Recent startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings: “The surest sign of a midcurved institution is its insistence on an ability to control, predict, and dictate to complex adaptive systems”

19/ I have 0 insight if/when Indian policies change but honestly feel like the fact that the most populous country on earth has banned crypto is not discussed enough
Utterly massive opportunity when/if this changes

With a simple meme, you can make millions of people laugh all over the world. I can tweet a joke that gets 15 million views, and I can do it from my toilet. That’s scale. And as every good entrepreneur knows, wherever there’s scale, there’s a chance to turn a massive profit.

If there were one rule to unite all memelords, it would be this: capitalize on the current thing.

Mr. Beast —
Anytime we do something that no other creator can do, that seperates us in their mind and makes our videos more special to them. It changes how they see us and it does make them watch more videos and engage more with the brand. You can’t track the “wow factor” but I can describe it. Anything that no other youtuber can do. And it’s important we never lose our wow.

Let’s say we have 10 minute video about a guy surviving weeks in the woods. Instead of making the first 3 minutes of the video about his first day then progressing from there like a logical filmmaker would. We’d tried to cover multiple days in the first 3 minutes of the video so the viewer is now super invested in the story.

But in general once you have someone for 6 minutes they are super invested in the story and probably in what I call a “lull”. They are watching the video without even realizing they are watching a video.

There were days back in the early 2000s when you would have no idea what to expect from a Bernanke or Greenspan-led Fed. The FOMC meetings were actually quite riveting because you simply had no idea what to expect. But not the Powell-led Fed. They often explicitly tell you what they will do, but in rare cases when they don’t, they leak it to their favorite Wall Street Journal puppet, Nick Timiraos, who spells it out for you.

Lest you think I’m being unfair to our ivory-tower friends, here’s the lore of the term “capitalism”: borne from a socialist French intellectual and popularized by Marx. Lol. Yeah. The guys who don’t like the natural system, named the natural system something that’s kinda pejorative.

I want you to help me build a media empire, where we make (formerly) obscure scholars famous, compile the real time history of ASI, and produce the very best intellectual content in the world.

Content, confidence, and context—these are the three dimensions Shreyas Doshi discovered traditional companies use to promote employees. “This is unfortunately the cause of a lot [of] persistent frustration for otherwise-talented people who are GREAT at content, but repeatedly get passed over for promotion to higher levels… it is usually because they are not projecting as much confidence as they ought to for the next level and they are not as attuned to the context of the org & the company.”

Their SwiftNet private key infrastructure and banking messaging standards like ISO20022 are used by 11,000+ banks globally to facilitate the communication of payment instructions between banks

On Mr. Beast as Buzzfeed 2.0
(he can only sell very generic products like chocolate because his audience is so poor and so broad) — and he is in the most competitive part of the ecosystem / general entertainment.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone.

This “secret privatization” of the entire North Korean economy has been incredibly thorough. It’s estimated that around 80 percent of all goods and services in North Korea are provided in secret and in shadow. It’s capitalism as an extremophile species of lichen, colonizing the cracks and crevices of the official society, and keeping the whole system afloat.

“The concern was that 200 phones traveling at 800 kilometers per hour in a plane could rapidly connect to many towers at once, overloading the infrastructure. At least that’s what the FCC thought could happen. So, they banned cell phone use in flight in 1991. But there’s a problem with this theory—a plane is a big metal enclosure, essentially a Faraday cage. So, it should block almost all electromagnetic signals.”

After analyzing value spread throughout his career, AQR Capital cofounder concludes that markets are becoming less informationally efficient. “You’d be forgiven if, like me, your initial whiggish assumption is that markets would get more efficient over time. After all, over the last 20-40 years the ubiquity and speed of available information has continuously grown, and at the same time trading costs have come rapidly down. But like me initially, you’d be mistaking speed for accuracy.”

In the 1950s alone, America built five generations of fighter jets, three generations of manned bombers, two classes of aircraft carriers, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear-powered attack submarines.

In 2020/21, very loose monetary conditions + huge money printing combined with two major breakout innovations DeFi & NFTs. People were given stimmies, fiat was massively devalued again, and the prospect of decentralized finance being the genuine future of finance, alongside NFTs being the future of digital property caused enormous retail participation.

“Your highly questionable parenting vision,” responded Nicole, who was a day away from labor. “One, no school or college. Two, separate apartment in childhood. Three, move out at 16. Four, learn to drive all machines as early as possible. Five, leave the family fortune to one child. Six, children have to fly in economy while we are in business.” Luckey also believes strongly in (legally obtained) child labor (permits), that having fewer than 2.1 children would make him a traitor to the nation, and that children as young as 2 are fully capable of walking several miles without a stroller (“History shows it,” he says).

“At some point, in business and in life and in romance, you have to commit to a path,” said the 31-year-old Luckey. “A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy … They’re always pursuing everything with optionality.

By 2023, the cold war between these tribes had escalated into open conflict as hedge fund billionaires led the charge to oust Ivy League presidents and The New York Times sued OpenAI. Incursions into enemy territory are treated with alarm, like when Google’s AI model Gemini was criticized by Riverians for reflecting distinctively Villagey political attitudes.

Villagers see themselves as being clearly right on the most important big-picture questions of the day, from climate change to gay and trans rights. So they view the Riverian inclination to poke holes in arguments and “just ask questions’’ as being a waste of time at best, and as potentially empowering a wake of bad-faith actors and bigots.

Bitcoin is worth a trillion bucks and half of Wall Street owns it at this point. All the rest of crypto is worth another trillion. Tether owns more Treasuries than Germany. There’s been more than $20bn of venture capital poured into this space in the last four years. We’re not that early.

The surest sign of a midcurved institution is its insistence on an ability to control, predict, and dictate to complex adaptive systems. You don’t control them, they control you.

Envision interest rates as futures for dollars.
Interest rates = price of money

I trust GPT4 more than I trust our politicians. In the coming years AI models will become so much more capable that their judgment will start being used to mediate disputes – first inside companies but then legally . Lawyers already use it constantly.

China was The State.
Crypto was The Individual.
It’s the Machine that will overthrow the plutocracy, because the core of the plutocracy – its super bubble was the false insistence it was a machine.

Wisdom patterns #1: OBSESSIONS WIN

Like the giant nerd I am, I have been trying to find the shared patterns and common principles among the many quotes and excerpts I’ve collected. I’ve managed to create a list of 20 or so, so called wisdom patterns, and I’ll steadily share them here when I’m feeling inspired to write which is not often.

Starting with what I consider the most powerful pattern, which summates to something like “Obsessions win”.

Alternate names I had for this pattern include “Go very deep” and “the power of focus”.

All quotes below are taken verbatim, all mistakes mine.

Wisdom principle #1 — OBSESSIONS WIN:

One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep thinking of things to try. – Paul Graham

Van Gogh didn’t say: Thats just an old chair. He looked, and looked, and looked. He sensed the Beingness of the chair. Then he sat in front of the canvas and took up the brush. – Eckhart Tolle

“It’s tough to be good at something you’re not interested in. It’s nearly impossible to be great at something you’re not obsessed with.” – Shane Parrish

that money and time are the heaviest burthens of life, and that the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use. – Samuel Johnson

For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is a being who is able to completely affirm life: someone who says ‘yes’ to everything that comes their way; a being who is able to be their own determiner of value; sculpt their characteristics and circumstances into a beautiful, empowered, ecstatic whole; and fulfill their ultimate potential to become who they truly are.

“Trust your obsessions. […] You don’t always use your obsessions. Sometimes you stick them onto the compost heap in the back of your head, where the rot down, and attach to other things, and get half-forgotten, and will, one day, turn into something completely usable. Go where your obsessions take you. … Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.” — Neil Gaiman

A single-minded devotion to an idea can spur massive change (but this type of fanatical devotion can also backfire)

TS Eliot observed that “only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

We are strongly biased towards people who are so determined to succeed that they never give up, never quit. — pmarca

The most successful people i know didn’t work the hardest. They took the most risk. – @howard

Here’s how to live: Commit. – Derek Sivers

You can become the world’s best in something primarily by caring more about it than anyone else. – Kevin Kelly

Give yourself a lot of shots to get lucky’ is even better advice than it appears on the surface. Luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area—you meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn patterns, etc. – Sam Altman

There are arguments that go in both ways but I’d say yes: it’s beneficial to build an obsession and compulsion with things you want to be better at. Especially if that thing is hard to do because you can overcome the difficulty with brute force

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, “I am happy,” or “I am afraid,” you are not being aware of it. – Alan Watts

When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you’ll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.) – PG

But when we are at our best, we’re not slogging through. Great people are obsessed and they’re not slogging through either. They are driven. They are motivated. They are deeply, deeply engaged

Once you make a decision, go all in.
Commit fully to your choices. Half-hearted efforts yield half-hearted results.
Indecision only leads to stagnation and missed opportunities.
Stay committed to your goals, even when faced with obstacles and setbacks. Perseverance is single-handedly the most important key to achieving a goals.
-Anil Lulla

“Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled. You feel like it’s insulting to be asked to do just one thing.
But Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He’d basically say: ‘I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I’ve assigned to you. I don’t want to hear about how great you’re doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one problem.’…
The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company but they’re difficult–you don’t wake up in the morning with a solution to them, so you tend to procrastinate…
If you have a company that’s always solving B+ problems, you’ll never create the breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it” – Keith Rabois

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. – TS Eliot

Seinfeld: I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I’m thinking, could I do something with that?
Howard Stern: That, to me, sounds torturous.
Seinfeld: Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with

“Life punishes a vague wish and rewards a specific ask.” – Tim Ferriss

But the artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don’t believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.

And in that flow, you find yourself doing things not purely for status, but because there’s something in them that’s more meaningful to you. As I’ve written before: “To become truly great at something, you need to be at least a little obsessed with that thing — enough to get lost in the joy of doing it, not the allure of what it could get you.” – Anu Atluru

I see a lot of people with talent but the one thing they don’t have is that just love of doing it for the sake of it. — Rodney Mullen

Since I was 13, there probably hasn’t been a single hour that’s gone by that I’ve been awake where I haven’t thought about YouTube – Mr. Beast

I knew from the age of 13 that this is what I was gonna do until the day I died – Mr. Beast

Obsessions tend to win. Whether sports, a startup, a community, or a movement. Those who are obsessed will almost always, with enough time, beat those who are not

Find what you love and let it kill you – Bukowski

The only thing that will make you happy is to set a goal, then kill yourself to achieve it. I have a theory that the elation you feel is directly proportional to the sacrifices you make. – Dr. Nicholas of Broadcom

Next wisdom pattern will be “Do it now.”

Podcast notes – Mr. Beast on Lex Fridman: “Subscribers is a vanity metric”

Started notes ~an hour in

If he interviews job applicants who say their goal is movies or some other thing, instant rejection – YouTube should be THE goal

$100K is around max prize giveaway that most captures attention – above that, diminishing returns

First time in western social media you can go viral on all platforms with same content (short viral video)

Viral videos is a teachable skill

Lex: crucial part of your success is idea generation – others don’t put enough ideas on paper

Every 6 months, you should look back and be embarrassed by your old videos – otherwise you’re not learning enough

Need to be endlessly learning – will go on walks and call people to learn stuff

If new channel, what should you do?
“Just fail”
Your first 10 videos will not get views
Just start uploading
Make 100 videos and improve something every time – better script, better editing, better thumbnails
Maybe by 101st video you’ll have some views and can get serious
No such thing as a perfect video – every little thing can be improved

Create best ideas – then determine if they’re doable (don’t let practicality stop you)
eg, when they gave away a $10M island, really had to find creative methods to find a worthwhile island

It’s about intuition – you know your viewers the best, you spent most time on your content, trust your gut

His typical viewer: “a teenager boy that plays video games”
But if 30% of his viewers are women, and a video gets 100M views, that’s still 30M women (!)

Elon said “We want to limit the amount of regrettable minutes people spend on Twitter”

Lex: “I follow the thread of curiosity”

Lex: “I’m against centralized censorship and shadow banning”
Beast: agrees shadow banning should be transparent, you should let people know

Antarctica video
-during summertime the sun never goes down
-named a mountain that wasn’t named
-lucked out with warm weather

Process eg, Stand in circle for 100 days
-figure out idea, act on inspiration
-need independent crew for those 100 days
-need 10 cameras rolling all times – trailer, cameras, house

Process, 100 adults v 100 kids
-did 100 boys v 100 girls, people loved it, wanted to do more
-lots of shooting problems eg, room with bad acoustics

Earlier on, if video did bad, he’d be devastated, cry over it
Now he’s much better about it, just figure out how to improve and move on

Earlier on, spent 24 hours on deserted island – but didn’t like the footage
So scraped it, went back and spent another 24 hours LOL

Videos where weather is very hot, or filmed on water – he suffers a lot more (gets sea sick)

“Once you get over fear that you’ll wake up one day and be irrelevant”
Some creators go a little mentally insane during this process

Subscribers is vanity metric – doesn’t really correlate with views

If goal is to be super successful entrepreneur, you either need be WORKING or recharging / resting to recover
Need to find balance
Used to overwork and hate rest / downtime

Optimal day – going down list of his 8 companies, go thru biggest pain points for each (eg, Beast Burgers, Beast Charity, etc)
Delegated most day to day to his teams

For younger first time biz owners
-whenever he hires from traditional industries (eg, Disney) – they just don’t get it – YT is its own new thing
-doesn’t wanna get trapped in bubble of what works today
-shouldn’t start experimenting only when you plateau / start declining – could get even worse
imperative to experiment while you’re still growing / winning

Beast Burgers
-just started as an experiment, didn’t plan to run a restaurant chain

Always wanted to do Feastables, hasn’t been any innovation in American snacks in a long time
“Feastables is just crushing”
Wal-Mart – didn’t think they’d do this kind of revenue
Had to stop promoting for awhile due to supply chain issues
Expect to 10x in 2023

November recommended reads

Absolutely incredible long profile of MBS, Saudi Arabia’s de facto king. He’s like Kim Jong Un, but much richer, and actually driving significant change. Significant to whom, is the question

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/mohammed-bin-salman-saudi-arabia-palace-interview/622822

MBS rebuked me when I called this attitude “moderate Islam,” though his own government champions the concept on its websites. “That term would make terrorists and extremists happy.” It suggests that “we in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries are changing Islam into something new, which is not true,” he said. “We are going back to the core, back to pure Islam” as practiced by Muhammad and his four successors. “These teachings of the Prophet and the four caliphs—they were amazing. They were perfect.”

A great newsletter on global affairs through the lens of finance and macroeconomics. Adam Tooze’s output is astounding.

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-174-finance-and-the-polycrisis

The effect of US financial shocks on really large economies like China is relatively muted. So too for France and, surprisingly, the UK. But Germany feels American shocks heavily, as heavily, indeed, as Canada and almost as heavily as Mexico.

Another great newsletter, this one on all things China, through local (Mandarin Chinese) news sources.

https://sinocism.com/p/protests-covid-xis-diplomacy-national

Since the start of the pandemic China has had several waves of massive outpourings of online anger, especially around the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, the Shanghai lockdown disaster and the Guizhou bus tragedy. But that virtual anger about Covid policies and censorship, among other things, did not cross into real world protests. Until the last few days, as people gathered publicly to express their anger and frustration in Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan and other cities, and at many college campuses around the country.

More on Mr. Beast and his incredible business success. Willy Wonka self-promo + Walt Disney ambition. He doesn’t capture, he IS the zeitgeist

https://www.shopify.com/blog/mrbeast-business-backstory

In the earlier days of his channel, Jimmy would spend all day on Skype analyzing videos with other aspiring YouTubers. They called their group Daily Masterminds. From 7 a.m. until 10 p.m., they would break down the anatomy of each other’s videos, study popular YouTubers, and brainstorm ideas. Jimmy credits these group calls with helping him perfect his craft and intricately understand his audience.

Gambling gray markets + regulatory arbitrage + people desperate for economic opportunity

https://restofworld.org/2022/cambodias-scam-mills/

Linh Ne came to Bavet in 2021 at 17 years old, she said, accepting a typist job through Facebook. To cross the border, she pushed through forested areas and waded through a ditch filled with waist-high water; only on arrival did she realize she’d been recruited to a scam company that emulated the shopping platform Tiki. Her employers asked her to defraud Vietnamese shoppers, and she said that when she refused, they starved her. She was sold after two weeks to a second company conducting a romance scam, where her boss gave her a guide to manipulate clients.

A weekly newsletter with an insider’s view of crypto news

https://page1.substack.com/p/round-tripping-677

The same relative level of energy and emotion that occurs in bull markets, has to then be inversely mirrored in bear markets for finality to occur…perhaps crypto is slowly becoming contrarian again…there will be aftershocks in the market and likely some final contagion…crypto did not need a bailout here, bad actors failed and will be punished…we have no doubt a recomposition will occur and narratives will shift again in time…’this too shall pass

Semiconductors = the oil of the metaverse

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/2020-most-traded-global-good-was-not-crude-oil-semiconductors

Since 2015, semiconductors have taken the top rank for the most traded good, representing 15% of total global goods trade

I read this once every few months. I love articles that completely change your view on a topic you *thought* you understood. If you want to *actually* understand proof of work, this is a must read

https://grisha.org/blog/2018/01/23/explaining-proof-of-work

And there is the crux of it: The difficulty in finding a conforming hash acts as a clock. A universal clock, if you will, because there is only one such clock in the universe, and thus there is nothing to sync and anyone can “look” at it. It doesn’t matter that this clock is imprecise. What matters is that it is the same clock for everyone and that the state of the chain can be tied unambiguously to the ticks of this clock.

Some recent reads and my brief commentary (Shein, Areopagus, Do Kwon, Mr Beast)

Great weekly newsletter, a sort of Western cultural history buffet:
https://culturaltutor.com/areopagus

Mr. Beast is the new Disney. Attention = money and Beast is the king of YouTube attention and has proven people will attentively follow him into other products even if it’s as dumb and unrelated as chocolate bars
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/25/mrbeast-youtube-fundraising-merch-restaurants

Surprise — that opaque Chinese company with the insanely cheap clothing is opaque for a reason and pays its workers insanely cheap(ly)
https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/shein-is-treating-workers-even-worse-than-you-thought.html

I also took notes on this interview and…yes. Impressive levels of self-denial
https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/19/do-kwons-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-world
my notes: https://kevinhabits.com/podcast-notes-do-kwon-on-unchained-even-to-this-day-im-proud-of-work-we-didvalues-we-tried-to-defend/

What do words like “capitalism” and “free market” even mean anymore (aware that I sound like a libertarian purist curmudgeon here)
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/one-bank-makes-stunning-discovery-bank-japans-ycc-broken-and-soon-entire-jgb-market-will