Why do books and records have standard pricing? You’d think that a record from Miles Davis or Patricia Barber would cost more than one from the local garage band.
Economists tie themselves into knots trying to explain why wine and handbags have such wide price variation, but tickets to movies do not. They invoke “credence goods” and “focal point coordination” and “transaction utility” and “cost disease.” Darby, Karni, Schelling, Baumol, Thaler—a parade of Nobel-adjacent thinkers building elegant models to explain what’s sitting right in front of them.
It’s simpler than that, I think. People don’t go into publishing or music to make a profit (not most of them, not the smart ones). They do it to create culture and to be part of a culture. They’re not going to brag about making a lot of money, they’ll brag about finding art or sharing it.
Meanwhile, down the street at the hedge fund, the entire point is to find and capture price differences. Leaving money on the table isn’t just a missed opportunity—it’s an embarrassment. It means you weren’t paying attention.
The pricing norms in any industry reflect the identity of the people who built it.
Hermès could auction Birkin bags and make more money. They don’t, because scarcity-through-restraint is the elegant move, the identity-consistent move. It’s what people like them do.
Movie theaters were built by showmen who inherited vaudeville instincts: pack the house, give ’em a show, make it up on popcorn. Uniform ticket pricing isn’t economically optimal. It’s simply what people like us have always done.
This explains why industries are so stable—and why disruption feels like betrayal.
When concert tickets went dynamic, the backlash wasn’t about economics. It was moral outrage. Artists who adopted surge pricing weren’t just changing strategy; they were declaring themselves to be a different kind of person. The fans noticed.
Amazon didn’t share publishing’s allergy to profit. Ticketmaster didn’t share the old promoter’s loyalty to fans. They weren’t optimizing within the culture—they were violating it.
The price variation in any market reflects not what the market will bear, but what the people in that market can bear to charge.
The economists will keep building models. But if you want to understand why things cost what they cost, don’t ask what’s efficient. Ask what kind of person would be embarrassed to charge more. Or embarrassed not to.
It’s difficult to write directions.
A user interface, a map or a recipe all require empathy.
That’s because the person writing it knows something the reader doesn’t. In fact, that’s the only reason to do it.
But because instructions exist to bridge this gap, we benefit by understanding and focusing on the gap. The instructions aren’t there to remind you of how to do something. They serve to help someone who doesn’t know, learn.
Here’s a useful way to begin:
Assume less.
Yes, the person reading your recipe knows what a knife is, but do they know you keep your mustard in the food cabinet, not the fridge?
List every step you could imagine, and then list some more.
Once the overdone, step-by-step instructions exist, begin removing them. The interface for your induction cooktop probably doesn’t benefit from having icons so obscure they’re meaningless, but it also doesn’t need every step for boiling water enunciated in capital letters.
In my experience in reading instructions, it’s easier for the user to skip over steps that are too complete than it is to try to guess what the person writing the directions had in mind.
We are story-processing creatures, and the most effective stories are often embodied in people. Living examples of the lesson we’re trying to learn and the posture we hope to model.
Heroes, mentors, martyrs, examples, icons, avatars, archetypes, and even villains.
Sometimes those people are fictional, living in an anecdote and refined to form a legend.
The leverage of media, though, has made history more powerful than any made-up story ever could be.
When we rehearse and amplify the story, we can’t help but make the person less real. The story has a purpose, and its purpose is to remind us of who we could be and how we move forward.
This is what saints do for us. This is why we put pictures on the wall or invoke the memories of the people who came before us.
Reminded of our heroes, we know we can improve. We can work harder for justice, find more compassion and show up as a contribution. We can look at the ordinary moments when someone chose to keep going and realize that choice is available to us as well.
There are so many extraordinary people who have come before. It’s on us to choose our heroes wisely and to do the hard work to honor the contributions they made. Even when it’s difficult and unpopular. Especially then.
Today is a fine day to consider who’s on our wall.
Celebrity gossip, fortune-telling and superstitions are the original forms of fake news, but now it’s increasingly widespread. In every field from science to world affairs, it’s troubling to see. People who are familiar with reality can’t understand why it’s popular–in a low-trust world, why would people engage with made-up noise disguised as information?
The irony is that it’s easier to trust fake news. It’s consistent, simplified, coherent and predictable, all the things that humans look for when we’re seeking solace.
The challenge for all of us is that while it’s easier to trust in the short run, it ultimately disappoints.
The trust we earn with complex and consistent analyses of reality takes more effort, but it’s worth more in the long run.
What sort of trust are you selling? And what are we buying?
Until you look at the system.
Kevin Wilson wrote a great short story about the workers who have to sort the tiles that go into a Scrabble box. The hero is responsible for searching through the pile for the letter ‘q’. All day. On commission.
At this absurd level, it’s clear that the game isn’t made this way. They’d never produce all 26 letters, mix them up and then sort them. It pays to be thoughtful about the production process, so you simply make what you need in the first place.
But now, particularly with digital output, we’re doing it backwards. Making lots of stuff and then sorting it later. There’s very little cost to making more, and it’s getting more and more time-consuming to find what we’re looking for.
We’re replacing the magic of Google’s ability to sort through the miscellaneous with a new system based on simply making more, on demand.
Trust and attention remain the building blocks of brands and culture. We ignore this at our peril. There are no good shortcuts.
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