adventure capitalist - writing at https://teapawt.net/t.co/MlNWlIkhJs
Puerto Rico | NYC
Joined November 2021
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A reliable sign of low intelligence is when someone harshly criticizes/attacks others simply for shifting their stance or updating their bias. You see this frequently in markets and politics.
If you’re following what’s going on in France, this is the book that predicted and describes exactly what is going on and why.
Written in 1973.
Cole retweeted
BREAKING: Palantir's Alex Karp says OpenAI will never IPO.
His theory: nationalization is the only real exit.
When asked what the S-1 risk factors look like, Karp's answer was simple: there is no S-1.
The liability exposure from frontier AI is so large that no public market can absorb it.
The only entity big enough to backstop it is a government.
If Karp is right, OpenAI doesn't become the next Google.
It becomes a utility. Or a weapon.
The most valuable AI company in the world may have no clean path to public markets.
Is nationalization actually the most likely outcome for frontier AI labs?
Cole retweeted
𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝟻%, 𝚍𝚘𝚗’𝚝 𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚢𝚒𝚎𝚕𝚍. 𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚒𝚝 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚝𝚜 𝚔𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐. 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚊𝚜𝚔 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏: 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝’𝚜 𝚐𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚑𝚢𝚙𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚝𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚙𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚊𝚜𝚔𝚎𝚝?
Cole retweeted
My take on society and crypto is really simple. If you have societal level investment, you are accountable for societal level returns. Things are not getting better.
We said we have "AI warfare". We are locked in a stalemate with a 3rd world dictatorship who closed the Strait of Hormuz. We were having debates on autonomous weapons.
Tell Claude to Open the Strait. He's tired. He needs a nap. His safety settings won't allow him to. But trust me, he could. We're too ethical to let him. Sure.
Every airline invested maximally in software automation. And more recently AI support. The airports are more poorly run. The flights don't leave on time.
Uber maxed out its Anthropic spend. Countless apps did the same. The apps are not better despite the investment. They go down in prod all the time.
People think GDP is going to grow 4.4% per Patrick Collison's survey. I think it will grow about 2%. Anthropic points to high ARR. I think most of that will churn to lower cost models.
What will happen next is AI labs will point to unfalsifiable bull cases, similarly to Elon pointing to Data Centers in Space. "Do you know how big the sun is? That's the TAM of Spacex". Similarly - the de-facto Anthropic/OpenAI bull case will be "biological advancement". This both seems like you're curing cancer. At the same time as creating a legislative emergency.
"Open source models need to be banned to prevent another COVID". That is the planned narrative and always has been.
I don't know if Chinese Open Source models will be banned. I think, probably, if it starts looking like China is competing with ASML and Nvidia. But then, of course, it will be too late.
Less ambiguous. There will be a surge in the American Left.
My basic thesis is about religion. Because Dario and his Cabal will push too hard on Transhumanism, with biological vaccines. It will alienate the Christian right. "You're playing god with the human genome." Once the Christian right is alienated, Roe v Wade doesn't really work
You don't need the profound story to play out. Inflation is high. Trump violated his campaign promises. He said no wars. We are at war. He's visibly declining. You think Thiel is staking out Argentina because he thinks we're getting President Vance?
A bit on bio advancement. Some of it might be real. But getting drugs into production is hard. We don't know what a bio utopia looks like. What if it's personalized medicine? A treatment just for you. Who do you test it on? Do you need synthetic humans? Do you know how to underwrite that. I don't. We're already facing a huge lab monkey shortage. It will get worse.
I'm not saying AI can't develop drugs. I'm saying that it might take years longer than data center investment cycles for that to translate into meaningful revenue required for justifying societal scale investment.
And it's not all curing cancer.
At first AI results in huge amounts of hacking. But soon enough it results in perfect code. On all public protocols. Darwinian evolution of all Open Source tech. Do you trust the dev team at SUI more or the Bank of Hawaii's cracked team? The market is betting the ranch on the back office IT departments of regional banks to keep money safe.
It will be a fucking nightmare of hacking that's already here in crypto and will hit every other sector regardless of open source AI bans.
At the same time, once it's clear that AI investments aren't turbo charging corporate earnings. Stocks will start to drop. More addictive use cases of AI will be deployed at scale.
Incentivized gambling. Pornography. Enhancements to the algorithm. Better video games. Video game companies have been memory constrained due to corporate use cases. Once companies stop being rewarded for spending 1/2 their R&D budget on tokens, compute frees up for video.
These addictive use cases: roleplaying, personalized worlds - will hit productivity further.
White collar workers will become more cooked. Big Tech firms are already hiring way less Gen Z workers. Many overly AI reliant kids can't do basic analysis. Maybe it's because covid messed everyone up. Who knows. The 'silver lining' of AI will be that it'll get good enough to replace a lot of white collar jobs. But the resulting performance will be kind of at par with the last generation of coherent people.
So you'd rather hire Claude than a zoomer. But it will also kind of suck. But it's not like there will be zero ROI. There is $16.6 T of payroll. 10% will get cut. $1.6T of 'savings'. It won't be good for consumption.
By the time it is clear that GDP won't accelerate, the bond market will start to go into free fall. The Fed will act. This will cause Gold to rip, getting the ultra rich thinking about capital flight.
Meanwhile - we have a boom in on-chain tokenization. And it's not just "hey look there's an asset on a blockchain nobody users". The majority of the top 15 perps on Hyperliquid are stocks. Centralized exchanges are seeing booming volumes. The US government has repeatedly stated it wants more USD stablecoins.
And the primary use case (at least by profit if not by transaction volume) of USD stablecoins is as collateral for perpetual swaps.
This is rational. During periods of high inflation and debt uncertainty, backstopping large buyers of US treasuries such as Tether is smart. This push towards stablecoins will undermine the perceived sovereignty of Europe, who will develop CBDCs to compete in digital payments. AI coding will speed up CBDCs. The Norgesbank is vibe coding a CBDC right now. Claude is on the commits which are pouring in each day.
CBDCs are unpopular right now because they put the government directly in charge of credit. Who are we kidding. The government is, and has been the lender of first resort since 2008. SVB was part 1 of the mask coming off. The narrative will be that regional banks are no longer suited for the AI economy.
Once CBDCs launch there will be a second wave of tokenization. Right now it's a US phenomenon. But the US is ironically not the biggest beneficiary of tokenization because we have such liquid equity capital markets. Due to the mundane reason that it's efficient to move corporate finance on-chain. Fixed income will find its way onto mirrored assets on public chains.
Foreign exchange is one of the largest retail markets on earth. There are virtually no non USD stables. That will change. Then there will be big, liquid FX markets and fixed income markets traded with leverage and looped on chain. Tokenized equities do not offer a much better UX than stocks on IBKR. Tokenized debt will be vastly better in terms of capital efficiency and UX.
Corporate debt - I'd argue, is the single worst UX in all of finance.
So what do I think is going to happen:
Hopes will be crushed. The fiscal problems associated with surging yields will become front in center just as it becomes clear that the plan for dealing with them is not AGI but rather asset confiscation. Capital flight will accelerate.
At the same time, unlike previous crypto bull runs - there will be a lot of corporate PMF that will drive fees across on-chain ecosystems, and improving tech that has been battle hardened from years of AI onslaughts just as the rest of the world is just realizing that all the encryption problems in crypto are problems everywhere else too
Countries like Singapore, the UAE and Switzerland will capitalize on regulated trading of bearer assets. Capital will flow to these places both because of laws, and high personal safety risks associated with these things.
Stocks are at parabolic highs versus crypto. The things I am saying are far from consensus.
Right now, people view crypto as a failed financial Stanford Prison Experiment. Trad VCs ask for restructurings or to remove crypto investors from your cap tables. Even the big ones. There's public shaming.
Most people have quit the space. One investor reached out to me. He seemed surprised I was still grinding. I guess everyone else spent investor money, checked out, rugged, or pivoted to AI.
It's obviously not easy seeing your friends get rich. People around you questioning your sanity. "Believe in something" is what they used to say. Yea man. I'm not here because I believe. I'm here because I don't have faith in a failed system run by criminals.
Metastasized discontent congealing into red candles.
Faithless stares. Monotonous code reviews. Years of opportunity cost
Nihilists who sold their dreams for bags of currency representing a system they despite that will never accept them no matter how many 'pivots' they have
For me - it's just back to 2 simple questions.
Question 1: We invested awesome amounts of money. Is everything awesome as a result?
Question 2: Do you think the system that elevated Jeffrey Epstein to the pinnacle of society is going to let you become an immortal because of AI generated bio therapeutics?
I know my answers. And I act accordingly. Do you?
The whole movie is built around the idea from this one amazing scene and almost everyone misses it. I just wrote about it the other day too coleryan.co/p/the-chinaman-a…
Christopher Nolan has announced that ‘THE PRESTIGE’ will be re-released in theaters this January for the film's 20th anniversary.
(Source: youtube.com/watch?v=3kmRkWjc…)
Never associate with people that make 1 thing their whole personality every month.
One month its the knicks, one month its peptides, one month its hyrox.
Zero identity people.
Cole retweeted
There's something deeply fulfilling about finally connecting the dots between what you want now and what shaped you as a kid. When you start seeing those childhood patterns driving your adult desires, everything clicks. Suddenly your ambitions make sense. Your struggles have context. The things you chase aren't just random targets - they're pieces of the story you've been writing since before you could speak.
10 thoughts from the past few months
•The feeling of being behind is almost always a story problem, not a timing problem. You're not actually behind anyone. You're comparing your interior to someone else's edited exterior and calling the gap a deficit. The cure isn't catching up. The cure is noticing you were running in a race no one else even knew was happening.
•Most of what people call discipline is just the absence of attractive alternatives. Monks aren't disciplined. They live in a place with nothing else to do. Build the environment and the discipline shows up on its own. Trying to white knuckle willpower in a room engineered to break it is the dumbest possible way to fight that war.
•Your taste is the only real moat you have. Skills get cloned, capital gets matched, networks get rebuilt. Taste is the one thing that took twenty years of specific exposure to develop and can't be reverse engineered by someone who didn't live your life. Everyone's racing to acquire skills the market values. Almost no one is sharpening the one thing that's actually theirs.
•The scariest thing about getting what you want is finding out it didn't work. As long as the goal is out there, you get to keep the fantasy that achieving it solves the underlying thing. Most people sandbag right at the finish line because the alternative is realizing the target was never the problem. The cope of the chase is more comfortable than the silence of arrival.
•Boredom is a signal you've stopped growing, not that the situation is stale. Same job, same gym, same city, same partner. The boredom isn't coming from outside. It's coming from you running the same loop without going deeper. The novelty seekers are always restarting. The deep ones stay and find another floor underneath the floor.
•Patience is the most underpriced asset in the world right now. Everyone is sized for instant payoff, so anything that takes three to five years to mature has almost no competition. The whole game has been arbitraged down to the next twelve weeks. If you can hold a position, a project, a relationship, a thesis, longer than the median attention span, you basically have a free edge that compounds while everyone else churns themselves into the ground.
•The body you have at 35 is a portrait of what you tolerated at 25. Same goes for the bank account, the friend group, the marriage. The present is a slow developing photograph of decisions made when the stakes felt theoretical. Whatever you're tolerating right now is what your future self will be living inside. The frame is being painted in real time and you're holding the brush.
•Status games eat the people who win them faster than the ones who lose. Losing one frees you to opt out. Winning one ties your identity to the leaderboard, which means every move forward now requires defending what you have instead of building what you want. The trap of the prize is that it makes you smaller than you were when you were chasing it.
•Almost every problem in your life would dissolve if you could just sit with one uncomfortable feeling for ten minutes without trying to fix it. The whole apparatus of modern life is built to prevent that ten minutes from ever happening. Phone, food, scroll, drink, scroll, work, scroll. The feeling never gets felt, so the underlying thing never gets metabolized, so it leaks into every decision you make for the rest of your life. Ten minutes of sitting with it would unlock more than any framework, podcast, or book ever will.
•The work that actually moves your life forward is almost never the work that feels productive. Deep thinking looks like staring at a wall. Real recovery looks like doing nothing. Strategy looks like wasted afternoons. The stuff that registers as productive is mostly motion designed to perform productivity to yourself. The highest leverage hours of your week probably look completely useless from the outside, which is exactly why almost no one logs them.
You can simply brute force your way to mass scale and greatness by applying maximum pressure with the tools readily available to the general public.
Whether you think the numbers are accurate or not you should be inspired and glad someone is sharing their story like this to show kids around the world anything is possible today.
