Friday's Finest - The Five Best Substack Articles I Read This Week
Blame it on the snow.
Or at least that is what I think I heard Milli Vanilli lip-syncing.
Cocooned in a warm house, with the snow piling up, I was in a more contemplative mood than usual about the broader world this week. Meaning, I contemplated it.
Maybe it was being in the heart of ‘wife season’, that period between the Super Bowl and Opening Day, when I am less distracted by sports. Maybe I was inspired by Toothless Jack, the hockey equivalent of Shoeless Joe, and the US hockey team’s thrilling win over Canada. But for whatever reason, I was seeking out differing viewpoints this week, and that is one of the great things about Substack. There are plenty of writers with perspectives that differ from my Flinstone-ian, brontosaurus-burger-loving view of the world.
And so many of this week’s top five are of a more serious nature. They are well worth your time, but a warning: don't read all of them in one sitting.
5) ‘The Anti-To-Do List: A Major Life Hack’ - by Sahil Bloom
Bloom rose to prominence from his book The Five Types of Wealth. He begins this article by explaining the concept behind the Anti-To-Do List.
In the 19th century, a German mathematician named Carl Jacobi developed an interesting insight:
Many hard math problems become easier to solve when you flip them around and work backwards.
He famously preached to his students, “Man muss immer umkehren.”
Translation: Invert, always invert.
My first insight here was that “Man muss immer umkehren” surprisingly does not translate to ‘I will have another Heineken’.
Bloom continues explaining the concept with examples like Michelangelo, a famous Ninja Turtle who carved his renowned statue of David Ortiz by supposedly ‘removing everything that wasn’t David.’
Which got me thinking inversely about the Davids I would like to remove (David Duke and David Hasselhoff). Duke is an obvious one. I have nothing against Hasselhoff as a person, but MacGyver set unrealistic expectations for every guy on the planet. There is no possible way to jumpstart an engine with a piece of dental floss.
Bloom then gets to the heart of the matter.
To get closer to your truth, remove what doesn’t belong. To achieve your goals and create your vision for the future, avoid what holds you back.
Today, I’d like to tell you about a practical tool for doing just that...
I call it my Anti-To-Do List.
We all know the To-Do List. That staple of modern productivity. The daily guide for where to direct your attention.
But it only governs one side of the equation. It tells you what to focus on, but nothing about what to avoid.
It’s like staring at your feet while you go for a walk. You’ll certainly walk somewhere, but when you eventually look up, you may realize somewhere was never really the goal.
The Anti-To-Do List is your Via Negativa tool for life:
It’s a simple list of behaviors, habits, mindsets, self-limiting beliefs, or patterns that you want to avoid. The things you don’t want to do. They are anti-to-dos.
Not because they’re catastrophic, per se, but because they slowly hold you back from operating at full power. They silently pull you away from the life you want and deserve.
The first item on his Anti-To-Do List is not to use his phone around his family. His guidance is to make a list of a few items, but not move on to the 2nd one until you master the first one 100%. I would list a similar item for my first one and expect to reach my second item somewhere in the vicinity of 2043, but phone addiction and especially short-form videos are killing our brain cells. A non-Substack podcast, Diary of a CEO, recently had a very powerful episode on this topic.
4) ‘The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis’ by James Van Geelen and Alap Shah
The good news is that even as Silicon Valley pumps out more addictive apps to ruin our brain cells, we aren’t going to need them anyway because AI will replace all our jobs, giving us oodles of free time to doomscroll about AI.
The economic death spiral of this scenario has spooked Wall Street this week, and this Substack article has gotten quite a bit of buzz. Van Geelen and Shah paint a dystopian view of an economic collapse rivaling the Great Depression fueled by the domino effect of AI taking over white collar jobs, reducing consumer spending due to rising unemployment, reducing business spending both because of the dwindling consumer spending and the efficiencies of AI, price compression through AI shopping agents seeking out bargains and eliminating premiums for brand loyalty, a resulting collapse of the mortgage market (hey, something familiar!) and so forth and so on. In a nutshell, they call it ‘a daisy chain of correlated bets on white collar productivity growth’.
In every way, AI was exceeding expectations, and the market was AI. The only problem…the economy was not.
It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero. -
Happy days are here again.
Many companies do post-mortems when things go wrong. This is a pre-mortem: you look into the future and say what could possibly go wrong. I would advise the Louvre security team to look into this exercise. And while Van Geelen and Shah’s scenario might take things to an extreme, and I suspect it will be more like 2029 than 2028, I do believe some version of this is coming. And it does not help to be an ostrich about it.
As the authors point out, it is an economic pandemic. And the key difference this time is that AI is a structural transformation versus a cyclical issue.
In a normal recession, the cause eventually self-corrects. Overbuilding leads to a construction slowdown, which leads to lower rates, which leads to new construction. Inventory overshoot leads to destocking, which leads to restocking. The cyclical mechanism contains within it its own seeds of recovery.
This cycle’s cause was not cyclical. - James Van Geelen and Alap Shah
They go on to explain the vicious downward spiral.
AI got better and cheaper. Companies laid off workers, then used the savings to buy more AI capability, which let them lay off more workers. Displaced workers spent less. Companies that sell to consumers sold fewer products, weakened, and invested more in AI to protect margins. AI got better and cheaper.
A feedback loop with no natural brake. - James Van Geelen and Alap Shah
They go on to discuss some of the global implications, such as the coming disruption to India’s IT Services sector, where the key driver is that Indian engineers cost a fraction of what their American counterparts do. But of course, AI engineers cost nothing. And I cannot wait to hear the coming corporate buzzword for that.
This being wife season, when I shared it with my wife, my elite co-pilot, per Kyle Van Noy, she asked, ‘Great, so what do we do about it?’
Hell if I know, probably ask AI.
3) ‘There is one word that explains why so many men are in the Epstein files. So why is no one saying it? by Celeste Davis
Spoiler alert: The word is patriarchy, a word I like about as much as a shart.
But in the spirit of Bloom’s premise of always inverting, Davis rightfully asks a critical question that is not getting enough attention. With all the hullabaloo about why the perpetrators of the Epstein-fueled crimes are not being held to account, there is not enough focus on why the hell so many men want to rape underage girls in the first place. And it is clear that everyone in Epstein’s orbit knew exactly what he was doing, and that you weren’t going to his island to sea kayak, which means the rapes were premeditated. But as Davis points out, sexual assault is a larger societal problem, and hardly limited to the rich and famous (though Robin Leach’s name did appear in the files).
Money and corrupt elite networks of billionaires are certainly not off the hook here. Those are important conversations to have.
But while money may have enabled Epstein’s sexual abuse, it didn’t create it.
One in four women has experienced sexual abuse. Billionaires seem to do a lot of raping, but they can’t do THAT much raping. - Celeste Davis
Davis uses data to dismiss the easy answer of male testosterone. She correctly views that, because they can get away with it as an unsatisfactory reason that does not get at the root of the problem. She then gets into more complicated reasons, like the patriarchy. I give my daughter a hard time for something called feminist lunch at her school, but this one definitely did get me thinking about the world my daughter and son are inheriting from my generation and those before it, where women get sexually assaulted because men feel a venomous combination of entitled and inadequate.
A CDC report studying US States found the exact same thing: “States with a high degree of gender inequality also report higher prevalence estimates among women for completed or attempted rape using physical force.”
Now we are digging at the root. What other factors have scientists found leads to sexual assault?
“Evidence suggests that it is not innate aggression that makes men violent, but the internalized belief that they fall short of society’s perceived standards for masculinity. Psychologists call this phenomenon, “masculine discrepancy stress” and research shows that the more acutely a man suffers from this, the more likely he is to commit almost every type of violence, including sexual assault, intimate partner violence and assault with a weapon.” - Ruth Whippman
Ah, yes, masculinity - that North Star our society hands men that says the worst thing you can do isn’t cruelty, the worst thing you can do is act like a girl.
Seventh Inning Stretch
This seventh-inning stretch, of course, involves music. If you Google country singer Ingrid Andress, the first option Google auto-completes is “Ingrid Andress National Anthem.” Baseball fans may recall her horrifically off-key and widely criticized rendition of the National Anthem before the 2024 Home Run Derby. It was sad as a fan of Andress because she has an incredible voice, but was extremely drunk.
Having hit rock bottom in front of a national television audience, she checked into a rehabilitation facility for alcohol addiction. I like to listen to Apple’s country music playlists when I do the dishes, and was very pleasantly surprised to hear Andress’s new song.
The lyrics in the chorus (far better listened to than read):
Now I know my voice might shake but I can say goodbye
I can drive just fine with tears in my eyes
Most people run back first night alone, but I don't
Now I know I can feel like I'm dying but still be alive
I can pick up the pieces one at a time
Most people just settle for what they know, but I don't
'Cause now I know
The most powerful line to me, which applies far beyond romantic relationships:
’Most people just settle for what they know, but I don’t.”
2) ‘Oakland’s Alysa Liu: A Brief Coda’ by Michael Weinreb
Weinreb, an accomplished sports writer, not only tells the story of Alysa Liu's rejuvenation but also how the city of Oakland helped her get her groove back, find joy in her sport, and ultimately win a gold medal.
Before COVID, my daughter figure skated. You train for four months for a routine that lasts four minutes. And if you make one mistake, kiss your chances of winning goodbye. The pressure to perform athletically while also being beautiful and graceful can be soul-sucking. And so, not surprisingly, Alysa Liu burned out and left the sport.
Weinreb’s story, though, differs from the many others on Liu’s comeback by juxtaposing it with the role the city of Oakland, and cities in general, can play in allowing us to claim our individuality and get to know what we really want versus conforming to the expectations of others.
There’s a kind of fraternal feel to Oakland, as if this is the place we all wound up in for varied reasons, and we know it has its issues, but we’re also free to be ourselves here and to order a key lime cheesecake and a dinosaur rib and eat it next to Lake Merritt while watching an African drum circle.
All of this is a way of saying that I don’t think it’s an accident that Alysa Liu, who won the gold medal in women’s figure skating, identifies as an Oaklander. This may not be where she lives, but this is where she trains, and this is where she hangs out, and this is where she calls home, no matter what The San Francisco Chronicle says. - Michael Weinreb
Weinreb notes that, even though she lives in Richmond, CA, Liu referred to Oakland as her hometown during the Olympics and shouted out the city after her short program.
And why does this matter? It matters because Liu’s entire ethos is filtered through the lens of Oakland itself. This is a wonderfully weird place full of quirky and often very accepting people, and I imagine Liu gravitated to that for a reason. What happened with Liu is that she became a conventionally brilliant figure skater as a young teenager, and then when she was 16, she realized, This isn’t me. So she quit figure skating. She did other things until she found herself, and only then did she come back to figure skating.
“She has had to fight to reclaim (her) identity, to figure out what she likes—karaoke bars, video games, fashion, art, music, piercings, psychology,” wrote CNN’s Dana O’Neil, “so she could become who she is.”
Liu retired from figure skating at 16. She won gold at 20. Even more impressively, by age 20, she has figured out who she is and found joy again. And that made all the difference.
1) ‘What is Going on With The Angels’ by The Baseball Nerd
Since my Substack primarily focuses on human stories in baseball, I have to include at least one baseball story. In this one, along the lines of the Global Intelligence Crisis from #4, a death spiral has already begun. The AI involved in this one stands for ‘Arte’s Incompetence’ in honor of Angels owner Arte Moreno. And the warning sign on this one is not nearly as complicated: a professional sports team in Southern California with no air conditioning in its weight room.
That team would, of course, be the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim of Orange County of Southern California of the State of California of the United States. Their stadium is often called ‘The Big A’. Their fans see their owner as ‘The Big A-Hole’. They have baseball’s longest playoff drought: 11 years, and it has been 16 years since the Halos won a postseason game. The Baseball Nerd digs into why.
Sam Blum outlined a fan survey from February 2025 ( yes, a year ago), and it paints a devastating picture. 80.4% of respondents lack confidence in the team’s direction. 94.9% rate Moreno as below average or poor. 95.6% want him to sell. 74.2% don’t believe the Angels even have a plan to compete. And 70.8% said they’d be happyabout a full rebuild if the team committed to one. That’s how beaten down this fanbase is. They’re not asking for the moon. They’re asking for a direction. Any direction. That was last year
Then Moreno drops his own “survey” on Friday, February 20, 2026, claiming fans told him winning isn’t even in their top five priorities. The Angels declined to share who was surveyed, what the questions were, or any methodology. Blum wrote it, but we all think it; suggesting fans of any pro team don’t prioritize winning is “about as detached from reality as one could possibly be.”
Moreno didn’t help his cause when he spiked this gem: “For me, I’ve always wanted to win. It’s just, what’s the cost of winning right now?”
And even before that, they signed Anthony Rendon, who did not like playing baseball, to a 7-year, $245 million contract. And then decided not to trade Ohtani for a haul of prospects when it was fairly obvious he was not going to re-sign. Not even making the playoffs once with Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani on the equivalent of an NFL quarterback’s rookie contract is bad. The tragic Tyler Skaggs situation with team personnel supplying him with drugs that led to his overdose death is worse.
The Angels are a hot mess. The Baseball Nerd puts it in context from a financial perspective.
The numbers tell the real story. Payroll dropped from roughly $206 million in 2025 to somewhere between $155-$180 million for 2026, depending on how you account for the Rendon deferrals. The TV situation is a mess. Main Street Sports Group collapsed, the Angels haven’t signed with MLB’s broadcast solution yet, and they’re not even airing spring training games. Moreno cited the revenue hit as justification for spending less, but, as newly crowned MLBPA director Bruce Meyer pointed out on Friday, this is the second-largest media market in the country. The Dodgers aren’t struggling to figure this out.
And former MLBPA Director Tony Clark nailed it a year ago when he said the Angels embraced the luxury tax as a salary cap. And former MLBPA Director Tony Clark nailed it a year ago when he said the Angels embraced the luxury tax as a salary cap.
Of course, we now know that wasn’t all Clark nailed. Embracing the luxury tax as a salary cap still seems better than (allegedly) embracing your sister-in-law as your lover, or the union you led being under federal investigation for financial improprieties.
Moreno, for his part, is pressure-testing the death spiral: less revenue leads to less investment in the team, which in turn leads to more losses and less revenue. And to make matters worse, the owner is not being honest with himself or anyone else about the situation.
Maybe the Angels should move to Oakland and find themselves as Alysa Liu did. The sewage in the dugouts at the Oakland Coliseum might be a good thing for Moreno. Plumbing problems have a way of forcing you to face the truth.
But at least both remaining Angels fans don’t have to worry about snow, only SoCal traffic.
So, if you will excuse me, I need to shovel a path to my grill to throw on some Brontosaurus Smash Burgers. And if the snow is too high and I can’t get there, well, you gotta blame it on something.