Crypto’s dirty little secret is that it’s no more eliminated the need for trust than it has replaced the U.S. dollar. — It’s been a bummer summer for crypto. Flagship coins Bitcoin and Ether are at multiyear lows, while lesser coins barrel to zero. Luna went from a market capitalization of $34 billion (“market” and “capitalization” are becoming misnomers for crypto) to worthless in a matter of days.

Work is always changing, and it’s entering a period of rapid evolution — Work has been the most important thing in my life. It’s my identity, and has been the greatest source of reward. Yes, my kids mean more to me now. But, for 35 years, the majority of my waking hours, effort, skills, and even relationships have been focused on work. Is…

Big firms and wealthy individuals are just as prone to making bad decisions as anyone else — Your ancestors pet snakes and drank foul-smelling water. You (likely) do not, as you have learned from their mistakes via the ultimate streaming network of life lessons, always on in your head, called instinct+. In sum, our instincts help us predict the future. If you get close to a lion…

The secret of TikTok’s success is how it eliminates the burden of consumer choice with a continuous stream of videos curated for you — I recently vacationed with friends. As we were wrapping lunch one day, my friend said, “Watch this.” His 11-year-old son walked to the couch and lay on his side. With his arm extended in front of him cradling his phone, he … went vacant. For the next hour, he was…

Having a good person express how wonderful you are hundreds of times changes everything — Perspective My week has been a cocktail of layoffs, margin calls, and Covid. How’s your week going? Markets are down, the risk of nuclear war is up and, worst of all, it looks as if Cumrocket will not replace the dollar. Professor Adam Alter, my colleague at NYU, says dramas perform…

Global war and reproductive rights should not be at the mercy of our ever-shortening attention spans — The element fueling economic growth is not a rare earth metal, processing power, or NFTs: It’s attention. The average American spends 11 hours per day consuming media, 65% of their waking life. Roughly 40% of that time is spent on a mobile device. Billions of dollars and millions of person-years…

A day after I learned my show was #1 on CNN+, I learned the streaming service was shutting down — Last week, No Mercy/No Malice won The Webby and People’s Voice Award for Best Business, News & Technology newsletter. Other nominees included newsletters from McKinsey & Co., The Washington Post, and The Skimm. This is meaningful for us. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and voting. 🏆👍 I returned to my…

Powerful individuals without counterweights are prone to making bad decisions — “Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.” — Claude Lévi-Strauss As a young man, I thought my success was solely a function of my being awesome. My character, my grit, my…

The point of rules and referees isn’t to stop people from winning. It’s to keep the game alive. — Competition over scarce resources is at the heart of our evolution as a species and the success of Western democracies. We are the product of millions of generations of survivors who bested their rivals for food, shelter, and mates. …