Host of Radical Personal Finance, Publisher of the Life of Fred math and science curriculum, Founder of the EchoLingo app for multilingual children.
In your ears.
Joined May 2008
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Joshua Sheats retweeted
One of the EOD guys from my first deployment did the Army’s “enlisted to doctors” program.
He did 2 years of premed, 4 years of medical school, and then specialized as a trauma surgeon.
It cost him zero dollars.
He has no debt for medical school.
He’s set up for life.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
The American ideal was once the man who could play football, quote Shakespeare, understand Newton, appreciate architecture, debate Aristotle, and sing in church.
Now we demand that 12-year-olds specialize in one sport and spend their adolescence building college résumés.
We used to cultivate men. Now we manufacture applicants.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
We LOVED getting these on deployment. Kids would draw the wildest stuff and teachers clearly weren't reviewing them. They would draw Army men shooting people and blood coming out and then it would say "I hope you don't die." Everyone looked forward to getting them.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
i have been steadily banging the drum on domestic transformer production since 2023, and now, we have resolute grid. the last time an american company fully designed and built these was in the late 80s. so excited to see this come roaring back. incredible work!
This is a wonderful song. Enjoy.
My latest song/video is getting a lot of comments so let me explain a few things:
1 - The song was created from a hook I recorded as a hum; it guides the entire song; you hear that exact hook on repeat as the foundation of the entire song (even the bagpipes echo it).
2 - To generate the song itself it took 108 song generations in Suno; each one listened to, adjusted, modified and prompts tweaked to get it closer to the finish line.
3 - No specific artist was used to guide the style; the style was prompted as "Folk, Acoustic pop, folk-pop"
AI is incredible; creative people everywhere will produce amazing creative work with it, and we will be the lucky ones to be able to enjoy it. It's a wonderful tool; it empowers and unlocks tremendous creative potential. Having said that, the human has the steering wheel; if you defer to the AI for all creative output, it may produce greatness, but it is more likely to reverse to the mean, and averageness. It's no different from any other creative tool. Embrace it, use it, master it and compel it to create your vision.
Support cool art, at least with a follow.
What a story!
For fourteen years, everyone thought U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant John Chapman died in the first two minutes on top of a freezing 10,000-foot mountain in Afghanistan.
Then modern image technology unlocked the thermal camera footage recorded by a Predator drone circling high in the clouds on March 4, 2002.
When Pentagon investigators watched the enhanced screen, hardened combat generals broke down in tears. Because the video proved that after everyone else had left the mountain peak, John Chapman woke up alone in the snow and fought an entire army by himself.
That night on the peak of Takur Ghar, thirty-six-year-old Chapman, a father of two little girls from Connecticut, had charged uphill through thigh-deep snow alone to silence an enemy bunker and save his pinned-down team. Hit from a second bunker, he fell motionless. Believing he was dead, the surviving team was forced to retreat down the ridge.
Chapman was not dead.
The drone footage showed him regaining consciousness in the pitch-black snow, surrounded on three sides by enemy fighters, with nine separate wounds in his body.
In total darkness, with no comrade beside him and nobody on earth watching except a silent camera in the sky, he refused to surrender. For more than an hour, he fought from inside the bunker, killing an enemy fighter in bare-handed close combat when they tried to rush him.
Then, at dawn, Chapman heard the heavy thump of rotor blades in the mist.
An American Chinook helicopter carrying twenty-three U.S. Army Rangers was flying straight toward the peak to rescue him, right into the sights of an enemy rocket launcher.
Chapman knew that if he stayed safe inside the rock bunker, those twenty-three young Americans in the helicopter would be blown out of the sky.
So on the thermal video, investigators watched John Chapman deliberately climb out of the bunker, stand up tall in the open snow, and fire into the enemy positions to draw every machine gun on the mountain onto his own chest.
He died in the snow as the sun rose, shielding the incoming helicopter with his life.
True bushido is what a warrior does when he thinks nobody will ever know his story. The sky was watching, John. And America will remember your name forever.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
I live in what is often considered one of the top 10 most rural counties in America.
There used to be a trolly that ran regularly into the nearest very small "city."
The rails were more direct than the modern roads, I think it was about 65 miles each way.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
The modern home has not functioned as a home for 100+ years. It's essentially become a refueling station for corporate labor and a theater for digital entertainment.
The husband really only spends time there to sleep & eat before getting up each workday and spending 40, 50, 0r 60 hours a week working for a stranger’s business.
The wife collapses there after running errands to feed the consumer machine and dropping off and picking up the kids from government subsidized schools and daycares.
The children sit in dark bedrooms with glowing screens, being discipled by influencers and algorithms that hate their heritage, their faith, and their family.
No food is grown. No timber is cut. No books are written. No livestock is cared for. No hammers are swung. No trades are taught.
You bought a two-thousand-square-foot dormitory and theater and called it the American Dream.
Tear down the facade.
Turn the home back into a factory of life and rebuild that which was lost.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
If your house produces nothing, your children will likely learn little if anything of value inside its walls.
You cannot teach a twelve-year-old boy responsibility by giving him a chore chart with a five-dollar allowance for taking out the trash.
It's fake work, and boys smell the fake from a mile away.
He needs real work where the consequences matter:
- Repairing the broken fence.
- Mixing the mortar and cutting the stones for the wall.
- Tending the livestock and participating in the harvest. - Keeping the books for the rental units and using his hands to renovate and maintain them.
Give him work that actually feeds and provides for the household, and you will rarely have to lecture him on work ethic again.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
The beautiful thing about rejecting the blank slate is that intelligence stops conveying morality and begins demanding noblesse oblige.
There needs to be a place for men of every ability in our communities, and it falls on the more intelligent among us to make that possible.
Children who are illiterate and dumb generally have parents who are illiterate and dumb. And the children who are illiterate and dumb generally stay that way no matter what external system is forced upon them. We haven't really figured out any way to take dumb people and turn them into smart people reliably. What we've done instead is create a society that works exceedingly well for smart people and makes being smart the only viable pathway for success. I think that should be the primary discussion we have and we should reorganize our society to make a place where dumb people can flourish and succeed. Right now we've created a system called "school" which is really well designed for smart people and very poorly designed for dumb people.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
I once sold a truck to a guy who called and agreed to pay full price as long as I brought it to the airport within the hour. It was incredibly sus, but my truck had been for sale for months, and I had grown desperate. So I went. It only got weirder.
The moment I arrive he hops in the drivers seat for a test drive, and a run to the bank to get the money to buy it. He’s a freakishly large porcine fellow, adorned head to toe in dirty work clothes. He looked like Hagrid if he were an alcoholic with a the world’s most unionized construction job.
We get to chatting on the drive. Work, life, conspiratorial ramblings, Donald Trump, Pakis. The usual, if you know this type of guy.
I come to learn he needed to buy my truck to get home. He had bought a one way plane ticket to come buy a different one, but had been ghosted by the seller when he landed. He was stranded at an airport on the other side of the country with no other plan.
So I thought, “well maybe I know the guy who ghosted him. Let me see if I can help.” I asked to see his phone to read his FB Marketplace message with the seller.
He had been talking to some guy with Broken English and a vaguely middle eastern sounding name for several days now. The guy was selling an incredibly desirable truck for 30% below market. A virtually impossible deal. The vehicular equivalent of a horny singles in your area add on a porn site.
He turned to me and said “y’know, his listing says the truck is about an hour from here, maybe I should go look for him.”
I said “bro I’m looking at his profile, he has this same truck listed in every city in North America. The plate in the photos isn’t even from our state. This truck is spammed hundreds of times across marketplace.”
To which he replied, “yeah I thought that was weird. I think it’s a glitch.”
“No it’s not a glitch… you didn’t send him money did you?” I asked, fearing the answer.
“Yeah I sent him a money, otherwise he was gonna sell it to another guy.”
I winced. “how much?”
“Five thousand bucks.”
“……okay.”
“Well let’s look him up, we have his name.” He replies confidently.
“Look him up where?” I ask.
“Facebook”
“I’m looking at his Facebook. It’s not real.”
Just then we arrive at the bank, he parks my 2500HD in the handicap spot at a 45 degree angle. I say maybe we should pick a different spot, he tells me he isn’t picky.
We set up the wire transfer, he makes a disparaging remark about brown people to the teller. She frowns, she is brown. The money luckily still gets sent. And he takes off in the truck.
Hours later he calls me from the middle of nowhere. He had decided to fuck with the aftermarket tuner while driving and bricked it. He was stranded.
I don’t think all you xitter users realize just how difficult the modern world already is for an 85IQ person to navigate.
With 53% of youtube shorts views now coming from AI content, these people are about to be thrust into a completely incomprehensible dream realm forever.
Bricklayer, 49, travels 1,200 miles for dream girl - only to discover she's AI-generated trib.al/3CcGOfk
Children who are illiterate and dumb generally have parents who are illiterate and dumb. And the children who are illiterate and dumb generally stay that way no matter what external system is forced upon them. We haven't really figured out any way to take dumb people and turn them into smart people reliably. What we've done instead is create a society that works exceedingly well for smart people and makes being smart the only viable pathway for success. I think that should be the primary discussion we have and we should reorganize our society to make a place where dumb people can flourish and succeed. Right now we've created a system called "school" which is really well designed for smart people and very poorly designed for dumb people.
It’s easy to burn, it’s hard to build. Civilization must be built in every single generation. If you miss one, it’s a slow and arduous fight back.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
in just over a month, we've had
- flying cars
- AI solving a Millenium Math problem
- A new antibiotic discovered by AI lab
- 722 AI written Math papers released at once
- A solution to AI alignment
- Google reducing errors 40× in quantum computing, making it practical
- Opus 5 level AI running fully offline
- Opus 5.5 solving motion graphics and automations.
And that's just in the last 5 weeks. IYNYK.
Incredible time to be alive
