A study found that half of Americans surveyed were unsure of difference between Sweden and Switzerland. Even global leaders have erred - last year, President Biden referenced Switzerland instead of Sweden in a NATO speech.

This confusion has led Visit Sweden to launch a humorous campaign clarifying the distinction, with a satirical video introducing "Welcome to Sweden (not Switzerland)." The video proposes the countries clearly delineate communication domains to eliminate confusion. For example, Switzerland can discuss mountain tops and watches while Sweden focuses on rooftop bars and timeless nature.

A viral social media post described an airport counter in Salzburg, Austria assisting confused travellers who accidentally flew to Austria instead of Australia. However, Salzburg Airport has clarified no such service actually operates.

The idea stemmed from an advertisement placed at the airport by an Austrian tech company Commend, humorously orienting misdirected passengers. The truth however, is that it is a creative advertisement, and does not exist in reality.

Travellers landing in the wrong destination is remarkably common, with numerous high-profile cases of trips gone awry. There was the case of French soccer fans in 2021 who flew to Bucharest, Romania instead of Budapest, Hungary.

Just last year, a New Yorker landed in Sidney, Montana over Sydney, Australia. At an airport in the UK, about 14 years ago, passengers were called to board for Parma, in Italy. Approximately 50 percent of those passengers, were meant to go to the city of Palma in Spain instead.

So while the Austrian airport's imaginary desk gained viral fame, plenty of travellers have in reality found themselves far from their planned destination. 😀

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The Universe 25 Experiment: A Mouse Utopia Turns Awry

In the 1960s, a scientist named John B. Calhoun designed a grand experiment with 4 pairs of mice, one that would unravel the mysteries of society and overcrowding. It was called "Universe 25," a place where mice could live in a paradise untouched by predators, with endless food and water, and a climate-controlled environment. A utopia for mice, it seemed.

As the mouse population continued to swell, a strange transformation occurred. Despite the availability of enough resources, the mice began to exhibit various abnormal, often destructive behaviours. This included hyperaggression, failure to breed normally, infant abandonment, and, in certain cases, cannibalism. Some male mice formed gangs that attacked each other, while others withdrew completely, refusing to interact with others or breed, which Calhoun referred to as "the beautiful ones." Instead of participating in the violence and chaos, they withdrew. They no longer reproduced, grooming themselves endlessly and seeking solitude. The beautiful ones had distanced themselves from the social frenzy.

The population began to decline as violence, aggression, and withdrawal took their toll. The mouse society was collapsing, and no amount of resources or space could reverse the damage. Calhoun observed that, even when provided with all the necessities, the mice were unable to recover.

The peak population was reached around day 560 with around 2200 mice, thereafter population declined and by around day 920, the mice had died out completely.

Universe 25 was not just a mouse experiment; it offered profound insights into the behaviour of living beings, including humans, in crowded environments. It revealed the far-reaching effects of overpopulation on societal dynamics and individual mental health.

The similarities between Universe 25 and human society are striking. As cities grow more crowded, we see similar patterns emerge: heightened competition for resources, increased stress, and even individuals withdrawing from society. Calhoun's experiment serves as a stark reminder of what can occur when we disregard the consequences of overcrowding.

The Asch Conformity Experiment, conducted by Solomon Asch in 1951, aimed to understand how people behave in groups and whether they are willing to conform to group opinion, even if it goes against what they know to be true.

In the experiment, participants were brought into a room with other people, who were actually actors working with the experimenter. The group was shown a simple line on one card and then three lines on another card, one of which was the same length as the line on the first card. Each person had to say out loud which line matched the first one.

The catch was that the actors were told to give the wrong answer on purpose. As a result, the real participant was often the last to speak. They had to decide whether to stick with what they knew was right or go along with the group's incorrect answer.

The findings were surprising. Many participants chose to conform and give the wrong answer because they didn't want to stand out or appear different from the group. They were influenced by the group's opinion.

This experiment demonstrated the power of social pressure and the human tendency to conform to the group, even when the group is clearly wrong. It also highlighted the importance of independence and critical thinking in the face of peer pressure.

The Asch Conformity Experiment has had a lasting impact on our understanding of social psychology and how people respond to group dynamics and the fear of being the odd one out.

Imagine a room so silent your ears ring and panic sets in within minutes. Welcome to the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis - officially the quietest place on earth.

At -9.4 decibels, the background noise in this padded, isolated room is almost imperceptible. Even quiet concert halls measure around 15 decibels. Normal conversation hits 60 decibels.

In the chamber's oppressive silence, you hear every crack of your knuckles, crunch of your joints, and rush of blood. External noise is utterly eliminated while internal sounds are amplified.

Without reflected sounds, your senses grow confused. Eyes see a room yet ears detect no acoustic indications of walls or space. This sensory mismatch creates profound disorientation.

The stillness soon becomes suffocating. Few endure more than 45 minutes before succumbing to nausea, heart palpitations, hallucinations. The longest record is just over an hour.

So why build a room devoid of noise? These meticulously engineered chambers are designed to stop reflections or echoes of sound. They are used to conduct experiments by eliminating all reflected sounds, they simulate outdoor ‘free field’ conditions indoors, meaning that there are no reflected signals. All sound energy will be traveling away from the source with almost none reflected back.

Far from meditative, though, the experience often proves too much for the human psyche. Profound silence contradicts our fundamental sensory relationship with the environment. Like oxygen, we only appreciate noise once deprived of it, reminds how deeply sound saturates our realities.

Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single plant specie!

You may never have heard of the plant Brassica Oleracea, but six vegetables you eat on a regular basis are actually all from this one plant and they're all human-made products of selective breeding.

Its pretty interesting that kale and cabbage — along with broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collard greens, and kohlrabi, and several other vegetables — all come from the exact same plant species: Brassica oleracea.
Though they're all the same species, these various crops are cultivars — different varieties bred to have desirable qualities for human purposes.

How do you form a black hole? You’d have to compress Earth 🌏 to this size (9 mm) to form a black hole. You’d have to compress the moon to 0.1 mm (thickness of a human hair) to turn it into a black hole.

For every black hole out there, something THAT intense has happened.

The Cosmic Cliffs (among the first to be photographed by the James Webb telescope) are unimaginably huge. The tallest peaks in this image are 7 light years high - the height of 5 billion Earths stacked on top of each other. The cliffs are part of the Carina Nebula, located 7,600 light years away from us.

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The size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 🦕. A flying rock just this large wiped out all dinosaurs and more than 75% of all species on Earth.

Space is big 🌌. Really really big.

What we see in the night is just a small selection of the stars within this tiny red circle in our galaxy.👇🏼

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Countries closer to the equator (i.e. poorer) seem smaller than they really are

So we develop a weak intuition for comparing country sizes.

The biggest loser is Africa, which is humongous in reality.

Brazil is so big, the northernmost point of the country is closer to ALL North American countries than to the southernmost point in Brazil!

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Hasn’t Greenland always looked so large and dominating on the map? This is Mexico swapping places with Greenland.

Fun fact - Chile is as long as Europe!

Why does this happen? Because the Earth is spherical- flattening a ball distorts its shape completely!

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2. The impact of taxes on compounding. Just 25% tax results in this much deviation.

   

3. Compounding can be amazing. Not Growing vs Growing just 1% every day*.

   

   (*Not applicable for investments, it is not probable for any investment to grow 1% a day for 365 days)

4. Percentage gains needed to recover from loss. If your investment goes down by 50%, it needs to gain 100% just to come back to its original price.

   

5. Investing versus trading. Markets go up by stairs, but come down by the elevator.

   

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• On the left is a 40 year old triathlete with a large amount of muscle and minimal fat.

• In the middle is a 74 year old sedentary person with decreased muscle mass and increased fat.

• On the right is a 70 year old triathlete who has retained muscle and bone density similar to the younger athlete.

The takeaway is that consistent exercise can help maintain youthful muscle mass and fitness even in old age. In contrast, inactivity can lead to declines in muscle and increased fat regardless of age.

It's never too late to start an exercise regimen and experience the benefits. Consistent strength training and aerobic activity can keep your muscles and bones strong over time. Maintaining an active lifestyle is key to healthy aging.

This image shows that youthful fitness levels can be retained well into old age through vigorous exercise over the decades.

Smoking reduces lifespan significantly. Lighting up cigarettes results in a loss of 40% of expected years of life compared to non-smokers. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

However, lack of exercise is even more detrimental to longevity. The least physically fit 25% of people have mortality rates 4 times higher than the most fit 2% of people who exercise regularly.

In terms of impact on lifespan, being physically fit is more influential than quitting smoking. Engaging in consistent exercise and activity can significantly increase years of expected life.

Watch this video to know more.

A meta-analysis of 17 studies with over 220,000 participants found that more daily steps linearly associated with 15% lower risk of all-cause mortality with each 1,000 step increment and 7% lessser risk cardiovascular mortality with each 500 step increment.

Walking reduces your risk of death; benefits continue up to 20k steps/day.

Another study of nearly 5,000 people found that taking 8,000 steps per day was associated with a 49% lower risk of premature death compared to just 4,000 steps. 8,000 steps/day leads to significantly lower cardiovascular disease & cancer mortality.

Those taking 12,000 steps daily reduced their mortality risk by 65%. More intense walking cadence did not lower mortality beyond total steps taken.

At the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Netherlands, it’s hard for travellers to miss the enormous clock ‘with the man inside’. The clock is an iconic work of art that combines functionality with a very interesting experience.

This clock has no ordinary hands. Every minute is painted specially and then wiped away by a man in blue overalls. A small door and a staircase are incorporated into the back of the clock, to give the man access to his workplace. So what is the mystery behind the man in the clock who is day in, day out, painting clock hands on the glass plate of the clock.

This 'painter' is, in fact, a 12-hour-long recording that creates a compelling illusion of a man standing inside the transparent clock, tirelessly working as the hands move around. This inventive timepiece is the most recent work of Maarten Baas, a renowned Dutch artist and designer known for his series of similar live clock recordings.

For Astronomy fans, here’s a gorgeous picture of Saturn captured by the Cassini spacecraft. Space is mesmerising!

This is the Ring Nebula. The James Webb telescope reveals intricate details in the remains of a dying star.

Uranus has never looked better, really. This picture, by the James Webb telescope again of this ice giant highlights bright atmospheric features, as well as 11 of the planet’s 13 rings. We have never been able to photograph Uranus as clearly as this before.

Today, Ötzi is housed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy, where his remains are kept at a constant temperature of –21.2 degrees Fahrenheit. In an average year, about 300,000 visitors travel to Bolzano to marvel at the ancient human.

Ötzi was wiry, short (5’2”), and about 46 years old when he died. He was left-handed, had brown eyes and dark brown hair, and he had a typical Mediterranean skin tone. Ötzi was found wearing only a single shoe. His leggings and coats were pieced together from the hides of local sheep and goats.

His shoes were stuffed with wild grass and laced with leather. His fur hat was from a brown bear. The Iceman carried a wood-frame backpack and a deerskin quiver with arrow shafts. His dagger was sharpened.

One of the most important objects is Ötzi’s copper axe. Secured to a wooden handle with cow leather, the blade was cast from a mold and is 99.7% pure copper. It was an extraordinarily wealthy item for the time, and its discovery pushed back the European Copper Age by a 1000 years.

In the hours before his death, Ötzi had a hearty meal of wheat, red deer, and ibex (a mountain goat). A gash between the thumb and index finger of his right hand revealed that Ötzi had been stabbed a few days before he died. Then he was attacked again ..

.. with an arrow that hit an artery in his left shoulder, and it seems he bled to death within minutes. The Iceman also had substantial brain haemorrhaging. Did someone kill him off with a final blow to the head? This is a mystery still unsolved.

The museum receives 10-15 requests every year to study Ötzi. His 5000 year old genome was decoded in 2012, and recently researchers have been able to reconstruct his gut microbiome. Technological & medical advances in the future can likely help unfold more of the fascinating Iceman's secrets.

Did you know Google pays Apple an obscene amount to be the default Search Engine on iPhones?

2014 - $1 billion

2017 - $3 billion

2018 - $9 billion

2021 - $15 billion

2022 - $19 billion

Correlation or Causation

What Happened To Mental Hospitals in the US?

The Rise Of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, SA)

vs G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK)

BRICS are now 31.5% of global GDP vs the G7's 30%.

The rise of Obesity

Consider this Map of the US from 1987 (36 years ago)

Now just compare it with 2020. Wild!

The Scale of Saudi Aramco

Most people do not know of Saudi Aramco. It is one of only 5 companies in the world, valued at $1 Trillion or more.

It is so wildly profitable that in Q2 2022, it reported more net profit than Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Tesla combined.

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• Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

• Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

• Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

• You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.

• You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

• Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.

• The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.

• Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

• Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.

• Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.

• Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

• Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

• Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.

• Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

• Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

• When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.

• Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.

• Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

• The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.

• “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” — Archimedes

• Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

• Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgement.

• Labor means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.

• Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.

• Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

• An army of robots is freely available — it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.

• If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

• Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.

• Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.

• There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.

• Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

• Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.

• You should be too busy to “do coffee,” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.

• Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

• Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.

• Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

• There are no get rich quick schemes. That’s just someone else getting rich off you.

• Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.

• When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize that it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that’s for another day.

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