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whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 115

Fourteen layers of advice from fourteen years of watching where the bodies are buried, from the founder of Skift.

— Louis Cheslaw
1d ago
honest-broker.com
Mark Zuckerberg's Empire Is Now Crumbling

Zuckerberg used the occasion to publish a bizarre opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal—proclaiming himself as a champion of human potential and an opponent of centralized power. This is the same guy who laid off 8,000 employees a few days ago, and is building a data center as large as Manhattan. By the way, Zuckerberg himself can't be fired—because he limits the voting rights of most shareholders.

3d ago

The biggest risk of all is not taking one. Growth and comfort do not coexist. Every time I see a company protecting its core business rather than cannibalizing it, I know a competitor will do it for them—and far less gently.

4d ago

It is not the neutrals or the lukewarms who make history. Hot lead can melt, but it took hammer blows to shape the very foundations of civilization — the same is true of human will.

1w ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Dubai Creek Edition

In 1958, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed, then Ruler of Dubai, borrowed around a half a million dollars from the Emir of Kuwait to dredge the creek. Dubai had no meaningful oil wealth at the time. What Sheikh Rashid had was a conviction that trade would define the city, and that the creek needed to be deep enough for modern ships.

1w ago

We must not measure greatness from the mansion down, but from the manger up. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

2w ago

Organizational culture is not about perks or ping-pong tables. It is the answer to the question: what behavior gets rewarded and what behavior gets punished when no one is watching?

2w ago

To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers — or both.

3w ago
noahpinion.blog
Europe's resistance to AC is driving it insane

Perhaps the single most ludicrous story was that the people who run the European Commission decided to cut off AC for their lower-level employees, while keeping the AC on for themselves... 'It's like feudalism,' a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on.

1mo ago
currincy
Andrew Watt Talks About Making Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane”

I asked him how he's able to do that in front of everyone last night. He said really such an enchanting thing. Instead of sitting there and trying to tell someone else, 'No, no, it goes like this. No, no, do it like this,' you just do it yourself and then you know the way the song goes. You know what the drum part's supposed to be, what kind of groove you want. You're just beating yourself up to get it right.

1mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Does anything I write matter anymore?

Whether it was Covid, Trump's advancing age, or his attempted overthrow of the 2020 election that made Trump totally lose faith in everyone but himself, the big man now seems inclined to listen only to the voices in his own head. There's no intellectual movement here, just a cult of personality. There's no one to argue with, because nothing that's happening is based on an argument in the first place.

1mo ago

The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

1mo ago

It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence.

1mo ago

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal, a being of a warrior horde; he is led by a chief and his horde shares a common life. The striking fact about this is the extraordinary ease with which a man identifies himself with a group.

1mo ago
currincy
Andrew Watt Talks About Making Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane”

Instead of sitting there and trying to tell someone else, 'No, no, it goes like this. No, no, do it like this,' you just do it yourself and then you know the way the song goes. You know what the drum part's supposed to be, what kind of groove you want. You're just beating yourself up to get it right.

1mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Exclusive: Notion Names First Board Of Directors In Key Step Toward IPO

Few – if any – startups in Silicon Valley history have grown as big as Notion, or for as long, without some semblance of a board. But by virtue of a quirk of its own fundraising history and an intellectual internal leadership style, it's the position Notion found itself in even after more than a decade in operation, and as its valuation reached $11 billion.

1mo ago
noahpinion.blog
America needs liberal nationalism back

I believe that in the 20th century, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States devised the single best governing ideology that any country has ever created: liberal nationalism.

2mo ago
lennysnewsletter.com
The Lenny and Friends Summit is back!

There's such power in IRL events, especially these days and especially for product leaders, who often lack peers they can be real with.

2mo ago
dwarkesh.com
The mistake of conflating intelligence and power

Power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you, rather than some galaxy brain scheming capability. Trump is not powerful because his brain, considered in isolation, is the most effective optimization engine on Earth. He is powerful because the government which hundreds of millions of people consider legitimate gives him a lot of power.

2mo ago
honest-broker.com
How to Tell If You're Living in a Binary Crisis

The key to effective teamwork is having a single enemy. Now here's something even uglier. The same team-building hostility is heating up over in the enemy's camp. That evil team is getting bigger and stronger because it hates you—and precisely because you're bonding with your own team.

2mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Meet The DJing a16z Alum Who Raised $30M For New VC Firm Worldbuild

There is so much noise in venture today, that actually leading with original thoughts can have a competitive advantage. We want other, larger platforms to view Worldbuild as a tastemaker for where they should be spending time six months, or 12 months from today.

2mo ago
platformer.news
The Trump administration's AI doomer moment

Less than a year later, the administration's sneering dismissal of safety concerns has transformed into something that resembles a mild panic.

2mo ago
longreads.com
All My Dad’s Sons

Dad heard about a team at a youth prison in West Virginia that was supposed to be better than us. He loaded us into the van one morning and we drove two hundred miles to play them. This was a maximum-security facility for juveniles, up in Salem. We had to be buzzed in through a thick steel door and then through another one and another, but they wouldn't let us into the gym. We could hear someone in there screaming. Then it was silent, and the door opened. On one end of the court, the other team was about to warm up, and on our end—where we were supposed to warm up—a kid was mopping a puddle of blood.

2mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
Business Leaders Say Adapting to AI Is Essential to Survival

As AI tools become more widely used and increasingly specialized, many business leaders are trying to think quickly and creatively about how to best utilize this technology at nearly every level of their operations.

3mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Scoring the Jensen-Dwarkesh debate

It's all too easy to slip into doing a softball puff piece — fawning all over your guests and treating them like gurus dispensing wisdom from a mountain. This is an even easier trap for someone like Dwarkesh, who is very young and who is primarily known for interviewing people instead of for dispensing his own thoughts. So it's extremely impressive that he consistently avoids this trap — he always manages to challenge and provoke his subjects, rather than just letting them spout their usual talking points.

3mo ago

The primary cause of failure in leadership is that men do not think enough. They trust to their memories and their passions, and act from them, when they ought to consult their understandings.

3mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.17: He Came, He Saw, He Cooked

He was Apple's CEO longer than my son has been alive, and a year longer than Steve Jobs. That, needless to say, is worth reflection.

3mo ago
stratechery.com
Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

3mo ago

The best thing a company can do is to be a wonderful place to work and to create products and services that genuinely improve people's lives. Most companies optimize for the wrong thing—they optimize for quarterly earnings instead of for the long-term health of the business and the satisfaction of their customers.

3mo ago
fs.blog
Mario Harik: Playing to Win

Mario shares how he uses real-time data and second-derivative thinking to make decisions, how he hires and develops A players (and the gut test that tells you who isn't one), how he runs meetings that surface the best thinking from the most junior person in the room, and why ego, complacency, and small goals quietly cap everything.

3mo ago

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparent' ordinary people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.

3mo ago
noahpinion.blog
I told you this would end badly

I anticipated that Trump would be chaotic, dictatorial, and cruel, but I failed to anticipate how stupid he would be.

3mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
Scott Aaronson reviews the movie “The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist”

He tries to hear out every faction: first the AI existential risk people, then the AI optimists and accelerationists like "Beff Jezos," then the "stochastic parrot" / "current harms" people like Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru, and finally the AI company CEOs (Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis were the three who agreed to be interviewed), with Yuval Noah Harari showing up from time to time to insert deepities.

4mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Upstarts Turns 1! Here's What's Next (With Your Help)

I'll be honest that building a new media brand, and continuing to work on high-quality journalism while growing a business, has been the most challenging, stressful and rewarding experience of my career so far.

4mo ago

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