Dear Magicians,

Welcome to the last Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message of 2025. I can’t believe it! 2026 is going to be even better, but before we get to the regularly scheduled Musing, I can’t resist sharing one piece of ‘inside influencing’ that really hit me hard this year.

Pre-script 1 — One million people said yes!

YouTube is quite good at creating the hedonic treadmill — the insatiable desire to use their precision metrics to gauge your success as a creator. A tiny sampling of what YouTube studio tracks: Impressions (how often thumbnails are shown), Impressions click-through rate (CTR), Views, Traffic sources and hundreds more data points.

For certain milestones, you get physical artifacts: plaques for reaching milestones like 100,000, 10M, 100M subscribers. While I’ll never hit the 1M mark, the most important datum to me was to recognize how many people share an interest in my videos, meaning how many people commented on them, shared them with others, and, most importantly, liked the videos.

The milestone I’m proudest of this year isn’t 58+ million lifetime views. It’s not hitting a third of a million subscribers, though I appreciate each and every one of them. It’s the one million likes my videos have accumulated. That number hit me different.

For unknown reasons, YouTube doesn’t. register a ‘like’ unless a viewer has watched at least 31 seconds of a video. So, of course, I did the math.

That’s over 31 million seconds. Over a year of continuous human attention—one full orbit around the sun—spent just deciding to click a small button that says “this mattered to me.” Views can be accidents. Subscribers can be aspirational. But a like? A like is a tiny act of generosity from someone who already gave you half a minute of their life and decided to give you one second more. I don’t take that lightly. Now, before I get too cocky, I have to point out that 1 million divided by 58 million is <2% So clearly I need to improve to reach the remaining 98% of you. But it feels good nonetheless, and gives me a new North Star to chase, and possibly, if I’m honest with myself, obsess over as I ride the hedonic treadmill into 2026.

Pre-script 2 — Two asks:

1️⃣ If my work you focus or think more clearly, I’d be grateful for an honest review: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U​

2️⃣ Please fill out this quick survey. As a thank you, I’m giving away five $100 Amazon gift cards to five lucky winners drawn at random in early January. Your responses help me improve my content and reach a broader audience than I could on my own. Thank you, sincerely 🙏

Musing

This week finishes the short experiment in something I argued for explicitly in Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: spaced repetition. Not flashcards—signal reinforcement. Insight doesn’t stick because it’s clever; it sticks because it’s revisited under slightly different lighting.

Over the last two Mondays of the year, I’m revisiting ideas from The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast—not to summarize them, but to compress what survived reflection. If you missed last week’s episode, it’s here. The TL;DR from last week — repletion is intellectual weight training: fewer reps, heavier meaning, better form.

If you’ve ever finished a great conversation only to realize a week later that none of it changed how you think, this is my attempt to fix that—starting with myself.

Most intellectual failures aren’t caused by stupidity. They’re caused by smart people arguing inside bad frames and congratulating themselves for being rigorous.

I include myself here. I’ve won arguments that turned out to be about the wrong thing. Celebrated, even. Then realized I’d been playing chess on a checkerboard.

Embarrassing.

​Eric Weinstein made something uncomfortably clear: many debates are settled before evidence enters the room. Whoever defines the frame defines the menu of acceptable thoughts.

This explains why some conversations feel energetic but go nowhere. You’re not disagreeing about facts. You’re disagreeing about which facts are allowed to matter.

Think about it. In physics, for example, gauge invariance sounds like a technical detail. But it actually determines what questions you’re permitted to ask.

Lesson: Before you argue, check who built the room.

​David Deutsch pushed an idea that initially bruised my physicist ego: prediction is overrated.

Ouch. You can predict things for terrible reasons. A broken clock. A lucky guess. A model that works but explains nothing.

Explanation is the real currency. Good explanations make themselves vulnerable to being wrong. Bad explanations survive by being immune to contact with reality—like horoscopes, or certain tenure cases.

Consider Ptolemaic astronomy. It predicted planetary positions beautifully. For centuries. But it explained nothing about why planets moved. Or take Freudian psychoanalysis—it could “explain” any behavior after the fact, which meant it explained none of them. Popper groked this a century ago.

Lesson: If your theory can’t be killed, it was never really alive.

​Nathalie Cabrol — Life Detection Is a Discipline of Restraint

Mars teaches humility before excitement.

I wanted biosignatures. Mars wanted me to calm down.

False positives are easier than discoveries. Context matters more than chemistry alone. You don’t just need the right molecule. You need the right molecule in the right place doing the right thing for reasons that aren’t boring.

Like the Viking landers—they detected reactive chemistry and everyone got excited. Turns out it was probably just weird soil oxidation. Or take Allan Hills 84001, that famous Martian meteorite. Structures that looked like fossilized bacteria. Beautiful. Also possibly just mineral artifacts.

Lesson: Skepticism is a form of respect for reality. Also, a form of not embarrassing yourself at press conferences.

The pattern here is one of mental hygiene. Frames can trap you. Predictions can fool you. Excitement can blind you. Experts can dazzle you. But if you notice the frame, demand real explanation, and treat your own enthusiasm as a warning sign—you might actually learn something, and avoid confirmation bias as a side benefit.

Or at least lose fewer arguments about the wrong things.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week, and a Happy New Year!!

Brian