ARTICLES
The Ankler published a great piece last week that can be seen as a companion to the Rob Long Commentary article and the Jeremy Zimmer op-ed in THR I linked to last week. It’s “The Squeeze: Producers on 'No Trust', Anger, Struggle,” by Nicole LaPorte.
H/T to Chamath’s “What I Read This Week” newsletter for recommending this terrific New York magazine article last week: “Seed Money: How one billionaire with a savior complex and a voracious sexual appetite got conned by his best friend, who saw him as the perfect mark.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/how-michael-goguen-got-conned.html
By the way, the structure of the article is slightly misleading: If you only read the first third or so, you’ll walk away with the impression that the billionaire is a monstrous rapist asshole. At the risk of spoiling the article for you, by the end it seems clear he’s at least not a rapist, and probably not a monster. Apparently there are a couple of companion mini-articles in the print edition of the magazine that help make that clear from the jump.
Still working my way through Matt Levine’s 40,000 word opus, “The Crypto Story,” which took up the entirety of a Bloomberg Businessweek issue a couple of weeks ago. It’s an incredible piece of work from the finest finance writer alive, who brings a healthy dose of skepticism to the subject without tipping over into being a hater.
PODCASTS
This week’s “All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg” podcast was particularly spicy, in a good way. Best episode in quite a while, which is saying something - they’re almost always excellent.
“Invest Like The Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy” featured a great conversation between longtime friends Ravi Gupta, a partner at Sequoia, and NBA All-Star Shane Battier. Battier’s insights on leadership and being a catalyst for championship-winning teams are definitely worth a listen. Substack seems to be having issues tonight, so rather than embedding it below just click through to it here.
Sam Harris deleted his Twitter account last week, and this episode of his “Making Sense” podcast includes his monologue about why, as well as his interesting conversation with author and computer scientist Cal Newport. Newport’s take on social media is much more nuanced than I’d expected of some someone who doesn’t use any social media.
I’m low key fascinated by the polarized view of online content moderation that has evolved on both ends of the political spectrum over the past couple of years, so the prospect of Elon Musk raising the curtain on how that was done at Twitter over the past five years or so (and how it’s evolving under his new regime) was pretty exciting. Episode #1 of Matt Taibbi’s “The Twitter Files” didn’t quite live up to my expectations - I think it’s neither the bombshell nor the nothingburger that many people on the platform have been describing, since it seems like we knew most of this implicitly already. Curious to see where it goes from here, though.
Here’s a more readable version, courtesy of Mike Solana’s “Pirate Wires” newsletter.