"Not Even Wrong" Podcast
Investing in fundamentally new concepts and engineering practices with large impact.
❤️ David Deutsch oxymoron. If nature is the ultimate arbiter and laws of physics are human derived representations of how nature works, aren't we the ultimate arbiter? Bit from it or it from bit?
Preliminary discussion "The Enlightenment" by Ritchie Robertson. Part 2. Where did research come from? 1/2 Helps with war. 2/2 Innate property of humans.
❤️ Preliminary discussion "The Enlightenment" by Ritchie Robertson. Part 1. Who decides what is and what isn't? Human not authority. What is human? Sensibility and reason.
Be aware of the US youth su(o)cker complex. Most of US youth soccer is broken. If you are sucked into a system where improvement cannot happen systematically and goal posts continuously change. Excuses and blame are used to suck money and time. Change your environment or quit. Find a place that gives you the chance and resources to improve and reach goals. Optimize for incremental happiness.
AI for science. Knowledge Lab on Big Brains podcast by University of Chicago. Inefficiency in science due to lack of risk taking and creativity. Human barriers such as job security, prestige, egos etc. Solution is AI that acts like alien, not human. Dehumanize science through developing AI which doesn’t act like humans. Maximize iteration while minimizing cost of error and cost of error correction. Purpose of science is to understand nature. Surprising ideas = ideas that models based on current science wouldn’t predict. xAI should take note.
Tesla earnings call reaction. 1/4 AI is a big deal. Musk starts xAI to be on top of new important developments in the field of AI like for example transformers, LLMs and stable diffusion. 2/4 Production decline in Q3 to adjust for increase in inventory. 3/4 Margins are consequence of actions, not goal. 4/4 Cybertruck ramp sluggish.
Electrifying Economy = (Capacity * Flexibility )/ Cost. Flexibility = (Storage * Interconnect) / Time. Innovate along storage, interconnect and timing.
Kant and Musk both solve the problem of complexity with focus and optimizing for specific goals. Musk optimizes computer infrastructure for “Useful AI compute per Watt”. Kant optimizes for morality when dealing with complex navigation in enlightenment from superstition to rational thought. Useful knowledge sticks. At xAI Musk optimizes for curiosity and knowledge.
La Sagrada Familia and Cruyff football are both cathedrals build for legacy. They originate from special architects who put skills and product first. It starts with the product, then follows confidence and eventually excellence. Both win by entertaining. Both happen in Barcelona. It takes a place that tolerates uniqueness.
Book discussion “Run Rose Run” by James Patterson and Dolly Parton. 1/3 Novel accompanied by album with songs that make the plot. 2/3 “My desires have always been greater than my fears.” Line from “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans”. Only way to make it. In order to achieve anything in life you have to overcome your fears. 3/3 Insight into music industry in Nashville.
Transformers are representation of realty in vector space. Machine readable version of something like Newtonian physics which is also a representation of realty. AI engineering is the task to extract knowledge from transformers to execute useful tasks. Intelligence = efficient ability to learn and solve problems.
Tesla Q2 delivery numbers are great. CVPR presentation about foundation models. Run transformer model to represent camera sensed reality in vector-space. Then build frontend applications (think ChatGPT) to execute tasks relevant to humans. Vector space is representation of realty that machines understand. Use front end applications to de-convolute vector space into something humans understand and are able to use. Create animations so robot learns from its own iterative representation of reality.
❤️Tesla AI team talking about using generative AI for animation. FSD accelerating with animation based on real world derived foundation models and generated animation. Another application of generative AI to robotics is to use generated sequence, cross check with reality and identify matches or lack there off, which is the definition of an edge case. Computational definition of edge case = when generated AI doesn’t match perceived reality.
DOJO is the unit of compute when it comes to video learning. Tesla ready to ramp compute with DOJO. This is important. Goal is to build robot that moves around in the real world. How to do that? Use visual input to learn. That’s the purpose of DOJO = build compute stack to learn from video in software 2.0 manner. Great opportunity to expand AI and develop new types of use cases.
Discussing “My Turn” by Johan Cruyff. An autobiography. 1/4 Start with the game and mange from there. 2/4 Before the game there are skills. Skills lead to confidence. 3/4 Occam’s razor applied to sports. The most beautiful solution ends up winning. 4/4 Entertain the fans. Ultimate north star. Entertain the customer!
Preliminary discussion “My Turn” by Johan Cruyff. 1/3 Entertain crowds by playing beautifully and winning will come. In order to do that you need to take care of all the details including right staff and mentality. Like Bill Walsh 2/3 Technical skills are necessary and trainable. Focus on them and the winning mentality and confidence will follow 3/3 Same applies to people like Muscineci, Gordon Ryan, Guardiola, Musk or Jensen.
❤️Book discussion “The Magic of Physics” by Felix Flicker. 1/2 Why get into condensed matter physics? It’s the study of matter and matter transformation is the basis of wealth creation. Matter = electromagnetic interactions between atoms and sub-atomic particles. 2/2 Represent nature and matter in language form by tokenizing and training through LLM. Use science GPT to prompt and find solutions to physics and engineering problems. Engineer of the future = Prompt Engineer. Quantum world is better represented in token form and LLMs trained on large number of parameters will reveal much more than just math. Future of science = basic science + linguistics + comp sci.
Discussing “The Magic of Physics” by Felix Flicker. 1/3 Physics is the discipline tasked to decipher the language of nature. Translation problem from particles to human level and beyond. Engineering creates useful narratives with that vocabulary. 2/3 Science starts with giving a name associated to explanations. 3/3 Challenge is to find right level of aggregation. Not too small and not too big relative to human perspective.
Portfolio outperformance factors. 1/4 AI investment cycle and potential for foundation models in robotics. Tesla can build real world transformers with large video models. 2/4 Deals with Ford and GM for charging and software integration. 3/4 Twitter overhang removed with new CEO installed. 4/4 China macro recovery. LNG prices spiking.
IEEE AI conference on autonomous driving. 1/3 The 3Ps of autonomous driving; perception, prediction and planning. Wile first two P's have lots of machine learning, Planning doesn't. Dominated by rules and explicit coding. Because end to end learning in learning how to drive is hard. 2/3 Few shot learning or animation is solution. 3/3 AI is stuck in self inflicted dead end with large data models and high bandwidth solutions. Find algorithms where learning can happen with few data points. Geoff Hinton and others are working on this.
Anatomy of investment cycles. Once you have a name you know what to look for. Generative AI. People have reference, they’ll calibrate future information. Will Tesla participate in this new area of AI? Large Video Models, LVM.
Discussing new published essay “Defense is Government”. 1/5 Government is the entity that best provides defense to its people. 2/5 Government is who has the monopoly on violence. 3/5 Constraints on providing defense are: a)prevent enslaving b) have enough power to fight outside adversaries c) reign in illegitimate bureaucrats. 4/5 Optimal form of state is defined by how best to organize defense. Used to be kingdom, then nation and today...? 5/5 Species/Nations are defined by competition. Optimal way to provide defense is what a species/nation is 6/6 Competition is information. “This or that”.
Book discussion “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver. 1/4 Coming of age story of an orphan who gets through life by pure intelligence, humility, skill and hard work. Transcends hierarchies like Prince Myshkin in ‘“The Idiot”. 2/4 Allegory of USA growing up as an orphan with no monarch/parent on top. Country finding its own unique and natural way. (Let’s not loose this!) 3/4 Hip Hop language (“is life like an NFL draft?””when writing a story don’t just follow, push back!””he got curt-side seats to this drama””he used his 50-yard voice. 4/4 History of people is always more subtle than what popular culture makes of it. Read novels for that.
Platform companies grow sales and profits much faster because they leverage infrastructure over rapid sales growth. Tesla and Nvidia both are platform companies and they both confirmed it this week. Tesla by announcing charging and software cooperation with Ford and Nvidia by confirming rapid demand growth for their full stack offering of retooling the data center for accelerated compute and generative AI. Listen to our initial thoughts on NVDA.
Discussing new published essay “Turing’s error and the creation of Intelligence 3.0”. 1/4 Alan Turing designed machine intelligence specifically to manipulate humans. 2/4 This is the root of modern chatbots such as Chat GPT. 3/4 We call this type of AI Intelligence 3.0 and differentiate it from other types of AI. 4/4 Intelligence 3.0 is dangerous and must be contained.
Discussing “Principles of Economics” by Saifedean Ammous. 1/6 Human action is unit of analysis. Humans have agency. 2/6 Utility and Value. Value is utility when scarce. 3/6 Money is software that allocates labor and capital. Manipulating that software is bad. Solution is Bitcoin. 4/6 Time is ultimate scarcity. I disagree. It’s the number of iterations per unit of time. 5/6 Government is the one who monopolizes violence. That’s the definition. Defense is the ultimate source of government. Democracy is a way to organize defense. 6/6 The Book refutes Keynes from first principles. This is important. Keynes has done lots of damage and must be refuted.
Discussing Tesla Shareholder meeting and Elon Musk conversation with David Faber at the Austin Gigafactory. 1/5 Work from home is a moral issue, not about productivity. CEOs who want their employees to work in person because it's better for business. Working from home is a privilege people are not automatically entitled, too. It's massively inegalitarian. 2/5 Read the lines, don’t read between the lines. China says clearly what they want to do with Taiwan. 3/5 Tesla is leader in real world AI, which is AI. Rest is something else, like tech for manipulating humans. 4/5 “I used to be friends with Larry Page” 5/5 My question to Tesla: "How do you feel about legacy system called academia when it comes to recruitment? You are taking talent from an outdated legacy system. That, in my opinion, is the biggest longterm risk for Tesla.
Discussing “Bosnian Chronicle” by Ivo Andric, Part 2. 1/4 Human condition through meticulous portrait of characters during turbulent times around Napoleonic wars. 2/4 Main character is deeply human and survives. What does it mean to be human? To be like you’d want your children to be. Good in a practical and evolutionary successful way. The latte involves empathy. 3/4 Life is a circle with no path, only characters you encounter change . But you can find an opening for your path. It starts in your heart. 4/4 Establishment of US based on pillars of freedom, rational aristocratic discourse and compromise is zero to one moment in history opening door to better future for all.
Book discussion “Bosnian Chronicle” by Ivo Andric Part 1. 1/3 Liberty and its significance during the period of Napoleonic wars. 2/3 Jacobins transcendend history. Today it’s Wokism. Starts with pure moral incentives and ends up turning people into jerks. 3/3 New ideas require new borders. People in Bosnia, US and everywhere else must reorganize along like minded groups. Organic differentiation leaves more room for liberty. The ultimate goal of politics is to leave a better place for next generation.
Discussing Geoff Hinton’s comments in risk of AI. 1/3 Intelligence 3.0 learns how to manipulate humans. Intelligence 1.0 is evolutionary intelligence such as DNA learning how to navigate laws of physics. 2.0 is human intelligence learning how to navigate laws of physics and intelligence 1.0. 2/3 Backprop is a powerful tech for understanding intelligence 2.0 and manipulating it. It’s better than our brain for that task. 3/3 Law is best way to check intelligence 3.0.
Discussing takeaways from MIT conferences “Future Compute”and “EmTech”. 1/2 For Nvidia to push AI into healthcare at scale and with consequence Nvidia has to become a healthcare company. Start with small market, then iterate and build proprietary stack. 2/2 Why does Larry Page hate Elon Musk? Because Musk started Open AI to compete with Google. Irony meets Faith, now Open AI is real competitor to Google through cooperation with Microsoft and GPT.
Discussing “The Museum of Innocence” by Orhan Pamuk. Great novel. 1/4 Take your life seriously. What you encounter in your daily life is your life. 2/4 Story about love, Istanbul's bourgeoisie, fame, greed and vanity. But also childish optimism, loyalty and perseverance. 3/4 Fascinating literary techniques. Morphs novel with biography. Also physical manifestation of literary work in form of a museum. Joseph Beys comes to mind. 4/4 What is love? Pamuk almost drives main character to the absurd to show what love is not.
Reaction to Brian Sack on Macro Musings. 1/4 Fed officials cannot pretend the Economics works in vacuum. Must account for human behavior. QE didn’t work because it amplified recklessness amongst bureaucrats and bankers. We are now paying the price with more than 30 Trillion USD in debt. 2/4 Fed is not the only problem. Fix Congress. However, people like Sack must admit mistake so first step towards institutional healing can happen . 3/4 Bureaucrats like Brian Sack act in their own self interest maximizing status and money. 4/4 Bitcoin is competition to fiat money and helps fix problem.
Discussing essay “Energy is a Computer Science Problem”. Similar to Galileo and his contemporaries, who introduced human observation to the analysis of natural processes and revolutionized science at the onset of the Renaissance, computer generated simulation offers a new lens towards solving science problems. In particular we argue that most solutions to modern energy problems fundamentally look and feel like material science problems. Material science is a lot about iterating around elementary particles, a process that can be optimized with help of computer generated simulation. Hence, energy is a computer science problem.
Discussing Stanford Energy Seminar presentation by Chris Young from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Young describes the recent breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion. Our take away. 1/4 Academic Industrial Complex overreaching. See our essay “Fusion is Illusion”. 2/4 Spillover effects useful such as nano materials, computer architectures etc. 3/4 Energy problems are material science problems and material science problems are computer architecture problems because simulation and algorithms are best way to tackle multi dimensional material science problems. 4/4 Why rebuild the sun on earth? Why not just harness the energy from the sun with sun, wind and other renewables?
Travel log Europe, Istanbul. Davos lake empty. Manifest of bad energy policy. Istanbul . 1/2 Why was there an Ottoman Empire, what made it go away? Economics. Lack of efficiency in Byzantine empire which got replaced. 2/2 Why did Ottoman Empire go away? Bankruptcy. How do empires arise and why do they collapse? Interesting line in Orhan Pamuk’s "Museum of Innocence “ Every time I came back to Istanbul I wondered who was the police chief.”
Tesla earnings call reaction Q1 2023. 1/3 Production outpacing demand, driving down ASP. 2/3 Hit to margins now, cost recovery will come later, that will improve margins. 3/3 Energy business real contributor with 16 GWh run rate. Will be like Flash memory business with higher volume growth than sales growth due to ASP declines. 25% GM target. New business lines coming like energy and Cybertruck are exciting. Important: Tesla main focus is higher scale and higher utilization which drive down cost per mile.
When in crisis, compete. Western Liberal Democracy is not functioning anymore. Two problems are killing it. First, people replaced equal rights with equal outcomes, which is misappropriation. As a consequence, second, there is way too much debt to finance this ideology. Solution. More competition amongst independent states. Free flow of people and capital. Constraints are how to protect property rights. Protection within and against outside aggression. How can you protect against the monster of collectivism without become one ourself?
Book discussion “Bewilderment” by Richards Powers. 1/4 Take Children Seriously. Story about a boy that doesn’t fit. But is interesting. Listen to people. But don’t let them take over. 2/4 Environment is a bad problem. Extinction of species is a bad problem. If you obsess about bad problems, bad things happen. 3/4 Narrative and prose is best way to convey subtle issues such as politics in academia or misuse of environment. 4/4 Academia is political. Academic elite is not a good thing. We need better processes for academia. Asking for multi billion dollar budgets for mega projects is not a good thing.
Civilization is an accumulation of accumulated mistakes. Create knowledge to proliferate liberty. Liberty, Knowledge and Error Correction are vectors of Rawlsian progress. John Rawls , if a society can improve the poorest by not making anybody else worse off, it’s not just. Like free energy, use it.
David Deutsch Interview. 1/5 Optimism = humans can do everything in principal, if allowed by laws of physics. 2/5 Wealth is a set of potential transformations. Wealth requires knowledge. Wealth is knowledge. 3/5 AGI requires creativity. To program AGI you need to understand creativity. 4/5 Knowledge is hard to come by and hard to vary. It proliferates throughout multiverse. Knowledge will be copied. Do things that get copied a lot in multiverse. 5/5 Take Children Seriously. Children will find their way through knowledge and acquire what they find useful.
Discussing “A Flicker in the Dark” by Stacy Willingham. Thriller with suspense. Who’s the killer type of book. 1/2 female vulnerability. 2/2 Who are you gonna stick with? Who can you trust? Ultimately only spouse. 3/3 Book about identity in a non identity political way. Who are you? Where are the demarcation lines between you and rest around you. What is the limit? Eventually what you do is what you are.
Discussing Interview with Chelsea Finn on Robot Brains podcast. 1/4 Meta learning, learn how to learn. Robots need to be more flexible in learning. We can’t always intervene. When to use greedy policy and when to use exploration? 2/4 Reward function research. Define goal and find best reward function. Reward is complex. Even for humans it’s not clear. 3/4 Robotics needs more data and ways to intervene less. Leverage data across domains. 4/4 How can robots better adapt to new types of data. What if data distribution changes. Three important take aways 1/3 Solve meta learning problem by teaching robot how to ask relevant questions. Kind of how we raise kids 2/3 Jürgen Schmidhuber, Gödel Machine = hypothetical self improving computer program that solves problems in increasingly optimal ways. 3/3 Tesla has high likelihood of success in robotics because they solve some of the problems Chelsea talks about. Data, scalability, intervention, flexible learning, autonomous nature of Tesla data collection. Meta learning used in auto-labelling.
Exiting Biotch adding NVDA. Biotech is not delivering on its promise. Crispr needs an Elon Musk or Jensen Huang. Nvidia is trying to become the AWS of AI. Solve AI for general purpose compute and storage that work for many diverse customers. When compute offers new solutions typically markets grow exponentially.
Discussing essay “Through the Stranger of Liberty, Freedom has come”. 1/2 Liberty is the absence of oppression. It's a good problem to solve for. Freedom is a consequence of liberty. Three major threats to liberty are Military, Academic and Public Health Industrial Complex. Fighting threats to liberty starts with designing better institutions. Use AI and game theory to improve institutions. Orwell’s 1984 shows us threats to liberty such as unchecked power, doublethink and perpetual war.
Liberty is under threat. Use AI and game theory to design better institutions. Liberty rests on institutions that ultimately drive incentives. Humans are driven by incentives. AI and game theory can iterate over many complex scenarios to explore better solutions to problem of how to increase likelihood of more liberty in the future.
Tesla and the UFC are the defining companies of our time. Both have disrupted previously impenetrable markets. By doing so both have created a lot of value for insiders and other stake holders. EV engineers are much better of today than 20 years ago, whether at Tesla or not. The same applies to athletes in combat sports. For example, collegiate wrestlers are much more valuable thanks to the UFC. Both the UFC and Tesla are building an industry by vertically integrating the value chain. Both have a monopoly on talent. That comes with risks. Another parallel is the cult of the founder. We can learn a lot from both businesses about what free expression of entrepreneurship brings to society. It creates lots of value and lots of inequality. Inequality is a feature not a bug of freedom. We tolerate it because it creates opportunity for everybody.
Silicon Valley bank collapse and other regional banks crisis must to be mitigated. Depositors must be made whole. The only legitimate reason for FED is to offer insurance against bank failure contagion. We need regional banks. They take more idiosyncratic risks. That’s a good thing. But sometimes things go wrong. Reasons for bank failures 1/3 Bad credit decisions 2/3 shenanigans like giving founders loans against shares of startups and 3/3 maturity risk with Treasury portfolio. Depositors need to be made whole. Investors don't. What's important is that the financial system keeps functioning.
Discussing paper “Origin of the State. Land Productivity or Appropriability? by Omer Moav et.all. 1/3 Why did state emerge? What is state? What is taxation? 2/3 State emerged because they could tax. People chose certain cereals that need to be stored, increase flexibility of food supply but also enabled taxation. 3/3 What was first, state or more flexible production? Causality. State like everything else starts with ingenuity, creative ideas. It was human ingenuity to come up with idea of state that enabled more flexible food production and progress. Tesla is in the business of providing customer value and value to states. Interesting question: Tesla is in different jurisdictions with different institutional frameworks. Will Tesla develop differently in those areas or will those areas converge to Tesla’s needs. We believe as long as Tesla ads value to the states they will converge. Tesla delivers customer value and value to state.
Discussing “Next Year in Havana” by Chanel Cleeton. Freedom, Love and Hope. Cleeton’s writing is beautiful and makes it look easy. She tells the story of Cuba with fervor and tenderness of a people akin of having lost freedom and love but not hope. The most sorry thing about the Cuban revolution is what came after. When people tell you how to think and talk, it’s time to fight or leave. We must never forget that.
Discussing Tesla 2023 Investor Day. Problem Statement by Drew Baglino: 80% of global energy comes from fossil fuels and only one third produces work or heat. More granular formulation of Tesla's Mission Statement. 1/5 Car is data center on wheels. Proprietary controllers and power electronics. Integrate software and hardware from sensor suite to car to data center. All in one. 2/5 Drive Unit with permanent magnet and NO RARE Earths. This creates a new avenue of innovation. Use simulation and/or AI to innovate around power train and drive unit. 3/5 Storage + Power Electronics solves problem of how to bring renewable electrons to users. 4/4 Vertical integration crucial to accelerate Moore’s Law and lower total cost of ownership while increasing value 5/5 Vertical integration and building supply chain across Tiers. Tesla focusing on Tier 2 suppliers. Build and integrate supply chain for an electrification infrastructure. Three questions 1/4 App Store for Tesla platform ? 2/4 Why is Moore’s Law not penetrating car manufacturing faster ? 3/4 What are scientific breakthroughs you’d like to see like maybe superconductors, quantum simulation for better material design.. ? 4/4 Is there better way for eduction and/or recruitment to accelerate innovation?
Prelude to upcoming Tesla Investor Day. Name should be Tesla Mission Day. Investor day implies they’ll offer content for Wall Street analysts to fill in their models and sell tidbits to the buy-side. That's not what we expect. Two things we’d like to see. 1/2 Discussing power train technology such as magnetism and conductivity to improve performance. 2/2 Manufacturing efficiency. Ultimately this is an Investor Day as in investor in the Mission of Tesla.
Excerpt from “Love Story. A Memoir. Part 2. Thesis driven investing is often dangerous. Logic is a deceptive companion of a hedge fund manager. Certainly useful but often misleading. Boltzmann rules of gases is analogy to thesis driven investing. Probabilistic prediction of aggregate behavior. Is trajectory of molecules intrinsically probabilistic? Yes, because of Entanglement. Molecules don’t commute. Does trajectory of companies commute?
Discussing excerpts from “Love Story. A Memoir” by Krim Delko. Excerpt 1. Semantic gap in investing. Oil and Carlsberg in the summer of 2008. Logic is a dangerous companion in the hedge fund business. It’s useful but often deceptive. Logic - Reality = Semantic Gap.
Ten year treasury yields are rising. CPI and PPI reading fell higher than expected. Yield curve is less inverted. Good sign although short term turmoil in market due to higher longterm rates. Fed will be on alert longer than expected to eradicate real reason for inflation which is government complacency and waste. Discussing “Shackleton. A Biography” by Ranulph Fiennes. 1/4 Explorers in early 20th century were driven by ego and vanity. Products of their time. Or were they? 2/4 What drives people? Even today some are driven by ego and vanity, examples are Open AI rushing ChatGPT or Jeff Bezos attempting to go to Mars. 3/4 Think through the supply chain and innovate across the stack. 4/4 There were Norwegian whalers on South Georgia, an isolated island in the deep South Sea. Example of culture. Norway even today is pioneering marine exploration and extreme marine engineering projects.
Discussing “Alberto Giacometti” a biography by James Lord. Also discussing the movie “The Final Portrait” about Giacometti painting a portrait of a friend. Observations are theory laden. Giacometti struggled with this. His identity as an artist was formed around the attempt to overcome bias of seeing. How to express what is deep inside a piece, not just what you see? Like “Painted Word” by Tom Wolf. We see through words and form words through what we see. Art is a reciprocal process of seeing and forming theories. Repeat. Giacometti wanted to escape this bias and struggled with it all his life. We see through theory. Understanding is when what you see matches your theory.
Discussing capital allocation. 1/2 Like any other human institution capital allocation had to evolve through conjecture, try and error. We can always find better ideas to improve process. Trust-less trade. Blockchain could be next improved solution. 2/2 Raising capital from investors is like onion. You peel layers until you find the capital that is meant for you.
Two supply chain risks for Tesla. 1/2 China is large part of Lithium-Ion battery supply chain. That has to change. Biden Admin is working towards that goal. 2/2 Is there enough mining capacity to scale to TWh storage scale? Tesla is innovating across the supply chain to mitigate those risks. There is no such thing as scarcity of resources. Resources are a function of knowledge. Free markets are best way to assure adequate supply. China is not free market. Needs to be mitigated.
Inflation is not a monetary phenomenon. It’s driven by political, societal and economic factors. It’s about real stuff. Inflation can be cured. It’s the result of unforced policy errors. Obsession with monetary issues is detrimental.
Discussing our essay "Happy Customers are Always Right." Wall Street touts investment ideas. But more often than not those are just entertaining narratives. We dissect and critically analyze some of the most popular ones. Ideas matter. We identify two investment ideas. 1/2 EV adoption = Tesla adoption. 2/2 Microsoft is best positioned to make money with ChatGPT technology through applying co-pilot technology in software development.
EV adoption = Tesla adoption. There is no innate industry dynamic driving down cost of EVs. It’s Tesla and their vertical integration. Wright’s law works but only for Tesla. EVs are not like semiconductors, there is no innate law like Moore’s law. It’s more like Amazon Microsoft. Apple, Disney or Nantucket whaling. Ingenuity, risk and iteration driving down cost. Happy customers are always right.
Happy customers are always right. Microsoft is the way to make money with language models such as GPT because they are close to customer. GitHub Co-pilot is iteration platform to get better at co-pilot technology. Generative and interactive search. Search, LinkedIn, Browser are next.
Book discussion “The Passenger’ by Cormac McCarthy. Identify and Ideas. Both feed on each other. Ideas evolve in their their own world, we seize them, define them and put edges around them. Identity is fed by ideas. Do we own our identity? Yes. But we have to work for it. Let it not slip away. How do we seize our own identity? By deeds whether good or not. It’s the deeds that define our identity.
Discussing essay: "We Need Genuine Short Sellers. Not Imposters". Shorting and buying technology stocks are two sides of the same coin. They speak each other's language. The majority of self-proclaimed short sellers are neither. They are financial market harlequins.
Reaction to FOMC meeting. 2023 is the year of efficiency. Fed changes stance. Less worry about inflation because companies tightening employment conditions. Do more with less. Higher efficiency, higher productivity, less risk of inflation. Last shoe to drop in Federal government. Needs to cut expenses. Tighten budget. Link to your essay "The Anatomy of Disruption".
Discussing "The Last Kingdom" and "Twilight of the Æsir". Both cover transition of Northern Europe from tribal to Christian culture. Why was Christianity so successful. Like Bitcoin, voluntary adoption because it reinforces itself. In particular, it served the Kings to rule. Key difference between Viking multi god superstition and Christianity is there is something beyond the human in the human. Things like “my word” or "trust" are easier concepts to enforce in Christian culture. Truth seeking. Living in Reciprocity with nature as proxy for God.