Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture For the last few months, there's been a lot of conversation around the "Department" of Government Efficiency, which is ostensibly an effort at improv...
Lessons learned from burning things. One thing I like to do is make fires. It’s often considered a less socially-acceptable pastime than my other wood-destruction hobbies like writing and woodwork...
Don't call it a Substack. Email's been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and dis...
It feels like 2004 again. I keep having a conversation with people around the tech world about how the industry’s current state of change — especially the potential disruption of incumb...
How I got pitched by Anna Delvey Many people will be familiar with Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, who was one of the most high-profile of the wave of hipster grifters during the 2010...
23: What was 9/11? It’s hard to really take in, after all these years, that most people have no memory of the day. The majority of people in the world were either not born, or no...
How Oprah will screw up the AI story As I write this, we’ve just heard news that Oprah is planning to do a big broadcast special about AI and society. Despite the fact that it hasn’t aired, and I...
Systems: How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money A lot of the ways that the ultra-wealthy think about, and act about, money seem almost incomprehensible to those outside of their orbit. Having had a chance to...
Systems: Q&A about boards of directors Okay, previously we covered many of the most common things you'd want to know about a board of directors at an organization, including the basics like what a...
Systems: What does a board of directors do? Nearly every organization that is designed to have impact has a board of directors, whether that's a small non-profit, or a giant corporation, or anything in b...
The New Alt Media and the Future of Publishing You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of ba...
Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken . What I mean by this is, whe...
