And the amazing thing is that the opposite works too!

I think I mentioned this before but I was a national speech and debate octafinalist in high school and I was able to parlay that into a job running a debate program at an ambitious charter middle school in college.

My approach was the exact opposite of this. Like half the kids were TERRIFIED of public speaking and were only doing it because their tiger moms insisted they had to (and the other half LOVED the attention).

I had a lot of trouble getting the scared kids to open up and one day I asked one of the youngest ones what made her so afraid of speaking in front of the class, especially since they were all her friends.

And she told me she was afraid she’d say something dumb or make a mistake and everyone would make fun of her. And that they’d laugh and laugh at her if she froze up.

The next day I asked the class if anyone was scared of being made fun of and all the shy kids raised their hands.

Now I don’t actually know if this is the same pathology in adults with fear of public speaking but I suspect it’s similar, and now I’ll get to how I addressed it which worked fabulously.

First I told them that this was a ridiculous fear and that no one would make fun of them. But of course that doesn’t do anything lol. But then I told everyone to rip out 10 pieces of paper from their notebooks and crumple them up.

And I told them I was going to give a speech. I told them if I said “uhh” or “um” or used any filler words they were to throw a paper ball at me and shout “shame!” 3 times pointing at me.

And I gave a terrible speech. And they loved it! It was so much fun for them.

But then! I had the students give speeches with the same rules, starting with the confident ones.

After the third student the shy ones were volunteering.

After the lesson I explained to them that we had accomplished 2 things:

1. We had demonstrated how absurd such a reaction really is, because none of them would have ever reacted in that way if they weren’t specifically asked to, and none of them had any actual malice even when they did shout “shame” at their classmates

2. Everyone had experienced the comically worst case scenario imaginable of public speaking and survived!

So they became the rule during EVERY class and I was told by the other teachers that my shy students had started leading presentations and speaking up in class and some of them asked me how I worked with them.

They were HORRIFIED when I told them lol.

But it worked!

This reminds me of Boggarts in the Harry Potter books.

Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus:

This guy is founding an evangelical church, and I find his ecosystem fascinating. First for its stunning similarities to venture-capital-funded tech start-ups, and then for its simplicity and open-heartedness. None of the dynamics in church planting are unique or even particularly rare, but they are unobfuscated, and that makes church planting the equivalent of a large print book for the social dynamics that favor charismatic narcissists.

Moon helium deal is biggest purchase of natural resources from space:

Finnish tech firm Bluefors, a maker of ultracold refrigerator systems critical for quantum computing, has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon — spending “above $300 million” — through a commercial space company called Interlune. The agreement, which has not been previously reported, marks the largest purchase of a natural resource from space.

We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another (NYT): I try to avoid posting political or negative items but this was worth making an excception for. A long and insightful discussion between Ezra Klein and Ben Shapiro. Eye opening, if you read with an open mind.

They traveled to Thailand. They wound up cyber scam slaves in Myanmar.: Scary. I am not sure I like graphical news but an interesting experiment.

Teen depression has declined for the past 4 years, after peaking in 2021.:

ICPC medals for OpenAI and Gemini:

We received the problems in the exact same PDF form, and the reasoning system selected which answers to submit with no bespoke test-time harness whatsoever. For 11 of the 12 problems, the system’s first answer was correct. For the hardest problem, it succeeded on the 9th submission. Notably, the best human team achieved 11/12.

We competed with an ensemble of general-purpose reasoning models; we did not train any model specifically for the ICPC. We had both GPT-5 and an experimental reasoning model generating solutions, and the experimental reasoning model selecting which solutions to submit. GPT-5 answered 11 correctly, and the last (and most difficult problem) was solved by the experimental reasoning model.

and

An advanced version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think competed live in a remote online environment following ICPC rules, under the guidance of the competition organizers. It started 10 minutes after the human contestants and correctly solved 10 out of 12 problems, achieving gold-medal level performance under the same five-hour time constraint. See our solutions here.