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Alexandre Dumas ran what was essentially a content production house in 19th century Paris. His most famous collaborator was Auguste Maquet, who wrote substantial portions of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo . Maquet would produce drafts and outlines, and Dumas would rewrite and polish them, but the books went out under Dumas's name alone. Maquet eventually sued him over it in 1858 - and won a financial settlement - but the court ruled Dumas was the sole author. At the peak...

I had coffee last year with a guy - I won't use his real name - who told me he was "building a business." I asked what it did. Dropshipping jade face rollers. I made him say it twice. Jade face rollers. He'd found them on Alibaba for $1.20 each, and started selling them through Shopify for $29.99. Never used one himself. Didn't really know what they were for - something about lymphatic drainage? Reducing puffiness? He said "lymphatic" the way you say a word you...

I keep a folder in Apple Notes called “cursed websites,” where I save various artefacts that make me feel like the social contract has dissolved. Call it an act of self-loathing. Call it collecting evidence of the fall. Dansugc.com went straight into the folder this morning. It’s a site where marketers // entrepreneurs (and I find the line between those two groups has become blurred to the point of being illegible) can buy pre-recorded “Reaction” videos for $3 ...

I opened Twitter this morning and three different startups were announcing "the world's first" something. An AI CMO, an autonomous AI marketer, and a design agent "with taste," which is a phrase that made me close my laptop for about ten minutes. None of them are the world's first anything. I'd bet money there are 40 AI marketing tools already shipping, maybe more, and the category lines are so blurry that "first" really comes down to how specific you...

Since roughly // broadly 2020, I’ve been running a solo-powered minor empire . I have no employees, and my only office is my home office, filled as it is with cat hair and various comic books. My business is: me, a laptop, a set of AI tools that scale the parts I hate, and a personal network. I’ve done brand strategy, naming, GTM, messaging, content and growth marketing for a list of folks I respect and genuinely give a shit about - SaaS cos, VC firms on 3 continents, and an initia...

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s worth it. Upgrade On any given day, I have roughly 5 or so fucks to give. Before anyone takes that as a confession of total selfishness… I wake up each morning with a finite quantity of moral and emotional attention. That quantity isn’...

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s worth it. Upgrade In 1944, the Wehrmacht launched into Hitler’s last ditch effort to save the Third Reich. The Battle of the Bulge was a doomed campaign and a doomed gamble from a doomed regime, but its brutality was a true second test of the...

Nikolai Kardashev believed we could classify civilisations by the eneregy they harness. The Soviet Astrophysicist proposed three “Types” of civilisation - Type I controls the energy budget of its homeward, Type II controls a star, and Type III controls a Galaxy. By Kardashev’s measure, the human race is at roughly 0.73, crawling toward becoming a Type I civilisation. We’ll get there within the next hundred years or so, all things being equal.  Kardashev’s ...

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s worth it. Upgrade Appearing on the Founders podcast this week, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen made the rather extraordinary claim that - going back four hundred years - it would never have occurred to anyone to be “introspective.” ...

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s worth it. Upgrade A Scottish author named Samuel Smiles is arguably responsible for the self-help-hellscape. In the 1800’s, he published a book literally called Self-Help , which went through dozens of editions, was taken awfully seriously by...

On the evening of February 28, 2026, American B-2 bombers lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. By the time they reached Iranian airspace, Tomahawk missiles were already in flight from submarines in the Persian Gulf. Operation Epic Fury hit over a thousand targets in its opening hours. The opening salvo killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and approximately 40 other Iranian officials. Within two weeks, more than 1,200 Iranian civilians were dead and over 12,000 injured. At 6:14 a.m. loca...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an indie hacker in possession of a widget must be in want of a business model... Every tool is a startup now. Every script is a SaaS product. Every neat little hack you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon to solve your own problem is, according to the prevailing wisdom, an "MVP" waiting for its first round of funding. The entire machinery of online discourse around building and creating has been so thoroughly captured by entrepreneurial &q...

By the summer of 1945, West Berlin had been reduced to rubble. Allied bombing, the Soviet ground assault and Hitler's insistence on Götterdämmerung had destroyed roughly a third of the city's buildings and left most of the rest damaged. There was no functioning government, no reliable electricity, no clean water in large sections of the city, and somewhere around 75 million cubic metres of debris where neighbourhoods used to be. The women who cleared that debris by hand, the ...

February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die. In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to the early days of COVID, telling his non-tech friends and family that we're in the "this seems overblown" phase of something much, much bigger than a pandemic. Before anyone had finished arguing about that, Citrini Research published THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIG...

The "agentic swarm" vision of productivity is comfortingly familiar. Which should be an immediate red flag... You take the existing corporate hierarchy, you replace the bottom layers with a swarm of AI agents, and you keep humans around as supervisors. It's an org chart with robots instead of interns. The VP of Engineering becomes the VP of Engineering Agents. Congratulations. You've reinvented middle management. This is what Clayton Christensen would have called a sustaining...

For the past few weeks I've been asking myself why I'm still on Farcaster, whether I'll stay, whether I even want to. I've landed on some answers. Farcaster, for the uninitiated, was the most credible attempt anyone has made at building a decentralized, crypto-based social network that people actually wanted to use. Founded in 2020 by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, both ex-Coinbase, and backed by $180 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, and Union Square Ventures, Fa...