This one’s for paid subscribers—a huge thanks to everyone making this work possible. If you’d like to join, you can sign up here! Subscribe 🍕 We used to remember things because they were exceptional. Moments, dialogue, speeches, films and ideas etched themselves into culture by sheer force of
25.9% of teenagers who spend four or more hours daily on screens experienced depression symptoms in the past two weeks. 27.1% reported anxiety symptoms. Higher durations of Internet use increases depression levels. Adolescents who spend more than three hours online daily are more likely to fall into the
The world can no longer trust American tech. If that sounds dramatic, take a step back and consider the facts. The United States is a nation in the thrall of authoritarianism, owned and operated almost completely by a far-right doomsday cult intent on betraying every alliance, every contract, every promise
I have a stubbornly "anti" disposition. I don't react well to impossibilities. It goes way back - and I'm assuming it has its roots in my DIY and punk rock obsession that I developed as an early teenager. I know - how very unique.
We keep mistaking the highlight reel for the work. We see the headline, the launch, the million views—and forget the months, sometimes years, of invisible scaffolding beneath it. We've been trained to look for the sparks: the moment of inspiration, the viral post, the Hail Mary that
I didn’t leave the attention economy because I hated it. I left because I understood it, because once you see the system for what it is—a parasitic loop that rewards noise over nuance, metrics over meaning, reaction over reflection—you have two choices. Keep optimizing for reach, or
We're addicted to genius. We obsess over the wunderkind solving quantum equations at nine, the dropout who IPOs from his garage, the hedge fund oracle who posts a return so obscene it looks like a typo. Brilliance is seductive. But it's also unreliable. And more often
Popularity kills good ideas. The moment a thought gets traction, it gets watered down. The rough edges get sanded off. The disclaimers creep in. The speculative becomes declarative, the subversive becomes palatable, and the brilliant becomes content. Consensus isn't a signal of truth. It's usually just
On the morning of June 6th, 1944, Hitler was sound asleep. The Allies were landing. Tens of thousands of soldiers were pouring onto the beaches. The tide was turning, the war accelerating toward its violent, inevitable end. And the man leading the Reich was in bed, untouched. His generals knew
This one’s for paid subscribers—a huge thanks to everyone making this work possible. If you’d like to join, you can sign up here! Subscribe 🍕 We used to remember things because they were exceptional. Moments, dialogue, speeches, films and ideas etched themselves into culture by sheer force of
Smart people love new ideas. They collect them like rare coins. They turn them over in their minds, admire their shine, categorize them, and rank them. They build entire identities on the scaffolding of intellectual frameworks. They seek the elegant theory, the model that explains the world. And that search
I’ve spent the past year with thirty tabs open in my brain. Some of them are essays. Some are plans. Some are wounds. All of them humming. I used to think this meant I was broken — lazy, disorganized, allergic to follow-through. That’s the story productivity culture sells: if
You know the type. MIT-trained, Substack-fluent, AI-curious. They can quote Hume, dabble in Bayesianism, and confidently wield phrases like "regression discontinuity" and "effective optimization landscape" in casual conversation. They’re very concerned about the future. Superintelligence. Existential risk. Civilizational stability. The longtermist dream: guiding the ship
Joe Rogan changed. Not all at once. Not in some catastrophic fall from grace. But gradually — the way signals turn to noise when the frequency gets stuck. And now, millions of men are trying to survive a collapsing world by bulking up their biceps and shrinking their imaginations. I saw
Somewhere between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, we started believing that in order to be brilliant, you had to be unbearable. That cruelty itself was a kind of clarity. That the sneer, the kicking and screaming, the impossible-to-please demands were just signs of a mind operating on a different level.
TechCrunch: Substack continues to double down on video amid TikTok’s uncertain future in the U.S. The company announced on Monday that it’s rolling out a scrollable video feed in its app, making it the latest platform to introduce a TikTok-like feed. Given the timing of the launch,