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© Zac & Don
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A podcast that discusses an interesting article or concept.
275 Episodes
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The Best Paragraph I've Read:comes from the following articles that Zac & Don discuss:Nuclear Predictions Markets Are CanceledShould You Work Harder Now?Bitcoins Vibe is OffEducation Tech Doesn't Show GainsNo One Cares About Tik Tok AnymoreSingle Earning Households On the DeclineThe Russian Economy Is Dying
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"Open land represents the future in its purest form — after all, every place was no place at some point. The quest for resources, escaping bondage or seeking places to worship freely have all motivated new settlements and fresh modes of living. Buildings, sure, but also a chance to improve society in a place where the future looms larger than the past."This paragraph comes from the New York Times. The article is titled: "Maybe America Needs Some New Cities." The article is written by Conor Dougherty. You can read the full article here.Zac & Don discuss the idea of building cities from fresh land. They wonder what the pros and cons are. They also wonder if they will just become the same places with the same problems once people move in.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"By turning childhood into a thing that can be measured,adults have managed to impose their greatest fears of failure onto the youngest among us. Each child who strays from our standards becomes a potential medical mystery to be solved, with more tests to take, more metrics to assess. The onlything that seems to consistently evade the detectives is the world around that child — the one made by the grown-ups."This article comes from the New York Times. The title is: "Are Schools a Problem?" The author is Sam Sifton. You can read the full article here.Zac & Don are joined by their good friend Dave McKay. The three discuss whether schools and their system of standards should be blamed for the rise in childhood anxiety. They wonder if it is possible phones are being unfairly blamed.
Don tells Zac whether he needs to stop or keep thinking about the following issues:Robots taking JobsThe Southern Cone ThesisChina's Growing Aircraft Carrier CollectionGreenland's Subsidized PopulationThe Dollars Declining Value
The Best Paragraph this week comes from Kent Hendrick's Blog Post on 52 Things I Learned in 2025. You can read the entire blog here.Zac and Don discuss their favorite facts and statistics that Mr. Hendricks shares in his article.
The Best Paragraph I've Read comes from the new book by Chuck Klosterman, "Football."Zac & Don discuss the first half of the book. They wonder about why so few people play the game, if it's the perfect TV product, whether the game is applied track, and more!
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"With home affordability increasingly out of reach, many young adults are making choices that are reshaping the economy — and mostly for the worse — a new research paper says. They don’t think they’ll ever be homeowners. So they stop trying, and focus on the here and now.That’s the interpretation put forth by economists Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo — doctoral candidates at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago,respectively — who built a mathematical model of consumer behavior. When people conclude that they will never be able to afford a home, they put less effort into their jobs, tend to spend more on luxuries and do less long-term saving, and are more likely to invest in riskier assets such as cryptocurrencies, the economists’ findings suggested."This paragraph comes from the Washington Post. The article is titled: "Abandoning home ownership may be changing how people behave at work and home." The author is Julie Zauzmer Weil. You can read the full article here.Zac and Don discuss whether it is a big deal if younger adults have given up on home buying. They wonder if it's better to spend disposable income on eating out more and purchasing crypto instead of saving for a house. They also wonder if eventually younger home buyers will come into the market just later in life.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"Money is a source of mystery to children. They sense its power, so they ask questions, lots of them, over many years. Why isn’t our house as big as my cousin’s? Why can’t I have a carnivorous plant terrarium? Why should I respect my teachers if they earn only $60,000 per year? (Real question!) Are we poor? Why didn’t you give money to the man who asked you for some? If my sister can have Hello-Kitty-themed Beats by Dre headphones, why won’t you get me the Bluetooth-enabled Lego Mindstorms set? (It’s only $349, and it’s educational, Mom!) We adults, however, tend to do a miserable job of answering. We push our children’s money questions aside, sometimes telling them that their queries are impolite, or perhaps worrying that they will call out our own financial hypocrisy and errors. Sometimes we respond defensively and viscerally, barking back, “None of your business,” unintentionally teaching our children that thetopic is off limits despite its obvious importance. Others want to protect their children from a topic many of us find stressful or baffling: Can’t we keep them innocent of all of this money stuff for just a little bit longer? But shielding children from the realities of everyday financial life makes little sense anymore, given the responsibilities their generation will face, startingwith the outsize college tuitions they will encounter while still in high school."This paragraph comes from the New York Times. The article is titled: "Why You Should Tell Your Children How Much You Make." The author is Ron Lieber. You can read the full article here.Zac & Don discuss whether it is a good idea to tell your children how much money you make. They wonder what the benefits are and if there are any problems with the issue. They also reference the following Wall Street Journal article about No Swipe November.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"The power line starts in a remote desert in northwestChina, where vast arrays of solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity on a monumental scale. It snakes southeast, following an ancient river betweenmountain ranges before reaching Anhui Province near Shanghai, home to 61 million people and some of China’s most successful electric car and robot manufacturers.That’s a single power line. China has 41 others. Each iscapable of carrying more electricity than any utility transmission line in the United States. That’s partly because China is using technology that makes its lines far more efficient than almost anywhere else in the world. The feat isowed to China’s ambitious national energy policies and the fact that few residents along the path of these lines dare object — even though the lines cause small electric shocks that local people said they could feel when holding a metal fishing pole."This paragraph comes from the New York Times. The article is titled "How China Powers Its Electric Cars and High-Speed Trains." The author is Keith Bradsher. You can read the full article here:https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.htmlZac & Don discuss China and some of its latest engineering achievements. At the same time they discuss some of its potential problems such as 200 million gig workers. They then make connections to the Abundance movement in America and wonder what the future holds for both nations. Zac & Don also reference the following articles:China has a surplus of electric cars and is cutting prices.China has 200 million gig workers.China is the nation of engineers while America is a nation of lawyers.
The Best Paragraph I've ReadIf civilization is accelerating down a freeway that’s taking us away from our shared humanity—not to mention destroying the ecosystems we depend on—at whatexit do we get off? Artificial intelligence, new medical interventions, and other modern marvels allow us some choice about which natural limits we accept, and which we decide to blow past. According to Kingsnorth, each person must make individual decisions about where to begin “drawing a line, and saying ‘no further.’” Will you watch television shows written by large language models? Will you let the machines craft your emails, your college essays, obituaries for your loved ones? Will you get an AI-enabled virtual girlfriend? Will you let AI into your life knowing that data centers are metastasizing, while already-parched deserts are drained dry to cool them, while contentmoderators in Africa labor in quasi-slave conditions, sorting through images of beheadings and child abuse? Will you draw the line at letting algorithms design your baby? When the time comes, will you get your chip? Your brain-computer interface? Will you upload your consciousness to the cloud?"This paragraph comes from the Atlantic. The article is titled: "What A Cranky New Book About Progress Gets Right." The author is Tyler Austin Harper. You can read the full article here.Zac & Don discuss whether we are living in a limitless society and culture. They wonder if humans without limits is a problem or if it's as it has always been.
The Best Paragraph I've Read comes from an article in The Athletic. The article is titled: "Looking for the world's biggest stadiums? Why American College Football has most of them." The author is Seth Emerson. You can read the full article here:https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6736868/2025/10/23/college-football-biggest-stadiums-world/Zac & Don are joined by their good friend Kevin Kopec. The three discuss why college football happens to claim most of the largest football stadiums in the world. They discuss some of their favorite stadiums and wonder why no other college has tried to build anything larger than Michigan Stadium.
The Best Paragraph I've Read comes from the Washington Post. The article is titled: "An investor called $140,000 the new poverty line. Experts disagreed but said he had a point." The article is written by Julie Zauzmer Weil. You can read the full article here:https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/29/poverty-line-green/Zac & Don discuss whether America's new poverty line is $140,000 or why such a number can trigger such debate. They discuss what the poverty line is but also wonder why so many people can "feel" a number four times bigger is accurate.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"With investors that include venture capitalist PeterThiel and Donald Trump Jr., Enhanced is attempting to push sports into a world of logical and physical extremes, unencumbered by the rules, regulations or doping controls of traditional competition. They plan to host their ownOlympic-style competition in Las Vegas next year with a roster that already includes the British swimmer Ben Proud, who won silver at Paris 2024, and U.S. sprinter Fred Kerley, a multiple world champion. T he World Anti-Doping Agency has called it a “dangerous and irresponsible” undertaking. Seb Coe, the president of World Athletics, dismissed any participants as “moronic.” But organizers argue that they aresimply more transparent than the regular Olympics—and finally paying athletes what they deserve."This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal. The article is titled: "Faster, Higher, Stronger-and Full of Drugs. The Billionare Quest to Hack Sports." The article is written by Joshua Robinson. You can read the full article here.Zac & Don discuss The Enhanced Games and their desire to be transparent about which athletes are taking drugs to improve their performance. They wonder if this approach is honest, sad, or still just cheating.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"Skipper Robert Hanson’s lines have been hit by lots ofthe killer whales that dwell in the Bering Sea. He has found the Unalaska pod to be the most savvy, skilled and aggressive — leaving just traces of halibut, the largest of which could have netted Hanson hundreds of dollars apiece.“Most of the time, you get nothing. Sometimes a lip, or ahalf a fish, if they get full,” Hanson said. “They are particularly good at what they do.”'This paragraph comes from Northern Journal. The article is titled: "In Alaska, fishing skippers and hungry orcas vie for halibut pulled from the deep." The article is written by Hal Bernton. You can read the full article here:https://www.northernjournal.com/in-alaska-fishing-skippers-and-hungry-orcas-vie-for-halibut-pulled-from-the-deep/Zac & Don discuss Orcas! They wonder if this animal has had the best decade out of the animal kingdom in terms of news coverage. They also discuss Orcas attacking yachts and eating shark livers and the other ways the animal is impacting the oceans.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"Think of it this way. All college graduates enter acareer lottery for a chance at landing in the top 1% of earners. Recent research has found that graduates of top-ranked schools like Harvard or Stanford are 60% more likely to hit that jackpot. Essentially, they get two tickets in the lottery while graduates of public flagship universities get one. But even with that extra ticket, the vast majority of elite-college graduates aren’t winning the lottery either. Attending an IvyLeague university does open doors, but it’s not the guarantee of extraordinary success that parents seem to think. Nor does attending a different school preclude you from achieving great things."This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal. The article is titled: "The Elite College Myth." The author is Jeffrey Selingo. You can read the full article here.Zac & Don discuss the merits of the Elite College Myth argument. They discuss the data that shows most college grads can end up the same when it comes to long term earnings. They discuss happiness when deciding upon a college and whether people will adjust how they see the high stakes admission process.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"When Dariya Quenneville’s infant daughter was ready for solid food, she skipped the mushed up avocado and banana. On the menu instead? Raw egg yolk and puréed chicken liver. The child, named Schizandra, then moved on to sardines, butter and ice pops made out of bone broth. She gnawed on leg of lamb. “She would just teethe on that and soothe herself,” said Quenneville, 31. Schizandra is what her mom calls a “carnivore baby.” Most of her diet is meat, along with other animal-sourced foods like eggs and butter. “She’s an easy baby,” said Quenneville of her daughter, now almost 2. “I believe that the food in the diet is a very, very big piece of that."This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal. The article is titled: "Meet the Parents Raising 'Carnivore Babies,' Swapping Pureed Fruit for Rib Eye." The article is written by Andrea Petersen. You can read the full article hereAnother Best Paragraph I've Read:"Carla Dillon tried lots of ways to discipline her rambunctious 13-year-old, including making him write the same contrite sentence 100 times. But when he sprayed her with a water gun at a campground after she asked him not to, she saw only one option: She threw him in the pond, clothes and all. “Some of the best lessons in life are the hard ones,” she said. The internet calls it “FAFO,” short for “F—Around and Find Out.” It’s a child-rearing style that elevates consequences over the “gentle parenting” methods that have helped shape Gen Z. FAFO (often pronounced “faff-oh”) is based on the idea that parents can ask andwarn, but if a child breaks the rules, mom and dad aren’t standing in the way of the repercussions. Won’t bring your raincoat? Walk home in the downpour. Didn’t feel like having lasagna for dinner? Survive until breakfast. Left your toy on the floor again? Go find it in the trash under the lasagna you didn’t eat." This paragraph also comes from the Wall Street Journal. The article is titled: "Goodbye Gentle Parenting, Hello 'F-Around and Find Out'" The article is written by Ellen Gamerman. You can read the full article here. Zac & Don discuss two new trends in parenting: all meat baby diets and out feral the feral. They wonder if these are actually new trends. They discuss the positives and speculate which trend could last the longest.
Shameless Self Promotion this Week!Zac & Don discuss the book Zac recently wrote, Crypto School 2: Privot to A.I. While they discuss moments from the book, they also talk about AI in schools and wonder if education has fully considered what they should be doing with the technology. They also discuss unanswered questions, the role of principals, and if there is a good way to teach character education. You can find Crypto School 2 on Amazon here.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"The name of this fall’s most obnoxious classmate: SixSeven. Math teacher Cara Bearden braces herself for any equation that yields the two numbers, knowing her students will immediately scream them right back at her. “SIX Sevennnnnn,” they squeal with a palms-up, seesaw handgesture that looks somewhere between juggling and melon handling. The meme is ripping across the internet and spilling into real life, especially at school. “If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’” says Bearden, who teaches sixth- and eighth-graders at Austin Peace Academy in Austin, Texas.“It’s like throwing catnip at cats.” Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or seven minutes for a task. Six is a perfect number, and seven is a prime number, but only a glutton for punishment would put them together in front of a bunch of 13-year-olds."This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal. The article is titled: "The Numbers Six and Seven Are Making Life Hell for Math Teachers." The article is written by Ellen Gamerman." You can read the full article here.Zac & Don discuss 6-7 and their experiences in the classroom. They also discuss the concept of brain rot and the word Bro.Zac & Don also discuss the following articles:Taco Bell Ultra MarathonHistoric MRE eaters
The Best Paragraph I've Read:“The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it—the same old story over and over. Man will increase, and men will fight. The gunpowder will enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and blood, will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved. And of what profit will it be? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the new. It may take fifty thousand years to build, but it will pass. All things pass. Only remain cosmic force and matter, ever in flux, ever acting and reacting and realizing the eternal types—the priest, the soldier, and the king. Out of the mouths of babes comes the wisdom of all the ages. Some will fight, some will rule, some will pray; and all the rest will toil and suffer sore while on their bleeding carcasses is reared again, and yet again, without end, the amazing beauty and surpassing wonder of the civilized state. It were just as well that I destroyed those cave-stored books—whether they remain or perish, all their old truths will be discovered, their old lies lived and handed down."The paragraph comes from the short story: The Scarlet Plague. The author is Jack London who wrote the story in 1912. You can read the entire story here. Zac & Don discuss the story which was written in 1912 about a plague that hits in 2012. They discuss which predictions about the future Jack London got right. They also discuss their biggest takeaways from the story - Civilization is fragile & Nature will take everything back.
The Best Paragraph I've Read:"A place that was once entirely utilitarian is now a place to line up to get into. On social media, people profess their love for the Pennsylvania convenience store Wawa and talk about Target like it’s a habit-forming substance. Recently, I saw a guy at a bar wearing $300 pants and a sweatshirt with a logo for Kirkland Signature, the Costco house brand. When Wegmans, a supermarket chain based in upstate New York, officially opened on Long Island in February, people—they prefer the term Wegmaniacs—started waiting in line thenight before… Fong’s Instagram account, @traderjoesobsessed, has more followers than Fiji has residents. The supermarket is now a brand unto itself, not just the building that houses the other brands, and its shoppers aren’t just brand-loyal—they’re fanatical."This paragraph comes from the Atlantic. The article is titled: "What Your Favorite Grocery Store Says About You." The author is Ellen Cushing. You can read the full article here.Zac & Don discuss the idea that where you shop says something about your identity. They wonder how brands became so powerful to people. They discuss whether Trader Joe's merits all of the accolades and love that it gets from shoppers/fans.
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