I used to hate Substack. I was sad when Scott Alexander moved his blog there, and shed a tear when every other writer I liked did the same. I thought Substack was ruining the blogosphere — it made every blog seem bland, collapsing personalized corners of the internet, each with their own layouts and quirks, into the same boring template. I worried the metrics would create the wrong incentives for blogging, and worst of all, I worried Substack would end up destroying blog archives once it inevitably failed, or simply buried them behind forced logins and paywalls.

I was wrong about Substack, and I’m here to repent for my sins — I mean, I’m here to tell you why I think you should start a Substack now. I moved to Substack with great angst, but now, just over one year later, I wish I migrated much earlier.

I was wrong about Substack in two ways:

I previously believed Substack wouldn’t increase the number of people blogging. Since it’s always been easy to start a WordPress blog, I figured that anyone who wanted to blog would just do so. Seeing the sheer number of new bloggers, this is obviously false — there is now so much incredible content that otherwise wouldn’t exist without Substack.

The second is that I didn’t think Substack offered anything new of value — and this is what I was most wrong about. In my old blog, even after I had pieces that people genuinely enjoyed — including links and shares from people like Tyler Cowen — none of it converted into anything longer lasting. If I wrote a new piece, nobody would read it because there was no built in audience. It was discouraging. Sure, you could build up enough of a following that people subscribed to your RSS feed and you became part of the “blogosphere” — but the bar to get there was exceptionally high. Substack helps people find an audience in an unbelievable way. By making it much easier to engage with content, writers get much better feedback and have an easier time finding their niche.

So here is my case for why I think you should start a Substack (really, just random musings on why I think more people should write). But seriously - if you are writing this, I would love to read your content, so please share with me anything you write and are proud of or want feedback on!

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A lot of people are scared to blog because they think they’re bad writers — bad at grammar, prose, syntax, and so on. But blogging is almost entirely about ideas, not writing per se. Your excuse is a bit like saying you can’t be a great photographer if you weren’t good at drawing with a pencil as a kid. With AI, this is a now also a mostly solved problem.

Everyone has ideas to contribute. You don’t need to write a blog post on par with Meditations on Moloch (but who does?) to add value — even just curating links, writing book reviews, or sharing recommendations of blogs you like makes the internet a better place. For context, one of my favourite bloggers is Tony Gao, who has never written a single longform post.

A lot of people think blogging is only for grand ideas, and tell themselves they’ll either save their big ideas for the future, or only start blogging once they have something grand to say. But one of the secrets of blogging is that plenty of grand-idea posts flop, and many silly, random small posts become hits. I wrote a small, silly post about buying five babkas to try, and it ended up being discussed on a well-known film podcast. My post about how to “manifest” was written as a quick prompt after having tea with Michael Bateman (who I met, where else, on the internet), and it ended up being one of my most popular pieces, with a real impact on a lot of random strangers. Without a blog, all of these smaller ideas get lost - as even you don’t think these ideas are “important”.

Many people are discouraged from blogging because they think that just because nobody IRL finds their ideas interesting, nobody else will. Of the people who know me in real life, fewer than 10 read my blog (including relatives and best friends) - despite me being part of a pretty nerd-compatible community. The world is a very big place—it’s been one of the most surprising and validating things I’ve experienced: learning how much my blog resonates with people, when in my actual life there’s almost total disinterest in these ideas.

I think many people underrate how much ideas spreads on the internet. Most people read a whole lot, and if, eg some random smart person reads your post, you’d probably never know it, but your ideas still may stay in their thoughts and then spread through them. For example, take these two posts I wrote on /r/slatestarcodex - and read these two posts from Bryan Caplan and Jeremiah Johnson — where its clear that both of these people read my post on /r/slatestarcodex and had those ideas stick in their mind. Just because your post doesn’t go viral doesn’t mean your ideas won’t.

me on Tolstoy and Caplan on Tolstoy

me on simulacrum levels as a lens to understand political discourse and Johnson on using simulacrum levels as a lens to understand political discourse

Writing is a form of scaffolding. Once you write about something, you can finally stop ruminating on the idea, let it go, and free up your bandwidth for other things.

Everyone knows writing forces clarity in your thoughts. But the value of writing is much greater than that—most of the time, you don’t even know what your thoughts actually are until you turn on your ‘writing brain’. Being in the habit of writing makes you much more attuned to the world, forcing you to actually notice your own interesting observations and reflections as they happen. When you start taking notes, you finally have somewhere to put your random thoughts that would otherwise get lost to the wind. Slowly, without any real plan or intention, you start noticing how much these ideas relate to each other, and broader connections form in front of you that never would have happened otherwise. This also happens on a bigger scale the more you write: your posts, over time, will slowly reveal who you are and what your values are.

A lot of people are discouraged from writing because they think they already need to have fully formed ideas before they write, but writing is often a process of discovery. Try treating yourself like an LLM. In the same way it’s highly effective to ask an LLM to give you, say, 10 suggested ideas for X, and to say things like “keep going” or “believe in yourself,” try doing this to yourself. Your brain has all sorts of not-fully-formed ideas that, if you tap into the right mindset, you can unleash. Most of these won’t make sense, and anything that has value will be mixed with mostly incoherent and incorrect thoughts. But all of this will sort itself out later when you go back and evaluate your notes and filter out the nonsense. Unless you let yourself enter this mindspace intentionally, you’ll never know about all the great ideas secretly stored in your brain, otherwise inaccessible to you.

When you post a blog, that serves as a time-stamp for when you had your crispest thoughts on that idea, which you can always share with others and refer back to.

Writing a blog will help you meet people on the internet. It makes it easy to show others that you’re of substance, and what kind of person you are. I’ve made countless friends through the internet that wouldn’t have been possible without my blog acting as a representation for who I am. The social aspect of blogging is hugely underrated.

To me, the main benefit of blogging is sharing ideas and getting feedback on them. I genuinely love talking about ideas — especially my ideas — and without writing (and talking with my fiancé), I don’t really have an outlet for that. By writing, I get to share ideas with people who actually care about them, which is incredibly validating. But more importantly, I get to have people critique, improve, and expand on my ideas, which is such a joy.

So with all this in mind, I am announcing several blog bounties for people who I think would make great Substackers. These bounties follow the typical not not Rich Prize structure, so the recipient can either receive the funds directly, or have the funds redirected at 1.25x to a cause or individual of their choice.

$1,000 to Kevin Bryan if he writes two blog posts in the next six months, on any topic (not including a write-up of a Nobel Prize winner). Kevin is maybe the smartest and most interesting person I know, and has so many great insights I’d love to read about. He’s also one of the early-days GOAT econ bloggers, but has long since retired from the blogging world.

$500 to Dan Schulz for writing one blog post in the next three months. Dan is probably the person on the internet most similar to me — the creator of one of my favourite personal websites and the host of a formerly great podcast. I know Dan will be a great writer who writes content I love.

$500 to Damien Moule for creating his own blog and writing one post in 2026. Damien is the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to how housing policy actually works in Toronto and Ontario. He writes the 10/10 posts in City Hall Watcher, but I know he has so much more to share.

$250 to Sam Waters for creating a blog and publishing one single blog post before October. I don’t actually know Sam IRL, unlike the others on this list, but he’s a prolific Substack commentator who shows great taste and writes very thoughtful comments — which makes me confident that if he transitioned to medium- or long-form content, it would be fantastic.

See also:

https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/

https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/the-more-you-write-the-more-you-begin

https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/

https://nintil.com/substack-milquetoast

I thought I would make a list of things I’ve consumed or seen in other countries that you generally cannot buy in the USA—at least not easily, or anywhere near the price it costs in some other part of the world. Sometimes the good is literally banned; more often, some invisible institutional barrier makes it five times the price or a pale imitation of the real thing. [This list excludes things that are straightforwardly illegal, like certain drugs, as well as services that only exist because of extremely cheap labour, like having a local tailor make all your clothing from scratch for pennies. This is strictly about physical goods.]

I find this interesting for two reasons: 1) It’s fun to discover new things that, if you live in the US, you might not even realize exist. 2) It reveals the hidden structural and institutional reasons why certain things fail to cross borders.

1. Hyper-regional foods
You can eat a phenomenal steak for basically nothing in Argentina, or eat far higher-quality fruit in Spain or vegetables in India for a fraction of what you pay in the USA. Some of this comes down to the laws of physics and logistics: you either cannot ship the good fast and far enough to eat it while ripe, or the cost of the refrigerated supply chain is too expensive to ship far from where it grows.

But there are other structural barriers to food globalization:

• Protectionism: Countries like South Korea restrict the export of their Hanwoo cattle, with the beef almost entirely reserved for domestic consumption. Japan similarly banned the export of wagyu cows and sperm, and true Kobe beef is exported only in tiny quantities. Argentina works the other way around: its steak is so cheap domestically partly because the government has historically taxed and restricted beef exports to keep prices low.

• Health: Some cheeses which use raw milk cannot be legally imported to the USA because FDA laws ban the sale of raw-milk cheese aged for less than 60 days.

• Ethical Bans: Haggis, Scotland’s national dish, has been banned in the USA since 1971 because the USDA prohibits sheep lung in food. Many other delicacies like whale and shark are similarly banned.

• Danger (and pest control): There are fruits like India’s Alphonso mango, Blackcurrant and Jamaica’s ackee which, despite being beloved elsewhere, are largely unavailable in the USA. Fresh ackee is banned by the FDA because the fruit contains a dangerous toxin if improperly ripened. Indian mangoes are subjected to strict USDA irradiation or hot-water treatments to kill pests, which degrades the quality of the fruit.

• Economies of scale: Exotic foods common elsewhere, like camel’s milk, simply lack the baseline domestic demand to sustain a profitable import market in the US.

• Customs: Cuts of beef differ from one culture to the next. If a specific foreign cut doesn’t map onto standard American processing, it’s rarely imported because consumers don’t recognize it.

• Un-commodifiable goods: Then there are goods which cannot be industrialized like cloudberries (no ability to farm them at scale) or khat (it goes bad in a matter of hours after being picked).

2. Proper Finnish saunas
You generally cannot buy a true Finnish sauna in the USA, atleast anywhere close in price to what it costs in Europe. You can absolutely buy things labeled saunas—barrel saunas, infrared cabins—but not an actual Finnish sauna. Finland has a robust, localized supply chain: building codes designed for saunas, specialized tradespeople, and cheap domestic components. It is typically cheaper to fly to Finland to buy a sauna heater and put it in your checked luggage than to buy the same heater in the USA. But the biggest barrier is tacit knowledge. Proper Finnish saunas require a deep understanding of specific design principles in order to provide the proper Finnish sauna experience—a form of cultural, architectural expertise that sauna kits and contractors in the USA don’t possess.

3. Exterior roller shutters (Rollladen)
In much of Europe, homes feature heavy shutters integrated into the exterior of the window, enabling total blackout and better insulation. Sleeping in true, complete darkness—not “blackout curtain” darkness, but can’t-see-your-hand darkness—is an experience most Americans will never have. These shutters are nearly impossible to get in the USA because these shutters are built directly into the home during its construction. They are fundamentally incompatible with standard American wood-frame, siding, and drywall construction, meaning there is no domestic supply chain to support them, even if you built a house to fit them.

4. Tilt-and-turn windows
Related: most apartments in Germany (and much of Europe) have windows that do two things—tilt inward from the top for ventilation, or swing fully open like a door for airflow and easy cleaning. They also seal dramatically better than typical American windows. You cannot easily buy these windows in the USA because the entire domestic supply chain—manufacturing, replacement parts, and rough-opening framing conventions—is built around the double-hung sliding window. Because US builders aren’t set up for them, there is no market for them.

5. High-performance kitchen appliances (kettles and rice cookers)
In the UK and much of Europe, an electric kettle boils water roughly twice as fast as an American one. European outlets output 220-240 volts, allowing kettles to pull up to 3,000 watts. Standard US outlets max out at 120 volts, capping American kettles at around 1,500 watts.

This same electrical barrier is why you cannot buy the top of the line Japanese rice cookers in the US. Japan operates on a unique 100-volt grid. If you plug a highly precise 100V Japanese rice cooker into a 120V American outlet, the extra voltage ruins the delicate temperature settings and algorithms, making the best rice cookers unavailable in the US.

6. Fancy toilets
In Japan, nearly every home and public restroom features high-tech toilets with integrated bidets, seat warmers, and dryers. While you can buy cheap aftermarket attachments in the US, fully integrated models remain a niche luxury that is prohibitively expensive to install. Japanese bathrooms are built with grounded electrical outlets positioned right next to the toilet. Because most American bathrooms lack default wiring next to the toilet, installing a washlet is not just buying the washlet, but also hiring an electrician to open the drywall.

7. Micro electric vehicles
In Europe and Japan, micro-EVs (like Japanese Kei cars or the Citroën Ami) are incredibly popular, cheap, and efficient for city driving. You cannot buy them in the US due to vehicle safety standards. The US requires strict crash-testing, heavy structural roll-cages, and airbags for anything classified as a car, which has made these models of vehicles unavailable.

8. Better sunscreen
People who care about skincare greatly prefer sunscreens made in Europe and Asia over those available in the USA. Foreign sunscreens are less greasy, don’t leave a white cast, and provide superior UVA protection. They are unavailable in the USA because the FDA classifies sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug, whereas other countries regulate it as a cosmetic. The FDA approval process is so slow that new sunscreens cannot get approved.

9. Balcony solar
In Germany, it’s very common for apartment dwellers to put solar panels on their balcony and plug them directly into a standard wall socket to generate electricity for their home. Doing so feeds power into the household power supply, which required Germany to pass specific regulations standardizing plug-in inverters and relaxing grid-metering rules. Without these specialized safety standards and grid rules, the US electrical code effectively bans plugging solar panels directly into a regular wall outlet.

10. Grass roofs
Sod (grass) roofs are everywhere you look in the Faroe Islands and are common in Norway, providing excellent insulation and looking incredibly charming. You cannot put one on an American home. Wet soil is incredibly heavy, requiring specialized load-bearing engineering that American wood-frame residential construction isn’t designed to support.

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Government regulation and shipping are the two explanations you’d expect to be behind most of these — and they are. But in writing this list, what surprised me is how much housing-related factors also stop the spread of good home goods. What stands out is that when construction in your home community follows one particular custom, it becomes very hard to buy goods that only work if other people also want to buy them — because the same community norms that stop you from getting it are the same norms stopping everyone else from getting it too. Given this stickiness, it’s hard to imagine a future where eg exterior roller shutters, despite their superiority, ever make it to the USA.

The other thing that stood out is how some things are available all over the world in name, but not in essence. I was surprised to learn that the saunas commonly found in American homes aren’t the same thing as a Finnish sauna, and how hard it is to actually build one in the USA. I suspect most sauna owners don’t even realize this. This aligns with an existing view I have that many foods sold in the USA, despite having the same name as the food sold elsewhere, taste very different — but because the name is the same, people don’t realize this unless they’ve actually tried eg hummus in Israel or a tomato in Spain. While it’s more obvious that the $22 hamburger slider labelled Wagyu is in fact not actually Wagyu, it’s harder to understand the difference without tasting for yourself how some fruits and vegetables are planted to be eaten within a matter of days of being picked, vs being planted to be shipped around the world and consumed months later.

So that’s my list of things I’ve seen elsewhere that you generally can’t buy in the USA. I’m sure there are many others, so let me know anything else you’ve come across that you can’t find here.

This is silly. Of course, I did not “invent” this, nor am I the only person aware of the time difference between NZ and the US West Coast. But for digital nomads, or people on PST hours who work remotely, this exact framing — realizing that the 21-hour time difference can instead be viewed as a 3-hour time difference plus a one-day change (9am on a Monday in SF is 6am on Tuesday in NZ) — is a genuinely valuable insight. I could find no mention of it online or in any digital nomad community. When I shared it with co-working spaces in New Zealand, and with large communities of remote workers on PST hours, nobody had ever thought of this—and many I spoke with, upon learning this new “fact,” took advantage of it.”

Most people think of an inventor as someone who creates something in the world, like a new tech company — and they view this as something other people do, but definitely not themselves.

And I’m here to argue that being an inventor is a much broader category than that, and that it’s incredibly valuable for everyone to think of themselves as one.

One of the mission statements of this blog stems from this story:

Following the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, a group of Jews trying to flee the Nazis and Soviets needed to get transit visas through the Soviet Union to be able to escape. But a transit visa couldn’t be granted without an end destination that would approve them. Then a group of very creative Jews — realized that the admission policy of Curaçao was that no visa was needed, but that individual permission had to be granted by the governor, (who they had been assured by the Dutch consulate would never approve their admission). They then convinced the Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk, to write in their passport - Curaçao: “no visa needed”; leaving out the part about the governor. This idea then spread to many others, leading to thousands of desperate Jews to receive Soviet and Japanese transit visas.

It was already an existing fact that Curaçao didn’t require a visa — so writing it in a passport shouldn’t have changed anything. But it did. And this is the truth about so many “inventions”. It is taking something that already exists and, by presenting it in a new light, allowing it to be engaged with in a different way. It just so happens that this “invention” saved thousands of lives in the Holocaust.

Let me give you one final example before I explain my theory of invention.

I recently completed an incredible 11-stage hike in the Arctic Circle called the Lofoten Crossing. It’s becoming one of the fastest-growing hikes in the world in terms of popularity. This hike, which I loved and benefited so much from doing, was “invented” by the husband-and-wife team of David Souyris (may his memory be a blessing) and Magdalena Brede. The duo didn’t create any of the actual trails — what they did, based on their vast knowledge of the Lofoten Islands, was come up with a route/itinerary that crossed the entire archipelago, incorporating as many of the best day hikes and 2-3 day hikes as possible into one continuous, doable route.

What they really did was create a concept. All of these trails existed before them — but by coming up with the concept of this through-hike, and bringing everything together, they created something new, something that people all across the world can see and say, hey, that 11-stage hike looks epic, I want to travel there to do this.

Once again, all of the hiking trails already existed, but until they came up with the framing of the hike, nobody would have done this hike — and more critically, practically none of the thousands of people who have now done the Lofoten Crossing would have even traveled to Norway. Because going to a place with a lot of great day hikes is very different from going to a place with an amazing circuit/thru-hike.

And even greater than this — as people start to do the Lofoten Crossing, people are going to add suggestions, people are going to find optimizations for the route, new campgrounds will materialize, buses will get scheduled, etc. Once the “concept” is invented, it serves as the structure and frame for others to build upon - where without this “invention”, nothing else could be added.

So my theory of invention is that anyone can do this: taking things that already exist — whether it is a time zone, a legal technicality, or a set of hiking trails — and creating a new conceptual framing that makes the underlying structure more accessible to others and creates new value.

Merely by coining something, tying it together, giving it a shape, you make the underlying facts legible — and more than that, the framing itself becomes its own thing, something others can point to. And once something is legible, others can start to build on it, adding even more to it.

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Let me give some other examples of where this comes up:

If you do a lot of long-distance hiking, you will eventually want very light gear. But a lot of hiking-specific gear you can buy is either very expensive, or not so light.

This has led to a big, decentralized drive to use regular industrial goods as hiking gear.

For example, on my hike of the Lofoten Crossing, I used Tyvek window-repair material as a groundsheet, Campbell’s microwaveable soup containers as teacups, a very thick garbage bag to protect my gear from the non-stop rain, Tupperware as a hiking plate/bowl, and waterproof insulated gloves intended for commercial fishermen.

All of these had to be invented. Not the materials, or the goods — but for someone to realize, oh wait, this non-hiking thing is actually amazing hiking gear. Once that realization gets shared online, it quickly spreads through message boards and word of mouth, transforming a cheap household item into a standardized, legible piece of gear that thousands of others now rely on.

The question is — not can you make a new technological invention, but rather, can you take existing hiking trails and create a longer hike through them, or realize that you can use a microwavable soup container as an ultralight hiking mug.

There are thousands and thousands of little things like this, where someone can choose to reframe something, give it a name or a shape, and create huge value for others. But most people don’t realize this is something they are “allowed” to do, or if they do, to share with others — and for us all to collectively benefit from more valuable insights like this, we need more people to realize they can invent things in this way too.

One of the simplest and most underappreciated ways to do this is curating. Curation is ultimately just another form of conceptual scaffolding; by drawing a boundary around scattered, illegible facts, you transform them into a single, usable tool that others can finally act upon.

When I was younger, I compiled the “best advice” on how to negotiate with Canadian telecom providers to lower your bill, which was read and used by tens of thousands of people and spread throughout the country. As a teenager, I made compilations of various Phish playlists (best jams, best soundchecks, best guitar shredding, appearances with horns) — and while almost all of my curation was just taking the community consensus and compiling the songs, the playlists were downloaded thousands and thousands of times, and even 15+ years later, I still hear from people listening to them. Since writing my compilation of my favourite posts from bloggers like Joseph Heath, Scott Sumner, and Holden Karnofsky, I’ve noticed a huge increase in familiarity with many of their previously little read posts.

This is often much easier than people think — just because the consensus is obvious and knowable by anyone that is a part of that community, doesn’t mean that it will be obvious to anyone outside of that community, or even to those in the community in 5 years time. Just as nobody I met in New Zealand had ever thought about that time difference, most people have never heard the best Phish jams, or read the best Joseph Heath blogposts, or seen the best hikes in the Lofoten Islands gathered in one place. What may feel too obvious to you — because you’re already immersed within it — is often unknown to others and recognizing this gap can create enormous value.

And none of this has to start big. A playlist, a gear hack, a compilation of your favourite blog posts — each one can start small, but the moment you put it into the world, others can find it, use it, and build on it.

So while you may never make a new scientific discovery or found a tech company - I hope you consider thinking of yourself as an inventor and eagerly sharing all the new reframings, connections, curations you can think of that add value - and just because it’s obvious to you doesn’t mean there isn’t value in sharing it with others. When enough of us do that, we all benefit from the conceptual inventions each person brings to the world.

Another one of my favourite musicians is the jamband guitarist Steve Kimock, who also plays spacey, ethereal melodies on guitar.

Kimock is highly regarded among Phish fans and Deadheads, which makes sense: he spends most of his time playing Grateful Dead-inspired music and was once described as Jerry Garcia’s favourite guitarist nobody had ever heard of.

The thing is, Frisell and Kimock both play the same kind of guitar, in the same style—both have written excellent melodic compositions, and in my view are similarly skilled. They are both absolutely beloved by die-hard music obsessives. But for the most part, fans of Frisell—respectable, elitist, smug jazz fans—don’t listen to or even know who Kimock is. And fans of Kimock—smug Deadhead and Phish fan nerds—don’t, for the most part, listen to Frisell (though a much wider percentage of Kimock fans would know and love Frisell than vice versa).

My view is that their music is so similar, their styles so overlapping, and their talents so comparable, that anyone who is a fan of one should be a fan of both. I will note that as of 2003, when an interviewer asked Frisell about Kimock, he revealed he had never heard his music.

II.

Frisell plays with jazz musicians, at jazz venues, writing compositions in a jazz style. Kimock plays with jamband musicians, at jamband venues, focussing on jamband things (extended improv with soaring peaks).

While some of this is a matter of discovery (if you like jazz, you’re more likely to discover musicians popular in jazz circles), the deeper point is that because Frisell is framed in the language and context of jazz, he is accessible to those who already inhabit that world—but because Kimock is from a different context, they struggle to understand him.

The sad reality is that most people are unable to appreciate great things that are perfectly up their alley because those things are wrapped in a vocabulary and context they’re foreign to. We like to imagine that we judge music, books, and ideas on their merits — how much they resonate with us. Sadly, we often judge the packaging instead. More interestingly, we often don’t even realize that something belongs to the same category as the things we already love. The jazz fan doesn’t dislike Steve Kimock; they simply never realize that Kimock could provide the same joy to them that Frisell does.

III.

When you ask smart, nerdy, religious Jews what their favourite texts are, two of the most frequently cited are Pirkei Avot and Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Just, both seminal texts in the Mussar movement, a kind of Stoic-Buddhist-adjacent self-improvement tradition within Judaism.

Pirkei Avot is a compilation of ethical wisdom from Talmudic sages: wisdom about how to live, how to treat others, how to approach learning. Path of the Just is an 18th-century guide to moral self-improvement. While I enjoyed both, what stands out to me is that they don’t read exclusively as “Jewish” books; rather, they read as fairly standard entries in a broad tradition of aphoristic wisdom literature, the kind of thing you find in Stoic philosophy, in Confucianism, or in plenty of modern secular writing, but approved for religious Jews to read. The problem is that most religious Jews forego the rest of this content, even when I suspect some of it would resonate much more with them, simply because it’s not “Jewish”—or in my preferred phrasing, because it is not packaged in a context they understand.

IV.

It’s not just the religious people who are this insular.

One of my favourite thinkers and writers is the Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath. Heath is incredibly sharp, and writes some of the most insightful and interesting content about economics, philosophy, politics, and public policy that I’ve ever read. Despite covering all the same subjects that Slatestarcodex and Marginal Revolution readers love, with the same level of rigour and clarity—most of them don’t know or read Heath. Not, in my view, because his content isn’t excellent or wouldn’t be of interest to them, but because Heath doesn’t write in their context, with their language, with their references, or with them as his intended audience. Similar to the jazz fan who doesn’t know Kimock, Heath’s inaccessibility isn’t just because he isn’t linked to on LessWrong, but something broader.

V.
There are two important implications of this.

The first, and more obvious one, is that to expand the richness in our life and discover more things that add meaning and joy, we should learn how to appreciate things which are up our alley, but not framed in the context of our subculture.

The second, and more important implication, is that this dynamic works going the other way—protecting us from dismissing ideas we would benefit from engaging with.

Today, we shut off a large number of ideas simply because of their framing. If someone is writing something, and they are, for example, a Trump supporter, a rationalist, or a woke person, and they write using the framework, ideas, and vocabulary of their tribe, many will instinctively dismiss them.

When we engage with something new, we often pre-judge it: “Oh, just another effective altruist,” or “pfft, this person is a Trump supporter.” This heuristic acts as a gatekeeper before any real engagement can occur.

This is one of the reasons why reading old books and watching movies from a different time or place is so important. In every era, there are the kinds of people who possess the exact same psychological frameworks as today’s Trump supporters, rationalists, or woke. But when you read their thoughts and ideas, whether in a Tolstoy novel or a 1960s Italian film, your modern pattern-matching gatekeeping heuristic fails. Because these people don’t use the same contemporary language or share the specific affiliations of the groups you normally reject, the gatekeeping doesn’t work. You can’t easily sort them into the “bad group,” so you can actually engage with these perspectives more neutrally.

So while the easy solution is just to read more old books, the greater task is to recognize how much we act like the Bill Frisell fans who refuse to listen to Steve Kimock and try to develop to the point where you like metaphorical Kimock of your life — and to realize that this generalizes to everything.

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If anyone wants to explore more Bill Frisell or Steve Kimock, both of whom I cannot recommend highly enough — for Frisell, I’d start with Good Dog, Happy Man or his live album East/West. For Kimock, I highly recommend this show, which you can stream from the Live Music Archive.

I want to create a grocery store that specializes in selling flash frozen food.

Did you know more than half the croissants sold in France are from frozen? Did you know that nearly all of the fish in sushi sold in Japan was frozen? Did you know that the use of pre-made frozen dim sum in restaurants has become so widespread in China that Guangzhou — the birthplace of dim sum — passed a law in 2026 requiring restaurants to disclose whether their dim sum is handmade or factory-produced?

Flash freezing refers to freezing something very quickly at very low temperatures. The speed is what matters: when something freezes slowly, water molecules have time to form large ice crystals that rupture cell walls, releasing moisture and degrading texture. Flash freeze something fast enough, and the ice crystals formed are significantly smaller — the cellular structure is preserved, along with the taste and texture of the food at the exact moment it was frozen.

I want to create this grocery store partially because I think it could be economically successful, but the main reason I want to create it is to proliferate this idea and knowledge, leading to a cascading effect into how food is distributed and purchased, in a way that genuinely makes our world a better place.

The benefits of flash frozen food are thus:

Once something is properly frozen, it can be shipped all over the world and functionally becomes non-perishable. This enables food to be distributed at a greater scale, with a higher quality of food being able to be shared across the world, with reduced food spoilage. As frozen food has a longer shelf life, it’s easier to sell in bulk, which leads to further reduction in costs. For the end consumer, it reduces their need to frequently go grocery shopping - rather, they can always have higher quality food at home, ready to go.

When something is flash frozen, you are able to preserve it at its peak ripeness - which means that the quality of what you consume should be much better than what you typically eat, which is often well past its peak ripeness.

For the consumer, it reduces the times when they have no food at home and need to order something, in addition to reducing the number of grocery trips one has to make. And because it’s already frozen, it’s easier to distribute in single servings, which better caters to the growing demographic of single people in their mid-20s to 30s who have more disposable income and don’t want to buy food meant for a family that will go bad for them. It also helps elevate the quality of food available to those not in large urban areas.

So if flash frozen food is so good, why doesn’t everyone already know this?

The main reason why people don’t know that frozen food is so great is because most frozen food people buy is bad.

For flash frozen food to work, the food needs to be actually flash frozen at the source - and then strictly preserved in a temperature-controlled environment in distribution, at the grocery store, and on the way to your home.

Most frozen food purchased at the grocery store suffers from two defects. First, what gets frozen and sold is often what couldn’t be sold fresh - frozen at the last moment to prevent spoilage, rather than at peak ripeness. Second, and more significantly, if you purchase something that thaws and then refreezes and thaws again, each cycle causes those ice crystals to grow larger, rupturing cell walls, releasing excess water that degrades texture, and accelerating oxidation - making the quality much worse.

On top of this is the historical stigma. Frozen food has the reputation of being low quality but convenient. Most frozen food is not raw frozen ingredients, but prepared food filled with lots of hyper-processed ingredients.

While any business could sell frozen food right now - and many do in some capacity - a lot of items at higher price points and quality are ones that people instinctively don’t want to buy frozen, creating a cycle that’s hard to reset: stores don’t sell it due to lack of demand, and customers don’t know it’s actually good because it’s not on sale. The irony of this is that while grocery stores won’t sell flash frozen steaks today because of lack of demand, there are very popular boutique businesses like Omaha Steaks whose entire business is selling flash frozen steaks online.

What I’m proposing is the opposite of the stigma: that you can eat a high quality steak, filet of salmon, or croissant - sourced from anywhere in the world at its highest quality - something that previously needed to be sourced somewhat locally, or consumed before it passed peak ripeness, can now be something you have in your freezer, purchased at a lower price, to consume at your own convenience.

While raw ingredients sold at a higher quality would be the main focus of the store, the store would also sell specific prepared goods. During covid, most ramen restaurants in Toronto began selling frozen ramen as meal kits - which to my estimation, tasted like restaurant quality ramen at home. Most dim sum restaurants don’t make in-house dim sum but rather buy flash frozen prepared dim sum, which they merely defrost. Selling flash frozen high quality dim sum will allow you to have restaurant quality dim sum at home in less than 20 minutes total. Prepared dishes like frozen lasagnas made with all good ingredients (as sold by Costco) are also ripe for the kind of food that I would want to sell.

Some of my favourite flash frozen foods are: Montreal bagels, croissants, dim sum, ramen, Atlantic salmon, Chilean sea bass, and chicken breast.

To give a concrete example of how this actually works in my life: I live in NYC and right now have close to 100 Montreal bagels in my freezer. When prepared properly, they taste as good as if I were still in Canada. But here is the catch: this requires a lot of knowledge. You cannot do this with a thick NYC bagel. An NYC bagel is so large and dense that by the time the inside is properly defrosted and heated, the outside has become tough and overcooked. It’s not just about knowing the proper defrosting and heating method — it’s knowing which foods are even worth preparing from frozen in the first place. This kind of knowledge is what is preventing most other people from enjoying more flash frozen foods, and what the store—with curation, guidance, and education—will help change.

The main difference with my proposed store, compared to what already exists:

We would ensure strict quality control across the board — in sourcing, shipping, and, critically, ensuring customers know how to maintain the cold chain on the way home (eg selling specialized insulated freezer bags at checkout).

We would source high quality versions of the foods that are best served frozen.

We would provide guidance on how to prepare from frozen, including which foods actually work and which don’t.

All of this with the hope that, once people experience it, realize the benefits, and conceptually understand all of this, they modify their grocery habits so that buying flash frozen food becomes their default choice.

The edge of this business is entirely in awareness and education. The reason a rural bakery in France produces a better croissant than nearly every croissant in the USA is that French people have an expectation of what a good croissant tastes like and simply won’t tolerate bad ones. The flash-frozen-pilled consumer should be the same. And because what we’re really selling is knowledge and curation, even if a larger grocery chain eventually copies the inventory, they can’t easily copy the trust and association I hope to build— the same way you’d still go to the specialist.

The economics of this suffer from higher expected shipping costs and the logistics of ensuring something never defrosts - but premiums can be charged due to convenience and quality, and are somewhat offset by the absolute lack of spoilage.

I also want to acknowledge: not all foods are good frozen. If something is being cooked, or eaten in a blend, it should be equally as good as the non-frozen version. If something is eaten fresh and/or requires a specific texture, it may very well be worse.

While I am enthusiastic about this business idea, here are my top arguments against it, and why it might fail:

I haven’t done the work to actually investigate its economics, including things like electricity costs, transit, sourcing, market demand, pricing, etc.

There are substantially higher starting costs and mildly higher operating costs, due to needing to create new distribution channels from scratch, bulk-buying many commercial freezers, and ongoing higher electricity bills.

There is already a store in France called Picard doing something that is 75% this - only selling frozen food, much of which is viewed to be moderate to high quality. That it’s incredibly popular in France but hasn’t spread to North America is actually a positive signal — it validates that the model works, and suggests the opportunity is sitting there waiting.

Grocery stores already sell high quality flash frozen food, including pizzas made in Italy or croissants made in France. The main point is not that this doesn’t exist, but to provide the education, ensure the end-to-end quality of the cold chain, and make it a dedicated focus so it scales from a niche habit to a default choice.

So this is the business I can’t stop thinking about.

Why I am posting this here: to manifest. Which is mostly to help me achieve inner alignment of my wants in life. But if you want to encourage me, tell me it’s a good idea, tell me why this is going to fail, what I’m missing or wrong about, tell me your favourite flash frozen foods that I may not have tried, or countries where there are similar stores etc - please do so - no matter how blunt it may sound (can you imagine if I quit my job to build this and your comment contained important information that could have changed my actions!). And if you are someone who wants to invest in me/this - my email is always very open and eager to hear from you!

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What used to be a fun giveaway to build goodwill and excitement is now just a business opportunity for middlemen to take advantage of.

There is a post from /r/redscarepod I keep coming back to:

“Thrifting used to reward wandering. You showed up bored. You left with a high quality vintage jacket or shirt that actually isn’t made of some paper thin synthetic material. Now it feels strip mined. Racks picked clean before noon. Anything with weight, age, or character gone instantly. Somewhere online already. Triple the price. I HATE RESELLERS. The thrill disappeared. The luck disappeared. Thrifting became competitive shopping for people who hate clothes and love margins. I miss finding things by accident.”

In 2026, there is no room for free value. If there is value to be had, it will be captured—by someone.

This isn’t limited to ticket scalpers, or even worse, restaurant reservation scalpers. When the band Geese had a dramatic rise to fame, many people joked that they must be industry plants. They felt validated when they learned that Geese did in fact employ an organization to covertly fake organic support, dropping their songs into video backgrounds, having people comment about the band online, to help generate credibility. Once, a random comment online about a band, or a song in a TikTok video, was just an organic signal. Now it’s just another commodity to be leveraged.

II.
Tipping sucks.

In economics, there is a principle that no matter how fees are distributed, the final price should be the same. As businesses compete to drive profits to zero, paying $9 for a meal and $1 for a tip should be identical to paying $10 with no tip.

Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, explained the logic behind tipping differently: customers and workers are irrational. The customer treats every dollar they distribute in tips as being worth only $0.80 to them, while the driver treats that same dollar as being valued at $1.20. The act of tipping creates value by exploiting the psychological gap between how each party perceives the same dollar. And because of this, any business that doesn’t take advantage of this would lose market share to a competitor that does.

In theory, tipping should be great. If the final price is the same no matter what, you mentally accept the meal costs $10—but if the service is exceptionally bad, you have the discretion to discount it yourself.

But tipping ultimately fails for the consumer because of the cognitive burden it places on us.

Tipping causes stress. You need to remember in advance whether tipping applies for this service, how much is appropriate, what it costs all-in, whether someone is watching and judging your tip, and whether you have the fortitude that day to reject the prompt entirely.

Even worse, tipping acts as a perverse social tax. Those who are more conscientious—generally the people we want to reward in society—pay higher effective prices than the less conscientious, simply because they are too anxious about under-tipping. More perniciously, many businesses have resorted to a tip-before-you-receive-service model, where the tip functions less as a reward and more as preemptive protection against deliberately bad service.

I will note that when Kalanick opened his latest business, Picnic, a meal delivery service, he advertised as a selling point that there is no tipping—a soft acknowledgment of tipping’s hostile nature.

III.
If leaving value on the table invites resellers, and manipulating prices through tips creates a miserable cognitive burden, the logical corporate solution is to just perfectly price everything.

Recently there has been a lot of anger at FIFA over World Cup tickets. Not only are tickets expensive, but because they are dynamically priced, there is no official face value. The number fluctuates constantly.

Nobody likes the feeling of being ripped off when a ticket they bought later goes down in price. If you want to sell your ticket to a friend at face value, that face value no longer exists.

Despite the outrage, there are vocal enthusiasts for dynamic pricing—people who argue that price captures everything and that everything should be sold at the market-clearing rate. You see the same argument when people complain about impossible-to-get restaurant reservations. Why doesn’t the restaurant just charge more for a prime Friday night table?

But when businesses try to perfectly price things, it also has a cost.

If a restaurant increases its price from $25 a dish to $50, the patron arrives with different expectations—the way you judge a $40 per person meal is different from how you judge a $100 meal. With different prices, the audience also changes. If only rich people go to your restaurant, will it have the vibes you want?

Think of a concert venue with 1,000 seats. Should each seat cost the same, benefiting those who buy tickets earliest? Should there be tiers? Or should the venue price each of the 1,000 tickets at its exact marginal value—so that buying a ticket requires you to calculate the price difference against the expected marginal difference in sightlines and acoustics before you can commit?

Underpricing something often has distortionary effects, while efficiently pricing something fundamentally alters the experience itself. The reality is that price doesn’t just clear markets. It shapes who shows up, what they expect, and how they feel about the experience.

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IV.
Today, every modern business above a certain size has product managers. The caricatured version of the product manager’s job is to figure out all the incremental ways a business can be optimized to improve its success metrics. When you are greeted with a default tip option of 20% when you buy a loaf of bread, you can thank the fact that every business now has a person optimizing in exactly this way (in this case, not the bakery, but the payment terminal provider).

The reason you see these tricks is because these tricks work. When one business does this, the competitor is forced to do the same or, as Travis from Uber said, risk being outcompeted, leading to a new equilibrium—but what works for the business (at least in the short term) is not what works for us collectively. There is no product manager on behalf of society measuring whether these actions are good for us.

There used to be a concept of selling out, and there was real stigma attached to it. When I was growing up there was a common trope in media about selling out—it was treated as a genuine transgression, a betrayal of something. That stigma was doing invisible work.

The business ethos of 2026 America is that of the product manager: always ask what incremental step can increase our metrics, and if the market allows for it, do it—with no concept of selling out, or societal cost to constrain them.

And so Geese will engage in trend simulation and Swatch will run promotions designed solely for resellers.

There is no neat conclusion to this post, because there is no neat conclusion to this dynamic in society. All we can do is recognize the amoral turn that businesses have taken, acknowledge the social harms that some of these optimizations cause, and collectively reflect on what we want to do about it. 20% tip prompts when buying a loaf of bread are not ubiquitous around the world; at some level, they are a choice that we collectively engage in. Perhaps when there is enough recognition of these challenges, we can collectively work towards restoring more pro-social norms.

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My favourite movie is Yi Yi. My life feels different since watching it years ago. It made me feel connected to the world around me and made my heart and head feel lighter. I want to share why I (and others) love this film so much and strongly encourage you to watch it. I genuinely believe it can change your life — I know it did mine.

I discovered Yi Yi by stumbling across it on a movie review site and then being captivated by the reviews that appeared:

“Random thought: Whenever I have a dark day, I watch Yi Yi’s trailer to remind me there’s wonder in all of humanity.”

“captures the very essence of life itself”

“This movie makes you want to cry yet you may not know why.”

“I dare say it’s the kind of film you don’t miss if you’ve spent your whole life and haven’t watched it. In the same way, if you have watched, you will probably never forget this film or at least fragments of it.”

“Always my favourite film. Forever Yang.”

“Edward Yang is possibly my favourite director despite me only having seen ~three of his movies. Each one left me with indescribable emotion and made me feel truly connected with humanity. I’m trying to pace out watching his other films so that I can appreciate them more.”

And then several reviews followed with superlatives like: “goddamn,” “magnificent,” “wonderful.”

These weren’t sorted by the “best” reviews—these were literally just the most recent reviews, without any filtering.

In case you come from my corner of the internet and want more validation, Tyler Cowen calls Yi Yi one of his favourite films (he even rented out a movie theatre to screen it) and Scott Sumner gave it a perfect 4, listing it as one of the greatest films of the 21st century.

Seeing reviews like this, how could I not be tempted?

When I watched the movie, all the reviews immediately felt so true to me. I cried, and then I felt a profound connection with humanity and a deep sense of joy—and then decided that the very next day, I would rewatch it.

While the reception for Yi Yi is near universally positive (extremely so—it’s widely regarded as one of the best movies of all time), it’s very common for people to describe the film in a way that, if you haven’t seen it, seems mysterious. They say it’s powerful, or that it deeply impacts them, but they can’t quite explain why. So I am going to try to explain at least why I think Yi Yi is so impactful to so many—and hopefully, by reading this, you feel the curiosity to explore it for yourself.

In the most boring sense, Yi Yi is a film about life. Yi Yi means “one by one” in Chinese. I think this is the director’s thesis: we are all, one by one, living our own version of the same life.

Sure, the movie is beautifully shot, amazingly written, has great actors, and a great musical score, but I think Yi Yi is great for a very simple reason: how it overwhelms you with life.

Yi Yi—and for full disclosure, it’s 3 hours long (and quite slow at that) and in Mandarin—is a story about a Taiwanese family in the 90s going through the vicissitudes of life.

The film starts with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and its halfway point is marked by a birth. But while it is filled with these ceremonial milestones, it’s not these major events that drive the story. Instead, it’s the life in the cracks, the unceremonial, everyday moments happening in between, that truly give the film its meaning.

In Yi Yi, the grandmother falls into a coma after a stroke and lies there the entire film, with the family told to keep talking to her—quietly drawing out everyone’s confessions and regrets; the mother is having a midlife crisis and escapes to a Buddhist retreat, in part because, confronted with the silent grandmother, she realizes she has nothing to say to her; the uncle is perpetually broke, highly superstitious, and newly married to a pregnant woman he can’t quite handle, while his ex-girlfriend lurks around trying to sabotage everything; the father is facing a struggling business and has just been unexpectedly reunited with his first love, a woman he abandoned thirty years ago and has spent years regretting; the teenage daughter is weighed down by guilt over feeling responsible for her grandmother’s collapse, and tangled up in a painful love triangle with her best friend and a boy they both like; and the son, the heart of the film, is a young boy with an insatiable curiosity who wants to learn, understand, and experience everything, while constantly running into the problems of authority, rules, and the judgment of the kids around him.

All lead characters go through trials and tribulations that seem incredibly difficult, and to them, feel like the most important concern in the entire world. The film doesn’t moralize these affairs; rather, it just shows them to you, one after the other, as inevitabilities of life. But there is something about seeing all of these experiences, one after the other, that makes you finally realize: to go through these kinds of challenges is the human experience.

It leaves you with the message that whatever you are currently experiencing, it is all okay. It is all part of it. We are all experiencing it—not exactly the same it, but more or less, it.

In this way, Yi Yi reminds me of the Book of Ecclesiastes. All that has happened will happen again, and it happens to everyone. Rather than fighting this cycle or feeling isolated by it, we must embrace it, realize we are not alone in it, and keep going.

At the time I watched Yi Yi, I was struggling with a long-past but still not completely healed breakup. I lived with this repeated cursed thought—I felt that because I was so particular, that after having broken up with my ex, I would never meet anyone else who I was as compatible with, and I had to live a life doomed with this unfortunate reality. This is going to sound silly to you, but I genuinely thought my situation was objectively unique and that, basically, I was cursed.

And then when I watched Yi Yi, a weight was lifted from my shoulders. In that moment, my entire feeling disappeared. Because I really internalized that while every person thinks their struggle is uniquely challenging, we all share these struggles, which collectively, makes them not unique at all. In Yi Yi, by showing story after story of these supposedly “unique” challenges, I felt my experience was deeply shared. And with Yi Yi focusing so heavily on the story of growth and the passage of time, my problems suddenly seemed so trivial, so likely to be solved simply by giving them more time.

You may read what I wrote and think, well, if I was in that specific situation, maybe Yi Yi would be meaningful for me too. But I am telling you, the sentiment from nearly everyone who watches it is the same—it leaves you with this exact impression, irrespective of what your unique, all-consuming challenge is.

Werner Herzog describes the film like this:
“For me, when I watched the film for the first time, it was hard to distinguish: who belongs to this family? Who is the uncle? Who are the brothers? And all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter—family structures do not matter anymore, because human beings become visible. Very very deep. And all of a sudden, cultural boundaries do not exist anymore. I see myself. We see ourselves in these figures. And we see the dramas. We see the human. We take a deep look into the human condition; into the human soul. And all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter anymore whether Edward Yang is Taiwanese or was Taiwanese or whether he was French nouvelle vague, Brazilian cinema nuovo, because we recognize ourselves. And that’s something deep that cinema can do.”

Yi Yi is really led by three characters—two who are unabashedly positive by disposition, and one who learns this through the lessons in the film.

Yang-Yang, the cutest child actor I’ve ever seen, drives the film. He is incredibly naive and innocent. He doesn’t know anything, but he goes on unabashed, exploring his passions. He is constantly getting into trouble, exploring everything on his own, getting into hijinks like dropping water balloons on his mean teacher’s head, cutting class to buy film for his camera, or sneaking up to a group of girls and loudly popping balloons by their ears.

Yang-Yang decides to start taking photos of the backs of people’s heads, which is mocked by those who see it. He thinks we can only see half the truth of what’s ahead of us, and we need help to see this other perspective. Yang-Yang learns by doing. He sees someone swimming and decides to explore it himself, first by holding his breath in a bathtub and then by jumping into a pool when nobody is around. He teaches himself photography driven by pure curiosity.

But Yang-Yang doesn’t know anything—he doesn’t know that when you can’t swim, jumping into a pool without anyone around is a bad idea. He doesn’t know that taking photos of the backs of people’s heads doesn’t actually show them the literal “other half of the truth.” But while he is wrong about these particular facts, he is ultimately right about the bigger picture: that in life, we can’t be jaded, we can’t be constrained, and we need to keep learning, being curious, and following our passions. In a way, Yang-Yang’s camera is exactly what Edward Yang is doing with this film—showing you the back of your own head, the part of your life you couldn’t see yourself.

Then there is Mr. Ota, a Japanese software developer who the father’s company is courting as a potential business partner. He is a totally free character who lives his life with authenticity, consumed with art, open to the world and living life to the fullest. In both his work and his life, what matters to him is the soul of what’s being created, not its surface. To see his energy, joy, and integrity is infectious.

And finally, the father, N.J., who struggles with confronting the reality of the past 30 years. He has lived with the regret of leaving his first love, because he felt suffocated by her expectations. Given the rare opportunity to travel to Japan and rekindle his relationship with her, he ultimately learns that his life could only have unfolded the way it did. The reasons he acted then were fundamental to who he was, and everything that happened could only have happened that way. And in seeing his son and his potential business partner move through the world with such passion and curiosity, he begins to sense what his own life has been missing.

I think this is why people feel so impacted by Yi Yi. It overwhelms you with life, with humanness, and with the feeling that we are all experiencing not the exact same thing, but something that is more or less the same. And it reminds you that if that life is pursued with curiosity and optimism, we will prevail. Yi Yi is, in the end, exactly what Fatty’s uncle promised: a film that gives you twice what you get from daily life.

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In February, I made a short and silly post called what I’m manifesting in 2026, expressing all the things in life I wished would come my way. I posted it mostly as a fun short post with no real expectations. But the last two months have convinced me it’s one of the most important things I’ve ever written, and I want to come back to advocate for this idea even more strongly.

In short, the exercise of manifesting helps you identify your true desires, calibrate your priorities, and actually internalize them—while most importantly, letting the world around you collaborate to help you achieve these goals.

My view now is not only that everyone should create a manifest list, but that people should share it with their entire network, at least annually.

Here’s what concretely happened after I wrote the post: a reader and internet friend shared it with Tyler Cowen, which led to him writing this thread. This nearly doubled my subscriber count overnight, caused a lot of interesting people to message me, and led to several of my blogs being shared elsewhere, including Zvi’s monthly roundup—serendipitously bringing me several of the exact things I had explicitly written that I was manifesting. I feel confident in saying that all of this wouldn’t have happened but for my “manifesting”.

But the external results, while genuinely wonderful, are secondary. The bigger and more meaningful benefit has been internal: something about doing the exercise made me feel more aligned—more willing to actually explore what I want, more willing to believe it could happen, and more courageous about embracing what I actually wish for in life.

II.

The most common objection I’ve received when I try to convert people to this exercise is: I don’t actually know what I want. Nothing comes to mind.

Which, to me, makes it seem even more critical that these people try this. I’ll share my hacks for how to trick yourself into figuring out what you should be manifesting at the end of this article. But first, a digression into the problem of agency, and why knowing what you want is so difficult.

III.

I have an internet friend named Misha Saul. More than almost anyone I’ve met online or in person, he seems from a distance to be living exactly the life he wants. Two things stand out. First, Misha truly shares what he thinks and doesn’t write to try to impress people or appeal to certain audiences; Misha has the courage to advocate all his views without any self-censorship, while I censor myself constantly (I am working on this!). Second, and something that really stands out to me: Misha has four kids. More precisely, Misha decided at a much younger age that he wanted many children, and then he built his life around this objective and made it happen.

It’s possible I could end up with four kids one day too. But the difference is that he decided it, and then willed it into existence. That’s something I genuinely can’t do.

When I moved from Canada to NYC at 33—even though I knew I wanted to leave Toronto for years—I only made the move after systematically exploring and testing living in multiple other cities, trying to make life in Toronto as full as possible, until it became so clear and obvious (and relatively easy and risk-free for me) that I had to move that I finally had the courage to pull the trigger.

In contrast, there are people who know at 22 they want to move to a new city, or pursue some dream career—even if it’s difficult and scary—and then just do it. I wanted to be a concert promoter when I was younger; I wanted to work in basketball analytics; there were many other paths in life I wanted. But I could never just go and do those things. If someone reached out to me and offered me an opportunity, this would have been my dream, but to put in the work and sacrifice something to actively pursue those goals? I never considered it a real possibility.

As another small example, Misha also has his own podcast. I doubt Misha inherently wanted to have a podcast any more than I do, but I suspect it’s just that when he reflected and realized he would enjoy having one, he simply decided to do it. Whereas I could only pursue something if it was a truly incredibly strong desire, had minimal friction, and came after years of deliberation. I find this framing helpful: there are many people who do x, and while it’s superficially easy to think that they must want x more than you do, it’s often not because they want x more than you do, but because they have fewer barriers to accepting that they want that thing and doing it.

Henrik Karlsson writes about something similar in his post on Agency:

“The reason having Maud in my life made me more agentic was that it was the first time I experienced what it means to surrender to my values. I had a lot of idiosyncratic opinions and values when I was younger, too, but I held onto them in a rather flimsy way. Whenever things got too hard or people disapproved of what I was doing, I tended to give up and do the normal thing instead. When Maud was two, Johanna and I decided that we wanted to homeschool her. This is not only illegal in Sweden, but also seen as something akin to child abuse. So when we told my parents we were going to leave the country to homeschool their grandchild, they were shocked, afraid, heartbroken, embarrassed, and did what they could to talk us out of it. I remember lying on the sofa, reading their emails, and thinking there was no way to ever repair this. If I had experienced it before Maud, I would have caved in after 30 seconds. But in this case, caving in was unforgivable; I must never fail Maud. So I had to sit through the experience of having nearly everyone I knew either quietly disapprove of what we were doing or actively try to talk us out of it, crying. This was very empowering. Because I got to experience what it was like to stand my ground and do what I knew needed to be done, and see how good the outcome was.”

The thing about being free is it’s not enough to know it in your mind—you need to feel it in every part of your body.

But what do you do if you are unable to act like Misha, and you don’t have an external forcing function like Henrik?

The reality is that for most of us, we wouldn’t even be able to realize the things we should be wanting. Consider if there was a video game version of your life, where the high score was determined by your exact life utility function (and your own strengths and weaknesses as your character attributes). Think of what strategies would get the highest score—are those decisions the same ones you actually made in your life? If hundreds of thousands of people started playing the simulated version of your life video game—and then posted on message boards about what strategies yielded the highest results—the things that proved to be actually best for you are very unlikely to be the things you are currently doing.

IV.

This happens because there are at least two distinct kinds of wanting. There is abstract wanting—when you can clearly articulate that you want something in advance of the experience. And there is situational wanting—what you discover you want once life nudges something in your direction, and only after the fact do you realize that it was something you should have wanted.

In Ingmar Bergman’s movie Persona, Bibi Andersson’s character recounts one of the most vivid memories of her life—the most intense pleasure she says she ever experienced. She and a stranger are sunbathing naked on a beach when two teenage boys appear and begin staring at them. When one gets very close, the stranger calls him over and initiates a sexual encounter, and Andersson’s character joins in.

If you had asked her the day before whether she wanted two teenage boys to stare at her naked on a public beach, she would have said no. If you asked her whether she wanted to have sex with a teenage stranger on that beach while in a committed relationship, she would have emphatically said no. The experience wasn’t something she knew she wanted. It was something she discovered she wanted only from within it, after the universe presented it to her and all of the friction of initiation—or even thinking about it—had been removed.

Something similar plays out in a much more ordinary context. Think of the somewhat academic debate of whether someone should, after a first (or second) date, ask before kissing, or just lean in and kiss. The reality is that this is only up for discussion because asking vs kissing leads to different outcomes, and not just because of what asking reveals about a person—or because the recipient is scared to pull away—but because there is a big zone of uncertainty when someone is unsure of what they actually think is good and can only discern this after the fact.

This is an important gap for manifesting. Most of our genuine desires are latent, situational, and only accessible from inside the experience. We can’t identify most of what we want because the friction of initiation is too high for us to ever get close enough to discover whether we’d actually love it. So we need to find ways to make ourselves feel like we never had to start the process at all.

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V.

So my hack for manifesting is just to use this dynamic to reframe our desires. Instead of asking what do I want?—which requires abstract wanting, is underspecified for most people, and produces anxiety rather than answers—ask questions like: what email could land in my inbox tomorrow that would make me the happiest?

This converts the question from preference-in-the-abstract to a simulated situational response of what you think you would actually benefit from. It forces you to confront the potential opportunity without requiring you to initiate anything. You’re not being asked to want something; you’re being asked how you’d react to something that simply appeared.

To this end, as part of thinking about your wants, I recommend reflecting on prompts like these:

• Who are you jealous of, and why? Or whose life would you want to switch places with?

• Who reaching out to you, with what kind of offer, would make your entire year?

• Which person you haven’t spoken to in ages would you love to hear from?

• If your best friend came to you and said, “I want to start a venture, I will put up $100,000 and work my ass off on it, but I need you to join me with your idea”—what would the idea be, and how excited would you be?

• If your partner said they wanted to move somewhere for a year, or a recruiter cold-emailed you about a job at a dream company—how excited would you actually be, and which city or job would it be?

• If someone offered to start an article club where you and three other people discuss the best articles you read that month—would you be eager to participate? Or to co-host a podcast?

• If someone offered to pay you $10,000 if you hosted a dinner party with at least ten guests, each month for the rest of the year—what would you do to make this happen?

• If you were hiking and spent several days walking alongside a billionaire who took a liking to you and offered to fund any project you felt most excited about—what would you pitch?

• If the same billionaire asked if they could buy you a gift out of appreciation for your time, and you had to choose something orderable online that costs less than $1000, what would you ask them to buy for you?

• If you had to move to a new city and try to build a social group from scratch, what would you do?

• If your friend invited you to go on a three-month thru-hike? Or a trip to Tajikistan? Or to attend a specific music festival? How excited would you be?

• If your partner asked if you would be comfortable joining her at a nude beach, or at a swingers club? Would this prospect scare or excite you?

The point is to work through examples like these and notice what comes up. If the universe nudged you in that direction, which hypotheticals make you feel 10/10 excited versus “sure, that would be nice, but who cares.”

VI.

Once you trick your brain into identifying those 10/10 desires, the illusion drops and they simply become wants that you can action.

And while you might think, well, if I had a friend, partner, or billionaire offering me these opportunities this would be easy, that’s exactly the point. You don’t need a practical plan to make these things materialize yet.

Your wanting has a discovery problem. But by thinking through prompts like these, you can help better identify your wants. And by identifying your wants, removing the friction of initiation, and sharing those desires with the people around you, you can then sit back and let the world collaborate to help you achieve these goals.

Before getting to specific recommendations, my actual biggest recommendation is a social one: I highly recommend messaging anyone based in NYC who you think is interesting (either a blogger from the internet, or someone in your field) and asking to meet up. NYC is different from most places in the sense that nearly everyone here is not originally from here. Because of this transience, rather than sticking to the same small friend groups, people are very used to meeting new people. The city skews hyper-social, and few here have kids tying up their calendars. You’d be surprised at how many people will happily say yes to grabbing a coffee.

In terms of what to actually do, I highly recommend you see a jazz show when you’re in town. NYC is the hub and mecca of jazz for the entire world, and the kinds of shows you can see here simply do not exist anywhere else. This is partly because the kinds of jazz clubs that exist in NYC aren’t economically sustainable in other cities, but mostly because the majority of the world’s best jazz musicians actually live here. When they want to play with their friends or do random one-off gigs, they are only ever going to do it in NYC.

To see what’s playing on any given night, I recommend checking out the daily concert list at

https://tappedin.live/

If you don’t know enough about the music yourself, I still recommend going: just plug the listed performances into an AI, ask which will be the most interesting show to see on your specific dates, and go with that. If nothing stands out, default to one of the clubs I mention below as a backup, because they will all be excellent on any given day.

If you go to a jazz venue (and hopefully it’s the Village Vanguard) for a ticketed general admission show, I strongly recommend getting there very early (approx an hour before the show begins). At many of these small venues, being in the front row is a much richer experience than being stuck in a mediocre spot - and many of these venues offer many horrible seats.

My favourite jazz venue in NYC by far is the Village Vanguard, but only go here if there is a band playing that seems exciting or interesting to you. Watching a great artist from the front few rows at the Vanguard is one of my peak life experiences. It’s the most famous jazz venue in history for a reason.

Three other venues I like a lot and think you can go to almost any night, irrespective of who is playing, are:

• Ornithology: The best and coziest vibe, and very accessible - but in Bushwick.

• Bar Lunatico: Has a nice dinner option, so I actually recommend going there to eat, and it is very low-key and fun (in Bed-Stuy).

• Smalls: Great ambiance, but my main recommendation here is to go for their open jam session, which is what the club is most famous for. Professional musicians drop in to improvise and jam together. It happens every day from midnight to 4:00 AM, and on many weekend afternoons from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Admission is free. Check their website for the exact schedule.

There is no talking permitted at any of these venues during the shows, so don’t make plans there to socialize! The food at all jazz venues aside from Lunatico and Smoke Jazz Club is bad, so plan accordingly.

Food-wise, NYC specializes in two extremes: high-end, exorbitant dining, and very good ethnic food from pretty much everywhere in the entire world. While the city has a “good” version of practically everything, most of it is not special. If you’re looking for specific popular restaurants, a quick Reddit search of r/foodNYC will give you all the standard hits.

My main recommendation is to spend at least one day exploring an ethnic enclave outside of Manhattan (likely in Queens or Brooklyn) to eat. There are two important reasons for this. First, NYC is an enormous city, and to truly understand it, you need to realize it isn’t dominated by the people you see in Manhattan, but by everyone living in these entirely different worlds across the boroughs. Second, simply taking the subway an hour away and still seeing massive crowds of people is a really important perspective.

Some examples are: Chinese in Flushing, Central American in Corona, South Asian in Jackson Heights, Arab in Astoria, Yemeni in Bay Ridge, or former Soviet/Russian in Brighton Beach.

I recommend you spend an afternoon or evening in an enclave and eat at two to four different restaurants of that kind of cuisine. Often, when you step into one of these communities, every single person, shop, and conversation makes you feel like you’ve left the US entirely. The food is excellent, and it’s just a very rich cultural experience. If you live somewhere that doesn’t have an eg Senegalese or Yemeni restaurant, NYC is an amazing place to try cuisines you’ve never had before at a very high quality.

If you are interested in Jewish tourism, there is a lot of incredible Jewish food here that I love dearly: smoked fish, kugel, blintzes, babka, pastrami, etc. If you are craving a particular food, go look for a restaurant that has it. As for visiting Jewish neighbourhoods, the three big options are the Chabad headquarters at 770 in Crown Heights, the Satmar community in South Williamsburg, or a hodgepodge of different Orthodox communities in Boro Park. My recommendation is to go to South Williamsburg and get the babka at Oneg Bakery. South Williamsburg is the most accessible to where most visitors to NYC will be, while also being the most insular, jarring, and immersive—and the babka at Oneg is truly out of this world.

Since I don’t drink, if you are looking for late-night spots in lieu of cocktail bars, my girlfriend and I love going to Balthazar for dessert or french fries (it is very famous for its fries) or Din Tai Fung for their chocolate xiao long bao, which are genuinely exquisite and amongst the best foods I’ve ever eaten. You can go to Din Tai Fung any night without a reservation merely by joining their digital waitlist (which may be a 2ish-hour advance wait), so plan accordingly.

Beyond food and music, it might seem funny to suggest spending your NYC trip inside a movie theatre. In theory, you can watch the exact same movie anywhere. But there is a unique experience here that I really love. NYC has a handful of theatres that specialize in playing old and foreign films. Not only can you watch movies on the big screen here that you would never be able to see in a theatre anywhere else in the world, but you can do so in a room packed with enthusiastic, committed fans. It makes you feel a special appreciation for what you’re watching. You can check the daily screenings here:

https://www.screenslate.com/

I love tea, so I’m biased, but probably the most luxurious-feeling experience I’ve had in NYC is booking a private tea tasting and tea lesson with Roy from the New York Tea Society (https://www.newyorkteasociety.com/). It is both truly wonderful and an incredible value. It costs about $100 for a private session for two (by email appointment only). You get to try many different kinds of tea and learn a huge amount about it, all in a peaceful, serene space (in Midtown!) that feels like a total escape from the rest of the city. While doing a tea tasting has nothing to do with NYC itself, I’d argue that one of the best parts about New York is the sheer caliber of random, niche things you can do here.

I’d also recommend googling any specific interest you have alongside ‘NYC’ to find something related to your passions here. If you love Twin Peaks, maybe its exciting for you to visit the Twin Peaks themed coffee shop, or the if you love Borges, the Borges named library etc. There is something specific here for nearly every hobby and interest imaginable.

Ultimately, my favourite part of NYC is just the bigness and intensity of it all. To that end, I recommend spending a lot of time simply walking around Manhattan between Wall Street and Central Park (not those specific neighbourhoods, but the areas in between) to absorb the sheer density of humanity and ambition. There is no real need to walk north of where Central Park begins if your goal is people-watching, as the crowds and scenes are most densely concentrated below it.

If you feel like you must walk through Central Park, I recommend going at sunrise so you can watch the massive run clubs and huge number of eager go-getters running at incredibly fast paces before their intense corporate days begin. My favourite view in NYC is overlooking Central Park, where you can see the grass and trees surrounded by all the buildings. There are many spots for this, but the one I’ve been to is at the Darling bar.

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More than just providing interesting content, I love the linkpost for another important reason.

Linkposts serve as a solution to the discovery problem—helping interesting, underexposed content from writers without pre-existing audiences find a much larger readership. Without an audience, even a brilliant post disappears into the void; as a writer without an audience, you may never even know if what you wrote was remarkable or medicore, because the feedback loop simply doesn’t exist. Once a blog reaches a certain level of success and accumulates subscribers, it achieves a kind of critical mass: almost anything it publishes has the potential to reach escape velocity and break into the broader conversation. Because readership compounds in a winner-take-all economy, already-popular blogs effectively hold a monopoly on attention, meaning each post benefits from an audience far beyond what the marginal quality of that given post would otherwise attract. But most writers don’t have this. A curated linkpost is one of the best ways for already-successful bloggers to generate positive externalities and contribute to the broader intellectual blogosphere, redirecting their attention to help the world discover great content and lesser-known writers.

A second reason I love linkposts: similar to a blogger sharing their Goodreads profile, a linkpost gives you a real sense of who a person is—how they think, what captivates them. Exposing their intellectual diet is a window into their mind that no single essay can quite replicate.

The third and most obvious reason: linkposts are just filled with great content, and I selfishly want to discover more of it!

So this post has two purposes: to encourage more people to write their own linkposts, and by steering more traffic to existing linkposts, to give encouragement to those already writing them—to help them build their audiences and keep going.

My two favourite linkposts are Readsfast and Marginal Revolution.

Marginal Revolution’s linkposts are one of the most important intellectual anchors of my life. So many of my favourite writers had their audience growth meaningfully accelerated by a Tyler Cowen link (myself included)—the attention and momentum that comes from being discovered there is hard to overstate; it can completely alter the trajectory of a writer’s reach. And because so many of us read the daily links, Marginal Revolution functions as a kind of shared substrate: everyone who reads MR will know who Matt Lakeman is and when he publishes a new travelogue, or when something wild happens with a prediction market (and Tyler says ‘Okie-dokie’)—giving these communities a shared set of references that makes every conversation richer.

Readsfast is written daily by Tony Gao and offers mini-essays on seemingly everything happening across the AI, EA, rationalist, and broader Tyler Cowen universe, with a healthy dose of arts and culture links thrown in. While MR daily links are the OG and undisputed GOAT, I think the mini-essay contextualizing each link is the superior form of the linkpost, and Tony executes this exceptionally well.

Not quite a linkpost, but I also want to draw attention to something in a similar form: the Sentinel newsletter. It is a hybrid of news, linkpost, and forecasting—sharing analysis of the past week’s events in link form, accompanied by predictions on how those events will shape our near- and mid-term future. It is one of my favourite things to check every week.

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List of linkposts
(If there is another linkpost you enjoy—or if you write one yourself—please share it in the comments or by email and I will add it here!)

Daily:

• Readsfast *

• Marginal Revolution *

• update.news

Weekly:

• Sentinel *

Monthly:

• nomagicpill *

• Michael Bateman’s Passing Time *

• Astral Codex Ten

• Slime Mold Time Mold

• herfingersbloomed

• Sam Enright

• Ben Goldhaber

• an1lam

• x.com/james1ach *

• Eleanor Konik

• Splitting Infinity

• The Zvi

• Nintil

Non-active but excellent linkposts I wish came back:

• David Oks

• Guzey’s Best of Twitter

• Rachel Strohm’s Africa Update

In memoriam:
Jake Seliger

EDIT:

I recommend everyone check out all the links in the comments. Two additional sites I love which aren’t quite linkposts but worth sharing are:

• The Podcast Browser - a curated list of recommended podcast episodes

• The Browser - a daily singular link, always excellent

Will Michaels has also shared a great linkspost, which you can check out here.

Earlier this winter, my girlfriend and I took the train an hour north of NYC to the Capitol Theatre to see the Grateful Dead cover band, JRAD, the week of Bob Weir’s passing. As we waited for the show to start, I found myself explaining to my girlfriend why everyone was wearing the specific clothing they were, why people were selling things outside, others were sticking their fingers in the air, why strangers were high-fiving and talking with each other, and why everyone was talking about the setlist from the previous night. I explained why there was a collection of roses next to a photo of an old man with a beard, why the ushers were in tie-dye, and why—during a quiet jam—the walls projected a meme reading “Bob says STFU”, which everyone around us immediately understood.

You could say being a Deadhead is akin to being in a cult, or a religion. But I would describe it differently: seeing a show like this is participating in a high-context environment.

A few months earlier, my girlfriend and I saw another band we love, Big Thief. Despite the fact that nearly everyone at the show looked demographically identical, with the same wool beanies, there was a palpable, collective awkwardness in the crowd. People didn’t seem to know if they were supposed to sit or stand, whether dancing was acceptable, or when it was appropriate to cheer. I would call this concert a low-context environment.

II.

A high-context environment is one where attendees share a deep, pre-existing knowledge of the thing they are attending—the history, the inside jokes, the unspoken rules. But crucially, it is an environment where everyone knows that the people around them know the same things. That second layer is what makes it work. It’s not just shared knowledge—it’s the common knowledge of this shared knowledge.

These environments are built on a massive invisible foundation of what I call “cultural dark matter”—all the shared history and expectations that give explicit interactions their weight and meaning. It’s what you can’t see, but what holds everything together.

A low-context environment is the opposite. There is no shared history, no shared knowledge, and no enduring set of norms beyond the generic, lowest-common-denominator rules of polite society. These are typically one-off events where whatever happens will never be referenced again, and the people in the room don’t expect to ever see each other in the future.

III.

Something many people don’t realize is that unless you spend meaningful time in high-context environments, you become oblivious to their existence. It’s not just the vague awareness that “other scenes exist”; it’s that you could literally be standing in the middle of one and genuinely not perceive the depth of the community and knowledge around you, because you simply don’t know that level of context is even possible.

There is an interesting paradox to these environments: because they come with so many unspoken rules, high-context environments often provide much greater freedom and trust. You know exactly what is permitted or not, and you know that you are, in some sense, in it together with the others there. You also know that the event is not a standalone event; even if you never see the person beside you again, you are connected in some way, whether through broader friend groups, posting on the same message boards, or knowing you might see each other at a show later in the year.

At Metrograph—a movie theatre for obsessive film nerds in NYC—I can comfortably shush someone who is talking. I can do this safely because, even if I don’t know the person I’m shushing, I know the established norm of the community, and I know the rest of the crowd will be on my side. If I try to shush someone at a midtown AMC, I might get assaulted in response.

Low-context environments don’t have established norms, so behaviour defaults to a messy friction between the baselines of conventional society and some guess as to what other people think other people’s expectations are. The struggle is that, because these events are not connected to future events with the same group, there are no opportunities for norms to develop. At a low-context event, every social interaction is a question: Can I talk to this person? Am I dressed right? Am I acting weird? Is this permitted? Whereas at a high-context environment, it’s all already answered. The repeated, shared nature of high-context events solves the coordination problem.

IV.

My view is that most of the genuinely good things in life come from participating in high-context environments. And there is a revealing status dynamic hidden inside this.

High-context environments are one of the main sources of escape from the general status competition of life. Not that high-context environments don’t have their own fierce status competitions—often more intense than the general public one—but it’s through people pursuing status within a given high-context community that society enables multiple status hierarchies. Instead of everyone competing for the same scene, people can opt out of the greater struggle and instead decide to be cool to a much smaller and niche group. Critically, the existence of these high-context communities gives people confidence to be different when they return back to general society.

If someone flies to a different country to watch the Olympics and attends a handful of random events, or brags about flying across the world to visit some three-star Michelin restaurant, they likely think this is a flex. But given how low-context these environments are, no matter how prestigious the Olympics may be, this is the sign of someone who is profoundly low-context (and in my opinion, uncool). But if someone flies to attend a fly-fishing tournament or a curling bonspiel, while significantly less sexy than the Olympics, this person, in a very meaningful sense, is much more real. The tragedy is that the person flexing their random Olympic tickets likely doesn’t even possess the awareness to understand what a high-context event is, or why the person flying to the fly-fishing tournament is, in any meaningful sense, cooler than they are.

V.

High-context environments don't just form around specific hobbies; they form through extreme filters too. I have a vivid memory of eating dinner with people from my hostel in Uzbekistan, a destination that selects almost exclusively for a certain kind of traveller. Looking around the table, everyone had the exact same little backpack, brought their own water bottle, and casually mentioned they had been to over 50 countries. After dinner, rather than going to a bar, we all bought beer cans at a convenience store and washed our merino wool clothes in the sink. If I had been at a hostel in Spain, it would just be a random assortment of tourists with no shared story. In this case, the extreme filter of being the kind of person who visits Uzbekistan served as the basis for our context.

This framework maps onto many things outside of social events, like careers. Lawyers, for example, all went through the same gruelling law school process. They know the rankings of different schools and firms, they know the norms, and they know that every other lawyer in their office, or that they meet elsewhere, knows the exact same things. That shared context shapes how they interact, compared to a generic corporate office where nobody knows how the other got there or what the title really means.

But there is a trap here: not all high-context environments are actually healthy. When shared context becomes too dense, it can become suffocating. Think of life in a small, insular town, or the bubble of modern academia. If you spend time with academics, you might be surprised to learn they are actually paid to research specific subjects, because their conversations, due to their shared context, often focus on an endless loop of institutional gossip, prestige-chasing, and hyper-niche discourse at the expense of everything else. The shared context stops being a tool for connection and instead becomes a closed loop that consumes the actual purpose of the environment.

This also explains why childhood friendships carry such a specific weight. If you spend years and years in one environment—like going to the same school as kids, or playing on the same local hockey team—you accumulate a massive foundation of shared context. All those years later, those relationships end up in a completely different place than if you had switched teams or locations every year.

One of the more interesting wrinkles in this is that context may be divorced from a more literal type of knowledge. You can share a lot of context on one axis while sharing none on another.

I remember a devout Christian friend once lamenting to me that all the secular Jews he met knew basically nothing about the Old Testament compared to the people in his church, so we must be a low-context people. He wasn’t wrong in a literal sense, but those same biblically illiterate Jews, if you put them at a Shabbat dinner with complete strangers, would instantly share an enormous amount of context about being a Jew: references, social geography, jokes, and an implicit understanding that what happens at this dinner is part of a longer, ongoing conversation and relationship. My Christian friend, for all his factual knowledge of the Torah, would be a tourist at that dinner. And I suspect if he spent an evening with a random group of devout Christians who shared his biblical knowledge, he might find they didn’t share as much context as he thought. Intellectual knowledge is not the same as contextual knowledge.

VI.

The amount of time we can spend in low and high-context environments has shifted with the internet.

In the past, local communities were naturally high-context environments. The regulars at a neighbourhood bar, the local curling club, or the community centre knew each other, had years of shared jokes, and expected to keep seeing each other. That accumulation of shared context happened more or less automatically, just by virtue of proximity and repetition.

The internet, combined with the hypersorting of modern life, has eroded this. Local places feel increasingly low-context: the regulars have been replaced by people passing through as more and more people spend time at home or moving between different places, and there are no longer as many shared norms that develop organically.

But the internet has also done something meaningful in the other direction: it has made niche hobby communities more high-context than they’ve ever been. If you want to take up road cycling today, there’s an expectation that you’ve already gone deep on the relevant Reddit threads before you show up to your first group ride. The internet has hollowed out the local and intensified the niche. To be a sports fan in the past meant watching the games as they happened, and now it means reading about the team on Reddit.

There is a counter-intuitive flip side to this: online communities can now seed high-context IRL environments among people who have never met. When a group of people who’ve spent years on the same message board or blog comment section finally meet in person, they arrive already carrying enormous shared context. The first meeting feels like a reunion.

Historically, high-context environments were geographic and default; you got them just by existing in a neighbourhood. Today, because they are digital and niche, they require active effort, research, and planning to join. This means context is quietly transforming from a default human experience into a reward for the conscientious. With this change, the more apathetic are losing their outlets entirely, while the more optimized among us are turning our lives into high-context bubbles.

Ultimately, we spend a lot of time and energy trying to get into the ‘best’ or most prestigious rooms, assuming that’s where the value is. But the actual thing that makes an environment meaningful is almost never the prestige, but the community. If you want to feel genuinely connected to the people around you, stop trying to find the most prestigious room to be in, and instead find the rooms with more context.

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Have you ever thought about paying a company like McKinsey or Google $500,000 to work there? Maybe not, but it’s a bit weird how few people think about doing this, or treat getting a job at one of these employers as akin to winning a lottery ticket. There is a rough heuristic that many people have, rightly or wrongly: that one’s career outcome broadly matches their skill set and hard work — if you work at a prestigious company, you are the kind of person who deserves to work at a prestigious company. But I truly believe that career success is much more random and like a lottery than most people truly internalize.

II.

A big news story in Canada this month is the naming of Connor Teskey, a 38-year-old, as the CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, arguably the most significant Canadian company (for reference, the company Mark Carney worked for before he left to become Prime Minister of Canada).

When you read the profiles on Teskey, you don’t see stories of a wunderkind who dazzled the industry with a unique, unparalleled skill set. Instead, you see stories about how the former CEO, Bruce Flatt, loved him, put him in the right rooms, gave him the right opportunities, and effectively groomed him for the role.

But the defining characteristic of his career trajectory isn’t his raw ability — it is winning the lottery of Bruce Flatt choosing him.

This randomness isn’t an exception. I believe it’s how most career advancement actually works. We tend to view career success as a cumulative measure of ability, a scorecard that updates in real-time based on merit. But in reality, I think careers are defined almost entirely by randomness, legibility, and path dependency.

III.

To understand why, let’s reflect on the NBA.

In professional basketball, a top prospect is measured constantly. They are ranked in high school, scrutinized in the NCAA, and then, once they are in the NBA, every single minute of their work is recorded, quantified, and visible. There are huge incentives for teams to watch, study, and accurately value every player. If a player was hyped in college but fails to perform in the pros, their value drops. If an unknown player starts putting up numbers, their value rises — if you are not in the league, they will find you. The feedback loop is tight and continuous.

The corporate world is not the NBA. This sounds quite obvious when you read it on your screen, but I think it’s the kind of thing that most people don’t fully internalize. You may be the most talented, capable person in a given field, performing well beyond your peers at a certain job, and nobody cares. You may have extraordinary potential, but nobody is trying to or will discover you. The default is that nobody except you will ever know your “true” talent or potential. The corollary of this is that it’s on you to demonstrate this value.

In the corporate world, there is no “game tape.” There is no continuous measurement, no updated ranking, no mechanism that corrects the market when it mislabels you. Future employers cannot watch how you performed in your previous role. They have no incentive to do the deep discovery work required to find hidden gems, and even if they did, the costs are too high.

Imagine an NBA team signing a 32-year-old free agent based solely on the fact that they were drafted 7th overall twelve years ago, with no other information other than “they are still in the NBA now.” That is how corporate hiring often works. It doesn’t matter how good you actually are at basketball at age 32, and it doesn’t really matter how bad the other person is (so long as they aren’t bad enough to get booted from the league). Based on their past pedigree, they will sign the multimillion-dollar contract while you are left at home. And unlike in the NBA, where teams that misjudge talent lose games, most companies don’t need to find the best person — they need someone good enough. The prestige filter gives them that, so nobody has any reason to look deeper. The difference between the person who gets hired and the person, even if marginally better, is typically imperceptible to them. But the downstream difference to each person who doesn’t get chosen for one of these jobs is enormous: one gets the credential, the compounding begins, and their career trajectories can diverge by millions of dollars over a lifetime.

This is what makes career randomness so durable. In most markets, mispricing gets corrected — if a stock is undervalued, someone buys it. But the labour market has no equivalent mechanism, because talent in most fields is so hard to judge, career tenure is so short, and the blunt reality is that most jobs require you to have an existing body of knowledge from working in that kind of environment before — which if you don’t have, you will functionally never be given an opportunity to acquire.

IV.

I have worked three significant jobs before my current one. In each role, I was viewed as an “all-star” employee, empowered to work autonomously on whatever I wanted to work on and handle high-leverage tasks. But despite all that, in getting any subsequent job, my actual performance in the previous role was never a factor. My new employers had no idea I was an all-star. They hired me based on a de novo analysis of how I presented in the interview, the prestige of the names on my resume, and the kinds of tasks I I chose to write on my resume as being responsible for. I should note: all jobs had a robust interview process and take-home assignment. It’s just that those things are pretty poor indicators of ability and future performance and, once again, reflect nothing about how or what I did in my prior job.

Aside from delivering shareholder value and I guess making myself feel proud, there was no career benefit to being excellent in my previous jobs. My actual abilities, measured by my actual track record, were completely invisible to the people making hiring decisions for all my subsequent jobs.

With the exception of a few technical fields like programming or engineering where you can test via Leetcode or coding tests, it is too difficult to measure ability directly during the hiring process for most jobs. Instead, companies hire based primarily on what you did or where you did it in your previous job, which you only could have gotten based on what you did in the job before that. Since companies receive hundreds of applications, and so much of one’s actual work is illegible, hiring for prestigious companies has a strong filter: did this person previously work at a similarly prestigious company? The best predictor of your next job is your last job. The best predictor of your last job was the one before that. Follow the chain back far enough and you usually arrive at something arbitrary.

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V.

We often hear about wealthy parents bribing top colleges to admit their children. But something we don’t hear about is parents bribing McKinsey or Google to let their kids work there. Yet working at McKinsey or Google will often define someone’s future career trajectory far more than which university they went to.

I know what you might say: rich people frequently do give prestigious jobs to their kids or offer significant business to a company on the condition they hire their child. Or maybe rich people in fact do bribe companies like McKinsey directly and we just don’t hear about it because they aren’t under regulatory oversight in the same way. But I don’t think most people think of getting a prestigious job as something worth bribing for in the same way they view getting into Harvard.

But consider the logic. If you want to work at Anthropic on their sales, marketing, or legal team, my understanding is that they aren’t that interested in measuring the raw ability of all candidates. They are checking if you previously worked at Stripe or Google. And to get that job at Stripe, you needed to be sorted from a previous job of a similar tier.

This happens because prestige creates a compounding loop. If you work at a place like Stripe, you suddenly know many people who can be a resource for you. They become your referrals at new companies, and because they already met the prestige bar, they will be going to the exact kind of companies you want to work at next. Furthermore, you need to work at these kinds of companies to do the kind of work that future prestigious companies want to see. You can’t demonstrate “Stripe-scale” product management if you are working at a regional bank.

But getting into these companies is often just randomness. You can get in by starting at the beginning of your career and being lucky (or having already been sorted via the American university pipeline). Or you can start in an emerging area (like privacy or AI safety) before it is trendy, and then prestigious companies need to hire people with experience, and there aren’t that many people there. Or you start at a startup that is not prestigious, but over time it grows to be prestigious, retroactively gilding your resume.

This is why, notwithstanding the logistics and ethical issues, theoretically “paying” McKinsey or Google $500,000 for the right to work there for two years would actually be a rational investment for some — likely higher expected value than an MBA. Once you possess the badge of a prestigious firm, you become legible to the entire market. Your future jobs are almost entirely based on your past jobs, compounding over time. It doesn’t matter if you improve; it matters if you remain on the path.

VI.

This path dependency creates a cruel catch-22: if you miss the initial sorting, you are often locked out forever.

As a law student who loved economics, I wanted to work as a competition lawyer, the one area of law that engages with economics. Unfortunately for me, competition law is very prestigious and only practiced at a small number of the very top firms in Canada. This meant I was outcompeted by those with top grades. Because the field was practiced by so few firms, once I missed this initial hiring round in my second year of law school, there was practically no way to get the relevant experience. Those jobs were effectively unavailable to me for the rest of my career, no matter my interest or ability.

But the same randomness that locks people out also creates backdoors.

Right now, as I watch the Winter Olympics, I am struck by how unequal a gold medal may be across different sports, all while retaining the prestige of an Olympic medal. Some sports have millions of kids dedicating their lives to them while others like Skeleton have fewer than 1,000 participants worldwide.

High-status career paths like law, investment banking, and consulting are like Swimming in the Olympics. Everyone knows the rules, and you are fighting against hundreds of thousands of others who have been training for this since they were teenagers.

But there is another category of career success that looks more like Skeleton.

Skeleton is a sport where you ride a small sled down a frozen track face-first. There are only about 18 tracks in the entire world. Nobody grows up dreaming of being a Skeleton champion. But if you happen to live near a track, and you happen to try it, and you possess a baseline level of athleticism (and perhaps critically, have rich parents), you are suddenly competing against a pool of maybe 300 people globally. Or, as is the case more recently, your country is hosting the Winter Olympics, and they pay random athletic people to learn and train in this sport because there is so little competition. Nobody discounts a gold medal because only 300 people play the sport.

In the corporate world, these “Skeleton tracks” are niche departments, like the Risk Management department at Goldman Sachs or the marketing department at McKinsey.

Nobody dreams of being on the Risk Team at Goldman Sachs. It usually happens randomly: you graduate, you need a job, you know someone, you apply on a whim, and you fall into it. But many of these random jobs pay well, still have lots of prestige, and have a lot less competition than the Swimming track (working as an investment banker at GS). Once you are on the track, gravity takes over for the rest of your career. Because there are so few people who work in risk in the big finance world, once you have the experience, you are effectively “in.”

When you meet people in their 40s in senior positions in these roles, it reveals the randomness of it all, because rarely did this person actually have an interest in risk. They randomly got a job in a specific niche in their 20s and just kept going. This describes most people’s careers.

VII.

Another dimension of this is the nature of the superstar and the standout successes. Once you reach a certain level of wealth, status, or success, whether through the Swimming track or the Skeleton track, the rules of the game change.

I often think about Matt Lakeman’s blog post on meaning, where he describes the lives of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steve Bannon. He cites the incredible, varied things they’ve done, but what stands out to me is that they really only did one thing that mattered. They each did one thing that made them sufficiently connected, desirable, and financially successful to then pursue and succeed in everything else. That one success enabled all the rest.

Consider Elon Musk creating xAI. The company is valued at $200+ billion, not because of any unique labor or insight that went into its founding, but because Elon Musk founded it. If you or I had the exact same thesis, we would have received zero investment and nothing to show for it. But when you are already a “someone,” doing almost anything becomes infinitely easier. Yet when a future biography is written, Musk will get credit for starting another multibillion-dollar company, when really, xAI is just downstream from prior success.

Many people reach a level of “career escape velocity” where they can leverage their existing credentials to achieve 10x (or sometimes far greater) success, none of which would have been possible without the initial position that set everything in motion. A lot of one’s career story is just playing the game until they can get to this point, which once again, often originates from an arbitrary starting point.

VIII.

While there are many brilliant people in NYC, one of the things that stood out most to me since moving here is how incredibly conscientious people are. I’ve met so many people who are so successful, whether in academia, tech, law, finance, politics, or media, who seem utterly non-remarkable and without passion for anything other than success. But you can tell: these people are exceptionally hardworking and dedicated, the kind of people who not only do all the right networking and say all the right things, but have been doing this since they were teenagers. These large-scale hiring processes bias heavily towards conscientiousness — towards those who are comfortable molding their entire personality to fit in, who practice hard to ace the interviews and say all the right buzzwords. And while conscientiousness matters, it’s overvalued once everyone has already been filtered for it. If you find yourself in a room full of people who all got there through these prestige pipelines, you should probably pay the most attention to the least conscientious person in the room — because they must have faced far more adversity to end up there, and possess something rare enough to overcome the bias against them.

In the specific sector I work in (previously law and now tech), I am surprised by how few US companies hire in Canada. The Canadians I know in these fields are typically on par with the Americans, but doing the same work at half the price. This superficially looks like an economic puzzle: with no timezone difference, language barrier, or cultural friction, why would American companies not hire the much cheaper Canadians? I believe the answer brings together everything I’ve touched on in this essay. The reason is legibility. There aren’t enough Canadians with resumes that American hiring algorithms recognize. If an American tech company uses “Previously worked at a company like Amazon” as a filter, a software engineer from RBC, despite being equally talented, does not pass the filter. If Canada wanted to see more of its citizens hired by US companies, the strategy shouldn’t be better education or training. It should be subsidizing large US companies to open offices in Canada, purely to brand candidates as “Amazon Product Managers.” Because once they have the badge, the market will finally see them.

The bottleneck for most people is not talent. It’s getting lucky enough to get the badge, and riding it for the rest of their career.

Basically, the exercise of “manifesting” helps you identify your true desires, calibrate your priorities and actually internalize them — while most importantly, letting the world around you collaborate to help you achieve these goals. And by sharing this post, I hope you, dear reader, use this as a gentle nudge for you to think about what your goals actually are — what you want to manifest — and to share this with the world.

• More friends to come over for tea ceremony and see concerts with (particularly couple friends). If you are music obsessed and live in NYC (see my concert list here), please reach out!

• More friends online and in real life to discuss big ideas with—especially niche blog posts or the kinds of things I end up writing about. If you are reading this and have some weird idea you want to discuss, email me!

• Enough readers of my blog that: 1) I will always get at least one critical comment and 2) if I write a great post, it will get enough exposure to reach escape velocity on Substack.

• To have one article of mine shared in The Browser or some other link curation website I really admire this year.

• I am an exceptionally good tech/corporate lawyer. After my experience being on the board of one of the largest YIMBY organizations, as well as a large EA organization, I would love a job at an organization where I truly care about their cause, that has a culture aligned with my actual life values and where I think my direct contribution helps make the world a better place—working as a lawyer at somewhere like GiveWell, Coefficient Giving, Metaculus, a YIMBY org, etc.

If that job doesn’t materialize, I suspect my next career move will be in a completely different direction, leading my own initiative. To that end, for the world to provide an opportunity for funding, encouragement, or support to pursue any of the following:

• Writing a book about Syrian refugees opening up Syrian restaurants in 30+ different countries—to serve as a human interest story but more critically, a cross-country comparison

• A flash-frozen food only grocery store (see for details: https://danfrank.ca/why-i-love-flash-frozen-food-and-think-you-should-too/)

• A food court in Toronto with food stalls from 100+ different countries

Alternatively, a job at a leading AI company (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) where I’m actually involved in making decisions that impact the trajectory of how our society interacts with AI (the most important issue of my lifetime—and one I know a tremendous amount about and spend a large fraction of my time thinking about).

And if I can do one bonus one that has nothing to do with me: A Medeski Martin and Wood concert in New York City.

As a general heuristic in the modern economy, manufactured goods should get much cheaper over time. The forces driving this are well known: increases in material science, manufacturing techniques, and information technology; access to cheaper global labour and capital; and massive economies of scale.

You can go on AliExpress to see this in action: the price of a generic widget is shockingly low. But then we look at the things we actually want to buy and say, “Wow, this is now so expensive.”

Contrary to the deflationary pressures above, there are four significant forces that explain why many things have gotten more expensive over time:

1. Labour costs have gone up (Baumol’s cost disease).

2. Real estate costs have gone up: zoning constraints and the increasing opportunity cost of land.

3. Regulatory mandates that force costly “improvements” consumers don’t directly value (energy efficiency standards, safety requirements, environmental compliance etc)

4. The decline of demand for that particular good

The fourth point is by far the most important point for understanding how the world works, but the one that is least understood.

II.
Brian Potter writes a comprehensive overview of the manufacturing advances that drove down TV prices. We learn that LCD manufacturing scaled up mother glass sheets from 12x16 inches to 116x133 inches (the largest driver of cost declines), which reduced equipment costs per unit area by 80%. We learn about cluster plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition machines, the reduction of masking steps, and the switch from manual labour to robots, benefiting from techniques and knowledge borrowed from the semiconductor industry.

But, in a way, this is not all that interesting. This is just the story of industrial capitalism doing what it does for basically every physical good, what the ‘laws’ of capitalism impose on everything.

What’s interesting is understanding why these forces resulted in cheaper prices for TVs, but for so few other goods.

The true answer is that there isn’t a real market for “better” TVs. A TV can only be so good. We have hard material constraints in our homes regarding how large a screen can be, and biological limitations on our eyes regarding how many pixels we can actually see from the couch. The TV does not run software that perpetually needs access to better hardware to function (like phones and computers).

The TV also lost its power as a status symbol. Nobody comes over to your house anymore and judges you based on your television’s refresh rate. This has allowed TVs to become commodified. There is no demand for them to improve or distinguish themselves on performance—so instead of competition working to make TVs “better,” all those economic forces work exclusively to make the TV cheaper.

(A secondary but interesting reason is that TVs are often sold as loss leaders for stores or bundling opportunities for streaming services, subsidizing the hardware price. See my previous post on how most businesses don’t work the way you think for more on this dynamic.)

If you think for a moment about one of the titans of modern capitalism, IKEA—most of what you can buy there is more expensive than the similar item IKEA was selling 20 years ago. But certain pieces, like the Billy Bookshelf or the Lack coffee table, have gone down in price over the last 30 years. Why? Because the Billy is a commodity purchased to fit a specific function. It isn’t used to signal status or fashion sense. For the Billy Bookshelf, IKEA is making roughly the same model as it used to, at massive scale, allowing those economic forces of modernity to lower costs. A brand new sofa that will only be sold for two years won’t have the scale to be manufactured in a way that allows it to become cheaper.

III.
Now look at running shoes. Compared to when Nike first released their top-of-the-line running shoe in the early 1990s, you can absolutely buy a generic running shoe today that is objectively better and cheaper. But if you ask people who identify as runners, you will find they are spending more on shoes than ever before.

That’s because runners aren’t buying the “Billy Bookshelf” of shoes. Instead of there being one singular running shoe, there are now endless choices for every micro-purpose: tempo runs, trail runs, long runs, carbon-plated race shoes. Despite the technology being cheaper, nearly everyone who identifies as a runner wants a “better” shoe. While part of this is we want new shoes that physically look different, it’s mostly because of the inflation of “impressiveness.” It used to be impressive to run a 5k; now, unless you’re training for a half-marathon with a specific time goal, or a 50K ultra, are you even running? We need the new gear just to keep up with the Joneses on Strava.

This situation is even more extreme in road cycling. The components on the bike you buy need to be compatible with an ecosystem that is constantly evolving to be “better”: wider tires, tubeless setups, disc brakes, electronic shifting, aero frames. And because most people want to ride with others, and those others are riding faster, more expensive bikes, the social baseline for what constitutes an “acceptable” bike shifts upward.

The cruel irony is that these “improvements” often don’t even make the experience better in aggregate. Everyone spending $2000 more on their bike just to keep pace with the group ride means we’re all poorer but no happier—the exact opposite of what happened with TVs, where we’re all richer and watching the same shows.

All of these forces have the total effect of making it so the “standard” good you bought before is no longer produced at scale, which already removes the key cost-reducing driver. Demand is shifted to an ever-changing set of specialized, higher-status goods, which consume the gains from manufacturing efficiency to fund “improvements” or distinguishing factors you may or may not actually need—and which collectively, often don’t leave us better off.

So, the real interesting part of TVs becoming cheaper isn’t just the material science of glass sheets. It’s that the TV is a rare instance where there was no improvement to be had or status to be gained from the purchase. Almost every consumer category starts with genuine innovation, but the moment there is any social value from the purchase, market forces redirect those efficiency gains away from “cheaper” and toward better and “premium differentiation.” By allowing the TVs to become a commodity, we enabled the forces of modern capitalism to compete exclusively on price, rather than using that efficiency to fund an endless, expensive war for “better”. The how, which Brian Potter exposes, is not nearly as interesting or important as the uniqueness of the why.

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I’ve learned that there is Jewish history absolutely everywhere; I’ve probably had some sort of Jewish educational or cultural experience in over 70 countries—almost all of it, unexpected. When I first started travelling, it was meaningful to me just to meet other Jews from around the world. But pretty early on, I realized that travel became my favourite tool to learn about Jewish history.

I should start by saying I am a secular Jew born in Canada. I don’t speak fluent Hebrew and my actual knowledge of religious practice is minimal—so while I have a huge interest in absorbing Jewish history there is a lot to Jewish travel that is inaccessible to me.

Often, the best part about visiting a Jewish site is just the questions it raises in your head. If you visit the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue in Yangon, Myanmar, it’s not itself so impressive—and of course, there are no more Jews living there—but you’ll find yourself asking: who were the Jews who built this? Which leads you down a rabbit hole—who were the Sassoons? What’s the story of the Baghdadi Jews and their migration to India (and Myanmar)? How did a few Jewish families from Baghdad play such a huge role in the modern development and rise of China?

The simplest form of Jewish tourism is to go to a Chabad house. There are Chabad houses in more than 100 countries, and they will always be happy to host you. Chabad in SE Asia or Latin America is a party of young secular backpackers, while visiting Chabad in a place like Kazakhstan is you and a small number of local religious Russian speakers awkwardly sharing overcooked chicken. My favourite Chabad memory is attending a Passover seder in Kathmandu which, with over 1,000 people, was advertised at the time as the largest seder in history. The wine was homemade, the brisket was smuggled in by Chabadniks coming from Brooklyn, and we lost power halfway through the evening, but it was a lot of fun! There is even a TV show about the Chabad house in Kathmandu.

I have two other specific Chabad memories that stand out. Spending Shabbat in Armenia, where the Chabad rabbi shared stories of his family and life as a kid, covertly living as a Hasidic Jew during Soviet times. The other was in Kazakhstan, where I was shocked to see a large number of ultra-Orthodox Jews suddenly appear in a cemetery, only to discover they were making their way to the Rebbe’s father’s (Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson) ohel. In that same cemetery in Almaty, I saw one of my favourite gravestones ever in the Jewish section—that of a Soviet nuclear physicist who, instead of a Star of David, had an atomic logo and his dates written in mathematical notation—12/X/58 to 2/VII/81. He died at 22, presumably while engaged in nuclear research. Like so many Jews who I grew up around, I like the universalness of a Jew thinking their true religion is science (even if he was working on weapons that were intended to destroy my family).

My favourite thing I’ve done in Jewish tourism is to explore historic communities that have had isolated and insular histories with continuity to the present day. There are basically two historical “shtetls” in existence today, and both are absolutely fascinating places I highly recommend visiting to better understand this history.

They are the Qırmızı Qəsəbə in Azerbaijan and the community of Djerba in Tunisia. The story of the Djerba Jews is remarkable—they are the descendants of a group of Cohanim who fled Jerusalem and arrived after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, making them one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world. Despite many Roman Jews living in Tunisia and then a large Sephardic community forming there, the Djerba community remained insular and distinct. They’ve maintained their own traditions, and their El Ghriba Synagogue is the oldest active synagogue in the world. In Djerba, the Jewish homes are all painted white and blue, with fish decorating their doors, and there are many kosher restaurants, synagogues, Jewish schools etc in a few block radius—which is a unusual sight to see in a religious Muslim country.

The story of the Mountain Jews of Qırmızı Qəsəbə is equally fascinating—they speak Juhuri (a Judeo-Tat language) and have lived isolated and insular despite being ruled by empires (Russia, Persia etc) containing many other Jewish communities. They also, despite their tiny population of around 3,500, have spawned 3 billionaires, making it the most successful village in the world in terms of financial impact. When you visit these places, they are clearly from a different branch of Judaism.

I should note there are many other historic Jewish communities that are distinct from Ashkenazi and Sephardic custom—which have existed since ancient times—like the Jews of Italy or Georgia—but they are today very connected and integrated into both the rest of the Jewish and modern secular worlds. What separates places like Djerba and the Qırmızı Qəsəbə is that they evolved in isolation, developing on separate branches of the tree entirely. I just want to note that you can visit historic Jewish communities like those of Bukhara, Uzbekistan and despite their fascinating history and story (which are still very much worth visiting and learning about), they have been thoroughly integrated both in the present and in modern history by the broader Jewish community, rendering their “uniqueness” muted.

Something that was also deeply meaningful to me was visiting the Jewish community of Gondar, the historic hub of Ethiopia’s Beta Israel community. Since the 1980s and 90s, almost all of the Ethiopian Jews have moved to Israel. But visiting the synagogue there and seeing people bake thousands of little matzah over a fire for Passover—people who look very different than me, in very different material conditions, learning the same Passover prayers I sing—was deeply touching.

While I have not visited Iran, I suspect visiting its Jewish communities, with over 2,500 years of continuous history, would be a fascinating and enriching experience on par with visiting Qırmızı Qəsəbə and Djerba.

There are two kinds of Jewish tourism that I don’t particularly enjoy. The first is visiting old cemeteries to see the graves of famous rabbis. When you visit enough Jewish sites, you will learn this is a huge thing in the Hasidic world—and nearly every Jewish cemetery you will find in Eastern Europe will have dedicated prayer areas where there is a constant stream of Hasidic Jews visiting and praying.

I actually don’t know why I still visit these grave sites—and I vividly remember a moment of great awkwardness when I was asking two ultra-Orthodox Jews in Poland who didn’t speak English how I could find the Brisker rabbi’s grave at the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery—and then once I got there, they were confused why I wasn’t praying, but only taking a photo and then leaving.

The second is visiting Holocaust-related sites. I’ve done this in multiple countries but don’t find it particularly informative or meaningful to me, while also finding it a bit gross. I felt deeply unsettled on my three trips to Poland, although surprisingly, I enjoyed walking around in Vilnius—although maybe that’s because it helped affirm my Litvak identity. I loved seeing the memorial to Chiune Sugihara, who briefly features in the story of how I view myself and my purpose in the world , the Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Jewish lives by issuing transit visas during the Holocaust.

I am obsessed with Yiddish literature and love the idea of Jewish Eastern Europe, but the sad reality is that if you don’t care for these two things—cemeteries and Holocaust memorials—there are practically no Jewish sights to engage with in Eastern Europe. And in a meaningful way, because of how important cemetery visits are to Hasidic Jews, Eastern European Jewish tourism lives on through the Hasidim, with little for the secular to connect with.

My most random Jewish travel story happened while I was hiking in the mountains of Uzbekistan, near the Afghan border. I came across an illiterate Tajik Muslim farmer living in a literal hole in the ground, who shepherded hundreds of goats. We had no way to communicate except by listening to music, dancing, and drinking vodka together. Eventually, I heard him start yelling after his dog—”Hitler, Hitler, Hitler!” Confused, I tried to explain that I was Jewish. To my great surprise, he started naming cities in Israel and saying Hebrew words. I spent the whole night trying to learn what was going on to no avail. The next morning, he took me to his family’s home in the village (with a goat in hand that he wanted me to help slaughter). While enjoying a nice meal of plov (made with said goat), I met his niece, who was learning Hebrew (video attached). Apparently, this illiterate Muslim Tajik farmer who lived in a literal hole in the ground with a dog named Hitler had a sister living in Israel, and the family was trying to immigrate…? I think? I never learned the full story due to language barriers—but how does a Tajik goat herder’s sister end up in Israel?—it was definitely not something I would have expected.

My sketchiest Jewish travel moment was in Morocco. The day after visiting several Jewish sites (including visiting the former home of Moses Maimonides, which is now a Chinese-Moroccan restaurant), I was far away from all of them, wearing a hat with a Canadian maple leaf and no signs of anything Jewish, when a man came up to me and, in Hebrew, asked if I wanted a tour. Given where I’d been, and how unlikely it was that a Moroccan tour guide was just guessing random white people spoke Hebrew, I suspected the Jewish sites were being surveilled and I was approached by someone looking to kidnap an Israeli. Maybe he was just a savvy tour guide. Probably I was paranoid. The latter is more likely, of course. But I’ve thought about that moment every time I’ve visited Jewish sites in a Muslim-majority country since—especially how three days after that experience, while on a hike, a random person pointed out to me the home where two Norwegians were beheaded by ISIS.

I used to live in Israel and currently live in NYC, and have loved touring the Jewish sites in both places. One Jewish experience I haven’t had yet, but would love to explore, is visiting Uman for Rosh Hashanah with the Breslov Hasidim. This is where tens of thousands of Jews, primarily Hasidic Jews, but lately, a large number of secular Jews, go, even during pandemics or wartime, to pray at Rabbi Nachman’s grave—but it’s known for more drugs, prostitution, partying and dancing than you would expect for an ultra-Orthodox Jewish pilgrimage .

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P.S. While writing this, I stumbled across this thread on /r/redscarepod titled “Resellers completely ruined thrifting and vintage shopping” and couldn’t help but laugh and share:

Thrifting used to reward wandering. You showed up bored. You left with a high quality vintage jacket or shirt that actually isn’t made of some paper thin synthetic material.

Now it feels strip mined. Racks picked clean before noon. Anything with weight, age, or character gone instantly. Somewhere online already. Triple the price.

I HATE RESELLERS.

You can’t vintage shop in any major city anywhere because underpaid 18 year old interns have picked through every cheap shop to take some boutique to sell for 5 times the price.

Pickers swarm with phones out.Grab the Levi’s. Grab the leather. Grab anything with a label people recognize. The store turns into a carcass in minutes of fast fashion bullshit. It’s all now H&M and SHEIN and Zara and poorly made clothes from 3 years ago.

Ebay finishes the job. Endless listings. Inflated prices. Zero joy. Every piece flattened into inventory.

The thrill disappeared. The luck disappeared. Thrifting became competitive shopping for people who hate clothes and love margins.

I miss finding things by accident. I miss clothes that felt chosen instead of flipped. The whole ecosystem feels ugly now.

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II.
I recently had a delicious lunch at the famous New York steakhouse, Peter Luger. One thing that stood out to me, despite its notoriety, is that Peter Luger is decidedly not a cool restaurant to go to. People were not dressed trendy or fancy, and there were very few White bougie Americans. Instead, it’s a lot of different accents, different nationalities, and in addition to a large number of tourists, a lot of normal-seeming people.

For those who don’t know the story, Peter Luger was one of the “top” NYC restaurants for many years and was definitely a cool and exciting place to go. But this suddenly changed in 2019 after Pete Wells of the New York Times skewered the restaurant in what is now one of the most notorious and well-known restaurant reviews of all time, giving it zero stars.

This wasn’t just a restaurant review; it was a kill shot. Peter Luger was no longer an acceptable place to go. For those who read the Times (well, not read the Times, but identify as the kind of person who respects the Times) and care about “what’s what,” it had been decided: not only do you not go to Peter Luger anymore, you judge those who don’t know they aren’t supposed to. The status of the restaurant was revoked, even though the food itself (to my taste) remains excellent at being exactly what it is.

III.
When buying loose-leaf tea in Asia, there is often a quality system for helping you understand what to buy. If you want to buy a Longjing or a Sencha, you can do so in Quality Level 1, 2, or 3 (with each at a different price point).

Buying a “Level 3 Longjing” (the highest quality a specific cultivator offers of Longjing) does not mean this is the highest quality tea you can buy. It means that for what a Longjing is, it’s the highest quality available. But tea obsessives often prefer (and many consider) a different category, like a Gyokuro, to be a fundamentally “higher” quality tea.

I was thinking about this when reflecting on the experience of Peter Luger. For regular people (people with, say, 80th-percentile interest in food, where the 95th-percentile is the person who reads food blogs, comments on /r/nycfood and doesn’t shut up about the latest restaurant they tried), Peter Luger is the equivalent of buying the Level 3 Longjing. For what it is, and for the kind of meal it tries to be, it’s as good as it gets.

IV.
Russ Roberts recently wrote:
“I am getting old. Here’s how I know. When I watch a recently acclaimed movie, a best picture nominee or winner, it’s not that I don’t like it as much as everyone else, I don’t even think it’s a good movie. Recent examples for me include The Brutalist, Anora, and Minari... I never can suspend my disbelief that I’m watching a movie. I am getting old.”

[Russ later provided a list of movies he actually likes, including: Shawshank Redemption,Groundhog Day, Truman Show, Lives of Others, Scent of a Woman.]

My theory is that this has little to do with being “old,” but that Russ Roberts is a 80th-percentile movie appreciator. The movies he loves are the Peter Lugers of cinema: the highest possible quality of a “normal” movie — narratively driven, perfectly executed, and emotionally resonant.

V.
In the 90s, the prestige curve was aligned with what appealed to the 80th-percentile movie fan as the best (and most prestigious) there was. The movie studios made films to appeal to this group. The entertainment section writers were fans of the 80th-percentile movie and praised it. The zeitgeist followed. So when people talked about “Great Movies,” they meant the 5-star 80th-percentile movie. In the 90s, when a movie received buzz, you could watch it with your mom and your cousin and bet they would enjoy it too. Prestige and universality were correlated.

But the thing that changed is that movies are no longer made to appeal to the 80th-percentile appreciator.

In the 90s, movie nerds were isolated, didn’t have a place to congregate and were basically irrelevant. The film writer in a local newspaper was usually just a person with a job, not an uber-nerd watching Tarkovsky. But platforms like Letterboxd have made the 95th-percentile cohort legible. There is now a class of movie fans who congregate online, rate everything, and have decided that the Peter Luger of movies isn’t “good enough.” They want movies to appeal to the 95th percentile of movie nerdom: people who value cinematography, the subversion of tropes, and “vibe” over plot or dialogue.

Directors started making movies to appeal to this legible, loud group, and fans online judge movies against this new standard. Because this is now where the status and “buzz” come from, when there is buzz about a great movie, it’s going to be the 5-star 95th-percentile movie, not the 5-star 80th-percentile movie. As a result of this new status tier, the 5-star 80th percentile no longer gets made. (Though there is a good argument to be made that the 5-star 80th-percentile film not only still exists, but is actually thriving on prestige television).

VI.
This leaves the modern movie fan with a hollowed-out middle.

If the film studio wants a massive audience, they make the “5-star version” of a movie designed to appeal to the 50th-percentile of movie interest (eg the Marvel Cinematic Universe). If they want status and critical acclaim, they make the 95th-percentile “vibe” movie.

The highest quality version of the 80th-percentile movie (the movie Russ Roberts considers “perfect”) is no longer something the industry is interested in producing. It is no longer at the top of the prestige hierarchy. Russ hasn’t changed; just what he likes is no longer considered ‘sexy’ enough to keep being made. (The same dynamic has also reshaped the restaurant world, where trendy restaurants have moved away from the perfect execution of beloved classics toward entirely new kinds of dishes, presented in innovative ways).

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In theory, a concert selling out shouldn’t reveal new information. A sellout means demand exceeds supply, but any band can always book a smaller venue and force a sellout. But this does not seem to be what happens. In practice, it means something more than demand exceeds supply.

Superficially, there are a few reasons why we would expect a sold out show to be worse: Worse because tickets are hard to get and you may need to pay more. You can’t casually invite friends to join. You often need to arrive very early to find an adequate spot, and then even if you have them, you are very cramped, and can’t easily go to the bathroom without worrying about losing your spot. From the band’s perspective, it means some fans can’t see the show, which is both bad for growth and revenue.

There are also some superficial reasons why a sold out show would be better: it’s better because you can more easily sell your ticket if you decide not to go, the audience is more likely to be filled with committed fans who knew to buy tickets far in advance. But ultimately, sold-out concerts are better because of the ‘feel.’

But if you ask, what is this “feel” - and why does it happen? We first need to have a theory of why some concerts sell out and others don’t.

Sellouts typically happen for smaller bands on a fast rise. There are a few reasons why larger bands are less likely to have sell-out shows.

Bands with more experience touring have more data points to use to forecast their future drawing capacity in a particular city on a particular day (and a more sophisticated team). Established bands are less likely to have as much variability in their demand from year to year.

The more popular a band is, the larger the venues they will play. However, there are far more small venues than there are large venues. A band playing a smaller venue can choose to play a venue of 400 people, 450 people, 500 people etc. Whereas a band that can expect to draw 5000 people is often stuck choosing between one 4000 person venue and one 8000 person venue - and will defer to the much larger venue.

There is also a simple factor of scale - small shows are sensitive to tiny demand fluctuations. In a 100-person venue, with an expected 80 person demand, underestimating demand by just 20 people—a handful of friend groups—is a 20% error that causes a sell-out. In a 3,000-person venue, that same 20 people is less than one percent of the total audience.

Typically, younger bands will sell out when their rate of growth increases faster than they anticipate. Tours are booked very far in advance, and for a band that is fast growing, it’s very hard to know 9 months in advance what their demand will be eg on a Thursday in Des Moines.

When a band is fast growing, with wide uncertainty as to what their drawing capacity might be, they might err on the side of booking a smaller venue. If they book a venue too small, they leave money on the table - they don’t capture the value of scalped tickets, fans are left out and revenue is lost. But if they book a venue too large, they face higher venue costs and, more importantly, the harsh vibes of a less than half-sold venue. Some bands are also reluctant to book larger venues too early, because larger venues often require a different kind of infrastructure and support crew which many smaller bands haven’t built yet.

So because of all these factors - sellouts cluster around a specific moment: young bands in rapid growth who haven’t stabilized yet.

So to go back to the original question: the sold out show is better, because of the ‘feel.’ But the feel isn’t just the packedness of the crowd, but mostly because our minds associate sold out shows with up and coming bands, with faster than expected growth. When you are at a sold out show for a band like this, the sellout itself creates common knowledge - everyone there knows that everyone else thinks this band is the cool exciting new thing, the band growing faster than even their own internal forecasts suggested. There is a sense of excitement in the audience, this is new, this is the cool thing, we haven’t experienced this before - and we are the lucky few that were able to get tickets.

But there’s more to it than just this shared knowledge. When the show is sold out, it selects for only the most committed fans - the ones who knew to buy tickets far in advance. This more captive and enthusiastic audience is more likely to be focussed on the show and be visibly enjoying it. This is contagious. The band sees a packed room, feels that energy, gets excited themselves, and elevates their performance. When you see other people paying attention, dancing, and loving the show, you are more likely to feel the same, creating a self-reinforcing dynamic which compounds throughout the night.

And it’s this feeling - of shared excitement, of discovering something special together, of being part of a moment where a band is exceeding even their own expectations - that causes us to feel something we share with others. We can see and know others are feeling it, creating a shared sense of meaning and excitement that makes us enjoy the sold out show more.

This also explains why some sold out shows don’t feel all that special. Take artists like Taylor Swift, Coldplay, or the Rolling Stones - they’re simply too big to play anything less than a massive stadium. There simply aren’t enough venues for them to play with adequate capacity, causing nearly all shows to be sold out, despite their static trajectory. But these shows, despite being sold out, don’t carry the same magic as happens with up and coming bands. There’s no sense of discovery behind the band being able to sell out the venue - it’s just scale, not signal. And that’s why the intimacy of a sold-out club show for a rising band feels more special than a sold-out stadium show for an established superstar.

And that’s the magic I felt at the SML shows that inspired me to write this post - not just that demand exceeded supply, but the shared excitement of seeing a band on the rise, surrounded by only their most enthusiastic fans.

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In 2025, I did the following tastings: pistachio ice cream, babka, French fries from NYC restaurants, Taleggio cheese, ice cream from one particular shop in Spain, and NYC shawarma restaurants.

The structure works like this: instead of buying one container of your favourite ice cream, buy 4-6 of the top brands. Gather your partner or a group of friends and taste them one by one. Share opinions as you go, and once you’ve tried them all, rank your choices to declare a definitive winner.

Often the costs of doing this are minimal. Buying five babkas isn’t all that expensive—even if you end up giving away some of the leftovers—and if you buy five pistachio ice creams, you will likely be able to finish them all…eventually.

In a strict sense, the superficial benefit is that you now know which of category X is your favourite, so you can exclusively consume that going forward.

The real benefit, however, is the shared experience. While it may feel really indulgent to buy five different pistachio ice creams, this indulgence is the point. So many evenings blend together, but you will remember the time you ate five pistachio ice creams in one evening. The extra $40 isn’t food waste; it is a shockingly cheap price to pay to manufacture a guaranteed memory.

It serves as a social coordination mechanism. Rather than a vague proposal to “hang out,” a mission to taste five different babkas creates a shared goal. It transforms a passive hang into an active project, while also becoming a reference point for your group to quote and look back upon.

It is incredibly fun to talk through with the group: which is your favourite, what you like about them, and why. There is a specific excitement in going through the tasting—trying to guess which will win, feeling the anticipation for what’s next, and seeing if others share your preferences.

Most importantly, the exercise of putting so much focus on taste helps you form your own sense of what you like, rather than relying on some Reddit list of “the best babka in NYC.” I think this generalizes: the more you can confidently know which are your favourite babkas, the better you can know your preferences on other things, becoming less reliant on others for your sense of what you enjoy.

There isn’t much more to say here, and this isn’t so profound. Just go buy five different brands of your favourite ice cream, gather a friend or two, and spend an evening trying them all at once.

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So with all that said, my review of my favourite tastings of 2025:

1. Pistachio Ice cream (the first tasting my girlfriend and I did)

2. French fries (I loved having French fries as my entire dinner)

3. Taleggio (this is the most useful as my gf and I eat Taleggio 2x per week)

4. Babka (this felt the most indulgent and the silliest)

5. Spanish ice cream (the shop we got the ice cream from was good but not the best)

6. NYC Shawarma (shawarma in NYC is far worse than it should be)

The red pill wasn’t just that Brazilian music is incredible—it’s that something this good could exist in plain sight and be completely off the cultural radar. It broke the assumption I’d always carried that if something were truly great, it would already be known.

Brazilian music is mind-blowingly good—but so is lots of “world music.” What makes my discovery of Brazilian music so different is how familiar it feels. It’s not exotic or difficult; it’s like stumbling into an alternate 1970s where the same creative explosion happened, just in Portuguese. That’s because it was the same fusion of people—West African slave descendants and counter-culture hippies—driving the sound in both places.

The best of Brazil’s scene could stand next to the Rolling Stones or CCR—these artists just never got canonized into our version of rock ‘n’ roll history. Sure, there isn’t a Brazilian equivalent on par with those at the very top like Miles Davis or The Beatles, but the gap is far smaller than most music fans in the West realize.

And the strangest part is how invisible it all remains. Something this accessible, this universal, this great, should be everywhere—and the fact that it isn’t helped me internalize how provincial Western “global” culture really is.

These are my favourite Brazilian albums—the ones I listen to time after time. There are so many other great albums and artists beyond this list, but consider this my friendly introduction to get you started.

Novos Baianos – Acabou Chorare and Novos Baianos F.C.

Gilberto Gil – Expresso 2222

Jorge Ben – A Tábua de Esmeralda and África Brasil

Banda Black Rio – Maria Fumaça

Os Mutantes – Os Mutantes

Raul Seixas – Krig-ha, Bandolo!

see also - my beginner’s guide to African music: https://danfrank.ca/african-music-i-like-and-think-you-may-enjoy-too/

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