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. …

Does Musk’s stake in Twitter herald a new direction for the social network, or is it another pointless distraction for the Tesla CEO? — Ed note: After this post was originally published, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted that Musk decided not to join Twitter’s board. Desperate to recapture a delinquent attention cycle that’s wandered off to war, Elon Musk announced Monday he is the largest shareholder in Twitter, with a 9.2% (correction: 9.1%) stake…

What my string of adventures in TV have taught me about the medium — In 2015 I gave a presentation at the DLD Conference about brands and tech. The video of the talk went semi-viral on YouTube after a music industry analyst (@boblefsetz) featured it in his newsletter. Soon after, I had a book deal; I was writing this newsletter every week; CNBC, Fox…

Amidst the scams and bubbles, credible scarcity and authenticity will unlock real value in digital markets — Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced NFTs are coming to Instagram. What does that … mean? The announcement was a word salad of platitudes, so we don’t know how the Zuck will bolt this latest thing onto his Frankenstein product structure. The good money is it won’t work — Meta is…

Kleptocrats invest in football clubs, luxury apartments, and higher education with few restrictions — Mount Everest has been scaled by 6,000 climbers, and 300 have died. Of those, 85% died on the descent. Just as invasion is (usually) harder than occupation, criminality itself is often easier than figuring out how to spend your ill-gotten gains. Digital bank records and international regulatory systems make it…