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Trump was interviewed, and he explained a very simple and also absurd view: He believes “a deficit is a loss” and therefore wants to be “even” or have trade surpluses with every country.  It’s worth pausing here to explain how nonsensical Trump’s actual position is. The United States is the richest nation on earth with the most prolific consumers in the world. In most cases, that makes us net buyers of other countries’ products, but in some cases countries want more of our own exports. For instance, we lump our trade policies towards Germany and the Netherlands into one broad policy on the European Union, but we have a trade deficit with Germany and a trade surplus with the Netherlands. Why? As a Council on Foreign Relations primer explains, we love German cars and machinery, and the Netherlands loves American medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. Dynamiting this free, beneficial exchange with Germany to make it look like the relationship we have with a different country — as Trump apparently wants to do — doesn't make any sense.

A cohesive industrial policy would be good for American workers, but a major stock market crash and recession would not. Obviously. Tens of millions of American workers are in the services industry that could be crushed by these tariffs. If you manage a business that involves importing parts for construction, you are also headed for very big trouble. There has to be an off-ramp or a fleshed-out plan for success — and there has to be a way to navigate the storm that’s coming. But I don’t get the sense we have that right now.

If you really want to be intellectually honest, you have to acknowledge the possibility (however slim) that Trump’s tariff gambit induces better trade deals, raises billions or trillions in tariff revenue, refinances our debt, and helps us confront China on trade. Still, to help manage the immediate pain and uncertainty, the administration ought to set some parameters: What do success and failure look like? What deals are we hunting with adversaries in global trade? How much manufacturing investment do we want to bring home? How much tariff revenue do we want to raise? Despite the lack of answers to these questions, I hope this is all part of some larger plan to refinance the debt and invite better trade deals — but I also know that is me projecting my wants onto this administration again. Contrary to my hope, a good deal of reporting indicates that Trump’s economic team spent months working on individualized tariff plans for different countries before he instead opted for a simple, broad formula to apply to all of them.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said over 50 countries have already approached him to make tariff deals. If true, this is good news, as successful negotiations could help us avoid a worst-case economic downturn. But simultaneously, the administration has insisted they aren’t going to negotiate, and Axios reported on internal frustration within the administration over the lack of structure to even conduct such negotiations. This constitutes a pattern: We’ve seen it with the Department of Government Efficiency, with deportations, and now with tariffs. Trump could be approaching popular ideas like efficiency reforms or reworking trade policies with fleshed-out plans, but instead all the signals out of the White House show them shooting from the hip and trying to figure the mess out as it happens.

The annoying truth, though, is that the consensus is usually the consensus because it’s accurate. If The Experts are right here — which I have an increasingly hard time doubting — we are headed for an economic storm I’m not sure people have totally prepared for.

The “sales, then logistics” framework: Always sell people on why something matters before diving into how to do it. Even executives who seem rushed need 30 to 60 seconds of context for why this matters now.

Being concise is about density of insight, not brevity: “Being concise is not about absolute word count. It’s about economy of words and density of the insight.” The bottleneck to being concise is often unclear thinking.

Use “signposting” to guide your audience: Words like “for example,” “because,” “as a next step,” and “first, second, third”

Before sharing an idea, spend just a few seconds anticipating the most obvious objections.

Don’t overstate hypotheses as facts or understate strong recommendations. Match your conviction level to the evidence available.

Focus on motivating behavior change rather than venting your frustrations. “Trim 90% of what you initially want to say and keep only the 10% that will make the person want to change.”

he CEDAF delegation framework: Comprehension: Ensure they understand what needs to be done Excitement: Make the task meaningful and motivating De-risk: Anticipate and address potential issues Align: Confirm mutual understanding Feedback: Create the shortest possible feedback loop

Whatever tools may be at the disposal of the Federal Reserve and the US federal government will not be able to undo the damage to reputation and relationships upon which so much commerce bases its functions on day-to-day. As much as humans fancy themselves civilized and sophisticated, as a whole, societies still have serious trust issues internally and therefore externally. That’s why the concept of “credit” exists worldwide for the most part and is a component of trade, of alliances, and of good will.

By first taking a chainsaw to the global relationships of a worldview nature — most easily seen in the conflict of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rightful concern expressed by Western interests…credit has been damaged. By next taking a chainsaw to the global trade relationships which have functioned for decades and, while problematic, have enabled commerce to proceed at a reasonable level…credit has been damaged. By exploiting internal divisiveness of the political spectrum and the wealth inequality where the investor class seemingly has unchecked rule over hundreds of millions of disenfranchised people in the United States…the nation can no longer trust itself.

The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.” By this logic, anything that slows the flow of imports, or raises their cost, would indeed be a self-inflicted wound. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to block the sale of U.S. electric vehicles in China, let it. We should still want as many cheap Chinese EVs as possible flooding into our market.

Even Friedman’s claim that “the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible,” runs directly counter to what Smith actually wrote, which was: “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.”

With some part of the produce of our own country. A vital assumption of the classical model was that trade would be balanced—something made here for something made there

Most of the economists I trust and follow (regardless of their political orientation) are absolutely, 100% sure that President Trump is in the process of making a massive, term-defining mistake. They are predicting rampant inflation, a recession, and an era of economic disruption that is entirely of his making. They similarly predict that this tariff strategy will isolate us from our most important trading partners and push them into China’s sphere of influence, an outcome that would be antithetical to one of Trump’s core goals.

I’m open to the idea that our trade policies, founded on an obsession with growth and cheap goods, are hurting us.

If Trump’s goal is to reduce the barriers on American exports other countries have erected, he may well get a few wins. Israel, for instance, already agreed to lift all duties on U.S. imports in an effort to be exempted from new tariffs. Trump can already point to Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Hyundai as major companies who have been talking about expanding their manufacturing operations in the United States. Yes, Trump’s belief that trade deficits represent us being taken advantage of is totally wrong, but it doesn’t make those potential gains any less real.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent believes a lower yield will force the Federal Reserve to cut rates, which the administration wants. After the tariff announcements, the ten-year T-note yield fell — potentially the exact indicator Bessent was looking for.

Even if those goals amass into coherence, with no articulation of the administration’s long-term strategy on file, supporters are left offering haphazard, conflicting explanations.

If the point is to force other countries into reciprocity and fair trade, then why did Trump move forward with a large tariff increase on Israel after it removed all its tariffs on us? If it’s to impose reciprocal tariffs, why is the Trump administration using a custom formula to levy these tariffs based on trade balances rather than tariff rates?

How should small developing countries react? Some of the territories on the tariff list don’t even have inhabitants. It could take a country like Cambodia years to prepare before reducing its tariffs on the U.S. without cratering its own economy. Lesotho, an African country with a GDP smaller than that of most U.S. territories, just got hit with a 50% tariff rate because it’s a part of the South African Customs Union (SACU). How does Lesotho work its way out of these tariffs without South Africa? And why did South Africa get a lower tariff rate than Lesotho when both tax us equally?

Our treatment of Indonesia is another head scratcher. Indonesia has a high tax on coffee imports because it is a major exporter of coffee. Trump has slapped a 32% tax on coffee imports from Indonesia, even though the United States exports zero coffee to Indonesia. Where’s the reciprocity there?

We import 98% of the clothing sold in the U.S. — primarily from Southeast Asia. Are we supposed to divert hundreds of thousands of Americans from higher-paying jobs to manufacture clothing, stand up those manufacturing plants, and start producing our own clothes? How does that help us?

How does this help us confront China? If they are a more open trading partner than we are, won’t we lose trading partners — and therefore political power — to them? What’s the plan there?

What is the explanation for the exceptions? Oil imports have been exempted from Trump’s tariffs, as have semiconductors (something we actually need to be re-shoring the production of). What are the administration’s explanations for making these exemptions if the impacts of the tariffs are supposed to be so uniformly strong? We don’t know, and they don’t say.

Let’s not forget that we are mostly living in Trump’s trade world — the one he created in his first term by abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership, signing new trade deals, and levying new tariffs — most of which Biden did not change in any meaningful way. He called those deals the greatest in history; now he’s trumpeting broad tariffs by arguing they are all terrible deals.

he’s also been beating the drum of “short-term” pain for long-term gain.  How short? Six months? A year? His entire term? We don’t know and he doesn’t say — but his administration will be kneecapped in 2026 if the plan is to let Americans’ stock portfolios and retirement plans crater while he promises a golden age of manufacturing sometime in the undefined future.

Murphy claims what Trump really wants is a means to compel loyalty from every business leader and industry — to solicit donations, public support, and fealty in exchange for sanctions relief. I don’t doubt that Trump relishes the power or influence these tariffs may afford him, but I think Murphy is wrong.  For starters, I don’t think this plan is going to draw industry leaders to the president for favor. I think it is going to draw their ire, and probably cost Trump some support.

I think Trump’s fundamental belief that the United States is getting ripped off by globalism is much like his view on immigration: It is one of the few genuine ideological perspectives that he is rigid and consistent on. He’s had it since long before he was in office, and tariffs have always been a key part of the resolution in his mind. With only one term left, he seems to earnestly believe he can pursue them without facing real political consequences — and without inflicting too much economic damage on the American people.

ROCKWELL I pitched Mike some ideas, and we read it through, and he was on board with the take I had on this guy. We wanted to make him feel possibly ex-military, super masculine and kind of nonchalant, which worked in contrast to Mike’s writing in the scene.

And the incest thing, it’s really more about someone who is trying to connect with his brother and his sister through the things they value. Saxon is all about getting off, and Piper is renouncing the materialistic.

MONAGHAN The three of us originally just referred to them as “the ladies.” People have taken to referring to them as “the toxic trio,” but Mike’s original inspiration for us was “the big blonde blob” — this group of women that moves together and sort of sounds alike and looks alike. Interchangeable. Once the season starts to progress, you start to see them individuate from each other. WHITE I knew I didn’t want to do, “Here’s the short dumpy one, here’s the pretty one …” I wanted them all to be variations on the same idea when they show up. I’d been on a vacation where there were these three women who I couldn’t even tell apart until one would peel off and you’d hear the other two talking [about her].

GOGGINS The very first conversation he and I had was me asking, like, “How does Rick move through the world? Where has he been? How does he dress?” Mike said, “I don’t know.” I go, “Well, I do know.” And he said, “OK, let’s do that.”

COON Mike will do this thing where he scream-laughs at the monitor if he thinks you’re funny. We’re actors, so as soon as you know that’s happening, you become obsessed by it. “He didn’t do the scream-laugh! It’s not funny! I’m not as funny as this person!” You just spiral.

What makes The White Lotus feel like the cultural product of a new era is that White doesn’t try to build shallow morality plays around these or any other characters. Nor does he drop in stock “Karens”—think of the way And Just Like That turned Sex and the City’s leads into idiot middle-aged ladies whom minor characters endlessly lecture about their outdated attitudes—whose primary job is to provide teachable moments.

White’s most countercultural belief is that a heavy focus on identity is a prison, not a liberation. He told Sullivan that his time as an actor made him feel limited by his appearance, whereas writing allowed him to explore the way that “we’re all monkeys, first of all—we’re all apes—and we also share so much.”

Viewers crave yachts, and hot people, and terrible mistakes, and hot people making terrible mistakes on yachts. Give them that, and underneath you can smuggle the message that it’s all incredibly hollow and unfulfilling.

Post-something doesn't mean it's reversed. We're post-communism, but its effects are forever. Post-modernism doesn't mean that we're back to horse carriages and revolutionary portraits, it means that the mechanisms that created modernism are finished and we live in their wake. Applied to wokeness, everything we make now has to have some sort of reaction to woke for the foreseeable future. White lotus does adopt many woke tropes, but instead of adopting them as a way to push them as an agenda, it's adopting them as themes that Mike White riffs off of.

opening notion or obsidian feels less like launching software and more like putting on your favorite jacket. it says something about you. aligns you with a tribe, becomes part of your identity. software isn’t just functional anymore. it’s quietly turned into a lifestyle brand, a digital prosthetic we use to signal who we are, or who we wish we were.

somewhere along the way, software stopped being invisible. it started meaning things. your browser, your calendar, your to-do list, these are not just tools anymore. they are taste. alignment. self-expression.

suddenly your app stack said something about you. not in a loud, obvious way but like the kind of shoes you wear when you don’t want people to notice, but still want them to know. margiela replica. new balance 992. arcteryx. stuff that whispers instead of shouts, it’s all about signaling to the right people.

notion might be one of the most unopinionated tools out there. you can build practically anything with it. databases, journals, dashboards, even websites. but for a tool so open-ended, it’s surprisingly curated. only three fonts, ten colors.

if notion is a sleek apartment in seoul, obsidian is a cluttered home lab. markdown files. local folders. keyboard shortcuts. graph views. it doesn’t care how it looks, it cares that it works. it’s functional first, aesthetic maybe never. there’s no onboarding flow, no emoji illustrations, no soft gradients telling you everything’s going to be okay. just an empty vault and the quiet suggestion: you figure it out. obsidian is built for tinkerers. not in the modern, drag and drop sense but in the old way. the “i wanna see how this thing works under the hood way”. it’s a tool that rewards curiosity and exploration. everything in obsidian feels like it was made by someone who didn’t just want to take notes, they wanted to build the system that takes notes. it’s messy, it’s endless, and that’s the point. it’s a playground for people who believe that the best tools are the ones you shape yourself.

notion is for people who want a beautiful space to live in, obsidian is for people who want to wire the whole building from scratch. both offer freedom, but one is curated and the other is raw. obsidian and notion don’t just attract different users. they attract different lifestyles.

the whole obsidian ecosystem runs on a kind of quiet technical fluency.

the fact that people think obsidian is open source matters more than whether it actually is. because open source, in this context, isn’t just a licence, it’s a vibe. it signals independence. self-reliance. a kind of technical purity. using obsidian says: i care about local files. i care about control. i care enough to make things harder on myself. and that is a lifestyle.

now, there’s a “premium” version of everything. superhuman for email. cron (i don’t wanna call it notion calendar) for calendars. arc for browsing. raycast for spotlight. even perplexity, somehow, for search.

these apps aren’t solving new problems. they’re solving old ones with better fonts. tighter animations, cleaner onboarding. they’re selling taste.

chrome gets the job done, but arc gets you. the onboarding feels like a guided meditation. it’s not about speed or performance. it’s about posture.

arc makes you learn new gestures. it hides familiar things. it’s not trying to be invisible, it wants to be felt. same with linear. same with superhuman. these apps add friction on purpose. like doc martens or raw denim that needs breaking in.

linear even has a “work with linear” page, a curated list of companies that use their tool. it’s a perfect example of companies not just acknowledging their lifestyle brand status, but actively leaning into it as a recruiting and signaling mechanism.

a guest in November 2021 was Alex Jones, the founder of the misinformation website Infowars and a prominent conspiracy theorist who described the killings of 27 people, including 20 children, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School as a hoax. The hosts were apparently trying to rehabilitate his reputation, asking him softball questions like, “Do you feel like a caricature that the liberal media made you out to be?”

self-improvement can turn into hyper-individualism very quickly, which is also another incredibly American attitude in general

right-wing commentary is like a warm blanket that you can surround yourself with that says: “You’re right to be angry and you should be angry at vulnerable populations. You should be angry at people who have no power over you. And then if you dominate them a little bit, then that gives you a little bit of power, right?”

there’s definitely a lot of interest amongst the American working class to to change things. Some people have associated that change with Donald Trump. I find that kind of change to be worse because I think Donald Trump is further breaking the system that was broken previously prior to this.

That’s the attitude that many Americans have. They’re just like, “Yeah, everything is messed up. At least this guy wants to break the system. And I don’t really like the system anyway. I don’t like the institutions anyway. They, what have they done for me? So let’s test this out.”

Where previous generations of tech companies sold software to hotels and taxi companies, Airbnb and Uber used software to create new businesses and to redefine markets. Uber changed what we mean when we say ‘taxi’ and Airbnb changed hotels.

But for all sorts of reasons, the actual effect of that on the taxi and hotel industries was very different. The regulation is different. The supply of people with a car and few hours to spare is very different from the supply of people with a spare room to rent out (indeed, there is adverse selection in that difference). The delta between waving your hand on a street corner and pressing a button on your phone is different to the delta between booking a hotel room and booking a stranger’s apartment.

Sometimes disruption is much more about new demand than challenging the existing market, or only affects a peripheral business, as happened with Skype.

it’s always easier to shout ‘disruption!’ or ‘AI!’ than to ask what kind.

since the iPhone launched Apple has created three (!) more innovative and category-defining products - the iPad, Watch and AirPods. The iPad is a little polarising amongst tech people (and it remains unfinished business, as Apple concedes in how often it fiddles with the keyboard and the multitasking) but after a rocky start it’s stabilised as roughly the same size as the Mac. The Watch and the Airpods, again, have both become $10bn+ businesses, but also seem to have stabilised. (The ‘Wearables, Home and Accessories’ category also includes the Apple TV, HomePods and Apple’s sizeable cable, dongle & case business.)

Meanwhile, since both the Watch and AirPods on one side and the services on the other are all essentially about the attach rate to iPhone users, you could group them together as one big upsell, which suggests a different chart: half of Apple’s revenue is the iPhone and another third is iPhone upsells - 80% in total.

I think the car project was the classic Apple of Steve Jobs. Apple spent a lot of time and money trying to work out whether it could bring something new, and said no. . The shift to electric is destabilising the car industry and creating lots of questions about who builds cars and how they build them, and that’s a situation that should attract Apple. However, I also think that Apple concluded that while there was scope to make a great car, and perhaps one that did a few things better, there wasn’t really scope to do something fundamentally different, and solve some problem that no-one else was solving. Apple would only be making another EV, not redefining what ‘car’ means, because EVs are still basically cars - which is Tesla’s problem. It looks like the EV market will play out not like smartphones, where Apple had something unique, but like Android, where there was frenzied competition in a low-margin commodity market. So, Apple walked away - it said no.

People often suggest that Apple should buy anything from Netflix to telcos to banks, and I used to make fun of this by suggesting that Apple should buy an airline ‘because it could make the seats and the screens better’. Yes, Apple could maybe make better seats than Collins Aerospace, but that’s not what it means to run an airline. Where can Apple change the fundamental questions?

It ships MVPs that get better later, sure, and the original iPhone and Watch were MVPs, but the original iPhone also was the best phone I’d ever owned even with no 3G and no App Store. It wasn’t a concept. it wasn’t a vision of the future- it was the future. The Vision Pro is a concept, or a demo, and Apple doesn’t ship demos. Why did it ship the Vision Pro? What did it achieve? It didn’t sell in meaningful volume, because it couldn’t, and it didn’t lead to much developer activity ether, because no-one bought it. A lot of people even at Apple are puzzled.

The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. Last summer Apple told a very clear, coherent, compelling story of how it would combine the software frameworks it’s already built with the personal data in apps spread across your phones and the capabilities of LLMs to produce a new kind of personal assistant. This was the eats of Apple - taking a new primary technology and proposing way to make it useful for everyone else

In December 2023, Rockstar Games dropped the trailer for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI. In just 24 hours, it was viewed over 93 million times! In the same period, a deluge of fan content was made about the trailer and it generated 192 million views, more than double that of the official trailer. Youtube’s 2024 Fandom Survey reports that 66% of Gen Z Americans agree that “they often spend more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself.” (Youtube Culture and Trend Report 2024)

Much like the discussions and dissections populating YouTube fan channels, ancient scholarly traditions have long embraced similar practices. This dialogue between the original text and the interpretation is exemplified, for instance, in the Midrash, the collection of rabbinic exegetical writings that interprets the written and oral Torah. Midrashim “discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces. They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions”. (Gafney 2017)

The Midrash represents a form of religious para-content. It adds, amends, interprets, extends the text’s meaning in service of a faith-based community. Contemporary para-content plays a similar role in providing insights, context and fan theories surrounding cultural objects of love, oftentimes crafting new parallel narratives and helping fans insert themselves into the work.

highly expressive YouTubers perform an emotional exegesis, punctuating and highlighting the high points and key bars of the song, much like the radio DJ of yore. TikTok is now flooded with reactions to the now unforgettable “Mustard” exclamation in Kendrick’s “TV Off,” affirming to fans that this moment is a pivotal moment in the song, validating that it is culturally resonant.

Para-content makers may be called “creators” or “influencers” but their actual role is that of “contextualizer”, the shapers of a cultural artifact’s horizon. The concept of “horizon” originates from “reception theory” in literary theory which posits that the meaning of a text is not a fixed property inscribed by its creator but a dynamic creation that unfolds at the juncture of the text and its audience.

American economist Tyler Cowen often uses the refrain “Context is that which is scarce” to describe that while art, information and content may be abundant, understanding—the ability to situate that information within a meaningful context—remains a rare and valuable resource. Para-content thrives precisely because it claims to provide this scarce context.

As content proliferates, the challenge isn’t accessing cultural works but understanding how they fit into larger narratives and why they matter. There is simply too much content, context makes salient which deserves our attention.

Your friend’s favorite line in a song became a hook for your own appreciation of it. Seeing how people reacted to a song’s pivotal moment at a house party made clear the song’s high point. Hearing a professor rave about a shot in a movie made you lean in when you watched it. Often, you developed your own unique appreciation for something which you then shared with peers. These are all great examples of organic contextualization. Yet this scarcity of context also illuminates the dangers of para-content. When contextualizers wield disproportionate influence, there is a risk that their exegesis becomes prescriptive rather than suggestive.

The tyranny of the contextualizer online is their constant and immovable presence between the reader and the text, the listener and the music, the viewer and the film. We now reach for context before engaging with the content. When my first interaction with a song is through TikTok reactions, I no longer encounter the work as it is, on my own. It comes with context juxtaposed, pre-packaged. This removes the public’s ability to construct, even if for a moment, their own unique horizons.

you’re given the opportunity to work with kids before they’re thrown to the wolves they’ll encounter throughout the rest of their days in public education and shape them at the start of their most vulnerable and impressionable state in life. you’re with them eight hours a day, five days of a week - something their parents can’t even say at this age.

it’s a profession where you’re provided with more power than you’ve probably ever had; but with that power comes tremendous responsibility and obligation as well (sorry to crib from spider-man, it was unavoidable). of course, you’re there first and foremost as an educator. but you’d have to be blind not to see the start of some of the biggest problems facing society today simultaneously.

when faced with such sights, you can either bury your head in the sand and stick to your “lesson plans” or pursue the path that goes above your paygrade and confront these conflicts head on, before they blow up in a bigger way a decade down the road.

kids truly are sponges at this age, soaking in everything you do and don’t want them to. they see everything, they hear everything, and though they may not know everything, they’re savvier at connecting context clues than one might initially foolishly assume.

don’t submit to the self-fulfilling prophecy - be the author of another.