Hurricane Ian slashed through Florida this week, a personally visceral whirlpool given that my family has now set down roots in the Sunshine State. The storm veered at the last minute and they were spared the worst of the destruction, but as circulating videos can attest, the damage to cities like Sarasota and Fort Myers […]

We live in a time of tremendous focus on … focus and productivity. Scan the shelves of any self-help section in a bookstore and you’ll find copious volumes on how to focus better, deeper, and longer along with a litany of productivity hacks and habits to efficiently glean. What you will often struggle to find […]

Fourteen years after the release of the Bitcoin white paper, Web3 and crypto are transitioning into adolescence. Technologies and communities that have collectively been a financial Wild West are slowly but inexorably transforming into mainstream infrastructure powering payments, finance, banking, and even identity and data storage. That transition though is hampered by a data and […]

I was recently asked to provide a CliffsNotes summary of the macro chaos enveloping our world, and my response was a meme of Homer Simpson carrying a sign that displayed “The End is Near.” Flippant, if accurate. The original question though is worth pondering: How exactly do you summarize the present state of the world? […]

America spends more money on defense than ever, with a budget that more than doubled in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Despite those dizzying appropriations though, America is now down to just 5 big prime defense contractors, consolidated from dozens during the Cold War. It’s a pattern of consolidation, higher costs, and […]

What does security — national, economic, social, health — mean when the planet itself is creating the threats? Lethal combinations of climate change and human war are cutting harvest yields globally, from rice in California and corn in Iowa to grains in Europe and soybeans in China. With declining harvest projections arriving almost weekly from […]

Stanford University is at the beating heart of Silicon Valley and has become almost a rite of passage for generations of entrepreneurs. But how does each generation form, and what skills and mindsets should they be equipped with given our changing world? No one has thought more about how to shape that entrepreneurial spirit than […]

Most hiring in business is functional, with roles tied to specific problems that executives identify. If a company has a marketing problem, executives hire a marketer. Launching a new product? Hire engineers, designers and product managers. A lot of the friction between new staff and their new companies stems from a lack of precision on […]

Agricultural commodities is a bit like accounting: you only hear news stories about it when things go wrong. And unfortunately for the world in 2022, a lot is going wrong in agriculture. Russia’s war on Ukraine has devastated one of the world’s great breadbaskets, and global climate disruptions are wrecking havoc on food productivity. That’s […]

It’s August, and along with the bronzing rays of sun come the inevitable schmoozing estival get-togethers. It’s a ritual that has come back in force after two years of small-group pandemic huddles in yards and on beaches, and this conviviality comes coupled with that most modern of games, what might be dubbed Cultural Minesweeper. “Have […]

“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the latest newsletter issue, “Truth and reputations.” Reputations are always a trailing indicator of truth. When people and organizations are rising, reputations obviously lag — the public has never heard of these new upstarts, and its opinion remains unformed. Reputations gallop to catch up, […]

The quantified measurement of truth is often impossible, which forces us to find proxies. Even then, proving the causal linkage between truth and proxy can be an extraordinary endeavor. Research biologists have spent decades exploring, detecting, and refining biomarkers to understand their accuracy and the attenuation of their usefulness. Economists and other social scientists have […]