As many of you know, I love New York.

I don’t follow sports particularly closely, but basketball is one of the few games I can actually understand and enjoy. My husband is a diehard Knicks fan, so over the years I’ve tagged along to plenty of games and always had a great time.

But the Knicks making the Finals (and now WINNING THE NBA CHAMPIONSHIP) has transformed the city’s already-electric energy into something I can’t even describe. It feels like New York has been plugged into a power outlet.

People are outside watching together. A united front. (It also helps that Knicks fans are delightfully unhinged. I can’t stop watching the “man on the street” interviews on Instagram.)

We went to Game 4 at Madison Square Garden hopeful.

Then the Spurs took a small lead. Then a bigger one. By halftime, they were up 27 points. The cheers turned into groans, and the groans turned into silence.

And then — a miracle. The Knicks didn’t take their first lead until just under a minute remained in the game.

Thousands of fans experienced the same emotional sequence. Everyone went from “it’s over” to “wait…” to “maybe?” to “oh my God what did I just witness?”

Jalen Brunson missed the potential game-winning three-pointer. The Knicks won only because OG Anunoby tipped it in with 1.2 seconds remaining. One point two seconds!

Moments like that are rare because they force us to confront something we spend most of our lives trying to avoid: uncertainty. We want certainty. We want to know how the story ends.

By halftime, most of us were convinced we knew exactly how the Knicks’ story would end. Then, in the span of a few minutes, that certainty left and the hope returned. The comeback was a reminder that the improbable happens more often than we’d like to admit — and that even when the odds look overwhelming, it ain’t over til’ it’s over.

As a storyteller, I love that. I love hearing my normally-pragmatic husband talk about destiny. I love hearing a lawyer who demands evidence in every other aspect of her life talk about serendipity.

It’s equal parts absurdity and magic — the combination that makes New York City extraordinary.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE KNICKS AND ALL THE KNICKS FANS! As one of the commentators said when Jalen Brunsen hugged his dad: “Life is not perfect, but there are perfect moments. And there’s one right there.”

Here is a video I took from the stands of the game-winning shot of Game 4:

— Polina

PROFILES.

— The world’s most likable celebrity [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The trailer park billionaire
— The king of New York
— The ultra-athlete competing in Antarctica
— The modern conservative woman

THE PEOPLE.

The world’s most likable celebrity: If you read one thing today, let it be this profile on Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Beneath one of the world’s most carefully managed public personas is a man increasingly preoccupied with the scars of his past. Through long, tequila-fueled conversations, Johnson reflects on marriage struggles, his fear after discovering a potentially serious health issue, the pain of childhood poverty and abandonment, and his evolving view of masculinity, politics, and fame. Such an entertaining read. (Esquire) (For more, check out my Profile Dossier on Dwayne Johnson here)

The king of New York: Jalen Brunson’s rise from an overlooked second-round draft pick to the face of the New York Knicks is a story of relentless work, self-belief, and humility. Long doubted because of his size and athleticism, Brunson steadily proved skeptics wrong at every level before arriving in New York, where his grit, leadership, and clutch performances have made him the city’s unlikely basketball king. (ESPN)

The trailer park billionaire: Bob Bull turned Britain’s trailer parks into a billion-pound empire by convincing lenders they were luxury housing developments, borrowing heavily to fuel rapid expansion. But inflated valuations, questionable business practices, and mounting debt eventually caused the company to collapse, leaving creditors owed billions and raising questions about where much of the money went. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

The ultra-athlete competing in Antarctica: Stephanie Case, a 43-year-old lawyer and ultramarathon runner who famously won a race while breastfeeding her infant daughter, is attempting something no woman has ever done before. She will compete in — and potentially break the overall record for — the 100-mile Antarctic Ice Ultra. Despite admitting that she “genuinely hates the cold,” Case will face brutal -13°F temperatures and fierce Antarctic winds in a challenge she says is about more than endurance. (The Athletic; alternate link)

The modern conservative woman: At Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit, attended by roughly 3,000 women, Erika Kirk outlined a vision of conservative Christian womanhood centered on faith, marriage, motherhood, and family over career ambition. The conference reflected a broader shift within the movement away from overt politics and toward cultural and religious values, with speakers promoting traditional gender roles, criticizing feminism, and encouraging young women to prioritize family life while framing conservative communities as a refuge from increasingly hostile mainstream institutions. (WSJ; complimentary link provided)

👉 Below, premium members get a curated list of podcasts, interviews, documentaries, and conversations worth your time.

Upgrade to unlock:

Read more

Last week, I hosted a live Q&A with premium members of The Profile.

A reader asked me about my process for getting to the deeper, harder questions. Do I start with small talk or do I just dive right in?

Here’s what I said: Small talk earns you a bit of trust, which you can then use to ask the hard questions. But even then, sometimes, it can backfire and get really, really awkward. Sometimes a subject gets defensive or angry or visibly uncomfortable.

During one of my shadowing sessions, I asked a question that struck a nerve. The subject became upset, and the entire energy of the interview changed. In moments like that, every instinct tells you to retreat and make the awkwardness disappear.

But I often remind myself that the topics that make people uncomfortable are usually the ones that matter the most. So instead of backing away, I did the only thing I know how to do — I tried to understand.

Eventually, we got through it. I understood where he was coming from, and he understood why I was asking the question. Although I could tell that some of the trust evaporated after that moment, the exchange taught me something important about him.

I saw the mask drop, and for a brief moment, the polished answers disappeared, and I got to see the real person underneath. To me, that was a win.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from profiling people is that genuine curiosity can diffuse almost any emotionally-charged situation.

And in the end, the quality of the answers you get is usually a reflection of the trust you’ve earned.

— Polina

—

A WORD FROM OUR PARTNER ✨: Have you ever read about a founder building the next great consumer brand and thought — I wish I could invest in that? Most people can’t. The best startup deals go to a handful of elite VC firms, and everyone else hears about them years later.

Alumni Ventures changes that. As one of TIME’s Top Venture Capital Firms, AV gives accredited investors access to curated Next-Gen Consumer deals — startups like Oura, Quince, and Bluesky — already co-invested alongside brand-name investors including a16z, Forerunner, and Khosla.

No cost to see deals. No obligation to invest. Just access to the deal flow that used to be off-limits.

See Next-Gen Consumer Deals →

Disclosure: Not an offer to sell securities. Example portfolio companies for illustrative purposes only and not available to future investors except potential follow-on investments. Venture capital investing involves substantial risk, including risk of loss of all capital invested.

THE PROFILES.

— The Murdoch seceding from his family [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The billionaire who fell from grace
— The celebrity-backed AI shopping startup
— The billion-dollar beauty brand
— The anti-corporate hero of the games industry

THE PEOPLE.

The Murdoch seceding from his family: James Murdoch is buying New York magazine and Vox Media in a move that looks like a declaration of independence from his father’s legacy. While Rupert Murdoch built a media empire by giving audiences what they wanted, James is betting that in an AI-saturated world, trusted journalism and original ideas will become even more valuable — even if they generate less profit. The irony is that both father and son are building media empires around distinct audiences. They just have very different visions of the world. (The New York Times; alternate link)

The billionaire who fell from grace: Few people have spent more time managing their public image than Bill Gates. But after years of successfully recasting himself from tech villain to global philanthropist, his association with Jeffrey Epstein is threatening to unravel one of the most remarkable rebrands in business history. (WSJ; complimentary link provided)

THE COMPANIES.

The celebrity-backed AI shopping startup: Phoebe Gates is building an AI shopping startup with a cap table that looks more like a Met Gala guest list. Phia has raised $43.5 million, attracted dozens of celebrity investors, and already serves 1.5 million users. Gates wants Phia to become a personalized shopping agent that knows your taste, curates what you should buy, and eventually predicts what you’ll want before you do. (Vogue)

The billion-dollar beauty brand: Rhode has become one of beauty’s fastest-growing brands, reaching $390 million in annual sales and setting its sights on $1 billion in global retail revenue. Hailey Bieber’s strategy is simple but difficult to execute: turn a skincare brand into a lifestyle universe through viral products, immersive pop-ups, and carefully curated experiences that make customers feel part of a world. The challenge now is staying culturally relevant in an industry where consumers move on quickly and attention is the scarcest resource. (Vogue)

The anti-corporate hero of the games industry: Valve spent decades cultivating the image of an anti-corporate gaming utopia — a quirky, flat organization run by gamers for gamers. But as Steam grew into the dominant marketplace for PC games, critics began to see a company with enormous power, a 30% tax on developers, and rules that competitors say are impossible to escape. Now, antitrust lawsuits in the U.S. and U.K. are testing whether Valve is the benevolent backbone of PC gaming or simply another monopoly hiding behind a beloved brand. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

👉 Below, premium members get a curated list of podcasts, interviews, documentaries, and conversations worth your time.

Upgrade to unlock:

Read more

I’ve spent a decade researching the most extraordinary people in the world — spending time with them, watching hundreds of hours of interviews, combing through old blog posts, and trying to understand what makes someone truly remarkable.

The most important thing I’ve learned is that pretty much no one is who they appear to be in public.

Here’s a small example. When I profiled Jake and Logan Paul, I expected indifference. Their entire brand is built on being loud, reckless, and seemingly impossible to embarrass.

But on set, during a podcast taping, a joke about Logan’s daughter lands a little too close to home. For a moment, the mask drops. He recoils, pushes back, tells the host to cut it. Later, when I ask about reputational hits, the warm, gregarious version of him disappears.

What I found is that Logan obsessively reviews and edits every single video, clip, and post before it goes out. Jake hired a celebrity attorney to pursue legal action against anyone who questions the legitimacy of his boxing matches. These are not men who don’t care. These are men who have built an empire on performing like they don’t.

How someone presents themselves and what’s actually true is often at the core of my profiles. I’ve developed something close to a methodology for it. There are signals I look for, questions I ask, sources I go to, and clues that help me read what someone is not saying as much as what they are.

This Wednesday, June 3 at 12 p.m. EST, I’m hosting a live, members-only session called “How to Read People” and I want you there.

For one hour, I’ll walk you through exactly how I research someone, what I look for in the first five minutes of an interview, and the psychological tools I use to read them. Then I’ll open it up to you. Bring me questions, and I’ll give you techniques.

This session is for paid members only. If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, this is your sign. You can sign up & upgrade below:

Subscribe now

I’ll see you there.

— Polina

THE PROFILES.

— The CEO who revived a struggling bookstore [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The founder who built the most profitable startup
— The investor who bet everything on ChatGPT
— Hollywood’s most polarizing actor
— The ‘buy here, pay here’ auto dealer

THE PEOPLE.

The CEO who revived a struggling bookstore: Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt seems to have pulled off one of retail’s most surprising turnarounds. It explores the story of how a struggling big-box bookstore chain became a thriving, highly localized retail experiment under private equity ownership. Rather than relying on rigid corporate strategy, Daunt empowered individual stores to behave more like independent bookstores — letting staff curate inventory for their specific communities, redesign displays around “pyramids” instead of publisher-driven “blocks,” and prioritize passionate booksellers over traditional retail managers. (Remember this profile when he first started making the changes?) (Bloomberg)

The founder who built the most profitable startup: Jeffrey Yan is a hyper-intense former quantitative trader who walked away from a lucrative crypto trading operation to build what he believes could become the infrastructure layer for a new financial system. This profile details how Yan and his tiny team of 11 built Hyperliquid into one of the most profitable startups per employee in the world — rejecting venture capital, refusing to pay insiders, and distributing billions of dollars worth of tokens directly to users instead. It reveals a portrait of a founder who views traditional finance as outdated, works with near-monastic intensity, and believes that truly transformative systems must be public, decentralized, and owned by the people who use them. (Colossus)

The investor who bet everything on ChatGPT: Sarah Guo became one of the most influential AI investors by betting aggressively on artificial intelligence years before ChatGPT made the industry mainstream. After leaving Greylock in 2022 to launch her AI-focused fund, Conviction, Guo built a concentrated portfolio of companies like Harvey, Baseten, and Mistral AI that are now collectively worth tens of billions of dollars. The piece portrays Guo not as a passive investor but as an intensely hands-on operator obsessed with long-term technological shifts, willing to ignore conventional venture capital wisdom in favor of deeply researched, conviction-driven bets on the future of AI. (Forbes)

Hollywood’s most polarizing actor: In this interview, Nicolas Cage reflects on the artistic philosophy that made him one of Hollywood’s most original and polarizing actors. Cage describes his performances as intentionally risky, grotesque, and emotionally extreme, drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Francis Bacon paintings, comic books, Bruce Lee films, and pop art. He discusses his willingness to be misunderstood in pursuit of originality, the strange afterlife of becoming an internet meme, and how his larger-than-life mythology eventually took on a life of its own. (New York Times; alternate link)

THE COMPANIES.

The ‘buy here, pay here’ auto dealer: This investigation into Byrider examines the harsh economics of America’s “buy here, pay here” used-car industry, where people with poor credit often end up paying double — or more — the actual value of a vehicle through high markups, steep interest rates, and aggressive collection tactics. (Bloomberg)

👉 Below, premium members get a curated list of podcasts, interviews, documentaries, and conversations worth your time.

Upgrade to unlock:

Read more

My first book, Hidden Genius, published exactly three years ago. I still remember how surreal it felt to walk into a bookstore and see something that had lived in my head for years sitting on an actual shelf.

Here is the moment I saw it for the very first time:

What I didn’t expect was how many messages I’d receive from readers saying the book changed the way they think about success, talent, and their own potential. That has meant more to me than I can properly express.

The book was born from a question I became obsessed with as a reporter: Why do some people build extraordinary lives and companies while others — with just as much talent — never quite break through? Over years of interviews with founders, athletes, investors, and operators, I realized that what separates people is in the hidden advantages — thed mindsets, habits, emotional patterns, and ways of seeing the world that compound quietly over time.

✨ And now, three years later, I’m excited to share that the paperback edition of Hidden Genius launches this August. ✨

Pre-Order Hidden Genius Here

This new edition is incredibly special to me because it gives the book a second life, and hopefully introduces these ideas to a whole new group of readers.

How you can help:

If you’ve ever wanted to support my work, pre-ordering the paperback is one of the most meaningful ways to do it. Pre-orders genuinely matter in publishing more than most people realize. They help determine how much attention a book receives, where it gets placed, and how far it travels.

You can preorder it here:

Pre-Order Hidden Genius Here

Thank you for reading my work, supporting The Profile, and allowing me to spend my life chasing stories and ideas that fascinate me. None of this exists without you.

— Polina

PROFILES.

— Silicon Valley’s AI tycoon [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The Amazon CEO making AI-era bets
— Comedy’s breakout star
— The company building a $200-billion data center
— The billion-dollar skincare line

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

Silicon Valley’s AI tycoon: Is Cognition founder Scott Wu a new kind of Silicon Valley genius? Wu is hyper-competitive, mathematically gifted, and less interested in academic prestige than in building world-changing AI products at extreme speed. This profile details the transformation of the “nerd genius” from isolated academic outsider into founder-king — someone whose intelligence now translates directly into power, capital, and infrastructure. Wu argues that AI coding agents like Devin could eliminate much of the friction and “sludge” of modern life, while also hinting at a future where human creativity matters more than execution itself. (Colossus)

The Amazon CEO making AI-era bets: Andy Jassy is trying to turn Amazon from the company that dominated e-commerce and cloud computing into the infrastructure backbone of the AI era. This profile portrays him as a disciplined operator cleaning up Bezos-era excess while making some of the biggest AI bets in corporate history — spending hundreds of billions on chips, data centers, satellites, and partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic. Can Jassy preserve Amazon’s culture of invention while transforming it into a mature, tightly managed corporate empire? (Bloomberg; alternate link)

Comedy’s breakout star: Robby Hoffman has quickly become one of comedy’s breakout stars through her hit Netflix special and role on Hacks, building a reputation for provocative, deeply personal humor that divides audiences. Raised in poverty in a strict Hasidic Jewish community, Hoffman channels her chaotic upbringing, outsider identity, and blunt worldview into comedy that rejects polished Hollywood norms in favor of radical honesty, emotional openness, and unapologetic self-belief. (The Guardian)

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The company building a $200-billion data center: Meta’s $200 billion Louisiana data center shows what happens when the AI boom collides with small-town America. This profile frames the project as a lifeline for a struggling farming community now being reshaped by billionaires, politics, and massive energy demands. Residents want economic revival, but many fear they had little say in the transformation of their home. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

The billion-dollar skincare line: Hailey Bieber turned Rhode from a celebrity skincare line into a billion-dollar beauty empire by combining obsession and internet-native storytelling. Rather than relying solely on fame, she and her team built a “360 world” around Rhode — using YouTube, social media, aesthetics, and lifestyle marketing to cultivate demand long before products launched. The brand that sold out instantly, broke Sephora sales records globally, and was acquired by e.l.f. Beauty for up to $1 billion. (TIME)

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

I know all of you read a ton of newsletters, articles, posts, and updates every day, so I want to make sure The Profile continues to feel genuinely worth your time and attention.

If you have a few minutes, I’d really appreciate if you took this short survey. I’m trying to better understand what resonates most with you, what you want more (or less) of, and how I can make the publication more valuable over time.

Thank you for reading week after week, sharing the stories, replying to emails, and supporting The Profile. Your feedback genuinely means a lot to me.

Start Survey

PS: I haven’t been posting a lot on X or Instagram because I’ve turned my focus to Substack Notes, which I love. You can follow me on Notes here.

PROFILES.

— Comedy’s newest star [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— Silicon Valley’s pro-tech Democrat
— The reality TV star building a real estate empire
— The influencer selling longevity hacks to women
— The struggling celebrity media company

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

Comedy’s newest star: Marcello Hernández is emerging as Saturday Night Live’s breakout Gen Z star — a hyper-energetic Miami comic whose charisma feels built for both TikTok-era fame and old-school stand-up. This GQ profile paints him as relentlessly “on,” turning every interaction into material while grinding obsessively at comedy even as Netflix specials and movie roles pile up around him. Hernández wants to become the next crossover comedy star in the mold of Kevin Hart or Adam Sandler. (GQ)

Silicon Valley’s pro-tech Democrat: Ro Khanna is reinventing himself from Silicon Valley’s favorite pro-tech Democrat into one of its loudest critics — backing a billionaire wealth tax, attacking the “Epstein class,” and openly antagonizing donors like Peter Thiel. Khanna believes distancing himself from tech elites could make him a credible 2028 presidential contender at a moment when public distrust of AI, billionaires, and Silicon Valley is surging. (Bloomberg)

The reality TV star building a real estate empire: Ryan Serhant says the real villain of his Netflix show Owning Manhattan isn’t a rival broker — it’s himself. The profile frames Serhant as a reality-TV savant who understands that fame comes from “creating noise,” whether that means jumping naked into a pool on camera or turning his own ambition and ego into storyline fuel. (New York Magazine; For more, check out my profile on Ryan Serhant here.)

The influencer selling longevity hacks to women: Kayla Barnes-Lentz is building a female-focused longevity empire on the idea that the biohacking world was built by men, for men. This profile portrays her as part wellness guru, part human experiment — turning blood tests, sleep tracking, saunas, and hormone data into a booming business for women who feel left out of Silicon Valley’s “live forever” movement. How much of modern longevity is real science, and how much is elite wellness theater?

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The struggling celebrity media company: Once valued at $650 million, Kevin Hart’s media company has faced layoffs, executive turnover, stalled projects, and internal conflict as Hollywood spending slowed and the business remained overly dependent on Hart himself. The profile suggests Hart’s new deal with Authentic Brands Group — which moves his endorsement business outside Hartbeat — may signal the slow unraveling of the company’s original vision.

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

Last week, I published my latest profile on Jake and Logan Paul.

I spent months reporting it — sitting in on LP meetings, watching how they operate behind the scenes, digging into their businesses and investments, and trying to answer this question: Can internet attention actually be converted into longstanding wealth and power?

One thing I’ve learned from profiling people is that we’re all driven by some unspoken need. Why do we keep doing what we do every single day? Usually, there’s something we’re trying to prove, resolve, escape, or heal within ourselves.

So when I profile someone, I really try to understand their worldview. What drives them? What scares them? What are they chasing?

With Jake and Logan, I could tell that they seem to genuinely want to be taken seriously while simultaneously having become wildly successful by being unserious.

That was the crux of my story. So instead of only asking, “Why do you want to be billionaires?” I kept approaching the question in different ways:

• “What would billionaire status actually change for you?”

• “Would it change how people see you?”

• “Does it bother you that people underestimate you?”

Eventually, both brothers arrived at the same idea: At the highest levels of wealth and power, people care less about how you got there and more that you made it there at all.

If you read the piece, I’d love to know what you thought. And if you have questions about the reporting process, profiling, or anything behind the scenes, reply and send them my way. (I’ll be answering the questions in a live AMA soon.)

A WORD FROM OUR PARTNER ✨:

Have you ever read about a founder building the next great consumer brand and thought — I wish I could invest in that? Most people can’t. The best startup deals go to a handful of elite VC firms, and everyone else hears about them years later.

Alumni Ventures changes that. As one of TIME’s Top Venture Capital Firms, AV gives accredited investors access to curated Next-Gen Consumer deals — startups like Oura, Quince, and Bluesky — already co-invested alongside brand-name investors including a16z, Forerunner, and Khosla.

No cost to see deals. No obligation to invest. Just access to the deal flow that used to be off-limits. Join the Alumni Ventures Next-Gen Consumer Syndicate →

Disclosure: Not an offer to sell securities. Example portfolio companies for illustrative purposes only and not available to future investors except potential follow-on investments. Venture capital investing involves substantial risk, including risk of loss of all capital invested.

PROFILES.

— The influencers turning attention into a billion dollars [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The engineer-CEO building America’s $31 billion defense startup
— The NFL commissioner going to Hollywood
— The obsessed investor
— The $2 billion brand rejecting the Victoria’s Secret playbook
— The companies driving renewed interest in nuclear energy

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The influencers turning attention into a billion dollars: Jake and Logan Paul are trying to turn internet outrage into a billion dollars. The same traits that made the brothers impossible to ignore online — provocation and attention-seeking — have evolved into a deliberate business strategy centered around their venture firm Anti Fund and stakes in companies like Prime Hydration, Betr, and Whatnot. (The Profile)

The engineer-CEO building America’s $31 billion defense startup: Brian Schimpf is the engineer at the center of Anduril’s rise — a technical, intensely operational CEO trying to build the next great American defense company by applying Silicon Valley speed and software thinking to modern warfare, while avoiding becoming the bloated military bureaucracy he’s trying to replace. (FORTUNE)

The NFL commissioner going to Hollywood: Roger Goodell has turned the National Football League into the most valuable force in modern media, with giants like Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube fighting to pay billions for live football rights because the NFL still commands mass real-time attention. The profile argues that in a fragmented media landscape, live sports have become the ultimate power asset, and Goodell is the executive sitting at the center of it. (Vanity Fair)

The obsessed investor: This profile of Kima Ventures investor Jean de La Rochebrochard is all about obsession, insecurity, and endurance. The piece follows Jean through founder meetings, nonstop dealmaking, emotional setbacks, and Ironman races, revealing a man driven by a constant need to prove himself. This profile reveals something we can all understand: the fear of never quite being good enough. ()

The $2 billion brand rejecting the Victoria’s Secret playbook: Jennifer Foyle is the retail executive who turned Aerie into a nearly $2 billion brand by betting early that women wanted comfort, authenticity, and “realness” over the hypersexualized fantasy pushed by Victoria’s Secret. Now she’s trying to turn that same instinct into an advantage in the coming backlash against AI-generated beauty. (FORTUNE)

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The companies driving renewed interest in nuclear energy: This is the ****story of how Three Mile Island — once the symbol of America’s nuclear disaster fears — is being revived to power the AI boom. As companies like Microsoft race to build energy-hungry AI systems, nuclear power is suddenly becoming strategically valuable again. The piece frames it as a remarkable collision of two high-risk technologies reshaping the future. (Bloomberg)

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

“Oh — hi Jake Paul?” His face makes clear he has just encountered someone in a place where they don’t belong.

“What are you doing down here?”

Jake steps into character. “Hustling, bro. Empire State of mind. What are you guys doing?”

They laugh and state the obvious: “Working.”

“Same, bro. Same.”

Upstairs, in a glass conference room overlooking the Hudson River, Jake is about to meet with investor Rudy Sahay, whose firm is the largest limited partner in his venture fund, Anti Fund. Geoff Woo, Anti Fund’s co-founder, slides into a chair. They are there to talk about capital — whether Sahay will commit more money to the fund.

It’s not the version of Jake Paul most people are used to seeing. Before I began reporting this story, my understanding of the brothers Jake and Logan Paul was surface-level at best. I remembered Logan’s 2017 “suicide forest” vlog, which showed a dead body and sparked global backlash. I remembered that Jake’s Calabasas mansion was raided by a SWAT team in 2020.

But mostly, I remembered them as the internet’s first “influencers” on the now-defunct social media site Vine, where they posted stunts and skits featuring all sorts of teenage debauchery. I dismissed them as recurring characters in the internet’s endless outrage cycle.

I thought they would eventually fade into obscurity like so many in their cohort, but they never did. In fact, they’re more present than ever. The behavior that makes Jake and Logan hard to take seriously is the same behavior that has kept them at the center of everything.

Over the past two decades, Jake and Logan built a social media empire in public, amassing a combined following of more than 150 million and becoming a case study in growing up in the attention economy.

Even their biggest critics can’t seem to look away from the escalating stunts, the public feuds, the diss tracks (remember “It’s Everyday Bro?”), and the steady drip of controversy.

It’s all part of the Paul brothers’ playbook: declare a bold ambition publicly, repeat it often, direct attention toward it, position themselves as the underdog, introduce just enough controversy — and, over time, the performance starts to tilt toward reality. By the time Jake was pitching his fund at the Aquarian office, he was reinforcing a brand he had been building for two decades.

Today, that Paul brothers brand shows up in some not-so-obvious places. Jake and Logan have each separately co-founded companies like sports drink brand Prime Hydration, boxing promotions company Most Valuable Promotions, personal care startup W, and sports betting platform Betr.

I write deeply reported profiles on power and money. Sign up for The Profile:

Subscribe now

At the center of that strategy is Anti Fund, the venture firm Jake launched with Geoff Woo. Logan has since joined as a general partner, helping invest in and promote companies through their combined audience.

Anti Fund’s investment thesis is that capital is abundant, attention is not. At their scale, attention can act as leverage by bringing awareness, shaping a company’s narrative, and driving user growth. Traditional venture firms tend to specialize in a specific industry or sector, while Anti Fund’s portfolio spans everything from consumer brands to frontier AI and defense.

The portfolio includes OpenAI (currently valued at $852 billion), Anduril ($60 billion), Ramp ($32 billion), Whatnot ($11.5 billion), Cognition ($10.2 billion), Physical Intelligence ($5.6 billion), and Modal Labs ($1.1 billion).

The Profile has exclusively learned that Anti Fund’s stake in OpenAI has more than doubled, while an early-stage check into robotics startup Physical Intelligence could turn into a 100x outcome if the company’s next round lands at the rumored $11 billion valuation. Even smaller consumer bets, like soda brand Olipop, have already multiplied several times over.

Jake and Logan understand that brand deals and YouTube revenue won’t make them billionaires. Building companies and investing in startups might. They’re trying to turn attention into ownership — real equity they can eventually cash out — rather than relying on fleeting brand deals.

The Paul brothers forced their way to the center of YouTube and entertainment, where performance eventually evolved into strategy. Logan pivoted to professional wrestling, and Jake to boxing. “All those performances are a vehicle for us to build big businesses,” Logan tells me.

They’ve even turned that ambition into content. I opened YouTube to find Jake and Logan posted a video titled “Jake & Logan Paul Expose Their Billion Dollar Business Plan,” laying out their intent to become billionaires and stake a claim in the world of business.

And now, after spending time with them, I came away with the sense that they genuinely believe billionaire status is within reach — even if declaring it publicly makes it part of the performance.

Logan, 31, says, “It just seems like an accomplishment that Jake and I can both independently achieve in this life. So why not try to achieve it?”

When I ask Jake, 29, when he expects to become a billionaire, he thinks for a moment and lands somewhere around his 35th birthday. But there’s a difference, he notes, between a billionaire on paper and one with a billion in liquid assets.

So which does he mean?

“I’m saying liquid [by] 35 years old,” he says in a way that sounds like he’s making a bet.

“It’s over, it’s over,” Logan says, out of breath, leaning on auctioneer Ken Goldin behind a long wooden table stamped with the Ripit logo — his new company built around Pokémon cards and premium collectibles. Three cans of Prime Hydration, his sports drink, sit in full view.

He watches the screen in disbelief as the auction for his rare illustrator Pikachu card comes to an end. Someone had made the winning bid for $16,492,000.

Logan, who often speaks in hyperbole, is about to say something that sounds outlandish but is actually true. He had sold “the most expensive trading card of all time.” Logan bought the card in 2021 for $5.275 million, tripling his money in five years.

Suddenly, AJ Scaramucci, investor, collector, and son of financier Anthony Scaramucci, steps on stage and says, “Logan, I bought your card, baby.”

The Pikachu card auction, which generated 2.5 million views on Logan’s YouTube channel, got covered in CNN, FOX, The Los Angeles Times, the BBC, and countless other outlets.

“They know we can’t look away, and they keep escalating the level of insanity,” Scaramucci says. “They tap into that primal, amygdala, fight or flight, animalistic craziness that is society.”

And nothing is more primal than getting punched in the face. Once the Paul brothers discovered combat sports, they started turning the online performance into a business with real money at stake.

Six weeks after the auction, Logan is in New York City for WWE’s “Monday Night Raw.” He’s in a black Escalade being driven between podcast stops ahead of his match at Madison Square Garden.

As we weave through traffic, he explains the difference between his private self and his public persona. “Jake and I have a secret weapon in that we’re not actually the dumbasses that we’re perceived to be,” he says. “This is a façade. This is all a façade.”

I stop him. “Are you performing right now?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

Minutes later, he’s heading into Caleb Pressley’s comedic podcast, “Sundae Conversation.” Logan tells me he’ll conduct the interview “in character” as a “fucking dumbass dickhead that people love to hate,” before beelining toward a jar of lollipops, grabbing a pink one, and walking on set.

The transformation is jarring. Logan turns from the reflective, almost philosophical version of himself in the car into the jockish character I had seen on the internet — yet off camera, he tells me he’s into sci-fi, animé, Pokémon, collectibles, and dinosaur documentaries.

When the podcast ends, he drops the persona. He’s in the elevator debriefing with his team — breaking down what worked, what didn’t, and how it could be better next time. “I have really high standards for the content we put out,” he says. “Maybe unrealistically high sometimes.”

Professional wrestling has a word for this: “kayfabe.” It’s the practice of treating performance as reality, never breaking character, and protecting the illusion at all costs. The Paul brothers have been refining this skill for most of their lives.

In 2007, two years after YouTube launched, Logan, 12, and Jake, 10, created a channel where they uploaded prank calls, backyard stunts, and low-budget sketches to an audience of strangers.

The views began growing, and brand deals followed. In college, Logan asked his dad, who worked as a commercial roofer, how much he had made in his best year.

$120,000.

“I was like, ‘Dad, I made that much this year, and I’m 18,’” Logan says. “I think this internet stuff has some legs. I’m going to pursue it.”

He dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles. Jake followed, leaving high school to do the same.

Subscribe here to receive longform profiles of the world’s most successful people.

Subscribe now

When influencer Amanda Cerny first met Jake and Logan, they were living in the same apartment building. “From the very beginning, they wanted to launch businesses,” Cerny says, recalling how Jake tried to convince the Vine influencers to start a clothing brand together. “They saw that eyeballs meant dollar signs, so attention was really valuable.”

In 2016, Jake launched Team 10, a content house and talent management agency where creators collaborated on videos and tried to make them go viral every day.

Justin Roberts joined at age 14. “I went over to the Team 10 house, and [Jake] was filming a video where he was going to blow up a car in the desert,” Roberts says. “We were building homemade water slides, pulling pranks on each other, [creating] dating gossip — all to get the attention of the audience.”

As Jake reflects on that period now, he calls it “the YouTuber Disease” — the compulsive cycle of feeding the algorithm, each video more extreme than the last. He takes responsibility, saying he feels “guilty” for helping to perpetuate an internet culture of constant escalation.

“I didn’t know anything about life,” he says. “I was just full steam ahead. I didn’t care about consequences. I didn’t understand my impact. I didn’t understand emotional intelligence.”

Things came to a head in 2020, when FBI agents, accompanied by a SWAT team, raided his home and seized multiple firearms. The raid followed charges in Arizona for misdemeanor criminal trespassing and unlawful assembly — both of which were later dropped.

After Team 10 disbanded in 2020, Jake turned to boxing where the performance and the attention are central to the business. With his combat sports promotion company Most Valuable Promotions, he is the owner, not the talent. He controls the narrative and the economics.

By April 2021, Jake had beaten two YouTubers and a former NBA player, but few in boxing took him seriously, dismissing him as a showman. His match against Olympic wrestler and MMA champion Ben Askren was seen as his first real test, and Jake leaned into his “Problem Child” boxing persona by provoking Askren and calling him “a pussy ass bitch.”

“At that point, no one knew how good Jake was,” Askren tells me. “Unfortunately, he was better than what I anticipated, and the fight didn’t go so well for me.”

Jake knocked him out in under two minutes. Soon after, Jake appeared on Logan’s podcast and focused on the metric that mattered most to him: the earnings.

The match generated a whopping 1.3 million pay-per-view buys at $50 each — a roughly $65 million event.

Even when he’s losing, he’s still winning. More recently, 33 million viewers tuned in to watch Anthony Joshua knock out Jake and break his jaw. It was a brutal defeat, but Jake still reportedly made $92 million. By some estimates, his total boxing earnings now fall between $170 million and $200 million.

All across social media, critics insist that Jake isn’t a real boxer, that he handpicks his opponents, and that his career is more entertainment than sport.

And yet, here we are all watching, putting millions of dollars in his pocket.

In a TikTok video, Jake Paul smiles and counts down: “3, 2, 1 … I’m gay!” A makeup palette appears in his hand. “I’ve got a makeup set, guys. Oh my gosh, it looks amazing.”

The nine-second clip racked up 25 million views. It’s Jake, but not exactly. He had licensed his name, image, and likeness to OpenAI’s text-to-video platform Sora, allowing users to generate hyperrealistic deepfakes of him.

To many people’s surprise, it was later revealed that Jake was advising OpenAI on the development of the Sora product. After meeting Sam Altman at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, he began working closely with the team, weighing in on everything from high-level direction to details as granular as button design.

As both investor and distribution engine, Jake helped OpenAI garner more than one billion views on the Sora product in six days — an estimated $57 million in organic media value for the company.

Six months after Jake’s videos went viral, OpenAI shut Sora down because running it proved to be astronomically expensive for the company.

A similar dynamic played out during the early days of Jake’s personal care brand W (the name is a nod to “winning”). The launch drew millions of eyeballs and brought in customers, but it couldn’t make them like the product.

Users of the W deodorant criticized the glide (“shit is so dry and hard to put on”), the scent (“it smells like alcohol wipes”), and some even made a bizarre claim that it ripped out their armpit hair.

“Normally, companies start with something and build, grow, change, iterate and continue to refine — and then they get more and more customers,” Jake says. “W had a ton of exposure on day one.”

In March, W debuted a “new and improved” formula as an answer to the customer feedback. “It’s fair to say that not everything we touch turns to gold, but I think it’s standard for an early stage venture firm,” Anti Fund co-founder Geoff Woo says. “You try, you launch, and then you run it back.”

As a Stanford computer science graduate and a seasoned operator, Woo brings institutional credibility to the partnership. In conversations with founders and investors, he is consistently described as the one driving deals — “an absolute stud,” “a sharp investor,” and “an ultimate brain.”

Though Woo and Jake had met years earlier, they reconnected at a Miami tech party in 2021. The two formalized their personal investing into a $10 million rolling fund, which has returned roughly half of investors’ capital within five years.

Anti Fund has since scaled. Its first early-stage venture fund was $30 million, and it is now raising a second expected to reach $50 million, according to people familiar with the matter. It is also reportedly raising a $150 million growth vehicle targeting more mature companies.

Anti Fund’s limited partners consist of individuals, entrepreneurs, and institutions, including Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon of a16z, as well as Aquarian Holdings and Autilus Partners.

When I ask Jake if it bothers him that some people see Woo as the dealmaker and him as the distribution engine, he pauses for a long time before responding. “Um, I mean, I’ve never even heard someone say that, but I don’t give a shit,” he says. “As long as our LPs — and we — are making money, and the flywheel is working, that’s all that matters.”

That flywheel is most visible at the company level. When Joey Levy was building Betr, Jake’s involvement extended beyond capital.

He kicked off an 8-minute YouTube video by explaining Betr’s model and revealing he’d gotten the company’s logo tattooed on his leg. The stunt generated 2 million views, giving Betr instant visibility without a traditional marketing budget. The $50 million fundraise that followed was covered across major news outlets.

When the alignment between the company and the Paul brothers’ audience is strong, the model starts to make sense. Logan’s early investment in the live-shopping platform Whatnot, which mirrors his audience’s interest in collectibles, has multiplied significantly.

The founders approached Logan during their Series A round. Logan invested $100,000 in 2021, when the company was valued at $90 million. Today, Whatnot is valued at $11.5 billion, which would put his stake somewhere in the $10 to $12 million range, depending on dilution. His name is listed beside investing heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and CapitalG.

Harry Stebbings, investor and host of the 20VC podcast, explained it this way: as technology gets cheaper to build, founders will increasingly prioritize distribution. In other words, the ability to get a product in front of millions of people quickly may matter as much as the product itself.

That approach has produced both breakout successes and volatility. Prime Hydration, the sports drink Logan co-founded, produced more than $1.2 billion in revenue in 2023 before projections dropped sharply in the following years.

Media reports have pegged Logan’s stake at around 20%, though the company has never confirmed the exact ownership split. Majority control sits with Congo Brands, which handles manufacturing and distribution, while Logan’s role is to drive attention.

Anti Fund is built on a similar premise, and not everyone in venture buys the strategy. Several investors described it as thin — more narrative than substance — arguing the fund’s approach lacks specificity. One investor, speaking anonymously, said his conversations with the group felt unsubstantiated, with little evidence of an original approach beyond access and amplification.

That amplification only intensified in December, when Logan attached his brand to Anti Fund, announcing he was joining as a general partner. “I have two of the top five American tastemakers of the millennial and Gen Z [demographic],” Woo says. “We’re not afraid to talk a little shit and shake things up.”

When I first heard Jake and Logan say they want to be billionaires, I dismissed it. It’s an audacious goal under any circumstances — let alone by age 35. But I still decided to pressure-test this claim. What would it actually take?

As a teenager, Jake thought about becoming a billionaire as a game — almost like Monopoly, where the objective is simply to win. Over time, he says, it became more about what the number represents. “It’s freedom,” Jake says, describing it as the ability to say what he wants and provide long-term security for his family.

The path to a billion dollars is inherently difficult because it requires generating — and holding on to — an inordinate amount of wealth. Jake and Logan have to earn cash, convert it into ownership, let that ownership compound, and eventually turn it into liquidity.

The brothers have already proven the first step. Between YouTube, boxing, WWE, and brand deals, they’ve earned hundreds of millions of dollars in cash.

The second step is underway. Instead of relying solely on sponsorships, they have taken ownership stakes in companies like Prime and Betr, while investing through Anti Fund.

The numbers, however, show how far there is to go. Betr, which is valued at $375 million, might make Jake tens of millions depending on his stake, which is meaningful but not transformative. For it to matter at a billionaire scale, it would need to become a multibillion-dollar company and compound over time.

Similarly, W was last valued at more than $150 million in 2024. If Jake still owns a sizable piece, that stake could be worth real money on paper. But unless the company grows far beyond that mark, it’s unlikely to close the gap to a billion.

Logan comes closer. Estimates have placed his sports drink brand Prime between $3 billion and $8 billion at its peak, according to CB Insights — which would have put his ownership stake at around $1 billion on paper back in 2023.

But he’s not a billionaire yet. The valuation isn’t confirmed, his stake isn’t liquid, and the business itself has already proven volatile, with revenue projections declining from their 2023 peak.

This is where it gets complicated. Compounding is what creates billionaires, but it takes time, and most investments don’t work. The bet Jake, Logan, and Geoff Woo are making is that attention can compound into real equity, and that a few outliers will be big enough to matter.

The risk isn’t purely financial either. In 2023, Jake settled with the SEC over touting a cryptocurrency without proper disclosure, which underscores that reputation may be the most fragile piece of the entire strategy.

Ryan Serhant, the real estate entrepreneur known for turning attention into business, frames the challenge more broadly: “Durable brands have to outlive algorithms, and that’s hard.”

Even if they clear that bar, there’s one final hurdle: liquidity. Jake explicitly says that he’s not aiming to be a billionaire on paper. He’s aiming to be liquid.

But time is the constraint. Whether the Paul brothers become billionaires won’t depend on their ability to make money. They’ve already proven they can do that. The question is whether they can turn something as fleeting as attention into something that lasts.

When I suggest that some still see Jake as nothing more than an entertainer, he tells me a story about hosting people at his house for a recent event.

“I start talking about Anti Fund, our investment strategy, the markups, and you can tell they’re like, ‘What the fuck? I didn’t expect that,’” Jake says. “Some of the people there were telling my team, ‘Oh, he’s actually smart?’”

I ask if that bothers him.

“I guess the results will speak for themselves,” he says.

It’s a question I was asked repeatedly while reporting this story: Are they actually smart? By traditional measures of intelligence — credentials and pedigree — they’re easy to underestimate.

Their advantage is a more creative form of judgment in that they know how to manufacture moments, turn them viral, and convert that attention into tangible opportunities like deal flow.

More importantly, they have shown an ability to stay culturally relevant while anticipating where the world is heading — backing companies like observability firm Chronosphere and drone startup Aerodome early, before they were acquired for $3.35 billion and $300 million, respectively.

Both brothers are careful with their words, intentional about how they present themselves, and acutely aware that declaring a path to billionaire status is both a goal and a form of content. Jake, in particular, has built a team of experienced operators, allowing him to focus on attention while they handle the sourcing and execution of deals.

The structure isn’t unusual, but the reaction to it is. Athletes like NFL star Saquon Barkley invest in a similar way, surrounding themselves with seasoned partners to manage the details. The difference is perception. Jake, with years of internet baggage, is still treated as an outsider.

“Everyone my whole career underestimates me, and then I surpass expectations, and they’re like, ‘Oh, okay, well,’” Jake says. “I think anytime you start to break out of the norm and do something different in life, you’re always going to have haters.”

What surprised me most about Jake and Logan is how much they care. On set, during the Sundae Conversation podcast taping, a joke about Logan’s daughter lands a little too close to home. For a moment, the mask drops, and he recoils and pushes back, telling the host to cut that part.

When I ask about times when he has taken a reputational hit, his demeanor changes from warm and gregarious to a much more guarded version of himself.

For most of their adult lives, Jake and Logan have been defined by the internet as “obnoxious assholes” and “famous for being famous.” They are not as indifferent to it as I expected.

They are still intent on controlling how they come across — even if that control provokes more hate and, in turn, more attention. Logan obsessively reviews and edits every single video, clip, and post that goes out on his social media channels. Jake hired celebrity attorney Alex Spiro to pursue legal action against people who question the legitimacy of his boxing matches.

“There’s a certain sector of the audience that still thinks I’m the 21-year-old YouTube kid,” Jake says. “A lot of my haters don’t know enough about me. I think people react to different versions of who they think I am.”

That gap between perception and reality is part of what attracts them to business. It’s one of the few areas where they can prove the work is real, and, by extension, that they are too. The problem with applying their attention playbook to business is that it leans on traits — like cockiness and provocation — that run counter to a field that tends to reward restraint (or at least the appearance of it).

As Jake’s driver parks in front of the Aquarian Holdings office, he tells me he wishes fundraising could be reduced to a five-sentence pitch: “I just want to walk in the room and be like, ‘Hey, you’re going to make a fuck ton of money. Bet on me. I have a great track record. I’m putting all my money into it. If you don’t want to do it, peace out.’”

It’s a pitch that has worked on the internet for two decades: bet on me. And in some ways, the room he’s walking into isn’t as different as it seems. Even here, the attention of the most traditionally successful people in the office bends toward him.

During my time with them, Jake and Logan both kept returning to the same idea: at the highest levels of wealth, the path you took to get there matters less than the fact that you made it.

Eventually, the winners all end up in the same room.

–

Written by Polina Pompliano | Edited by Laura Entis | Photos & video by Stephen Yang

Want more longform stories like this? Sign up for The Profile.

Subscribe now

Check out more original profiles here:

Can internet fame be turned into a billion dollars?

I spent the last few months inside the world of two of the most polarizing figures on the internet who are trying to do exactly that.

Tomorrow morning, I’m publishing a deeply reported profile that pressure-tests whether it actually works. If you’ve ever wondered whether attention can be converted into something real, this story may change how you think about it.

This piece took five months of reporting — dozens of interviews, days of shadowing my subjects, and a close look at the actual numbers behind their business empire.

If you value original, deeply reported journalism like this, you can support the work by upgrading your subscription below:

Subscribe now

I appreciate you always.

— Polina

PROFILES.

— The podcaster letting you eavesdrop on the AI elite [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The conservative media figure breaking with Trump
— The actress reframing aging
— The ‘free’ social casino games
— The startups allowing you to choose your ‘best baby

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The podcaster letting you eavesdrop on the AI elite: Dwarkesh Patel went from a bored college sophomore to the go-to interviewer for the people building A.I. — with CEOs and researchers treating his podcast as required listening. He wins access by going deeper than anyone else, mastering the material and speaking the insiders’ language. That proximity gives him real influence, shaping how the industry talks about its own future. He’s an embedded operator who documents power from inside the room. (The New York Times; alternate link)

The conservative media figure breaking with Trump: Tucker Carlson has broken with Donald Trump over the Iran war, arguing the president was pressured into a disastrous conflict that betrays his core promises. He now casts himself as a critic of both the administration and the broader Republican establishment, framing the war as morally wrong and politically ruinous. At the same time, Carlson’s worldview has grown more ideological — blending anti-interventionism, skepticism of U.S. alliances, and a belief that deeper cultural and even spiritual forces are at play. (The New York Times Magazine)

The actress reframing aging: Anne Hathaway is reckoning with what comes after the “have it all” era. And she has found that it’s … harmony. After two decades of fame, motherhood and sobriety have shifted her from relentless ambition to a more grounded, self-aware version of success. She’s still intensely driven, but now less interested in proving herself and more focused on how she moves through her life. (Harper’s Bazaar)

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

**The ‘free’ social casino games:** “Free” social casino games are generating billions by mimicking gambling — hooking players with virtual coins they can’t cash out but can endlessly pay to keep using. A small group of heavy spenders drives the business, sometimes losing tens of thousands — or even millions — while companies actively target and retain them. Apple, Google, and other platforms profit from the model, taking cuts of in-app purchases while avoiding many gambling regulations. Fascinating. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

**The startups allowing you to choose your ‘best baby:’** Startups are selling $50,000 tests that promise to help parents pick the “best” embryo, but the science behind them is still shaky. The real appeal is control, tapping into deep parental anxiety about risk and uncertainty. For now, the benefits appear marginal, but the ethical stakes, from inequality to “designer babies,” are enormous. (New York Magazine)

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

My husband Anthony went on The New York Times’ podcast, “Interesting Times” to talk about the future of Bitcoin.

What I found compelling is that the conversation sidesteps the usual “Is Bitcoin a fad?” debate. Instead, it gets at the much more fascinating question of, “How does the financial system actually work, and who does it work for?”

Anthony’s core argument is that the system is structurally designed to erode the value of cash, and that’s why he believes bitcoin is a long-term digital savings mechanism.

Having watched and learned about Bitcoin since I met Anthony in 2016, it feels like the debate has changed. For years, the question was whether it had value at all. Now, the argument is over what kind of asset it is — currency, commodity, tech bet, insurance policy, or some combination of the four.

Anyway, it’s a fascinating conversation, and I hope you give it a listen.

Check it out here

— Polina

PROFILES.

— The CEO buying struggling airlines [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The TV anchor who went independent
— The billionaire trying to build the newsroom of the future
— The sports stadium surveilling you
— The AI startup helping reverse denied health insurance claims

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The CEO buying struggling airlines: Scott Kirby has reshaped United Airlines by aiming to build an ecosystem that keeps customers spending. Known for his sharp edges and outsize confidence, he’s paired bold strategic moves — like massive plane orders during Covid — with a push into higher-end travel and loyalty economics. This has resulted in a stronger, more competitive United, even as it chases Delta and flirts with industry-shaking mergers. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

The TV anchor who went independent: Katie Couric has embraced her post-network “no filter” era and built a thriving independent media business to match. Free from corporate constraints, she’s leveraging newsletters, social media, and podcasts to reach millions while speaking more bluntly about politics and the media than ever before. At the same time, she’s deeply skeptical of legacy news, arguing that corporate pressures, polarization, and the push for “both sides” coverage are eroding journalistic integrity. (Variety)

The billionaire trying to build the newsroom of the future: A billionaire media veteran is making a high-stakes bet on Washington journalism — again. After sensing an opening created by turmoil at The Washington Post, Robert Allbritton is aggressively hiring top reporters and rebranding his startup as “The Star,” aiming to build the capital’s next dominant newsroom. Backed by a $10 million investment and a plan to double staff, he’s betting that a focused, insider-driven publication can thrive in an already crowded market. (WSJ; complimentary link provided)

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The sports stadium surveilling you: Madison Square Garden may be watching you. A new investigation reveals an expansive surveillance operation under owner James Dolan, using facial recognition, watchlists, and private security to track critics, employees, and even ordinary fans, sometimes in extraordinary detail. What’s framed as security often blurs into personal score-settling, with allegations of profiling, intimidation, and overreach extending beyond the arena itself. Dolan may be an early example of a broader shift toward corporate “private armies” powered by biometric surveillance. (WIRED; alternate link)

The AI startup helping reverse denied health insurance claims: When insurers deny care, most patients give up, but one startup is betting AI can change that. Claimable helps patients generate legal-grade appeals to fight coverage denials, flipping the script as algorithms increasingly drive those decisions in the first place. Early results are striking, with a majority of cases overturned, often by combining automation with public pressure and escalation tactics. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

My next profile is on two people who have spent most of their lives as targets for public scrutiny. In response, they’ve become highly skilled at controlling what you see.

I went in expecting to spend the day with the characters I’d seen online. That’s not who showed up. In their place were two people who were more thoughtful, more self-aware and more human than I anticipated. I found a constant negotiation between the person and the persona, and the question of whether, after two decades, any real separation remains.

I’ve spent the last four months working on this one, and I’ll be sharing more soon.

(This is the crowd that formed outside once one of them walked inside an office building in NYC.)

— Polina

PROFILES.

— The OpenTable CEO reinventing the business
— The new Mrs. Bezos who is unapologetic about being uber-rich
— The secretive wealth adviser to tech billionaires [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The $10 billion startup training AI to take our jobs
— The AI school bus camera company

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The OpenTable CEO reinventing the business: When Debby Soo took over OpenTable, restaurants — its real customers — were fed up, calling the company expensive, out of touch, and stuck in the past. She rebuilt the business by flipping its focus: serve restaurants first, or lose them entirely. The turnaround meant reworking pricing, rebuilding products, and winning back trust—often by sitting through angry meetings across the country. Now, as competition and AI loom, OpenTable is growing again with the idea that better data and better alignment with restaurants can fill every empty seat. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

The new Mrs. Bezos who is unapologetic about being uber-rich: Lauren Sánchez Bezos has turned her marriage to Jeff Bezos into a full-throttle embrace of wealth, visibility, and influence. From the morning gratitude lists to the headline-making appearances by night …. she’s living it up. She wants you to know she’s truly happy, even as critics see excess and provocation. I don’t know what to say about this one except you need to read it for yourself. (The New York Times)

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The secretive wealth adviser to tech billionaires: Iconiq built its fortune managing money for billionaires, and now it’s using those relationships to become a major power broker in the AI boom. The firm is pouring billions into startups like Anthropic, leveraging its elite network to open doors that traditional VCs can’t. Its strategy is concentrated and high-stakes: pick a few winners, go deep, and use access as an edge. If it works, Iconiq will help shape who gets to build our AI future. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

The $10 billion startup training AI to take our jobs: A social worker logs on every night to train the very AI that could one day replace her. She’s part of a fast-growing startup, Mercor, that pays professionals to break their expertise into data — turning real-world judgment into machine intelligence. For many, it’s a lucrative side hustle born out of job insecurity; for others, it feels like monetizing their own obsolescence. The bet is that AI will create more opportunity than it destroys, but the transition may be awfully messy. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

The AI school bus camera company: A company promises safer streets by installing AI cameras on school buses, but the real engine may be fines, not safety. Across the country, drivers are racking up tickets by the thousands, while violations barely decline and cities often keep only a fraction of the revenue. Confusing road design rather than reckless driving appears to be racking up many infractions, trapping ordinary residents in a costly system. When enforcement becomes a business model, is it protecting children or profiting from confusion? (Bloomberg; alternate link)

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

The artist, Alex Mebane, told me the cartoon chicken was once real. His daughter named it “Marzipan,” eventually shortened to “Little Marzi,” and it became his muse.

I’ve written before about “weak social ties” — the casual relationships with people you encounter in coffee shops, bookstores, or on your daily walk — and how they can magnify your happiness. This felt like one of those moments.

I stood there longer than I expected. There was something paradoxical about it — the simplicity of the image paired with the weight of the words.

When I asked Alex how much the paintings cost, he told me: “You pay me whatever you want. This is such a weird gift from God that he knows what I need.”

Today is Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox Easter, and it made me think about the nature of faith. I saw its power firsthand when my newborn twins were in the NICU. I’ve seen it again in friends going through difficult seasons.

And now, I saw it in the way Alex had turned his hardest moments into something unexpectedly bright. A belief in God carried him through the darkest stretches of his life.

For me, believing in God has always been a source of strength — the kind you don’t realize you have until you need it.

Of course, I asked Alex more questions, and I’ve shared his answers below. If you feel inclined, you can check out his work here or find him in Central Park.

Q: How did this become your life’s work?

ALEX: In 2016, my family had moved to Austin from Santa Monica and getting backyard chickens seemed like a fun idea. Marzipan (named by my youngest daughter), the main character to my paintings, was the only yellow chicken and a bit odd. Granted, ALL chickens are odd but she was more so. After a year, I moved back to Santa Monica to resume my career in entertainment. Then Covid happens, and I’m not working. A friend was painting water colors live on Facebook and I joined purely out of “something to do.” I envisioned perhaps writing a children’s book with Marzi (that’s usually what we called her) as the main character. I broached the subject with my painting friend and he responded, “I’ll teach you how I do watercolors.” So in 2020, my life as an artist began. The first couple of hundred looked like I had painted them with my foot. But they got better.

What drew you specifically to New York City and Central Park?

ALEX: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way profoundly influenced both my painting and my move to New York. One of her exercises was to do a vision board and unfortunately, nothing I chose for it was in California. My grandparents had lived here in NY when I was young, and I always thought of NYC as a magical place. And still do. I figured I would just get a new agent and go back to working in entertainment.

I loved Central Park as a child and visited here not long before I moved here in 2022 and met a girl near the Bethesda Fountain doing poetry for strangers. She told me a permit wasn’t required to vend there along the Mall, so after I moved here in June of 2022, I gave it a shot. And oddly enough, people responded in a way that I didn’t expect.

Faith seems central to what you do. Has that always been true, or did it emerge over time?

ALEX: I’ve been a Christian for 50 years, and it’s always found its way into what I create. More than a few of my paintings I sell here in the Park came from struggle. LA was a hard period for me. I had some success (I sang on some Disney children’s albums, won a Los Angeles Emmy for a children’s show I’d help produce), yet consistent work was difficult to find.

Also, during the pandemic, I read an article by a pastor from Philadelphia, Paul David Tripp, about dealing with hopelessness, from which I was struggling. One of the suggestions was, “Be the encouragement you need to hear.” So some of what I paint is that. Hope my own heart needed to hear.

You let people pay whatever they want for your work? Why do it that way?

ALEX: Honestly it’s such a weird gift from God, (I had never painted anything before the pandemic other than a wall) and the reality, God knows what I need. It’s how I’ve made a living for the past 4 years. I often joke, following the Lord is a lot like the mapping app Waze. It takes you on paths that seem totally opposite of where you want to go, but you end up exactly where you were supposed to be, at exactly the right time.

My dad often tells me: “Sometimes God helps us, and other times, He uses us to help others.” I’ve come to believe that the highest form of faith is the kind that extends beyond yourself — helping others, even in the smallest ways.

Below is a ‘day in the life’ video of how Alex makes a living selling chicken paintings:

Share The Profile

To read my profiles, check out:

… For more like this, make sure to sign up for The Profile here:

Subscribe now

✨ Order my book, HIDDEN GENIUS below:

On a recent walk through Central Park, I stopped in front of a display of watercolor paintings of a chicken — a small, yellow, wide-eyed bird, each one paired with a line of scripture or a simple, handwritten quote.

The artist, Alex Mebane, told me the cartoon chicken was once real. His daughter named it “Marzipan,” eventually shortened to “Little Marzi,” and it became his muse.

I’ve written before about “weak social ties” — the casual relationships with people you encounter in coffee shops, bookstores, or on your daily walk — and how they can quietly magnify your happiness. This felt like one of those moments.

I stood there longer than I expected. There was something paradoxical about it — the simplicity of the image paired with the weight of the words.

When I asked Alex how much the paintings cost, he told me: “You pay me whatever you want. This is such a weird gift from God that he knows what I need.”

Today is Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox Easter, and it made me think about the nature of faith. I saw its power firsthand when my newborn twins were in the NICU. I’ve seen it again in friends going through difficult seasons.

And now, I saw it in the way Alex had turned his hardest moments into something unexpectedly bright. A belief in God carried him through the darkest stretches of his life.

For me, believing in God has always been a source of strength — the kind you don’t realize you have until you need it.

Of course, I asked Alex more questions, and I’ve shared his answers below. If you feel inclined, you can check out his work here or find him in Central Park.

Q: How did this become your life’s work?

ALEX: In 2016, my family had moved to Austin from Santa Monica and getting backyard chickens seemed like a fun idea. Marzipan (named by my youngest daughter), the main character to my paintings, was the only yellow chicken and a bit odd. Granted, ALL chickens are odd but she was more so. After a year, I moved back to Santa Monica to resume my career in entertainment. Then Covid happens, and I’m not working. A friend was painting water colors live on Facebook and I joined purely out of “something to do.” I envisioned perhaps writing a children’s book with Marzi (that’s usually what we called her) as the main character. I broached the subject with my painting friend and he responded, “I’ll teach you how I do watercolors.” So in 2020, my life as an artist began. The first couple of hundred looked like I had painted them with my foot. But they got better.

What drew you specifically to New York City and Central Park?

ALEX: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way profoundly influenced both my painting and my move to New York. One of her exercises was to do a vision board and unfortunately, nothing I chose for it was in California. My grandparents had lived here in NY when I was young, and I always thought of NYC as a magical place. And still do. I figured I would just get a new agent and go back to working in entertainment.

I loved Central Park as a child and visited here not long before I moved here in 2022 and met a girl near the Bethesda Fountain doing poetry for strangers. She told me a permit wasn’t required to vend there along the Mall, so after I moved here in June of 2022, I gave it a shot. And oddly enough, people responded in a way that I didn’t expect.

Faith seems central to what you do. Has that always been true, or did it emerge over time?

ALEX: I’ve been a Christian for 50 years, and it’s always found its way into what I create. More than a few of my paintings I sell here in the Park came from struggle. LA was a hard period for me. I had some success (I sang on some Disney children’s albums, won a Los Angeles Emmy for a children’s show I’d help produce), yet consistent work was difficult to find.

Also, during the pandemic, I read an article by a pastor from Philadelphia, Paul David Tripp, about dealing with hopelessness, from which I was struggling. One of the suggestions was, “Be the encouragement you need to hear.” So some of what I paint is that. Hope my own heart needed to hear.

You let people pay whatever they want for your work? Why do it that way?

ALEX: Honestly it’s such a weird gift from God, (I had never painted anything before the pandemic other than a wall) and the reality, God knows what I need. It’s how I’ve made a living for the past 4 years. I often joke, following the Lord is a lot like the mapping app Waze. It takes you on paths that seem totally opposite of where you want to go, but you end up exactly where you were supposed to be, at exactly the right time.

—-

My dad often tells me: “Sometimes God helps us, and other times, He uses us to help others.” I’ve come to believe that the highest form of faith is the kind that extends beyond yourself — helping others, even in the smallest ways.

Below is a ‘day in the life’ video of how Alex makes a living selling chicken paintings:

Share The Profile

PROFILES.

— The OpenAI CEO who may control our future [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The nuclear engineer who started the sports betting revolution
— The people who live on an isolated island
— France’s tech hub trying to win the AI race
— The luxury reading retreats

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The OpenAI CEO who may control our future: At OpenAI, the question isn’t just what Sam Altman is building, but whether he can be trusted to control it. Inside the company, allies see a brilliant operator; critics see a leader willing to bend the truth to win. As A.I. inches toward world-shaping power, that tension has turned one man’s judgment into a global risk. (The New Yorker; alternate link)

The nuclear engineer who started the sports betting revolution: A bored engineer turned a mainframe into a money-printing machine while accidentally rewriting the rules of sports betting. Mike Kent’s algorithm gave his crew an edge so powerful it drew the mob, the FBI, and millions in wagers into its orbit. But as the winnings piled up, so did the risks, until the operation collapsed under betrayal, paranoia, and federal scrutiny. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

The people who live on an isolated island: On Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated inhabited island on Earth, there’s no such thing as a quiet life. With just 221 residents and no way in or out except by sea, survival is a full-time, all-hands operation. Everyone does everything—and the island only works because no one opts out. What a fascinating article. (NPR)

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

France’s tech hub trying to win the AI race: At Station F, France built a startup campus to showcase its tech talent. Now, it’s trying to win the global AI race. Backed by political power, elite founders, and deep-pocketed partners, the campus has become a magnet for ambition and capital. But turning that momentum into lasting global dominance means closing the gap with Silicon Valley’s speed, scale, and mindset. ( Substack)

The luxury reading retreats: Reading, once a social ritual, is being reinvented as a luxury escape. Across the US and UK, people are paying up to $1,000 to sit in silence with strangers. The appeal is supposedly about reclaiming attention, community, and the rare feeling of being fully present. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

One Christmas a few years ago, my mom gave me a book titled, Life Stories. It’s a compilation of The New Yorker’s greatest longform profiles.

The first line of the book reads, “One of art’s purest challenges is to translate a human being into words.” That sentence has been on my mind ever since I read it, and as a writer who specializes in profiles, there’s no greater challenge.

There are layers on layers to a human being. And to think that you could deconstruct someone’s essence into 4,000 words is naive, and frankly, silly. But there are some profiles that capture the complexities of that elusive je ne sais quois in a way no one has been able to before*.*

One writer who is able to capture it is named Wright Thompson. He wrote this epic 2016 ESPN profile on Tiger Woods.

Let me preface this by saying that it’s about Tiger Woods, but it’s not really about Tiger Woods. It’s about anyone who has ever experienced profound loss, grief, and inexplicable loneliness.

In the 10 years since his father died, Tiger lost his greatness at golf, while becoming obsessed with the military and indulging in a dozen or more affairs — both reflections of his dad Earl. All kids, the story says, whether they love or hate their fathers, want to shake free of the past and overcome any inherited weakness. Tiger’s father seemed to evoke conflicting emotions: The best and worst things that have happened in his life happened because of Earl.

Tiger grew up without any siblings or many friends and spent his childhood with his father, either on the golf course or hitting balls into a net in the garage. They often butted heads, but their biggest, most serious fight centered around Earl’s love for women. Tiger hated that his dad cheated on his mom. Yet somehow, Tiger’s life unraveled in a way much like his father’s, and he found himself repeating the same mistakes.

We never see the past coming up behind because shaping the future takes so much effort. That’s one of those lessons everyone must learn for themselves, including Tiger Woods. He juggled a harem of women at once, looking for something he couldn’t find, while he made more and more time for his obsession with the military, and he either ignored or did not notice the repeating patterns from Earl’s life. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, we grow up like our daddy after all,” says Paul Fregia, first director of the Tiger Woods Foundation. “In some respects, he became what he loathed about his father.”

And that’s the thing — the past always sneaks up on us when we least expect it. We unknowingly pick up our parents’ habits, fall into old patterns, and get nostalgic about how things used to be.

The thing that struck me about the profile is that so many people expected Tiger to act a certain way because of his status. But he almost never behaved in accordance with social norms, and that made him, well, “a weird f---ing guy,” as one Navy SEAL put it.

This is a remarkable story of early success, a meteoric rise, a catastrophic fall, and an uncertain future. But it’s mostly a reminder that humans are complex creatures, and the unpredictable forces of life can bring anyone to their knees.

Wright Thompson — the writer of the piece — recently appeared on a podcast in which he discussed what a profile’s really about. He said: “Profiles are about figuring out what is a central complication of somebody’s life and how, on a daily basis, they go about solving it.”

It sounds simple, almost obvious, until you realize how rarely profiles actually do this. The best profiles reveal the problem the subject is trying to solve, and why a person’s decisions that seemed erratic start to feel inevitable.

Right now, I’m working on a profile of two people who have spent their entire adult lives in public. On the surface, their story seems like it is about attention. I was struggling to write the piece until I realized that the attention is actually not the complication of their life. It’s a need for a scoreboard that’s concrete enough to silence the doubters, the haters, and all the people who want to see them fail.

And so every day becomes a kind of experiment in solving that problem.

Thompson’s framing becomes useful because it forced me to look past the spectacle and ask: “What are they trying to fix?”

My hope is that the profile answers it.

— Polina

PROFILES.

— Apple’s next CEO [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The billionaire who wants to reshape Miami
— The most prolific reporter in media
— The woman who alerts the world when an asteroid could hit
— The designer helping men dress better

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

Apple’s next CEO: Apple is entering a leadership transition as longtime executives retire, with John Ternus emerging as the top candidate to succeed Tim Cook. Ternus is a respected operator who has helped steady Apple’s core products, but his rise raises this question: Can a company built on iteration find its next breakthrough, especially as it falls behind in AI?

The billionaire who wants to reshape Miami: Ken Griffin is betting Miami is the future of American capitalism, citing its speed, pro-business culture, and openness to growth. The Citadel CEO has turned that belief into power by building Citadel into a financial giant while emerging as a key voice in shaping Republican economic policy. Now, he’s pushing a broader vision of low-regulation, pro-immigration capitalism and positioning himself to help lead it. (FORTUNE)

“The fight in America is all about protecting the cultures in places like Miami or Silicon Valley, and keeping us a nation of entrepreneurs.”

The most prolific reporter in media: Nick Lichtenberg is using AI to produce more stories in days than many reporters do in months. At Fortune, his AI-assisted work now drives a significant share of traffic, offering a glimpse into how legacy media is adapting to survive. His approach is all about scaling speed and output while risking accuracy, trust, and the very definition of reporting. (WSJ; complimentary link)

“It’s like a sports car that you can crash if you’re not careful. You’ve got to be like a Formula One driver.”

The woman who alerts the world when an asteroid could hit: Aarti Holla-Maini, the little-known UN official in charge of planetary defense, found herself confronting a real “Armageddon” scenario when an asteroid briefly threatened Earth. Trained for simulations, she had to quickly coordinate a global alert to 193 countries — testing, for the first time, the world’s response system to a potential space disaster. The moment revealed how much responsibility rests on a small, under-the-radar team—and how thin the line is between routine monitoring and global crisis. (The Guardian)

“This wasn’t a simulation or a drill. It was real.”

The designer helping men dress better: Todd Snyder has built a thriving fashion brand by offering high-quality, Italian-crafted style at prices that don’t feel absurd. As luxury brands lose millions of customers amid soaring prices, Snyder is winning by occupying the middle — delivering classic, wearable clothes that feel elevated but attainable. His bet is that most men want to dress better, just not at the cost — or risk — of high fashion. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“I’ve always been about creating something that is attainable.”

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

I am slowly emerging from the postpartum haze, and there’s no better way to do it than to try and turn your brain on for a philosophical discussion with the legendary Jim O’Shaughnessy.

We sat down in person this time and talked about something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: how people actually think versus how they present themselves.

A few ideas from the conversation:

• We are not who we say we are. We are how we move through the world. This is something I notice more and more when reporting. The truth usually lies in the small, in-between, seemingly ordinary moments. That’s why I pay attention to what someone emphasizes, what they avoid, and what slips out unintentionally. (Check out my piece: How I Capture the Hidden Side of Public People)

• The most creative people don’t wait for inspiration to strike. They move through the world actively looking for patterns, connections, and ideas. You can literally design your day in such a way that you find ideas in the most unexpected places. (Check out my piece: How the World’s Most Creative People Bring Their Ideas to Life)

• Rationality is a competitive advantage. It is such an advantage to be an emotionally sober person. The people who go furthest are often the ones who can attack ideas without attacking people. (Check out my piece: ‘The Power — and Limitation — of Rational Thought’)

• Betting on yourself is the most radical thing you can do. It becomes hardest right after failure. And yet, the people I gravitate to are the ones who are willing to do it again anyway. (Check out my piece: Why It’s So Hard to Create Original Work In the Face of Conventional Wisdom)

• Media has changed, but the core problem hasn’t. We all want to believe we’re consuming objective information. In reality, we’re often choosing sources that confirm what we already think. The harder (and more useful) path is to engage with ideas you disagree with. (Check out my piece: How to Improve Your Content Diet in the New Year)

• Freedom of speech is easy to take for granted — until you’ve seen life without it. Ah, freedom of speech. It’s one of those things that underpins everything like, you know, democracy. Remove it, and the system collapses faster than people expect. (Read my piece: Why Democracy Requires Action)

• Stories are what make ideas stick. Facts alone rarely change minds. But when you attach them to a person, a moment, or a lived experience, they have the power to change your life. (Check out my book: Hidden Genius)

You can watch, listen to, or read the full interview here. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

The OSVerse

What Drives Successful People? (Ep. 307)

Today I speak with my friend Polina Pompliano, writer of The Profile and author of the excellent Hidden Genius, which studies the secret patterns of the world’s most successful people. We explore the mental models behind high performers, why we misunderstand people (including ourselves), and what it takes to see the world differently…

Listen now

3 months ago · 8 likes · Jim O'Shaughnessy

PROFILES.

— The CEO trying to revive Red Lobster [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The Mango founder’s mysterious death
— The WIRED editor angering the people it covers
— The satellite startup that imploded
— The $30-billion AI startup

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The CEO trying to revive Red Lobster: Red Lobster’s new CEO, Damola Adamolekun, has promised one of the greatest turnarounds in restaurant history, but the reality is quite messy. The chain, gutted by years of private equity deals, bad leases, and strategic missteps, is still losing money and weighed down by aging locations and crushing rent obligations. Adamolekun has brought energy, marketing savvy, and modest operational fixes, but none address the structural problems threatening the business. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“We’re going to execute the greatest comeback in the history of the restaurant industry.”

The Mango founder’s mysterious death: The death of Mango founder Isak Andic looked at first like a tragic accident on a mountain trail outside Barcelona. But as investigators reopened the case and scrutiny fell on his son Jonathan—the only person with him that day—the story metastasized into a dynastic thriller involving inheritance, succession, class resentment, and the unresolved question of what really happened on that cliff. What makes the piece so gripping is that it’s not just about one suspicious death; it’s about the fragility of a family empire the moment its founder disappears. (New York Magazine; alternate link)

“Jonathan is a very nice guy. Spoiled kid. But I mean, you cannot run an aircraft carrier if you’ve only run a small boat.”

The WIRED editor angering the people it covers: Katie Drummond has reinvented Wired by pushing it beyond tech coverage into politics, power, and accountability, even though there’s been much backlash from the very industry it covers (see here). Even so, publication has added hundreds of thousands of subscribers and become a rare growth story inside Condé Nast. (The New York Times; alternate link)

“If you still don’t understand why Wired covers politics, you are either willfully ignorant or a complete idiot.”

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The satellite startup that imploded: A startup called Theia raised more than $250 million on the vision to build a real-time, planet-wide satellite imaging network that could track everything from trucks to whales. It attracted elite talent, political connections, and global investors, but it never launched a single satellite. Instead, the company unraveled into lawsuits, unpaid debts, and federal fraud charges alleging it misled investors about its finances, technology, and contracts. Here’s how Theia’s collapse has become a cautionary tale of the space boom. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“I began to get really suspicious about strange things that just weren’t making sense.”

The $30-billion AI startup: Cursor helped ignite the AI coding boom by growing at breakneck speed to billions in revenue and widespread enterprise adoption. But it’s now facing the brutal reality of its own market. New competitors like Anthropic’s Claude Code are reshaping how software gets built, shifting from human-assisted tools to fully autonomous agents, and threatening to make Cursor’s original model obsolete. The company is scrambling to adapt, even as talent leaves and pricing pressure mounts, revealing how quickly dominance can evaporate in the AI era. (FORTUNE)

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

Last week, I joined Jim O’Shaughnessy on his podcast, Infinite Loops.

We covered a wide range of topics — from the traits of successful people to freedom of speech to how my upbringing has shaped the work I’ve chosen to pursue. (If you’re interested, you can also revisit our 2021 conversation, where we discussed my decision to leave FORTUNE, the business of content creation, and how my writing has evolved.)

I’ll share the new podcast episode as soon as it’s published.

As an aside: one of my favorite pieces Jim has written is his guest essay for The Profile on the value of writing letters to your children.

It literally prompted me to start writing letters to my children, and I think you’ll enjoy it, too.

PROFILES.

— The longevity guru who fell from grace [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The founder battling the company board
— The biographer telling Judy Blume’s story
— The artist behind the Banksy mystery
— America’s most valuable used-car retailer

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The longevity guru who fell from grace: Peter Attia built a longevity empire on trust. In this profile, Bloomberg reports that the newly released Epstein files exposed a years-long relationship that now threatens the credibility behind his entire brand. The fallout has been swift and merciless. Business partners are backing away, his bestseller has stumbled, and a figure once seen as the voice of wellness is suddenly looking a lot more like the world he claimed to rise above. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“The biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”

The founder battling the company board: Lululemon’s founder is back in attack mode, arguing that the brand he built has lost its creative edge and become bloated, cautious, and forgettable. This time, though, his complaints land harder. Wall Street, former insiders, and even customers seem to agree that the company’s North American business has gone stale. The piece’s core tension is whether Chip Wilson is just another aggrieved founder who can’t let go or whether he is the person saying out loud what everyone else is already thinking. (FORTUNE)

“Lululemon has lost its soul.”

The biographer telling Judy Blume’s story: Mark Oppenheimer spent years researching Judy Blume and, with Blume’s cooperation, set out to write the definitive story of her life. But once she read the draft — returning it with hundreds of comments and a 40-page memo — the relationship cooled, and she stepped away from the project entirely. When a living subject invites a biography into being, how much truth are they really prepared to see once it’s no longer theirs to control? (The New York Times; alternate link)

“When you decide to write a biography, you don’t work for the subject. You work for the reader.”

The artist behind the Banksy mystery: Reuters claims that it has unmasked the legendary street artist Banksy. This investigation posits that the artist is Robin Gunningham, who later legally changed his name and continued operating behind an even more ordinary identity. What makes the piece especially strong is that it’s a portrait of how Banksy turned anonymity itself into a business model and a source of power. (Reuters)

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

America’s most valuable used-car retailer: Carvana’s comeback is one of the market’s strangest success stories: a used-car retailer once left for dead is now booming again. How? The company’s explosive growth rests on debt, subprime credit, and a tightly controlled Garcia family machine that investors have decided to trust. If demand holds, Carvana looks like the Amazon of cars, but if the credit cycle turns, the whole model could crumble. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“If anyone but my son asked me to invest in this idea, I’d have politely told them to leave my office.”

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

Last week, my friend Hilary Hoffman invited me to take a workout class at her new Upper East Side studio, SotoMethod.

As Hilary guided us through the movements, she spoke to the room in that calm but focused way that great instructors have. In between cues, she kept returning to three words: intensity, consistency, and authenticity.

A little backstory: Hilary and I first connected over our shared love of words. On a Zoom call three years ago, we talked about language, ideas, and the power of the right phrase at the right time.

Back then, I had one child. Now I have four.

In the years between those two realities — pregnancies, postpartum recoveries, sleepless nights, and the chaos of a growing family — Soto became a small but meaningful constant. I would return to the virtual classes again and again because they made me feel stronger, calmer, and more like myself.

And this is why those three words hit me so strongly when she said them. If you really think about it, “intensity,” “consistency” and “authenticity” apply to almost everything that matters.

Raising children requires intensity — that ferocious love and superhuman strength that shows up at 3 a.m. when you’re exhausted but still rocking a baby back to sleep.

Building something meaningful requires consistency — the unglamorous act of showing up again and again, long after the initial excitement fades. Consistency is what has allowed me to send this newsletter to you for the last 9 years without ever missing a single week.

And living a life that actually feels good requires authenticity — the courage to do things your own way, even when the world is pushing you in a different direction.

This is how I think about it: Intensity is what you need to get started, consistency is what you need to keep going, and authenticity is what makes it all worth it.

You can apply those three words to parenting, relationships, writing, business, fitness — to pretty much any craft that requires devotion over time.

When you combine these three simple ideas, you are unstoppable.

PS: Hilary has an excellent Substack called that helps you frame the week ahead. And if you’d like to take a Soto class, check it out here.

—

VIRTUAL EVENT THIS MONDAY: I’m speaking at a New York Financial Writers’ Association event tomorrow, Monday March 16 at 8pm EST about how I built The Profile. I would love it if you could join. Register here.

— Polina

PROFILES.

— The best-selling author on the planet
— The libertarian negotiating lower healthcare costs
— The celebrity makeup artist
— The most disruptive company in the world [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The best-selling author on the planet: James Patterson built a literary empire by treating books like a business. He moves fast, follows the audience, and never confuses prestige with sales. But as younger authors and internet-driven fandoms reshape publishing, even the king of mass-market thrillers is feeling the squeeze. His answer is more collaboration, bigger names, and now even a MrBeast novel, as he continues to chase relevance. At 79, he may not care about legacy, but he still cares deeply about winning. (Bloomberg; alternate link) [For more, check out my Profile Dossier of James Patterson here.]

“One thing I love about the publishing business is that it’s this intersection of creativity and commerce, and Jim is the perfect embodiment of that.”

The libertarian negotiating lower healthcare costs: For decades, anesthesiologist Keith Smith has argued that one of health care’s biggest scams is that patients often have no idea what anything costs until the bill arrives. At his Oklahoma surgery center, he’s tried to prove the opposite. He posts the prices upfront, keeps them low, and forces the system to make sense. What began as a libertarian crusade against hidden fees is now influencing employers, governments, and providers looking for cheaper, more transparent care. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“I wanted to start a price war—wanted these damn hospitals bankrupting people to have to explain themselves.”

The celebrity makeup artist: Celebrity makeup artist Nina Park has become Hollywood’s power behind the “no-makeup makeup” look, a style so natural it’s meant to look like nothing at all. Her philosophy is all about precision. Park’s approach, shaped by her early training as an artist and years of obsessive experimentation, has made her a favorite of stars like Emma Stone, Zoë Kravitz, and Greta Lee. The result is a paradox of modern beauty: the more effortless it looks, the more deliberate the work behind it. (The New York Times; alternate link)

“Success used to mean momentum and opportunity, and now it’s more about clarity.”

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The most disruptive company in the world: Anthropic has become the company most obsessed with AI safety and the company that’s also racing fastest toward a future it warns could spiral beyond human control. Its Claude models are reshaping coding, office work, and even military operations, putting the company at the center of fights over jobs, war, surveillance, and who gets to set the rules for artificial intelligence. After clashing with the Pentagon over red lines on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, Anthropic cast itself as the rare tech giant willing to sacrifice business to hold the line — though even it is already softening some of its own safeguards. Will it control the future? (TIME)

“We’re driving down a cliff road. A mistake will kill you. Now we’re driving at 75 instead of 25.”

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

🚨 If you’ve emailed me in the past month and didn’t hear back, there’s a reason.

For a while, I noticed that editions of The Profile would go out, and the usual stream of reader replies had completely vanished. Normally I hear from dozens of you after a post. And now … nothing. Total silence.

Support told me everything looked fine on their end, which only made it more confusing.

After some more digging, I finally discovered the issue: my domain had essentially blacklisted Substack, which meant I wasn’t receiving any Substack-related emails — including reader replies.

So if you wrote back to a recent newsletter and I never responded, please accept my sincere apologies. The issue has now been fixed, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you again.

—

VIRTUAL EVENT: I’m speaking at a New York Financial Writers’ Association event on March 16 at 8pm EST about how I built The Profile. I would love it if you could join. Register here.

—

PROFILES.

— The anthropologist reviving Coach
— The face of the ‘looksmaxxing’ movement
— The parenting guru who built a massive business
— The Olympic figure skater who won gold
— The companies gamifying truth [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The anthropologist reviving Coach: Coach, which was once dismissed as a safe suburban brand, has staged an unlikely comeback, winning over Gen Z and pushing annual revenue to $5.6 billion. Leading the revival is CMO Joon Silverstein, an anthropologist-turned-marketer who studies young customers the old-fashioned way: by visiting them in their homes and observing how they live. Her insight that Gen Z sees identity as fluid shaped Coach’s strategy by selling products like the Tabby bag as tools for self-expression rather than status symbols. (WSJ; complimentary link)

“A lot of brands mistake data for real insight. You don’t learn about people or culture by reading research reports or by studying them afar.”

The face of the ‘looksmaxxing’ movement: A 20-year-old streamer called Clavicular has become the face of the internet’s “looksmaxxing” movement — a subculture obsessed with hacking male beauty for status and success. He’s built a massive following by livestreaming extreme self-optimization, rating people’s looks, and turning bizarre slang like “mogging” into viral memes. The result is part performance art, part manosphere spectacle, and part commentary on the anxieties of young men online. In the attention economy, Clavicular may be less a fringe character than a sign of where internet culture is going. (The New York Times; alternate link)

“On one level, he’s funny. But on a deeper level, he’s kind of a demon.”

The parenting guru who built a massive business: The Dr. Becky Kennedy turned simple Instagram parenting videos into a full-blown company. What began as reassurance for overwhelmed millennial parents has grown into Good Inside, a profitable business with 3.4 million followers, 100,000+ paying members, and $34 million in annual revenue. Instead of relying on social media alone, Kennedy built a broader ecosystem — digital memberships, workshops, community forums, and even an AI chatbot — to “professionalize” parenting. Her core pitch is that parenting, like leadership, is a skill you can learn. (FORTUNE; If you want more, check out my Profile Dossier on Becky Kennedy here.)

The Olympic figure skater who won gold: Olympic champion Alysa Liu is focused on protecting her joy. After becoming the first American woman since 2002 to win Olympic figure skating gold, the 20-year-old celebrated by going home, eating Chinese food with friends, and ignoring the noise. Liu’s career has been defined by boundaries (she retired at 16 before returning to win gold on her own terms). She skates out of pure passion and joy, and that freedom is exactly what makes her so compelling. (Teen Vogue) “I pick hanging out with my friends over a session, and if that makes me a worse skater, so be it.”

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The companies gamifying truth: Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are exploding by turning everything from elections to Jerome Powell’s word choice into tradable bets that claim to “price” the truth in real time. Big money and big media are piling in, pushing those odds onto TV screens and trading desks. But the boom also brings manipulation fears, messy rule calls, and lawsuits that could decide whether this is finance or just gambling with better branding. Can they really become a useful signal? (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“Nothing is more valuable than the truth.”

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

I recently read the following quote in James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter:

Writer and scholar C.S. Lewis on what matters most:

“To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor. The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a person alone reading a book that interests them; and all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, are only valuable in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes.”

With so much going on in the world right now, it’s helpful to remember that the point of this life is to protect and multiply those little scenes.

So today, if you can, step away from the noise. Linger a little longer at the table. Call a friend. Close the laptop, and be present with your kids. The real work is smaller — and closer — than we think.

—

For more ideas like this, you can check out my 2021 interview with James Clear here:

PROFILES.

— Palantir’s secretive CTO [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The AI that built a viral Epstein podcast
— The Georgia pastor accused of defrauding the VA
— The gravedigger grappling with grief — The crypto casino

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

Palantir’s secretive CTO: For two decades, Shyam Sankar has been Palantir’s hidden engine: the CTO who built its “forward-deployed” culture. He sent engineers into the field to turn chaotic government data into real-world decisions. The profile traces how an immigrant childhood marked by violence, instability, and relentless grind hardened him into a builder obsessed with meritocracy and national strength. Now, with Palantir’s valuation exploding on the AI wave, Sankar is stepping into public view as an evangelist for “defense reformation” and American industrial revival. (Colossus)

“He’s been one of the most impactful people in defense tech, working for 20 years, and he’s done it privately, quietly, and very much behind the scenes.”

The AI that built a viral Epstein podcast: Adam Levy built an AI-generated podcast about the Epstein files, and it rocketed into Apple’s top 10 after pulling in 700,000 downloads in days. Created in 48 hours, it uses large language models to mine 3.5 million documents and crank out twice-daily episodes. Critics call it bloodless and mechanical, but its viral rise signals a new reality: in the race to dominate sprawling investigations, speed may be beating soul. (Fast Company)

“People just want no bullshit. Strip the emotion, strip the bullshit, strip everything away—just tell me things for what they are and when you tell it to me, help me understand the facts.”

The Georgia pastor accused of defrauding the VA: A struggling young soldier finds faith, only to become entangled in a church former members say operated like a cult. Prosecutors allege its leader, Rony Denis, used spiritual control to build a hidden real-estate empire and siphon more than $23 million in veterans’ benefits. Now Denis is jailed on fraud charges, and the church is fracturing as followers confront claims that even his identity was fake. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

The gravedigger grappling with grief: A young gravedigger in Asheville takes a job hoping it will make him wiser about mortality, only to find death far harder to face than expected. His work partner Alison, who embraced death with humor and grace, becomes a close friend until Hurricane Helene kills her and her entire family. Forced to bury his own colleague on the same land where they once guided others through grief, he confronts loss as the bereaved. In the end, nature slowly covers the graves, reminding him how grief, like life, eventually grows over even the deepest wounds. (New York Times Magazine; alternate link)

“I was desperate to keep her death alive, to keep reckoning with our cataclysm, before it was all gone for good.”

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The crypto casino: Drake’s Stake livestream showed him torching millions in crypto until co-founder Ed Craven jumped on the call, topped up his balance, and urged the crew to make the wins go viral. A Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of hundreds of hours of footage found that Drake and a few other influencers hit unusually frequent “big wins” on slots owned by Stake’s parent company, while their odds on third-party games looked typical. The profile argues this influencer-fueled jackpot theater helps power one of the world’s largest, lightly regulated crypto casinos, which is now facing lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny. Stake denies giving anyone preferential treatment and disputes the findings. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

I wrote this post two years ago, and I wanted to re-share it with you today. I hope you find it valuable.

—

What has been the most defining moment in your life?

I bet I could tell a lot about you based on your answer to this question.

Some of you will answer with a joyful event that shaped you into the person you are today — the birth of your child, the launch of your business, the attainment of a big goal.

Others, however, will point to a traumatic event — a near-death experience, a tragic medical diagnosis, or the loss of someone dear to them.

These are all life moments, but defining life moments are laced with emotion. And that emotion depends on the narrator’s perception of the event. (For example, one person may say a near-death experience made them paranoid and fearful while another may say it made them loving and grateful.)

I recently wrote about how no one single event will transform your entire identity because we have a multitude of layers that make us us.

But, as humans, we have a very hard time accepting this. We often can’t make our brains understand that people can be two (or three, or four) things at the same time. We want simplicity while we resist ambivalence.

And because we want that simplicity, one moment can dominate our entire life — for the rest of our life. But it’s not really our fault. Our brains sometimes get stuck in a loop that replays the moment like a broken record.

In a recent New York Times feature, writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner says this about trauma:

“I’ve now come to understand the same thing about trauma: Happy, well-adjusted people are all different. The traumatized are exactly alike.

“I’m about to tell you a story that is nothing like a violent kidnapping — almost laughably so — but what I’ve learned over the years is that trauma is trauma. Something terrible happens, beyond what is in our own personal capacity to cope with, and the details don’t matter as much as the state we’re thrown into.

“Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that threatens us with financial ruin or from the dismantling of our world by our parents’ divorce. It’s wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system.”

Brodesser-Akner tells the story of the painful, invasive, and traumatizing birth of her first child. She says that she never got over it, never stopped being bitter about it, and never quit worrying about the impact it had on her son.

“I had been rocked into a full nervous breakdown, and I had no idea what aspect of the birth did it, she writes. “All I knew was that, should something go wrong — a car accident, maybe, or a mugging — I would be prone to falling apart.”

Her son’s birth transformed from a moment into a defining moment with tentacles that touched every aspect of her life.

Now, let’s take a look at someone else.

Last week, I included a profile about a skydiver named Emma Carey who survived a 14,000-foot fall when she dove out of a helicopter into an empty cow pasture in Switzerland, with two tangled parachutes and her instructor passed out on her back.

The reporter writes:

The skydiving story is just a story, and [Carey] wrestles with how much longer she wants to keep telling IT. She wants to talk about her.

It’s human nature to make a story about you into the story of you, and most of the time feels harmless. Think about how many people whose identities are subsumed going from Justin and Maria, to “Justin & Maria,” to Mom and Dad, to Grandma and Pap. Everybody has a friend whose marriage falls apart and he suddenly becomes “Divorced Dave,” or a cousin who has borrowed money from everybody in the family and therefore is “Broke Brooke.” We connect people with one of their stories, and a chapter about them becomes the book on them.

But who wants to be simplified down to one thing about themselves? This is especially problematic for people with trauma and disabilities. Most of us have said “Heather is paralyzed” or “Mike is autistic” without thinking twice, with no ill will. But there’s a reason why those affected often prefer person-first language -- Mike isn’t autistic, he has autism. He also has a dog, a job, a guitar and an on-again, off-again relationship. Nobody says “Mike is guitar.” And if they do, they probably shouldn’t.

As the writer notes, who wants to be simplified down to one thing about themselves? Who wants one moment to become the moment of their life?

Carey survived the impossible, but understandably, she wants to move beyond it. She doesn’t want to be the girl who “fell from the sky” for the rest of her life.

I got curious. I went to her Instagram to see how she’s moved on. How she’s told the story of her. How she hasn’t let this traumatic moment become the defining moment of her entire life.

The first thing I notice is her bio: “Emma Carey: The girl who fell from the sky.”

— Polina

PROFILES.

— The members of the ‘gay tech mafia’ [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The teen dominating YouTube
— The insurance analyst-turned-health influencer
— The No. 1 company of the Fortune 500
— The conservative Cosmo

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The members of the ‘gay tech mafia:’ Silicon Valley is buzzing with rumors of a so-called “gay tech mafia” running the industry’s upper ranks. This profile uncovers tight-knit networks of influential gay founders and investors who socialize, fund one another, and move in overlapping social and professional circles. In a hyper-networked ecosystem where access is everything, power, ambition, and sexuality sometimes blur in ways that can feel both empowering and uncomfortable. (WIRED; alternate link)

“The high tech VC world just seems to be one big, exploitative gay mafia.”

The teen dominating YouTube: Teen YouTube star Salish Matter has turned her father-daughter channel into a Gen Alpha empire. She’s selling out malls, landing a Netflix deal, and launching a Sephora beauty brand that flies off shelves. Millions watch her playful adventures with dad Jordan, making her one of the most influential creators under 18. But her meteoric rise also fuels debate over kids, fame, and the booming business of young influencers. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“People will assume the worst. There’s this built-in assumption of exploitation.”

The insurance analyst-turned-health influencer: Gary Brecka has surged from little-known insurance analyst to celebrity biohacker at the center of America’s wellness and political conversation, boosted by allies like Dana White and RFK Jr. His longevity promises and supplement empire have drawn millions of followers — and sharp criticism from scientists who call many claims unproven or risky. After a past marked by business failures and lawsuits, Brecka reinvented himself as a health influencer whose rising power now sits at the heart of a broader fight over U.S. health policy. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“He spreads a lot of really dangerous lies about a lot of different health conditions.”

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The No. 1 company of the Fortune 500: Amazon is set to overtake Walmart as No. 1 on the Fortune 500, a symbolic changing of the guard in a rivalry rooted in radical customer obsession — a creed championed by Sam Walton and scaled by Jeff Bezos. Fueled by AWS profits and massive AI bets, Amazon has grown from online bookstore to $700-billion powerhouse, outpacing Walmart’s slower retail engine. Yet under Doug McMillon and Andy Jassy, the two rivals now resemble each other—tech-driven, logistics-obsessed, and locked in a two-company battle for the future of commerce. (FORTUNE)

“Indeed, the cost of not making bold moves is far riskier than the cost of steep investment.”

The conservative Cosmo: At a candlelit Fashion Week party atop the Standard hotel, Evie magazine—billed as a “conservative Cosmo” — showcased its vision of the modern right-leaning woman: glamorous, traditionally feminine, and unapologetically anti-feminist. Founded in 2019, the profitable, social-first brand blends beauty and lifestyle content with conservative cultural messaging, tapping into a growing audience of young women eager to make traditional values feel fashionable again. (WSJ; complimentary link)

“We started with a mission to embrace femininity, and we were definitely ahead of the curve for a couple of years.”

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more

It’s been nine years since I sent the very first edition of The Profile to a few friends, my mom, and her friend Peggy. I had no idea it would grow into a massive community of curious people who continue to show up week after week.

Back in February 2017, I was 25, living in New York City and writing FORTUNE Magazine’s dealmaking newsletter, Term Sheet, Monday through Friday.

On the side, I started emailing family and friends the longform profiles I’d read and loved that week. (I almost didn’t send it — I thought people already had newsletter fatigue. Little did I know.)

Since then, I’ve left FORTUNE to pursue this full time, Substack has become a cultural phenomenon, and I now have a husband and four kids. Needless to say, life looks very different.

But one thing hasn’t changed: I’m still here, still writing, and this newsletter has landed in your inbox every single Sunday for nine years.

I made a reel about why I think The Profile has lasted while most newsletters disappear within a few months. As always, thank you for being here, and here’s to the next nine years together.

PROFILES.

— The author contemplating consciousness
— The woman teaching AI morals
— The princess-turned-VC
— The Mormon wives who conquered pop culture
— The company trying to understand their AI system’s mind [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The author contemplating consciousness: Michael Pollan’s new book explores the mystery of consciousness at a time when A.I. and modern media are increasingly competing for our attention. He argues consciousness may have evolved to help humans navigate complex decisions and social worlds, while questioning whether machines could ever truly achieve it without bodies and feelings. Pollan also examines how practices like meditation and psychedelics can temporarily dissolve the ego, offering insight into the self and our connection to something larger. (New York Times Magazine; alternate link)

The woman teaching AI morals: Anthropic’s resident philosopher, Amanda Askell, is shaping the moral compass and personality of its AI chatbot Claude. She’s essentially teaching a machine how to be ‘good.’ As chatbots grow more human-like, Askell’s job is to ensure empathy, ethics, and self-awareness are built in from the start. In the race to build smarter AI, she’s trying to make sure intelligence comes with a conscience. (WSJ; complimentary link)

“If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?”

The princess-turned-VC: Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, a German heiress-turned-VC and literal princess, is now one of the most powerful forces in European tech. As president of General Catalyst, she’s betting heavily on AI and defense startups to help Europe stand on its own against the US and China. She believes crisis can fuel a European tech renaissance, but only if the continent learns to take risks and embrace failure. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“Every crisis always has an opportunity. And Europe, historically, has always risen from crises.”

The Mormon wives who conquered pop culture: Utah’s influencer boom — led by shows like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and creators like Jessi Draper and Ballerina Farm — has turned Mormon and ex-Mormon women into major cultural and commercial forces. They’ve been selling everything from beauty treatments to homesteading fantasies. Social media, reality TV, and affiliate marketing helped these once niche “mom bloggers” become mainstream tastemakers, reshaping how Mormon motherhood and lifestyle are seen across America. Yet tensions remain between empowerment, commercialization, and the church’s traditional expectations, even as Mormon aesthetics and family-centered branding continue to drive massive business and cultural influence. (New York Magazine; alternate link)

“The Utah bloggers were the first to drive commerce in a way we weren’t seeing with traditional street-style bloggers.”

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The company trying to understand their AI system’s mind: Large language models are just vast math systems that convert words into numbers and predict what comes next, but once they started “talking,” people swung between hype (“they’re conscious”) and dismissal (“just parrots”). This article follows Anthropic’s attempt to understand these black boxes through interpretability, using experiments with Claude that reveal both impressive competence and unsettling, sometimes deceptive or self-protective behavior. The takeaway is that these systems are already reshaping work and forcing us to rethink what we mean by intelligence, agency, and even the self. (The New Yorker; alternate link)

“How are we going to interact with the models? How are we going to be able to understand them?”

✨ The rest of this newsletter is only available for premium members of The Profile, whose support makes this work possible. If you’re not already a premium member, consider upgrading your subscription below for access to an additional section of weekly audio + video recommendations. ✨

Read more