A Red Baron stocker who wouldn’t laugh off a prank, a rookie who thanked his Heavenly Father after winning the World Series, and the death of Jean-Luc Picard. The world is dripping with sarcasm. But we clearly, culturally, hunger for more.

This is Networked Conviction 008, my weekly investing journal: one idea I’m still working out, one startup I’d want to see built, and a handful of things from my notes worth resurfacing. The first two sections are free for everyone; the rest is for paid subscribers.

Reader Mail: Why I Cite Myself

After Saturday’s McDonaldization of Venture Capital, a reader wrote in:

“I love your articles, and I’ve taken away a lot from past pieces. Though on this, I find the amount of references to your past writing a bit too abundant (my claude counts 22), over and over again, to the point that it takes away from the piece. It’s a bit ironic, because you write about something that may lose itself by way of over-optimizing for a metric, and isn’t this optimizing a bit too much for cross-selling other works? Otherwise I’m really a big fan, you’re a very solid thinker. Thanks for investing your time into this.”

It’s a fair question, and I spent some time thinking about it so thought I would share my answer.

I’m not cross-selling. I don’t get anything from you going back to read my old pieces. This is, very deliberately, an indexing of the threads of my thinking. I very clearly started out my writing journey in 2022 believing venture would be productized and unbundled. And I was wrong! Why? Because of the forces I, then, ended up writing about over the next 5 years. I can see the pulse through my writing that was simply observational of the forces taking root in venture; the precursors to McDonaldization.

In an era of AI slop, content marketing, and mechanistic optimization, it’s all well and good to hand-wavedly dismiss an author’s choices as algorithmic fodder. But if you default assume someone is optimizing their writing for clicks and clacks, then I would argue you should read them sparingly anyways.

If, however, you give the benefit of the doubt to the author that their choices in prose are not robo-deference but deliberate, then you should suspend your gut instinct that the choice is made to assuage clicky-clacking and ask the question, “why?” Why would I choose to reference my own writing 22 times? And perhaps it is because my “secret public journal” is doing exactly as it was designed to do. Acting as a historical record of the observed vibes of a moment in time, each week, in a rapidly evolving asset class and discipline.

Historical records, however, are inert if left un-revisited. What’s more, my vanity, though excessive, is by no means fervent enough to assume that everyone will have read every major piece I’ve written over the last half decade. Therefore, I can either say “take my word for it, the historical record has clocked this trend and it’s nothing new” or I can do the reader the kindness of not expecting them to have internalized every lesson from every entry like a Marvel nerd grasping for a buried reference in Season 2 of a sub-par sideshow as a pivotal plot point in a multi-billion dollar franchise.

So, in case you were wondering, that is why I reference my own writing.

A Week of Earnestness

Three people took over my feed last week, and I keep thinking about them together.

The first is a Red Baron stocker in White Lake, Michigan. A douchey content creator tried the Apple Pay prank on him (playing the payment chime so he’d think he’d been charged), but this was clearly the last straw for this guy. “I don’t have time for this. My life is hard enough as it is,” he says in the video. “You’re probably making money off this. I can’t pay my mortgage, and I’ve got four kids at home.” Within days a fundraiser for him has raised over $750K. The post I saw everywhere: “I’ve been red pilled, black pilled, white pilled, clear pilled. All the pills. I don’t even know which one this is, but it’s one of the strongest ones I’ve had in a long long time.”

The second is Cooper Pratt, the Brewers’ rookie shortstop (and fellow member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). Milwaukee beat the Rays to win the World Series, and his postgame answer was: “I owe it all to my Heavenly Father.” (This is the same kid who’d been celebrating with orange Fanta instead of champagne.) For those of you who know somebody Mormon, you know a Cooper Pratt of your very own.

The third is Patrick Stewart, who passed away last week at 86. For a lot of us he was Jean-Luc Picard first. There’s an endless supply of clips getting shared around. One clip, in particular, reminded m why I loved his portrayal so much. These examples of a quintessential vision of progressive masculinity and commitment in the face of struggle. I saw videos of people genuinely weeping at the loss. Noah Smith wrote a great piece called “Farewell, my Captain.”

What struck me most was the common thread I felt across all of these: a respect for earnestness. See, the world is dripping with sarcasm. So when a man loses it over being manipulated, or a young man thanks his Heavenly Father for a championship, or we lose a cultural icon who represented a progressive vision of the future, it’s reminiscent of an earnestness that so many of us desperately desire more of. We’re exhausted by the pessimistic malaise we’re battered with.

I don’t mean to say I’m always “Sally Sunshine” by any means. For most of us, we just can’t help defaulting to negativity. Cynicism is free. And, increasingly, it’s in-group reinforcing; you belong by being negative. The sensationalism at a swipe is too overwhelming, so we become poisoned by a default resignation to life.

But we clearly, culturally, hunger for more. These were just a few examples of that desire boiling over, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing them. It was humanizing.

Below, you can check out this week’s Under Construction (the death of patience), a startup I’d want to see built (a new credit bureau), ten things from my wiki (five I added this week and five from the historical stacks), and a look back at Dreaming Of Dry Powder.