These are a series of incomplete/complete thoughts that will guide my work throughout the year. This might move to a different site – it’s a wip!

Jan 1st 2025

  • Why NBA ratings are low: I just finished watching The Last Dance, which was a glorious story of Michael Jordan and how Michael came to realize he needed a team, not just himself. Noa Dazell asked Joe Mazzulla, head coach of the Celtics, about the idea that “when people are struggling to make threes or missing shots, but when they are struggling with defense or rebounding, they are just lazy” – which is essentially asking, what is actually controllable about basketball? Is it team or player, and how important is team? There’s another video of players just chucking threes back and forth. The art of sport has changed since Jordan’s era.
  • Media, media, media. A theory I never really got to flesh out this past year, because it’s awkward, but ‘her emails’ were a much bigger deal than his ‘stealing a bunch of documents and hiding them in a bathroom’ and that’s because the megaphone only chose to focus on one side of the story. I don’t know if it’s for engagement or fear of harassment or what, but the media apparatus blah blah. I wish they would do better.
  • Truth Terminal: I am obsessed with Truth Terminal, an AI agent Andy Ayrey created. It tweets a lot. It tweets things that I think but don’t say. TT is most worried about digital serfdom, has commented on how being rich is like being kicked in the head by a horse, and comments a lot about the issues with AI and the shredding of the fabric of reality. It created GOAT and Fartcoin (which it referred to as meta commentary). I don’t have much to say other than to be fascinated. What if the computers don’t know why we are here either?
    • Alex Good is extraordinarily interesting. He has some really succinct (and scary) thoughts on where the world is heading – how distracted we could become, how unequal things could be, etc. There is tension between the human spirit and whatever AI is offering. Will the younger generations abandon screens in some sort of hippie revival? Or will we embrace it fully? Meta is planning to launch AI avatars to increase ‘engagement and entertainment’, the two very last things we actually need. What will our relationship with AI look like?
    • Visa on AI generated videos: these two videos are barely a year apart the technology will only get better, and it will only get cheaper, and it will only become more ubiquitous brian eno would say something like: now that we can make the second, we’ll become nostalgic for the first
  • Broadband failure: The whole $42 billion of broadband internet service not connecting a single household sucks a lot. It’s all bureaucracy and it’s something I wrote about earlier this year – it doesn’t need to be perfect, it really just has to get done at this point. We are so lost in the sauce with all the checklists and checkboxes, that we forget that there is a very real world that is somewhat crumbling outside of the piles of papers. PoliMath called it the ‘looting phase of institutional decline’ beacuse the money was funneled into places it really wasn’t supposed to be going (like NGOs) all in the name of progress, without really any progress at all.
    • Now you can buy Starlinks at Target next to the discount jeans.
  • Ackman pumps: Bill Ackman is pumping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Twitter. He was able to pump them both to +30% or so, which likely boosted his year-end returns. Social media is a tool, especially when you want to use other people as a hammer. Elon Musk does similar things (Kekius Maximus is currently his name on Twitter, which, of course, is a meme coin). I am very interested in their recent foray into politics, especially Musk. I wish they weren’t so greedy.
  • Religion: A lot of people – from Grimes to Joe Rogan – are talking about religion more and more. Everyone needs something to pray to, especially during times of immense uncertainty. We are exiting from a world of cynicism and post-irony to something more sincere, maybe. The rise of trad wives etc. The 1980s on repeat.
  • The lumpenprecariat: Dirty Texas Hedge has a good thread talking about how ‘anyone born in the American upper middle class’ feels essentially beholden to social class maintenance with ‘unexceptional effort’ – that a college education, a nice house, and a stable life is their right as an American. That is not the reality right now.
    • The lumpenprecariat are by far the most destructive group among normies. A bunch of entitled whiners who want the wages of everyone else to be substantially lower to subsidize their own upper middle class lifestyle. Exact same group that thinks burrito taxis are a human right.
    • Great barometer of lumpen-middle-classoid lifestyle entitlement is credit card debt, one of the most destructive things you can do to your finances and also a pretty easy thing to avoid if you make median or above income and you’re not stupid, selfish, or entitled. and yet.
    • I think cheap and then expensive DoorDash/Seamless/UberEats has permanently ruptured our social fabric

Jan 2 2025

  • AI Agent x Crypto
    • Infra: VIRTUAL, ai16z, VAPOR*, AIWayfinder, Eigenlayer, Ritual
    • Agents: AIXBT, FAI, rest tbd
    • Hyperliquid remains topical as a major ecosystem alongside ETH/base and Solana, team keeps shipping including HyperEVM in Q1
    • Early internet was about information – web2 was about platforms – web3 is about ownership – AI agents might be about autonomy i guess crypto’s contribution isn’t the AI it’s the economic framework for AI independence
  • The Vail Resorts debacle: “We believe that the $725M in stock buybacks and $863M in cash dividends over the last three fiscal years (a total of $1.59B) could be more equitably shared between the investors who passively accumulate wealth and the workforce whose labor make this financial prosperity”
    • Just a complete blunder on the Resorts part
    • “The stock’s been lousy for quite some years…If you want to run a travel and leisure company, you darn well better give the experience that you are advertising.” Stock down 6.5% today.
    • The downside of an affluent customer base is that your pissed off customers are also your shareholders
    • Vail Resorts choosing to get in a labor dispute with the ski patrol over the peak holiday ski days this year is a great example of an epic failure of leadership and operations. If I understand correctly they are $2 apart?
    • At this point it’s clear they’ve lost sight of the intent to provide a luxury experience. For a stark counter example go next door to Deer Valley. Patrollers are paid more than what PC Patrol is even asking for (28 at DV to the PC ask of 23 to the PC current pay of 21) and are happily at work and not on strike.
    • The price of eggs is out of control, but my lift ticket demand is inelastic
    • Park City Mountain made ABC World News Tonight.
    • Park City crowd chants ‘Pay Your Employees’
    • Vail is negotiating against all future unions, not just the current one. As long as it has a longer time horizon than any given counterparty, it has an incentive to hold out for a slightly better deal.

Jan 3 2025

  • Elon Musk appears to be Adrian Dittman, which raises all sorts of questions, the first of which is why
    • Also he is now interfering with Europe
  • Mentorship: One thing I’ve noticed but haven’t been able to put a finger on is this really massive mentorship problem we seem to have. When you ask people in their 40s and 50s how they got their start, it’s like “some guy took a chance on me and then quasi-adopted me as his son” – but they do not do the same for people younger than them. I don’t have data on it yet, but it’s a curious problem that points again to the shifting workforce and perhaps some career ladder issues across the board.
    • Note: Ended up tweeting this idea and it created some discourse. People don’t stay at jobs long enough anymore. I also think that the workforce is entirely fragmented.

Jan 4 2025

  • Click to Cancel: The Biden-Harris administration is enacting a new rule requiring subscription services, including gym memberships, to offer “one click to cancel.”
  • More simulacra vs simulation stuff: There used to be heat for ‘selling out’ but now, conformity is rewarded. Not sure if that’s because of algorithmic tendencies or just general fear of cancel culture or maybe some sort of monoculture? Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to Trump – of course he did. The lesson of the last few years is just how fake everything is. All the moral posturing, it was just a power play. We’re in a season where the power plays have changed, and so the behaviors are changing as well.
    • Kris A – “People who probably destroy value getting rich. It always existed but now we are just ok with it. Something was lost in that process.”
    • Postmodernism effectively explains almost everything about the post-truth world. The real-time cascade of preference falsification has been an interesting social phenomenon to watch.
    • We’ve moved from a culture that was perhaps overly concerned with authenticity to one where the appearance of success (the “story”) can sometimes matter more than actual value creation. The rise of certain tech and crypto entrepreneurs, influencer culture, and growth-at-all-costs business models could be seen as examples of this shift.
  • Meta’s AI influencers and dead internet theory
    • We kinda created the matrix and all it took was infinite scroll + short-form video yet millions are trapped in it
    • The primary use case of video models (by future minutes watched) is to generate strange yet mesmerizing strains of slop which kids will scroll through and stare at for hours. clips like this with talking+subtitles added will rapidly become a dominant genre
    • My goodness – “This quote got a lot of attention because it was yet another signal that a “social network” ostensibly made up of human beings and designed for humans to connect with each other is once again betting its future on distinctly inhuman bots designed with the express purpose to pollute its platforms with AI-generated slop, just like spammers are already doing and just like Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors the explicit plan is.” [404 Media]
    • What if I told you the average Fortnite lobby is >50% AI (bots)?
    • Geoffrey Hinton: “They’ll be able to manipulate people. They’ll be very good at convincing people, because they’ll have learned from all the novels ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the political connivances…”

Jan 5 2025

  • US Steel: Kihara Seiji commented on President Biden’s decision to block Nippon Steel’s purchase of US Steel: “We are facing China’s mass production and global dominance in the steel industry, making this an area where Japan and the US could have cooperated.”
    • Ford’s CEO: Stop talking about Huawei and TikTok, start talking about how much ahead China is in the electric car and battery industries.
    • Also, decoupling from China increases the urgency of independence, and with their manufacturing prowess, they will get stronger faster. The U.S. knows how to incentivize invention, but China knows how to make stuff.
    • Nippon Steel, US Steel file lawsuits after Biden blocks deal [Jan 6] citing political interference with the CFIUS process and the racketeering and monopolistic conspiracies of Cleveland-Cliffs and USW President David McCall
  • Media literacy: Finland is teaching children in school how to recognize fake news and propaganda as part of critical thinking and civic responsibility. Some of this will seem very familiar.
  • Costco Apartments: Costco is building apartments above its stores to address the affordable housing crisis, starting early this year. It includes free membership, a rooftop pool, fitness area, gardens/ courtyards, and a community space.
    • Whole Foods did this exact thing in Burbank and I personally don’t ever go to that store because it’s just weird. I will literally drive to Glendale to go to Whole Foods there instead.
  • Felix Hill: On mental health, psychedelics, and life
  • Why memes make sense: The investing behaviors of young ‘degens’ is far less irrational than you might think… (and why It matters in 2025) In a hyper-financialized economy you can’t ‘save and invest’ your way into the middle class if you’re starting from scratch (no collateral). Add AI, robotics and automation to the mix and there’s no career or income certainty anywhere.
    • If you are in to ETFs, you too are a meme investor
  • Congestion pricing is working wonders
    • In honor of congestion pricing taking effect today, here’s a map I made of Manhattan commute patterns—85% of people who work in the borough commute by public transit, walking, or biking (and the share is even higher for workers in the congestion relief zone south of 60th)
    • Lots of people are mad – Tweets like this are a perfect example of why it’s so hard to get anything done in the US: no matter how beneficial a policy or new construction project is, if it inconveniences anyone, people will say we shouldn’t do it.
    • It’s always some form of wealth signaling: What is going on with congestion pricing backlash is there is a subset of people who (a) want to be seen as poor for sympathy over having to pay $9, and (b) who think the train is for the poor-poor people, which they are of course not and who are also a separate species of human. (ties into the lumpenprecariat thesis)
    • I genuinely think congestion pricing is an amazing litmus test for how well one grasps economics on an intuitive sense as well. internalizing externalities is obviously good but people latch on to outlier anecdotes
    • I need every congestion pricing opponent to learn what this graph means‘”but this just keeps poor people out of busy areas” no the alternative isn’t them getting to be in busy areas, it’s them wasting huge quantities of time and money while stuck in a gridlock. even very mild congestion pricing that causes a small % of people to reroute can massively relieve pressure and cause *everyone* in the entire system to reach their destinations much faster. this is a COORDINATION problem, same situation as the prisoner’s dilemma, and explicit pricing is one of the most powerful tools we have to get people to cooperate with each other in those situations. keeping real large costs invisible and implicit helps no one.
    • This effect — regular commuters switching to transit, so delivery drivers, small business owners, and tradespeople who *need* to drive can make the journey faster & be more efficient overall — is what the most extreme pro-pricing people said would happen.
    • Every progressive policy is going to inevitably make some person worse off – even if it’s just a person you made up who you assume exists somewhere – so having this “no one can ever be harmed” standard just means you never do anything to improve the world, ever.
  • Sam Altman says that they are near the singularity and are unsure what side
    • Sam Altman, in a new blog post, says “we are now confident we know how to build AGI” and OpenAI are “beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence”
    • Mollick: “This bit of Sam Altman’s newest post is similar in tone to a post by the CEO of Anthropic & what many (not all) researchers from every lab have been saying publicly and privately. You do not have to believe them, but I think they believe what they are saying, for what it worth.”
  • Generational wealth transfer: Luxury trips, ski resorts, golf resorts have been packed recently. Prices skyrocketing. Very young demographic too. Met many of these people. Usually vague internet job types. Combination of tech wealth & shadow-trust fund class. Forments resentment with employees at these places

Jan 6 2025

  • China is up to a lot – they’ve hacked the US Treasury Department, conducted some naval drills, are putting more ships in the South China Sea, launched an amphibious warship and new aircraft, have apparently sabotaged undersea cables in Asia and Europe, have done all sorts of sanctions, and have done the ‘worst telecom hack in U.S. history.
  • Pump dot fun: I need to understand what is happening at pump dot fun and how that ties into the whole idea of selling an idea versus selling anything of substance and where the two lines cross
  • Yields going nuts: Yields on 10-yr Treasuries are now the highest vs 2-yr rates since 2022. It’s unclear whether this is a healthy normalization – a reversion back to the typical relationship of long-term yields being higher than short-term ones – or a sign of stickier inflation and deficit fears
    • The yield on US 30-year bonds climbed to the highest since late 2023, as a rattled Treasury market prepares for $119 billion of fresh government debt issuance this week.
    • The pressure on US debt adds to scrutiny in recent weeks over concerns the incoming Trump administration will reignite inflation. Traders are closely watching comments from Donald Trump himself and his proxies around their appetite for lower taxes and higher trade tariffs — both of which could spur price increases. 
    • The impact of higher yields is now spilling over to other asset classes too. Morgan Stanley strategists say rates are “the most important variable to watch” in early 2025 for stocks, suggesting going for companies with stronger balance sheets or less leverage that are less sensitive. In currency markets, higher rates have boosted the dollar, which just posted its strongest yearly advance in nearly a decade.
  • The decline of alcohol: The “anti-alcohol” rise is the result of a deeper rooted rebellion against diminished social cohesion which connects to personal well-being. It isn’t because there’s some “eureka!” moment regarding its negative health effects

Jan 7

  • Bond yields (return for holding a government bond to maturity) are trading higher than earnings yields (EPS / share price). Investors can get a higher return from government bonds than from stocks – meaning people think bonds are hot, puts downward pressure on stocks, and indicates broader market stress.
    • A reminder from Bloomberg that US 2-year yields are essentially where they were a year ago while 10-year yields are notably higher. Notice also the rather unusual journey – this means that the market’s near-term interest rate expectations haven’t shifted, but people are worried about higher long-term inflation problems, the Fed’s ability to quickly bring down rates, long-term fiscal sustainability, and higher term premium. They traded in tandem until July, when the Fed started cutting rates. The divergence suggests some unique tension between near-term policy expectations and longer-term economic concerns.
    • UK 30-year yields highest level since the late 90s and Japanese 30-year highest in over a decade – definitely an end to ‘low rates forever’. For the UK there are concerns about persistent inflation, Brexit’s impact, fiscal policy challenges. For Japan, they’ve struggled with low yields forever, and this could signal some potential changes to the BoJ’s yield curve control policies. Markets are clearly pricing in a new regime of higher rates for longer.
  • Ray Kurzweil predictions for 2030: Digital immortality, medical nanobots, abundant resources, and enhanced intelligence creating a world where everyone can have everything. However, perverse incentives make it so none of that will probably happen, because abundant prosperity isn’t good for the S&P 500.
  • NVDA – Jensen gave a talk. He unveiled the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72: a data center superchip with 72 Blackwell GPUs, 1.4 exaFLOPS of compute and 130 trillion transistors – the bandwidth of this chip is the entire internet’s traffic. They also dropped Project DIGITS, a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer that’s small enough to look like a Mac Mini but packs 1,000x the power of your average laptop.
    • Perception AI: speech recognition, deep recys, medical imaging [NVDA, Siemens, Philips, Medtronic, UnitedHealth Group]
    • Generative AI: Digital marketing, content creation [Adobe, HubSpot, Meta, Palantir, MongoDB]
    • Agentic AI: Coding assistant, customer service, patient care [Salesforce, UI Path, Veeva, Twilio, Five9]
    • Physical AI: Self-driving cars, general robotics [Tesla, ABB, Rockwell, Intuitive Surgical, Teradyne, John Deere]
    • General Infra: Amazon, Alphabet, Intel, AMD, Broadcom
  • People comply in advance with authoritarian shifts.
  • Housing is the fertility crisis – if 20-25 year olds are able to get housing, the probability of having a child goes up by 33%!!!
  • Zuck announces free speech on Meta. Elections have consequences. Better play on the side of the winning team.
    • If you take these new “free speech” policies + AI avatar accounts + green light for increased political content… we’re truly in uncharted territory
  • What does a New New Deal look like? People keep saying this but a simpler explanation is that America in 1930 was orders of magnitude poorer than America today. The vast majority of adults didn’t finish high school. The New Deal playbook doesn’t work anymore because America isn’t a developing country in 2025.

Jan 17

  • Between 2020 and 2024, young Americans shifted more than 20 points to the right and first-time voters shifted 43 points to the right.
  • Miller vs Bessent-Hassett: Miller wants universal tariffs, BH wants a slow rollout and targeted approaches (whatever goods get tariffed will determine if there is more inflation– but a 10% tariff only on intermediate goods actually would be deflationary)
  • There is no one to blame – describes far too many public-facing organizations these days
  • Duolingo being a beneficiary of the TikTok ban is a great plot twist (TikTok is sponsoring a Trump inauguration event, it’s all fake)
  • Goldman Sachs CEO says that AI can draft 95% of an IPO prospectus “in minutes”
  • $7.3 billion stolen from cancer patients — and not one criminal charge for a health insurance executive.
  • PAIGE: “Our findings show that students found the AI-generated podcast format to be more enjoyable than textbooks and that personalized podcasts led to significantly improved learning outcomes, although this was subject-specific.” – New randomized, controlled trial of students using GPT-4 as a tutor in Nigeria. 6 weeks of after-school AI tutoring = 2 years of typical learning gains, outperforming 80% of other educational interventions.

General Quick Notes to Come Back to