#EVOLvingBiz w/ @TheXLR8team at the intersection of #ConsciousCapitalism #Evolution and #PositivePsychology. #ROC ❤ #CUSE 🏀 #Mets ⚾️ @Cornell @Penn
Rochester, NY
Joined January 2009
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Honored and deeply grateful for my FIRST #EVOLvingBiz #BookReview in the @PennMAPPAlumni magazine!
mappmagazine.com/articles/wh…
Currently working on final edits and awaiting a publication date. Sign up for updates:
thexlr8team.com/book
#ConsciousCapitalism #InclusiveProsperity
Andrew Brady retweeted
Thirty years of research has identified one of the strongest predictors of anxiety, depression, PTSD, and addiction.
It's how unwilling you are to sit with an uncomfortable feeling.
Why modern life is making this worse
We’re all avoiding the experience of discomfort: substack.com/home/post/p-194…
Andrew Brady retweeted
Parents, I'm a psychology professor and the developer of Independence Therapy for Anxious kids.
The easiest way to set your child on a path to independence is to begin with one simple question.
"What's something you've never done before, without an adult, that you would like to try?"
You might just be amazed at the answers you get.
Share what your child said below!
Andrew Brady retweeted
"Our technology keeps getting better. Our social lives keep getting smaller...
Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party.
Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. It requires matching schedules, cleaning the house, buying food, accommodating children and allergies, tolerating awkwardness, and taking the risk that the evening is mediocre. By contrast, what does television ask of us? Nothing. TikTok? Even less.
We keep creating opportunities for downtime that eliminate the need for other people to be present."
derekthompson.org/p/the-deat…
Andrew Brady retweeted
One of my subway takes is that the most valuable person in any friend group is the one who actually makes the plan.
New newsletter: THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN HOST
The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has declined by 70 percent in the last 50 years.
derekthompson.org/p/the-deat…
I feel like I’m an outlier for frequency of hosting, but that’s probably still not monthly. Honestly shocked it’s 12% and fairly certain it’d be <1% for people under 40.
Yesterday was National “Good Neighbor” Day. Resolve to build some #SocialCapital and host something!
👞👟🤟🏼
New newsletter: THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN HOST
The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has declined by 70 percent in the last 50 years.
derekthompson.org/p/the-deat…
Andrew Brady retweeted
The single most powerful anti-anxiety activity for children that exists is exhilirating/mildly risky play.
Our society has systematically moved to stamp it out, to the point of criminalizing it.
High anxiety in kids is the least surprising outcome we could have predicted.
Andrew Brady retweeted
About a year ago, a Princeton student named Kyler Zhou was sitting in traffic in New Jersey. At some point he was so bored that he put on a podcast with… me 🙃
It was my usual talk about the talent crisis. About the smartest kids of a generation going to work for McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, while the biggest problems in the world go unsolved, blablabla, you may have heard it by now ;)
What’s interesting is what happened next. As soon as Kyler got home, he emailed me and The School for Moral Ambition (the organization we started to get talented people working on the world's biggest problems).
Kyler wanted to bring this to Princeton.
Well, we told him no 😅. We had just launched our first university fellowship at Harvard, and there was no capacity for a second campus...
Kyler decided to ignore us. Three days into the semester, he launched the first* Moral Ambition Chapter at a university in the United States. In just a few days, more than 120 Princeton students signed up. In November of last year I visited, and the energy was simply AMAZING.
Since then, everything has been escalating. Students have started Moral Ambition Chapters at Brown, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Georgetown and 5 other campuses – often before we've heard of them.
Which brings me to today. After the launch of our Harvard Fellowship (8% of ALL Harvard juniors applied to the first cohort!), we're now also launching Moral Ambition Fellowships at Princeton, Brown, Vanderbilt and Stanford. The program is simple: twelve super talented students per campus, a $15,000 stipend, and a summer working full-time on the most important causes of our time, like lead poisoning or child poverty or ending factory farming or AI safety etc. – instead of polishing a boring corporate pitch deck.
It's just incredible to see how quickly this movement is growing. Every year, thousands of brilliant graduates are funneled into corporate careers that add little to the world. More and more of them are starting to walk the other way.
(For students: applications for Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Vanderbilt are open now. Stanford opens October 6. moralambition.org/fellowship…)
* Brown University claims that they were actually the first – I've decided to stay neutral in this quarrel 😅
Andrew Brady retweeted
"It is now the least rewarding time to be a worker in the U.S. economy since the government started keeping track." nbcnews.com/business/economy…
Andrew Brady retweeted
Anxious kids don’t need more reassurance. They need repeated practice at doing hard things without a parent hovering. One concrete start: let a 9-year-old walk to the corner store alone while you stay home. Sit with your own discomfort. That’s the treatment.
Andrew Brady retweeted
Gen Z is moving money from stocks to sports betting in wealth plans, 52% of them have redirected inv funds to sports betting and quarter of them treat sports betting as a deliberate part of their long-term financial plan, according to survey from Betterment. Wow.
100% accurate, but now I just want to know what it’s like everywhere else…and also how the erosion of social capital (i.e. “Bowling Alone”) has impacted the American “I got a guy” economy.
I mentioned that my garage door was making a sound.
An American immediately said, "I got a guy."
He did not ask what the sound was. He did not ask what kind of door. He produced a guy on the basis of the word garage.
I asked who the guy was.
He said, "Just a guy."
He did not have a company name. He had a first name and a phone number in his phone saved as "Mike Garage."
That is the contact name. Mike Garage. As though Garage is his surname. As though there is a family.
I asked how he found this guy.
"My brother-in-law used him."
I asked if the brother-in-law was satisfied.
He thought about it. Then he said, "He's still standing."
The house is still standing. That is the entire review.
Inside I said: THEY DO NOT KEEP RECORDS. THEY KEEP LOYALTIES.
I called Mike Garage. He answered from inside a vehicle. There was wind. He said he could come Tuesday between eleven and four.
Between eleven and four. A window of five hours. In my country this would be a scandal. Here it is generous. He gave me a window at all. Some guys do not give you a window. Some guys say "Tuesday" and that is the whole appointment.
He came at 1:40.
He fixed it in twenty minutes. He charged me less than I expected and he did not take a card, only cash or an app I had never heard of.
Before leaving he looked at my water heater, which I had not mentioned, and said, "That's gonna go."
I asked when.
"Couple years."
I asked what I should do.
He said, "I'll give you a guy."
He gave me a guy. Mike Garage has a guy. The guy has a guy. There is a network beneath this country made entirely of men named after their function, and none of them advertise, and all of them are busy.
Inside I said: THERE IS A SECOND NATION HERE. IT HAS NO SIGNS. IT IS ENTERED ONLY BY INTRODUCTION.
I have been given four guys since.
I have a guy for trees.
I did not know I needed a guy for trees.
I have trees now, apparently. They are my responsibility. A man named Rick told me so and then left.
Andrew Brady retweeted
Jo Nagai was raising swallowtail butterflies at his home in Kobe, Japan, when he noticed something odd. The ones he had looked after as caterpillars seemed to recognize him. Wild butterflies fled. His didn't.
He was in second grade. He wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Martha Weiss, an entomologist at Georgetown University who had studied whether moths could retain memories through metamorphosis. He asked if she could help him design a version of her experiment for butterflies.
She said yes.
Using a muscle therapy device, Jo trained caterpillars to associate the scent of lavender with a mild vibration. When the caterpillars became butterflies, 70 per cent of them still avoided the lavender. Their brains had been completely rebuilt during metamorphosis. The memory survived anyway.
Then he bred them.
The offspring, which had never been trained, also avoided lavender. So did their grandchildren. Without ever experiencing the vibration, two generations of butterflies inherited an aversion to a scent their grandmother had been taught to fear.
Jo documented it all in a 33-page research paper and presented his findings at the International Congress of Entomology in Kobe in 2024. He was 10.
A second grader wrote a letter to a Georgetown professor, and together they found evidence that butterflies can pass memories down through generations.
-Wilderness Whisper
Andrew Brady retweeted
There's a wild economics phenomenon behind the decline of every venue in these charts. Almost nobody knows its name.
Start with what it isn't. It isn't an American problem. Britain, the country that invented the pub, has lost 16,150 of them since 2000. Over a third, gone. Same slope, different continent, no car culture to blame.
The actual culprit was discovered by accident in 1966. An economist named William Baumol was hired to answer a boring question: why were symphony orchestras always broke? Sold-out halls, rich patrons, government grants, and the books never balanced. Any city. Any decade.
Then he noticed the thing hiding in plain sight. A Beethoven string quartet took four musicians and 40 minutes to perform in 1826. In 1966, it took four musicians and 40 minutes. Productivity gain across 140 years: zero. But those musicians live in the modern economy, where the factory worker's output grew 20x. Pay them like it's 1826 and they leave to work in the factory. So their wages rise while their output stands still, and costs climb forever.
Baumol called it cost disease. Every bar, bowling alley, and movie theater in these charts has a terminal case. A bartender pours the same drinks per hour as in 1980. A theater fills the same seats per screen. Flat output, compounding rent, labor, and insurance.
Your couch caught the opposite condition. Quality-adjusted TV prices fell 97% since 2000, per BLS. Streaming ships infinite content for $15 a month. One more night in costs approximately nothing.
Tickets up 42%. TVs down 97%. Americans and Brits both read those price tags every Friday for 25 years. The charts show the verdict.
And here's Baumol's grimmest finding: cost disease has no cure. Nothing makes a bar 10x better at being a bar, because the inefficiency IS the product. Humans, in a room, taking their time.
The couch just keeps getting cheaper.
America is running out of places to gather:
Bars and clubs per capita have fallen over 60% since the late 1970s, and since 2001 a fifth of movie theaters have shut their doors.
Over the past two decades, the country has lost roughly 2,000 golf courses and 7,000 bars and nightclubs.
Catching live music now costs a pretty penny: top-tour concert tickets averaged $134 last year, up +42% from 2019.
So Americans stay in. Nearly 80% see friends and family less than three times a week.
Read that again.
America has traded their community for their couch.
Andrew Brady retweeted
The US loves to boast about how wealthy it is, but its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs.
US oligarchs are so insanely rich that they make average wealth seem very high.
But *median* wealth in the US is lower than in Slovenia & Portugal, and half of Italy's
Surprising (not really) stat from the new UBS Global Wealth Report 2026.
The US ranks #2 when you look at average (mean) wealth per adult, but drops to #28 when you look at the median.
ubs.com/content/dam/assets/w…
Andrew Brady retweeted
it is genuinely psychotic that we dug up literal primordial dirt, scrubbed it down to an impossible 99.9999999999% molecular perfection that violates the very laws of physics, handed it over to techno-wizard necromancers to stretch into flawless geometric god-cylinders, blasted it with invisible uv death-rays to carve ten quadrillion microscopic cyber-sigils into its flesh, trapped actual lightning inside of it, and somehow birthed an omniscent eldritch deity capable of simulating the universe and thinking faster than a billion human civilizations combined.
and our grand, supreme purpose for this enslaved lightning-god?
sending "per my last email, please see attached" to a guy named gary.
Andrew Brady retweeted
There is a better way.
Play the penalty shootout straight after 90 mins.
The winner of the shootout gets a 0.5 goal lead going into 30 mins of extra time.
Now the team that lost the pens has a chance to win and crucially, no matter score, there is one team that has to go for it at all times, making extra time fun too.
From @TheAthleticFC: Penalty shootouts are brutal. Is there a better way to settle tied games? A fairer way? A more fitting test of skills?
We asked our writers and this is what they think the World Cup can steal from other sports: nyti.ms/3SAbKgI
Andrew Brady retweeted
A team of undergraduates from @CornellCALS and @CornellEng beat out 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their invention: an autonomous robot that kills weeds with electricity.
Their robot can travel through a vineyard or orchard without a human operator, zapping weeds with a small amount of electricity, saving labor and energy, and preventing crop loss, without the use of herbicides.
Read more: news.cornell.edu/stories/202…
Andrew Brady retweeted
Norway wins the most medals at the Winter Olympics, with a population of just 5.6 million. People say it’s because Norway is a winter wonderland, but they’re also elite at triathlon, beach volleyball, cycling, and as the world is now seeing, soccer.
A big part of their success is how they treat youth sports—and it’s the opposite of what we do in the US and Canada. Here’s what we can learn from Norway:
1. Scorekeeping:
In the US: Youth sports tend to be hyper competitive even at early ages. Leagues almost always keep score.
In Norway: Scorekeeping isn’t even allowed until age 13.
Removing winners and losers keeps the focus on the process not outcomes. It keeps kids engaged longer because it minimizes pressure (and tears) and maximizes fun, learning, and growth. The goal isn’t to win a third grade championship. It’s to love sport and keep playing.
2. Trophies:
In the US: If you give everyone a trophy, you’re creating snowflakes who will never gain a competitive edge.
In Norway: Whenever trophies are awarded, they are handed out to everyone.
If getting a trophy makes young kids feel good, we should give them trophies. Maybe they’ll come back and play again next year!!
As for the creation of snowflakes with no competitive edge—Norway’s athletes are tough as nails and all they do is win.
3. Prioritizing Fun:
In the US: Far too often, the goal is to win.
In Norway: The national philosophy is “joy of sport.”
Youth sports in the US are driven by adults, ego, and money. Youth sports in Norway are driven by fun.
Only half of kids in the US participate in sports. The number one reason they drop out: because they aren’t having fun anymore. In Norway, 93% of kids participate in youth sports. Fun is the foremost goal.
4. Playing Multiple Sports:
In the US: There’s pressure to specialize early and play your best sport year round.
In Norway: Try as many sports as you can before specializing as late as college.
Norway encourages kids to try all types of sport. This reduces injury and burnout and increases all-around athleticism. It also helps promotes match quality, or finding the sport you are best suited for as your body develops, which is impossible if you commit to a single sport too early.
5. Affordability
In the US: There is increasingly a pay-to-play model with high fees for leagues, equipment, and travel. This excludes many kids from playing.
In Norway: It’s a national priority to keep youth sports affordable and therefore accessible for all.
Kids aren’t priced out, which creates opportunities for everyone to participate (and develop into athletes), regardless of their parents’ income level.
Norway’s sporting success isn’t just speculation or a nice story. A large body of research supports their approach:
• Studies show athletes who specialize later in life have a significantly higher chance of becoming elite.
• Soccer players whose motivation is primarily internal (versus external) have more than a 3x better chance of making it to an elite level.
• The number one predictor of whether or not kids stay in sport is are they having fun.
• Parents connect winning to having fun whereas kids say having fun is about being with their friends and learning.
We could learn a lot from Norway:
In the US, 70% of kids drop out of youth sports by age 13. This not only diminishes an elite-athlete pipeline, but it also destroys an opportunity for healthy habits and all the character lessons kids can learn from sport.
In Norway, lifelong participation in sport is the norm. The goal isn’t to have the best 9U team. It’s to develop the best athletes. Those are two very different things. And Norway has the medals to prove it.
Andrew Brady retweeted
Step 1: Remove filters in Reflecting Pool because Obama put them in.
Step 2: Give your criminal neighbor who runs "Greenwater Services" a $20 million no-bid contract to paint the pool.
Step 3: Fill the pool with water from the Potomac River, the phosphates from which cause algae blooms.
Step 4: Freshly sealed pool and extreme heat result in a super scum event
Step 5: Direct National Park Service to dump hydrogen peroxide into the pool which causes the paint to peel.
Step 5: Deploy US National Guard to stop people from taking photos of the swamp as a perfect metaphor for the administration.
Step 6: Blame someone else.
