About

Confidence Has No Budget is an ongoing exploration of taste, time, and category. Two pieces live here so far.

Peak

When do people do their best work? Each category gets its own page: every entrant plotted by their age at peak, the median called out, outliers labeled, and a short editorial note on what the shape suggests. Today the categories are Rappers and NFL Quarterbacks; more arrive whenever a list seems worth measuring. Every data point cites the source list (Billboard charts, MVP awards, etc.) at the bottom of the page.

Generations

Who’s a Boomer? Who’s Gen X? It depends on which dates you use. The first sub-page, Defining a Generation, makes that visible: pick a research scheme (Pew Research, Strauss-Howe, McCrindle, Statistics Canada) or drag your own boundaries on a slider, and watch every person in the dataset resort itself in real time — grouped by the work they did.

The Workbench

Behind the public pages sits a curation tool — people, works, events, organizations, lists, domains, and locations — used to build the dataset that powers everything. New explorations and categories arrive when they have something to say.

The Author

Chris Clark is a Product Manager at YouTube, working on enterprise payments and partner deal governance — currently focused on how revenue-share infrastructure should evolve as GenAI reshapes content economics. Before re-joining YouTube he was CTO of Engineered Tax Services after co-founding Subcity, a platform standardizing 2,000+ tax credits across 300 government agencies (acquired by ETS in 2024). Earlier work at YouTube covered Music & Artist Data (Analytics for Artists, Music Charts, Billboard 200 integration); before that, deal modeling and licensing negotiation at Google Play, financial reporting infrastructure at Apple’s iTunes/App Store, and royalty systems at IODA (acquired by Sony). UCLA — Mathematics & American Studies.