#MentalNote Archives

The Mob and the Mirror: You Are the Worst Fan in the World

11 hours ago By cumeadi

The final buzzer hadn’t even finished its jarring cry when the court became a chaotic sea of bodies. Watch the footage. In February 2024, after Wake Forest upset Duke, thousands of students swarmed the floor. In that crush was Duke’s seven-foot center, Kyle Filipowski. As he tried to escape, fans, celebrating students, just like you or your kids, collided with him, shoved him, and left him with an injured knee. “I feel like it was personal,” he said later. Of course, it was personal. We’ve made it that way.

I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that hostility. I’ve been booed at away games, had objects thrown in my direction, and heard the creative ways opposing fans can turn your name into a slur. Playing football, running track, rugby, soccer…across every sport, every level, the script was the same. Before away games, coaches would warn us: “Not everyone is going to like you out there. In fact, right now, you’re their enemy.” They weren’t wrong. What they didn’t prepare us for was how that enmity would metastasize beyond the game itself.

My family and friends who made it to the Olympics, who played professionally here and abroad, they all have stories; the fan who followed a sprinter to the hotel, the death threats sent to a rugby player’s family after a controversial call. The racial slurs screamed at a soccer player from the stands, then amplified on social media for days. These aren’t war stories from some bygone era of barbaric sports culture. These are text messages from last month.

Filipowski’s experience is the modern crisis in miniature. This isn’t some shocking anomaly; it’s the logical conclusion of the culture we have built, click by click, bet by bet. We’ve become the architects of the very toxicity we claim to lament. From the phone hurled at artist Bebe Rexha, who needed stitches after being struck at a concert, to the racist harassment that forced WNBA rookie Angel Reese to limit her social media presence, these are not isolated incidents performed by some alien “other.” They are the predictable tantrums of a culture that has replaced admiration with ownership, and support with a transaction. This isn’t a problem out there; the call is coming from inside the house.

Look at what we did to Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Two phenomenal athletes who elevated women’s basketball to unprecedented heights, and we weaponized their rivalry. We couldn’t just celebrate their talent; we had to pick sides, create narratives, and then unleash our digital armies when they didn’t perform to our fantasy expectations. When Clark struggled in her first WNBA games, the death threats poured in. When Reese celebrated too enthusiastically, she was labeled “classless” by people who had never stepped foot on a competitive court. We took two young women at the pinnacle of their sport and made them symbols in our culture war.

Let’s be honest about the psychological loophole we so eagerly exploit. We call it deindividuation, a clinical term for the moment we gladly surrender our conscience to the mob. In the anonymous roar of the stadium or the digital echo chamber of a message board, we find a perverse freedom; the freedom from accountability. I’ve felt it myself…that moment when you’re screaming at an opponent and the crowd carries you further than you’d ever go alone. We let the group’s roar drown out our own better judgment. Online, we take it a step further, embracing the online disinhibition effect as a license to be our worst selves. Behind the shield of a screen, we say what we’d never dare say to a person’s face, forgetting that there is, in fact, a person on the other side. We have weaponized our anonymity.

And then there’s the money. We have transformed ourselves from supporters into petty, entitled investors. The explosion of legalized sports betting has rotted the fan experience from the inside out. A missed free throw is no longer a moment of shared disappointment; it’s a direct financial assault. When North Carolina’s Armando Bacot gets over 100 messages from gamblers furious that he didn’t grab enough rebounds for their parlay to hit, that isn’t fandom. That’s the rage of an addict, and the athlete is nothing more than the slot machine that failed to pay out.

This toxic transactionalism has poisoned everything. Look at Noah Lyles winning the 100m at the 2024 World Championships, then collapsing after his 200m bronze with COVID. Instead of concern for his health, social media erupted with accusations that he was “making excuses” and “letting down bettors.” A man literally struggling to breathe became a villain because he didn’t perform to gambling expectations.

In the NBA, we’ve normalized fans screaming personal attacks at players’ families. When Russell Westbrook’s family was repeatedly targeted by fans in Utah, the league’s response was essentially a shrug. When Kyrie Irving was pelted with a water bottle in Boston, we debated whether he “deserved it” for his past comments. We’ve created a culture where athletes are expected to endure psychological warfare as part of their job description.

Don’t think for a second this is limited to the sports arena. We’ve found other, more insidious ways to turn entertainers into our personal stock portfolio. We crowdfund their albums, subscribe to their Patreons, and pay exorbitant fees for concert tickets, creating a direct financial link that breeds a toxic sense of ownership. The artist becomes an employee, and the fan, a disgruntled manager. When a musician changes their sound, or an actor takes a role we dislike, we feel betrayed. The phone thrown at Bebe Rexha isn’t a random act of violence; it’s the fury of a “shareholder” whose investment has gone sour.

We’ve formalized this with college athletes through Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals, but this is just the officially sanctioned version of the unspoken contract we’ve already imposed upon every creator and celebrity. We don’t just consume their art; we consume their lives. And when they deviate from the brand we paid for by setting a boundary, expressing a political opinion, or simply being human; we react with the fury of a consumer who has received a defective product.

All of this plays out on the stage of the attention economy, where we gorge ourselves on a diet of outrage served up by algorithms we know are manipulating us. We are not passive victims of this system; we are its engine. We click. We share. We amplify the poison. Thoughtful analysis is boring; a vicious takedown of a movie or a personal attack on an actor generates engagement. We reward venom with our attention, ensuring that the most toxic voices are the loudest. We have become willing consumers of hate.

Having competed at various levels, I understand the raw emotion of sports. I know what it feels like to have your heart broken by a loss, to feel genuinely angry at an opponent’s tactics, to want to will your team to victory through sheer vocal force. But somewhere along the way, we lost the plot. We forgot that the person wearing the other jersey, the person who just missed the shot, the person who celebrated a little too long; they’re human beings with families, fears, and feelings just like us.

So, how do we fix a problem we are so actively creating? It requires more than just complaining. It requires a collective admission of guilt and a radical assumption of responsibility.

1. A Reckoning for Venues, Leagues, and Promoters:

Enforce Zero-Tolerance, Period: Stop issuing tepid warnings. Eject, ban for life, and press charges. Make the consequences for assault, because that’s what it is: real and severe. Anything less is cowardly complicity.
Acknowledge the Money Problem: Leagues, teams, and promoters who profit from these transactional relationships must be held accountable. A portion of every betting partnership or VIP package should be taxed to fund programs combating online abuse and promoting mental health for performers.

2. An Ultimatum for Platforms:

Break the Outrage Machine: Social media and betting platforms must be forced to take responsibility for the fire they pour gasoline on. Their algorithms are not neutral; they are engines of radicalization. De-amplify inflammatory content. Build in “cool-down” periods for gamblers. Stop hiding behind “freedom of speech” as an excuse for profiting from abuse.
End Anonymous Abuse: The idea that you have a right to anonymously threaten or harass someone without consequence is a perversion of free expression. Link identity to accounts. Make people own their words.

3. A Moral Inventory for Ourselves:

Stop Commodifying Human Beings: Athletes and artists are not your fantasy team avatars. They are not entries on your betting slip or your content creators. They are people. Every time you scream at your TV, fire off an angry tweet, or justify your rage because an album disappointed you, you are part of the problem. You are contributing to the dehumanization that allows the mob to form.
Demand Better from Yourself: Look at your own media diet. Are you feeding the outrage machine? Are you passively scrolling past abuse? Silence is complicity. It’s time to stop pointing fingers at the fan who threw the bottle and start asking what role we played in creating the anger that propelled their arm.

The swarm that injured Kyle Filipowski is the physical manifestation of the digital mobs we create to tear down Caitlin Clark for missing shots, Angel Reese for celebrating, Noah Lyles for getting sick, or any artist who dares to be human. It’s easy to blame the troll or the screaming fan, but they are just the final, ugly expression of a system we all feed. It’s time to stop consuming the spectacle of outrage and start dismantling the machine. Look in the mirror. The worst fan in the world might be staring back at you.

#MentalNote · Big Ideas

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

2 weeks ago 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.

#MentalNote · product · startups · venture capital

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

1 month ago 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.

#MentalNote

The Father, The Son, and The Man I Hope to Be

1 month ago By cumeadi

The image of my father that sticks with me most isn’t one of grand gestures. It’s the quiet consistency of his presence. It’s the worn-out look of his work shoes by the door, the sound of his car pulling into the driveway at the same time every evening, the weight of his hand on my shoulder, a silent assurance that he was there. For years, I saw these things as simple facts of life, the unchangeable backdrop of my world. Now, standing on the cusp of my potential fatherhood, I see them for what they were: daily acts of sacrifice, a quiet language of commitment I’m only now beginning to understand.

As we get older, our parents transform from gods into people. Their choices, once immutable laws of the universe, reveal themselves as decisions made by a man who was often tired, likely uncertain, but always resolved. I look at my father now and I’m in awe, not of a superhero, but of the sheer, unrelenting effort. The quiet heroism of showing up, every single day, for a future he was building but might not fully get to see. That is the inheritance that leaves me breathless.

Happy Father’s Day to him, the original architect of my world. And Happy Father’s Day to my brother, and to all the other new fathers in the trenches of that beautiful, bewildering first chapter. Welcome to the journey. I can only imagine the mix of profound love and sheer panic you’re feeling. If there is one piece of advice I can offer from the sidelines, it is this: be kind to yourself. You are not just raising a child; you are raising yourself into a father.

It is a role you learn on the job, and the learning is as much about discovering your child as it is about rediscovering yourself. You will be confronted with the limits of your patience, the depths of your love, and the echoes of your childhood. You will find joy in moments so small they are almost invisible and feel a weight of responsibility so immense it feels sacred. It is a journey of becoming, and it is the most important work you will ever do.

This brings me to my path, a more internal one for now. For months, I’ve been in a quiet dialogue with myself, turning over a single question: “Why do I want to be a father?” For a long time, I think I assumed it was a natural, inevitable step, the next logical beat in the rhythm of a life. But to step into fatherhood consciously, I’ve realized, requires more than assumption. It requires interrogation.

I know that we often parent from one of two places: a place of repetition or a place of repair. We either unconsciously repeat the patterns of our upbringing or we consciously seek to repair the parts that were broken. To want a child from a place of “healing”—to offer them a security you may not have had, or to give a voice to a part of you that was silenced—is a noble instinct. But it is incomplete. A child cannot be a tool for our self-actualization.

The real work, I’m learning, is to arrive at a place of wholeness before they arrive. To sort through your baggage so they don’t have to carry it. It’s about asking: Am I seeking to be a father to fill a void within myself, or to guide a new soul from a place of fullness? Do I want to be a father to prove something, or to simply be something, a steady, loving, present man?

Knowing your “why” is the foundation. It’s what separates fatherhood as an identity from fatherhood as an act of service. It’s the anchor that will hold you steady when the nights are long and the days are trying. It’s the difference between seeing a child as a reflection of your legacy and seeing them as their person, a sacred trust you are privileged to shepherd.

Fatherhood, I see now, is not a destination. It’s a calling. It’s a call to be better, to dig deeper, and to love more fiercely than you thought possible. It’s a legacy passed down from men like my father, a challenge being met by men like my brother, and a question that I am learning to answer for myself, with intention and with hope.

#MentalNote · #productideas · Big Ideas

Decoding the Chaos: Welcome to Wahala Economics

2 months ago By cumeadi

During my time navigating the vibrant streets of Lagos, I often found myself observing patterns that defied conventional economic wisdom. What initially appeared as disorganization or inefficiency hinted at something more complex, a hidden logic beneath the surface-level ‘wahala.’ It was there, amidst the bustling markets and intricate social dynamics, that the idea of ‘wahala economics’ began to take shape for me – a lens through which to understand the underlying, often unconventional, economic forces at play in such environments. It’s about recognizing that what looks like chaos might actually be a rational, if not always optimal, response to a unique set of constraints and incentives.

Consider the real estate market in Lagos. An outsider might observe seemingly high property prices, perhaps juxtaposed with visible signs of economic hardship. Scratch a little deeper, and you might hear about the lucrative returns some are making through platforms like Airbnb. This visible success, even if enjoyed by a relatively small fraction of property owners, can act as a powerful signal. The perceived profitability of short-term rentals creates an impression of high returns across the board. Consequently, buyers and investors, perhaps lacking granular data on actual Airbnb occupancy rates and profitability across different properties, may bid up prices, not just for Airbnb-suitable apartments, but for real estate more broadly. What appears ‘irrational’ – higher prices even for properties less suited to short-term rentals – becomes a rational response to the distorted incentives created by the highly visible, though potentially unrepresentative, success of some Airbnb ventures.

This phenomenon in the Lagos real estate market isn’t an isolated quirk. Across ‘wahala economies,’ you often find that the incentives themselves are skewed in ways that would seem counterintuitive in more conventional settings. What might appear as irrational behavior – individuals making choices that don’t maximize standard economic utility – often becomes rational when you understand the distorted incentive landscape they navigate. For instance, in environments where trust in formal institutions is low or where scarcity is pervasive, seemingly ‘inefficient’ behaviors like hoarding resources or prioritizing immediate gains over long-term investments can become logical responses to the prevailing conditions. The actors aren’t necessarily irrational; their rationality is simply calibrated to a different, often more challenging, set of incentives.

Beyond the immediate distortions of information asymmetry and skewed incentives, another layer of understanding in ‘wahala economics’ comes from the perspective of ‘infinite games.’ Unlike finite games with clearly defined players, rules, and an end goal, infinite games are about continuing to play. In environments marked by uncertainty and ongoing challenges, actions that appear ‘inefficient’ in the short term might be strategic moves within a much longer, undefined game. Consider a seemingly convoluted or time-consuming negotiation process. From a purely transactional viewpoint, it might look like a waste of resources. However, within the context of an ‘infinite game’ – where building relationships and establishing trust for future interactions is paramount – that extra time and effort might be a crucial investment.

Ultimately, ‘wahala economics’ invites us to look beyond the simplistic metrics of efficiency and immediate transactional gains. The seemingly chaotic dance of these economies often reveals a deeper, adaptive logic rooted in navigating information gaps, responding to skewed incentives, and playing the long game in environments where trust might be localized rather than widespread. The ‘inefficiencies’ we observe on the surface can be understood as the emergent strategies of actors responding rationally (within their context) to the particular ‘wahala’ they face.

What examples of ‘wahala economics’ have you observed in your own experiences or travels? Share your insights!