Make It Make Sense

The Spurs blew a 29-point lead, which should have created all kinds of interesting conversations.

It didn’t.

By the time I checked X, the investigation was already over.

De’Aaron Fox did it. Case closed. Apparently, the jury didn’t need much time.

That’s how basketball works now. A team blows a 29-point lead, and all kinds of things happen. Guys stop taking the shots they were taking in the first half. The crowd gets louder. One team starts believing. The other team starts looking at the clock. The rim gets smaller, and before you know it, the game feels completely different than it did twenty minutes earlier.

Yet somehow the entire conversation got reduced to one guy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Fox didn’t play great. If you’re a veteran and a star player, criticism comes with the territory. But if you watched that game and your only takeaway was De’Aaron Fox, I don’t know what to tell you.

I listened to a few podcasts and watched a few clips. It didn’t matter where I looked. Everybody was saying the same thing.

I kept waiting to hear somebody go the other direction.

It never happened.

Not a lot of independent research happening. Everybody had their own take. It just happened to be the exact same take.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting there thinking about OG Anunoby.

The guy kept showing up whenever the Knicks needed a gut punch. Every time the Spurs looked uncomfortable, the game somehow found its way back into his hands. Yet somehow the entire conversation became about the guy everybody expected to be the story.

A few years ago, people used to watch the game and then form an opinion. Now it feels like everybody waits for the opinion and then watches the game.

The story was Fox.

The story was always going to be Fox.

The World’s Most Complicated Convenience

I saw a headline this week that Social Security is moving more people to electronic payments.

Makes sense.

Paper checks are expensive. They’re slower. They’re easier to lose. They’re easier to steal.

My first thought was simple. 

Who are these people still getting paper checks?

My second thought was even simpler.

They’re probably sleeping better than the rest of us.

At this point, I’m not even sure my money belongs to me. It belongs to whoever can remember the password, answer the security question, find the verification code, and identify all the pictures with bicycles.

The paper check people don’t have that problem. They just walk to the mailbox once a month.

Honestly, they might be onto something.

Every ‘Rich’ Person Has a Course

Maybe it’s just me, but every successful person seems to end up selling a course. I’ll hear about somebody who made millions in real estate, and five minutes later I’m on a landing page. Same thing with Amazon sellers, social media experts, AI experts, traders, entrepreneurs…every road somehow leads back to a course.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see:

How I Built My Fortune on OnlyFans.

Limited seats available.

At some point, I started wondering if becoming rich was just the prerequisite for becoming a teacher.

Look, I’m not against courses. I’ve bought a few myself. Some were great. Some probably saved me years of making mistakes. What fascinates me is how every success story now seems to come with a curriculum attached to it.

It’s like nobody is allowed to simply be successful anymore. You have to explain how you did it, package how you did it, market how you did it, and then teach other people how to do it.

And maybe that’s because people genuinely want to help. Maybe it’s because knowledge has value. Maybe it’s because teaching scales better than doing.

I don’t know.

What I do know is sometimes I wonder if the real money is still in doing the thing or if it’s in teaching people how to do the thing.

Based on my algorithm, the answer seems pretty clear.

The Internet Would Like You to Log Off

I saw an awesome Pinterest commercial the other day that said, “The best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline.”

This is funny because Pinterest is an internet company.

Imagine your bartender telling you to drink less. Or your trainer telling you to eat a brownie.

The more I thought about it, the crazier it sounded. We’ve gotten to a point where even the people building internet companies are hinting that maybe we should spend a little less time on the internet.

And they’re not wrong.

I can’t remember the last time somebody called me excited because they spent four straight hours scrolling.

Most of the things people talk about years later happened away from a screen. Vacations. First dates. Road trips. Family stories. Championship games. Bad decisions that somehow became great stories.

Meanwhile, half of us are sitting around watching other people live.

We’ve spent years building a digital world so powerful that even the people who profit from it are telling us to take a break.

Nobody Left

My tweets started disappearing the other day.

I’d post something, see it on my profile, scroll down, and suddenly it was gone. I would scroll up, scroll back down, and then it would disappear again.

At one point, I started checking from a different account because I thought maybe I was losing my mind.

I still have no idea what happened. Maybe I posted too much. Maybe the system thought I was spam. Maybe I tripped some rule I didn’t know existed.

Who knows.

What struck me was how little any of that surprised me.

Today, most of us just accept that these platforms can do pretty much whatever they want when they want. Posts get buried, accounts get flagged, something stops working, and nobody really knows why.

Nobody explains it. We just keep scrolling.

People complain about algorithms, censorship, moderation, shadow banning, and whatever new term we’re using this week. Then they pick up their phone the next morning and open the same app again.

Nobody leaves.

The most impressive thing these companies have ever built was not the platform itself, but the habit.

The World Cup Is Here

The World Cup is upon us, which means experts will convince you that Brazil is winning, France is winning, Argentina is winning, Spain is the one, and somehow a dark horse nobody can agree on is winning too.

I scroll past all the rankings, predictions, betting odds, sleeper picks, expert analysis, and talking heads that somehow make every prediction sound right.

For the next month, this is what everybody will be talking about.

What’s my prediction?

Mbappé. France.

Let’s go!