Good morning!

My birthday is tomorrow. I’m turning 33 which is the same age Jesus was when he died. It’s also roughly 1/3 of the way to 100 which means I’ve definitely got less than 2/3 of my life left because there’s no shot in hell this body is lasting for a whole century.

On the flip side, I’m not entirely convinced that I’m not invincible. I just recently did my blood work for the first time in 10 years and the results came back positive (“positive” as in good; not “positive” as in bad, the way the medical industry often uses it [ex: “your test came back positive, you have herpes”.]), including my liver.

You see, the last time I did blood work the doctor literally prescribed an MRI for my liver. He said to me, “you should get your liver checked”. I obviously did no such thing. I instead did my best to forget about it, or write it off as a fluke, and continued on the same path I was on.

Given the copious amounts of alcohol I consumed between then and now, you could imagine how elated I was to receive the results of my most recent tests. You might also understand why I suspect I may be invincible.

Enough about me.

→ BNPL is still bad for consumers. I’m not a fan of BNPL. BNPL stands for buy-now-pay-later, which is just a fancy way of saying installment payments. It’s basically a technological repackaging of the technique Billy Mays perfected on QVC.

I wrote about it back in September and since then usage has been rising. At that time, a Credit Karma survey showed that 44% of Americans had used it. That number is now 61%. From Black Friday 2020 to Black Friday 2021, Klarna—one of the biggest BNPL firms—saw a 141% increase in US sales.

While inflation is a factor behind increased usage (60% said it drove them to use BNPL), almost 1/3 of users say they spent more than they would have had the service not been available. Even worse: over 20% say they use credit cards to pay down their BNPL payments (which could lead to a dangerous credit cycle).

The good news is that most consumers use the tool responsibly, which is to say they plan to use it (over 60%). Many even say they use it to avoid credit card debt (34%). But there’s still 38% who don’t use it responsibly, which is to say they decide to use it at the point of checkout. Those are the people behind charts like this:

They also tend to be on the younger side:

Thankfully, my home state is taking steps to ensure that youngsters are armed with the tools to recognize the dangers of services like BNPL before they’re in a position to make financial decisions that could negatively affect them down the road.

→ Florida seeks to equip young adults with financial literacy. There’s a new bill in Florida and it’s not controversial. In fact, it was passed unanimously by both the House and the Senate earlier this month. After Gov. DeSantis signed it into law this week, SB 1054 made Florida the largest state (and 11th overall) to require that its high school students take and pass a standalone personal financial literacy class to graduate. The class is meant to cover the basics and give students a rudimentary understanding of how money works. Here’s the relevant section from the bill:

As things are right now the first time youngsters do any of these things—for the most part—is when they need to do them, which is less than ideal because you should never be playing for keeps on your first try at anything. This bill is long overdue and it’s honestly kind of shocking that these kinds of courses (which are about as bipartisan as it gets) are a recent development.

→ Aristocratic tutoring. I read a great piece this week titled “Why we stopped making Einsteins”. The author posits that the world has seen a decline in geniuses worldwide and that the decline can be attributed to the absence of “aristocratic tutoring”. It’s a bit of a long read, but it’s a good one. The TL;DR is that when you dive into the biographies of geniuses—think Plato, Archimedes, Marcus Aurelius, Isaac Newton, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin, Rene Descartes, John Stuart Mill, Voltaire, John von Neumann—a common theme is the presence of a tutor, or in many cases several tutors.

We’ll call these “aristocratic” tutors so as not to confuse them with our narrow, modern conception of tutors. Nowadays tutors are typically reserved for underachieving students: Little Timmy does poorly on his test, the parents employ a tutor, the tutor and Timmy do some exercises, Timmy improves. But you don’t often see parents employing tutors for overachieving students or even students who are “merely” above average to help further their knowledge. It’s almost like they’re saying, “Nah, this is good enough”. This is a shame because one doesn’t need to be struggling to experience the benefits of one-on-one learning—the benefits are universal.

Aristocratic tutors were mentors and impactful figures employed to expand a student’s mind. As opposed to contemporary tutors, which are more like contractors paid by the hour to boost a test score by X points.

Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields.

Obviously, the historic version of the aristocratic tutor is not feasible today, at least not for a student without significant means. So I’m wondering how this old-school concept could be brought into the 21st century and applied at scale? There are things like SAT prep courses that could be considered modern-day examples, though those courses resemble aristocratic tutoring like the modern-day political arena resembles the Greek Forum, which is to say they don’t. In any case, prep courses are basically the antithesis of the spirit behind aristocratic tutoring. They stress the memorization of systematic solutions to a finite set of problems with predictable parameters. There’s little to no thinking involved and there’s nothing engaging about it.

The piece mentions the ongoing research and development of AI tutoring (like The Collins Institute), but that would lack the human element I think makes this time-tested practice effective. There’s also Elon Musk’s Ad Astra Academy (a unique private school he created), but I’m not sure if that’s still open. Even if is, there’s a good chance it’s just him LARP’ing Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

→ Wall Street bankers just aren’t paid enough. For many on Wall Street, bonuses represent the bulk of compensation. Last year, the average bonus jumped 20% to $275,500.

“Pablo, wtf are you talking about? That seems like a lot of money.”

Does it? If it’s so much money then why did these Deutsche Bank douchebags bankers feel the need to request reimbursement for a legitimate business expense?

I’m not a math expert but maybe if Wall Street paid them more they wouldn’t have had to.

YOU tell me!