Random Threefer of thoughts that came to mind this morning.

Old Patterns No Longer Work

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek among other bestsellers, recently observed a rapid falloff in sales of his self-help books. He makes the reasonable hypothesis that AI is the cause, prospective readers instead using LLMs as their source of lifestyle and productivity hacks.

There are many other reasons why self-improvement books might be faltering1, or why specific well-worn tomes and authors might fade in and out of favour2, however AI is certainly impacting the industry.

The reason, I suspect, is that LLMs get to the point. If you’re looking for concrete, direct answers, tricks, tips, whatever, an LLM is usually an efficient mechanism. And while it’s often simply wrong, little of the self-help industry has any scientific basis for their recommendations, so it isn’t really a change in the accuracy department. Try things out and see if they work for you.

Filler is an antipattern in 2026, yet the self-help realm is addicted to it. The reliance on filler is why a lot of traditional media venues are facing attention losses.

What do I mean by filler?

The average self-help/how-to book — and I’ve read loads of them — can be condensed by 90% and absolutely nothing will be lost. Some can be reduced to a single page. Some to a single paragraph. Often even a single sentence.

But you can’t sell a page or a paragraph — basically a tweet — for $40. You can’t build an influencer career or celebrate your best seller around a blog post or a tweet, however many hits you get.

So instead you take a simple premise and fluff it up with narrative filler until it hits 300+ pages3. And every reader knows that is what’s happening, but it was just something you had to slog through because everyone does it. Filler also can imply a complexity that isn’t actually there, allowing one to easily dismiss doubters as people who just must have missed some of the nuance in the parable of the Turtle and the Pie.

A good example that I recently read is the “Glucose Revolution” by Jessie Inchauspé. The entire book (all 304 pages) is taking a tiny number of bullet points and repeating and rephrasing them endlessly. The author has made a whole career from this book, re-iterating and pounding on this incredibly simple foundation in endless ways, all while pitching hilariously overpriced protein powders and vitamins.

Ask a decent LLM to give you the book in bullet points, and it will basically give you 100% of the worthwhile content of the book in a quick four-minute read, saving you the time that slogging through a few simple thoughts padded to 300+ pages.

It’s unfair that an LLM can do that4, but if you give readers the choice between mostly filler and little filler, they will often choose the latter.

YouTube And The New Ask Button

YouTube recently added Gemini AI to YouTube via the Ask button. Increasingly I’ve found myself jumping to it and requesting a summary of the video at the outset before committing time. Doubly so for videos with shocked face thumbnails combined with the classic Betteridge law of headlines, or that teases some big reveal.

“A common ingredient might kill you?” [Pikachu Face]

Click on Ask / summarize and in seconds you see that it’s just restating old nonsense, and so on.

As more people discover this tool I suspect the classic teasers and then filler padded to maximize engagement minutes and thus advertisement potential are going to see the same results as the self-help industry is seeing.

I don’t know why it came to mind, but years back there was an Apple-sphere influencer who posted a video detailing whether you should get 8GB or 16GB in your Mac (maybe it was the M1 Mac release?). He yapped for just over 10 minutes — much like 300+ pages is the self-help target, 10-minutes has some sort of monetization importance for YouTube — to finally just say “get 16GB if you can afford it, and if you can’t, don’t”. Zero metrics. Zero tests. Zero benchmarks. Zero effort. Just a lot of meandering, worthless filler, finally to get to a worthless completely subjective “eh” finale. What a waste of time. I remember this video appearing across a number of social media venues.

The “Ask” button will not be kind to videos that resort to this sort of nonsense. If the entirety of the content could be a one sentence tweet, just do that?

On “We Evolved Doing/Alongside X”

Follow any nutrition or lifestyle discussion, and invariably you’ll come across those people who will declare that things we did in the past5 are beneficial and optimal because we “evolved” alongside it (saturated fats, sun exposure, etc). Alternately that anything we didn’t evolve with must be harmful (seed oils, artificial sweeteners, sunscreen, modern medicine, etc).

Which is a rational argument if you are happy dying at 406, which is around the point where evolution is basically done with you. Even if living to 40 is your ideal, evolution is also fine with short, brutal lives filled with deaths so long as propagation happens faster still7.

Evolution is not the magical optimization people often perceive it to be, and ultimately the goal of evolution is to get enough of its members old enough to spawn some kids and provide for them until they can provide for themselves / each other. From that point on your survival, from an evolutionary perspective, is meaningless if not even suboptimal. Your continued existence is nothing more than left over inertia.

Evolution is ready and willing to toss you in the dumpster, so if it’s your key to longevity you have chosen a bad ally.

There is something called the “Grandmother Hypothesis” that imagines a tiny evolutionary pressure to continue providing past the reproductive age, however this a minuscule selection pressure compared to simply living long enough to spawn children.

Not only does evolution not really care about you past 40, it actively conspires against you. Things like the mTOR pathway are geared to get us growing and reproducing as quickly as possible in youth, but as you age it turns into a mechanism of self-destruction. We carry loads of genes that optimize youth and sabotage us later in life.

So sure, load up on saturated fats and sun exposure — we “evolved” with them — but understand that evolution has never selected to defend against the melanoma and CVD you’re going to suffer in your 40s, though it will fight against these outcomes in younger years. Your early death is arguably evolution’s natural plan.

On Obnoxiously Loud Children

Periodically I see online arguments concerning eternally screaming, screeching kids. Invariably it breaks down into the “kids will be kids! Stop being a Karen8!” camp facing off against the “control your sprogs” critics.

The former usually leans upon the proven “look who has never had kids” parental privilege / perspective thing, believing this trumps all other positions. Some sort of heroic sacrifice, enlightened higher-calling.

I have four children. None of them were ever the eternally screaming, screeching kids that people revile. Somehow we managed to raise kids that are considerate and thoughtful of others, via simple reminders that other people do exist, that there isn’t a need to constantly be so loud, to be mindful of others, and so on.

Most kids actually don’t have to yell and scream constantly, but the ones who do have been taught this careless selfishness by equally selfish parents, and are likely to be equally dysfunctional in society.

They’re doomed to become the universally hated people who obnoxiously play music on a Bluetooth speaker on transit. Who hold loud speakerphone conversations in crowded places.

Their parents were thoughtless, inconsiderate assholes, and they’ll follow in the tradition.

Footnotes

  1. Nihilism, defeatism, GLP-1s, changing interests, etc ↩

  2. Or groups of them. There are cliques of self-help gurus who all glaze and endorse each other in a big circle-jerk. It can be off-putting and makes the whole thing feel like a coordinated grift ↩

  3. Around 300 pages is by far the most common length in this field. It’s so common that I suspect this is what publishers demand of their authors.

    “I want to write a book telling people to exercise more and eat less!” “Okay make it 300+ pages.”

    “Chapter 1 - My Childhood Cat and What She Taught Me About Calories” ↩

  4. I mean…is it? If I say that her book tells you that you should avoid blood glucose spikes by choosing complex carbs, eating your meals in a way that puts simple carbs last, slowing absorption and digestion, and by taking short walks after meals so your muscles absorb some of the blood glucose…have I stolen her content? ↩

  5. Often these are disproven or spurious claims. Keto fanatics, for instance, often contrive a past where we ate meat as our primary diet. Archeological evidence does not support this at all ↩

  6. Even that is a lie. Evolution is perfectly served with outrageous mortality levels and brutal, pain-filled lives if just enough of its members live long enough to swell the ranks ↩

  7. The billions of broiler house chickens, living brutal short lives, are a massive evolutionary success. Evolution is not the ally to the individual it is usually imagined to be ↩

  8. There are people who are overly harsh on kids just having fun and living life / existing. I’m not sympathizing with those people, but instead for the people who have to endure the forever-96db only-volume-is-super-loud sort of kid that no one wants in their proximity ↩