Transcendent Human Experiences Optimized, 3129 Quimby Street, Glendale, CA (2026)

04/21/2026

Ever been confused by your medical lab results?

You get your results back, and for the umpteenth time, you are confused, or angry, or frustrated.

Clearly, the system is not designed to make you feel confident that you and your health care providers are doing the right thing. Or that they can explain things to you correctly. Or even that the right tests were done.

Tomorrow, I’m launching a PDF guide about how to face lab results, based on my own voluminous experience dealing with two auto-immune diseases, plus stroke, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, any hypoglycemia.

But today I’d like to offer some encouragement, if you can call it that, on how to navigate the territory. I want to save you the dozens of hours of wild-goose chases I have gone through, by not understanding how the system works.

For reference: I happen to have a bunch of medical conditions ALL OF WHOSE RESPECTIVE MEDICATIONS CONFLICT WITH EACH OTHER. So I’ve spent a lot of time in labs.

Here are the top 5 complaints people have about medical lab tests — and what you can do about each one:
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1. Confusing Results You Can't Understand

Studies show that 67% of patients report confusion about their lab results — including medical terminology, reference ranges, and what the values actually mean for their health. Over a third of patients are unsure whether they even understood their results at all.

What to do: Before leaving your appointment, ask your doctor to explain each result in plain language. Write down or screenshot your results and use trusted sources like the NIH's MedlinePlus to look up terms.
You can also ask your provider's patient portal for a plain-language summary, or bring results to a pharmacist — they're often underutilized and great at explaining numbers.
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2. Surprise Bills & Hidden Costs

Patients are increasingly frustrated by long wait times and unpredictable expenses in traditional healthcare, which is partly why millions are now turning to direct-to-consumer lab services.

What to do: Always ask upfront: "Is this test covered by my insurance?" and "What's the cash price?" You can also use tools like GoodRx, Singlecare.com, or request itemized bills after the fact. If billed unexpectedly, you have the right to negotiate or dispute charges.
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3. Too Many Unnecessary Tests

Research reviewing 177 hospitalized patients found that nearly 90% received at least one unnecessary test, and roughly one-third of all tests ordered were deemed superfluous. Unnecessary tests can trigger a "cascade of care" — a chain of follow-up tests and procedures that can cost patients thousands of dollars and cause significant anxiety, even when the original finding turns out to be nothing.

What to do: Don't be afraid to ask your doctor why a test is being ordered and what will change based on the result. The nonprofit initiative Choosing Wisely (choosingwisely.org) publishes lists of tests that are commonly overused — it's a great resource to review before appointments.

Personal experience: I once estimated that I saved $2000, 5 lab visits, and 30 hours by assiduously using choosingwisely.org. If your medical situation is complicated, it can be invaluable.
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4. Lab Errors & Mistakes

Lab errors can range from samples being mixed up or improperly stored, to results being reported to the wrong doctor or never communicated to the patient at all — with consequences ranging from delayed treatment to misdiagnosis and even death.

Common grounds for lab negligence include contamination, wrong result reporting, mixing up samples, and failing to send reports in a timely manner.

What to do: Always follow up if you haven't received results within the expected timeframe. If a result seems off or doesn't match your symptoms, advocate for a retest. Keep copies of all your lab results for your own records — don't assume your providers are coordinating perfectly.
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5. Health Care Providers Who Misinterpret Results

Research has found that many physicians misunderstand test results or overestimate how accurate tests are — particularly around false positives. This can lead to major medical decisions being made based on incorrect assumptions.

What to do: If a result comes back abnormal, ask your doctor: "How likely is it that this is a true positive?" and "What are the next steps before we take action?" Getting a second opinion from a specialist before pursuing invasive follow-up procedures is always reasonable and within your rights.
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The through-line across all five? Being an informed, proactive patient makes a real difference. Ask questions, keep records, and don't hesitate to push back.

I’m going to be creating a Substack Community about these issues, and I’d love your input. I’m especially Hero's Journey Interactiverested in your tips on navigating the medical labs labyrinth.

Please comment if you’d like to share your experience with others, and share and repost to someone you love if you found this valuable.

01/14/2026

Welcome to Be a Sustainability Hero. Due to character limits, we couldn’t use a more accurate, comprehensive name, which might be “Grow your Substack while also earning a Hero Award for advancing planetary sustainability, which in turn helps you build your Substack audience, and anything else you’re doing. For free.”

That’s what we help you do.

It’s no mistake that you’re here. Most probably, you landed here because you wrote something that resonated with our tribe. Most people arrive here because we liked, or shared, or re-stacked, or positively commented on something they wrote on Substack.
Or they did the same for us.

“Be a Hero” may sound somewhat presumptuous, so let’s break down exactly what that means.

There are a lot of creators on Substack who can teach you how to build your audience.

OUR specific niche is helping you grow while at the SAME TIME, helping you earn a Hero Award by partnering with AI to position yourself as an authority on a specific challenge relating to planetary improvement, as exemplified by one of the UN’s 169 Targets within the 17 Sustainability Goals.

The two things reinforce each other.

Key to our process is that while the UN’s 17 Goals don’t make good AI prompts (they are far too broad) the 169 goals DO work well when adapted as prompts (or as beginnings of a human-AI conversation), and when used wisely can produce new insights on their topics relatively continuously. And the 7 Ais we use (as of 2026 they are ChatGPT 5.2, Gemini 3, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Meta.ai and DeepSeek) each offer their own unique spin on each Target.

Our Hero Award consistently places #1 on Google’s Page one for that term, even though more than 20 organizations offer some prize called Hero award. You can mention that when sharing your Substack, which provides credibility.

In addition, since we issue many press releases, and have reached the same journalists, bloggers, and influencers for years, our Hero Award announcements get consistently picked up by both traditional and social media outlets around the globe.

Here’s how it works: We have developed a multi-step protocol, like a recipe, for using your insight combined with 7 carefully selected AIs to derive new approaches to one of the UN’s Targets, which you can choose here:

(https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal10 ).

When you complete the procedure, which takes 2-3 hours, we confer the Hero Award upon you. Then we publicize you on our socials and in Press Releases. You can mention this to your followers and subscribers, AND confer the same benefit upon them.
The protocol works as follows, after you select a UN Target:

1. After teaching the AI to understand your style of cognition, and learning its idiosyncrasies (meaning the AI is ‘primed’ for you and you are ‘primed for it) you run your chosen UN Target through all 7 AI LLMs sequentially. Right now the best sequence seems to be Gemini-Copilot-Meta.ai-Claude-Perplexity-DeepSeek-ChatGPT. The result should be a page or less.
2. You post your result on Substack. Some like to present the entire text as a Post, and then divide it into individual pieces for use as Substack Notes. You can initiate a Chat for discussing the answer.
3. You create a GPT with ChatGPT on OpenAI’s site and list it on the GPT store site.
4. You mention it in our Hero Awards Linkedin group, with a link back to your Substack post.
5. You list it on our Hero Awards Academia.edu page, with a link to your Substack.
6. You tell us, at [email protected], so we can add your name to a press release, and confer the Hero Award upon you, which we then mention in our socials and on our website.

You can use the acronym ASCLAP to remember this sequence (Ais, Substack, ChatGPT, Linkedin, Academia.edu, Press Releases).

These 6 elements work well and reinforce each other because:

1. The 7 Ais refine your answer, with each offering its unique approach.
2. Substack, because it is a network of people who build their networks by furthering each others’ growth, expands your reach.
3. ChatGPT: The GPT you create from your content continues evolving and improving your answer as OpenAI grows and expands its models.
4. The Linkedin group exposes your work to a Professional audience.
5. Academia.edu shares your results with the scholarly community.
6. Press Releases allow you to be discovered by journalists, bloggers, reporters, and social media.

Doing this doesn’t cost you anything, though it will take 2 or 3 hours of work. (But it’s fun work, and depending on which of the 169 Targets you choose, you might be doing something no one has ever attempted before!)

In addition, after you earn the Award we deputize you to confer the Hero Award upon friends, relatives, and colleagues who do the same thing.

It’s a win-win-win: you earn a prize that shows your dedication to a worthy cause, your followers and subscribers learn about the opportunity to do the same from you, and WE benefit by getting to spread the knowledge of the Hero Award. And Earth and Humanity win because we’re creating 169 never-resting, always improving solution engines for the UN’s 17 Sustainability Goals.

The ability to name your friends and subscribers as Hero Award inductees is an easy ask, because you’re not bragging. If you told people just “I’ve won a Hero Award” they might feel jealous, or resentful, as you are not offering them anything. But if you tell them “I’ve won a Hero Award, and I want you to earn one also, and I can show you how”, it’s a completely different feeling.

How does this help you grow your Substack? Being able to offer the Hero Award to others for following a protocol that is not hard, can be completed in less than 3 hours, and positions someone forever as an authority on a particular UN Target, is an incentive you can offer subscribers to join your Substack, upgrade their membership, or purchase a product or service.

Plus you receive the benefit of a reputation as a humanitarian, the way big companies do. Apple receives a lot of good will from its Apple in the Schools (now the Apple Community Education Initiative). You can do the same.

Also, once you’ve gone through the protocol with a UN Target, you can follow the same process with a problem or challenge that you are known for addressing. This can be something from your work, your research, or your writing; ideally it should be something you are famous for, or would like to be. It should be central to whatever the reason is that you are on Substack in the first place. The fact that you are a Hero Award honoree primes readers or viewers to take you seriously on this question.

12/09/2025

Read this to see how seeing each day as a series of experiments leads to a more robust life.

12/09/2025

When your daily life includes dozens of ongoing research projects

10/01/2025

Everywhere you look, people say success comes from waking up at 5 a.m., meditating, exercising, journaling… the same routine, every day.

Sure, habits can help. But here’s the problem: routines were designed to make workers act like machines during the Industrial Revolution. And we’re not machines. We’re human. We have impulses, creativity, emotions, desires—and those don’t always follow a schedule.

At AI Happiness Accelerator, we’ve been testing something different: asking, “What do I need right now?” Maybe it’s gratitude. Maybe it’s laughter. Maybe it’s deep focus or a group brainstorm. The answer changes throughout the day—and that’s the point.

Think of it like an emotional buffet. Gratitude, awe, curiosity, heroism, storytelling, brainstorming, laughter—these are all on the menu. The real skill is knowing which to serve yourself in the moment.

✨ You don’t have to follow the same routine every day. Sometimes, freedom beats predictability.

👉 What about you—do routines energize you, or do you prefer to follow your impulses?

09/29/2025

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

09/28/2025

AI FOOLED YOU AGAIN!

Hey, remember the famous Internet phenomenon years ago when a picture of a dress looked blue to some people, and gold to others?

You can create the same thing with ChatGPT 5.0. I just did. The result is here in this post. Different people report at least 4 different colors for this knitted wool cap.

What's interesting is that I created the image 5 minutes ago. That's when I got the idea. I only know that people see different colors in it because there were 4 people in the room as Chat made it.

The point here is not that you should make artificial illusion images, but that many things that have gone viral, or have even changed lives, can now be created instantly thanks to AI. There must be hundreds of examples. We only need to think of them.

So Ihave 2 questions for you now:

A. What color do you think the cap is?

B. What web phenomenon can you think of that went viral some time in the last 30 years, that you can re-create (or refine or riff off of) now? Tell us, or if possible DO It and show us.

09/27/2025

🍇🍞🍷 Imagine being at a Roman feast…

Some emperors loved eating so much they even built "vomitoriums' so they could keep going—an endless banquet of pleasure (not exactly the healthiest idea).

But here’s the twist: today, you can have your own “buffet”—not of food, but of emotions. And this one is healthy.

Gratitude. Awe. Laughter. Curiosity. Storytelling. Acts of service. Brainstorming. Each one feeds your body and mind in a different way. The trick is finding the right mix for you.

Your “Recommended Daily Allowance” of emotions won’t be the same as anyone else’s. Discovering yours—and learning how to evoke these feelings regularly—is one of the most transformative adventures you can take.

That’s what we’re doing at AI Happiness Accelerator: helping people design their own emotional buffet, and use it to create lasting well-being.

👉 Which emotions feel most nourishing to you right now?

09/25/2025

When I found this quote by Albert Einstein, I immediately had all sorts of thoughts about how this works, and how it has appeared in my own life. I was going to brain dump all that stuff here, but then I thought: I'd MUCH RATHER hear examples from YOUR life. So let us know: how does Intelligence 'have fun' in your life? The best stories may win a prize.

09/18/2025

Imagine that you are walking on the beach, and you see an ancient brass bottle, looking like it's been in the ocean for a thousand years.

You pick it up, rub it (since you were born with an intuitive sense of what to do in such cases) and out pops a Genie. The Genie offers you one wish.

You ask it to provide you with a team of famous Superheroes, like Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Hornet, Black Panther, etc, who will serve you selflessly. This happens, and your new all-powerful friends agree to do your bidding.

In the coming months you derive great enjoyment from having your loyal team beat up bad guys, rescue residents of burning buildings, save damsels in distress, pulverize wicked ogres, and perform all manner of good deeds, of the traditionally heroic type.

Then you wake up and find out it was all a dream.

Except that it's not a dream. You HAVE a team of Superheroes at your beck and call, willing to do your bidding.

They are the hundreds of AIs that now exist, many of whom are happy to serve you for free (to illustrate this, I asked Copilot to create an image of popular current AIs as Superheroes; you can see it at the bottom of this post. I don't know why it misspelled "DeepSeek" but I decided to leave it there.)

Now there are certain things these AIs can NOT do. If someone in your neighborhood is on the roof of a burning building which is about to collapse, none of them can fly to the top of the roof and save them, as Superman could.

But when used wisely, in concert with other tools and apps, and with innovation and creativity, they can help you do things that traditional Superheroes can not, and that end up being way more impressive in the long term.

If, for example, you are Rita Kimani of FarmDrive, a Kenyan social enterprise that connects unbanked and underserved smallholder farmers to credit sources, you are clearly helping thousands of people. You assist not only the farmers who can plan responsibly because they know they have credit, but their customers who benefit from lower food prices.

If you are Carolina Medina from Colombia, you start Agruppa, a start-up that leverages cell phone technology to organize small businesses, which helps lift people out of poverty.

Or if you are Vincent Loka from Indonesia, you use the most popular tech apps and tools to build WateROAM, which develops water filtration solutions that bring rapid access to clean drinking water to underserved populations.

To me, that's more impressive than saving ONE damsel in distress from a burning building, as Superman might do. It has the potential to improve the lives of thousands, if not millions.

Performing miracles with modern AI is sometimes even more impressive than the feats of the greatest of the mythical Superheroes.

Take Ulysses (Odysseus). He is celebrated in Homer's Odyssey because he piloted his ships through lots of legendary dangers in the eastern Mediterranean, before finally making it home to his wife Penelope in his home town in Ithaca.

But who did he actually HELP? His wife and family, yes, and the men on his ships– for a while. But of his 600 crew members, none survived the whole ten year journey except himself. Ulysses was a hero who in the long run benefited–- himself.

To me, what Vincent Loka did with water filtration is WAY more impressive, because millions around the world suffer from unclean water, and the potential for lives to be saved from water-borne diseases thanks to his work is limitless.

My point is clear: fire up your imagination and use AI tools, in combination with your non-artificial human intelligence, to create something heroic.

Transcendent Human Experiences Optimized

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