I read alot. And clip and save, thinking that I will use that clip as the springboard for 1600 words. Sometime later, I might still like the thought but conclude it is just a thoughtful and catchy pier of a thought. And now I cast it forward into the lake and clear my tackle-box.
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
– Søren Kierkegaard,
The negativity of the internet is not a moral failure. It is a transmission constraint. We built a room the size of the species and discovered that the only things audible in it are alarm.
In Same as Ever, Morgan Housel said “it’s not the best idea, or the right idea, or the most rational idea. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads is the one who tends to be rewarded.” This is true in investing as it is in life. I’ve heard hundreds of terrific strategies. Only a handful ever get traction. It’s the ones described with a great story. Past performance doesn’t sell the future. Stories do. It’s not just in investing. Storytelling has always been how we pass wisdom from one generation to the next. If you remember any of these lessons a year from now, it won’t be because the ideas are original. It’ll be because stories are how we remember them.
Warren Buffett on what actually makes a life successful:
- “if you get to be 65 or 70 and the people you want to love you actually love you, you’re a success.” i’ve met very rich men. testimonial dinners. schools named after them. and nobody loves them. their own kids say “he’s in the attic.”
- the best investment you’ll ever make is in yourself. learn to communicate. on paper and in person. if you can’t get your idea across, it’s like winking at a girl in the dark. nothing happens. get good at it and you raise your own value 50%. and nobody can ever take it from you.
- you get one mind and one body. that’s the whole deal. say i gave you a car and told you it’s the only one you get for the rest of your life. you’d read the manual. keep it in the garage. baby it. you get exactly one body like that. you can’t start caring for it at 50. by then it’s rusted out.
- you become whoever you spend your time with. you drift in the direction of the people around you. so pick people better than you. the biggest pick of your life is your spouse. marry someone a little better than you. and hope they don’t figure it out too fast.
- with money, doing nothing beats doing something. a farm or an apartment, you can’t sell it tomorrow. so you just hold it. stocks you can sell in a second. so people can’t help themselves. but moving your money around isn’t smarter than leaving it alone. buy a piece of america and stop touching it.
Ben Thompson of Stratchery on Fake Mark Zuckerberg
Third, the single most important indicator that our business is on the verge of a step-change in growth is when we dramatically increase inventory. This is something investors regularly get wrong: back when we added Stories, investors panicked about falling prices-per-ad without realizing we were increasing inventory we could grow into. Five years later, investors made the exact same mistake with Reels. Those were the two best opportunities to buy Meta stock — or any stock, really — in history. We are facing an even larger opportunity over the next several years. AI makes every pixel monetizable, which means we are looking at the largest inventory expansion ever. Yes, it will take a few years to realize this opportunity, but the technology is there.
More importantly, what I’ve come to realize as I’ve embraced our status as an entertainment provider and ad purveyor is that — our nature as a digital business notwithstanding — we are remarkably well-placed to thrive in an AI era. Remember what we learned about humans: they are obsessed with other humans, and they want to connect with them; that obsession and desire are only going to increase as we interact more and more with AI. AI is going to make our properties more essential, not less.
Moreover — and here I must issue one more mea culpa — AI is a productivity tool, but productivity is not the end-all-be-all of the human experience. I have talked over the last year about building superintelligence that helps you get things done, but that’s a business story. What we can uniquely do is give people the experiences they want — from connection to entertainment to shopping — when they are off the clock. The fact that we are investing in AI but not selling solutions to businesses is actually one of our biggest advantages.
Oh, and by the way, AI might actually lead to new hardware paradigms. I admit I was wrong to spend so much time on virtual reality, but that did lay the groundwork for a unique opportunity to develop devices that make much more sense in a world where we want to access AI everywhere, not just on a phone in our pocket.
AI and The Travel World..But Likely Many Worlds
What we do get is we know what the AI adoption component is and the amount that they’re spending into it is going. Now, here’s the bigger issue that’s really not being asked, and that is if you’re doing it, everybody else is doing it. It’s a mad situation, mutually assured destruction in that everybody’s doing AI right now. The OTAs are dumping a ton of money into this, and the brands are dumping a ton of money into this, too.
Really, it’s about the leverage differential is what’s going to make the difference. You think about it, have we seen an increase in bookings because of this? The answer is actually no, we have not. It’s about the same as last year before all this stuff exploded because everybody’s doing it. There’s not that differential to be able to say that “Gosh, one company’s doing it better than the other at this point.”
Always A New Generation for Stupid
“The market’s defining trade is no longer AI, tariffs, oil or interest rates – it’s fasten-your-seatbelt risk-on itself,” Bloomberg ETF strategist Athanasios Psarofagis wrote today. “The biggest risk for many investors now is being left behind.”
I Still Love this From the SpaceX IPO Docs
Apply “The Algorithm” (make less dumb, delete, optimize, accelerate, automate). We operate under a set of core execution principles that we refer to as “The Algorithm,” a five-step iterative process that we use as our guiding principles day-to-day. We make the requirements less dumb , delete unnecessary processes or parts (embracing the principle that the best part is no part), only then optimize the necessary processes or parts, and then accelerate cycle time (many entities have launched once; no one other than us has ever launched over 100 times per year), and automate only proven processes after the first four steps are completed. We apply the Algorithm across every aspect of our organization, creating a cultural and operational standard of excellence that has defined SpaceX since inception.
Peter Lynchisms
The stock doesn’t know you own it” and that is the whole rule, and almost no one actually lives by it.
You could be the most generous, kind, virtuous person who ever lived, if you owned Bethlehem Steel, you lost money for thirty years.
You could have 67 spouses and never done a single thing right in your life, if you owned Coca-Cola, your investment went up 300-fold.
The stock does not care about you, your intentions, your character or your conviction level.
The market has no memory of how much research you did before buying.
It does not reward your loyalty for holding through a rough patch, and it does not punish your indifference if you happen to own the right business.
It does not know your name, your cost basis, or how long you have held it and yet most people invest as if it does.
This passage was written by Katherine Boyle, a General Partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
It is the opening of her essay titled “The Age of the Pilgrimage,” which was published in The Free Press in October 2023.
Just yesterday morning I stopped in to visit a friend who is a prominent rare book dealer in London. The shop had recently gotten new shelves, and seemingly quite a fair bit new stock. These are irregularities for a business like the book trade that normally grows in small and inconsistent ways.
He told me his business had been totally transformed over the last year. Americans, largely tech execs, were happy to spend one, two, or even three hundred thousand quid to buy a first edition. He was closing the shop for the next week to fly to San Francisco for a round of private sales. Books these men will almost certainly never read, bought in quantities that would take a lifetime to get through. Largely first editions of science fiction novels. But via their purchase they are demonstrating the same value, same self sacrifice, and same virtue that a medieval did in their tithe to build a church spire. They are demonstrating movement and sacrifice towards the sacred totem, just a different and more secular one than their ancestors.
The internet, in its way, has made everyone a bit more Catholic.
The exaltation of the ordinary embodied faith of the local parish church– the proximal, the convenient, and the totally adequate– is fading in every domain. What is replacing it is not atheism. It is acts of great pilgrimage. The same re-sorting that is emptying the Church of England’s pews is emptying every category of consumption that cannot function as a center. What we are left with is the older structure: sacred centers and the relentless devotional motion toward them.
Every domain is about to re-sort along this axis. Can this thing function as a center? Can it generate demonstrative motion– real movement, real expenditure, real pilgrimage?
The things that survive are the things that can still make a person get on a plane. Everything else is scrolling. Scrolling is moving your thumbs a few inches in reverence to no center at all.
The Late Murray Stahl
“How do I improve as a portfolio manager?” and he said “you have to Pareto Optimize your portfolio.” and he proceeded to explain that you needed to analyze and use criteria to force rank the 20% of your ideas that you believed would potentially generate 80% of your profits and size those more aggressively. Then you needed to identify the 20% of your ideas that you believe were potentially 80% of your losses and get out.
Robert Mondavi so famously said as he approached 90 and was asked to what he attributed reaching such an age, ‘All things in moderation, with a few glorious exceptions.’
