thrive
Moontower Munchies #108
Friends,
Today’s items:
Risk reversal
We added a new column to the moontower app's SKEW page: Risk reversal
.25d put skew - .25d call skew as % of ATM vol We had the legs before but added the risk reversal series and its own percentile (you can toggle bt percentile and the actual measure)
We also added the time series. TLT:
Where one day equals twenty
One earnings day can equal the variance for all the trading days for the rest of the month. Our eyes over-accentuate kinks in term structures that include events. A simple demonstration:
That square root that turns variance into volatility is a menace.
Thrive
I want to highlight a section from the Alex Honnold/ Rich Roll interview I mentioned last week.
Skewed View from the Parks
Honnold acknowledged that spending so much time in pristine natural environments skews his perspective on the world. He noted that his constant exposure to thriving national parks makes it easy to forget that most communities and ecosystems are not doing well:
Tommy wanted to do this trip partially because of the environmental impact—he wanted to try a self-supported, mostly human-powered adventure. Of course, because we filmed it, it's not truly human-powered—there are support crews—but it was roughly human-powered.
The Devil’s Thumb is in Tongass National Forest, the largest temperate rainforest in the world. It's an amazing landscape with pine trees, grizzly bears, salmon. Some old-growth forest remains, but much has been heavily logged. There are a lot of policy issues around forest management.
Tommy’s main sponsor, Patagonia, has done a ton of work to protect the Tongass and raise awareness. So Tommy was really into this idea of a human-powered journey to an important, threatened ecosystem—combined with a climbing adventure.
The journey he envisioned was a deep immersion in the landscape—tour the American West, visit this critical forest, and climb along the way.
I got it, I respected it—but I was like, “Why don’t we just drive?” I’m a climber, I want to spend more time actually climbing. A lot of this part didn’t make the final cut because the film became more of a buddy story. But in another version, this easily could’ve been an environmentally focused film.
We biked across the entire American West. Interacting with the land that way is different from driving or flying over it. At first, I thought we were both just trying to have a nature experience.
But my main takeaway was how much of the landscape has been pillaged by man. It was crazy—the amount of environmental degradation, the loss you could see, and just how scrappy the towns were.
Nobody is thriving.
The landscape isn’t thriving. The people aren’t thriving. The communities aren’t thriving.
Nothing about this is working.
It was depressing in a lot of ways—besides the buddy aspect of the adventure. When you looked around, it was deeply sad.
Then we got to the Inside Passage in Alaska, and it was the same. Communities there had depleted their fishing stock, their economies collapsed, and now they’re exploited by cruise ships. Again—nobody is doing well.
On this bike route, I realized everything else—literally everything else—has been exploited. I kind of thought the middle of British Columbia would be untouched because it’s so remote. Turns out, it’s all been logged.
You see second-growth forest. And if you’re not paying attention, you think, “Oh, there are trees here.” But none of it is old growth. All of it has been cut and replanted. You pass sawmills everywhere.
It made me realize my perspective has been skewed. I spend my time in places like Yosemite, where nature looks like it’s thriving. But it’s only thriving within the boundaries of a national park.
Outside the park? Everything’s been cut down.
We passed through Yellowstone, and it was incredible—wildlife everywhere. But once you leave? It’s just fields. Everything’s been cleared.
If you're not in a protected area, it's being exploited. It was wild.
That was the sobering part of this trip: I realized that, despite spending a lot of time outdoors, I’ve mostly spent it in parks, on protected land…or high up in mountains:
Those places are pristine not because humans are good stewards—but because they’re physically too steep and hard to exploit…The climbing areas I go to will probably be the last places on Earth to be exploited, just because they’re hard to access. But literally everything else is being consumed.
Even the Devil’s Thumb showed massive changes. We compared photos from just 10 years ago. The glaciers have receded so much that the mountain’s shape is different.
There are now new rock ridges where ice used to be. The famous North Face—once covered in hanging glaciers and snowfields—was completely dry when we were there. It looked like death in the old photos. Now? Bone dry.
There’s a technocratic thread of optimism anchored in Hans Roling-esque objective facts about progress, humanity being raised from poverty, the decline in infant mortality and other victories that are unequivocal in their goodness, but always seem to land as “take a picture of my good side” when they enter the conversation.
I think it’s possible to hold two truths in your head at once without the need to declare a verdict — our progress has come with tremendous technical debt. It’s interesting to me that environmentalism is a liberal totem, whereas the recent conservative sweeps have been a pushback against what’s held up as progress, but is fundamentally about a lack of thriving despite whatever the heck GDP numbers say.
If horseshoe theory has any predictive merit, we won’t be shocked environmentalism gets a reactionary rebrand.
Anyway, I just wanted to share that word through Alex’s lens. Thrive. It’s just 6 letters but encompasses so much.
Stay groovy
☮️
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Interesting take by Alex Honnold...thanks for sharing.