David ex Machina

The NFL is a Fractured Product Mark my words: the 2025 NFL season will be remembered as the year the “product” finally started to crack under the weight of its own physical demands. While the league office continues to tout parity, ratings, and global expansion, I witnessed: a lack of talent depth, increasingly lopsided games, and a growing war of attrition where “any given Sunday” has given way to “whoever is healthy today.” Yes, injuries have always been part of football. But the scale, timing, and severity of injuries this season is a fundamental shift in the game, not just random luck. Let’s recap. The Meat Grinder The number of notable players injured during the 2025 season was staggering. By Week 5, entire playoff pictures were already compromised. And take note of the severity - these are season-ending injuries, team playoff trajectory defining injuries, non-contact injuries (I’m not even going to mention CTE). Look at some of the names involved: Joe Burrow. J.J. McCarthy. Lam...

Adapted from Flickr and transparentpng.com ( cc 4.0 license ) Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, an SF tech exodus emerged. There are many well documented reasons for the exodus, namely a high cost of living, unaffordable housing, and increased crime - all accelerated by the switch to remote-first work. But few have been more vocal than Keith Rabois , the paypal mafia venture capitalist, after physically moving and encouraging others to move to Miami. The level of hype raised tech eyebrows, including my own, to wonder if this is self-serving publicity, or something more?  Before I dive in, let me get a few things out of the way. First, I don’t have anything against the city of Miami. Second, I actually think it’s a good thing for tech to diversify and have many intellectual strongholds, not just one mecca. One of the few positives of the pandemic is making people reevaluate their lives and figure out what matters to them, including where to live. I also agree with many of...

TV (by which I mean the Film and Television medium) is the great modern meditation. Before you roll your eyes, hear me out. It’s one of the easiest ways to shut your brain off, escape, and transport yourself to another world. It’s powerful because it hooks into human imagination. How else can we so easily relate to characters with drastically different lives than ourselves, be it a lawyer, cop, billionaire, or superhero? TV is the visual representation of reading a book. Sports and other live TV gives us a chance to connect with other humans and experience a moment together; think Olympics, the World Cup, or an election night. TV is the original livestream. Reality TV gives us insight into how others live and learn about businesses, places to travel, and food to eat. Did I mention the news? TV expands your horizons. With so much content, TV is the original “netflix and chill,” the binging euphemism for a couch potato, whose actions are not too dissimilar from someone in a 3hr meditatio...

SpaceX Demo-2 Launch by NASA/Joel Kowsky   The Curious Case of Elon Musk . Both brilliant and audacious, but equally stubborn and irritable. The idol . Elon has greatly impacted our way of life, from PayPal to Tesla and SpaceX. I’m writing this literally the weekend of the first NASA SpaceX human space flight in 9 years ! An incredible feat that few people thought possible a few years ago. The same holds true for all of his companies’ products: all solve hard problems that aim to make the world a better place, and always seem to be ahead of their time. Read the Elon Musk biography for more inspiration. The worshiper . Let’s be clear, I’m a big fan. Elon has the amazing combination of vision, technical ability, and execution skills to deliver on big audacious goals and the reputation of backing it up time and time again. And his goals are noble; save the planet and the human race from destruction, whether it is evil AI, climate change, or an asteroid. The tribe . He represents Sil...