And that’s when it clicked.

Not just something about Jay-Z — but something about how culture actually works.

In this video, I break down a framework I haven’t been able to unsee:

There are two lanes of culture.

One is trending.
The other is what I call premium rooms.

The difference between them explains why:

• Some artists dominate attention but lose access

• Some moves feel loud, and others feel controlled

• Some careers expand while others quietly contract

This isn’t just about Jay-Z or Ye.

It’s about power, structure, and how value actually gets decided.

Once you see it, you start asking a different question:

Is this for the timeline… or for the room?

Even the superintendent carried himself like old money. We started asking typical maintenance questions like mowing heights, fertilizers they use, and the standard stuff you’d ask to get a deeper feel for the course. He told us they have a strict no-comment policy on everything they do. Not because it’s some guarded industry secret. It’s because nobody spends as much money on their course as Augusta National, and they don’t want public courses and local clubs around the country trying to copy them, destroying their own grounds, and then blaming Augusta National.

That’s about the time I started to realize what made that place so magical, and started paying attention to what you never see as a patron of the Masters.

There’s one detail from that tour that stuck with me over the years. The golf course is only about half the land the superintendent maintained. Adjacent to the course is a plant nursery with near-exact replicas of every iconic plant on the property, all the way up to some of the most massive pine trees. Why? If a signature tree gets struck by lightning on Monday, they can replace it before the Thursday broadcast. The viewers at home will never know.

Old money is not about what you see. It’s about what you don’t see.

That’s the framework for everything The Masters does, and why the tournament feels so different from every other major sporting event in America. The difference isn’t quality. It’s restraint.

They don’t want, or need, your money

A weekly tournament badge for the 2026 Masters costs $525 (that’s 6 days including the practice rounds, the Par 3 Tournament, and everything all the way through Sunday). People will pay triple and quadruple that for a 4 hour concert ticket these days. A four-day pass to the U.S. Open starts at $1,500.

It’s not just the tickets either. Concessions at Augusta National might as well be free. A pimento cheese or egg salad sandwich is $1.50, and the most expensive item on the menu is a $6 glass of wine. And this isn’t some off brand crap they bought at Walmart. It’s name brand everything and those sandwiches are as good as any I’ve ever had (and I’m from the south, I’ve had plenty). In a sports landscape where a beer at an NFL game costs $16, Augusta is clearly playing a different game.

They don’t need your money.

Now look at the access control. Every smart phone gets confiscated at the gate. Not “silenced.” Not “please be courteous.” Taken. If you’re caught with a recording device on the course, you’re removed and you’re never coming back. There’s no warning, no second chance. In an era where every live event is engineered around shareable, viral content, Augusta opts out entirely.

Even the language is governed. Did you notice I’ve been using the word “patrons” and not fans? That’s on purpose. Jim Nantz explained that CBS commentators are instructed never to use the word “fans.” The full word is “fanatics,” and that’s not what Augusta is about. The people walking the course are patrons. (I’m honestly surprised they don’t call them guests.) The broadcast itself runs limited commercials, which sponsors agree to in advance. The Masters streaming app is completely free (and is surprisingly good, coming from someone who’s built live sports streaming apps): no cable login, no registration, no account. Download and watch.

They don’t need your data, either.

What is old money?

People who are truly of old money don’t want or need your attention. Their defining quality and the thing that separates “wealthy” from “rich,” is restraint (at least in public theaters). If you’ve ever known someone who has more money than you can imagine (and then imagine more), you probably noticed they’re among the calmest people. They never talk about what they have. They don’t have to. You should already know, and they don’t really care if you do anyways.

That’s the window The Masters hands you, whether it means to or not. Once you see it, you may start to notice the pattern.

Old money sets the pace, they control the flow of pretty much everything. That’s the game they play. They don’t act like celebrities or influencers who will jump at people clamoring to give them free shit. That’s a sales game, where popularity matters. They don’t act like people with new money who will hustle to get a celebrity onto their yacht for photos, so they can leaked them to the press and know requests for rentals will go through the roof. Old money is the bank that funded the construction of the yacht in the first place.

It doesn’t matter how much something costs for true old money. Not only do they not have to ask how much it costs, it flat out doesn’t matter to them. That’s why they never talk about money or flaunt what they have.

And that’s the pattern to watch for: The restaurant with no sign on the door. The company that never advertises. The person at the table who talks the least and gets listened to the most.

Premium rooms don’t announce themselves. They don’t need the foot traffic. They’re not optimizing for conversion.

The flex isn’t what’s on display. It’s what’s been made invisible: the nursery behind the course, the infrastructure behind the calm, the money behind the $1.50 sandwich. You’re not meant to see the machinery. You’re meant to feel the effect and wonder how it all works so smoothly.

None of us will ever join Augusta National. We’ll never walk across the member and player only bridges. But knowing what you’re looking at when you watch this week? That’s the takeaway. The most powerful rooms don’t look powerful. They look easy. And that ease is the most expensive thing in the building.

This week was a lot. Again.

At first glance, the stories below do not seem like they belong together. Baseball rolled out robot-assisted umpiring, and it turns out the game did not collapse. Bob Dylan wandered into the AI conversation through Patreon, which is either absurd or exactly on time. The NFL made a polished move toward owning flag football just as the sport’s growth is becoming impossible to ignore. And in entertainment, people with actual creative power kept saying, in increasingly blunt terms, that AI may be useful, but usefulness and legitimacy are not the same thing.

Different stories. Same tension.

This week kept circling the same questions: Who gets taken seriously? Who gets ignored? Who gets to define what counts as progress? And how often do we confuse status with truth?

That was the real pattern. Not just disruption, but gatekeeping. Not just innovation, but control. Not just what is changing, but who gets to name the change after it has already started.

The machine that’s rewriting baseball

Baseball’s next evolution showed up this week at home plate.

MLB opened the 2026 season with the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System, which sounds clinical until you realize what it actually does: it allows players to challenge a call in real time and appeal to a system that is, at least in theory, more precise than the human making it. Through the opening stretch, 94 calls were overturned across 175 challenges. That is not a small correction. That is a real one.

And what is interesting about it is that it does not erase the human element. It exposes it.

The umpire is still there. The performance of authority is still there. The instincts, the timing, the ego, the drama, all still there. But the call is no longer untouchable. It can be checked. It can be challenged. It can be corrected without the whole structure falling apart.

That feels bigger than baseball, honestly.

Because we are living through a period in which many institutions still behave as though accountability is the same as disrespect. Baseball, of all places, just offered a decent counterargument. Giving people a credible mechanism to challenge the system did not ruin the game. It made the game more honest.

A lesson, if anybody is in the mood for one.

Nightlife knows first

One of the clearest truths this week came from a place respectable culture still does not like to credit: nightlife.

The people closest to power after dark often know what is going on before the rest of us do. Sex workers. Club workers. Bartenders. Bottle girls. Drivers. Hosts. Service workers. People whose jobs require them to be near money, ego, appetite, and influence when all of those things are least guarded.

They hear the loose talk. They catch the mood shifts. They see who is spiraling before the official version gets cleaned up and released to the public.

And still, we hesitate to treat them as credible.

That is not a coincidence. It is a class system.

The source-credibility problem is often less about evidence than it is about status. We trust the polished witness. We trust the person whose authority already looks familiar to us. We distrust the witness whose access came through labor, intimacy, or proximity to mess, even when that person is standing much closer to the truth.

The information is often out there. We just prefer it when it arrives in a blazer and not in lashes at 2:15 a.m.

The NFL is looking to own flag football

The NFL announced a formal partnership with TMRW Sports this week to launch a professional flag football league for both men and women, with support from all 32 NFL teams and a very polished bench of investors. The timing is not subtle. Flag football is headed to the 2028 Olympics, participation is climbing, and the sport is growing quickly, especially among girls and women. The league sees the wave.

And when the NFL sees a wave, it generally does not ask how to cheer from the shore.

It asks how to build a structure around it before somebody else does.

To be clear, this could create real opportunities. More investment. More visibility. More legitimacy. A stronger pipeline. That part is real. But so is the broader pattern. Powerful institutions are very good at letting something become culturally valuable on its own and then arriving just in time to present themselves as its natural home.

The NFL is not just investing in flag football. It is trying to shape its future before that future fully arrives.

That is smart. That is strategic. That is also what power looks like when it learns to speak the language of inclusion.

Bob Dylan has a Patreon, and nobody really knows what to do with that

Bob Dylan launched a Patreon this week called Lectures from the Grave, and I do think that sentence should be allowed to sit with us for a second.

For five dollars a month, subscribers get access to audio essays and other historical-literary oddities tied to figures like Aaron Burr, Wild Bill Hickok, and Frank James. The material appears to use AI-generated audio. Dylan has not fully explained what was written by him, voiced by him, or shaped with machine assistance. The content is described as “curated by Bob Dylan,” which is both carefully worded and spiritually suspicious.

What makes this interesting is not just that it feels strange. It is that Bob Dylan, of all people, is now attached to one of the biggest live debates in culture: what happens when authenticity becomes branding, authorship becomes hazier, and the audience is still being asked to pay for the aura.

Because that is really what is being sold here. Not efficiency. Not even clarity. Dylan is selling Dylan. The name. The mystique. The authority. The weather system around the work.

And that is where this gets useful.

We are past the point of asking whether AI will enter art. It already has. The harder question now is what happens when the person remains iconic, the product remains desirable, and the labor underneath it becomes increasingly difficult to pin down.

When Bob Dylan’s name is the product and AI is part of the labor, authorship starts to feel less like a fact and more like a deal the audience has agreed to keep honoring.

Can AI get into the premium rooms?

Two different people said versions of the same thing this week, and both were worth hearing.

Kathleen Kennedy reportedly argued that taste cannot be automated because taste comes from life experience, and AI does not have one. Hannah Einbinder was much less diplomatic and basically said that the people making AI-generated art are losers and will never be cool. Different delivery. Same locked door.

What they are both pointing to is this: there is a difference between access and belonging.

AI can absolutely enter workflows. It can get into drafts, mockups, brainstorming, revisions, research, clean-up passes, concepting, and all kinds of places where time and money are real constraints. But the people who still control cultural legitimacy are making something else clear: efficiency does not automatically grant you authorship, taste, or entry into the inner room.

That room may be elitist. It may be gatekept. It may be inconsistent and occasionally unbearable.

It still exists.

And a lot of the anxiety around AI right now is really about whether scale can buy its way into spaces that were never built around scale in the first place. The answer from many of the people already inside seems to be: not like that.

We’re still standing

I do not think this week wants a neat ending.

It felt too revealing for that. Too many systems showed their hand. Too many institutions renamed control as progress. Too many examples reminded us that credibility is still distributed according to class, polish, access, and aesthetics long before it is distributed according to truth.

So maybe the throughline is not that everything is changing.

Maybe it is that the same old fights keep returning in newer costumes.

Who gets authority? Who gets access? Who gets believed? Who gets dismissed as unserious. Who gets to innovate without being punished for it? Who gets to profit once the shift becomes too obvious to ignore?

That was the week.

A little strange. A little clarifying. Not exactly comforting, but at least honest.

And if nothing else, baseball now has a second opinion.

— Will, Steph, & Jamie

Media from this issue:

• Book: Moneyball by Michael Lewis — Amazon

• Film: Moneyball (2011, Brad Pitt) — Amazon Prime

• Music: Usher — “OMG,” “Confessions Part II,” “Nice & Slow” — Spotify | Apple Music

• NBA Pride Night — NBA LGBTQ+ initiatives

• TGL (Tech-driven golf league, TMRW Sports) — TGL site

• Music: Bob Dylan — “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Mr. Tambourine Man” — Spotify

• TV: Hacks (HBO Max, 2021–2026) — HBO Max

I stood in the living room realizing I was in a moment of active personal change. The way I saw things and interpreted the world would be different from here on out. Two thoughts echoed in my head:

• One: I didn’t know they still made movies that good.

• Two: How is it possible that we’re still telling this person’s stories and making up new stories about his stories more than 400 years after he died?

Shakespeare was so skilled at writing that we’re not just reading his work. We’re grieving the loss of his child alongside him, right now, today. And Hamnet isn’t even something he wrote. It’s a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, published in 2020. Shakespeare is such a force that the stories we tell about his stories can climb to the top of our culture in a completely different century.

So where am I going with all this?

Writing changes how you see the world

Alan Moore once said that writing is a magical power and that it can modify the reality and consciousness of the entire species. I believed him when I heard it, and didn’t fully understand what he really meant until I was sitting on my couch, softly weeping as Paul Mescal delivered the “to be, or not to be” soliloquy.

I had heard those words a hundred times. In school. In movies. In jokes. They’re background furniture in the room of my life. But in Hamnet, framed inside the grief of a father who just lost his son, I could finally feel what they were meant to carry. It’s not a passing thought about life and death. It’s a man standing at the edge. In that moment, he’s deciding whether or not to keep going.

The entire way I see that speech and honestly, the entire way I see Shakespeare, shifted on a Tuesday night on my couch. That’s what Moore was talking about. Writing doesn’t just record reality. It rewires it.

The writers who survive aren’t the most talented

Here’s the thing that kept pulling at me: plenty of brilliant writers are forgotten. Craft alone doesn’t keep you alive for centuries. The writers who survive, who people still cry over, still adapt, still argue about, are the ones who were processing something real and couldn’t fake their way through it.

Shakespeare didn’t invent grief. When he wrote Hamlet while he was inside grief. That specificity is what makes his work universal and timeless. Sitting on my couch, I wasn’t borrowing his emotion. I was feeling my own by following the map he’d laid out in his work.

The mechanism sounds so simple on the surface. When a writer is honest with their emotions and successfully channels them into their work, it becomes more than just some story. It becomes a living place. People can visit, interact, play, enjoy, and share their own emotions. The author doesn’t disappear into the work. They’re preserved in it.

Homer probably knew soldiers who never came home. The Brothers Grimm collected stories from people surviving brutal lives. Pu Songling wrote ghost stories while failing his imperial exams. All that longing is in the work. These writers weren’t performing. They were processing. That’s why they lasted.

You can feel the difference

Most of what we consume and most of what gets praised, awarded, put on syllabi is creative craft that’s an embodiment of human emotions. You can feel the difference, even when you can’t name it. The gap between a story that you feel in your soul, a story that impresses you, and a story that makes you say, “I’ll never get that time back,“ isn’t subjective.

Like it or not, this is why real country music can be so universal. Not the formula Nashville pumps out today. I’m talking George Jones, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” You can feel that song in your chest. You can see the wreath upon his door. That’s specificity doing its work. A song about one man’s refusal to let go becomes a song about everyone who’s ever held on too long.

The filter isn’t genre or complexity or prestige. It’s whether there’s an actual person somewhere in the work, bleeding.

O’Farrell understood this. She didn’t write “a literary novel about grief.” She wrote about a mother who couldn’t save her son, and she wrote it like she was in the room. Which is why, on a random Tuesday, my wife and I ended up crying with people we’ll never meet, over a boy who died before the modern world existed.

Cleverness fades. Wounds don’t.

If you want to dive a little more into this, check out Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History episode The King of Tears where he delves into why country music makes you cry, and rock and roll doesn’t. I listened to it years ago, and understand it in a much different way after Hamnet.

What we carried this week...

We're not going to lie; it was hard to sit down and write and record this week. The world is loud right now. But then the Connecticut Sun got sold for $300 million to a family that already owns the Rockets, and a robot called its first strike in a major league game, and a jury told Mark Zuckerberg his company built an addiction engine on purpose. It hit us that sports, media, all of it, these aren't distractions from the big stuff. They are the big stuff. The same people making the same moves for the same reasons.

The Comets Are Back. The Sun Are Gone. And the WNBA Just Showed You How Leagues Really Work.

The Fertitta family, owners of the Houston Rockets, bought the Connecticut Sun for $300 million and will move the franchise to Houston after the 2026 season. The team will rebrand as the Comets, resurrecting the name of the original WNBA dynasty that won four straight titles before folding in 2008.

The price is a record for the WNBA. For context: the Atlanta Dream sold for under $10 million in 2021. That’s a 30x jump in five years. The Mohegan Tribe, which made history as the first Native American tribe to own a professional sports team when they bought the franchise in 2003, exits the league entirely.

The sale feels like a bellwether. Real money is flooding into women’s basketball (a new $2.2 billion media deal, a salary cap that jumped from $1.5M to $7M, six expansion teams by 2030). But the way it happened tells you more than the price tag: the league blocked two higher offers to steer the team where it wanted it to go. The WNBA is growing. It’s also consolidating power.

Baseball’s Robot Umpire Is Here. The Question Is Whether You Wanted It.

MLB debuted the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System on Opening Night for the Yankees-Giants, which was also the first-ever live MLB game on Netflix. Players can now challenge ball and strike calls by tapping their helmet. Each team gets two challenges; lose both and you’re done. José Caballero became the first player to use it in a regular-season game. He lost. The umpire was right. The 12 Hawk-Eye cameras confirmed it.

The system works. Umpires are still apparently pretty good and most of their misses are on pitches that barely clip the zone. But once you’ve conceded that the machine is the final authority on whether a call is right, you’ve quietly eliminated the case for having the human there at all.

And here’s the thing nobody’s saying out loud: the blown call is part of the game. The argument at the plate, the manager kicking dirt, the bar erupting because the ump squeezed the zone in the seventh; that randomness is part of why sports feel alive. Perfectly measured rules might produce a fairer product. Whether it produces a more fun one is a different question.

Meta and YouTube Built an Addictive Machine. A Jury Just Said So. Now What?

A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable on all counts in the first social media addiction case to reach a verdict. The plaintiff, a 20-year-old California woman identified as Kaley, testified that she started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at 11, and that the platforms fueled depression and suicidal thoughts. The jury awarded $3 million in compensatory damages (Meta 70%, YouTube 30%) plus $3 million in punitive damages. The day before, a separate New Mexico jury hit Meta with $375 million for failing to protect children from predators on its platforms.

The money is negligible for these companies. The precedent is not. The legal strategy that worked here was targeting the design of the platforms rather than the content on them. Internal documents showed Meta allowed beauty filters despite 18 of its own experts warning they could harm users. The Big Tobacco comparison keeps surfacing, and for good reason: same pattern of internal knowledge, public denial, eventual reckoning. Both companies plan to appeal. This will take years. But there are thousands of consolidated cases waiting behind this one, and the first domino just fell.

March Madness Delivered the Bracket TV Execs Dreamed Of. Is That a Problem?

The Elite Eight is set: Duke vs. UConn, Michigan vs. Tennessee, Purdue vs. Arizona, Illinois vs. Iowa. For the second straight year, every team in the Sweet 16 came from a high-major conference. The closest thing to a Cinderella is 9-seed Iowa. The Hawkeyes have won three tournament games in a week after winning four in the previous 24 years.

The NCAA tournament has a brand built on chaos but this year’s Elite Eight feels mild and almost predictable, and there are structural reasons why. NIL and the transfer portal funnel talent upward. The mid-majors that used to shock the world are now farm systems for the programs they once beat. Duke-UConn in the Elite Eight is great television. But March Madness was never really about the best teams winning. It was about the feeling. When the house always wins, what’s left? Ratings, probably. Magic, probably not.

We’re still standing

It’s a tough world out there right now for many of us and we hope you’re all keeping above water.

— Will, Steph, & Jamie

Not the abstract kind — the real ones we live inside every day.

We started with Will’s article, “Whatever happened to meet me at high noon?”, which examines how something as simple as time was standardized and how we’ve been living within that decision ever since.

And once we pulled on that thread, it showed up everywhere.

In sports.
In labor.
In how value is created AND who actually benefits from it.

In this episode, we get into:

• The MLB vs WNBA collective bargaining agreements and what players are really negotiating for

• Why Unrivaled is more than a league — it’s WNBA leverage in real time

• Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game and why the reaction said more than the performance

• The bigger question: why does the NBA feels harder to watch than it should

• March Madness, NIL, and why college basketball feels different right now

What happens when the system becomes visible?

If you haven’t already, read Will’s full article, “Whatever happened to meet me at high noon?”

This conversation is inspired by , “Whatever happened to meet me at high noon?”, where he traces how we moved from living by the sun to living by standardized time — and never really questioned it.

What starts as a conversation about daylight savings turns into something much bigger: how systems are imposed, normalized, and eventually become invisible.

And once you see it in time, you start seeing it everywhere — in work, in sports, in culture.

If you want to go deeper, read Will’s full piece on the TIP website. It’s one of those articles that changes how you think about something you experience every single day.

Conan O’Brien said something at the Oscars that I won’t soon forget. He gave me words for a feeling I’ve had for a long time, but never been able to name. It’s the feeling of opening a bottle of champagne on a random Tuesday night for no particular reason. As he lead off the broadcast he said, “We celebrate not because we believe all is well, but because we work and hope for better times.” It’s not optimism. It’s a practice. And it hit different because he wasn’t performing it. He has such a huge personality, it’s easy to tell when he isn’t acting. Thank you Conan; that meant a lot.

That’s what this week felt like. BTS came back after mandatory service and a quarter-million people showed up in the rain. Afroman wore a flag suit to court and won. College kids nobody recruited ran back a 19-point deficit on national television. None of those people waited for permission. They just kept working.

I don’t know what your version of that is right now. Maybe it’s small. Maybe it’s just getting through the week without losing your mind. That counts. The point isn’t scale, it’s direction. Keep pushing toward good, even when good doesn’t seem to be pushing back.

We’ll be here next week. Same place. Still standing.

What we carried this week...

This week brings Episode 15 where we have a conversations ranging from labor unions collaborating to fight league products to how we even tell time.

• We get into CBAs (MLB and WNBA), the NBA’s watchability problem, Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game, March Madness, and NIL’s quiet reshaping of college basketball.

• Will continues to post cryptic messages and screen shots about his March Madness simulator, so we still don’t really know if it’s real or not.

• And the world kept moving. BTS came back with ARIRANG and a quarter-million people in Seoul.

• Afroman beat seven deputies in court.

• And the college basketball tournament opened with the kind of chaos that makes you remember why you filled out a bracket in the first place.

CBAs: Same Word, Completely Different Fight

Two collective bargaining agreements are happening at the same time, the MLB and the WNBA. The comparison reveals more than either story does alone. MLB’s current CBA expires after the 2026 season, and ownership is pushing a hard salary cap in the $260–280 million range with a floor around $140–160 million. The MLBPA, led by Tony Clark, remains firmly opposed and the last time a cap fight went this far, it cost the sport the 1994 season. Meanwhile, the WNBA and WNBPA reached a verbal agreement on a new CBA after more than a year of negotiations. The new deal jumps the salary cap from $1.5 million to $7 million, with the supermax rising from $249K to $1.4 million. Housing, a flashpoint when the league tried to remove it from the deal, is guaranteed through at least 2028.

MLB players are negotiating how to split massive revenue. WNBA players are still fighting over whether the system reflects the value they’re already creating. Same word, completely different reality.

Bam scored 83 Points and pretty much everyone hates it

Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Wizards on March 10, which is the second-highest single-game total in NBA history behind Wilt Chamberlain’s 100. He shot 20-for-43 from the field and set NBA records with 36-for-43 from the free throw line. But the conversation wasn’t about the number. With the Heat up 27, the team began intentionally fouling Washington to stop the clock and feed Bam. Much the same happened with Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 (but we don’t talk about it like that anymore). Every record is engineered to some degree. We just don’t like seeing how it’s made.

The NBA Is Hard to Watch Right Now

The Bam conversation opened up a bigger one: the NBA’s product feels broken. Too many games, too much content posing as competition, officiating that feels designed for gambling optics rather than basketball. The regular season has become background noise and we find ourselves checking highlights for rather than sitting down for a watch (and forget buying tickets). Steph proposed solutions: shorten the season, keep the in-season tournament, create real stakes, stop optimizing for volume.

Fans don’t want more basketball. They want basketball that matters.

March Madness Opened With Chaos

The tournament’s first day delivered. VCU erased a 19-point second-half deficit to beat North Carolina 82-78 in overtime. It’s the largest first-round comeback in tournament history. High Point knocked off Wisconsin 83-82, with a player whose stat line all season was built on threes hitting the shots that mattered most. Meanwhile, ESPN published a piece arguing that NIL and the transfer portal are making upsets rarer by concentrating talent at the top and then the bracket immediately proved it wrong.

BTS Came Back, and 260,000 People Showed Up

BTS released ARIRANG on March 20, which is their first album in nearly four years. Why you ask? They had to complete mandatory military service. The next day, they performed a free public concert at Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square, live-streamed globally on Netflix, with an estimated 260,000 people in attendance. An 82-date world tour is already sold out, with Live Nation projecting it could rival the Eras Tour in scale.

Like not understanding the scale of soccer on the global scale, BTS and K-POP are something many American’s just don’t quite get.

Afroman Won

An Ohio jury cleared Afroman (Joseph Foreman) on all 13 claims after seven Adams County sheriff’s deputies sued him for $4 million. In 2022, they raided his house on drug trafficking and kidnapping allegations, found nothing, left him $400 short, and filed no charges. Afroman used his home surveillance footage to make a series of satirical music videos including the viral “Lemon Pound Cake.” The deputies sued for defamation and invasion of privacy. After a three-day trial, the jury sided with Afroman on every count. He wore an American flag suit to court.

They raided his house, found nothing, and then spent three years trying to make him pay for having a camera and a sense of humor about it. Go see the videos yourself.

Thanks for reading — we’ll see you soon.

— Will, Steph, & Jamie

The Academy handed nominations to Delroy Lindo, Jacob Elordi, Stellan Skarsgård, Rose Byrne, Wunmi Mosaku, and Renate Reinsve. These are names that most casual moviegoers can’t pick out of a lineup. Sinners broke the all-time nomination record with 16. While Ryan Coogler is no stranger to the Oscars, a vampire-blue film certainly is. And what about Wicked: For Good? It was the biggest franchise play of the year (and sequel to a film that earned 10 nominations and two Oscars just twelve months ago). It was shut out completely: zero nominations.

This wasn’t just a bad year for the old guard. This feels like someone is closing the door.

We got a usual and predicable reaction from the nominations. Some people were snubbed, then varying outrage ensues. Pundits entrenched in ‘Old Hollywood’ assume that the Academy made some sort of a mistake, that voters got it wrong, that something broke in the process. But nothing broke. The machine is working exactly as designed, it’s just being operated by different people now.

Generational turnover in institutions doesn’t happen gradually. It happens in bursts.

Here’s a fact nobody’s talking about: the Academy nearly doubled its membership in under a decade. In 2012, the organization had roughly 5,800 members who were 94% white, 77% male, with a median age of 62. After the #OscarsSoWhite reckonings of 2015 and 2016, the Academy launched an aggressive expansion with record-setting invitation classes year after year, pulling in younger filmmakers, more women, more international voices, more people of color. By 2025, membership exceeded 11,000 with dramatically different demographics (+10% women, and +24% non-white)

That’s not a minor tweak. That’s a recipe for a regime change.

New members vote differently than old ones. Not because they’re trying to make a statement, but because they have different points of view, different canons, different definitions of what extraordinary looks like. Nearly half the voting body joined in the last eight years. A Ryan Coogler vampire-blues film earning more nominations than any movie in Oscar history isn’t an aberration. It’s the new membership expressing its taste at scale for the first time.

Some of the sharpest evidence might be Hamnet. The film earned eight nominations for Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao, Best Actress for Jessie Buckley, and Best Adapted Screenplay among others. It succeeded by every measure the Academy uses. But it didn’t carry the old model of stardom. The film worked because it was good and it hit with audiences (much like Anora did last year); these films didn’t need a mega-name to guarantee their nomination. They were great stories, well written, with strong directing, and strength in acting.

Look at the supporting actor category.

• Delroy Lindo at 73 years old, over 50 films deep, famously snubbed for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. He finally gets his first nomination.

• Stellan Skarsgård at 74, more than 200 credits, the first supporting actor nominee ever from an international film and he gets his first nod too.

• Wunmi Mosaku with her first Oscar nomination, for Sinners. Best known for her TV work in Loki and Lovecraft Country). In the old world of Hollywood, moving from TV to movie recognition can be a life long battle.

• Jacob Elordi, who most people still associate with a Netflix teen franchise, earns his first nomination for playing the Creature in del Toro’s Frankenstein.

These aren’t sentimental picks. They’re a voting body with different eyes looking at the same industry and seeing different things.

That's what this Oscar class is really about. For decades, Hollywood's gatekeepers controlled the pipeline and decided what got made, who got seen, and which stories counted. The doors to the premium rooms were locked. We played along because the system felt like a relationship. You watched Clooney and Roberts enough times that they started to feel like people you knew. The star system wasn't just marketing. It was a substitution for connection; a curated, sanitized version of culture designed to land softly in suburban living rooms.

The pipeline is cracked now.

The same phone where you streamed Sinners can stream Sentimental Value (a Norwegian family drama most Americans never would have heard of ten years ago). The stories don't need permission from a room full of old white men to reach you anymore. When people get access to the full range of what film can be, not just what a handful of executives decided plays, Oscar nominee’s get pick differently. The Academy didn't break. It just started reflecting a world where culture isn't filtered through three cable channels and a multiplex.

That’s what this Oscar class is telling you. It’s a reminder that the world is changing and the lasting effects of the internet are only starting. The snub list isn’t a list of who got unlucky. It’s a roster of who hasn’t figured out that the club has new owners and the new owners aren’t interested in legacy pricing.

This was a week about clocks; real ones and metaphorical. We published Whatever happened to, “meet me at high noon?”, which traces how we surrendered our relationship with the sun to a railroad logistics decision made in 1883 and never looked back. Daylight savings hit this weekend and the article landed right on time (pun absolutely intended). No episode this week, but the Oscars are Sunday and we’ve got thoughts including a full article coming Saturday on what A-list talent got shut out and if that means something more than just simple politics.

The Clock Isn’t Yours

In Whatever happened to, “meet me at high noon?”, we traced timekeeping from monks ringing bells by candlelight, through the railroads imposing four time zones on a continent, to the DST policy we can’t seem to kill. The core finding: DST doesn’t save energy. It costs about as much as it saves, and heart attacks spike 10% the week after the spring transition. The real problem isn’t the clock change, it’s the assumption that work and school schedules are fixed and the only lever we can pull is the clock itself. British Columbia just ditched clock changes permanently after 93% of surveyed residents said stop.

The takeaway: A coordination problem gets solved by whoever has the power to impose a standard, and then the standard becomes invisible and you stop noticing it.

Unrivaled Sold Out. The WNBA Can’t Agree on Housing.

Unrivaled sold out the semis, 21,490 in Philly, 18,261 in Brooklyn, over $2 million in ticket revenue between two stops. The demand for women’s basketball is not theoretical anymore. Meanwhile, the WNBA and the players’ union blew past the March 10 CBA deadline with no deal. Players want 26% of gross revenue. The league is offering 70% of net, which sounds generous until you realize “net” means they subtract everything first. They’re still fighting over housing.

The takeaway: The proof of concept is everywhere. The investment to match it is not. A lockout, the first in league history, is still on the table.

Kanye’s Back at SoFi. Two Nights Now.

Kanye announced a SoFi Stadium show in LA on April 3rd. Then demand hit and he added a second night April 1. Tickets starting at $200 (good luck getting them that cheap). The album is called Bully, which… say less. This is a man who spent the last three years saying the worst things out loud, and 70,000 seats still aren’t enough. Accountability was never the point of celebrity. The point is proximity. And proximity doesn’t require forgiveness.

The takeaway: The music still matters to people we love, and the man behind it keeps daring us to stop caring. Both things are real. We still processing but already talked through Ye’s Paid Apology (Not a Verdict) and JAŸ-Z and the Cost of Re-Entry and we’re definitely not done on this one.

Substack Wants to Be the Whole Studio

Substack launched a built-in recording studio this week; solo video, up to two guests, auto-generated clips and thumbnails, screen sharing, all native. They already own the subscriber relationship, the payment layer, and the distribution feed. Now they own the production tool too. Creators using audio or video are growing revenue 50% faster than those who aren’t. The play isn’t competing with Riverside or Spotify. The play is: why would a journalist with 20,000 subscribers ever need a network again?

The takeaway: It’s a question legacy outlets don’t want to answer. Substack just made it harder to avoid.

Oscar Preview: The A-List Shutout

The Oscars are Sunday. Here’s the preview: this year’s nominations tell a story about what the Academy actually rewards, and it’s not star power. We’re also pulling in some thoughts from our BAFTA-focused episode — Ep14 covered BAFTAs, Tourette’s, and Hamnet, and some of those threads connect directly to what’s happening at the Oscars this weekend.

Listen to Ep14 — BAFTAs, Tourettes, and Hamnet — our BAFTA conversation that sets up this weekend’s Oscars

Bam Scored 83. Everyone Lost Their Minds. Both Are Worth Examining.

Bam Adebayo put up 83 points against the Wizards on Tuesday, the second-most in NBA history behind Wilt’s 100. He passed Kobe. And immediately, the discourse split into two camps: historic achievement versus manufactured stat line.

Here’s what actually happened: Bam had 62 by the end of the third. The Heat were up big. And instead of pulling him, Spoelstra kept feeding. The team intentionally fouled Washington on defense to get the ball back faster. Bam went 36-for-43 from the line; both NBA records. He was fouled 26 times in a single game. The Wizards threw quadruple teams at him in the fourth quarter while Gordon Hayward called it “not legit” and ESPN’s Tim MacMahon called it “hideous basketball.”

Here’s what bothers me about the reaction: nobody questions when a system is engineered to protect a star’s legacy. Front offices tank entire seasons for draft picks and we call it strategy. But when a team engineers a single game to let a player do something historic, suddenly it’s an ethics debate. Tyrese Haliburton had the best response — he said it finally made him believe Wilt’s 100 actually happened in almost the same way as Bam’s 83. Of course it was engineered too. They all are. The question isn’t whether the system helped. It’s whether we’re honest about how much systems always help.

The takeaway: Every historic stat line is a collaboration between talent and circumstance. We just don’t like admitting it.

We’re still standing

We lost an hour this weekend. The clocks changed, the coffee hit different, and Monday morning felt like a personal attack. But that’s the rhythm of life these days ins’t it? We adjust, recalibrate, and keep moving. This week felt like a gut punch, and we have a few things to look forward too. Next week we’ve got Oscars coverage (which we’ll ALL have a lot to say about), more from the WNBA situation as it develops, and we’re settling into a frequency that feels right.

See you next week.

— Will, Steph, & Jamie

I’m not lazy. My body is just still paying attention to the sun, and our clocks stopped doing that a long time ago.

You used to live by the sun. Everyone did.

Picture a medieval village. Nobody owns a clock. Why would they? Each day has a rhythm set by light: you get up at dawn, eat when the sun is overhead, stop when it gets dark. A monk watches shadows on a sundial and decides when to ring the bell. Those bells tell you when to pray, when to eat, when to come in from the fields.

The bells in your village don't need to match the bells in the next village over, because you're never going to both villages in the same day. Time is local because life is local. It works for centuries.

Now look at what we replaced that with.

We have an atomic clock in Colorado, NIST-F4, so precise that if it had started running 100 million years ago it would be off by less than a second today. We went from monks eyeballing candle stubs to a machine measuring cesium atoms vibrating 9.2 billion times per second. And we use it to tell 330 million Americans the wrong time twice a year.

In a lot of ways, it’s no better than those monks and their candles.

Local time was railroaded.

The railroads killed local time not because local time was bad, but because trains moved faster than the problem could tolerate. Two trains, one track, different time standards and the margin for error was minutes. The consequences were bodies. In 1883 the major rail companies in the US and Canada imposed four time zones and America reset its clocks. Congress caught up 35 years later. By then it was already just the way things are.

Daylight saving time arrived in 1918, packaged as wartime fuel conservation. Farmers rejected it on contact. Hired hands arrived an hour earlier by the clock, but crops still had morning dew. You can’t harvest wet grain no matter what time the government says it is. Congress repealed it the following year. It came back for WWII, disappeared after, became a patchwork, got standardized in 1966.

A messy story at best. Day Light Savings time is series of coordination decisions that slowly buried the sun under phrases like, “it’s just business.”

Once again, the Roman empire

The Romans, for what it’s worth, never made that tradeoff. They divided daylight into twelve hours regardless of season — a summer “hour” lasted about 75 minutes, a winter “hour” about 44. Their schedules flexed with the sun rather than the other way around.

We find that quaint and simple now. We have cesium atoms. We have precision. But, they had solar noon and a connection to the day we’ll never know.

Nobody voted to stop living by the sun. It was easier for business to move the clock than to ask harder questions about schedules, about work, about what we’re actually optimizing for. We trade for decisions like this all the time. We traded sleep for the electric light bulb. We traded fertile and abundant topsoil for higher corn yields. We traded the starts in the night sky for the ability to leave the lights on.

Nobody voted on any of it. It just kept being easier to take the thing that was offered rather than to ask what we were giving up.

High noon used to mean something specific: the sun, directly overhead, where you stood. A great time for a gun fight on the high street right outside the saloon. Now it’s just a wrong number we inherited from the railroads.

We didn’t lose it. We traded it. We just didn’t know we were negotiating.

This year’s field was the most competitive I’ve seen in five years of doing this. A brand new team, a couple of genuine reinventions, and one car that refused to change at all. Let’s get into it.

The first review and ranking

1. Cadillac - it’s so different than what I’m used to seeing with F1 cars. As my wife puts it, “it’s giving a real Cruella de Vil vibe” and it feels like the car could be a villain this year. And with Sergio Perez and his aggressive driving style behind the wheel, I’ll bet you’ll see just that.

2. Audi - Bold. Clean. Striking. It photographs so well. I love the “lava red” and their use of it as an accent throughout the car. Very few notes for me here. Clearly a car marketed toward men with dark colors and sharp lines, and I’m happy to play into that bias on this one.

3. Ferrari - This is a race car. I didn’t realize at first how much it was a throwback to their older cars, which I’m always a sucker for. I understand they’re in a tricky spot with HP as a sponsor (that blue and the Ferrari red don’t exactly go together), and I think their commitment to using more white from their older car styles has really paid off.

4. Haas - A definite upgrade. It has some real punch now. They’ve done well with their sponsor integration. It looks much less like something from NASCAR masquerading in Formula 1. I’m excited to see it move.

5. Red Bull - A master class in how subtle changes can make such a huge difference: the texture of the blue, the deepening of color, and the advancement of yellow and red to expand the logos. For the first time in a long time, I think the Red Bull looks genuinely good.

6. Mercedes - I’m intrigued, but not instantly in love. It looks like it has a lot of potential, but the photos have left me wanting more. It feels both similar and different than last year and I can’t quite put my finger on it, which is all reflected in its place in the rankings.

7. Williams - I initially liked the lighter blue, looks fast; but after watching it for a while my enjoyment wore off. The blues seem to clash just ever so slightly, which is what’s throwing me off.

8. Aston Martin - Can we please stop calling this “racing green” -- it’s teal. Racing green is deeper and richer. What AM have done here can only properly be called, “an interpretation.” In serious notes, I do like the new use of the neon yellow. It makes the car look much more dynamic and much less flat. We’ll have to see what it looks like on the track to tell for sure.

9. Alpine - I love the depth of the metallic blue, but for me, it makes the flat bubble gum pink just that much more disappointing. Make the pink more dynamic and I’d probably love it.

10. Racing Bulls (VCARB): Welp here we go. Someone needs to be second to last. I think it’s the same car as last year? Right? If not; ooof -- this isn’t very good. How is it that I feel like there’s nothing on this car, while at the same time there so much going on?

11. McLaren - Yep. Looks the same. I didn’t like it last year either.

The Battles on the track, Play by play

Round 1

Aston Martin v Alpine: I thought initially that the Alpine would take this one. It moves nicely on the track and the metallic blue has great depth that pulls my eye to it. But, the pink still takes me out of it. It’s just too flat. The Aston Martin looked rough in the garage. That teal blue doesn’t look great under the garage lights, but it popped on the track. The neon highlights add more intrigue as the car moves and the view changes through corners. Winner: Aston Martin

Williams v Racing Bulls: Yep. the Racing Bulls is a weird non-upgrade from last year. Winner: Williams

McLaren v Mercedes: No contest. Winner: Mercedes

Round 2

Haas v Red Bull: A match up between two teams who took a car and advanced its existing design. No major changes, just a deepening and enhancement. Haas’s new sponsor, color, slight asymmetry -- all lovely. The Red Bull’s subtle texture which adds to the richness of their color differences; chef’s kiss. Winner: Red Bull

Aston Martin v Cadillac: Pretty easy for me on this one. The Aston is greatly improved, but the Cadillac just might be the runaway for me. Winner: Cadillac

Williams v Audi: This one almost made me sad. Williams is my favorite team and seeing their improved car next to the dominant and clear look of the Audi was like seeing your hero get punched in the face. They’re still your hero, but who is that newcomer exactly?! Winner: Audi

Mercedes v Ferrari: A match up of titans. Classic throw back versus advancing modernism. In a way, they both played to their history. Ferrari provided a more literal interpretation, Mercedes played with a more figurative use of silver to hint at “the silver arrows.” Both paths can be fraught with peril and in bad news for me, each team executed their vision at the highest level. While a love a good throwback, the subtle nod to the silver arrows got me in the end. Winner: Mercedes

Round 3 - Losers Bracket

Yes; it’s double elimination

Racing Bulls v Red Bull: The match up these two cars put such an amazing spotlight on the fact that Racing Bulls is “Red Bull Lite” and is not to be taken seriously as a competitor. It’s a B Team, the G League, or a AAA Baseball farm team -- I’m baffled as to how Red Bull is still allowed to have 2 teams on the grid. Winner: Red Bull

McLaren v Aston Martin: Yep. It’s still the same McLaren. Winner: Aston Martin

Alpine v Ferrari: Surprisingly harder to decide than I initially thought. The Alpine has really grown on me. The blue is something else. But, the pink. The pink just looks lazy next to it. The Ferrari on the other hand, designed to match energy from stem to stern. Winner: Ferrari

Round 4

Haas v Cadillac: Two predominantly black and white cars. What a fun match up. The Cadillac seems settled into its villain era (in my mind at least) and the upgraded look of the Haas in comparison just looks a little under-designed to me. Almost as though they’re still searching for their true identity. Winner: Cadillac

Audi v Mercedes: Oooof. This is gonna be rough, but we have a long ways to go, so I pulled the trigger quickly. Audi’s clean lines and powerful use of color won it quickly for me. Winner: Audi

Round 5a - Back to the Losers

Red Bull v Aston Martin: After looking at it for a while, it’s clear the Aston Martin team put in a good amount of work on the livery design for this year’s car, but the subtle perfection of the Red Bull just smothered the efforts of AM for me. Winner: Red Bull

Williams v Ferrari: This one really highlighted the difference between classic and new. For me on this one, classic wins out. Perhaps it’s a bias I should fight more; but not today. Winner: Ferrari

Round 5b - More Losers

Mercedes v Red Bull: A classic F1 matchup from the last decade on track. This felt fun just to think about. Surprisingly enough, I found a moment where they were next to each other on track. They’re super close to me, but Mercedes is just a little more dynamic and interesting. Just slightly. Winner: Mercedes

Haas v Ferrari: Harder to decide than I thought it would be. The Haas really does look fast and fun this year, but in the end the neatly appointed Ferrari just plays to my love for the classics. Winner: Ferrari

Round 6

Cadillac v Audi: This matchup brought something into light for me. I love the Cadillac, but mainly in photos. The stark contrast to the Audi’s strong, simple, and clean design just made the Caddy look a little messy to me and I’m not sure I can unsee it. Winner: Audi

Round 7a - So close, losers

Mercedes v Ferrari: Here we are again. A rematch to be back into the final. And sadly for Ferrari my feelings haven’t changed; they’ve deepened. Seeing the Mercedes move around that track has done something to my mind. Winner: Mercedes

Round 7b - The last loser challenge, can they redeem themselves?!

Cadillac v Mercedes: A tough one for me. While I loved the Cadillac at the start of all this, I can’t unsee the “messiness” of the design on the track. If you catch it in the right light, it almost looks like the wing is broken. Matching that against the Mercedes was no contest for me. Winner: Mercedes

The Final - Audi v Mercedes

Another rematch. I had to go deep on this one.

Most of testing is in the light of day, so I went deep to find night time footage to break the tie. It was made clear when I saw them moving through the corners under the lights.

The Audi with flashes of color and a deep, dark matte body looked quick, dynamic, and powerful. The Mercedes looked like it was dancing across the track. The shine of the light played off the texture of the car almost as though they’d designed each Mercedes logo splash, the silver arrow fletching, and sponsor mark to specifically play into the lights on track at Bahrain.

It took me a full 30 minutes walking around the house to decide on this one.

Winner: Mercedes

Mercedes wasn’t my pick going in. They were sixth in my initial rankings — intriguing but unproven. But that’s what the tournament is for. Photos lie. Garage lighting lies. The track tells the truth, and the Mercedes told a story I couldn’t stop watching. Five years of this game and I’ve never had a winner climb from that far back in the seedings.

My new swag gets here tomorrow, just in time for the season opener. Year five, fourth different winner. The system works.

Go check them out for yourself! Here are all F1 Cars on Track made by the lovely people at Formula 1.

What car was your favorite?

Jay-Z’s umlaut pops up again — JAŸ-Z — and Steph and Will treat it like an operator signal: a subtle, coordinated move across platforms that makes the ecosystem react. They connect that kind of “signal” behavior to Ye’s paid Wall Street Journal apology as a premium-room strategy: not optimized for the timeline, but for the financiers, insurers, and gatekeepers who decide what gets funded.

RELATED: Smoke Break Episode 1 (our first processing session on Ye’s WSJ apology): https://www.takeitpersonalpodcast.com/p/processing-yes-paid-apology-not-a

QUESTION
What random subject do you secretly know too much about?

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QUESTION
What’s your verdict: iconic, underrated, or just “fine”?

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We talk about the big ad themes (hello crypto/AI), the spots we actually remember, and the ones that mysteriously didn’t show up. Then we go full deep-dive on Bad Bunny’s halftime performance — sugar cane symbolism, a real on-field wedding twist, surprise appearances (yes, Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin), and the flags finale that gave actual goosebumps.

After that, we pivot to the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies: why the celebrity choices felt confusing, Shaun White’s “infomercial energy” in the booth, and the Lindsey Vonn discourse — comeback mentality, risk, crash mechanics, and why the 40+ crowd felt seen.

FOLLOW / WATCH / LISTEN

• TikTok + YouTube + Substack

QUESTION FOR YOU

What was your #1 halftime moment — the wedding twist, the light poles/power grid, or the flags finale?

Leave a comment

Just like I did in my sister article on this topic about sports, there are a few things you should know about me before we unpack this. I’m almost 20 years into a corporate professional life. I’ve worked at well funded startups, bootstrapped small companies, lifestyle businesses, big companies, global companies, and I’ve been through 5 acquisitions, mergers, and/or hostile takeovers. I switched careers and industries from architecture and engineering consulting to software development. In that time I’ve seen many companies and cultures behave in different (and some wild) ways, and learned that it’s not hard to spot the ones that are on an upward, or downward trajectory if you’re looking for the right things.

I’ve learned this one truth: the difference between a company that’s struggling and one that’s dying isn’t always obvious from the quarterly earnings. It’s in how decisions get made, who has power, and whether anyone actually owns outcomes when things go wrong.

Spot the pattern

Corporate oligarchies are born out of dysfunctional “transformation.” Through change and ill-planning, organizations sabotaged themselves until enough bad actors get into executive level positions.

Defining this mess

There’s a crucial distinction between two types of failing companies that feel similar from the inside but have very different trajectories:

Type 1: The Oligarchy

Corporate Oligarchies are blind to their own mistakes. They have LOTS of high-paid executives, no responsibility down the chain, and everyone is just there to make the C-Suite feel placated; not actually deliver results. These companies are very often riding the strength of their brand, straight into the ground.

A direct quote from my life; “if there’s a feature you think we should build, just make it sound like [the CEO’s idea] and you’ll get to work on it.”

That quote was from the COO and they gave it to me like it was golden insider advice. It was instead the final straw that broke this camel’s back.

Some key characteristics to watch out for.

• Executives genuinely don’t know what customers want. If you hear the phrase, “we’re working on a strategy to figure out what our customers need” come out of your executive’s mouth you should be worried. Unless you’re at a startup. In that case, it’s totally normal.

• You live in decision-making theater where endless presentations barely change from meeting to meeting. You can spot this when the format changes for every audience (Powerpoint, to Word Doc, to Excel, back to Powerpoint), but the conversation and the content within never progresses.

• Merit and output quality are completely disconnected from advancement and high performers exit while political operators accumulate.

Type 2: Aggressive Capitalism

Aggressively Capitalistic Organizations (you can think of this as though Private Equity Executives disguised themselves as industry titans) understand exactly how powerful the brand is and they’re extracting maximum value which leads to its collapse.

Key characteristics:

• Major job cuts executed swiftly where entire divisions are moved or eliminated overnight

• Massive projects get cancelled based on dubious ROI analysis or when they cut something “for tax reasons”

• The same board of directors follows executives from company to company live a roving band of vikings pillaging an industry

• Everything can be explained as calculated extraction, dressed up as “efficiency”

How to identify which type you’re in

The town hall temperature test: Spot the difference by how people leave company-wide meetings.

• If people are complaining about what assholes the executives are → Aggressively Capitalistic. The executives know what they’re doing and don’t care that you hate it.

• If people are leaving feeling like they just saw the same presentation for the sixth time and the main point of the meeting seemed to be to announce 3 brand new executives → Oligarchy. Nobody knows what they’re doing and everyone’s pretending they do.

Corporate oligarchies aren’t random dysfunction. They’re a structural transformation with historical precedent. They can form and are sustained partly because of the same cognitive bias pattern we saw in sports organizations.

• Fundamental Attribution Error (where people blame individuals more than a system or team) makes workers blame individual executives for systemic failures. “If only we had a better CEO,” people say, when the real problem is the power structure that makes access more valuable than output.

• Diffusion of Responsibility (where there’s no individual responsibility, so everyone blames everyone else for dysfunction) protects executives from accountability. Decision-making gets concentrated in small groups high up the chain of command, but when things fail or don’t move the fingers get pointed back down the chain and everyone starts doing just enough not to get fired.

The result is the same loop: workers blame individuals while the oligarchic structure escapes scrutiny. The system protects itself.

How companies sabotage themselves into oligarchy

Before we look at the famous failures, it’s worth understanding how organizations create the conditions for oligarchic takeover. And I’m not kidding about the sabotage part.

The CIA’s 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual was designed to teach ordinary citizens how to disrupt enemy organizations from within. What’s darkly funny is that it reads like almost any corporate employee handbook when it’s really the blueprint for modern corporate dysfunction. A note to readers; this isn’t the first time I reference this document; I’m a broken record with it because the patterns are so easily recognizable.

Here’s what organizational sabotage looks like when mapped to modern corporate life:

1. Obsess over process: Insist that every task or decision follows rigid “processes” or “approval workflows.” Discourage any form of expedited action, citing the need for compliance or risk mitigation.

2. Committee paralysis: Delegate decisions to large committees under the guise of inclusivity. Advocate for endless brainstorming sessions and evaluations, ensuring no action moves forward without exhaustive review.

3. Demand documentation for everything: Require detailed written instructions for every task, regardless of simplicity. Use ambiguities in instructions to justify delays or revisions.

4. Perfectionism on low-stakes work: Demand flawless results on trivial deliverables while overlooking critical flaws in major projects.

5. Meeting mania: Schedule frequent meetings during peak productivity hours and ensure they run over time. Prioritize “updates” over actionable discussions.

Sound familiar? That’s because most modern companies have accidentally recreated these conditions without outside enemies. They’ve sabotaged themselves.

When too much change happens too fast for an organization like restructuring, mergers, and “transformation initiatives,” weak, or bad, or selfish hires can end up in charge. The company weakens and becomes susceptible to takeover, either by a bureaucratic oligarchy that genuinely doesn’t know what it’s doing (but are getting paid insanely to play like they do), or by private equity cosplaying as totally normal corporate executives, who knows exactly what they’re doing.

Why do these companies not fall apart faster?

You might wonder how companies can sustain this level of dysfunction for years.

The answer: brands are more important than you realize.

A strong brand and company can live off the shoulders of its originators for a LONG ASS TIME. Customers who’ve trusted a brand for decades keep buying out of habit. Suppliers keep working with you because switching costs are high. Employees keep working there because the name looks good on a resume and “the job market is tough right now.”

This creates a grace period where the oligarchy can operate with impunity. The company isn’t making good decisions, but it doesn’t have to. It’s coasting on brand equity built by people who left or retired years ago.

Eventually that equity runs out. But “eventually” can be a decade or more.

When oligarchies fail: General Electric

General Electric under Jack Welch provides a clear example. Between 1981 and 2001, Welch fired over 170,000 employees while GE’s market value soared from $14 billion to $600 billion. Wall Street loved him. Fortune magazine named him “Manager of the Century.”

But Welch built an oligarchy. He implemented "stack ranking”; automatically firing the bottom 10% of employees every year regardless of absolute performance. He slashed GE’s American workforce by half while nearly doubling its foreign workforce. He turned the company from a manufacturing powerhouse into a financial services firm, with GE Capital accounting for 40% of revenue and 60% of profit by the time he retired.

Access to Welch mattered more than ideas. Political skill mattered more than domain expertise. The company optimized for quarterly earnings and shareholder value while gutting the systems that created actual value.

When Welch retired in 2001, his succession process triggered a mass exodus of bitter executive talent. His handpicked successor, Jeffrey Immelt, presided over GE’s collapse. By 2017, Immelt stepped down and GE stocks posted their strongest growth in months just from the announcement. The company eventually split into three separate entities, unwinding Welch’s empire.

The oligarchy had a shelf life. Innovation died when access mattered more than ideas. Talent left when merit stopped correlating with advancement. Strategic blindness set in from echo chambers at the top. The terminal phase was insiders extracting value while the ship sank.

GE is a textbook oligarchy failure: the executives genuinely believed in what they were doing. They thought stack ranking created excellence. They thought financialization was innovation. They were wrong, but they believed it. That’s the difference from what happened at Sears.

Sears: When oligarchy turns to extraction

Eddie Lampert allegedly took oligarchy to its logical endpoint. After buying Sears in 2005, he didn’t just prioritize access over output. According to allegations in ongoing litigation, he stripped billions in assets from the company and transferred them to himself while serving as CEO, chairman, largest creditor, and landlord simultaneously.

Sears sued Lampert in 2019, alleging he “transferred billions of dollars of the Company’s assets to its shareholders for grossly inadequate consideration or no consideration at all.”

The alleged pattern was methodical:

• He allegedly sold Sears’ best 266 retail properties to a real estate investment trust he controlled, Seritage Growth Properties, in deals that allegedly undervalued the properties by at least $649 million. Sears then paid rent back to Lampert’s company.

• He allegedly rejected a $1.6 billion offer for Lands’ End from private equity in favor of spinning it off in a way that preserved his equity stake, netting ESL Investments at least $490 million while Sears got far less value.

• He sold the Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker for $900 million in 2017, stripping Sears of one of its most valuable assets.

Through it all, Lampert’s hedge fund allegedly owned roughly $2.66 billion in Sears debt, generating $200-225 million per year in interest payments from the dying company. When Sears filed for bankruptcy in 2018, Lampert bought it back through his hedge fund for $5.2 billion, acquiring the remaining assets.

The lawsuit eventually settled for $175 million in 2022. Lampert still has a net worth of $2.2 billion. The 175,000 workers who lost their jobs over that decade got nothing.

This is what the end stage can look like: not an oligarchy that doesn’t know what it’s doing, but one person, and a board to back them up, who knows exactly what they’re doing. Whether Sears started as an oligarchy or was always targeted for extraction is unclear. What’s clear is that it ended as methodical value extraction by someone holding every position of power simultaneously.

The warning signs

You can spot this transformation in your company before it reaches terminal phase. The pattern is predictable:

• Decision-making groups get smaller and less diverse. Strategy sessions become performance theater for decisions made elsewhere, in private. The org chart matters less than “who has the CEO’s ear.” New initiatives require executive sponsorship regardless of merit.

• Resource allocation follows relationships, not business cases. Projects with executive champions get greenlit despite weak fundamentals. High-performing teams get gutted to fund pet projects. Budget and headcount flow to whoever has access to power.

• Information becomes currency instead of shared resource. “Need to know” replaces transparency. Unofficial channels like Slack DMs, dinners, and golf games matter more than official ones. Knowledge hoarding gets rewarded over knowledge sharing.

• Merit signals break down completely. Output quality stops correlating with advancement. Political skill gets valued over domain expertise. “Cultural fit” means alignment with the power center. High performers leave. Political operators stay and advance.

• Goal posts move constantly. If you feel like performance expectations shift every time you have a review, that’s not a good sign. It means the people evaluating you don’t actually know what success looks like.

The clearest signal: if you find yourself more worried about what your executives are going to say than about output quality and whether or not your solution or feature will actually work, the transformation is already underway.

What this means for you

Understanding this pattern won’t stop it, but it explains why talented organizations fail, why your work stopped mattering, and why hope keeps getting crushed despite obvious capability on the team.

If you’re staying

Map the actual power structure, not the org chart. Track resource flow and decision authority. Build relationships with power centers while maintaining output. Understand you’re playing a different game now. But keep in mind that the game is probably outside your ability to control or even influence it now. You’ll need to mentally separate yourself and your emotions from daily work because sabotage creates uncontrollable chaos and you need to protect yourself.

If you’re leaving

When interviewing, ask questions that reveal power structure. How do decisions actually get made? Can you walk me through a recent project that got killed and why? How have resource allocation priorities changed in the last year? Watch for oligarchic patterns in the interview process itself like who makes the final call, how transparent they are about decision-making, whether they can articulate why they’re hiring for this role now.

Long-term protection

Build career insurance. Portable skills matter more in oligarchic environments because the company’s shelf life is shorter than you think. Network externally. Save aggressively. Work on side projects. Recognize when you’re optimizing for a sinking ship. Document your work extensively. When the collapse comes, and it will, you’ll need to prove your output quality to your next employer.

In an oligarchy, your internal reputation means nothing outside.

Protect your well being

Here’s what matters most: corporate oligarchies systematically destroy the conditions that support human flourishing. They make personal security precarious by constantly restructuring. Relationships become transactional because everything is about political survival. They sever the connection between effort and outcome by concentrating decisions at the top. They consume all unstructured time with performative busy-ness.

Research on civilizations that sustained both technological advancement with happiness and wellbeing (Song Dynasty China, Edo Japan, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) shows the same pattern. People in those societies had:

1. Material sufficiency (not wealth)

2. Non-transactional social bonds

3. Visible connection between effort and meaningful outcomes

4. Protected unstructured time

These four conditions reinforce each other. When one breaks, the others follow.

Corporate oligarchies break all four systematically. They’re not just bad at business. They’re machines for converting human capability into executive compensation while destroying the structural conditions that make work sustainable. That’s why recognizing oligarchic patterns isn’t important just for career survival, but for understanding when you’re investing your finite time on this earth in a system designed to extract value from you while providing nothing back.

You can’t fix the system alone. But you can see it clearly, protect yourself, and make informed decisions about where to invest your effort. And maybe, if enough people recognize the pattern, we stop treating corporate dysfunction as inevitable and start demanding the structural conditions that actually work.

From the Recording Academy’s YouTube premiere ceremony to the CBS broadcast and the group chat chaos, the 2026 Grammys revealed far more than winners and speeches.

In this episode of Take It Personal, we talk through:

• Why the pre-show felt more musically honest than the main broadcast

• How the Recording Academy’s structure shapes what gets rewarded

• The performances that worked — and the ones that didn’t

• Fashion, spectacle, and cultural signaling

• And why we kept asking the same question all night: are they okay?

This episode is less about awards — and more about how we process fame, agency, and cultural change in real time.

🎧 Listen to the full episode above.
💬 Join the conversation in the comments

Take It Personal

Episode 11 | The Impact of Sports on Identity and Community

Sports aren’t just games—they’re emotional, social, and deeply personal. In this episode of Take It Personal crew, dig into the psychology of sports: why fandom becomes part of identity, how community turns wins and losses into shared experience, and why certain sports moments stay with us for life…

Listen now

3 months ago · 2 likes · StephBee, jamie renell, and Take It Personal

Stephanie, Jamie, and I talked about sports fans who take a bigger interest in individual players versus those who focus more on teams. Personally, I’ve leaned toward teams over individuals and I can’t shake the feeling that I am missing something.

Note: if you’re not very interested in sports, but are a worker in the corporate world, I went in two directions with my curiosity. A second article is coming about how this applies to corporate America in a few days.

Before we really get into my thoughts, there’s something you should understand about my history as a sports fan. In the early days of my professional life, I spent 5+ years doing business development in building architecture and engineering. Most of my clients were universities across the southeast: University of Georgia (one of my alma maters), University of South Carolina (who I did the most work with), Clemson University, and Georgia Tech to name some of the larger schools. When you’re selling to competing schools (particularly those in the SEC), you learn pretty damn quick that smack talk is a one way street. Talking back when your client insults your team is not a very successful or well accepted sales tactic. I had to ease up on my personal allegiances and learn how to adjust my vibe based on the audience.

Learning that lesson softened my edge as a sports fan. I calmed down a bit and started to become a fan of “a really good game,” even if my team ended up losing. Somehow, this also moved me away from being a fan of specific players. As I took in more information about more teams (so I could shoot the shit with my clients), it made focusing on individuals too hard. So all that, plus a undisclosed number of years of life, get us to today.

Formula 1: The best of both worlds

If you’re not as familiar with the concept of rooting for individuals versus a team, you’re in luck! There’s a sport specifically setup to explain it. Formula 1 is structured for individual AND team competition. In each race drivers and teams earn points toward winning one of two trophies:

1. The Constructor’s Championship (awarded to the full team team with the most points at the end of each season - note that there are 2 drivers on every team)

2. The World Driver’s Championship (WDC) (awarded to the individual driver with the most points at the end of the season)

On occasion; the driver who wins the Driver’s Championship is NOT on the team that wins the Constructor’s Championship. This was the case in 2024 when Max Verstappen won the WDC and McLaren Racing won the Constructor’s.

When I watch races with friends, F1 puts our individual versus team focus on full display.

I’m a big fan of Williams Racing (partly due to the team’s history, partly because William is my name) and secondarily I like Mercedes (partly because a co-worker once complimented me as being very much like Toto Wolff and he even bought me the team shirt so I could cosplay). Depending on the weekend I may throw another team in there. Some of my favorite drivers include Carlos Sainz and Lewis Hamilton (who reignited my interest in the sport a good while ago). But on any given weekend I’m mostly interested in what’s happening with the constructors, up and down the grid. I’m far less interested in the individual drivers and the driver’s championship; though I’m super happy to gossip about them (if you’re not familiar, F1 is “The Real Housewives” but for sports).

Most of my friends like one driver, maybe two, and whatever team that driver is currently on. It seems crazy to me, but I’m starting to think I may be the weird one and there’s a world out there I could really enjoy if I find a little more balance.

In all my thinking and research about this topic, I uncovered something interesting: both approaches to fandom have blind spots. And when you understand those blind spots, you start to see why some sports organizations fail over and over again and why fans keep getting disappointed despite obvious talent on the roster.

The Biases That Break Sports

If you focus on individual players, you’re probably guilty of something called the Fundamental Attribution Error. It’s a pattern where people will over attribute others’ behaviors to personality while under attributing the situation or context. Applied to sports: fans blame individual players for team failures. Players get called lazy, chokers, whatever, when the system (front office decisions, roster construction, culture) is doing the actual damage.

Let’s us Jamie’s example from the podcast. Bill Buckner committed an error in game 6 of the 1986 World Series that lost the game. The final score of the game was 6 to 5. Bill error didn’t cause the other 5 runs the Mets scored. He didn’t give up all the other runs, in all the other games that the Red Sox lost, but all we remember is his one error and Red Sox fans will say to this day, “Bill Buckner lost the 86 World Series.”

Fans blame players because that’s how human brains default. Personality over situation. Front offices exploit that by building rosters around star names knowing fans will absorb the blame when it doesn’t work.

But the people who focus on teams (like me) fall victim to another bias: Diffusion of Responsibility. When there’s not enough individual accountability on a team, players don’t feel responsible for their actions and are more likely to loaf. In hierarchical structures, accountability gets diluted across layers and nobody owns the failure.

On the roster, this can play out in real time. In research on team collapse, athletes described how responsibility gets handed off from one player to another in difficult situations. Players pass the ball and then “hide a little.” Think of all the basketball clips you’ve ever seen when someone is just walking back to get on defense. Everyone thinks “I don’t wanna be the one to make the mistake,” or “someone else will cover it.”

When a team is built around stars rather than a team culture, there’s no shared accountability structure to counteract this. Nobody owns the moment.

In the front office, and I’m looking at you Atlanta sports, the pattern is even clearer. In hierarchical structures, people can diffuse accountability to those with greater responsibility and a higher level in the structure. Any time you’ve ever heard someone say, “I need my boss’s approval on this,” they’re taking part in diffusing responsibility. “Followers” don’t take accountability because they feel they have lower status (or have been explicitly told that they have lower status). The GM defers to ownership, the coaching staff defers to the GM, and when it all falls apart, nobody’s fingerprints are on the gun. The decision to prioritize player value over team building isn’t one person’s call. It’s the culture in the front office where everyone assumes someone else is thinking about the bigger picture.

That’s the direct connection: Fundamental Attribution Error explains why fans blame players. Diffusion of Responsibility explains why the front office never gets held accountable for building the wrong team in the first place. The loop closes. And nowhere is that loop more visible than in Atlanta.

The Pattern: Asset-Over-Chemistry

Atlanta has had world-class individual talent for decades, and they’re fantastic at marketing that talent. The amount of swag you see around town is staggering. Yet the trophy cases stay empty (except for the Braves, because for one year the ‘talent over team’ model magically gelled — please note: the team fell apart the year following the World Series win). It’s not bad luck. It’s a structural pattern in organizations like Atlanta’s that means they’re going to keep wasting star power.

Hawks: The Trae Young Era

The Hawks just traded Trae Young, their franchise player for seven years, to the Washington Wizards for CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert. No draft picks. Just salary relief and role players. That’s how little value a four-time All-Star point guard commanded in January 2026.

The Hawks went 2-8 with Young in the lineup this season before trading him. Meanwhile, they were 16-13 without him. The team defended better and moved the ball more effectively when Young sat.

They reached the Eastern Conference Finals in 2021 with him at age 22, and it looked like the start of something. Instead, that was the peak.

The front office that drafted him turned over multiple times. He was on his third permanent head coach. The Hawks had a choice. Build a culture that could maximize Young’s talents while covering his defensive weaknesses, or just treat him as a tradable asset whose value was declining. They chose the latter.

This is what happens when a front office treats players as assets on a ledger rather than components of a team. The organization optimized for individual player value, not for building something cohesive. And when the individual value declined, they just moved the asset. Fans will blame Young for the losses (Fundamental Attribution Error), while the front office’s failure to build around him got lost in the organizational shuffle (Diffusion of Responsibility).

Falcons: The Cousins-Penix Disaster

The Falcons signed Kirk Cousins to a four-year, $180 million deal on March 13, 2024. Then on April 25, they drafted Michael Penix Jr. with the 8th overall pick.

Cousins’ agent said they “had no idea this was coming” and got no heads up. The agent clarified: “The truth is the whole league had no idea this was coming. We got no heads up. Kirk got a call from the Falcons when they were on the clock. That was the first we heard. It never came up in any conversation.” Kirk himself said he felt “a little bit misled” and that if he’d known, “it certainly would’ve affected my decision.” He had no reason to leave Minnesota if both teams were going to draft a quarterback high.

This wasn’t some clever long-term plan. This was a front office that couldn’t decide whether they were competing now or building for later, so they tried to do both, and in the end they did neither. Cousins started 14 games in 2024, went 7-7, threw 18 touchdowns and a career-high 16 interceptions, and got benched for Penix in Week 16. Then Penix tore his ACL in 2025, Cousins came back, and now the Falcons have restructured Cousins’ deal to set up his release while still eating $35 million in dead cap.

That’s $100 million paid to Cousins for 22 starts and a 12-10 record. And they still don’t know who their quarterback is.

The Falcons optimized for individual assets without thinking about how it fit the team they were building. Then they drafted Penix without communicating the plan to anyone, including the guy they’d just given $180 million. The front office was focused on collecting individual pieces of value and they forgot to build an actual team.

This is asset management masquerading as team building. And it’s not just bad luck or bad timing. It’s a predictable outcome of organizational structure that prioritizes individual player value over team cohesion. Fans blame Cousins for the poor record (Fundamental Attribution Error), but nobody in the front office gets held accountable for the incoherent decision-making (Diffusion of Responsibility). Just like the Hawks with Young.

I will note that the Falcons made front office changes to address this situation and appease the pretty angry fan base. They fired some people and appointed Matt Ryan as the President. But, this isn’t the first time they’ve made changes like this. It all follow the same pattern of diffusion of responsibility.

Pattern Across Franchises

Look at the patterns:

• Consistent prioritization of player market value over team chemistry.

• Decision-making that optimizes for the asset ledger, not winning culture.

• Front offices structured around analytics and finance focused on individual players, not around coaches that focus on team development who understand how to use those same analytics to fit pieces together.

Atlanta sports teams are built primarily for revenue, not for fan enjoyment. The franchise model treats players as tradable commodities. And when the teams fail, nobody in the front office takes the blame because responsibility is so diffused up the chain that there’s no single point of accountability.

The fans, stuck in their Fundamental Attribution Error loop, keep blaming the players. The front office, protected by Diffusion of Responsibility, keeps making the same structural mistakes. Both sides feed the problem.

The Contrast: Teams That Get It Right

The Spurs. The Patriots. The Seattle Seahawks. These franchises blend hiring individual superstars and bolstering them with the talent they need to succeed. They value chemistry alongside individual performance. They don’t just collect assets, they build teams.

Pete Carroll’s first rule at Seattle was ”always protect the team.” The veterans became the beacons for that rule, taking younger players under their wing. It helped players stay eligible, stay out of trouble, practice hard, and take responsibility for their in-game assignments. That’s culture. That’s the opposite of diffusion of responsibility. It’s accountability flowing from teammates to teammates, not getting lost in layers of hierarchy.

The Seahawks may have moved on from Pete Carroll, but guess what, they’re in the Super Bowl again this year. It’s starts from the top.

And there’s Curt Cignetti, recent College Football Playoff champion coach who took Indiana from nothing to champion in two years: “production over potential.” That’s the antidote to Atlanta’s model. Don’t pay for the name, pay for what they’re actually doing on the field right now.

These organizations understand something Atlanta doesn’t: individual talent is quantifiable, but chemistry is not. Risk-averse front offices default to what they can measure. But the things you can’t measure like accountability, trust, and shared purpose are often what separate winners from the teams that waste talent.

You have to delegate responsibility to people who have the direct influence over a given task, and then trust them to do it. This is Indiana University and Curt Cignetti, to a ‘T.’ It’s also what Seattle did under Carroll; accountability wasn’t diffused up the chain, it was distributed across the locker room where it could actually function.

The System Behind It

Why do front offices default to asset management over team building?

Incentive structures are easy to quantify. You can measure player value. You can’t measure culture. Executive backgrounds matter too; if your GM comes from finance and analytics rather than coaching or player development, they’re going to optimize for what they know how to measure. It doesn’t mean they’re bad at what they do, it just means there was a mismatch in the hiring process.

There’s also a short-term thinking problem driven by ownership and executive timelines. Building culture can take years. Signing a star gives you headlines next week and immediate merch sales. When your job security depends on showing results fast, you chase the name over the coherence.

And finally, there’s the hierarchy itself. The more layers between decision and outcome, the easier it is for everyone to assume someone else is thinking about the big picture. The GM assumes ownership has a plan. The coach assumes the GM has a plan. The players assume the coach has a plan. Nobody actually owns the plan.

That’s how you end up with Cousins and Penix on the same roster. That’s how you end up trading Young for role players. Everyone made defensible individual decisions, but nobody was responsible for making sure the decisions added up to something coherent.

What This Means for You

You can spot this pattern in your team’s decision-making. When ownership talks about “building around our stars,” look at the gaps between those stars and ask yourself: are they building a team, or just collecting assets?

An immediate internal signal you can use to check-yourself is to ask, “how badly do I want to buy this player’s jersey.” If every time your team makes a trade or adds a new player you find yourself pulling up the Official {your sport here} Gear store online, your team is optimizing for star power and you’re falling into the Fundamental Attribution Error trap. When they make a move that doesn’t make sense, like signing Cousins and then drafting Penix, ask who actually owns the decision and what happens if it fails. If nobody takes the blame when it goes wrong, you’re watching Diffusion of Responsibility in action.

Understanding this won’t fix your team. But it explains why hope keeps getting crushed. It explains why talented rosters underperform. It explains why you feel like your team is always one piece away but never gets there.

The next time your team signs a big name or makes a splashy trade, watch what happens to accountability. Watch whether anyone takes responsibility for building something coherent, or whether everyone just assumes someone else has the plan figured out. Watch whether fans immediately start blaming the player when things go wrong, or whether they look at the system that put that player in position to fail.

Because until someone in that organization takes ownership, real ownership, not the diffused kind, nothing changes. The fans keep suffering from Fundamental Attribution Error; blaming the players. The front office keeps benefiting from Diffusion of Responsibility; avoiding the blame. And the trophy case stays empty.

Atlanta has the talent. It’s always had the talent. What it doesn’t have is anyone willing to own the outcome of putting that talent together into something that works. And until that changes, you’re going to keep getting disappointed, not because the players aren’t good enough, but because the system is designed to fail while ensuring nobody has to take responsibility for it.

It’s about what we are rewarding.

This year, Rap Album of the Year sits at the intersection of arrival versus culmination, joy versus discipline, momentum versus mastery. Some albums defined moments. Some albums carried people through seasons. And one album, for me, feels like the rare thing that arrives fully formed, with nothing left unresolved.

Below is my Rap Album of the Year ranking, from “I respect it deeply” to “I need this for my mental health”, followed by my Best Rap Performance ballot. This isn’t objective. It is intentional

Rap Album of the Year

(least desired winner to the one I need)

This ranking isn’t about what I played the most. It’s about where each artist is in their creative arc, and whether the album feels like an arrival, continuation, or culmination.

5) Glorious by GloRilla

Released July 26, 2024 · ~43 minutes

Glorious was a breath of fresh air the moment it dropped. From the opening track, it was immediately clear GloRilla was bringing her Memphis fun-girl, girls’ girl energy to a full album, and my only real concern was whether she could hold a theme across a debut project. You never really know with first albums.

She did.

What impressed me most is the range without confusion. She moves between confidence, humor, leadership, sex, and faith and never sounds like she’s chasing respectability. Some features I could take or leave, but others are real bright spots. “Rain Down On Me,” with Kirk Franklin, Maverick City Music, Kierra Sheard, and Chandler Moore, holds space for faith without turning it into a gimmick. “Glo’s Prayer” is one of the most honest conversations with God you’ll hear from a young artist with the world at her feet. It is unpolished, direct, and sincere.

Culturally, Glo’s presence exceeded the album. “Let Her Cook” already feels like an anthem that will live forever in women’s sports. That end-of-game, highlight-package energy is undeniable. Glo moved people this year. She moved me. Watching a younger woman pop her shit while still sounding grounded is a joy.

Why it’s here: a cohesive debut people wanted to hear end to end, without losing joy, faith, or edge.
Why it doesn’t have to win tonight: this is arrival, not culmination, and that is still a victory.

4) God Does Like Ugly by JID

Released October 28, 2024 · ~53 minutes

I was late to JID, and my entry point wasn’t rollout hype or a thinkpiece. It was an Uber ride in Atlanta in 2022. I asked the driver who was really having the most impact in the city’s rap scene. I expected the standard answers. He told me the lyricist pushing things forward was JID, who is more introspective and layered, rapping about real life at a deeper level. He even told me he thought JID could rap better than Cole.

This album feels like the payoff to that scouting report.

The pen is elite, but what makes God Does Like Ugly stick is that JID pairs bars with songs you actually live with. Songs that feel good, feel heavy, feel conflicted, sometimes all at once. He’s comfortable sitting with tension: faith and doubt, ambition and insecurity, clarity and confusion.

The clearest example of how intentional this album is comes on “Community.” JID doesn’t just feature Pusha T and Malice, he hands them the narrative baton. He starts local, names what’s missing in his own environment, then deliberately moves the story to Virginia and lets Clipse finish the thought. That is regional storytelling done with restraint and respect. Knowing when to pass the mic is part of mastery.

Why it’s here: control, emotional range, and authorship.
Why it might not win: the Academy doesn’t always reward artists leveling up in real time unless the narrative is already loud enough.

3) Chromakopia by Tyler, The Creator

Released October 28, 2024 · ~53 minutes

I need to be honest about this album because my relationship to it is inseparable from the moment it arrived.

On the morning of October 28, 2024, three days after my sister and I said goodbye to our mother in a hospital room in Richmond, I put my earbuds in at 6 a.m. and went for a run because I didn’t know how else I was going to survive the week ahead. Funeral planning. Shock. Grief. All of it. I opened Apple Music, and Tyler’s face popped up.

When the Chromokopia album started, and it was his mother speaking, reminding him that the light doesn’t shine on him but shines from within him, it felt like a hand reaching through the moment I was in. A Black mother’s voice offering grounding, affirmation, and love. That morning, that voice landed like something meant for me. I ran seven miles, the fastest and longest run I’ve ever done. Chromakopia will always be tied to that moment.

Musically, there’s so much here that I love. “St. Chroma” is one of the best tracks Tyler has ever made, and the way Daniel Caesar is used feels intentional and earned. “Judge Judy” is provocative and thoughtful in a way people didn’t sit with enough. “I Killed You” will probably always be my favorite song on the album. Any record that can balance humor and pain around the Black hair journey has my heart.

The features are used well. “Sticky,” with GloRilla, Sexyy Red, and Lil Wayne, is one of the most exciting hip-hop moments of the year. And Lola Young/Doechii collabs showing up here is another reminder that Tyler has an eye for who’s about to matter.

Here’s the distinction I can’t ignore. Tyler is already rewarded by the Recording Academy. He doesn’t need pity votes. If Chromakopia wins, it’s because voters believe it’s the strongest album-level argument. And while this album is ambitious, emotionally resonant, and important to me personally, I don’t think it’s his most focused work. If I weren’t such a huge fan of Call Me If You Get Lost, there’s a version of reality where my emotional ties might push this higher. But when I step back, I don’t think it fully clears Tyler at his absolute best.

Why it’s here: timing matters, and this album met me in grief and held me there.
Why it isn’t my number one: meaning and mastery aren’t always the same thing, and this year I’m rewarding mastery.

If Tyler’s album met me in grief, Kendrick’s met the culture in confrontation.

2) GNX by Kendrick Lamar

Released November 22, 2024 · ~44 minutes

GNX does not exist in a vacuum. It arrives after the rap battle that rewired the culture in late November 2024, following a year where Kendrick owned the second half of the conversation. That context matters, because this album sounds like an artist who already understands how he’s perceived in his city, in the industry, and globally, and is choosing how to move with that power.

The sequencing is part of why I respect GNX so much. It opens beautifully with “wacced out murals,” setting the stage for perception and self-awareness, then slides into “squabble up” after teasing it earlier in the year. That song one to song two transition was one of the best I heard all year.

But the real reason I love this album is the writing. “Reincarnated” is my favorite Kendrick Lamar song, and it isn’t close. He distills lives, souls, judgment, purpose, and God-given gifts into four minutes and thirty-six seconds with barely a breath. It is end-to-end storytelling at its highest level.

On a more personal note, I was a huge Black Hippy fan. I always wondered why that collective never became what it could have been. “The Heart Pt 6” answers so many of those unanswered questions, and using an SWV vocal flip to unpack his rise, his relationships, and his own responsibility in how things played out is emotional accountability packaged as art. It’s my favorite “Heart,” and I’m not negotiating that.

Then there’s “gloria,” nearly five minutes of someone showing more commitment to craft than most people show in their relationships. Kendrick knows exactly how to collaborate and elevate voices like SZA without flattening them into decoration.

I love GNX. I love “reincarnated,” “squabble up,” “wacced out murals,” “gloria,” and “the heart pt. 6” so much that I can look past the tracks I like but don’t feel as deeply, like “hey now,” “dodger blue,” and “peekaboo.”

Why it’s here: some of Kendrick’s best writing and sequencing in years, delivered with authority.
Why it’s not my number one: even with all that greatness, I don’t think GNX is Kendrick’s best album, and in a year this strong, I’m voting for the album that feels most complete.

1) Let God Sort Em Out by Clipse

Released January 17, 2025 · ~49 minutes

For me, Rap Album of the Year starts with how an album opens, because the opening tells you what kind of conversation the artist thinks they’re having with you.

Let God Sort Em Out opens with a level of emotional maturity I never expected.

“The Birds Don’t Sing,” featuring John Legend and Voices of Fire, produced by Pharrell Williams, and written in part by Stevie Wonder, is about the last conversations you have with your parents before they die and what it means to live afterward.

That song hits me personally. My mom’s password to everything was some version of “MyTwoGirls,” for my sister and me. Hearing the detail about a dead father’s password being “ILoveMyTwoSons” doesn’t feel poetic. It feels exact. If you’ve lost a parent, especially both parents, that kind of specificity lands like memory. I’ve played that song in the mornings even when it hurt, because it’s healing to hear someone articulate the very particular grief of losing your heroes and what that does to siblinghood.

From there, the album never loses control. “Chains & Whips,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, is structural. Without that verse, this album doesn’t win. The same is true of Tyler on “P.O.V.”, and that feature matters because Tyler, an artist famous for doing whatever he wants, locks into Clipse’s discipline and shines within their constraints. That’s respect.

I was born and raised in Virginia. Watching Clipse perform this new material alongside “Virginia,” “Grindin’,” and “Keys Open Doors” is deeply validating. What they delivered in 2025 doesn’t feel nostalgic. It feels refined. Same hunger, sharper execution, deeper reflection.

Every feature is used correctly. Stove God Cooks, Nas, Ab-Liva, Pharrell again. No wasted placements. No wrong energy. The rhyme schemes don’t just hold for verses. They hold across entire songs. Even when a track isn’t my personal favorite, the rapping is so precise I can’t dismiss it.

That’s why it has to be Let God Sort Em Out for me.
Not because the other albums aren’t great.
But because this one feels like culmination, mastery meeting purpose, with nothing left unresolved.

Best Rap Performance (Quick Ballot)

5. Outside by Cardi B
Performance as event.

4. “Darling, I” by Tyler featuring Teezo Touchdown
Solid, but not the cut I would have chosen.

3. “tv off” by Kendrick featuring Lefty Gunplay
Makes sense, but not the strongest representative from GNX.

2. Anxiety by Doechii
Necessary, and yes, it would make some people mad.

1. “Chains & Whips” by Kendrick, Pharrell, and Pusha T
Capital P Performance. Built for the trophy.

After the show, we’ll be recording a Take It Personal episode reacting to what I got right, what I got wrong, and assigning one song from each Rap AOTY nominee to talk through what actually holds up once the lights are off.

No matter what happens tonight, I the music won. I said what I said. :)

What album met you where you were this year, even if it wasn’t “the best”?

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