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,
A Philosophy of Happiness Through the Uncurated Life In 1953, Ernest Dichter—the father of motivational research—wrote that the American consumer was no longer purchasing soap to clean themselves, but to feel clean. Advertising wasn’t selling products. It was selling identity. A bar of soap promised not just
Let me tell you about my smartphone. Not the one I have now - the one I had in 2015. It took decent photos, browsed the web reasonably well, and let me text my friends. When it eventually died, I replaced it with a newer model that... took slightly better
The billionaire with the bunker in New Zealand isn't actually preparing for the apocalypse. Not really. He's telling us a story. It's a story about scarcity and exclusivity, about knowing something others don't, about having options when others won't. The
The least fun fact you're likely to read today: IBM helped the Nazis. Through its German subsidiary Dehomag, "Big Blue" custom-engineered Hollerith punch card machines specifically designed to meet the Third Reich's requirements for tracking, sorting, and processing human beings. These were specialized systems
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night
I've lost count of how many times I've been cornered at conferences by men in meticulously over-casual $300 t-shirts, evangelizing their startups with religious fervor. "We're DISRUPTING the entire industry," they insist, with the insufferable confidence of someone who believes their "
I've written a few words lately about trying to shift away from U.S. tech dominance. I want to buy European/Canadian, support independent software over big tech, and move toward a digital life that aligns with my ethics. I want to question as much as I can
During COVID, I started working on a book called Permissionless. It was born out of frustration—the kind that gnaws at you when you see how broken the systems are, how unnecessary the gatekeepers have become, how much red tape gets in the way of solving real problems. The book
“Life isn’t a series of good and bad choices. It’s harder to steer it one way or the other than most people think. You just get pulled along. You look back and you wonder, “could I have changed the course of my life?” Maybe you could’ve…but
The best parts of life are messy. They refuse to follow scripts. They defy prediction. They explode past the dull constraints of data. And Silicon Valley is a doomsday cult that keeps clawing at them, stripping away the raw, unpredictable joy of the human experience and replacing it with something
We've all heard the saying. "Everyone is entitled to their opinion." But it's not quite true, is it? An opinion isn’t a birthright, and it ain't a free pass to the conversation. It’s not something you wake up with, fully
Fuck it man. Just put on some Grateful Dead. Put on some Aretha. Print some kind of zine. Paint a sign. Start a band. Write a manifesto. Bootleg a t-shirt. Hand out stickers. Throw a party. Keep it weird.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 cast a long shadow. France, humiliated and burning for revenge. Germany, rising and certain it had to strike first to stay on top. Every decision, every alliance, every military maneuver was shaped by one core belief: another war wasn’t just possible—it was inevitable.
We curate ourselves into something safe. We smooth out our rough edges. We keep things palatable, we stay detached, we’re less invested, we’re dedicated to avoiding embarrassment at all costs. That’s the mantra. Be cool. Be aloof. Don’t try too hard. Don’t try at all.
For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
My current project: I've been dusting off the old hard drives with my ripped CD collection and loading them into an iPod. A 20-year-old piece of tech with its click wheel intact, no WiFi, and no algorithm feeding me recommendations I didn't ask for. The result: