Links

Nothing has as dire an impact on productivity as poor communications.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel *Catch 22* over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . *Enough*.”

When you can’t express what you mean, it’s usually because you don’t know what you mean.

While having so much internet real estate in the hands of just a few slumlords is a big problem, it’s not the *main* issue. It’s that these companies actively encourage people to share *whatever* they want, with little regard to truth, public health, or safety — all because outrage is the best way to maintain viewership which leads to more ads and more product sales.

These were porn *shrines.* In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.

the honest truth, as I see it, is that things are actually pretty bad right now. Nearly everything in the political arena — the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles — it all seems to be getting worse in basically every meaningful way.

The next time you're coming up with ideas, tell yourself, *Forget about good ideas, let's come up with a list of ten bad ideas.* The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.

Presence also extended beyond simple typing into features like reactions. Double-tapping a friend's chat bubble placed a heart exactly where you tapped, along with a faint animated circle and a simultaneous haptic felt by both users. This visually (and physically) pinpointed precisely what you were reacting to and when, creating the sense of a truly shared space.

There is a sickness, a striving, that pollutes the purity of what building a business should be. Because growth attracts headlines and seduces investors, companies over-optimize on growth metrics in their early years. In the end, it ruins them.

In an age where AI can generate anything, the question is no longer "can it be made?" but "is it worth making?" The frontier isn’t volume—it’s *discernment*. And in that shift, taste has become a survival skill.