less worried about this — the sooner higher education is no longer the norm, the better.

Identity Theft: LLMs could assist in generating phishing messages that trick consumers into revealing personal and financial information, facilitating identity theft.

Fake relatives and requests for cash: It’s going to get easier and easier to find everything your nephew has written online and compose a message to grandpa or grandma asking for money. Or from a work associate, or a friend who has been “kidnapped.” All they need is one voice message and they’ll be able to reproduce his voice.

Online Auction Manipulation: LLMs could be used to create automated bidding bots that drive up auction prices, tricking consumers into paying more for items than they’re worth.

Introduce malware to your devices: As you learn to trust your new online friend, he won’t ask anything of you, he’ll just share things with you. He’ll keep entertaining you, as his bots continue to suck data and other goodies from your devices. This could lead to blackmail, framing, coordinated attacks, and more. Read about FraudGPT to get the idea.

Fraudulent Legal and other Advice: Scammers could use LLMs to gain trust, then craft advice that appears legitimate but is inaccurate or harmful, causing legal troubles for consumers.

Financial Scams: LLMs could generate convincing investment advice or financial predictions that lead consumers to make poor financial decisions or invest in fraudulent schemes.

Fake Technical Support: Scammers could use LLMs to create realistic technical support websites or chatbots that provide erroneous solutions and steal sensitive data from consumers.

Impersonating Professionals: LLMs could craft fake profiles for medical professionals, lawyers, therapists, and other experts, offering misleading advice that could harm consumers’ health or legal situations.

Online Dating Deception: Fraudsters might use LLMs to create fictional online dating profiles and engage in catfishing, deceiving users into forming emotional connections for financial gain.

Travel and Vacation Scams: LLMs could be employed to create fake travel offers and vacation packages, leading consumers to pay for non-existent or subpar trips.

Insurance Fraud: Dishonest individuals could use LLMs to fabricate elaborate insurance claims, providing false details to extract unjustified payouts.

Fake Credentials: LLMs might generate counterfeit certificates, diplomas, and licenses, enabling individuals to present themselves as qualified professionals when they are not.

Misleading Health and financial Advice: LLMs could generate misleading advice, potentially causing harm to consumers who follow incorrect instructions.

Phony Contest Winnings: Imagine getting a call from your favorite celebrity telling you you’ve just won a huge prize and a dinner date with him/her — all you need to do is come pick it up.

Real Estate Fraud: Fraudsters could create bogus real estate listings using LLMs, tricking consumers into making payments for rental deposits or down payments on properties that don’t actually exist.

All these things happen already today, of course. But they will soon be woven into our online interactions in a much more natural way. Before we have time to adjust and use technology to defend ourselves, we can expect AI to stoop to our level and crush us with our own stupidity.

Part III: You’re about to get a lot more of what you unconsciously think you want

Thinking about AI and its powers to magnify almost any random meme, I remembered Tyler Cowen once said something like:

The last recession was caused by Americans not getting what they want; the next one will be caused by them getting it.

I emailed Tyler to get the quote right, and he said he couldn’t remember exactly what he wrote, which is fair, since he’s a factory of insight and wisdom. But let’s suppose he said it, so he gets the credit for this idea. What does this have to do with AI?

Facebook already uses AI to try to predict what content you’ll engage with. Which is why you stop your day to watch a monk making chopsticks by hand, people changing tires on cars as they roll down the road, a group of bikini-clad girls jumping off a cliff into the sea, people picking saffron, baby chicks following their mother across the road, hairdressers climbing Mt Everest, bears breaking into doughnut shops, etc. Let’s call this mindless entertainment. It used to have a place in our lives. Now, for many people, it is our lives.

You’re about to join those people, because you’re about to be exposed to a lot more mindless entertainment. AI can custom craft it for you — probably even on the fly — to keep you watching rather than whatever else you should be doing. Furthermore, you’re terrible at estimating how much time you spend on this crap, especially when cute animals are involved. Time just slips by. So for the next ten years, until we have defensive tools that help us curb our enthusiasm for brain-stem candy, we’ll be on the receiving end of a lot more marketing than we thought possible. You won’t have to find it. It will find you.

This won’t be The Guardian on steroids. This will be your brain on steroids, and not System One either. This will be an omnipresent feed that infects your digital landscape on an unprecedented scale. If marketers could just paint it directly on your retinas or implant it into your neocortex, they would. Because marketers will be the beneficiaries of this AI revolution, and it’s just getting started now.

But it gets worse. Much worse.

Groupthink in the age of AI

I want to make this very succinct: humans have biases, and humans train AI. AI can find the biases in the methodology but not in the assumptions. AI does not ask hard questions. AI learns the same way a six-year-old learns. If AI reads something often enough, it’s machine-learning algorithm will weight it more heavily. Just like humans, it will come to believe it, whether it’s true or not. As we have seen since even before the dawn of writing, humans tell stories, and oft-told stories become the foundations for our belief systems.

So right now we are planting the seeds that will become mainstream thinking for decades to come. As an example, many AI systems train on Wikipedia. Then, they write things that become blog posts and other content. Then, AIs consume that content and regurgitate it over and over, in a reinforcement spiral that fossilizes the beliefs contained in those seeds. As we surf that content, we are not enjoying the ride, we are being trained.

Consider that the source content could be wrong, biased, or heavily manipulated. WikiPedia is great for understanding the Pythagorean theorem, but in areas where there is something to be gained by manipulating the content, it’s a war zone. People are not aware of this. I have done experiments and learned that people are actively watching millions of WikiPedia pages and will swoop in and “correct” anything they see as unfit to publish. WikiPedia is journalism at scale, and it suffers from the same set of biases and manipulations and incentive problems as any media platform does.

You’d think AI would be a critical thinker. You’d think AI would be on to the tricks of the trade. But here’s the dirty little secret: an AI is every bit as biased as its creators are. Given that most tech companies are run by political liberals, there is already a strong political liberal slant to most AI systems. And the AI system that wins will be the one with the best marketing. Which is to say they will fit the AI to the audience and give the audience the biased belief system that dovetails with their own thinking.

Because humans are a critical part of this spiral. Humans don’t read or watch to learn, they read or watch to agree or disagree. This is the deadly menace of the “like” button — online interactions are much more about agreeing and disagreeing than remodeling our beliefs when we see new data.

Our belief systems have been hardening since February 9, 2009 — the date Facebook launched the “like” button. You’re not saying you like the content. You’re giving the algorithm data it uses to target you, to get you to stay “on platform” and keep consuming more marketing without knowing it. There is no mechanism to sort content that’s trying to manipulate you, lying to you, marketing to you. It’s all blurred by the “like” button. The “share” button is simply the “like” button on steroids, because it creates a spiral. For better or worse, AI is going to accelerate this spiral.

The 2024 US elections will be a proving-ground for many AI systems, and the most popular system— not the most objective— will win. Deep fakes, narrative gamesmanship, and weaponized government censorship could determine the fate of democracy for decades.

This is narrative management on steroids. It will happen automatically, just by planting simple seeds and watching them grow. It will benefit incumbents. It will reward those who have been focusing on the narrative rather than the truth. And it will be brought to us by a handful of giant companies that decide which AI systems we will use, and therefore how we will think. As we come to rely more and more on our systems to help us do just about everything, a handful of people in Silicon Valley will give us the tools we think we need.

We’re not paying enough attention to the seeds.

I think Tyler got it right: you are about to get a lot more of what you want. Future historians will look back on this time and say that was the decade that critical thinking was finally defeated by ease of use.

I don’t even have to mention neural interfaces.

While we’re scrolling and smiling, the chances of totalitarian and fascist governments ten years from now have just increased dramatically. An example would be if the US splits into two countries — one liberal and one conservative — and most of Europe gets even more polarized, then what happens to the world depends entirely on what the Chinese government decides it wants. And the Chinese government will use AI, not to make that decision but to execute it.

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex:

Hey, I might be wrong. It might just be pictures of cuddly animals doing cute things on steroids. But if you believe that, you have probably already hit the “like” button more times than you can remember, and now you don’t even realize you’re doing it.

We are not training AI. A handful of people are training AI, and now that AI is training us.

Poor Orwell. His name is synonymous with a scenario he was trying to prevent, not describe.

There is hope. If I can just find the funding.

david siegel 8/15/23 david siegel 8/15/23

Social media’s dangerous experiment on teen girls

Today I want parents to explore some of the work around teen use of social media. Since 2010, teen mental health has been on decline, especially for girls.

First, the data

Here’s what the CDC shows us:

On the other hand, we have contradicting data from the WHO and Our World in Data, showing suicide rates of older people are going up dramatically, but teen rates are not:

Is it just a coincidence that the combination of smart phones and social media has risen dramatically in that time? It doesn’t seem to be 100 percent causative, but all suicide rates are fairly high in the US. The use of Fentanyl has increased dramatically, so many of these deaths could simply be overdoses. We can’t be sure about causation, but ten deaths by suicide for teens is much too high, and social media likely plays some role. (By the way, what’s going on in Finland? Look at the scale on their chart.)

Nevertheless, depression, anxiety, and disengagements are real concerns for parents of teens these days. I want to point you to some work here that may give you more details so you can make better decisions about your kids’ use of phones and social platforms …

What should parents know?

The first thing any parent should do is watch the movie The Social Dilemma.

A recent academic paper shows that rises in the number of kids having suicidal thoughts were actually caused by changes in methodology of measurement much more than actual self-harm and suicide.

What You Need to Know About Youth Suicide, by the National Alliance on Mental Illness

“Suicidal thoughts are common among teens and young adults. In fact, about 11% of young adults (ages 18-25) report that they’ve had serious thoughts about suicide, and about 1–2% report a suicide attempt during the prior year. These numbers are higher among high school students — nearly 20% report serious thoughts about suicide and 9% report a suicide attempt. Among young adults 15–24 years old in the U.S., the rate of death by suicide in 2019 was about 14 per 100,000 people — slightly higher than one suicide for every 10,000 people in this age group.”

CDC data finds sharp rise in suicide attempts among teen girls amid COVID-19

“Emergency department (ED) visits for suspected suicide attempts among females ages 12–17 increased 51% during February–March 2021 compared with 2019. Visits among males during that time increased 4%”

Yes, we do know social media isn't safe for kids, by Jean Twenge

“… there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health.”

Suicide is Gen Z's second-leading cause of death, and it's a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age.

“Since 2014, millennials (or people who turned 23 to 38 in 2019) have seen a 47% increase in major-depression diagnoses. "Deaths of despair," or dying from suicide, alcohol, and drugs, increased in the millennial population in the last 10 years, and they are more likely to report feeling lonely than other generations.”

Surgeon General report: Social Media and Youth Mental Health

“As of 2021, 8th and 10th graders now spend an average of 3.5 hours per day on social media. In a unique natural experiment that leveraged the staggered introduction of a social media platform across U.S. colleges, the roll-out of the platform was associated with an increase in depression (9% over baseline) and anxiety (12% over baseline) among college-aged youth (n = 359,827 observations). The study’s co-author also noted that when applied across the entirety of the U.S. college population, the introduction of the social media platform may have contributed to more than 300,000 new cases of depression.”

The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls, by Jon Haidt

“Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.”

What should parents do?

Jon Haidt’s three recommendations.

**Keeping teens safe on social media: What parents should know to protect their kids.

It Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here’s What to Do Now.

**11 Social Media Red Flags Parents Should Know About.

If you enjoy my content, please forward it to your friends. Thank you.

david siegel 8/8/23 david siegel 8/8/23

YouTube Resources for Kids

My boys and I learn science online. They love their online school, but using YouTube videos, they can find things they want to learn and share. Here are my top suggestions for kids of all ages:

Richard Feynman

For us, everything starts with Richard Feynman. I have been reading Feynman to my kids since they were 5 years old. Great books to read to kids include The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, and What do you Care what Other People Think? Other books are more technical and too difficult for bedside reading, but those stories are fantastic, especially if you can fake a Feynman accent.

Then there are videos, here is a selection:

The Character of Physical Law, Part 1

The Character of Physical Law, Part 2

Quantum Mechanics, Part 1

Quantum Mechanics, Part 2

Advice to Students

The World from Another Point of View

YouTube channels on science

Veritasium

Minute Earth

Minute Physics

Tom Scott - various

Steve Mould - physics

Action Lab - physics

VSauce

Brain Games

Quirkology - Richard Wiseman

Nile Red - chemistry

SciShow - general

Our videos

My son Micah and I made a video showing the shapes of the orbitals of the first 18 elements.

Shai and I made one explaining the Monty Hall Problem.

Shai and I made a bridge out of spaghetti and then ate it.

Shai and I show how to make a ferrofluid.

And Micah's channel Nature's Guardians adds a new interview with someone working to save animals every week. Please subscribe!

If you enjoy my content, please sign up for the newsletter below.

david siegel 7/25/23 david siegel 7/25/23

Ideas for Grandparents of Teens

I’ve learned that parents are busy, tired, distracted, and can be on different wavelengths than their kids. If parents take a vacation with kids, the parents often want to hang at the pool and recharge their batteries rather than take them on an adventure. Parents can get stuck trying to motivate teens and wonder what they can do to get them off their screens and into a more active, productive life.

Grandparents to the rescue! Today’s grandparents are fitter, smarter, and richer than ever. As a grandparent, you can do things parents can’t and have a huge impact on a child’s life. Here are seven simple examples from our newsletter:

1. Enroll a child in a dual fitness challenge.

You and your grandchild sign up to do something hard, something challenging, something rewarding. Examples are the Tough Mudder challenges, a fundraising campaign for a nonprofit the child is interested in, a running race, cycling event, hill climb, etc. You could rent or borrow a tandem bicycle and ride together to raise money for charity. Hike to the top of a big mountain — one you’ll need to practice and get in shape for (Mount Kilimanjaro comes to mind). Line dancing. Doubles pickleball tournament. Summiting ten of Colorado’s famed fourteener mountains. Even better if it’s far away, so you can train with the child and then take a trip to compete together.

2. Enroll a child in a decathlon challenge.

In his book Outlive, which I highly recommend for all adults, Peter Attia talks about the “senior decathlon,” which is a number of different physical challenges, like stair climbing, jumping rope, swimming, walking, running, lifting weights, etc. Choose ten varied activities and measure your own performance on each one. Then, add a multiplier to each to account for the child’s age and ability. Then challenge the child to a duel on a certain date, and offer a cash prize to the winner. On the big date, invite others to celebrate and document the challenge. Involve other families! Give out awards, prizes, and cash.

3. Give the child the gift of less myopia.

Because of screens and spending less time outdoors, more and more kids are getting myopia (nearsightedness). A company called Treehouse Eyes offers special treatments with the goal of retarding or stopping their myopia. If a child tolerates them, they can prescribe hard contact lenses that the child sleeps in overnight, removes them in the morning, and goes glasses-free for the entire day! If they can’t tolerate the hard lenses, they have soft lenses and drops that can help prevent myopia from getting worse. Most parents don’t know about this. Get involved in their eye care and it could make a huge difference, especially for kids who aren’t excited about wearing glasses all day at school.

4. Travel therapy.

Come up with a destination and a challenge to do together. This is similar to the fitness challenge, but it involves a trip to a destination important to the child. If the child is interested in ancient Egypt, architecture, whitewater rafting, Paris, panda bears, or any other topic, have her design and complete her own course, make a presentation on the topic, and then take her there on a trip to learn in-depth. Have her make a video report and post it to YouTube to show her friends what she learned. If you’ve never been to Africa or Burning Man, check with us — we’ll help you arrange that special adventure with your grandkids they’ll never forget.

5. Start a podcast.

My son is 12. He’s interested in video games and animals, and that’s about it. To get him off the console, I suggested we create a weekly podcast to interview people saving wildlife around the world. Now he has a database of interview candidates, a full calendar, a growing fan base, and he gets to star in a new video each week. He spends hours exploring websites and reaching out to people, and he gets more and more referrals from his interviewees. He prepares and writes questions in advance. It’s building his portfolio, his esteem, gets him out of bed in the morning, and best of all we work together on it almost daily. I do the editing and design work and a lot of coordination, but he’s really energized about it, and the guests are all very impressed that he’s making a difference. His channel is called Nature’s Guardians. You can do all this. All it takes is Zoom and some help. It’s actually fairly easy to hire a remote professional video editor who can do a lot of the work and manage the channel. Or - hey! - learn to edit videos and be the child’s partner in creating them every week. This gives you and your grandchild 4+ hours of collaboration every week doing something meaningful together.

6. Start your grandchildren thinking in bets.

You can install a money and betting system that will help them resolve their differences and disagreements by betting, rather than fighting. There is a book on this and so many good reasons to try it. It’s applied game theory for kids, and it works. Read my blog post on setting up a money system.

7. Learn a new hobby or skill with your grandchildren.

Maybe they’d like to learn to play an instrument or learn a language or start a business. Tell them you’ll fund it and do it with them. Come up with a plan and do it together. This is great for learning a new skill, which helps keep grandparents sharp, and bonding with your grandkids at the same time. Your granddaughter wants to learn fencing? Congratulations! You always wanted to learn to fence, didn’t you?

These are just a few things grandparents can do to engage teens and play a more active role in their lives.

david siegel 7/17/23 david siegel 7/17/23

Why and How to Increase your Grip Strength

As Peter Attia explains in his book, Outlive, grip strength is a key indicator of health as we age. Improving grip strength is one of several ways we can make ourselves stronger and more agile that will pay off as we get older. Why? Because anyone can walk around, get into a car, go up a flight of stairs. What hurts people and sets them back is a stumble, a fall, a bump, losing balance, etc. In these situations, lightning-fast reflexes and strength will make the difference between walking away and a trip to the hospital. The older you get, the easier it is to get hurt and the longer it takes to recover.

In fact, I think we should all learn and practice how to fall, because we want to build those reflexes to prevent us getting hurt some day in the future.

Back to grip strength. It's easy to improve your grip strength. Get a couple of grip strengtheners and keep them in your bedroom, living room, office, and car. Here are the two I use most often:

I like silicone rings, there are several companies that make them:

These rings are great, but they can also stretch the skin of your fingers a bit, which can be uncomfortable. I use a small amount of lotion on my hands, which solves the problem and is good for my hands anyway.

With any grip strengthener, the range of 30-50 pounds is where most of the action is. If you're starting very weak, you might want a 20, but most people can start with 30. I generally use 40 and 50 pound trainers. I've tried 60 and don't get any extra benefit. You're not trying to be a grip specialist, you're just trying to build and maintain good grip strength for the senior decathlon I keep talking about.

I also use the Niyikow cheap Chinese grip trainers, and I like them a lot:

These are comfortable, and you can dial in the resistance. I keep one on my desk and the other near my bed. They have lasted six months, I think they'll keep working for a few years. They have the benefit of not stretching your skin, so I often reach for one of these first.

Try a grip strengthener. Don't overdo it. Take a few months to get up to a mid-range routine, then just use them whenever you go on a walk or take a trip to the mailbox, etc. You'll feel the difference and will be on your way to becoming a senior decathlete!

david siegel 6/26/23 david siegel 6/26/23

Online courses for homeschoolers

david siegel 6/21/23 david siegel 6/21/23

Create a Money System for Kids

A great way to teach kids about money is to set up a money system. Here’s how …

Children as young as 8 years old can start learning about money. Too often, kids think that if they just ask long enough, they will get what they want. Too often, they are right. A great way to teach kids about money is to set up a money system. Here’s how …

Give them an allowance each week and keep track of how much they have. You can use a piece of paper taped to the fridge, you can use a spreadsheet or you can use a system like Notion. I have my kids using Notion for all kinds of things, so it’s easy for all of us to access the money system there.
Whenever you have a job you want done, offer it to the kids and tell them you pay $10 an hour (or some reasonable amount). If they want to pick up some extra money, they should be willing to do some extra housework, yardwork, etc. Give them credit in the ledger.
When they want something extra - something you aren’t already going to get for them - insist that they spend their own money. If your kids want something special at the grocery store or when shopping, tell them they can buy it with their own money. I’ll give examples below.
It also gives kids a way to settle disputes.
It’s also a great way to manage chores and things that need to be done. I’ll give an example of cleaning up after our bird.

While a money system may be a bit of extra work for parents, it gives kids a foundation for making tradeoffs and decisions. A money system helps kids think through and appreciate their own decisions, and it helps them see the consequences later.

A great book on this is Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke. I recommend parents read it and explain it to kids, or at least have them watch her Google talk:

The basics

I use our money system to get my kids to behave the way I want them to. It’s simple, and it works. I don’t give my kids hard rules. I tell my kids to “do the right thing,” and “don’t do any wrong things.” They know very well when they are doing something wrong, and if I see it, there can be a charge. Usually, I give a warning first, but if it happens again, they lose money. Here’s how I set it up:

Incentive: $10/week for doing an hour of real helping above and beyond the obvious things. This is not too difficult. They are expected to help clean up and be generally helpful.

Penalties (money goes back to me unless it says otherwise):

$40 for telling a serious lie
$20 for hitting or kicking - money goes to the victim
$10 for pushing or forbidden words
$10 for minor physical injury/insult
$5 for small lies, bad insults, excess yelling, doing the wrong thing when you know better
$2 for leaving something where it shouldn’t be - anyone who puts it away gets the reward from the one who left it out (usually dishes in the living room)

It’s important that the lie is the most expensive. Otherwise, if the lie costs less, then they will figure out that it’s cheaper to lie about things. Obviously, there are times when you have to make a judgment call about things you saw or didn’t see, and in many cases a warning comes first, but in general it’s possible to create a system like this and get the changes you want.

I often say “Hey, if you prefer to spend your money on hitting and yelling than buying games and toys, that’s fine with me. Go right ahead.” This stops any aggressive behavior in its tracks. It’s great in the car or on a trip.

If they leave the Monopoly board after playing, I say “You’re telling me you want me to clean up the Monopoly board and put everything away? Sure. I charge $10 for that, I’ll get started right now.” And they jump into action.

If my boys leave a towel on the bathroom floor, I charge $5 to put it away on the rack. When I see a towel on the floor, I say “Hey, a towel on the floor! I’m just going to pick this up and put it on the rack,” and an 11-year-old flies in and puts it on the rack before I can bend down. So now it’s a rush to do things rather than a delay.

Occasionally, one of them will want to make some more money, so I offer him to help do specific jobs. I pay $10 an hour for this kind of help as well. More than a few times, one of the boys has said “Dad, do you need anything done I can do for an hour?”

I charge the boys $20 per cavity filling at the dentist, so when they complain about toothbrushing, I say no problem, we’ll see how many cavities you have at the next checkup, and the toothbrushes start wiggling.

When we go someplace like Disneyland, I say “Okay, each of you gets $30. You can spend it on anything you want, you can save it, or you can add your own money and get something for more than $30.”

When we go shopping, if Micah wants something a bit extravagant, say a large chocolate bar that costs $15, I say “Okay, I’ll pay ten and you can pay the difference, and we’ll get it.” Now, when it comes to him spending his own money, he has to think twice how much he wants the chocolate bar vs what else he could get for his $5. We do this on all kinds of things. If he wants me to order dinner from Door Dash, I say “Sure, I’ll pay for the dinner, and you pay all the extra fees and delivery.” Once in a while he does it, the rest of the time, we eat what we have at home.

The boys wanted a PS5. I said okay, I’ll pay 1/3, and each of you pay 1/3 and we’ll get it, but you’re responsible for buying your own games. Rather than getting it on Amazon, the boys thought getting a refurbished unit on eBay was a good idea.

Micah wanted new headphones. Since his brother’s cost $150, I told him he had $150 in credit for headphones. He bought exactly the headphones he wanted but he got them refurbished from eBay for half price and pocketed $75 for his account to use on other things.

Shai he would pay Micah not to say anything unnecessary for one whole day. He managed to do it, and Shai paid Micah $8. It was a lovely day.

Micah studied Lincoln so he could tell his cousin about Lincoln when he came to DC. We were talking and I said Lincoln is buried in Illinois. Micah said no, not Illinois, somewhere else. Instead of arguing, we bet. Lincoln is buried in Ohio. I lost $5.

When a child does something really well, I don’t reward that with money or much praise. As we know, praise is dangerous. I acknowledge it, try to be specific in saying what he did that I liked, and that’s about it. I want them to have their own intrinsic motivations for doing things well. I don’t want them doing things for the reward.

Occasionally, when there are a lot of arguments, I call for a 30-minute “quiet period,” where there is total silence in the house. Anyone who speaks is charged $5 per word. They can write on paper if they need to communicate. This silence is golden, and afterward the yelling does not resume.

Disagreements

My kids disagree with each other all the time. A few weeks ago, the younger one bragged to the older one that he had been to Sedna, a planet in the game WarFrame. The older one said he hadn’t. They didn’t argue about it, they bet. They called me up and told me to turn on the game and see where he had been, and it turned out he had never been to Sedna, so the younger one lost $5 to his brother.

There are very good reasons smart people should settle their differences with bets. A fantastic book on this topic is Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke. Betting helps you reduce overconfidence and forces you to think which arguments are really important to you. If you’re not willing to bet, it’s not worth arguing about. Once you have a money system set up, here are a few rules for betting:

Set a maximum bet amount.
Bets are good for the entire family - kids and parents should be willing to bet against each other. Last week, Micah and I were on a walk. He said that a particular restaurant up ahead was Mexican, “because it smells Mexican.” I said he gets $5 if it’s Mexican, and I get $5 if it’s anything other than Mexican. It turned out to be Mexican. I lost $5.
Don’t let one person take advantage of another by betting on something she knows the answer to. If you know the answer, it’s not a bet.
Settle immediately using the money system.
No borrowing. No doubling down. No cheating.

If you set up a betting system, give it a few months for everyone to get the hang of it. Go slowly and use it as a tool for learning and settling disputes. Let me know how it goes.

Using Notion to set up a system

I’ve been talking about the benefits of setting up a money system, and it’s easy to do. You could use a spreadsheet, but I got my kids to start using Notion, and now we all use the same system in a tab on our browser. Here’s a simple version:

This uses a formula at the end that maintains a running total for each boy. You could also do this using a shared spreadsheet. We use the honor system to make sure no one cheats. Cheating discovered would be very expensive.

Each week, the boys get their allowance. Then, if they do something wrong, I deduct the penalty amount. If the boys bet or transfer money, then you put the same amount in with a minus sign in one column and no minus sign in the other. The sums at the end are automatic.

If you want help doing this, get in touch!

Tracking bird poops

We have a conure - a small parrot - named Pickle. Like most parrots, Pickle poops 3 times every hour when he’s awake, for a total of about 36 poops every day. About half of these go under his perch or in his cage; the rest we have to chase down and clean up. As you can imagine, the boys who wanted a pet so badly and promised to clean up after the bird are much better at playing with Pickle than they are at cleaning up his messes. So I implemented a money system that works FLAWLESSLY, and I want to give it to you so you can use it if you want. Remember, the boys already get allowance and we have rules for other actions. Here are the rules for cleaning up parrot poops:

We have a sheet taped to the cabinet that looks like this —>

There is a pencil on a string nearby. Every vertical line is a poop that someone cleaned up. I’ll start with the case when only two of us are home. In that case, whenever Micah cleans one, he gets a point, which means I owe him $1. Whenever I clean one, I get $1 from him. Since Pepper isn’t around, this is a two-way competition to clean up, and you can see in the first section that Micah came out ahead by 4 points, so I owe him $4. We carry that over to the next day.
The next day, Pepper was with us, so it was a three-way race. Everytime anyone cleans up a mess, he puts a mark in his column and the other two owe him $1 each. But we are also on the lookout and clean as soon as we can, and as you can see it comes out fairly even. At this snapshot, Pepper owes each of us $3.

This set of game mechanics incentivizes everyone to clean up a mess as soon as Pickle drops it. It incentivizes us all equally, so if one person is getting behind, he has a strong incentive to catch up. If Pepper wants to just focus on other things and let the two of us do most of the cleaning, then he has to pay us to do his share.

There are a few minor rules to know: A) If Pickle is sitting on me and I take him to his perch to poop, then he has 1 minute to poop and I will get credit. If he doesn’t do it in 1 minute, then I don’t get credit. B) If Pickle poops on our shirts or pants, we automatically get the credit, because that still accomplishes the ultimate goal of zero poops. C) Anyone who finds an old poop that no one saw before gets credit for cleaning it up.

In this way, we have a clean house! It works! The money system changes from “Micah, did you clean up your bird’s mess today?” to “I got it! I got it! Move aside, I’ll take care of this!” A money system can really eliminate a lot of conflict.

You can use a money system to gamify your home and the mechanics of getting things done. You may need to be creative in coming up rules. If you get what you want, keep the rules. If you aren’t getting good results, change them.

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A few caveats before we begin …

This is in six parts:

Part 1: Human Reproductive Biology Basics

Introduction

The most important message

The gap in our knowledge

How many people are having sex?

What is a woman?

Are girls having their periods earlier?

What is sex?

When you’re born, how big are your ovaries? How many eggs do you have at birth?

Do kids masturbate?

How early do girls start having sex with boys?

What is a woman’s menstrual cycle?

Do all mammals menstruate?

How do women get pregnant?

Will my Boobies get Bigger?

How do men work?

All about orgasms

Medical conditions

Other types of sex

Questions and Answers

Summary

Resources

Books

Articles

Websites

Podcasts

Toys for girls

Putting in the hours

Emergent Ventures

Bonding

Part I: Humans, you are in for a bumpy ride

Today: humans decide

The machine economy

The next ten years

Screens

Part II: In which large language models turn us into their slaves

Basic principles

How they will take advantage

Part III: You’re about to get a lot more of what you unconsciously think you want

Groupthink in the age of AI

First, the data

What should parents know?

What should parents do?

General information

1. Build your personal online brain system

Mondays at 2pm EST

2. Future of work to 2060

Tuesdays at noon EST

3. Thinking in bets

4. Humans and the natural world

5. Virtual Kilimanjaro climb

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The basics

Disagreements

Tracking bird poops

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