Agalia Tan

Anything a friend once did, apps do “better.” Instead of a friend picking you up from the airport, you summon an Uber. Instead of taking food to a sick friend stuck at home, they order Instacart. Even Venmo, making the exchange of money digital and therefore more “convenient,” has meant that friends’ shares of the bills languish for weeks unpaid,... See more

In his own fine post on baseball and optimization a couple of years back, Rob Horning cited Melissa Gregg who observed that “personal productivity is an epistemology without an ontology, a framework for knowing what to do in the absence of a guiding principle for doing it.”

a larger movement toward real-time, highly textured, human person-driven interaction

Consider the difference between Trader Joe’s (a beloved grocery store with a wide variety of goods, all of which you can trust) and whatever new CPG goods are popular on TikTok. Hype is a flash in the pan. Narrative network effects are durable, long-lasting, and broadly applicable.

One of the benefits of producing consistent creative work is that it comes with a narrative network effect: The more people who know and love the story of an object, the stronger the tie to that object becomes. For a brand like MSCHF, success might not always come from money—sometimes, it comes from products that reinforce how they want to... See more

People Can Only Meet You As Deeply As They’ve Met Themselves.

To sabotage the mindless saboteurs who are following the CIA’s manual, here are some new instructions:

01. ELI5 (Explain Like I’m Five) : Play dumb. Require over-simplification in the recommendation. Request or provide a super basic answer to help strip jargon and complexity. If it doesn’t make sense to a five year old, it won’t ever make sense.... See more