📚 #244 Games WallStreet Plays, Tacit Knowledge, System, Stables & Stars, Talk About Us Without Us

Understanding Journalism, Google Maps as Market Maker, Sacred Infrastructure & more

Jan 05, 2026

Hello,

Welcome to Stay Curious #244.

A brand new year; the same old Monday morning routine though. I’ve recharged over the past week. Today’s curation excites me on many levels. The topics are close to my heart. The diversity is just the way I like it. And there are one or two pleasant surprises too.

I could not have asked for a better way to start 2026 than with the lineup below.

Let’s go go go…

🃏 Games Wall Street Plays

I spent the last four years working at a gaming startup, thinking deeply about how to build games that also create meaningful businesses. One of my biggest learnings was this: games are powerful teachers.

Games are the best simulators of real life. They create tension, force choices, demand decisions, and make you live with the outcomes. Players learn all this simply by playing. The learning is not forced. It is incidental, even desired. People grind, practice, and build expertise because they want to.

A recent feature from Bloomberg Markets Magazine brought this idea to life with real examples. In The Games Wall Street Plays (archived here), the piece shows how people in high stakes, high pressure roles use games to sharpen their skills. Poker, crosswords, Jeopardy, and sports. These are games you and I play for fun. For bankers and finance professionals, they become serious training tools.

What they get from their pastimes varies widely. Poker teaches risk management and emotional regulation. Crosswords are exercises in pattern recognition and understanding how other people think. Sports, too, can be a mental training ground.

The article shares several such stories, each more fascinating than the last. Read it, and you might start wondering why we do not encourage our kids to play card games a lot more. Here’s just an outline of what it coves.

🔪 Tacit Knowledge with Stripe Press

Cedric Chin’s essays on tacit knowledge were my entry point into this idea. They helped me go beyond definitions and truly understand how mastery in arts and crafts is built.

In a recent post, Cedric writes about a new Stripe Press series on tacit knowledge, including a set of short documentaries that let you experience what this kind of knowledge feels like. Watching Fingal Ferguson, a master knifemaker, and Christophe Laudamiel, a master perfumer, talk about their craft is pure brilliance. Their work depends on actions and judgments that are hard to explain, yet sit at the very core of their mastery. If you enjoy seeing great artists at work, these videos are a treat.

The post itself is full of gems, like this one:

This kind of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit,” resists instruction. You can read about riding a bicycle, but you only truly learn by trying (and falling). You can follow a recipe for crème brûlée, but you only learn how the custard should settle—the particular wobble that means done, not the wobble that means wait—by overbaking a few. This is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to describe, easy to recognize, and nearly impossible to fake.
The mechanism for developing tacit knowledge is straightforward but slow: repeated practice that gradually moves skills from conscious effort to automatic execution. The mechanism for transmitting it is even slower: apprenticeship, where a learner works alongside someone experienced, observing and imitating until their own judgment develops. This is why tacit knowledge often concentrates in lineages, unbroken chains of practitioners passing expertise to the next generation.

There’s a quick note about Cedric’s framing of tacit knowledge as well;

Cedric Chin, a Singaporean analyst and one of the inspirations for this series, describes the process of acquiring tacit knowledge as the process of moving from conscious incompetence, to conscious competence, to, finally, unconscious competence.

This is a brilliant piece. The act of reading it, and even interacting with it by scrolling or trying clicking or copying yourself, feels unlike most blogs out there. That is the Stripe Press magic. Big ideas, crafted with care, and built to delight every single time.

✴️ System, Stables and Stars

You know how large organizations with very mature systems and talent distribution still end up pulling in the same top 5 or 10 people to work on their most pressing problems?

That is the premise of Hardik Pandya’s Systems, Stables and Stars. The situation described above is deeply relatable and quietly uncomfortable. It pushes you to reflect on your gaps as a leader and a coach. Hardik admits he has felt this tension himself.

In this short essay, he makes a simple but important point. Every organization has two kinds of jobs. Ones that raise the floor. And ones that raise the ceiling.

Raising the floor and raising the ceiling are very different problems. They need very different solutions.

Systems raise the floor. They ensure consistent quality on routine work. They make you resilient to turnover. They let you handle the predictable stuff at scale. This matters a lot, most work falls into this bucket, and doing it reliably is enormously valuable.
But star performers raise the ceiling. They handle the novel stuff, the ambiguous stuff, the stuff you genuinely haven’t seen before. When you’re facing a problem your systems haven’t encountered, when the stakes are asymmetrically high, when you need both speed and quality, you’re not looking for someone who can follow the playbook. You’re looking for someone with exceptional judgment, pattern recognition across domains, ability to synthesize under uncertainty.

The real test of a strong organization is not choosing between systems and stars. It is knowing how to design for both, and creating an environment where each can thrive. That is what prepares an organization to succeed, no matter what comes next.

[via Sidebar]

💬 Talk About Us Without Us

They have to be able to talk about us without us. What this phrase means, in its simplest form, is that you have to tell a story so clear, so concise, so memorable and evocative that people can repeat it for you even after you’ve left the room. And the people who hear it need to be able to do this the first time they hear the story. Whether it’s the idea behind a new product, the core promise of a political campaign, or the basic takeaway from a persuasive essay (guess what the point of this one is!) — not only do you have to explain your idea and make your case, you have to be teaching your listener how to do the same thing for themselves.

If you care about building culture or spreading an idea, Anil Dash offers a quiet masterclass in his latest essay, They Have to Be Able to Talk About Us Without Us.

The idea feels even more important today, when AI generated noise is flooding the usual ways we absorb messages and make sense of our role in them. Anil shares thoughtful suggestions on how organizations can enable real storytelling to take root and travel on its own.

One suggestion stood out to me in particular, mostly because I have often done the opposite without realizing it.

Be evocative, not comprehensive. Many times, when people are passionate about a topic or a movement, the temptation they have in telling the story is to work in every little detail about the subject. They often think, “if I include every detail, it will persuade more people, because they’ll know that I’m an expert, or it will convince them that I’ve thought of everything!” In reality, when people are not subject matter experts on a topic, or if they’re not already intrinsically interested in that topic, hearing a bunch of extensive minutia about it will almost always leave them feeling bored, confused, intimidated, condescended-to, or some combination of all of these.

📰 Understanding Journalism

I love The Newsroom. It shows journalism at its gold standard. The world of Will McAvoy, MacKenzie, Jim, Maggie, Sloan, Neal, Don, and Charlie Skinner is not very different from ours. What they do at ACN, across three seasons, feels like hope. Almost a romantic vision of what journalism and the fourth estate could be.

Most of what I understand about journalism and news organizations comes from this show, along with a few readings about people who tried to live up to that ideal. Needless to say, it’s not much.

Anandita Mehrotra’s piece, Things I Wish Everyone Understood About Journalism, covered some gaps, and reiterated some that I really hope existed in real life.

It is a fantastic read for anyone who wants a clearer view of a profession and a mission that shapes how we understand and participate in society.

Here are a few excerpts from the post that really stayed with me.

Is news neutral?

News is never neutral. Every headline, every verb, every choice of expert carries bias — because reporting is a chain of unavoidable decisions: what to include, what to leave out, what to amplify, what to trim. Bias isn’t the crime; pretending there isn’t any is. And if your news always agrees with you, it’s not journalism.
If there’s one takeaway from this essay, let it be this: it’s not the job of journalism to make you feel smart, its only job is to keep you informed enough to form your own opinions.

On media/content & journalism

The uncomfortable truth is that content asks, “Will this go viral?” but journalism asks, “Should this be public?” And the space between those two questions is where most good reporters spend their entire career — fighting, negotiating, and sometimes falling.

I highly recommend this one. Hats off Anandita for this one!

[via Harnidh, HK’s Newsletter]

🗺️ Google Maps as a Market Maker.

When we think of Google Maps, navigation is the first use case that comes to mind. It is the default guide from point A to point B. Stopping to ask for directions feels like a thing of the past.

Lately, a second use case has quietly become just as important. Reviews. For anything listed on the map, places, services, even shops. While Zomato still dominates restaurant reviews, Google Maps has become the go to place for almost everything else. Even for restaurants, it has found its footing.

What never really struck me was how much control we have handed over. Between reviews that can be gamed, ads, and our innocent search for recommendations, Google now shapes a lot of our choices.

Lauren Leek’s exploration of London’s restaurant scene digs into this shift. She argues that Google Maps is no longer just a directory. It has started behaving like a market maker. We rarely notice this, but it has real consequences for small and local businesses.

In economics, this dynamic closely resembles the logic of a market maker: an intermediary that does not merely reflect underlying supply and demand, but actively shapes liquidity, matching, and price discovery. Platforms like Google Maps perform an analogous function for local services by controlling visibility rather than prices directly. In the language of digital economics, ranking algorithms act as attention allocators, steering demand toward some firms and away from others.

It is a thoughtful piece that reveals a hidden side of a tool we take for granted. Definitely something to pause and think about.

[via Marginal Revolution]

🕌 Sacred Infrastructure

Humzah Khan’s thoughtful travelogue Sacred Infrastructure takes us into Hijazi Arabia.

What is this Hijaz? I learned that it referred to a historical region of the western Arabian Peninsula, encompassing Islam’s holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, and the port city of Jeddah.

This is my kind of travel writing. Part history. Part photography. Part storytelling. And full of small, careful observations. Mecca and Medina may not sit on my personal travel wishlist, but I feel lucky to experience them through Humzah’s lens. The piece helped me understand aspects of one of the world’s most important pilgrimage rituals that I barely knew before. I come away feeling more aware and grounded.

Here is one excerpt from his observations in Mecca.

One of the stranger characteristics of the Grand Mosque (by strange I mean unfamiliar) is the lack of gender segregation. Pilgrimage rites are done with men and women in the same space, sometimes pushing up against each other in tight crowds. Often, I encountered contingents of heavyset Arab women, arms linked together, shoulders lowered, pushing through the masses to get closer to the Kaaba.
The Grand Mosque is one of the only places on earth today where you can experience monumental architecture in real time. Expansions are always ongoing. But because the mosque needs to remain operational, we get to see inside the construction site. Pillars in the great mosque do much more than hold up the ceiling. Now, they house air conditioning units, speakers, and security cameras.

[via Marginal Revolution]

✨ Everything else

We Want Plates. That’s pretty much the ask. You’ve to give it to these guys for being so committed to a cause. [via Joost Plattel]
Throwing Bricks: Shane Lyons’ LEGO collection highlights the drama of sport, brick by brick.
FukuTaku: Takuya Fukugawa creates 3D pixel sculptures using Lego. The attention to detail is unbelievable. [via Dense Discovery]

ICYMI, here is the link to last week’s post: