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Penn & Teller have this philosophy about their craft. Or, I guess, all stage magicians do, but Penn & Teller are the ones who spend the most time talking about it. They will spend months on a single trick. Years, sometimes. More time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect, they’ve said. The same motion. The same timing. The same angle of the wrist at the exact same millisecond. Eliminate every possible deviation from the plan. Because when you’re an illusionist...

You had a technique. Don’t pretend you didn’t. Everyone had a technique. Three short breaths, then one long one. Or two long breaths across the whole cartridge on either side. Or you put it in your shirt and blew through it like I did. You knew yours was the right one because it worked , and you could prove it, because the game started right up every time. Want to know what was actually happening? The 72-pin connector inside the NES was just flaky. When you pulled the cartridge out a...

So try explaining freemium to someone who’s never heard of it. You build a thing. A whole thing. Then you give away part of it. The worst part. On purpose. And you hope that the people using the worst part of your thing will eventually want the better parts badly enough to pay you. This is the foundation of a trillion-dollar industry. It sounds insane when you say it out loud but it worked for a really long time because of one specific asymmetry: the company knew how to build the thing and...

There’s a seed library at the community center near my house. Or there was. The way it worked: you’d take a packet of tomato seeds, grow your tomatoes, save some seeds from your best plants, and bring them back. Then last year, something changed. People started dropping off bags and bags of seeds. They all got those new bulk seed generators that had gotten cheap enough for anyone to use. Hundreds of seed packets at a time, all labeled perfectly, all sorted into neat little envelopes....

On Sunday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts. I teased, at the end, that I’d been writing science fiction about what life looks like on the other side of that explosion. The same day, Citrini Capital published The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis . A fictional macro memo from June 2028 describing the economic fallout of AI displacing white-collar workers. S&P down 38%. Unemployment at 10.2%. Mortg...

Jim Barksdale, not the guy from The Wire (that was Avon), the Netscape guy. Before your time maybe. Definitely before mine in any meaningful sense. He said once that basically there are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling. That’s it. That’s the whole theory of business. Everything is either getting stitched together or pulled apart. Cable TV bundles channels. iTunes unbundles albums into songs and Spotify bundles them back up. Newsletters unbundle journal...

There’s this talk from 1997 that I keep bringing up on here, but there’s a different part I want to call to your attention this time. Alan Kay, standing in front of a room of programmers, talking about dog houses. “You take any random boards, nail and hammer, pound them together and you’ve got a structure that will stay up. You don’t have to know anything except how to pound a nail to do that.” So imagine someone scales this dog house up by a factor of 100. A ...

The following materials were recovered from a decommissioned Slack workspace. The workspace itself was migrated to a new platform six hours after these documents were created. The new platform has since been deprecated. We have preserved them here for historical purposes. We realize “historical” may not be the right word for things that happened last week. Some of this may be familiar. I. Orientation You will receive your Mission on your first day. This is not technically true. You w...