Random facts 9 – things I learned recently – Hugh Howey: “I’ll write 2 books a year for 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years I’ll know if I’m a writer.

All of these costs will trend down until eventually it’s just like…the cloud. Like they’re all the same. You might use AWS or Oracle or IBM Cloud, they all have different purposes, but you don’t really care, but there might be lockin. You build your stack on AWS, it’s kinda expensive, you want to switch but it’s difficult… if I had to guess that’s how this plays out…
Turner Novak

Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt. Luck helps—but only if you don’t seek it.

And the Portuguese rutter? That’s our death warrant, for of course it’s stolen. At least it was bought from a Portuguese traitor, and by their law any foreigner caught in possession of any rutter of theirs, let alone one that unlocks the Magellan, is to be put to death at once. And if the rutter is found aboard an enemy ship, the ship is to be burned and all aboard executed without mercy.

Alan Greenspan in 1966, when he was still in the private sector:
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions…In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves

It is breathtaking how slow, substandard and unfocused many companies out there get through the day. And think nothing of it. The lack of energy is palatable. There is performance upside everywhere. As a leader, your opportunity is to reset in each of these dimensions. You do it in every single conversation, meeting, and encounter

In a system that depends on irresponsible government spending (especially for perpetual war) and fiat printing to cover that irresponsibility, alarm bells cannot be allowed to work. There must be no pure price signals. And above all, an alarm bell must not also serve as a life-raft that’s easily accessible to everyone, especially the general public, in the form of an ETF. There must be no escape hatch

The overall degree is negligible. In 2013, researchers found that the average degree of personalization in Google Search was 11.7%, of course varying widely by query and rank. Higher positions, for example, have a higher chance of being personalized than lower positions.11 A study from 2019 found that Google personalizes 2/10 results when searching for people and 4/10 for political parties. In other words, not much

When you’re healthy you have 10,000 needs, but when you’re sick you only have 1

marketplaces are fueled by two core properties: 1) discovery and curation (presenting things that users want to see and interact with), and 2) trust and reputation (providing assurances to users)

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it

From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.

Tyler Cowen, economist, professor, and founder of the popular blog Marginal Revolution, developed three laws while he was teaching macroeconomics. One: “There is something wrong with everything,” two: “There is a literature on everything” and three: “All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.”

Also, he changes one menu item every week. Has a massive spreadsheet that tells him what’s being ordered, profit margins on each item, etc. He gets rid of the least popular thing, tries something else. Every. Single. Week

The interesting thing about OnlyFans is that OF agencies use the models as image/video content to bait simps. However, many of the OF girls are unable to talk to so many simps at once and end up using virtual assistants who are following a script in an attempt to extract maximal value from simps by sending them prepared media from a google drive after the simp tips his final buck. Even if it is not real, it feels real to the end consumer and that is all that matters

They say movies are the shared dreams of the audience—that’s why they have to be experienced in the dark.

“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”

“Failure is the information you need to get where you’re going”
Every time in Delphi’s history when we expected or “needed” something to happen. It didn’t happen and ended up turning out for the better.
– We weren’t able to raise money to start our business so we bootstrapped it ourselves and today, Delphi is fully employee owned.
- We weren’t able to finish raising a fund, and today – Delphi Ventures is basically all prop capital.
- There were numerous times we *almost* got acquired and ended up saying no – and it’s resulted in us building up Delphi into a brand we’re proud to be building for the space first and foremost

When galaxies collide, the black holes at their center begin orbiting one another before merging, and astronomers have just identified the largest pair yet. Researchers estimate that the black holes at the center of elliptical galaxy B2 0402+379 (the Loop’s longtime favorite galaxy, obviously) weigh about 28 billion times the mass of the Sun.

Curse of Knowledge: The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume others have the necessary background to understand what you’re talking about.

Compassion Fade: People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.

Bottom line: There is room up in organizations to boost performance by amping up the pace and intensity. Considerable slack naturally exists in organizations to perform at much higher levels. The role of leadership is to convert that lingering potential into superlative results

We see in professional sports all the time how teams go almost overnight from losing to winning with basically the same roster, but different leadership. Call it what you want, the X factor, whatever, it is real. Anybody can dial into this, but not many do.

It is not easy because you will drive people out of their comfort zones. There will be resistance. Change is hard. Some will vote with their feet. If you want to be popular as a leader, this may not be for you. The role of a leader is to change the status quo, step up the pace, and increase the intensity. Leaders are the energy bunnies and pacemakers of the organization. Some people drain energy from organizations; not leaders, they engulf organizations with energy.

Open Source vs. Proprietary Models: Zhu discusses the ongoing debate between open-source and proprietary AI models. He predicts that open-source models will eventually catch up with, if not surpass, their proprietary counterparts. This viewpoint reflects his belief in the democratization of AI technology and skepticism toward the long-term dominance of closed, proprietary systems.

If you’re not nervous it doesn’t mean anything to you — Justin Thomas

The inevitable direction of history is that the vast majority of AI systems will be built on top of open source platforms – Yann Lecun

“Deep learning, which is fundamentally a technique for recognizing patterns, is at its best when all we need are rough-ready results, where stakes are low and perfect results optional“ Still true

Your worst day is a chance to show your best qualities, to stand out, and to learn an enormous amount about yourself. Very few people plan or prepare for what they’ll do and how they’ll act during those times. Those who do might well end up turning their worst day into their best

In short, it will FEEL like a regular bear cycle, but in reality the game has changed for BTC and ETH – forever.
This means the window in time for the average non rich person to get generational exposure to BTC and ETH is closing, very rapidly

Essentially, most people will be priced out of owning 10 ETH or 1 BTC.
I also believe that going forward alts will be less appealing each cycle as people just prefer the concensus trade of BTC and ETH that are guaranteed to go up due to ETF flows + because of new market participants size, you could still get 20-50% per year, with way less downside risk.
As such I think people will be less interested in altcoins.
This mimics how the S&P500 works, with basically 4-6 massive tech firms, like Google, apple, amazon, meta etc. Propping up the entire thing

Hugh Howey (on Tim Ferriss): I’ll write 2 books a year for 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years I’ll know if I’m a writer.

The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them to default and triggering a collapse in the confidence of homebuyers hasn’t improved matters. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs and stomping out their businesses isn’t boosting sentiment. Does the government need to rein in official corruption? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy has also made the policymaking apparatus more paralyzed and risk averse. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

“When you cook for yourself there’s love in there”

“resilience matters in success…I don’t know how to teach it to you except for, ‘I hope suffering happens to you’..greatness comes from character & character…is formed out of people who suffered..I wish upon you ample doses of pain & suffering” – Jensen Huang

We are in a “Tower of Babel” moment of AI research, where hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, and technologists are collectively using the same language to tackle every engineering problem under the sun.

As I usually do, I’ve appended our 1997 letter, our first letter to shareholders. It gets more interesting every year that goes by, in part because so little has changed. I especially draw your attention to the section entitled ‘‘It’s All About the Long Term.’’

that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

A counterculture is blowback. It’s intentionally offensive to establishment beliefs. Find it repellent? Good, it’s meant to gatekeep you.

Norwegian endurance training hack: high volume lactate threshold training. Train just below lactate threshold so you can do a lot more volume instead of at or above which requires a lot more recovery

More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil.

in 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI challenged 14-time world champion Lee Sedol and won four out of five games. The next revision of AlphaGo was completely out of reach for human players: it won 60 straight games, taking down just about every notable Go player in the process.

the Bell Labs patent lawyers wanted to know why some people were so much more productive (in terms of patents) than others. After crunching a lot of data, they found that the only thing the productive employees had in common (other than having made it through the Bell Labs hiring process) was that “Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, ‘he drew people out, got them thinking'”

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.

we’ll see Software 2.0 subsume more and more of the existing Software 1.0 stacks, resulting in more compact human-written codebases with the bulk of engineering complexity offloaded to data and learning. One of the most profound benefits of end-to-end machine learning is that it can drastically reduce the amount of code needed. Before deep learning, the AI backing Google Translate was roughly a 500,000-line codebase. After deep learning, a single neural network could be expressed in about 500 lines of TensorFlow code, with the bulk of “translation knowledge” now replaced with data.

Bezos shareholder letters

I invite you to please read the section entitled It’s All About the Long Term, as it is the best way I know to help make sure we’re the kind of company you want to be invested in. As we wrote there, we don’t claim it’s the right philosophy, we just claim it’s ours!

We are doubly-blessed. We have a market-size unconstrained opportunity in an area where the underlying foundational technology we employ improves every day. That is not normal.

Hayek would in particular focus on the function and effect of prices. Prices, he went on to explain in the following years, are the market’s decentralized and socially scalable means of communication. Although established as a simple function of supply and demand for goods and services in an economy, Hayek described how prices actually embed a wide array of relevant information that individuals require to make economic decisions.

Bitcoin is the most successful financial meme since gold and even at today’s all-time high, all the bitcoin in the world is still only worth about 1/14 of all the gold in the world.
Unlike the gold meme, which has infected about as many minds as it ever will, the bitcoin meme is growing — and it’s growing in a time when 1) people have more money than ever to invest and 2) people are more than ever looking for lottery-ticket type investments

Financial Nihilism goes hand in hand with Populism – a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups

The dirty secret of influencer marketing: ~80%+ of influencers DO NOT CARE about anything but $
I see this happen 24/7 in my space. They don’t care about product quality, brand (theirs or the brand they’re repping), their audience, etc. They just want $$$
The reasons why are simple:
– They don’t make a lot of $ (even large accounts)
– This is usually their 1st business venture
– They suffer from extreme short-term thinking / high time preference
– They don’t understand how brand is built
– They can be quite entitled

Peter Thiel on The Power Law of Distribution:
“One distribution method is likely to be far more powerful than every other for any given business:
Distribution follows a power law of its own.
This is counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs, who assume that more is more. But the kitchen sink approach—employ a few salespeople, place some magazine ads, and try to add some kind of viral functionality to the product as an afterthought—doesn’t work. Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business.”

Perhaps the most important insight NASA has gleaned from studying team dynamics—in space and on Earth—is the preciousness of one trait in particular: a sense of humour. Studies of crews overwintering at the South Pole show that a confined group needs people to fulfil various roles, including leader, storyteller and social secretary. But the most important task by far is that of the clown, a person who is funny and also wise enough to understand each member of the group and defuse tensions. Laughter, as much as courage, will sustain astronauts on their long quest to Mars.

The guy I know who is the best at friendships (also a spectacular salesman) keeps proposing plans. I asked him why once & he told me:
People get busy. If you want to be their friend, don’t take it personally & keep asking.
He did this with me & he eventually became one of the few genuine, lifelong friends I’ve made in adulthood.

Studies show that by adding physical activity to our lives, we become more socially active—it boosts our confidence and provides an opportunity to meet people. The vigor and motivation that exercise brings helps us establish and maintain social connections.

That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers

Nothing is Something: “The most underutilized parenting strategy is doing nothing.”– Dr. Becky Kennedy

When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox

When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files

Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you’re lost

The signals have changed over the years: After horse equipage, it was Hermès trunks for traveling by rail, then large Hermès bags for day trips by automobile, and then small Hermès handbags for everyday use (originally sized to fit in the overhead bin of an airplane

The first modern LLM, Jeremy Howard’s ULMFit, was trained on Wikipedia. GPT was trained on a corpus of books. GPT-2 was trained on the reddit-curated “WebText,” corpus, i.e., a crawl of websites linked on Reddit. GPT-3 expanded the dataset scope to web text from CommonCrawl. Data selectivity trended downward as data volume and diversity requirements went up.

It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle…

Puzzlingly though, despite facing an increased risk of skin cancer, people who are exposed to lots of sun appear to have longer life expectancies, on average, than sun avoiders.

Prior editions:

“Cars get better by some modest amount each year, as do most other things I buy or use. LLMs, in contrast, can make leaps.” – Tyler Cowen on AI

Must read if you’re interested in AI and its implications; Tyler’s commentary on the recent explosion of AI into the popular consciousness (driven in large part by ChatGPT) has been, in my view, the most realistic+pragmatic:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-23/chatgpt-is-only-going-to-get-better-and-we-better-get-used-to-it

“I don’t have a prediction for the rate of improvement, but most analogies from the normal economy do not apply. Cars get better by some modest amount each year, as do most other things I buy or use. LLMs, in contrast, can make leaps.”

“I’ve started dividing the people I know into three camps: those who are not yet aware of LLMs; those who complain about their current LLMs; and those who have some inkling of the startling future before us. The intriguing thing about LLMs is that they do not follow smooth, continuous rules of development. Rather they are like a larva due to sprout into a butterfly.”

Podcast notes – Tyler Cowen on Lunar Society with Dwarkesh Patel – “Existence of sex is most pessimistic thing there is”

Guest: Tyler
Host: Dwarkesh

Went to India for 6th time, read 100s of books, but traveling there is a deeper and different kind of knowledge
Prefer traveling over reading

What is Conquest’s law (note to self)

Doesn’t see left v right (eg, left wing, leftist politics) as consistent and historical categories

Doesn’t buy that famous / successful people in the past were more abused or had harder childhoods – lots of selection bias, historical bias

Disappointed at how geographically clustered “talent” is – today it’s places like London, NYC, etc
These talent clusters have been such for a long time – seems like an enduring effect
Talent comes from many different areas, but always migrates to these clusters – how good are these clusters at producing talent, versus attracting them?
Problem for SF – may be a more temporary cluster, not much historical persistence

Why did Renaissance blossom in Florence and Venice but not Milan? Hard to understand

High status thing to do is feign humility

Well-dressed 20 year olds (eg, suit / business) are too conformist for what he’s looking for

Nootropics – don’t personally like it, but does seem to work for some people

Doesn’t drink coffee

Believes 15-17 year olds among most neglected talented people – high schools should invite real local experts to talk to them

The best moral instruction (in classrooms) are teachers being good people

“Context is that which is scarce”
Kids learn a lot of context in school – even if they can’t memorize as many explicit facts – it’s the residual, it’s what matters

“Super talented are best at spotting other super talented individuals”
There are exceptions, not a science, but there’s some art / intuition to it

Will sometimes chew out certain people, try to light a fire under them

Not an EA (effective altruism) person, but like libertarianism it will continue for quite a long time
Need more religions – in the meantime EA will do

Emergent Ventures – applicants are remarkably bi-modal distribution – pretty clear who makes it vs doesn’t make it
Believes a lot of foundations give out too many big grants, not enough small grants – small grants are under-rated

Believes mental stamina / energy can increase significantly (eg, 30%) – but some people are gifted super stamina

Lots of geniuses can’t get out of bed in the morning – they’re stuck and you should write them off

Top level athletic performance is very cognitively intense – this is under-rated – you have to be really smart to practice, lead a team, outsmart competition, “very g-loaded”

“Whoever is the top gardener [in the world] – I suspect I would be super impressed by”

Should be more bullish on immigrants from Africa – hard to get out, so it’s a positive sign

US not into demographic decline yet – maybe so in Japan

Doesn’t worry as much about woke ideology – “if that keeps you down…I’m not so impressed by you”
“Europe isn’t woke enough in a lot of eyes… chauvinist, old fashioned”
Europe is less egalitarian (than America) – Paris is the extreme by status; too few dimensions of status competition

YC more like scalable business school now – could be stale in good sense like Harvard is stale

Novelists can blossom much later, very discrete act – won’t really know until you do it – makes it harder to predict talent

Existential risk matters more than almost anyone thinks – but the things we do to eliminate them are more typical than most EA believers think – also over worry about certain types of risks, “not epistemically modest enough”, eg, AGI alignment

After a modern nuclear war – humanity permanently set back, medieval living standards, feudalism, more violence – no reason to assume you just bounce back, more problems will appear after – crop failures, climate change, disease

“Existence of sex is most pessimistic thing there is” – can’t just stand still or you will die / be defeated – thus sex as requirement to force genetic diversity

Growing up, read a lot of sports and chess biographies

Has blogged for 20 years – importance of constancy – like a public biography

If only had 5 years to live, would focus more on Emergent Ventures – institution building and talent spotting

Most talented people have unique philosophies / worldviews – eg, Peter Thiel (on Gerard, one heretic belief) – need unique way of looking at the world, protects you from other peoples’ idiocy

Doesn’t bet as much on single ideas unlike, eg, Jordan Peterson – rationale is he wants to stay as broadly relevant for as long as possible

Leading by example is number one way we teach – specifically referring to his students at GMU (?)

Bloggers – as people who write publicly on regular basis – have been around for centuries – will survive a long time
Substack encourages posts that are too long, too whiny, too focused on a few topics

The more that progress advances, the easier it is to destroy things, easier to destroy than create – to square his short-term optimism with his long-term pessimism

Fukuyama has changed views often – one of his views is that rest of history is how we’ll manipulate biology
“Are you long the market or short the market?” – one of Tyler’s favorite forcing questions

And this is what Stable Diffusion thinks is a “lunar society, podcast interview, two people”:

Russell Napier’s interesting macro views: “What does it tell you when central banks speak loudly? Perhaps that they’re not carrying a big stick anymore.”

Found him on Tyler Cowen’s blog, and now I’m reading his book on the 1995-1998 Asian Financial Crisis.

Here are more highlights from the article that Tyler references (emphasis mine):

But now, when governments take control of private credit creation through the banking system by guaranteeing loans, central banks are pushed out of their role. There’s another way of looking at today’s loud, hawkish rhetoric by central banks: Teddy Roosevelt once said that, in terms of foreign policy, one should speak softly and carry a big stick. What does it tell you when central banks speak loudly? Perhaps that they’re not carrying a big stick anymore.

I’m not talking about a command economy or about Marxism, but about an economy where the government plays a significant role in the allocation of capital. The French would call this system «dirigiste». This is nothing new, as it was the system that prevailed from 1939 to 1979. We have just forgotten how it works, because most economists are trained in free market economics, not in history.

I think we’ll see consumer price inflation settling into a range between 4 and 6%. Without the energy shock, we would probably be there now. Why 4 to 6%? Because it has to be a level that the government can get away with. Financial repression means stealing money from savers and old people slowly.

Podcast notes – Sam Bankman Fried (FTX founder) with Tyler Cowen

Guest: SBF – FTX and Alameda Research founder, crypto billionaire
Host: Tyler Cowen

What is his production function?
World is messy, huge power in getting quantitative / numerical when it’s hard to do so

Worked at Jane Street before crypto
Lot of interview questions are game questions
You’re always making probabilistic decisions, focus on the factors that matter and ignore the rest

Trading is grinding to do a good job
Goal is making money
Constantly think of solutions and try them out

Parents are famous Stanford law professors

Utilitarian perspective – turn things into numbers, and decide which number is the biggest, even in a messy system

Crypto today is enormous fraction of discourse in politics and regulation
Understand the nuances, possible directions
200 countries – each one is trying to figure out how to regulate crypto

Thought he was a good manager until he started Alameda
Seems easy when things are going well
What to do when two employees vehemently disagree?
First, think of the object level truth / answer
Find the right answer
Company culture should focus on that right answer, being ruthless about it
Need agreed upon process to make hard decisions

Some sports teams outperform every year
eg, Belichick + Patriots
They’re known for doing the right thing – what play optimizes our winning – it’s not about conventions or what’s popular
In sports, a lot of fruit is low hanging, focus on that

Supporter of effective altruism
Lot more funding for it now than before
Still need more innovation in how to properly spend money
Also need more good people – to start and lead projects and take responsibility for their success
A leader who can get everyone to take leap together, putting flagpole down

Next $million, where do you give it?
Two things
1. Pandemic preparedness (covid response screwed up, haven’t improved for next one, we got lucky all things considered). We just shut everything down. Vaccine was fast by vaccine standards but not by “people are dying” standards. Lobbying Washington for more spending on pandemic preparedness. Funding vaccine capacity / vaccine stockpiles / early detection systems
2. ?

He’s a pure Bentham-ite utilitarian
Tyler: Why spend money on life extension? Easier to grow utils than save them
SBF: Not compelled by life extension research, not necessary for world flourishing

SBF is vegan
No problem with eating meat if you’re net happy
When he switched to vegetarian / vegan, took 6 months to make real progress
Easier to go cold turkey than steadily wean off it
Doesn’t like cognitive load of deciding whether to eat meat

Everything gets weird at infinity when you think about expected values
Infinity matters, but no one has good account of it

Crypto
Can you coherently regulate stablecoins?
All stablecoins backed by dollars, in regulated accounts – solves most of current problems
But lots of gray area, like what’s difference between PayPal and USDC?
Banks can re-hypothecate, but what about stablecoins?
How do you regulate a coin that doesn’t call itself stable, but in reality has a very stable price?
A stablecoin is stable in both directions (asymmetric for consumer)

DeFi
Tyler: where is implicit (hidden) leverage?
In 2008, lots of bespoke OTC swaps that weren’t properly accounted – these exist in crypto too
Everything’s on-chain, but it’s inconsistently tracked
Dai – algo stablecoin, backed by crypto assets, not perfectly stable – but can also be used itself as collateral for other loans / leverage

Do we have rational theory for crypto prices?
Dogecoin – does away with pretense – can’t do DCF – bizarre and wacky but powerful – it’s just supply and demand (memes and anti memes)
Elon’s greatest product is TSLA (the stock, not the car)
Are there other asset classes aside from crypto that have price models that are similarly artificial / unreliable?
Meme stocks show this

Bitcoin’s price comp with gold is useful
Currently trading ~10% of gold
Swiss franc or bitcoin – which has more impact on world? Now the answer is obvious, but it wasn’t 2-3 years ago

What does it take for global scale blockchain?
take NYSE, Nasdaq, Google, Facebook
if billion users, 10 clicks per day, 1M TPS (transactions per second) – need something of that scale
most blockchains can’t support that today
ETH can support 10 – off by 6 orders of magnitude
ETH2 will support thousands of TPS per shard, but the shards don’t talk to each other

Growing up, McDonalds fries were his favorite
hard to find good fries in Asia
Tyler’s favorite fries are in Patagonia (also Belgium)

likes Beyond Burger – huge fraction of all veggie burgers sold, taste a lot better than most veggie burgers

currently in Bahamas – somewhat bullish on it, great place for some types of businesses
investing in schools, health infrastructure
nimble small state, robustly democratic
people are very nice
close to Miami
how would he give away $10M in Bahamas?
Health and hospitals
cash transfers are always a reliable answer