This is Charay Gadd-Spencer, holding a framed photo of her daughter, London. London was a bright, artistic, soccer-loving 12-year-old who dreamed of becoming an Air Force pilot. She deeply sensed the world we live in and all the pain it can bring. When her family sought help, the mental health industry responded with rushed prescriptions instead of real support. After a crisis admission, London was started on Prozac without discussion of non-drug options or the FDA black box warning for suicidal ideation in children. Just weeks later, on July 30, 2024, she died from an overdose. The system failed her at every turn. While London became a direct patient of the mental health industry, Charay was not. Yet she has lived through every parent’s worst nightmare—the sudden, preventable loss of her child. She is now channeling her grief into advocating for vital change. As the founder of The London Effect, her nonprofit is championing informed choice, pharmacogenetic testing, and London’s Law to prioritize non-drug interventions first. As an organization run by and for patients who have left or are leaving the mental health industry, much of what we talk about is from the perspective of patients. But we want to highlight the impact the mental health industry can have on the families and loved ones of patients—people who never directly received the diagnoses and drugs that so many of us have. People like Charay. At this point, Charay and London may be new faces to you all, but Charay’s voice is only going to carry further. So we’d love for you to join her in saying hello in the comments to welcome her into this community. You can say hello here or to her directly via our corresponding Instagram post. And given all that’s happened to Charay, we’d especially love to hear from those of you who are loved ones of patients and former patients. Thank you. 💛

Offset has been liking and commenting on all ‘Set it Off’ videos he’s been sharing this morning. It’s called showing love back to people genuinely supporting your record. The way these people have been scrambling for some mess for days now is actually just funny at this point. 😂

It isn't unexpected that the focus of the Bun Rust rewrite is on the anti-Zig side more than anything, since the internet loves to hate. What is unexpected and unfortunate is that leadership within Bun hasn't tried to steer the conversation away from that at all. There are so many positive and interesting takeaways from this and I'm not really seeing any of them pushed as the primary message. A positive thing that hasn't been talked about at all is how far Bun came thanks to Zig. And even if you dump it now, its meaningful for how good Zig was to even build a product to this point and impact by any metric. I would've loved to see anyone in leadership say this. On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. Its useful until its not then it can be thrown out. That's interesting! There's been a lot of talk about memory safety and no doubt Rust provides more guarantees than Zig. But I'd love to see a better analysis of why Bun in particular suffered so much rather than take the language-blame path. How could engineering as a practice been more rigorous to prevent this? What were the largest sources of crashes other programs should watch out for? How does Rust prevent them? How could Zig theoretically prevent them? That's interesting. I know the official blog post hasn't come out yet from Bun. But they're smart enough to know that that PR would stir up controversy the moment it opened, or they should've been. And plenty in the company have been tweeting and writing about it. Its somewhat telling to me in various dimensions what they chose to talk about first. I tend to think I'm pretty good at corporate PR/comms (especially when it comes to developer audiences) and I think appealing to the negative is never the right long term strategy; it does work to get short term eyes though.

I am the VP of Workforce Strategy at Meta and I built a spreadsheet called the Replacement Ratio that is, without exaggeration, the most elegant financial instrument in this building. Column A is headcount. Column B is quarterly CapEx allocation. Column C is what I call the Narrative Yield — how much each layoff announcement moves our price-to-earnings multiple. At Meta, cutting 8,000 people generates approximately 2.3x more shareholder value as a story than the $27 billion those people actually cost us. Like a controlled demolition where the dust cloud is worth more than the building ever was. I discovered this by accident in November 2022. We announced the first round on a Thursday. 11,000 people. The stock jumped 4% before market close. Our share price was $90 that week. I pulled up the actual savings — roughly $2.3 billion in annual compensation — and compared them to the market cap movement and the ratio was so disproportionate I thought I'd made an error. I had not made an error. I had discovered the Narrative Yield. The announcement IS the product. The terminations are just the input cost of producing it. Then Mark sent the second memo in March 2023. 10,000 more. "Flatter is faster," he wrote. "Leaner is better." "Keep technology the main thing." My team built talking points around each phrase. I remember testing "returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles" and watching three analysts independently upgrade the stock within 48 hours. Not because the ratio mattered. Because the sentence contained the word "optimal" and the word "ratio" and both of those words trigger the part of an analyst's brain that releases dopamine. We cut 21,000 people total. Our stock went from $90 to $600. Mark's net worth grew by approximately $170 billion. That is $9 million per fired employee. I calculated that number on a Tuesday afternoon and then went to get a coffee from the espresso bar in Building 40 that still operates at full capacity. The barista's name is Diego. He makes a very good cortado. He was not in any of the rounds. Our entire global payroll is $27 billion. Every engineer, every content moderator, every cafeteria worker who restocks the oat milk refrigerator in Building 21 next to the motivational poster that says EFFICIENCY IS CARING in Helvetica Bold, which was printed four days before we eliminated the internal print shop. All of them. $27 billion. Our CapEx guidance this year is $60 to $65 billion. Susan Li said it on the call in January — two weeks after we announced the latest round. The combined Big Four spend is $350 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. Up from $165 billion just two years ago. If I fired every single employee tomorrow, all 72,000, the savings would cover maybe 42% of one year's data center buildout. The humans are a rounding error in the budget of machines that replace them. So what are the layoffs paying for? They are paying for the sentence. The one Susan Li reads on the earnings call: "These actions help us move more quickly while also helping to offset the substantial investments." That sentence is worth $40 billion in market cap. I know because I A/B tested the language with investor relations in March. We tested seven versions. Version C outperformed Version A by 340 basis points. Version C is the one with "actions" instead of "terminations." Version F used "workforce adjustments" and tested even higher but Legal flagged it as too close to the phrasing in the severance agreements. So we went with C. Turns out the market doesn't mind what you do. It minds what you call it. We call it a lot of things. "Flattening the org." "Removing redundancies." "Focusing our investments on our highest priorities." "Raising the bar on performance management." That last one was January 2025. Mark's memo. 3,600 people. He called them "lowest performers." The memo went out on January 14th. The earnings call announcing $60-65 billion in spending went out on January 29th. Fifteen days. My team scheduled both. The proximity is not accidental. You announce the human cost first so that when you announce the machine cost, the narrative is "disciplined" rather than "reckless." Sequencing is everything. We tested the reverse order once, hypothetically, in a simulation. The model predicted a 2.1% stock dip. Discipline first. Ambition second. Always. The performance framing was my suggestion. If you call them layoffs, it triggers severance obligations and unemployment benefits in thirty-seven states. If you call them performance-based terminations, it triggers nothing. Same people. Same desks cleared. Same badge deactivated at 5 AM before they woke up. Different word. Different $180 million in severance liability. I keep a legal pad in my desk where I track the savings per euphemism. "Performance management" saves approximately $50,000 per head in reduced severance. At 3,600 heads, that is $180 million. The cost of drafting the memo was forty minutes of Mark's time and sixteen hours of my team's time. That is approximately the best ROI in the history of corporate communications. Better than the Narrative Yield itself. Each phrase tests differently with different analyst cohorts. Growth-focused analysts respond to "investing in AI." Value analysts respond to "disciplined cost management." Same 8,000 people. Different sentence. Different $40 billion. The notification protocol is standardized now. Laptop access revoked at 5:47 AM Pacific. Badge deactivated at 5:48. Slack channels disappear at 5:49. Calendar cleared at 5:50. Personal email notification sent at 6:00. The thirteen-minute gap between systems going dark and the employee being told why is not cruelty. It is security protocol. We cannot have 3,600 people with simultaneous access to internal systems and knowledge that they have been terminated. The window for sabotage is too wide. So we close the window first and explain later. Some of them find out from the press release. Some of them find out because their phone loses work email at 5:47 and they check Twitter. I do not love this part. But I respect the engineering of it. Thirteen minutes. Clean. We announced the January cuts the same week Mark said "people will be more important than ever." My team wrote both statements. There is no contradiction if you understand that "people" and "headcount" are different financial instruments. People are the future. Headcount is the cost of having had a past. I keep a framed printout of both quotes side by side on my office wall. Not as irony. As a reminder that language is architecture. Meanwhile: we spent $77.86 billion buying back our own stock between 2022 and 2024. $27.96 billion. $19.77 billion. $30.13 billion. Each buyback inflates the share price. Each share price increase makes the layoff announcement look more justified in retrospect. The stock went up because we cut. We used the cash from cutting to buy back stock. The buyback made the stock go up more. The stock going up proved the cuts were correct. I mapped this loop on a whiteboard in January 2024 and one of our financial planning analysts took a photo of it and made it her laptop wallpaper. The total severance bill for 21,000 employees was approximately $2.5 billion. We spent 31 times that amount buying back stock. The humans cost less to remove than the stock cost to inflate. That is not a metaphor. That is the actual ratio. I have it in Column E. Reality Labs lost $60 billion between 2020 and 2024. Sixteen billion in 2023 alone. It was never subjected to the "Year of Efficiency." No one asked the metaverse division to be leaner or flatter or faster. The humans were asked to be efficient so the machines could be profligate. I did not design this asymmetry. I just maintain the spreadsheet that tracks it. The rehire pipeline is my favorite part. Half those roles reopen in Hyderabad and São Paulo within nine months at 31% of the loaded cost. Revenue per remaining employee went from $1.3 million in 2022 to $2.7 million in 2024. Each survivor now generates more than double what their predecessor generated. Not because they work harder. Because the denominator shrank and the numerator — AI-driven ad revenue — grew independently of human effort. We call it geographic rebalancing. The Workforce Transitions team keeps a Lucite tombstone on their shelf from the 2023 round, 11,000 MANAGED DEPARTURES etched in Helvetica, right next to a half-empty bottle of Clase Azul someone brought back from the offsite in Cabo where we planned the 2024 round. The same team is hosting a culture workshop next month called "Our People, Our Purpose." I wrote the talking points. Amazon is doing 30,000. Intel cut 21,000. Microsoft invented "voluntary departures" for 125,000 people, which is the most inspired euphemism since "rightsizing," because it implies the 125,000 chose this. Google cut 12,000 and called it a "moment of clarity." Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer support roles and cited AI directly. Combined across the industry: 644,000 tech workers laid off since 2023. Combined CapEx on AI infrastructure: $350 billion this year alone. They spent seven to ten times more on GPUs than on severance for the humans those GPUs replaced. The layoffs are the press release for the spending. The spending is the excuse for the layoffs. It is a perpetual motion machine that runs on the difference between what a person costs and what their departure is worth. The free food budget for remaining employees is approximately $800 million per year. $10,000 to $12,000 per person. Artisanal pizza. Sushi bar. Pour-over coffee stations. The campus amenities operated without interruption during every round. Nobody asked the cafeteria to be efficient. I eat lunch there every day. It is very good. The oat milk is organic. Column D is the one I'm most proud of. It tracks average severance duration against local unemployment rates and cross-references media coverage density by market to optimize announcement timing for minimal news cycle disruption. January announcements get buried in earnings season. September announcements get lost in back-to-school cycles. I have mapped every dead zone in the American attention span and they are all on my calendar. January 14th — two weeks before Super Bowl coverage saturates every newsroom — was not an accident. The 3,600 number was calculated to stay below the threshold that triggers a WARN Act filing in California. 3,600 across twelve states. Below the threshold in each. That was also Column D. I presented the Replacement Ratio at our Q2 planning offsite last Tuesday. Someone from Legal asked if we'd modeled the human impact. I said yes. Column D. That's what Column D is. They promoted the spreadsheet to a standing dashboard. It refreshes hourly. Net income last year was $62.4 billion. Headcount is 72,000. The dashboard calculates revenue per head in real time. Every departure makes the number go up. Every departure makes the announcement worth more. Every announcement makes the stock go up. Every stock increase makes Mark $4.7 billion richer per percentage point. I named the Slack channel #narrative-yield#. It has 340 members. None of them are in Column A.

PAIN IS A SINE #DawnofChromatica# I invite you to dance to this album in celebration of young artists all over the world. Artists who see the world, feel the world, and put that feeling into something bigger than all of us: music. All love, LG xx

I just love my babies! For Mothers Day this year they made me these jeans and they were so happy when they saw me wear their work or art! Every Mothers Day they have drawn on clothing for me that I will keep forever! . I love seeing their personalities shine through their art. You can tell which one of my kids drew on what side of these jeans. From Psalm’s foot and hand print to Saint’s soccer drawings, North’s backwards letters and Chi’s hearts…I will cherish these forever!

My sister Natali and her husband Alex started this gorgeous brand Natali Alexander, designing and releasing 350 numbered scarves. The Lumina Scarf was created with a signature stained glass romantic print exploring how darkness gives light its meaning 🖤 love them so much

Spotted something neat at IKEA yesterday. In their bedroom section, they’ve placed a stand with paper shopping lists and measuring tapes (free to grab). The shopping list has columns for product name, article number, price, and warehouse location. Because at IKEA you browse in the showroom but collect your flat-pack from a separate warehouse area so you need to note down where to find it later. The measuring tape? Same logic. You’re looking at a bed, wondering “will this fit?” and the answer is hanging right there. What I love is that they’ve already simulated my need before I even felt it. They know I’ll want to note things down, they know I’ll want to measure. They’ve pre-empted the customer’s next move and placed the solution right at the point of intent. Nothing digital, nothing fancy -- the design is the placement.

I got liquidated 3 times until I started making money in trading. Everyone says find a strategy, build “discipline”, then you’ll make money. This is the most bullshit and misleading advice of retail trading. Because discipline can NEVER be “practiced” into existence like a habit. You CAN'T train it like a sport where repetition makes you better. That fake discipline works fine until real pressure hits, then you completely fall apart. No strategy will ever work on you if your mind is the weakest part of your setup. Because here’s the ugly truth👇 > If life hasn’t broken you (multiple times) before, you simply don’t have the psychological resilience to REPLICATE the discipline in traders you admire. > Their strategy works because it’s PAIRED with a level of INNER RESILIENCE most haven’t earned yet. > The calm you see in profitable traders wasn't “practiced.” > It was forged from surviving enough PAIN that their old instincts had NO CHOICE but to DIE. > Their discipline came from DESTRUCTION, not DETERMINATION. > With luck and fake discipline you can make money, but you sure as hell can’t keep it for long. So HOW to get "REAL" discipline?👇 > You cannot “gradually” grow discipline over time. > It happens very suddenly and violently, usually at your lowest point when your old self finally gets ripped apart. It’s like arguing with someone. Some people stay ice cold and say exactly what destroys the other person. Others break down crying. The difference isn’t “self control.” It’s that the calm one has already survived far worse, so this moment means nothing to them. Chaos doesn’t touch them because they’ve seen bigger storms, not because they “practiced patience.” So if you're in your lowest point right now, don't waste it👇 > People don’t get many chances in life to experience metamorphosis. > If you waste all that emotional energy attacking the world or pushing away the people who love you, you’re burning fuel that should be used on yourself. > Put that energy into your own damn evolution. > Put it into the quiet moments where you sit down and actually face your shame and fear. > Start by writing down the 30 things you are most afraid of or most ashamed of. > It sounds small, but it’s huge, because the version of you who is “doing well” would never have the guts to face that list. A lot of people think the secret to trading is more strategies, more macro research, more knowledge. They’re wrong. It's stepping completely outside of trading to recognize and accept your broken parts. Your demons. And STOP studying people's success! Study how they survived their lowest point instead👇 > People love calling someone smart or disciplined, then they copy their routines like it'll magically work. > It won't. You can't copy success because half of it is luck, timing, and advantages you don't have. But you can learn from how they fell apart and got back up: > How they handled losing everything > How they kept going when most would quit > How they turned pain into power instead of self-hatred Those parts are real. Those parts can be copied. Those parts are earned through fire, not gifted by genetics or privilege. Success is personal. But the path of dying, rebuilding and coming back stronger is universal. And it’s the only damn part worth copying.

Friends… we lost Sharpie. It’s been emotionally heavy over here. We all knew from the beginning that this outcome was still a strong possibility, even with all the work I’m doing to try and avoid it, but this news still feels devastating to have to share. Even though intakes like Sharpie are wild animals who are only with me for a few short weeks, the loss of these hydro babies always breaks my heart. I think part of what makes these losses so difficult emotionally is that these babies are often some of the sweetest patients. You wouldn’t normally want to encourage a rehab patient to bond to you, however, these babies don’t process the world quite the same way as a typical fox kit. Their lack of normal fear - which is always part of how a human was able to get their hands on them in the first place - and their inability to really distinguish friend versus foe means they seek out comfort and affection and express excitement in a way that makes it almost impossible not to become attached. Sharpie was arguably our hardest hydro baby loss yet, because he was SO “good”. He was so much more like a “typical” kit than most cases. I really thought he might “be the first one” because of his encouraging mentation and ability to function. His sudden decline was a blow to the chest, to say the least. Some of you may remember the hydrocephalic baby we named Coconut from a few years ago; he wasn’t with us long, as usual, but that loss really stung for my daughter, Ella. I still remember coming home from the vet without him in the carrier and watching her young, knowing eyes instantly fill with tears. Well, Ella has been more involved than ever assisting where she safely can with my wildlife rehab work this year, prompted both by her maturing and showing genuine, personal interest in my work, and also by my fractured foot forcing me to heavily rely on loved ones for help. Her true involvement this year led to Ella really viewing Sharpie as “her intake” in a way. Even though she understood from the beginning that this outcome was still likely - because we haven’t quite “figured it out” yet, & because I’m VERY transparent with my children about the realities of this line of work - it still shattered her heart. So, grieving Sharpie’s loss while simultaneously empathizing with my own blood and mini-me as she experienced her first truly excruciating rehab heartbreak, seeing silent tears fog her glasses when I acknowledged that it was time… that was a very unique kind of pain. Sharpie was playful, curious, and full of personality. He happily ran around carrying toys in his mouth, activated his little “Porsha ears” every time he heard someone approaching, loved cuddling with Apple, and genuinely just seemed happy to exist. He was also able to stay with us a couple weeks longer than most (and again, he was not just “alive” - he appeared comfortable and maintained the ability to perform most normal functions), which was very encouraging. And that’s exactly why I will continue pushing back against the idea that every one of these babies should automatically be euthanized upon intake. Because Sharpie’s life mattered, and I have absolutely no doubt that he ENJOYED life right up until his sudden turn for the worse - which, unfortunately, is a spontaneous reality that can occur with the delicate brains of these babies, especially in these early stages while we’re still fine-tuning medical management and seeing if they may someday become appropriate candidates for surgery. But because of all of you, his story became bigger than just another loss. We were able to officially confirm severe obstructive hydrocephalus via MRI. We gathered advanced imaging while he was still with us, more data, & more firsthand experience managing this condition than we’ve ever had before. We learned from him, documented it all, and even though his loss feels like a smash to the heart, his life ultimately moved this mission another step forward. CAPTION CONTINUED…