with the lights out, its less dangerous

New York, NY
Joined November 2025
I started a @Substack today in the lead-up to ‘Creditworthy: A Ledger Theory of History.’ You can use it to see how the framework shows up in the everyday. The goal is to make the underlying patterns visible. Once you see them, you can't unsee them. open.substack.com/pub/credit…
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Pretty good breakdown of the internal and external pressures of geography, BRICS vs US, and palace intrigue that MBS is facing.
Saudi Arabia Faces a Deepening Economic and Security Crisis
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The key to paid media is to mix the channels with language — targeting the inside of the person — being what you plan and measure. linkedin.com/pulse/creating-…
PPC will always be reasonably profitable assuming your competitors aren’t PE backed and blitz scaling. You are paying for rented space in front of people that are googling YOUR specific product or service / related keywords. Meta Ads will be unprofitable for everything but high ticket, giant margin agency, software and injury lawyers in 5 years. Yes targeting will continue to get better, however it won’t matter. Organic socials and having a review moat will be the only distribution.
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NHJ managed to do both enmeshment (my child ‘s an extension of my ego) & neglect (I didn’t know my child’s school was bad for a decade) —AT THE SAME TIME! Most narcissists couldn’t even achieve in their fever dreams. Still, she blames others. A marvel! Generational talent.
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Competency markets have been replaced by identity markets. So I’ll just say the word — Susudio.
Maybe millennial podcast bro performative masculinity should be understood as a satire of something they do not understand and cannot emulate. A dude who, at the same time, gives absolutely zero fucks about what you think of his outfit, his hairline, or his physique, while holding sports arena sized crowd in the palm of his hand with virtually no effort. Nobody in the audience at that moment doubted the rumors the Phil Collins had written that song to call out a murder he had witnessed. As a baby boomer rock star, he was pretty unique, but he was the type of man that was unexceptionable when Gen Xers were growing up. They coached our sports teams, were scoutmasters, taught history. I'll be honest, Gen X did not appreciate them enough and we replaced their quiet dignity with the worst possible substitute - the ironic stance.
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All of the slogans, -isms, & -ologies of the noblesse de robe (our elite credentialed, compliance classes) are meant to create and impose a moral user interface upon the world. But the underlying source code that underwrites everything they do is always anti-competence.
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Working in ads, media & tech, this is my office experience. Any time you try to faithfully model the mind of rural and suburban consumers — not as a conservative but merely as a capitalist — they either can’t or won’t do it. Then they call you names (or worse) for even trying
Les gauchistes se demandent souvent où se cachent les gens qui votent à droite et pensent ne jamais n'en côtoyer. On vous explique comment ça marche: - vous, les gauchistes, êtes absolument incapables de ne pas faire référence à la politique plus de 5 minutes dans une conversation. Nous savons tous qu'il suffit de quelques minutes de discussion pour savoir si on a à faire à un insupportable gauchiste. Les mots clés feront référence au racisme, au colonialisme, à la mysoginie, à l'homophobie, au climat, aux riches, aux inégalités.... Quand quelqu'un semble incapable de tenir une discussion de quelques minutes sans la politisier, n'importe quelle personne de droite sait instinctivement qu'elle a à faire à un zozo gauchiste - Vous parlez comme si il était évident et convenu que nous sommes 100% d'accord avec vous sur tous les sujets. Tout désaccord vous paraît inconcevable. - En cas de micro contradiction, le gauchiste lance un fort regard de réprobation et indique son malaise implicitement ou explicitement. Commence alors une suite de questions type inquisition car le gauchiste se doit de dénicher les traîtres à l'humanité. - Si la personne de droite ose contredire ouvertement un gauchiste, serait-ce même sur un détail, le gauchiste devient alors hyper agressif. Il se sent alors le droit et même le devoir de vous expliquer la vie, pourquoi votre position est honteuse et vous met au banc de l'humanité. Discuter avec des ayatollah est particulièrement désagréable. On sait qu'on ne vous fera pas changer d'avis et qu'on passera juste un mauvais moment. Sans parler du risque que vous lanciez une fatwa contre nous dans notre entreprise, groupe ou école pour "mauvaise pensée". Alors que faisons-nous? Nous vous fuyons. Si nous n'avons pas le choix, souvent, nous nous taisons. Et vous finissez par vivre dans un monde imaginaire où tout le monde pense comme vous. Ensuite, quand la droite dure finit par monter partout, vous tombez de votre chaise. Qui sont ces sauvages qui osent voter extrême-droite? D'où émergent-ils? Où sont-ils? Si vous étiez capables de tenir des discussions civilisées, vous seriez au courant depuis plusieurs années, voire décennies.
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Imagine just needing to go to the store to get some milk that day and all of a sudden all four Beatles are on the roof of a building and they want to sing for you?
The Beatles - I've Got a Feeling (1969) "All I've been looking for was somebody who looks like you"
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Fenway is a cool park the first time you visit — the history alone is essential especially when you think about all the greats that roamed left field. But as a day to day ballpark, it’s not the best…
For almost as long as there have been cars, people have made their way to Fenway Park in Boston 🚗 Join @askkaitt as she takes us on a Road TWIB to MLB’s oldest ballpark! (MLB x @Goodyear)
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Not a Starbucks in sight.
NASA just released this new photo from the surface of Mars 🔭 [📸: via/ NASA]
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
These images are artistic composites from black-and-white Curiosity rover navcam panoramas taken at different times of day, with added blue/yellow coloring; they are not natural-color photography of Mars. science.nasa.gov/photojournal/c… petapixel.com/2023/06/16/the… x.com/NASAMars/statu…
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Patrick Berzai retweeted
We already ran this experiment. The App Store made everyone a mobile builder in 2008. Seventeen years later, the top 1% of publishers captured $154 billion in app revenue last year while the other 99% split $13 billion. That is what happens every time the cost of building collapses. The supply of products explodes. The supply of attention stays exactly where it was. Every new builder bids for the same fixed pool of eyeballs, and the price of being seen climbs until most builders are priced out. RevenueCat tracked new apps and found 81% never clear $1,000 a month. Here is the part that should worry AI builders more. In 2008, when supply flooded, the discovery channels still worked. App Store charts, Google search, early social. You could grind your way to visibility. This time the channels are flooding too. Search is filling with AI content, app stores with AI apps, feeds with AI posts. When anyone can ship a product in a weekend, shipping stops being a signal of anything. Buyers can't evaluate 100 lookalike tools, so they default to names they already trust. Which produces the uncomfortable ending. A technology sold as democratization sends the winnings to whoever owned distribution before it arrived. Apple took 30% of the app boom without building a single app. The same toll booths are going up for this one. The scarce skill in 2008 was writing code. The scarce skill now is giving anyone a reason to look at yours.
AI made everyone a builder
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During the French Revolution, the Thermidorian (which was Jacobin July) Reaction, was where a counter revolt to Robespierre occurred, ending the Reign of Terror and the crazy things they’d implemented. It’s important to note this didn’t end the Revolution — not by a long shot.
JUST IN: Gavin Newsom says closing California beaches during COVID was “insane, in hindsight.”
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The Jacobins erased all that came before, even rebooting time where weeks became 10 days, months renamed and year 0 began in 1792. When you ask “how did such ridiculous things happen? How in the world would anyone agree?” remember that now people argue over what a “woman” is…
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A little Bach accompanied by the sound of rain. For anyone who needs a beautiful, peaceful moment today. 🎻🌧️
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Patrick Berzai retweeted
Replying to @MaralSalmassi
I use “noblesse de robe” from the French elite civil war, The Fronde instead of blame decay on a gender. They were the credentialed, compliance class who sought to extract/regulate the noblesse d’epee, the warrior class (today’s competence class). creditworthy.substack.com/p/…
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I’d be curious about downstream and secondary search behaviors for research intents. The sort of “did you mean” style information panels do provide a good experience and likely accelerate the research —> action in the user.
Google says its AI Overviews on searches create a better experience and “higher quality” clicks. We were sent research clearly showing otherwise. - AI Overviews didn’t improve satisfaction - and they didn’t improve visit quality - they just reduced clicks to their sources 1/5
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It’s funny that people in NYC deny this exodus is even happening. The first time I used UHaul data to show this massive movement to clients as part of a business case, I got laughed out of the room. It has only accelerated since 2019, when I first started showing it.
Reminder if you leave NY or Calif for Texas please vote for the opposite of what they're doing (we like capitalism, abundant energy, free markets, don't want government-owned grocery stores or rent-controlled price distortions, we don't demonize successful people etc)
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Nostalgia is one of the most sought after emotions of young people. But not just for their own past, but as Nietzsche used ‘Sehnsucht’ a longing for a past one never experienced, usually as a sign of decadence and a desire to transmute that past glory into a new creation.
when pilots started flying planes using fly-by-wire they lost the vibration pilots used to feel right before a stall. so engineers had to build that vibration back in artificially, because without it pilots had no way of knowing they were about to crash. genz are returning to the vinyl, film cameras, hard back books and lobbying to bring back blackberry bc they feel more alive with some friction in day to day life
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I would wager this was an outcome that was intended when Trump took on Iran in February. I think Americans will eventually drop the hagiography of WW2 and begin to see Europe for the strategic rival that it is.
SAUDIS TELL EUROPE OIL REFINERS THEY’LL GET NO CRUDE NEXT MONTH
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It connects to what has been an elite civil war between the US and EU that dates back to before DeGaulle. creditworthy.substack.com/p/…
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