21 January 2026

Americans Mostly Uneasy About Trump's Presidency (but also frustrated, unsafe, exhausted ...)

The pursuit of happiness seems to have taken us down a rabbit hole.





So, America, how do you feel about Trump's presidency?
Mixed. I have mixed feelings.


Market Manipulation and Puzzling Political Orientation

Trump says he'll invade Greenland. Markets fall nearly 2%.
Trump says he won't invade Greenland. Markets rise nearly 2%.
Market manipulation is incredibly lucrative for folks who know what is coming.

Related, after a generation or two of civics classes being taught by high school football coaches and home schooling parents, there must be millions of Americans surprised to learn that - in spite of what they've been taught - they are actually fascists and not conservatives.

20 January 2026

Trump's Odd Hatred for the Great City of Minneapolis

I've worked with a number of product development teams in Minneapolis and got to spend quite a bit of time there. (Among other things, they have a vibrant medical device industry there.) The simplest way I can think to sum up what a delightfully unexpected place and people it is? The same city gave us Garrison Keillor and Prince.

If a community can nurture and make a home for people so talented and so different, you know that it has a great blend of practical, whimsical, and nurturing, a sense of humor about itself and a sense of respect for others and who they can become.

And the world's oldest toddler has sent troops to that city to disrupt and kill and has sent arrest warrants for Minnesota's governor and Minneapolis's mayor.

I guess a few people who hate Garrison Keillor and or Prince might consider themselves real Americans but that seems odd. What is really American? Lauding the communities that manage to nurture people capable of contributing to the rich culture that makes it so hard to say, exactly, just what America is.

Both weird and unsurprising that Trump finds Minneapolis so offensive.

Stock Market Day After Trump's Announcement That He's Going to War Over Greenland

Markets were down sharply today.
NASDAQ - 2.4%
S&P 500 - 2.1%
Dow - 1.8%

Weird that an American president can't even announce that he's going to war against NATO without investors getting all nervous.

The Toronto Stock Exchange was down about half that, by the way.

Trump Daily Amps Up the Fascist Meter - Serving Subpoenas to Minnesota Governor, Attorney General and Minneapolis Mayor

Trump is casually planning going to war with NATO - putting the US in the same camp as Russia - and is arresting state governors, mayors and attorney generals. And some of you supporters of his still think you're conservatives, not fascists. You need to read some history.

From Reuter's ... BREAKING: Subpoenas were served at the offices of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a DOJ official said as protests and an immigration enforcement crackdown continue in the state.

19 January 2026

Time to Invoke the 25th Amendment



The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clarifies presidential succession and disability, establishing procedures for when the President dies, resigns, or is removed, allowing the Vice President to become President (Section 1). It also provides a process for filling a vacant Vice Presidency (Section 2) and mechanisms for temporarily transferring presidential powers (Section 3) or permanently removing a disabled President with Congress's help (Section 4). Ratified in 1967 after President Kennedy's assassination, it addresses succession gaps and presidential inability, ensuring continuity of government.

Donald Trump 2026 - Like King Lear But With Nuclear Weapons

Another way to phrase Donald Trump's note to Norway's Prime Minister?
"Since you would not give me the Nobel Peace Prize I will be going to war with you."


This is surreal. The stuff of a deranged mind. Republicans who continue to support Trump (yes, this includes ordinary Americans and not just elected officials) are colluding with this descent into madness. It is like King Lear - a descent into madness - but with nuclear weapons.


Here is Donald's note from 19 January 2026:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”


18 January 2026

The 100 Year Gap Between the Civil War and Civil Rights - an Argument About How Culture, Entrepreneurship and Institutions Are Connected

Jeremy Bentham wrote that “natural rights” are “nonsense upon stilts.” He was not criticizing rights as aspirations but instead rights without institutions. Bentham’s core claim was brutally pragmatic: You can declare a right all you want, but unless there is organized power to define it, adjudicate it, and enforce it, it doesn’t actually exist.

In other words:
Rights are not self-executing.
Rights without enforcement are moral sentiments, not social facts.
What makes a right real is not the declaration but the machinery behind it.

The United States ended slavery in 1865, but it was not until the 1960s that it built - and enforced - the institutions required for equal citizenship. Progress stalled not for lack of moral clarity, but because power was ceded to those determined to preserve the old order. It was a century between winning the Civil War and winning the fight for civil rights.

Declaring a right is an act of imagination; enforcing it is an act of institution-building. Without the second, the first is just rhetoric. Put differently, rights are not wishes; they are policies backed by power.

Culture defines what we believe should be a right.
Institutions determine whether that belief becomes reliable reality.
Entrepreneurship is the work of building the scaffolding that makes that reality durable.

Each line answers a different question:
Culture answers: What do we owe one another, what norms should we share?
Institutions answer: Can we count on this tomorrow?
Entrepreneurship answers: Who builds the systems that make it so?

Nothing is redundant. Nothing can be skipped.

Many contemporary arguments collapse everything into culture:
“Change hearts”
“Win the narrative”
“Shift norms”

Others collapse everything into policy:
“Pass a law”
“Enforce a rule”
“Fix the system”

But both are incomplete alone.

Culture without institutions is aspiration.
Institutions without culture are brittle and might be ignored.
Entrepreneurship is the missing middle that translates between them.

Rights begin as cultural commitments—and only endure when someone builds the institutions to carry them forward.

17 January 2026

The Difference Between a Conservative and A Fascist

There is a difference between a liberal and a communist and a difference between a conservative and a fascist. If you voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, you're probably a conservative. If you voted for Donald Trump in 2024, you're probably a fascist.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

A Tentative Theory About 20th Century Germany and the US and the Impact of Conscious Social Change on Entrepreneurship

Germany went through multiple, unmistakably distinct phases in the 20th century—imperial, Nazi, occupied, divided East/West, and reunified liberal democracy. The United States changed profoundly too, but in a way that more often felt continuous: less externally imposed, less punctuated by regime replacement, and easier to narrate as organic evolution.
I think we could argue that Germany is more aware that it is constructed, that things could be very different, and that the US is more forgetful of its past. In Germany norms changed abruptly. In the US, they seemed to evolve more organically. In the U.S., many ruptures were narrated as fulfillment (continuity with founding ideals), which keeps “constructedness” less visible.

I'll offer the tentative theory that the US makes it easier for entrepreneurial imagination to flourish but in Germany entrepreneurial efforts might be safer. Put differently, entrepreneurial imagination flourishes more easily in societies that “forget” (where norms feel flexible), but it flourishes more safely and scalably in societies that “know they’re constructed” (where people can redesign rules deliberately). Strong institutions can increase safety and scalability while still reducing the rate of deviation or entrepreneurship. 

Entrepreneurial imagination needs two permissions. First, the cultural permission to deviate—to try something strange without being socially exiled. That’s why looser cultures often produce more startups and experimentation. But imagination also needs a second permission: the institutional permission to scale—rules that make trust, contracts, and cooperation reliable. Without that, entrepreneurship may be abundant but not especially productive. The sweet spot is a society loose enough to try and self-aware enough to redesign the rules so the good experiments can compound.

The practical implication is that entrepreneurial societies need to build institutional literacy: the ability to change rules deliberately without breaking the hidden load-bearing norms. Looseness produces ideas; constructedness produces guardrails. Progress needs both—permission to deviate, and the capacity to institutionalize what works.

Trust and Innovation - The Value of CEO Trust

Research using CEO turnovers and a trust proxy based on culturally inherited “generalized trust” finds that more trusting CEOs foster more exploratory R&D—showing up as ~6% more patents and higher patent quality—consistent with employees feeling safer taking risks.
Raising CEO trust by ~11 percentage points (for example: Greek-American → English-American average trust difference) corresponds to about a 6.3% increase in patents filed, roughly ~1 additional patent per year for the average firm, estimated at ~$3M in additional value. [ source:
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/.../trust...
]

Photo from yesterday as we drove out of the neighborhood. Spectacular sky.



16 January 2026

Harper's Reports - 92 Percent of Investment Driven by Data Centers & How Credit Card Debt is Increasing Divorce Rates

From Harper's Magazine

Estimated percentage of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 that was driven by investment in data centers : 92

    [January 2026 • Source: Jason Furman, Harvard Kennedy School (Cambridge, Mass.)]

Percentage of American couples who got divorced in 2023 who said that credit-card debt was partly to blame : 29

Of those who got divorced in 2025 : 42

    [January 2026 • Source: Debt.com (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)]

Source:
https://harpers.org/harpers-index/?issue_month=01&issue_year=2026

14 January 2026

Institutions As Enablers of Excellence

The aim is not to institutionalize people, making them dependent, but to build enabling institutions: scaffolds that expand human ability by making cooperation reliable and enabling. At their best, institutions are conspiracies to make ordinary people more capable of making a difference in their world, giving people more agency and all that comes with that – from learning to belonging to confidence that one’s effort matters.

W. Edwards Deming put the point more plainly. One of his most radical management principles was that people have a right to take pride in their work. Not pride in themselves alone, but pride in what they helped create. When institutions work, they allow people to say, “Look what I played a part in making possible.” When they fail, they turn effort into frustration—work into motion without meaning.

"Mixed" Reviews on Trump Coming Into His First Anniversary

Well sure, federal troops have invaded American cities to find brown people, Trump is threatening to go to war with NATO for Greenland and to arrest the Fed Chair in order to coerce that institution to set in motion lower rates that would "stimulate" the economy to the point of rampant inflation and the Trump family has made deals with Saudi Arabia and other despotic regimes to increase family wealth by more than $6 billion and Trump has time for all this but no time to release the Epstein files that would reveal details of his close friendship with a pedophile ... and ... and ...

But you sure don't hear about those 6 trans kids playing high school sports anymore. And nobody is eating the dogs and eating the cats now. So, you know, reviews are mixed coming into the first anniversary of Trump's inauguration.

12 January 2026

Trump's Terrible Tariffs and Job Creation Rates

Since Trump announced his tariffs, average monthly job creation has been about 12,000 jobs.

Over the rest of this century - including the Great Recession and COVID - the average monthly job creation rate has been about 94,000 jobs.

Put differently: at the tariff-era pace, it would take two full presidential terms to create as many jobs as the U.S. economy typically creates in a single average year.

We're dangerously close to stall speed.

Tariffs weren’t a bold economic strategy. They were a brake.

I've Replaced my Keyboard with an Ouija Board

My keyboard died and I've temporarily replaced it with an Ouija board. It makes "typing" really slow but the good news is that I'm hearing from people I haven't heard from in a long time.





10 January 2026

2025 Job Creation Less Than 4Q of 2024

In 2024, the economy created more than 2 million jobs. In all of 2025 it created fewer jobs than were created in just the fourth quarter of 2024.
Jobs created
2024 2.012 million
2025 .584 million



If You Were Conscripted into Public-Sector Entrepreneurship Where Would You Focus

If you were conscripted for 12–18 months into public-sector entrepreneurship to help to create, improve, or eliminate our public sector institutions and policies, where would you choose to focus?

Imagine a world where public sector solutions are not always a product of long debates through congress and the oval office but can also emerge out of citizen initiatives, piloted in small areas and then abandoned, revised or scaled up depending on outcomes. As a draftee, you would work with other Americans to create these pop-up institutions that could be relegated to history or emerge as a new pillar of democracy.

• ☐ Primary focus
• ☆ Secondary interest
• ______ Fill-in-the-blank

Possible Public-Sector Entrepreneurship Domains

1. Education & Lifelong Learning
(schools, credentials, re-training, access, outcomes)

2. Workforce & Economic Mobility
(job transitions, entrepreneurship, precarity, local opportunity)

3. Health & Mental Health
(access, prevention, public health, addiction, aging)

4. Housing & Community Development
(affordability, zoning, homelessness, mixed-income communities)

5. Public Safety & Justice
(crime prevention, policing, courts, incarceration alternatives)

6. Climate, Energy & Resilience
(adaptation, infrastructure, water, wildfire, heat)

7. Transportation & Urban Systems
(mobility, congestion, public transit, walkability)

8. Technology, Data & Digital Government
(service delivery, trust, privacy, civic tech)

9. Democracy, Trust & Civic Participation
(elections, institutions, public engagement, misinformation)

10. Immigration & Integration
(newcomer support, labor matching, civic belonging)

11. Research, Science & Long-Term Capability
(R&D, national capacity, moonshots, readiness)

12. International Cooperation & Security
(diplomacy, alliances, global public goods)

13. Arts, Culture & Public Space
(public art, cultural districts, libraries/museums, creative economy, place-making)

14. Public Media, Broadcasting & Civic Information
(PBS/local news partnerships, civic explainers, media literacy, emergency communications, community dialogue)

15. Fill in the Blank

____________________________

You are not fixing everything. You are choosing one place to make something meaningfully better. Democracy should not be something that happens to you. It should be something you help to make happen.

09 January 2026

Excerpt from Pope Leo's State of the World address

"Although the context in which we live today is different from that of the fifth century, some similarities remain highly relevant. We are now, as then, in an era of widespread migratory movements; as then, we are living at a time of a profound readjustment of geopolitical balances and cultural paradigms; as then, we are, in Pope Francis’s well-known expression, not in an era of change but in a change of era.

"In our time, the weakness of multilateralism is a particular cause for concern at the international level. A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies. War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of “the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.” [4] Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence."
...

"The purpose of multilateralism, then, is to provide a place where people can meet and talk, modeled on the ancient Roman Forum or the medieval square.

- Pope Leo XIV First State of the World Address

2025 Was the Slowest Rate of Job Creation Since the Great Recession (And - of course - the Year of COVID)

2025 was the slowest rate of job creation (outside of COVID) since the Great Recession.



07 January 2026

Michael Reagan Dies at 80

Michael Reagan had a sad childhood. His adopted parents were Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. Even though he was Ronald Reagan's son, he lived at boarding school and when he came home to be with Ronald and Nancy, he did not have a bedroom or bed and simply slept on the couch. Hard to imagine that wouldn't leave a kid feeling a bit disoriented.

Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan & a conservative commentator, died 4 January, 2026, at age 80.

When We Began to Wear Clothes for More Than Warmth - Beginning the Move from Living in Nature to Living in Culture

 At a certain point in history, people begin to wear clothing not just for protection from the elements but as a cultural norm. At this point, culture begins to operate as a second skin. Clothing is both literal and symbolic. It is a technology, but it is also a signal—visible evidence that survival has moved beyond mere adaptation to nature and into adaptation to one another.

What clothing marks is the emergence of a new kind of life: not just survival in climate and landscape, but survival in relationship—in reputation, belonging, and shared meaning. Once clothing becomes normal, humans are no longer only animals navigating weather, hunger, and mating. They are social beings navigating expectations, norms, and interpretations.

Clothing, both practically and metaphorically, moves us one step further from a world defined primarily by nature and one step further into a world defined by culture. The body is no longer simply exposed; it is presented. Identity becomes legible. Membership becomes visible.

And the steps that follow extend this trajectory. Homes place a cultural layer between us and the elements. Settlements embed us in social structure. Climate control completes the arc, allowing humans to inhabit environments that would otherwise be unlivable—not by evolving new bodies, but by deepening shared systems of knowledge, cooperation, and design.

Seen this way, human history is not a story of escaping nature so much as interposing culture—adding layers between raw biology and lived experience. Clothing is among the earliest of those layers, a second skin that signals the moment when survival begins to depend less on genes alone and more on what we learn, share, and pass on together.

Politics in a Multicultural America

We went, in the space of a few generations, from one local newspaper and a handful of radio stations to three national television networks; from those shared broadcast rituals to magazines aimed at ever more specific sensibilities; from video stores with finite shelves to the internet’s effectively infinite catalog—memes, movies, lectures, conspiracies, fandoms, ideologies, all jostling for our attention at once.

The good news is obvious. The menu expanded dramatically. Voices once excluded could finally speak. Niche tastes found audiences. Curiosity no longer required permission. If you wanted depth, strangeness, humor, outrage, comfort, or beauty, you could find it—instantly.

But the tradeoff was subtle and only became clear over time. A shared culture does not fragment all at once; it thins, then stretches, then quietly dissolves. When everyone draws from a different information stream, agreement becomes harder—not just about policy, but about meaning. Not only what we should do, but what kind of country we think we live in, what stories count as real, and which events are worth noticing at all.

What felt like liberation at the level of individual choice became disorientation at the level of collective identity.

This is not because Americans suddenly became less reasonable or less patriotic. It is because coherence is an emergent property. It depends on overlap—on common reference points, shared facts, and cultural touchstones that allow disagreement to occur within some mutually intelligible frame. As those overlaps shrink, disagreement stops being a conversation and becomes parallel monologues.

Lewis Carroll anticipated this sensation better than most political theorists ever could. We have wandered, collectively, into a kind of Wonderland—one where nonsense is offered as poetry, where confidence substitutes for meaning, and where everyone seems to be talking, but no one quite appears to be talking to anyone else. Like Alice at the tea party, we sense that a conversation is underway, yet we “can’t quite follow it,” because the rules keep changing and the participants seem to be answering questions no one else asked.






Rabbit holes are, in themselves, a wonderful thing. Curiosity is not the enemy. Exploration is not the problem. The problem arises when a society becomes all rabbit holes and no common ground—when every individual experience is rich, but the collective story grows thin.

The information economy did not merely give us more facts. It gave us more realities. And while that abundance made personal freedom easier to exercise, it made social agreement far harder to maintain. We gained choice faster than we developed new institutions, norms, or habits capable of helping us choose together.

In that sense, our cultural confusion is not a failure of values so much as a consequence of success: a society suddenly able to generate meaning faster than it can coordinate it. Wonderland is dazzling. It is also exhausting. And sooner or later, every Alice begins to ask not just what else is there to see, but how do we find our way back to something shared?

**********

And the real punchline—the one we keep circling without fully naming—is that we are, and will remain, multicultural.

Whatever version of America we define next cannot be built by wishing that fact away. It has to begin with it. People realizing their potential will pursue happiness along radically different paths and, in the process, become very different people. That is not a failure of cohesion; it is the condition of freedom.

Some Americans will remain squares. Others will always be beatniks. Some will describe themselves as products of culture—of learning, environment, and choice. Others will insist that genes, heritage, and destiny loom larger. These differences are not aberrations to be solved. They are permanent features of a society that places liberty at its center.

Specialization, after all, was never only about the factory floor. Adam Smith gave us the image of one man drawing out the wire and another sharpening it, but specialization has long since escaped the bounds of production. We now specialize in lifestyles, sensibilities, identities, communities, and values. We choose different sources of meaning, beauty, obligation, and belonging. And that divergence is not going away.

What this means is something both humbling and hopeful: we will never be the same as one another—and that shared experience of distinctness may be one of the most universal things about us. To feel uniquely oneself, to sense that no one else quite occupies the same vantage point in the world, is an experience nearly everyone recognizes.

If there is a foundation on which a modern American identity can be rebuilt, it is not sameness but mutual recognition across difference—an acceptance that creativity, productivity, and vitality emerge not from enforced uniformity, but from coordination among people who are unlike one another in meaningful ways.

A country that can hold that idea—one that treats diversity of paths not as a threat but as a resource—has the potential to be endlessly adaptive. Not tidy. Not tranquil. But fascinating, creative, and wildly productive.

06 January 2026

Either We Become a Radically Different Country or the Republican Party Becomes Essentially Extinct for a Lifetime

Trump now appears intent on unraveling the U.S. commitment to NATO—reportedly over his desire to seize Greenland by force.

If you still believe “Russia, Russia” was a hoax, you may be clinging to a delusion that recent events are making harder to sustain. What once sounded implausible now fits an emerging pattern.

It is difficult to overstate how dramatic—and dangerous—a break this would be from American policy over the last century. It would amount to a wholesale reversal: from leading a coalition that helped secure a peaceful Europe to adopting the posture of a power willing to invade territory and redraw borders by force.

That is not merely a policy shift; it is a moral realignment. It would mean switching sides—from the defenders of a rules-based order to those who openly violate it.

If the Republican Party cannot or will not stop Trump, it risks suffering the kind of long political exile the Democratic Party endured for roughly sixty years after Lincoln—and that Republicans themselves endured for roughly fifty years after FDR. Parties, like nations, can survive many mistakes. What they rarely survive is abandoning their fundamental role in history.

***********

The fact that Trump is repeatedly threatening to invade and seize Greenland should alarm any serious person. Not because it is theatrical or provocative rhetoric—but because it crosses a line that Americans have not had to contemplate in generations.

Had anyone told me even a few years ago that a U.S. president would openly discuss invading and conquering territory belonging to a NATO ally, I would have dismissed it as absurd. Not “unlikely”—inconceivable. That idea simply did not belong in the realm of American politics as it had existed since World War II.

And yet here we are.

Trump has expressed this intention repeatedly, not as a joke, not as satire, but as an assertion of power. The repetition matters. This is no longer an offhand provocation; it is a declared posture. When a leader with control over the world’s most powerful military speaks this way, disbelief is not a strategy.

This would not represent a minor deviation in foreign policy. It would be a historic rupture—one that signals a shift from a rules-based international order to raw territorial ambition. From a nation that helped build NATO to one that treats alliances as obstacles. From a power that deterred invasions to one that contemplates launching them.

Trying to “tone down” that reality risks confusing sobriety with denial. There are moments—rare, but real—when calm language no longer clarifies the danger. Telling people not to worry because the idea sounds outrageous is like reassuring shoppers while someone is actively firing a weapon: the implausibility of the situation is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

The tragedy is that Americans are being asked to adjust, psychologically and morally, to something they were never meant to normalize. Threatening conquest is not part of our political tradition. It is the language of regimes we once defined ourselves against.

Disbelief was once the appropriate response. Now attention is.

05 January 2026

A Vote Against Democracy Should Mean The End of Your Right to Vote

Tomorrow is the 5th anniversary of Trump's attempt to violently overthrow democracy.

We need a constitutional amendment that simply suggests that anyone who supports the overthrow of democracy no longer gets to vote. A vote against democracy - by voting for someone who tried to violently overthrow it - should be a vote against your own voting.

Monogamous Penguins

Penguins are supposedly monogamous but given they all look alike, no one - including the penguins - is actually sure of this.

04 January 2026

History Compresses Vast Sprawls of Time, Lives, Events and Trends

The past feels simpler because we encounter it through maps, not terrain. History is what chaos looks like after it’s been cleaned up—after blind alleys, detours, and parallel parades have been edited out.

The 1900s took billions of people a full century to live—a collective experience amounting to something like a trillion human years. We condense all of that into a book that takes six hours to read or a documentary that runs for an hour.

It’s the difference between a thousand acres of dry-land wheat and a single slice of bread.

03 January 2026

Cooperation Helps One Compete

 "Having norms that increase cooperation can favor success in competition with other groups that lack these norms."

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success (p. 167). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Cooperation helps in competition. Hard to say whether that is wonderfully paradoxical or prosaically obvious. In any case, a truth worth repeating. 

A Cultural Contrast Between Canada and the US As Seen in Its Supreme Court

Reading Joseph Henrich's brilliant The Secret of Our Success - a book about culture and its importance in shaping societies and individuals - I came across this contrast between Canada and the US that articulated so much of what I've seen and experienced as a cultural difference between the US and Canada.

Henrich writes that the Great Sanhedrin - the Jewish Court that dates back millennia - had a custom of hearing arguments from its board of judges that started with the youngest, least experienced and concluded with the most senior and experienced judge. This process works in the opposite direction of natural dynamics that typically - say in a university or corporate department - start with the most senior person, then include a few people at the next level and then - often - never create room for opinions from the most junior people at all.

Henrich writes,

"Similarly, though the Supreme Court of Canada uses the same speaking protocol as the Great Sanhedrin, the U.S. Supreme Court goes the opposite way, beginning with the Chief Justice and proceeding down from there.

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success (p. 138). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

01 January 2026

The Secret to Becoming a Billionaire

Do you know why Warren Buffet is a billionaire?
He didn't retire until he was 95.

[File under, "life lessons kids don't want to hear."]