old-timey summer, old-timey thoughts
Moontower #276
Friends,
You’ll be reading an account of some eminent historical figure and it’ll be like…
”Dr. Max Timeonearth, born with an incurable limp, free-solo’d Mt. Krumpet by age 19, developed a number system that underpins quantum encryption, deciphered an ancient script found in Arctic cave fungi, sketched the first accurate map of a Martian lava tube using sonar echoes, wrote a fugue for eight instruments tuned to the Fibonacci sequence, discovered REM-like brain patterns in sleeping beetles, painted murals in oils he made from volcanic ash, proved a limiting case of the Riemann Hypothesis in a dream (then verified it on a blackboard made of sea glass), proposed a biomechanical model for zero-gravity childbirth, and spent his final years creating a speculative grammar for beings made of magnetic fields—only to disappear mysteriously in 1904 after walking out the back of the monstery he founded for the reification of elven telekenisis.”
Meanwhile, I’m all “traded options for 20 years, has a blog, could beat Contra on one life 3x in a row”. What’s an ego but a scab to claw at ya know?
In Flounder Mode (13 min read), Brie Wolfson profiles modern polymath Kevin Kelly. To simply call Kelly the “founder of Wired” would be like calling Jimmy Iovine a producer. Technically true, but a sin of omission. It’s an uplifting essay in the vein of “there are many ways to be while still being excellent” that can easily get lost in our mimetic feedback loops that tend to collapse the definition of excellent into trophies, commas, or fame.
While the profile is the main course, Brie’s deeply honest intro about her own path may have been even better because its angst is deeply relatable to bona-fide achievers who took illegible paths and wonder about the counterfactual.
Brie:
I started to have a sinking feeling that I had it all wrong the whole time.
I started to reflect on my own trajectory with fear that it didn’t mirror my ambition, work ethic, or deep care about the role of work in a life. Had I pointed my ambition in the wrong direction? What did I have to show for all my effort? Had I made some irreversible, unforced error with my career? How much money had I left on the table? Would the people I respected respect me back for much longer? Despite working my butt off for a decade, I had no expertise and no line of sight into where I was going. I felt immature for placing such a high value on “fun” and “bouncing around,” and full of regret about not picking a lane (or even better, a ladder). It had become hard to explain what I was good at—most importantly to myself. My sister had recently made partner at a prestigious law firm, and it seemed easier for my parents to be proud of her than of me. I couldn’t really blame them.Kevin Kelly would say it’s good to have an “illegible” career path—it means you’re onto interesting stuff. But I wasn’t so sure anymore.
With that intro, I point you to excerpts from this terrific profile:
Accounts of people pursuing their life’s work often include phrases like “maniacal focus” or “relentless pursuit.” I hear investors say they’re looking for founders with “a chip on their shoulder.” Facebook’s iconic ‘Little Red Book’ from 2012, which still serves as a pillar for peak tech culture, features a full-page spread that says ‘Greatness and comfort rarely coexist: A recent xeet from Reid Hoffman reads, “If a founder brags about having ‘a balanced life,’ I assume they’re not serious about winning.” Jensen Huang says he wants to “torture people into greatness.” When I was on the job hunt many years ago, an investor was pitching one of his portfolio companies by saying, with a wink, that the founder would do “whatever it takes to win.” I genuinely didn’t know what he meant by that, but it sent a shudder down my spine. Once I heard a serial founder say he started his second company “out of chaos and revenge.” I heard about another prominent CEO that looks in the mirror every morning and asks himself, “Why do you suck so much?” I read a biography of Elon Musk; he seems tortured. There’s some rumor floating around about how Sam Altman was so focused on building his first startup that he only ate ramen and got scurvy. According to Altman, “I never got tested but I think (I had it). I had extreme lethargy, sore legs, and bleeding gums.”
I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”
Kris: you can infer from this that Kelly places a large negative weight on being a jerk. Today, nice guys finish last feels fully internalized in our culture. I can't tell what's moved faster — my perception or the culture but something moved. Kelly’s view feels contrarian and old-timey.
What does Brie get from Kelly?
Compared to this, Kelly’s version of doing his life’s work seems so joyful, so buoyant. So much less … angsty. There’s no suffering or ego. It’s not about finding a hole in the market or a path to global domination. The yard stick isn’t based on net worth or shareholder value or number of users or employees. It’s based on an internal satisfaction meter, but not in a self-indulgent way. He certainly seeks resonance and wants to make an impact, but more in the way of a teacher. He breathes life into products or ideas, not out of a desire to win, but out of a desire to advance our collective thinking or action. His work and its impact unfold slowly, rather than by sheer force of will. Ideas or projects seem to tug at him, rather than reveal themselves on the other end of an internal cattle prod. His range is wide, but all his work somehow rhymes. It clearly comes very naturally for him to work this way, but it’s certainly not the norm.
“What I’m talking about is taking your interests seriously enough to have the courage to stay moving. You can give stuff away. You can abandon things. You can tolerate failure because you know that tomorrow there is more.”
Kelly’s perspective is refreshing. Maybe ambition doesn’t need to be an anxiety disorder?
No Complaining (4 min read)
Jared wrote a short one that went straight to my Favorite Posts By Others. As a reformed complainer, that’s all I did when I was growing up. Moaning about stuff without acting on it is supremely off-putting. We can all slip into that occasionally, we’re human and pressures build, but for some people, it’s a personality. One I avoid like the plague. It’s a reflexively bad trait that arranges your life such that you will have even more to complain about.
A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks — Oscar Wilde
Like anything, there are rare interesting exceptions. Seinfeld has said that his comedy is downstream of everything bothering him. There ya go. If you can channel complaining as profitably as Jerry then feel free to ignore.
🤖Practical AI links
Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide (9 min read)
Which AIs to use, and how to use them
The AI ecosystem feels impossible to keep up with. I try not to distract myself with the general discourse but focus on useful tools. Professor Mollick’s letter covers all aspects of AI but this one is practical. I’m using Gemini’s Canvas and Claude’s Artifact modes more these days. This post made me specifically more aware of the power of the “deep research” and “voice” modes.
ChatGPT now connects to your favorite apps (4 min read)
Khe’s AI letter is entirely focused on hands-on tools. ChatGPT now has the ability to connect to apps including your Gmail.
Money Angle
The title to this one states what is apparently not obvious to some people.
AI will not cause 20% unemployment and 10% GDP growth in the next couple of years (2 min read)
In 2 minutes, Matthew Vallone throws cold water on the idea that economic growth will soar if we have record unemployment. You don’t need to be an expert in Kalecki-Levy accounting to understand that a dollar of spending, at the system level, is a dollar of income.
The author is responding to a statement by the CEO of Anthropic because “one thing that he said stuck with me simply because of how perfectly it highlighted the limited understanding some of these leaders have of things outside their purview.”
I just listened to Jack Clark, an Anthropic founder, with a totally restrained view of AI’s possible contribution to GDP on Conversations with Tyler which seemed far more congizant of base rates and frankly fallacies of composition that easily leak into GDP estimates (Cathie Wood has thrown numbers around that flatter her positions that make it quite clear that reality and arithmetic are nothing but dismissable wet blankets when there are ETFs to be issued.)
I’m sure the CEO of Anthropic must be some sort of genius so I’d rather this isn’t some tomato from the cheap seats, but a reminder that the halo of expertise is a fitted hat.
[Which is a reminder that prediction is itself a rigorous domain of its own and well-demonstrated by the superforecasters who often predict outcomes in various fields with far more accuracy and calibration than the experts in those fields.]
Money Angle For Masochists
When trading is gets tough….
A "getting back on track” technique.
When a discretionary trader goes on a bad run, they might notice that they've been sloppier. They need to "reset" their discipline. I've had to do this many times. The technique is like reciting a mantra...(thread)
Time is event-based (4 min read)
I write a lot about volatility time vs “wall time” or time as it passes on the clock.
Long before I got into writing those more technical posts I talked about how time in financial markets should be measured in volume as well to see what that re-scaling might reveal.
(Time, volume, and volatility are all related but the scaling properties are discontinuous. This is fairly obvious if you think about the case where the clock captures the passage of time but volume does not — like if a war started when the futures are closed, time contained info that volume could not. Likewise, option price implied volatility contain informtion about the passage of time that both the clock and volume have not had a chance to confirm or rebut.)
Alex’s recent post talks about measuring time in terms of “events”. I love the arc of this post where he explains how his HFT firm measured time to how this explains the dissonanc between how humans experience time as compared to humanity. Really neat.
The comment I left on the post:
From My Actual Life
My kids come home today. Along with 6 of their cousins as we are in the midst of our annual summer tradition —Cousins’ Camp.
My family and in-laws comprise 4 families, 2 kids each. With 2 families in Sacramento and 2 in the East Bay.
The kids spent last week in Sacramento, their daytime at an adventure camp — paddle boarding, rock climbing, rafting, etc and the evenings back at the house swimming, boardgames, playing with the dog. Oblivious I’m sure to just how special these times are.
This coming week, like in prior years, they will go to our friend’s art studio where they work on a week-long project. Last year, they worked on movie scripts and storytelling, this year I think they’re creating a business. We’ll see how that goes. The evenings again are times to be feral.
This is year 5 of “cousins camp” (4 with all the kids — Covid was a trial ballon with just half the kids) and unfortunately the last one in which we and our in-laws are on a single large property, but we plan on continuing the tradition as long as possible. The kids are in 10th, 8th, 7th, 5th, and 4th grades. It goes by so fast. Childhood and the actual camp weeks. The kids talk about camp all year. Our hope is that it’s not just a summer highlight but something that will stay with them forever.
And no, I don’t teach them put-call parity.
(Although I taught them poker last cousin camp and they loved it, so looking forward to some tourneys this week!)
Stay groovy
☮️
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my working bio:
paul millerd, mostly drunk in his twenties, decided to take himself seriously in his early 30s. thinking that malcolm gladwell books were the height of intellectual exploration, lets just say he didn't do much of consequence for a while.
Thanks for the shout out!