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It’s easy to preach, but it’s hard to be congruent with whatever philosophies you espouse. Certainly there are people who do as they say they do, but I suspect the majority of those who (like myself) write blog posts on self-help themes don’t practice much of what they preach. Consider fitness gurus. People who tend to be physically fit are often that way not just because they work hard, but because they’ve won the genetic lottery in some way. Research suggests that fitness outcomes are influenced by genetics anywhere from 40-70%, with one twin study finding that genetic factors account for 47-80% of fitness trait variation. My unscientific observations align with this research.

You may occasionally hear about “yield inversion”, which is usually referring to the difference in yield between the 10 year and the 2 year US government treasury bonds. This number often gets mentioned in the news because when the value goes negative, it’s often interpreted as a sign that we’re either in a recession, or about to be in a recession.

Life is a series of random walks. Even if you walk the same path every day (in the literal sense), your individual steps on every walk you take are essentially random, and for the most part you aren’t even conscious of them because this is handled by muscle memory. When I say the steps are random, what I mean is that if you could precisely measure every step you take—where your foot lands, how much force you apply with your individual muscles—the data would reveal a pattern from a statistical perspective, but each individual step would follow a normal random distribution. In fact, research on human gait variability confirms this, with studies showing that step-to-step fluctuations follow statistical patterns characteristic of complex systems.

I realize this is a click-baity subject, but I couldn’t help myself. There’s so much confusion online about VR, the “metaverse,” Facebook’s pivot, and the cringeworthy marketing content (which you can skip unless you love buzzwords and egregious use of terms like “collaboration” and “AI”). The whole thing is oddly reminiscent of an episode of Star Trek.

I remember when my first serious girlfriend broke up with me decades ago. Her chief complaint revolved around some recent incident, the details of which have faded from memory, but our conversation remains vivid. I pleaded with her, explaining how she was clouded by recency bias—focusing on the recent negative experience while overlooking all our positive history together.

We’re told early on in life that memorization is the path to success. Education systems seem to be largely based on this idea. Most school lessons involve some degree of memorization, and creativity is generally discouraged in core curriculums. I’m pretty sure this is a bad idea, because there’s not really that much benefit to memorization. Instead, I think critical thinking and the ability to quickly find information is much more valuable.

I’ve made my share of bad predictions. I’ve had plenty of good ones too. But being right often doesn’t matter, because few people will remember if you were right or wrong, and when it comes to placing bets on your predictions, timing is incredibly difficult to nail down. Some of my best predictions include my general bullishness on software and the internet since the 90s (when the dot-com bubble saw the NASDAQ rise over 400% from 1995-20001), betting on Airbnb (now valued at $86B+), and Bitcoin (up over 30,000% in the last decade). In the case of Bitcoin, I was right about the bet, but got the timing wrong. Bitcoin’s journey from $0.09 in 2010 to nearly $69,000 in November 2021 represents a staggering 76,000,000% return, making it the best-performing asset of the decade by orders of magnitude. For context, an investment of just $100 in Bitcoin in 2010 would have been worth over $76 million at its peak.

Once upon a time, the US government enforced antitrust legislation. One of the most famous examples of this is the case of Standard Oil, which remains the textbook example of monopoly breakup taught in economics and law schools worldwide. To understand what happened to Standard Oil, we need to take a short walk back in time through history. The year is 1890, and the US Congress is a well-functioning body with rational officials whose brains still function at a high enough level to pass sensible legislation.

I had the recent pleasure of speaking with someone from a big tech company about their interview process. They wanted to put me through the funnel to run the gauntlet and see if I “had what it takes” to make it to the offer stage. I declined, but (against better judgement) I gave them 30 minutes to pitch their company to me anyway.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai Imagine a technology so destructive that it kills 1.3 million people annually, consumes vast portions of our cities, and contributes significantly to climate change—yet we’ve designed our entire society around it. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the reality of our car-dependent world.