Recommended recent reads (Shillbert, early YC, enshittification, longevity, The New Yorker, longevity, and more)

I’ve been reading more articles lately, so I wanted to share some good ones.

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A corporate fraud bigger than Enron? Thread from @ramahluwalia detailing the accusations against Barry Silbert and DCG / Genesis. Another black eye for crypto but honey badger don’t care

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Jessica’s wonderful recounting of early YC days and the lessons she learned and advice she has for startup founders:

When it came to investing, I had something that my cofounders didn’t have: I was the Social Radar. I couldn’t judge our applicants’ technical ability, or even most of the ideas. My cofounders were experts at those things. I looked at qualities of the applicants my cofounders couldn’t see. Did they seem earnest? Were they determined? Were they flexible-minded? And most importantly, what was the relationship between the cofounders like? While my partners discussed the idea with the applicants, I usually sat observing silently. Afterward, they would turn to me and ask, “Should we fund them?”

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Must read from Cory Doctorow on the “enshittification” of the big internet platforms

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45 percent in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50 percent ads.

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Thorough and accessible round-up of the longevity industry from Nathan Cheng. Wish he had the time to write more of these again!

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The New Yorker on the the present and future of AI:

Neal Stephenson imagined an artificially intelligent book called “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”; in effect, it was a chatbot, built specifically to teach the protagonist everything she needed to know, with lessons that were always pitched at the right level and that adapted to her curiosity and feedback—in other words, a perfectly designed curriculum.

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What it’s like to live poor. Many anecdotes that stick with me such as:

When someone is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m trying to determine how poor exactly they were, there’s one evergreen question I ask that has never failed to give me a good idea of what kind of situation I’m dealing with. That question is: “How many times have they turned off your water?”.

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Another Balaji banger on what I beliee is the main storyline with macro and US credit markets:

Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen are bond villains. They destroyed every institution that trusted their words in 2021. They said inflation was transitory and that they’d keep rates low even as late as November 2021. They sold billions in bonds on that false pretense. Then the Fed executed a surprise rate hike, devaluing all the bonds the government had just sold, and turning Treasuries into the new toxic waste.

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Gwern compendium of all things nicotine (tldr: worth trying for yourself)

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Reading this on Amazon ad business is interesting especially in context of Doctorow’s enshittification essay:

“Given [Amazon Ads] margin structure and incremental cost base, it’s highly likely to be generating similar absolute profits to [the Amazon Web Services cloud business].”

Napkin math based on Q2 2023 earnings checks out: AWS revenue hit $22B (at a 30% margin, that is $6.6B of operating profit) while Amazon ads hit $10.7B (at 68% margin, that is $7.3B of operating profit).

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One of the most creative thinkers on Twitter / X crypto right now, love this one reframing AI:

Augmenting humans with tools like Google and AI can accelerate our data, or experiential, age. You can also view this as “prosthetic experience”. Someone enhanced by these tools can posses greater knowledge and wisdom than their biological age suggests. If you’ve been using Google the last 20 years, you’ve accessed several human lifetimes of info compared to someone who had to go to the library and laboriously search through stacks of paper to figure out one thing. If you exist in certain esoteric nooks of Twitter, you’re probably at least a data centenarian.

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If gold were just like bitcoin…

Bitcoin Gold

Many people think of bitcoin as digital gold. And that is true, but bitcoin is also much more. This misunderstanding is part of why bitcoin is still so undervalued.

For example, bitcoin is both a bearer currency and a payment network. It’s like the USD + PayPal, if they were inseparable from each other. Admittedly a very imperfect analogy.

But I want to pose a thought experiment:

What if gold were exactly like bitcoin? What if a gold bar or a gold coin could do everything that bitcoin can currently do?

If gold were exactly like bitcoin…

You could send gold to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world, in 10 minutes, for less than $10 (as long as they had an internet connection)

You could send the tiniest fraction of gold or a suitcase full, and it would be just as fast, cheap, and easy to send

With a simple computer program and internet connection, you could instantly verify whether the gold you have is real or fake, at no extra cost

Anyone in the world could instantly verify how much gold existed in the world, and exactly how much gold was held by each owner (each wallet)

Anyone in the world could also see every time new gold was minted, old gold was destroyed, or gold was sent.

You could carry any amount of gold that you want, to anywhere in the world, just by memorizing or writing down 12 unique words. No need to worry about gold’s heavy weight, or risk of confiscation, or losing it in your checked luggage.

Right now, there are people around the world working to improve this “gold”, and everyone who holds some can enjoy the improvements. So if someone devised a way to make sending gold cheaper or faster, every gold holder would enjoy this upgrade.

People are also working to build products and services on top of “gold”, that make use of its many unique features. For example, someone could build a tool that allowed you to temporarily lend small fractions of your gold (the lightning network), and in return you would earn more gold for providing this service. And anyone who holds gold could use this tool

You would know exactly how much new gold is mined around the world, every minute, hour, and year, and by exactly which miners. Further, every 4 years, the rate of newly mined gold would drop by half, in perpetuity

Finally and perhaps most importantly, you are certain that there will only ever be a maximum of 21 million “gold” units in the world, and that is also public and independently verifiable

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If gold were bitcoin… but gold is not. It can do none of those things. And that is why, slowly and inexorably, bitcoin will win in price and mindshare and adoption.

Bitcoin is gold with wings. Or conversely, gold is like a dumb bitcoin.

There are many more differences that I have left out. But I hope it’s an interesting thought experiment.

Note: of course, there are some benefits to physical gold that bitcoin doesn’t have. For example, gold has materiality. Gold has some niche industrial uses.

20% of our tax dollars just to pay *interest* on America’s debt

Paul Tudor Jones on our fiscal predicament:

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JONES: So, if you just think about what’s happened in since really in the last three or four months, we’re getting ready, I don’t know if we’ll have a Minsky moment in the bond market. I don’t know if we’ll have that point of recognition. But we’re going to have the grinding reality that with 122 percent of debt-to-GDP, as interest costs go up in the United States, you get in this vicious circle where higher interest rates cause higher funding costs, cause higher debt issuance, which cause further bond liquidation, which cause higher rates, which put us in an untenable fiscal position. We, our interest bill is going to, very shortly, exceed our defense spending, in just a couple of years. Our, it probably in four- or five-years ceteris paribus will have the highest interest bill as a percentage of GDP that we’ve ever had. It will probably be close to 20 percent of your taxes will go to pay interest on the debt unless we do something.

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Source: https://twitter.com/3xliquidated/status/1715509499023233232?s=46

“But you’re still carrying her” – Alan Watts

Monks River
Recently heard this great parable as told by Alan Watts:

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It’s like the story of the two Zen monks who were crossing the river, and the ford was very deep because of the flood.

And there was a girl trying to get across, and one of the monks immediately picked her up, and carried her across.

Put her down on the other side, and then the monks went one way and she went another.

And the other monk, who had been in a kind of embarrassed silence and which he finally broke, he said, “You realize that you broke a monastic rule by touching and picking up a woman like that?”

And he replied, “Oh, but I left her on the other side of the river, and you’re still carrying her!”

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Transcript: https://alanwatts.org/transcripts/the-veil-of-thoughts
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYXn8CClPmc

Must read Doctorow’s “Enshittification” article: “legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters”

Some gold bits including:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

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Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

Wired link: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/