Holiday Weekend

Ghosts of the Fourth

1 day ago Author By cumeadi

Tomorrow, the sky will burst with light. The air will smell of barbecue and sulfur. We will celebrate our Independence Day with a familiar, comfortable rhythm. But this year, comfort feels like a luxury we cannot afford. The divisions are too deep, the anxieties too raw, the very ground of our democracy feels unsteady beneath our feet.

So, on the eve of this Fourth of July, I decided to seek counsel. Not from the talking heads on cable news or the endless scroll of social media, but from those who navigated the deepest crises of the nation’s soul. I convened a conversation in a room outside of time, inviting four figures whose struggles and sacrifices define the American experiment: George Washington, the founder; Harriet Tubman, the liberator; Martin Luther King Jr., the conscience; and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the architect.

I asked them to join me to discuss where we came from, where we are, and the uncertain path of where we are going. This is what they told me.

I first turned to the man who was there at the beginning, his posture still as straight as it was at the head of the Continental Army. I needed to understand the foundation on which we stand. “General Washington,” I began, “When you think of the ideals of 1776, how do you reconcile them with the country you see today?”

He spoke with the measured, formal cadence of a different century, his eyes carrying the weight of a nation’s birth. “The ideals of ’76 were simple on their face, yet profound in their implication: that a people could govern themselves… Yet, even in our time, a great and terrible contradiction lay at the heart of our new nation. We spoke of liberty while holding others in bondage. It was a moral failing that I, in my later years, came to see as a stain upon our founding.”

The General spoke with the weight of a founder, his words etched in history. He acknowledged the ‘moral failing,’ the ‘stain’ upon the republic. But a stain is something seen from a distance. For Harriet Tubman, seated across from him, this was no mere abstraction; it was the blood and soil of her existence. Her voice, though low, carried the undeniable power of lived truth. “General, with all due respect,” she said, her gaze steady, “your ‘contradiction’ was my people’s bondage. My Fourth of July was a day that the lash felt heavier, the sun hotter, the chains tighter. The sound of your liberty bells was drowned out by the cries of my brothers and sisters.” She looked at me then, her eyes seeming to pierce through time. “The fight for true liberty, the kind that lives not just on paper but in the hearts of men, is a long and arduous one.”

It was on this very point, the gap between paper promises and lived reality, that the conversation turned to the great work of the 20th century. Dr. King picked up the thread, his tone one of reasoned passion. “And that is the very essence of the American story, is it not? A journey. General Washington, your generation penned the promissory note… But it was a check that, for too long, came back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ My work, our work, was to compel America to make good on that promise.” While Dr. King fought to cash that check in the streets and from the pulpit, Justice Ginsburg fought for it in the courtroom, meticulously working to stitch the promise of equality into the very fabric of the law. “From a legal perspective, the arc has bent, and significantly so,” she added, her voice precise and analytical. “But laws are only as strong as the will to uphold them… I worry that in your time, the very notion of a shared set of facts, of a common understanding of our own laws and history, is under threat. And when that foundation cracks, the entire structure is at risk.”

Justice Ginsburg’s words hung in the air, a perfect pivot from the past to the precipice of our present. Reflecting on history wasn’t enough; the anxieties of now were pressing in on me. I felt I had to be direct. I laid out the fears that keep my generation awake: a level of political polarization that feels like a cold civil war, a media landscape where truth itself is a partisan battlefield, and a President whose administration has enacted policies, like mass deportations funded by cuts to social programs, that feel to many like a betrayal of the nation’s highest ideals.

As I spoke, I saw a flicker of grim recognition in General Washington’s eyes. His fears of factionalism were no longer a historical warning, but a terrifyingly accurate diagnosis of our time. “Faction,” he stated, his voice tight with disappointment. “I warned of this very spirit. It serves to ‘distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.’ To hear that this spirit now threatens the very concept of truth is to hear that the foundation of the Republic is cracking.”

While Washington diagnosed the political sickness, Harriet Tubman went straight to the moral heart of the matter, cutting through the jargon of policy and politics. She shook her head slowly. “You are worried about your ‘democracy.’ I was worried about my people. When the law says you can tear a family from the home they’ve built because they were born on the other side of a line on a map, what kind of law is that? The danger is not your President. The danger is that good people will stand by and do nothing.”

Dr. King, ever the strategist, connected the moral outrage to a systemic framework, seeing the modern incarnations of old evils. “Let us look at the policies you describe through the lens of what I called the ‘three giant triplets’ of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. A policy that enacts mass deportations often has its roots in racial prejudice. A policy that cuts aid to the poor to fund tax cuts for the wealthy is the very definition of extreme materialism… The danger to democracy is that the government ceases to be an instrument for the well-being of all its citizens.”

And finally, Justice Ginsburg, with the precision of a surgeon, identified the ultimate danger—not a single policy or politician, but the decay of the system itself. “The phrase that gives me pause is ‘rule of law,’” she began, her quiet voice commanding the room. “That concept is the bedrock of a constitutional democracy. It means that law, not the arbitrary will of a leader, is supreme… When you describe policies that target specific groups, when you speak of a chief executive who challenges the judiciary or disregards established norms, you are describing a direct assault on the rule of law. A constitutional crisis occurs not when a president acts, but when the other branches of government fail to check his overreach.”

Le Fin? 

As their voices faded, the room outside of time dissolved, leaving only the quiet hum of the present. The séance was over. I was left not with a simple set of answers, but with a complex and profound set of instructions. A charge.

It is the charge to be a virtuous citizen, as Washington demanded, but to know that virtue without Harriet Tubman’s raw courage in the face of injustice is merely polite silence. It is the charge to remain vigilant in the pursuit of Dr. King’s “Beloved Community,” but to do so with a fierce respect for the very institutions and rule of law that Justice Ginsburg dedicated her life to upholding. Their wisdom does not compete; it complements. It forms a roadmap for a functioning, moral democracy.

Their collective counsel reframes the Fourth of July entirely. It can no longer be a holiday for passive celebration: a day for just fireworks and flags. It becomes, instead, a day of recommitment. A national performance review where we are both the employees and the shareholders. It’s a day to measure the distance between the ringing of the Liberty Bell and the reality of our lives, and to ask ourselves, with unflinching honesty, if we have done our part to close that gap.

The preservation of this Republic, it turns out, is not the work of ghosts. It is the solemn, urgent work of the living. It is the quiet, daily, often frustrating task of listening before we speak, of seeking truth over tribe, of protecting the rights of others with the same fervor we protect our own.

Tomorrow, the sky will burst with light, celebrating the birth of a promise made centuries ago. Let our actions, on the day after and every day that follows, be what keeps that promise alive.

I’d to thank Gemni and Claude for bringing these voices back to life. For the full discussion – check it out here.

#MentalNote · Big Ideas

The Liar’s Dividend: How AI Devalued Truth and What We Pay for It

5 days ago Author By cumeadi

I lost an argument at Thanksgiving last year. It wasn’t a debate I was unprepared for; I had my facts ready. The topic was a politician’s recent gaffe, and my uncle was insisting it never happened, a fiction invented by the media. I pulled out my phone and played the video from the Associated Press. The footage was clear. The source was impeccable. The words were undeniable. I looked up, expecting, if not an apology, at least a grudging concession.

He shook his head. “You can’t trust that,” he said, his voice layered with a kind of weary wisdom. “That’s probably one of those deepfakes. They can make anyone say anything now.”

In that moment, the argument was over. Not because I had lost, but because the foundation for a shared reality had crumbled beneath us. My evidence, my proof, was irrelevant. The mere possibility of a fake had become more powerful than the authenticated truth in my hands.

This quiet moment of conversational collapse is not unique to my family. It is a scene playing out in miniature across the country, in courtrooms, on campaign trails, and in newsrooms. The technologies of synthetic media have handed a devastatingly effective tool to those who wish to evade accountability, but the true danger is not the technology itself. It is the corrosive public skepticism the technology creates; something scholars have termed the “liar’s dividend.”

This is the profit reaped when truth becomes too difficult to verify and reality itself is cast as a matter of opinion. The proliferation of AI is merely the latest accelerant in a crisis of trust that began long before, with the decentralization of our media and the weaponization of “fake news.” To defend our democracy’s epistemic foundations, we must understand the behavioral mechanics of this dividend and build a robust, multi-layered defense in our companies, in our institutions, and in ourselves.

From Broadcast to Noise

The scene at the Thanksgiving table would have been unthinkable fifty years ago, not because deepfakes didn’t exist, but because the concept of a shared, verifiable reality was largely taken for granted. In 1976, a Gallup poll found that an astonishing 72% of Americans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the mass media. In an era dominated by a few television networks and major newspapers, figures like Walter Cronkite of CBS News, often cited as “the most trusted man in America”, served as powerful institutional gatekeepers. They delivered the news, from the Vietnam War to the moon landing, to a mass audience that consumed the same set of core facts. While Americans certainly disagreed on politics and solutions, they were, for the most part, arguing from a common playbook of reality.

The launch of CNN in 1980 and, more pointedly, Fox News in 1996, began the great fragmentation of the American audience. The business model of news shifted. Instead of broadcasting to the widest possible center, cable channels discovered it was more profitable to “narrowcast” to dedicated, partisan niches. The news became a constant, flowing stream, increasingly supplemented with opinion-as-news to keep audiences engaged and loyal. We began sorting ourselves into different information silos, and for the first time, large segments of the population were no longer operating from the same playbook.

The rise of the blogosphere in the early 2000s was a revolution in disintermediation; suddenly, anyone with a keyboard could be a publisher, reaching a potential audience of millions without the filter of an editor or the need for a printing press. This digital democratization of voice challenged institutional authority and broke open vital stories, but it also flooded the ecosystem with conjecture, conspiracy, and unvetted claims. The professional journalist, once a clear gatekeeper, was now just one voice shouting in a crowded digital marketplace. Discerning signal from noise became a full-time job for the average citizen, a job few had the time or training to do.

The final, decisive blow came when social media became the primary arena for our information lives. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter (X I guess) did not just accelerate the spread of information; their core algorithms actively shaped what we saw. These systems are designed for one purpose: engagement. And nothing is more engaging than content that triggers strong emotions: outrage, validation, fear, and tribal identity. In this environment, the term “fake news,” which once described literal hoaxes, was brilliantly and cynically weaponized. Around 2016, it was transformed into a political cudgel, used to dismiss any reporting, no matter how credible, that was critical or inconvenient. It gave millions of people a simple, powerful phrase to delegitimize any fact they didn’t like.

And so the ground was perfectly prepared. By 2024, that 72% trust in the media had collapsed to a historic low of 32%. Decades of fragmentation, decentralization, and deliberate weaponization had cultivated a deep, pervasive skepticism in the public. This is the depleted soil in which the liar’s dividend now grows so easily. The dismissal of a real video as a “deepfake” is not a sudden madness; it is the logical, tragic endpoint of this long decline.

Deconstructing the Devaluation of Truth

The depleted soil of public trust provides the perfect strategic opportunity for what scholars Josh A. Goldstein and Andrew Lohn, in their work for the Brennan Center for Justice, have termed the “liar’s dividend.” The concept is as brilliant as it is corrosive. The dividend is not the benefit a liar gets from a successful deepfake fooling the public; it is the benefit they get from the public’s awareness that deepfakes exist. It is the power to dismiss any real, inconvenient piece of evidence like an audio recording, a video, or a photograph, as a sophisticated fake, and to be believed, or at least to inject enough doubt to muddy the waters into inaction. It transforms the very technology meant to enhance reality capture into a tool for reality denial.

To understand how this dividend is collected, we have to analyze the strategic toolkit it offers to a bad actor. The first variable is the messenger: who delivers the lie? This choice exists on a spectrum of risk and reward. At one end, a political candidate can make a direct, high-impact denial themselves. This garners maximum attention but also carries the maximum risk of backlash if the lie is definitively proven. To mitigate this, the lie can be delegated to an official proxy, like a campaign manager, who offers a degree of separation. For even greater plausible deniability, the claim can be laundered through an unaffiliated proxy; a friendly pundit, a sympathetic media outlet, or an anonymous online account – sacrificing the impact of a personal denial for near-total insulation from accountability.

The second variable is the message itself: how direct is the lie? The most straightforward tactic is a direct claim: “That video of me is a deepfake.” It is a clear, falsifiable assertion. But a far more insidious and often more effective strategy is the indirect claim, which aims not to debunk a specific piece of evidence but to foster a general “informational uncertainty.” This is the world of vague dismissals (“You just can’t trust what you see these days”), oppositional rallying (“The media will do anything to make us look bad”), and whataboutism. This indirect approach poisons the entire well of information. It persuades citizens that discerning truth from fiction is a hopeless task, encouraging them to retreat into the safety of their pre-existing beliefs and partisan loyalties.

This two-axis framework, of messenger and message, provides a flexible and powerful toolkit for any individual or group seeking to escape accountability. They can tailor their strategy based on the severity of the incriminating evidence and their risk appetite. By understanding these mechanics, we can see the liar’s dividend for what it is: not just a simple lie, but a calculated, multifaceted assault on the very concept of verifiable evidence. The question then becomes, why are our own minds so susceptible to this assault?

Why We Are So Susceptible

The power of the liar’s dividend is not rooted in the sophistication of AI. It is rooted in the architecture of the human brain, which is not optimized for discerning objective truth, but for survival, social cohesion, and the conservation of mental energy. These ancient priorities make us profoundly vulnerable to modern informational warfare. The liar’s dividend is effective because it offers us an easy, comfortable, and psychologically satisfying escape from difficult realities.

The primary vulnerability it exploits is our intense aversion to cognitive dissonance, the mental stress we feel when holding two conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Imagine you believe your preferred candidate is a fundamentally decent person. Then, a video emerges showing them saying something cruel. This creates a painful dissonance. To resolve it, you can either engage in the difficult process of updating your entire view of the candidate or you can discard the offending piece of evidence. The liar’s dividend provides a perfect tool for the latter. The “deepfake” explanation allows you to resolve the dissonance instantly, not by changing your mind, but by invalidating the evidence. This isn’t just intellectual dishonesty; it’s a form of psychological self-preservation.

This is amplified by the powerful force of motivated reasoning. We do not process information like impartial judges; we process it like lawyers defending a client we are already committed to. Our client is our own set of pre-existing beliefs and tribal loyalties. When confronted with inconvenient evidence, we don’t ask, “Is this true?” We ask, “Must I believe this?” The deepfake defense allows the answer to be a resounding “no.” It feeds our confirmation bias, our natural tendency to embrace information that supports our team and reject information that challenges it. In an age where our social media feeds are algorithmically tuned to create personalized echo chambers, this effect is supercharged. Inconvenient truths feel like hostile intrusions into a reality that has been custom-built to comfort us.

Finally, the liar’s dividend preys on our brain’s fundamental laziness. Our minds operate on a principle of cognitive ease, constantly seeking the simplest possible path to a conclusion to conserve energy. It is metabolically expensive to question our own beliefs, fact-check a dubious claim, or live with uncertainty. It is cheap and easy to accept a simple, all-purpose dismissal. The claim that “you can’t trust anything” is appealing not just because it’s cynical, but because it’s simple. It relieves us of the burdensome responsibility of critical thought. In an era of crushing information overload, offering people a simple way out is the most powerful persuasion tactic of all.

An Arsenal of Imperfect Weapons

Diagnosing an illness is not the same as curing it. To combat the liar’s dividend requires a conscious and sustained counter-offensive, fought not with a single silver bullet, but with an arsenal of tools, habits, and responsibilities. The work belongs to everyone—the individual citizen, the corporations that shape our digital world, and the public institutions that form the bedrock of society.

What Individuals Must Do: The Practice of Discernment

The first line of defense is the individual mind. This requires moving beyond passive “media literacy” to a more active posture of intellectual self-defense. The most crucial habit is to practice emotional skepticism: when a piece of content makes you feel a strong surge of outrage, validation, or fear, pause. That emotional spike is a biological alarm bell, signaling that you are being targeted for manipulation. Before you share, practice lateral reading: open a new browser tab and spend two minutes searching for the claim or the source. See what other, independent outlets are saying. This simple act of “informational hygiene” is the single most powerful thing a citizen can do to stop the spread of lies. Resisting the urge to instantly share unvetted information is no longer just a matter of personal etiquette; it is a fundamental civic duty.

What Companies Must Do: The Responsibility of the Platform

The corporations that host our digital public square have a profound responsibility to architect for trust. For social media platforms, this means deliberately engineering “friction.” Instead of optimizing for seamless, instantaneous sharing, they should introduce pop-ups that ask, “Are you sure you want to share this article you haven’t opened?” or flag content from unverified sources. They must also move beyond half-measures and universally adopt and enforce clear, consistent labels for synthetic media and known disinformation outlets. For the companies developing AI, the work must begin at creation. They must bake in robust, open-source watermarking and content provenance standards, like the C2PA standard, into their models from the ground up. Making these tools proprietary or paywalled is an abdication of responsibility.

What Institutions Must Do: Rebuilding the Foundation

Our foundational institutions must undertake the slow, generational work of rebuilding our collective defenses. In education, digital citizenship and critical source analysis cannot be a single lesson; they must be a core competency woven into every subject from middle school onward. Our government and civil society leaders must establish and enforce clear, cross-party norms that create real political costs for candidates who knowingly profit from the liar’s dividend. This could take the form of public pledges, withdrawal of funding, or formal censure. Finally, we must reinvest in the institutions designed to create shared knowledge: public media, libraries, and independent, local journalism. These entities provide a crucial, non-partisan baseline of reality that can serve as an anchor in a sea of digital noise. The liar’s dividend thrives in a vacuum of trusted authorities; we must work to refill that vacuum.

Paying the Dividend

We have traveled a long and troubling road: from the high-water mark of shared facts to the fragmented noise of today, from the cynical mechanics of the liar’s dividend to the deep-seated cognitive biases that make us such willing participants. We have seen that this crisis is not the fault of any single technology, but the result of a decades-long erosion of institutional trust, supercharged by platforms that reward emotion over evidence. And while we have laid out an arsenal of potential weapons for this fight, in our habits, our corporate architectures, and our civic institutions, the choice to wield them remains ours.

I think back to that Thanksgiving table. The stalemate was not about a specific fact, but about the very possibility of facts. My uncle’s casual dismissal of a verifiable video was the final payment of the liar’s dividend, the moment where the exhausting work of discernment is abandoned in favor of the simple comfort of disbelief. His argument was the culmination of a system that has taught us that the truth is too difficult to find, that all sources are equally biased, and that trusting our tribe is a safer bet than trusting our eyes.

That quiet, helpless moment is the future on a small scale. It is a world where accountability becomes impossible because evidence has lost its meaning. It is a democracy where deliberation decays into a shouting match between alternate realities, and power flows not to the most competent or principled, but to the most shameless. This is the ultimate price of the liar’s dividend.

Defending our shared reality is now the central, defining challenge of our era. It is exhausting, difficult, and often thankless work. But the alternative, a world where truth is merely a partisan opinion and every citizen is an island of their own belief, is no world at all. We must choose to pay the cost of discernment, because the cost of disbelief is one we can no longer afford.

Relationships

This Isn’t Withdrawal—It’s Rebalancing: The New Economics of Intimacy

1 week ago Author By cumeadi

In her recent Modern Love essay, Men Where Have You Gone, Please Come Back, Rachel Drucker asks a piercing question that echoes in countless group chats and late-night conversations: Where have the men gone? To her, and many others, the answer appears as a slow, bewildering cultural disappearance. Men seem to be retreating from intimacy, avoiding vulnerability, and opting instead for passivity, performative engagement, or outright absence from the emotional front lines.

But what if we’re misdiagnosing the moment? What if this isn’t abandonment, but a complex and necessary adjustment? What Drucker mourns as a void may, in fact, be a market correction…a long overdue rebalancing in the emotional economy of dating, sex, and partnership. The rules of engagement have changed, fundamentally and forever. And men, rather than fleeing the game, may simply be repricing intimacy.

The Myth of Emotional Cowardice

Let’s begin by dismantling the most common critique: that men have grown afraid of intimacy, commitment, or vulnerability. This narrative is seductive because it’s simple, but it rests on a faulty premise: that men were once widely fluent in these domains.

They weren’t. For generations, male identity was scaffolded by a different set of metrics: provision, control, stoicism, and a calculated emotional opacity. “Showing up,” in our grandfathers’ time, often meant showing ownership, providing financial security, and maintaining a stoic calm. It was a performance of stability, not a demonstration of presence.

So, if today’s men seem “absent,” it’s not because they’ve suddenly become cowards. It’s because the market demands have shifted, and no one has issued an updated operating manual. Women today rightfully desire emotional fluency, genuine attunement, and a partnership built on mutuality. This isn’t an evolution; it’s a revolution in relational expectations. But this demand shift requires time, tools, and a deep rewiring of masculine conditioning. What is being widely interpreted as a mass disappearance might be more accurately described as a collective pause—a moment to recalibrate, retool, and renegotiate the terms of engagement.

Cost, Scarcity, and Signaling in the Intimacy Market

Viewed through a behavioral economist’s lens, every relationship market is shaped by signals, incentives, and risk-adjusted returns. When we apply this framework to the current dating economy, the behavior we call “withdrawal” starts to look less like a pathology and more like a rational response to market conditions.

Consider the current landscape:

  • The cost of vulnerability is high. In an age of screenshot justice and digital permanence, emotional exposure carries unprecedented reputational risk. A misstep is not a private lesson but a public liability.
  • The payoff is ambiguous. The traditional returns on romantic commitment—clear social status, predictable family structures, and defined financial partnerships—have become diffuse. The modern world offers many paths to a fulfilling life, and partnership is no longer the sole, or even primary, gateway.
  • The signals are noisy. Swiping, ghosting, breadcrumbing, and the curated perfection of social media have polluted the signaling environment. It’s become incredibly difficult to discern genuine interest from casual entertainment, making it nearly impossible to gauge whether an emotional investment will be reciprocated or even acknowledged.

Men aren’t opting out of love. They are responding rationally to an environment where the marginal cost of romantic effort has begun to outpace the marginal benefit. If intimacy is priced like a luxury good but sold in a chaotic, unpredictable market, men—especially those without elite reserves of social or emotional capital—are making a logical choice to minimize their investment.

The Overcorrection of Female Independence

In her essay, Drucker rightfully positions women as continuing to show up, often with immense tenderness, courage, and emotional generosity. But that’s only half the picture.

Women have also evolved, and not always toward softness. In response to the same market forces, many have (understandably) optimized for independence, professional achievement, and emotional self-containment. In many urban social spheres, there’s a performative casualness on all sides—a no-needs, no-pressure posture that ironically mirrors the very detachment women criticize in men.

So what happens when both parties are performing autonomy while secretly longing for surrender? You get a standoff. Each side waits for the other to lower their weapons, to send a clear, unambiguous signal that vulnerability will be met not with exploitation, but with care. The hunger for connection is mutual, but the perceived costs and unspoken expectations have grown asymmetrical. Men are not running away from women; they’re waiting for a clear signal that the risk of opening up will be met with a genuine reward.

Porn, Algorithms, and the Substitution Effect

Much of the discourse laments men’s turn toward digital intimacy, OnlyFans, Instagram lurking, and pornography, as a shallow substitute for real connection. This is often framed as a moral failure, another symptom of emotional cowardice.

But substitution isn’t failure. It’s market feedback.

If low-effort digital stimuli provide a consistent dopamine hit with zero risk of rejection, why wouldn’t a rational actor retreat into it? It’s not pathological; it’s economically efficient. When the real-world marketplace for intimacy is volatile and high-risk, a predictable, low-cost alternative will always gain market share.

Blame the algorithms that gamify desire. Blame the platforms that commodify human connection. But don’t confuse dopamine saturation with a lack of heart. The medium isn’t the message—it’s the marketplace speaking back, telling us that the price of real-world connection has become, for many, too high to pay.

The Need for New Scripts, Not Old Shame

Instead of asking, “Where have all the men gone?” the more productive and urgent question is this:

What culture, rituals, and signals have we created to invite men back into a new kind of relational space?

Where are the updated scripts that teach men how to stay, not through power or performance, but through authentic presence? Where are the cultural models for mutual emotional labor, for slowness, for the graceful navigation of conflict, and for the equitable sharing of relational risk?

Shaming men for their absence is like blaming a worker for going on strike when their contract is no longer viable. It addresses the symptom, not the systemic issue. Men are not unreachable; they are under-invited. They are waiting to be invited into spaces where their imperfection doesn’t disqualify them, where the courage to be vulnerable is seen as an asset, not a liability. Presence will return not by shaming men back into a broken model, but by co-creating a new one where connection feels like a worthy gain, not a reckless gamble.

VII. Conclusion: The Intimacy Market Is Not Broken…It’s Repricing

What we are witnessing is not a terminal crisis of masculinity or a permanent collapse of intimacy. It is a market amid a turbulent, painful, but ultimately necessary transition.

We are between scripts. Between incentive structures. Between emotional economies.

Drucker’s longing for connection is real, valid, and deeply felt by many. But so is men’s hesitation. Both are crucial signals from a system in flux. They point to a collective need to slow down, renegotiate our expectations, and begin the difficult work of co-creating a model of intimacy that is less extractive and more mutual, less performative and more present.

So no, the men haven’t vanished. They’re standing on the other side of a chasm, waiting for a clear reason to build a bridge. And they’re waiting for a sign that if they do, someone will be there to meet them halfway.

Sports

The Golden Ticket Paradox: The Short-Sighted Gamble of a Super-Team

1 week ago Author By cumeadi

The scene is easy to imagine. In the Dallas Mavericks’ war room, a bottle of champagne is uncorked. Through a miracle of lottery luck, they hold the #1 overall pick. But this isn’t a franchise mired in a desperate rebuild. This is a team that, in this hypothetical world, already boasts Kyrie Irving, Anthony Davis, and the newly acquired Klay Thompson. The selection of Cooper Flagg is not seen as the first step of a long journey back to relevance, but as the final, decisive move in a championship gambit. The press release writes itself: a cost-controlled, defensive dynamo joins a veteran core, creating a modern “Big Four.”

On the surface, it’s a stroke of genius. In reality, it may be one of the most significant miscalculations of asset value in recent memory. The argument that Cooper Flagg is “overrated” in this context has little to do with his undeniable talent. It’s about the fundamental misunderstanding of his hype, his developmental path, and the very DNA of a modern championship team. Dallas would be using a golden ticket not to enter the chocolate factory, but to buy a candy bar from the corner store.

The Front Office Fantasy: A Cost-Controlled Superstar

Let’s game out the scenario from the perspective of the Mavericks’ leadership. The pitch to ownership is intoxicatingly simple.

  • The GM’s Pitch: “We’ve built a win-now roster without crippling our future. Kyrie and AD are our offensive hubs. Klay is our elite floor spacer. And now, we plug in Flagg—a Defensive Player of the Year candidate—on a rookie-scale contract. He is the cost-effective linchpin that allows us to manage the luxury tax while our title window is wide open. We get the impact of a fourth All-Star for the price of a rookie.”

This logic is seductive but flawed. While Flagg’s salary is cost-controlled, the cost of acquiring him was the single most valuable asset in sports: the #1 overall pick. That pick represents the chance to draft a franchise cornerstone. From a pure basketball perspective, they would be using that asset to draft a fourth option.

The Brand Anchor: Selling the Future While Mortgaging It

But the calculation in a modern front office isn’t purely about basketball. The point about marketability is where the true temptation lies. The business operations side makes an equally compelling case.

  • The President of Business Ops’ Pitch: “We aren’t just drafting a power forward; we’re drafting the face of the franchise for the next fifteen years. Kyrie and AD are legends, but they are veterans. Cooper is our bridge to the next generation of fans. His jersey will be a top-five seller from day one. He makes us the lead story on ESPN. Even as the fourth option on the court, he can be the first option for the fanbase. He provides brand insurance long after this current core has moved on.”

This is the nuanced reality of the modern NBA. Flagg’s off-court value is a tangible asset. However, this creates a dangerous internal contradiction. The franchise will be marketing a #1 star while the basketball operations are deploying a #4 option. The more successful the marketing becomes, the greater the pressure on the court. Fans who buy the jersey and the hype will rightfully wonder why the “face of the franchise” isn’t taking the last shot. This disconnect between brand identity and basketball reality doesn’t solve the problem—it exacerbates it.

The Capped Ceiling: Building a Skyscraper with a Roof on the Third Floor

This brand pressure makes the coach’s job impossible. How do you handle a prospect the marketing department has anointed as the next global icon when your game plan requires him to be the next Bruce Bowen?

  • The Coach’s Dilemma: “How do I get Cooper the reps he needs to develop his handle when Kyrie needs the ball? How does he learn to score in the clutch when AD is our go-to? My job is to win now, which means Flagg’s development into a primary option is a secondary concern. But every time he has a quiet night, I’ll have to answer questions about why our ‘future’ isn’t more involved.”

This is the core of the developmental paradox, now amplified by marketing demands. Flagg’s “generational” hype was about the theoretical ceiling of a two-way superstar. By placing him on this team, Dallas would be making an implicit trade: they get his elite defensive floor and his off-court brand power immediately, but in exchange, they sacrifice any realistic path to him reaching his on-court ceiling.

The Inevitable Decay: A Three-Act Tragedy

The true flaw in this strategy is revealed not on draft night, but over the course of several seasons as the basketball, business, and branding narratives collide.

  • Act I (Years 1-2): The Championship Mandate. If a title is won, the strategy is hailed as a success. But if they fall short, the franchise has burned two precious years of Flagg’s rookie deal, leaving them with an aging core and a developmental project who has been marketed as a star but trained as a subordinate.
  • Act II (Years 3-4): The Awkward Transition. This is where the foundation cracks. Kyrie and AD are declining. Flagg is eligible for a max extension. The marketing department insists he’s worth it. The analytics department points to the on-court production of a high-end role player. They are forced to pay for the brand, not the basketball reality their own system created.
  • Act III (Years 5+): The Reckoning. The original “Big Four” is a memory. Flagg is a max player, but likely not the heliocentric force the franchise desperately needs. The fear of seeing him star for a rival team—the very fear that drove the decision to draft him—has led to a worse outcome: a decade of mediocrity, anchored by a player whose brand outgrew his role.

Ultimately, drafting Cooper Flagg onto this team isn’t the masterstroke it appears to be. It’s a fundamental misreading of value, a decision rooted in short-term thinking and fear. You don’t use the #1 pick on a player’s floor; you use it on their ceiling. Dallas would be paying a superstar’s price for a role player’s contributions, capping the potential of their prized asset from the moment his name is called. They may have won the lottery, but true genius lies in knowing that the long game is the only one that matters.

#MentalNote · product · startups · venture capital

The End of the MVP and the Dawn of the Attention-First Startup

3 weeks ago Author By cumeadi

After more than twelve years in startups and venture capital, you learn to recognize the patterns. You see the cyclical nature of hype, the ebb and flow of capital, and the perennial challenges of building something from nothing. You get a feel for the rhythm of the game.

But this isn’t just a change in rhythm. The ground beneath our feet is fundamentally shifting. A handful of powerful, accelerating forces are converging to rewrite the startup playbook I’ve known for two decades. The old pages are not just yellowed; they are becoming obsolete.

The ability to build and tell stories is cheaper and faster than ever. The cost of getting feedback on those stories and products has collapsed, thanks in large part to AI. Yet, in this world of infinite creation, the currency of human attention has never been scarcer or more valuable. All of this is happening as capital markets are tightening, demanding a clearer path to liquidity than the speculative bets of the last decade.

These aren’t separate trends. They are interlocking gears in a new machine. And for founders, investors, and even consumers, understanding this new machine is a matter of survival.

For Founders: The MVP is Dead. Long Live the MVT.

Let’s be blunt: The Minimum Viable Product is dead.

The classic MVP was an answer to the question, “Can we build it?” It was a test of technical feasibility and a hedge against wasting engineering resources. But today, the answer to “Can we build it?” is almost always “Yes.” With modern tools and AI co-pilots, a small, determined team can build almost anything.

That is no longer the operative question. The new question is, “Should it exist?”

This shifts the core activity of a startup from building to testing. Welcome to the era of the MVT: the Minimum Viable Test. An MVT isn’t a clunky product; it can be a photorealistic landing page, a simulated demo, an AI-powered concierge service, or a targeted ad campaign for a product that doesn’t exist yet. Its goal isn’t to acquire users, but to acquire evidence.

The paradox is that while the cost of testing a hypothesis has collapsed, the cost of capturing attention has skyrocketed. In a world where anyone can generate a product, noise becomes the dominant market force. A functional app is now table stakes, not a differentiator.

This elevates a founder’s other skills to the forefront. The most valuable founders of the next decade won’t necessarily be the best engineers; they will be the best storytellers and community architects. They will understand that the most durable moat isn’t a block of code, but a block of dedicated, engaged people. The new playbook is to build the audience before you build the product. The distribution channel is the asset.

For Investors: Alpha is Shifting, and Capital Isn’t King

For years, the venture capitalist’s edge came from access: access to proprietary deal flow and access to information. Both are eroding. AI agents will soon be able to scan every GitHub repository, every academic paper, and every new business filing, surfacing interesting signals for anyone to see. The “I found it first” alpha is vanishing.

More profoundly, for many early-stage companies, a check is no longer the most valuable thing an investor can provide. When a founder can run a dozen MVTs on a shoestring budget to validate their core idea, their primary bottleneck isn’t capital; it’s breaking through the noise.

They don’t need your money as much as they need your leverage.

The venture firm of the future cannot be a simple financial instrument. It must become a platform for leverage. The new value-add isn’t just a network of downstream investors; it’s a proprietary media engine that can guarantee an audience. It’s a stable of specialized AI agents that can automate a startup’s back office. It’s a data co-op that gives portfolio companies an unfair analytical advantage.

This demands a change in how we, as investors, evaluate founders. We must move beyond pedigree and PowerPoints to ask tougher questions. Is this founder a master of the MVT loop? Can they build a tribe? Can they tell a story that bends the attention market in their favor?

In this new reality, the generalist fund will be squeezed. The winners will be hyper-specialized firms that create a gravitational pull for the very best talent and ideas in a narrow domain, not just because of their capital, but because of the unique leverage they provide.

For All of Us: The New Gatekeepers

This rewiring changes the game for everyone. The line between consumer, fan, and early-stage backer has completely blurred. Through our clicks, our shares, our feedback, and our direct-to-creator funding, we are all on the cap table now. Our attention is the new seed round.

This brings a paradox. We have access to an unprecedented explosion of niche products and services tailored to every conceivable interest. Yet, we also face a tsunami of AI-generated sludge, low-effort “startups,” and sophisticated misinformation. In this environment, our most critical skill as individuals will be discernment.

We are trading one set of gatekeepers—the VCs in Sand Hill Road boardrooms—for another: the opaque, ever-shifting algorithms of TikTok, Google, and X. We have democratized access to the arena, but a new, invisible emperor still decides who thrives with a flick of an algorithmic thumb. Are we truly better off? I’m not so sure.

What I am sure of is that the game has changed. It’s no longer about who has the capital to build a fortress, but who has the leverage to command attention in a world of infinite creation. It’s a faster, more volatile, and intensely more personal game than ever before. It demands that we all—founders, funders, and fans—become more intentional about where we place our most valuable asset: our attention.