Patrick McKenzie

One of the better articles I've read over the years on the culture that is Google, warts and all. (This substantially matches my understanding from *many* conversations that do not have a publicly readable URL associated with them.)

There was a really good podcast episode with Patrick and John Collison on Invest Like the Best. It’s denser than most podcasts, covering (among others) differing perspectives on founder-as-auteur versus founder-as-metonym-for-tribe, how payments has gotten more complex, etc.

As someone who appreciates Matt Levine both concretely in the abstract, there could be a hundred other authors with this general lens on the world applied to various fields and I would read as many as I could find hours in the day for.

An excellent essay on a phenomenon that has people overrate content-light writing, focused on that produced by LLMs but extremely relevant to a lot of human writing:

Zvi, probably one of the best public intellectuals during the time of Covid, wrote up some interesting commentary on my VaccinateCA piece (and the initiative):

Extremely good thread from someone in the more formal end of the vaccination effort:

That was the best mainstream article about Tether, got to the story (it must be said!) years late, and did not successfully reach the correct conclusion. There are institutional reasons for these things, but they are reasons and not excuses.

An interesting thread about a yeoman constituent of neighborhood-scale capitalism, the humble laundromat. (One could write a book on why the economics of them have been so important to the lives of many families moving to America, and if that book already exists, I’d buy it.)

This is a particularly strong episode of a particularly strong podcast, if you’re trying to get a handle on events in crypto this week.

+1 for The Most Fun I Never Want To Have Again (best book about community banking I've read), and would add Lying for Money, Dan Davies, to that list (best book about fraud ever written IMHO).

My somewhat contrarian take on this excellent thread: if your software offering papers over inadequacies in human systems which persist even though they’re obviously value destructive, then your software offering is *extremely valuable.*

As always I refer you to Byrne’s excellent essay on this, which thoroughly earns the contrarian title: