Culture Wars - Performers for Obama and Trump This Week

The grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago's South Side featured Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Christina Aguilera, Common, U2’s Bono and The Edge, Marc Anthony, Eddie Vedder, Tems, and The Roots.

Trump's birthday party included performances by Zac Brown Band, Luke Bryan, Kid Rock, and Cage Fighters.

Which "Pay Iran for Trump's War" Payment Plan Have You Signed Up For?

Apparently Trump is giving Iran $300 billion to settle the war he started. That works out to $1,000 per American. Have you signed up for the one-time payment or are you going for the $100 a month plan for the next year? And are you covering your kids' share or are you just going to pass that along to them as something to roll into their college debt?

Will Car Sales Stall For the Next Couple of Years as Car Capability Hits an Inflection Point?

I'm an old man. I feel convinced that we're in the middle of about a five year period of transition in which cars will change more than they have at any time in my life.

I wonder if this will translate into a period in which new car sales drop off for the next year or two as people wait for self-driving, efficiency, in car entertainment centers, etc. to hit an inflection point.

Trump's Narcoleptocracy

Trump's governance? A narcoleptocracy. He gets to sleep through it but its a waking nightmare for the rest of us.

Pope Leo XIII and Pope Leo XIV - Writing About Industrial and AI Revolutions 135 Years Apart

Pope Leo XIV has done something fascinating. 135 years ago, Pope Leo XIII - the last Pope Leo - wrote a piece about industrial capitalism and the importance of protecting industrial workers. Titled Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"), it saw the mechanization of labor as the core threat - physical machines replacing human muscle power, reducing workers to mere cogs.

On the anniversary of that piece, Pope Leo XIV wrote a very similar piece about workers and AI.
Leo the XIV's document is Magnifica humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), subtitled "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence." It sees the core threat as the automation of cognition - algorithmic systems replacing human judgment, relationships, and intellect. Leo XIV's first encyclical, was signed on 15 May 2026 — the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum — and published on 25 May. The link reaches back to the first act of his papacy: he chose the name Leo in reference to Leo XIII, and has described AI as ushering in a "new industrial revolution."

Both Pope Leos diagnose the signature danger of their era as the same inversion — the human person slipping from end to instrument while the system or the machine becomes the thing served. The question is which is the tool: the new industrial technology 135 years ago or the new AI technology now vs. the humans interacting with these and at turns using and being used by them.

The first American pope. He's an interesting guy.

Baby Boomer Demand for Sources of Retirement Financing

America is experiencing the largest wave of retirements in history. Roughly 4.1 million Americans per year are reaching retirement age. That's about:

11,300 per day
470 per hour
8 per minute

What is one reason stock prices going up? People are buying equity to finance their retirement.

It is easy to say that this surely would have shown up in purchases BEFORE Americans hit this point of 65 but it is worth remembering that, on average, a 65-year-old American has roughly 20 more years to live, 20 more years to finance; they are not done buying equities once they hit 65.
 

Trump Apparently Wants a Parade After The Cage Match

 Trump started a war and then he ended the war?  Huh.

Converging P/E Ratios for Tesla and Nvidia

Bold Prediction: 
The P/E for Tesla and Nvidia will converge within 3 years. 

Currently P/E for, 

Tesla is 371

Nvidia is 31

First Trillionaire Got There With N/A P/E

Tesla's P/E is 371, more than 10X normal P/E, on profits of $477 million. (For instance, Nvidia's price to earnings ratio is 31.) SpaceX? It doesn't have earnings, posting a massive quarterly net loss of $4.3 billion for Q1 2026.

Combined, the most recent profits of Tesla and SpaceX are negative. Meaning, our world's first trillionaire's two most valuable companies combined have a P/E ratio of ... N/A.

Musk a trillionaire makes as much sense as Trump a president. Maybe that is inevitable in a world in which people get more exposure to memes than reality.

Hugh Laurie's Protest Song

"For evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to spout cliches."
- Hugh Laurie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8chs2ncYIw

Donald Trump's Birthday Party Cage Match

So many people complaining that Trump is spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for his birthday party tomorrow at the White House, at a time when the country is literally borrowing money just to make interest payments on the debt. I don't know, though. If Donald ends up in a cage match with the right guy, all the money spent could be worth it.

Masculine Themes at Trump's $60 Million Birthday Party

Don John Trump's birthday party this weekend will cost you $60 million. I hope you like cage fighting because that's what he got you. (And if you want to pay more to view it, you can!)

And Sunday we get our second 80 year old president in a row. Add up the ages of our last two presidents, subtract it from 2026 and we get back to 1864, the year Abraham Lincoln was re-elected.

And of course the reason we have such old men in power is because American men aren't secure enough in their own masculinity to vote for women. But they can, of course, pretend that they are so manly as they cheer for the cage fighters.

The Fifth America and Fifth Transitional President .... Coming Soon to a White House Near You

This summer I'll be releasing the book New Politics for the Next Economy. I argue that we've had four Americas with four distinctly different economies and sets of policies. And then prescribe / predict a fifth America. Here is an image of the four past transitional presidents welcoming the fifth and future transitional president.

Apparent Confusion Around Elon Musk's Plans

Global investors have colluded to make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, today buying shares of his Space-X company.

It is unclear how much of that came from people under the impression that they were donating to a collection someone was taking up to send Elon to Mars.

Three Facts About the US National Debt

Three facts:
The US now borrows money to pay the INTEREST on the national debt.
The US National debt is now greater than current year GDP.
Republicans who contribute the most to the debt regularly get elected by promising to go after the debt.

More on the size, cost and unsustainability of the federal government debt here:
https://www.gao.gov/blog/federal-governments-debt-growing-faster-than-economy-what-means-for-you

Why AI Is Likely to Surpass Us

AI pioneer, Nobel Prize and Turing Award winner, Geoffrey Hinton makes the point that AI is billions of times better than us humans at sharing information.

My own take of history is that the more people you can share with - goods, markets, ideas, services, information - the more affluent you will be, the more agency you'll have. This simple fact of their superiority in sharing may become the simplest explanation for why they surpass us.

In a decade or two when people ask about why they surpassed us, we will say "They share billions of times better than us."

We will be the first species to be surpassed by another who is able to discuss the fact of our inferiority and possible obsolescence.

[Hinton asks the question, Do you know of any example of a more intelligent being controlled by a less intelligent being (suggesting that as it gains intelligence, AI may not submit to us). And he offers only one example: a mother controlled by a baby.]

Full conversation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7t1Q_p2gZs

The World's First Trillionaire

And we now have the world's first trillionaire. On the day SpaceX went public, Elon Musk passed the trillion dollar mark 12 June 2026.

Possibly related? On 12 June 1987 - 39 years ago - U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!"

The Illusion of Stability and the Reality That Organisms and Organizations Continually Move Toward Extinction or Evolution

Organisms and organizations are being continuously nudged toward either extinction or evolution. Stasis is unstable as a long-term condition. The appearance of stability is usually the surface signature of dynamic processes that happen to be in temporary balance. And the practical implication is that the right response to this condition is not to try to preserve current arrangements unchanged but to engage actively in the adaptation that current conditions require. The choice is not between change and stasis. The choice is between deliberate adaptation and unintended decay, and the second is what happens when the first does not.

It is a fantasy to think that our founding fathers - or even Lincoln's new Republicans or FDR's active reformers or - most shocking of all - Reagan's advisors from just the 1980s - would step into our current world and recognize it as their own. We do not have the alternative to preserve our union as it was or is. We have only the alternative to intentionally adapt to changing conditions, people and imaginations or to watch it decay.

The choice between stagnation and change is mostly illusory. There is no genuine option to keep things as they are. The option to keep things as they are is actually the option to let them decay, because everything around them is changing and a system that does not adapt to a changing context is being increasingly mismatched with its conditions. The visible alternatives are usually adaptation toward continued function or accumulation of mismatch toward eventual failure. The third option, true stability, exists only as an artifact of short time horizons or selective attention.

This is uncomfortable to sit with because human psychology is heavily biased toward preferring the appearance of stability. We like the idea that things can stay as they are. We organize our lives around the assumption that what is reliable today will remain reliable. We resist changes to institutions, customs, and arrangements that have been working, on the grounds that they are working and should not be disturbed. The instinct is reasonable as far as it goes, because changes have costs and unintended consequences, and not every proposed change is an improvement. But the instinct can become pathological when it leads to the assumption that the current arrangement will persist without the ongoing work that has been keeping it in place. The institutions that look most permanent are usually the ones that have been most actively maintained, and when the maintenance stops, the apparent permanence begins to dissolve.

The deepest version of this comes from thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics says that closed systems tend toward maximum entropy, which is to say they tend toward disorder, equilibrium, the dissolution of structure. Any ordered system that persists is doing so by importing energy from outside its boundaries and using that energy to maintain its order against the entropic gradient. This is true of stars, of cells, of organisms, of ecosystems, of organizations, of civilizations. None of them are stable in the sense of self-sustaining without input. All of them are, in physical terms, nonequilibrium structures that persist only as long as they can keep importing energy and exporting waste fast enough to maintain themselves against the universe's general tendency toward dissolution.

Organizations are nonequilibrium structures sustained by ongoing inputs of resources, attention, talent, legitimacy, and institutional energy. When these inputs decline, the organization decays. When they grow, the organization can either expand or stagnate, depending on what it does with them. There is no neutral state in which an organization simply persists without development. Every organization is either developing in some direction or decaying, and the appearance of stability is usually the signature of dynamic processes that happen to be roughly balanced for a period.

There are a variety of theories that offer explanations of the balance between stasis and change.

Evolutionary biology gives us the version most people are familiar with. Species that fail to adapt to changing conditions go extinct. Species that do adapt continue, but as something different from what they were. The rates of evolutionary change vary enormously across species and conditions, but the underlying principle is that genetic stability without occasional revision is incompatible with long-term survival.

Systems theory and complexity science give us the version that applies most directly to organizations. Stuart Kauffman, Per Bak, Ilya Prigogine, and others have argued that complex adaptive systems exist on what is sometimes called the edge of chaos, a regime in which the system is dynamic enough to respond to its environment but stable enough to maintain coherent identity. Systems that drift too far toward order become rigid and brittle. Systems that drift too far toward chaos disintegrate. The sustainable position is somewhere in between, and maintaining that position requires continuous adjustment as conditions change. This is sometimes called dynamic equilibrium, but the word equilibrium is misleading because the position is not static. It is a moving balance maintained through continuous effort.

Schumpeter gave us the version that applies to economic and institutional life. Creative destruction is not a periodic event but a continuous condition. Industries, firms, and economic arrangements that fail to adapt are continuously being replaced by ones that do. The appearance of economic stability is the surface signature of constant turnover at deeper levels. The companies in the Dow Jones in 1900 are mostly not the companies in the Dow Jones today. The industries that dominated employment in 1950 are not the industries that dominate employment in 2026. The continuous renewal is what allows the larger economy to persist.

Buddhist philosophy, in a different idiom, has been making essentially the same point for 2,500 years. The doctrine of impermanence, anicca, holds that all conditioned phenomena are in continuous flux, that nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, and that the appearance of stable selves and stable objects is a cognitive overlay we project onto a reality that is fundamentally a process rather than a collection of things. This framing is not identical to the thermodynamic or evolutionary versions, but it points at the same underlying observation: stasis is not a feature of the world we actually live in. The world is constant change, and what we call stable things are local patterns of change that happen to maintain coherence for a while.

Institutional recession is exactly what an institution looks like when its capacity for genuine adaptation has weakened but it has not yet collapsed. The institutions are not extinct. They are also not evolving in directions that match the conditions they are operating in. They are persisting in a state of partial function, doing some of what they used to do, failing at increasing portions of their original purpose, and gradually losing legitimacy as the gap between their performance and the changing demands of their environment widens. This is the phase before either renewal or extinction, and it can last for a long time before resolving in either direction.

The prescription of public sector entrepreneurship as the practice of citizens working to renew their institutions is essentially an argument for active engagement with the adaptation process rather than passive observation of its failure. Institutions cannot adapt by themselves, they require deliberate human effort to undertake the changes that will let them continue to function, and without that effort the trajectory bends toward extinction rather than toward evolution. Complex systems do not maintain themselves automatically. They require continuous infusion of attention, energy, and adjustment, and when that infusion declines, the system declines.

The choice between stagnation and change is mostly illusory. There is no genuine option to keep things as they are. The option to keep things as they are is actually the option to let them decay, because everything around them is changing and a system that does not adapt to a changing context is being increasingly mismatched with its conditions. The visible alternatives are usually adaptation toward continued function or accumulation of mismatch toward eventual failure. The third option, true stability, exists only as an artifact of short time horizons or selective attention.

This is uncomfortable to sit with because human psychology is heavily biased toward preferring the appearance of stability. We like the idea that things can stay as they are. We organize our lives around the assumption that what is reliable today will remain reliable. We resist changes to institutions, customs, and arrangements that have been working, on the grounds that they are working and should not be disturbed. The instinct is reasonable as far as it goes, because changes have costs and unintended consequences, and not every proposed change is an improvement. But the instinct can become pathological when it leads to the assumption that the current arrangement will persist without the ongoing work that has been keeping it in place. The institutions that look most permanent are usually the ones that have been most actively maintained, and when the maintenance stops, the apparent permanence begins to dissolve.

Organisms and organizations really are being continuously nudged toward either extinction or evolution. Stasis really is unstable as a long-term condition. The appearance of stability really is usually the surface signature of dynamic processes that happen to be in temporary balance. And the practical implication is that the right response to this condition is not to try to preserve current arrangements unchanged but to engage actively in the adaptation that current conditions require. The choice is not between change and stasis. The choice is between deliberate adaptation and unintended decay, and the second is what happens when the first does not.

The Smaller You Make Your Circle of Trading and Investment Partners, The Smaller You Make Your Economy - the Impact of Brexit

David Frum shares data from an economic study of the effect of Brexit on the UK economy.

"... estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. .... these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade."

My take? The smaller you make your economy in terms of the scope of your trading partners, the smaller you make your economy in terms of investments, employment, incomes and growth in jobs and GDP.

AI Predictions

 AI is going to be bigger than ....

A) Microwave ovens 

B) Radio

C) Cell phones

D) the Railroad

E) Penicillin 

The Next Rocky Movie

It has been 20 years since a new Rocky movie has come out. I don't know what Stallone is waiting for. Maybe the surprise endings are getting harder to dream up.

Stallone: "And then, I'm like on the ropes. I mean, literally on the ropes. It looks like I'm not going to make it and then ..."
Producer: "Let me guess."
"What?"
"You manage an heroic comeback."
"Hey. Why you got to be like that?"
"Sorry."
"You didn't know what I was gonna say."
"I did not. You're right. Very rude of me to interrupt."
"I don't even want to tell you now."
"Please. Tell us. I do want to hear."
"You're sure?"
"Positive. Please. Do go on. I don't know what got into me."
"Okay." Pauses. Shuffles his feet, punches the air a couple of times. "Then, like just when everyone thinks I'm done for, I get this look in my eye. And I start punching. I mean, really punchin'."
"That's it?"
"No! I mean, I come back. I punch him a lot. I punch him hard. I knock him out. Everybody goes crazy."
"And then?"
"And then nothin' We run the credits. That's it."
"So how does it start?"
"Not so good. Things don't look so good for Rocky."
"But then you come back?"
"That's right. That's it."
"So who are you fighting in this one?"
"Chat GPT. He's a real know it all. I don't like him. Nobody likes him. I don't say nothin' I just throw punches."
"Sounds like a hit. That's great. Really."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."

Fascism Is Always Home-Grown

"Fascism is ultra-nationalist. In other words, there is no such thing as foreign fascism. Fascism is always home-grown."

- Sarah Churchwell, cultural historian

Culture - From Taming the Wilderness to Taming People

Culture began as agriculture, the art of taming wilderness into productive soil. Later, it became the art of taming people, making them productive. A tidy arc from soil to soul. From productivity of land to productivity of the human animal, a more cultured existence.

The Story of Inflation and Unemployment from 2019 Through May of 2026

Inflation was 4.2% in May, up from 2.4% a year ago.

During his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump frequently blamed the Biden-Harris administration for record inflation, calling it "probably the worst in our nation's history". He claimed the cost of basic groceries and energy had skyrocketed, causing a "disaster for people", and pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act as a cause of economic catastrophe.

Here are year end numbers for inflation and unemployment through COVID in 2020, the stimulus program and supply chain issues that dramatically reduced unemployment and raised inflation in 2021 and 2022, and then the slow return to normal interrupted this year by Trump's war with Iran and the resultant oil price shocks that have again raised inflation (the blue portion of the bar below).

Related, real income has dropped in the last year. This from BLS,

"From May 2025 to May 2026, real average hourly earnings decreased 0.7 percent, seasonally adjusted. 
The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.3-percent increase in the average 
workweek resulted in a 0.4-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period."

The Preposterous Age Difference Between Trump and Obama

The Obama Library opens in Chicago this summer.

Here is a curious fact: starting right now, Barack Obama could serve four more terms as president and still be younger than Trump is right now.

Trump is not 4 years older than Barack Obama. He's 4 terms older.

Trump's Preposterous Claim that a Republican Won California's Recent Election for Governor

The last time Californians cast a majority vote for either a senate or presidential candidate from the Republican Party was in 1988. That was a long time ago: a child born that year is now old enough to run for president.

Trump thinks you're stupid enough to believe him when he says that there is no way a Republican candidate for governor came in second place in a state-wide election last week, even though that is all they have done for 38 years.

Explaining the Sell-Off of Stocks in the First Week of June

The New York Knicks made the NBA Finals. New Yorkers had to liquidate some of their stocks to get money for seats for the home games, so last week (June 1 - 5) represented one of the sharper sell-offs of stocks in 2026, the NASDAQ dropping about 5%.

Rather Unseasonal for June

"What is that patter on the roof," she asked.

He stroked his beard then said, "Probably just the rain, dear."

"Oh," she nodded. And then instantly wondered whether this was yet another slip, him revealing yet again his secret life. Then again, she had never before been with a man who wore so much red and rather than chuckle or laugh actually "ho-ho-ho'ed," or was so generous with gifts.

Dallas Fed AI Projections - A Curious Mix of Wow, Hmm, and ... Well That Can't Be Good

There was an old Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert learns how to use PowerPoint for presentations. In the first panel, he shares this fact. "Bad news: our product is killing people." In the second panel he presents this instead. "Good news: drop in the number of dissatisfied customers."
Here is a curious graph from the Dallas Fed, which offers four scenarios to capture the possible effect of AI.

1. No change. Per capita GDP continues to grow at 1.9% a year as it has for more than a century.
2. Significant change. Per capital GDP begins to grow at 2.1 to 3.4% a year. (And this is not to be scoffed at. Given the size of the economy, this is a difference of trillions of dollars, a rate of progress equal to or significantly more than what we've had since the Industrial Revolution.)
3. A benign, or positive singularity in which our lives are so transformed by AI that we gain entirely new capabilities and productivity soars beyond what one might reasonably project now, changes more profound than what percentages could capture.
4. Or this singularity results in our extinction, AI deciding that we're either superfluous or detrimental to progress and ridding the planet of us the way we have tried eradicating various viruses and diseases.
So, the most plausible scenario is that because of AI we will be making ten thousand or more dollars each year than we otherwise might in a decade (an outcome bounded by imperceptible change on the one hand and remarkable progress on the other) and in the worst-case scenario we are extinct. But as Dilbert might point out, in this last scenario there are no complaints. I mean, can it really be called a risk if there is no one left to complain?

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0624

The Base of Trump's Support is the Former Confederacy

Trump won 10 of the 11 former confederate states. (The only one he lost was Virginia which was so divided over the Civil War that West Virginia actually split off from Virginia at that time.)
Those 10 states also opposed Civil Rights, the integration of schools, and the end of institutionalized racism. That is, they supported the least defensible side in the Civil War and on civil rights.

It could be that the former confederacy that was so far behind in 1860 and in 1960 is now far ahead of the rest of the nation in so uniformly supporting Trump in contrast to the West and Northeast. Or it could be that they are - once again - on the wrong side of history. And weirdly, for some of the same bad reasons.

Remembering the Planners on D-Day

D-Day is rightly remembered for the men who stormed the beaches. It should also be remembered for the planners who made the storming possible. This from Michael Lind's Land of Promise.

"In 1942, American policy makers were engaged in a secret debate about the feasibility of a US-British invasion of German-occupied Europe in 1943. In a classified report for the War Production Board, two economists, Robert Nathan and Simon Kuznets, concluded that it would not be possible to produce the necessary material until 1944 at the earliest. The army's chief military supply officer, General Brehon Somervell, was furious. He denounced 'this board of "economists and statisticians" ... without any responsibility or knowledge of production.' He called for the suppression of the report, which should 'be carefully hidden from the eyes of all thoughtful men.' But the argument of Nathan and Kuznets prevailed, and D-Day was a success in 1944 instead of a disaster in 1943."

The planning paid off. In 1944, the United States completed one plane every five minutes, launched fifty merchant ships a day, and finished eight aircraft carriers a month.

The Nazis were known for the Blitzkrieg, which combined German machinery and pharmaceuticals into an attack of tanks and amphetamine-fueled soldiers. But in truth, the Wehrmacht had more horses than tanks. Throughout the war, the German military relied on roughly 2.75 million horses to move supplies, artillery, and infantry, about 50 horses for each tank. By D-Day, the United States and its allies had clear superiority in numbers and in the production capacity that sustained the war."

On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Germans could deploy only 319 aircraft. The United States and its allies deployed 12,837.

Kuznets won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1971. By then, the economist Somervell had wanted to silence had been recognized as one of the most important economic thinkers of the twentieth century. He and Nathan helped to win the war by insisting that the war wait for the production capacity to catch up to the ambition.

Circus Tents, Factories and 2026 Job Creation

Five months into 2026, job creation appears to have returned to normal after an unusually weak 2025. The weak job growth of 2025 likely reflected several factors: uncertainty around tariffs and trade policy, slowing labor force growth from weaker immigration, and higher interest rates. Some of the 2025 tariffs have since been struck down by the courts. Trade uncertainty remains higher than it was in 2024, but 2026 has had less disruption than 2025.

A president changes the economy primarily through policy. War with Iran has increased inflation. Trump's 2025 tariffs lowered job creation. But in 2026 Trump has had less impact on trade policy than he did in 2025, because the courts have ruled that Congress, not the president, has the authority to impose taxes, even in the form of tariffs. That is good for the economy. To the extent that Americans no longer worry that presidential narrative will become actual policy, late night posts can be dismissed as odd but irrelevant.

Within limits, politics can become increasingly theatrical while much of economic life continues according to its own logic. America is at times a place with a circus tent out front, full of spectacle and sentiment, and a factory and office in the back where the actual economic work gets done. The next few years will depend in no small part on whether Congress, the courts, and the voters in November can keep the show in the tent and out of the factory.

Word Cloud for New Politics for the Next Economy

 Book due in 2026 ...

The Impracticality of Measuring Near-Magical Gains in Productivity Already Demonstrated by AI

"Through their artificial intelligence model AlphaFold, Demis Hassabis and his team at DeepMind cracked the code. By analyzing the amino acid sequences of hundreds of millions of proteins, the AI learned the rules of protein folding. Today, rather than spending years in a wet lab, the system can predict the highly accurate 3D structure of a protein in just 10 to 20 seconds."

AI completes this incredibly important task that once took a PhD student years in just seconds.

How do you even measure that kind of productivity gain? How would that even show up in productivity gains or economic value?

To the extent that AI is as transformative as it promises to be, it will - like the industrial revolution - actually elude proper measure. Think about air travel. In 1900, no one could travel by air. By 2000, millions of people regularly did. How do you actually measure productivity gains when they go from, "Doesn't exist" to "Fairly common?"

John Gray on What You Shouldn't Look for In Politics

"One shouldn't look to politics for human salvation. And one shouldn't look to politics for meaning in life. If you do you'll be terribly disappointed. You should look to politics as a way to protect yourself, the people you care about so that you'll be able to find or make a meaning in life." 

- John Gray

Sapphaccino and Greek Literature

Overheard in a Greek cafe.

"My knowledge of Greek literature begins and ends with the Iliad and the Oddity," she said before taking another sip of Sapphaccino, a curious concoction the waiter had suggested as a stimulating drink best shared with that certain someone.

LBJ, Robert Caro and Power

Lyndon Baines Johnson's biographer Robert Caro pushes back against Lord Acton's familiar axiom: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Caro saw something else.

"Power doesn't always corrupt. Power reveals. When a person gets power, you see what was underneath all along. With Johnson, what you see is that as soon as he had it, he passed the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, roughly a century earlier."

Related, LBJ's political career lasted 32 years. In 1937, he was elected to the House of Representatives and his presidency concluded in January of 1969.

Robert Caro has been researching and writing his multi-volume biography of LBJ for 49 years and the fifth and final volume is still in progress.

A half century+ to complete the biography of a career that lasted three decades. 

Optimizing a Life Means Suboptimizing Its Moments

There is a counterintuitive feature of systems optimization. You don't optimize a system by optimizing any one part of it. To optimize a system, you have to sub-optimize its parts. Let me illustrate by talking about a life.

Your life is a product of many things: your physical health, your mental life, your friendships and family, your sense of meaning, your connection to community, your sense of individuality within it,  your sense of legacy, your income and financial security, the pleasures of food and music and books and stories, the tribal urges that find expression in cheering for your team.

Here is the deal. If you optimize any one of these, you will sub-optimize the whole. Do everything you can to be in peak physical condition and you will have little energy left for great literature. Do both while working full-time and your social life will suffer. The hours in your week are zero-sum, and optimizing for any one piece sub-optimizes the rest. Oddly, the way to optimize any system, including and perhaps especially your life, is to sub-optimize every piece of it.

The punchline is familiar: a balanced life means moderation in all things.

Now the part that complicates this.

There is a familiar argument that to accomplish anything significant you need to work eighty hours a week. People point out, correctly, that an eighty-hour week is counterproductive. Long term, this is true. Short term, the original argument is right.

A balanced life is not something achieved in any given instant. You do not split each hour into seven minutes for workout, three minutes for great literature, eight minutes for relationships, four minutes for eating. Even within a day or a week, we focus on one thing at a time. So in any given instant, we are not balanced.

There are times in life when you need to move forward. In those instances you look for the limit or obstacle and you challenge it. You optimize to the part that is the limit, at least until it no longer is.

If you optimize a life but not any one part of it, what does it mean to sub-optimize in a way that is best for your life? It means you have stretches of life that really do optimize for one part and subordinate everything else. If you have children, you do not dedicate the rest of your life to optimizing for them. But in the first few months? First few years? The first decade or two? You often subordinate the other parts of your life to them. Nobody with a newborn is running marathons or throwing big parties or reading great literature. They are sub-optimizing everything to that new life.

If you write a dissertation or a symphony, build a business, pursue a gold medal, you will go through something similar. You will sub-optimize to that one thing for a few months or years. New parents do not put in forty hours a week for the newborn. It would die in the other eighty-eight. A similar but less dramatic version of this happens with any ambitious venture. Balance suggests you never dive in. Success suggests you do.

You may keep diving into things across your whole life. More realistically, the dives are separated by six months to six years of "la de dah," days when not much happens. (The perfect storm of incredible opportunity for which you are perfectly suited at exactly the right time of life happens once, twice, maybe three or four times in a lifetime. Know when that happens and dive into it.) You throw yourself into things that produce sub-optimization elsewhere. You are immoderately out of balance at every stage, and the end result is a full life that is balanced because it lets you experience life whole over the course of a whole life, but never in any one instant.

A life takes a lifetime. If you are interested in a legacy of any kind, you do not even optimize for a window as small as a lifetime. But that is the stuff of another post.

The Simple Trade Agreement that Helped Transform Two Countries Into a Shared Economy

After WWII, Europe transitioned from a model based on conquest and extraction to one based on trade and interdependence. You need coal and iron to make steel.

France’s steel industry relied heavily on the coal-rich Ruhr Valley in Germany, while Germany's heavy industry relied on the iron ore found in the Lorraine region of France.

Because neither country could effectively produce steel or build a modern, post-war industry without the resources of the other, they decided to merge their economic and production interests. It was a forced interdependence, almost like an arranged marriage.

The agreement to dependably formalize that trade, known as the the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), created in 1951, evolved into the EU. As it turns out, iron and coal are not the only exports / imports that go into creating a modern economy and the trade agreement that began with these simple but essential ingredients for modernity expanded to include thousands of other products and materials.

The two world wars were devastating for France and Germany.

France in WWI lost roughly 25% of all their men aged 18–30.
Germany in WWI lost about 13% to 15% of its entire mobilized military. In WWII, the destruction of the German military was even more complete; some historical estimates show that over 30% of all German males born between 1915 and 1924 were killed or went missing.

The arrangement made for trade and interdependence hasn't just made them far more prosperous, it has made France and Germany far more able to turn young men into old men rather than corpses. The last half of the twentieth century has seemed to support the notion that greater economic interdependence has made trading partners more peaceful and prosperous. 

Kyiv's 1,544th Birthday

Today, the city of Kyiv - Ukraine's capital - has turned 1,544 years old [per Olga Nesterova].

I suppose such a thing could change your perspective about how long you could hold out against a Russian invasion.

A New Kind of Hairdo

The barber was confused.

"You'd like a dome cut?" 

"No. Palindrome. I want my beard and hair cut and groomed to similar lengths so that I look the same coming or going." 

"So not a palin dome?" 

"I don't even know what that is." 

"Nor do I," sighed the barber. "Nor do I."

Harari and the Claim That The Whole of Human History is About Cooperation

 "The whole of human history is about, How do you get more people to cooperate and to trust each other? And you cannot do that only with brute force."

- Yuval Noah Harari on Ezra Klein podcast

Bull Market

Bullish and bull shit (excuse my language) sound quite similar in the conversation about market projections.

How You Ask Someone to Dance

The way my two and half year old granddaughter asked me to join her dancing. 

"Do you want to be dizzy like me?"

Scientific Ambiguity

The difference between them? Bob read a lot of science fiction. Carl read a lot of science nonfiction. Bob thought the difference between those two was mostly fictional. Carl thought the difference was real.

If Nvidia Were Priced Like a Few Other Tech Stocks

Nvidia is the world's most valuable company. If it were priced like comparable stocks, it would be worth even more.

As of this writing - Monday, 25 May 2026, the day the market is closed - NVDA price is $215.33.

If it were priced at the same forward as ...

Microsoft, with a Forward P/E of 21.6, it would be priced at $235.00,

Alphabet (GOOG), with a Forward P/E of 26.6, it would be priced at $289,

Amazon, with a forward P/E of 30, it would be priced at $324.

Nvidia price has gone up so much so quickly that it might just be lagging its real price. Which seems worth considering. 

A Very Simple Explanation for the Rise of Right-Wing, Populist Parties Across the West in Recent Decades

Until roughly the era of Reagan and Thatcher (the 1980s), the simplest predictor of whether you were rich, middle class, or poor was which country you lived in. The gaps between nations were enormous, and the gaps within the wealthy nations were relatively compressed. Globalization changed this. As trade and capital flowed more freely, the gaps between countries narrowed while the gaps within countries widened. The income disparities that had once shown up mainly between nations increasingly showed up within them. A class of relative losers emerged in the wealthy democracies, workers whose incomes stagnated even as the global economy grew.

This economic shift created the conditions for political backlash, but it did not by itself determine the form the backlash would take. The dissatisfaction could have been channeled toward redistribution, which is the traditional left-wing response to inequality. Instead, in most of the wealthy democracies, it was channeled toward nationalism and opposition to immigration, which are right-wing responses. The rightward direction was shaped by additional factors: the convergence of mainstream parties on support for globalization, which left the dissatisfied without mainstream representation; the shift of left-wing parties toward the educated professional class, which left the working class politically homeless; and the cultural dimension of the dissatisfaction, which the right addressed directly and the left, committed to cosmopolitan values, could not. The economic foundation produced the dissatisfaction. The political and cultural context determined that the dissatisfaction would find right-wing rather than left-wing expression.

On a Scale from Is This a Great Country to Or What?

11 years ago. Back when there was still reasonable doubt.

Nvidia's Phenomenal 2026 Growth

For the next fiscal year, Nvidia's projected revenue is more than $300 billion - a single year gain of more than $100 billion.

Nvidia Employees Net Worth

Informal report on Nvidia employees shared by Rick Munarriz  at Motley Fool ....

80% of Nvidia employees are worth at least a million dollars and 50% are worth more than $25 million.

There would be some fascinating insights to come from understanding how Nvidia retains employees whose salary no longer makes much difference to their wealth.

(And I'm sure there is a lag between when they "get" the stock options and when they can exercise them .... and yet ...)

Troops in the Middle East and Treasury Yields at 5.2%. It is Like 2007

In 2007, we had 170,000 troops in Iraq.
Now we have 50,000 troops in to the Middle East for the special operation in Iran.

In 2007, 30-Year Treasury Yields Reached 5.2%.
Now, 19 years later, they've hit that level again for the first time since.

In 2007, we got hit with our worst recession since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are focused on using their majority to get one billion in funding for Trump's ballroom, the one priority they are aligned on.

Hey Trump voters. Maybe your boy will save the last dance for you.

If You Want a Successful Organization, Draw Talent from Around the Globe

NBA, NHL, and MLB - professional basketball, hockey, and baseball in these United States - include a lot of foreign born players.


National Basketball Association (NBA)
The Status: Every single team has at least one international player. The Data: The NBA started its season with a record 135 international players representing 43 different countries. Even the least internationally diverse team in the league—the Dallas Mavericks—still carries two Canadian players and a center from Guinea on its roster.

Major League Baseball (MLB)
The Status: Every single franchise features international talent.
The Data: Roughly 26% to 28% of all Major League players on Opening Day active and inactive lists were born outside of the 50 United States.

National Hockey League (NHL)
The Status: Every team has multiple foreign-born players.
The Data: The NHL has the highest percentage of foreign-born players of any major American sports league. Because the league is a joint enterprise between Canada and the United States, and draws heavily from Europe, roughly 70% to 80% of all NHL players are born outside the U.S.

Bitcoin and Banksy

What if Satoshi Nakamoto and Banksy were the same secret organization, trying to convince us that crypto is money and graffiti is art? Turning random walls into art galleries and bits into currency.

Beginnings and Endings

Every beginning had its own beginning.

This is worth remembering especially when you think you've reached the end, because endings, too, are beginnings.

Ado

He said "without further ado" and then proceeded with what might better be described as "considerably more elaborate and convoluted ado." There was, in fact, no shortage of ado.

The Odyssey

The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus who was the sole survivor of a ten year voyage that killed off his original crew of 600 through a series of mishaps, tragedies and battles with gods and monsters.

The Odyssey is also one of the country's most popular minivans, a great choice for families.

One can't help but wonder about the personal traumas Honda's marketing team has experienced on family vacations.

California Connected - And Its Economy is Growing Fast

The larger the network you are part of, the more opportunities you have — to buy and sell, work and hire, entertain and be entertained, learn and teach, make friends and fall in love.

Few people move to the big city for the high-rises or the traffic. They move because other people are there. Each new arrival attracts more arrivals, and the possibilities expand with the population — not linearly, but exponentially.

This is true at every scale. The more connections between your brain cells, the better your brain works. The more connections between your household, your community, your state, and the wider world, the better your culture and economy work.

California's economy is larger than all but a handful of national economies. The reason is connection.

The United States is 13% immigrants. California is 26%. Silicon Valley is 39%.

Hollywood creates content the entire world watches. Silicon Valley creates the products and services that connect the world. It is the capital of the world wide web.

Californians are not harder working or smarter than other people. They are more connected. That is why theirs is the largest economy in the United States, and why it is growing faster than comparable advanced nations.

The Freedom 250 Initiative and Its Casual Disregard for Jesus and The Founding Fathers

Per Deep Mind:
"The Freedom 250 initiative and its "Rededicate 250" event, fronted by Pete Hegseth, promote their mission as a "national jubilee of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving" aimed at rededicating the United States as "One Nation under God". The organization, established by the White House, seeks to reframe the nation's 250th anniversary through a focus on Christian nationalism and the ideological assertion that America is an explicitly Christian nation."

I'm not suggesting that these people would crucify Jesus. I would suggest that they would deport him and denounce his socialist nonsense like the statement that "It will be as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for camel to pass through the eye of a needle."

And of course the founding fathers made explicit that they - unlike the royalty of Europe - were not a Christian nation. In the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which was negotiated to secure peace with Muslim Barbary states, the United States explicitly stated it was not a Christian nation. Article 11 declared, "[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion".

Treaty negotiations were initiated by George Washington and the treaty was approved by the U.S. Senate unanimously and signed by President John Adams in 1797. These were hardly controversial ideas among the founding fathers.

So, other than the fact that Hegseth and company don't know Jesus' teachings and don't know what kind of country the founding fathers created, they really seem to be on to something here.

Simple Mental Health Test

A simple cognitive test in the future will be to share a dozen of Trump's social media posts with someone and ask, "Does this suggest to you a mind in touch with reality?"

Inflation at 7.7% in Latest Report

Inflation report today - continuously compounded rate of change is 7.7%. The target is 2%, so we're a bit high.

 

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL#

A Stunning Rise in Boise's Wealth

I worked with project managers at Micron in Boise. One of the PMs told me that Idaho made three chips: potato, wood, and computer.
I suspect that it's tough to get reservations at the few fancy restaurants in town this week. Their stock has been on quite the run, up more than 75% in the last month. Be an interesting study for someone at Boise State to look at the effect of that level of new wealth in a relatively small city, an increase in market cap of about 240 billion in just a month in a city of just 240,000 - or about a million dollars per person. (I know. A lot of this is held by institutional investors, etc. but still.)

Are We Smart Enough to Use AI?

Demis Hassabis recently mentioned the Jevons paradox, which occurs when increased efficiency in using a resource lowers its cost and then spikes demand enough that total consumption rises rather than falls.The economist William Stanley Jevons described it in 1865 in the context of coal: more efficient steam engines did not reduce British coal consumption but increased it, because the efficiency made coal cheaper and uses for it multiplied.

What happens to demand for intelligence when its cost dramatically drops?

Are we smart enough to navigate this transition? Or, more broadly, to use AI properly? It would be a terrible thing for future generations to say of us: they were not even smart enough to use AI.

And yet.

Does Trump Give His Supporters a Feeling of Superiority?

Is it too simplistic to suggest that Trump supporters prefer a leader who they feel superior to while Trump opponents prefer leaders they think will do a better job than they could?

Ted Turner Died Today

Ted Turner died today, 6 May 2026.His CNN was the first 24 hour news channel, which was quite the cultural shift. Suddenly news was something reported on all the time rather than just at day's end. At that point in history fewer people had any time to make history because they were spending so much time trying to keep up with daily news.

The Turner quotes that have entered general circulation tend to be his more aphoristic ones: "I am too rich to talk to. I'm a billionaire." "Sports is like a war without the killing."

What stuck with me, though, was a story he told about becoming a billionaire and how anticlimactic that was. At first he was excited about it but realized he couldn't exactly call his friends with the news. "Hey! I'm rich! Far richer than you!" So he called his wife who simply said something like, "Good for you. Does this mean you can come home early to help with the kids?"

He gave away a third of his net worth to the United Nations in 1997, before the giving pledge made such philanthropy fashionable. He took the position that money was how the game was scored but not what made life worth living.

Who Is Now Wearing the Crown Jewels Stolen from the Louvre?

Not quite a year ago, thieves broke into the Louvre and stole about $100 million in jewels once owned by the last couple of French queens.

Which billionaire or billionaire's companion is most likely to now wear those?

Bedlam in Southern California

 Today is both Cinco de Mayo and Taco Tuesday.

Madness in Southern California.

Venture Capital or Startup Funding This Century

 Global Startup Funding continues to be a huge force for creating new jobs, technology, markets, businesses and wealth. 

(ZIRP refers to zero interest rate policy, a time when money was so cheap that investments became even more alluring.)

If You Think Trump is Too Old Today - Just Wait Until Tomorrow!

In 2024, Trump supporters incessantly claimed that Joe Biden was too old.

So they then elected a guy who broke Biden's record as oldest president on inauguration day.
Now most Americans believe that Trump is too old.

Maybe, before we get into policy discussions, we could simply walk people through addition.
Biden on inauguration day: 78 years, 2 months.
Trump on inauguration day: 78 years, 7 months.

Given it is a four year term and how math and calendars work, a man who breaks the record for oldest president on inauguration day will break the record for oldest president on every following day of his presidency. (Oldest president on day 100! Oldest president after one year in office! Oldest ....)

We are about 15 months into Trump's 48 month term. If you think that he's not mentally sharp now .... give him another 32 months.

The following poll numbers shared by Heather Cox Richardson

Subcontracting Texting to an Unemployed Fortune Cookie Author

Struggling to keep up, he had turned all his texting over to an unemployed fortune cookie slip author. The good news is that he was then able to keep up with texting chains. The bad news is that his texts were increasingly ambiguous and subject to interpretation. Weirdly, this seemed to provoke the most interesting and revealing text responses he'd ever received. Ambiguity, he'd learned, was an invitation to confessions. When one's own state of mind was increasingly opaque, it seemed to provoke revelations.

Reality as a Stage Set

As a child, J. G. Ballard lived in affluence in an enclave of ex-pats in Shanghai, a world of large villas, tennis courts and country clubs.  When the Japanese invaded, all of that was disrupted and he eventually found himself in an interment camp, his life suddenly impoverished and his safety uncertain. (Among other traumas, he witnessed bored Japanese soldiers cruelly beat a Chinese rickshaw driver to death.)

J. G. Ballard said that one of the things that the end of his childhood taught him is that reality is a stage set that can be dismantled at any moment.

Technology and Problems

The performance artist Laurie Anderson has suggested that if you think that technology will solve your problems, you don't understand technology. Or your problems.

Kentucky Derby - Stretching the Limit of Attention Spans

He had an avid but fleeting interest in sports. The Kentucky Derby was out of the question. That race lasts more than two minutes. He preferred the 100-meter sprints, which he watched two or three times a year. He could spare ten seconds. Little more.
He was a busy man, and he admired athletes who didn't drag out their performance.

The Soviet Union on the Eve of the Nazi Invasion

"The Red Army in 1941 was the largest in the world. In tanks it outnumbered and in planes it equaled the the rest of the world's armies put together." 

"For every 100 Russian prisoners, only 3 were to remain alive."

"In just the first 3 months of war with Germany, the Russians lost more than 3 million men."

The World at War Documentary (1973)

The Moon Even Makes The Rocks Beneath Your Feet Rise and Fall

The Moon's orbit creates ocean tides that cause the level of water to rise and fall throughout the day. It also moves land, albeit much less. 

The tidal pull of the Earth on the Moon is so strong that it causes a tidal wave on the ground, a permanent bulge of about 4 meters on the side of the Moon facing the Earth. (The Moon always has the same side facing Earth, so this does not ripple across the surface of the Moon.) The Moon doesn't just cause a bulge in the Earth's oceans as it orbits, it causes a bulge in the Earth's land surface. The solid rocks beneath your feet rise and fall by roughly 30 to 50 centimeters as the Moon passes over head. You don't notice this but sensitive equipment does. 

If that doesn't make the hair stand up at the back of your neck, you may be insensitive to tidal forces.

Trump's Parade of Business Failures Continues

In the last year, the NASDAQ is up 20% and Donald Trump's stock is down 62%.

Happy Labor Day!

May 1 is International Workers' Day, observed as a labor holiday across most of the world.

It traces back to the 1886 strikes for an eight-hour workday in the United States, which culminated in the Haymarket affair in Chicago. Three years later, the international labor movement chose May 1 as the day to commemorate that struggle.

The typical workweek then was 60 to 84 hours. (Where did they find the time to strike, right?)
How much longer did it take to get to a 40-hour workweek? About half a century. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 initially capped the workweek at 44 hours; an amendment two years later brought it down to 40.

So, be patient. Keep pushing for change. Your grandchildren will thank you. Or would, if they did not assume that what they experience as normal had always been the case.

Would Your Grandma Call This Progress?

For lunch we grabbed a sandwich and salad. We paid over $30 and listened to club music while we ate.

On the way out — it was another balmy day — we passed two men in their sixties walking in t-shirts and shorts, as if they had just come from the gym.

I love how much progress we have made over the generations. But I could easily imagine our grandmothers exclaiming over the prices, the music, and grown men dressed in public as if they were schoolboys.

"These prices are outrageous! This music is obnoxious! The way people dress! You poor things, you live in a hellscape."

It would be hard to convince them that this was progress. I am not sure I would even try.

Demis Hassabis on How Far Ahead You Want to Be

"You want to be 5 years ahead of your time, not 50."
- Demis Hassabis,
winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold to predict protein structures and Co-Founder and CEO of Google DeepMind

Fed Chair Powell's legacy may be calmly navigating crazy times

Today was Jerome Powell's last press conference as Fed Chair. He has a few more weeks to serve as chair, after which he'll step down to a place on the Fed committee. No previous Fed Chair has stayed on the committee but Powell feels that until the Trump administration's legal charges against him are completely removed, he is safer on the Federal Reserve Board. Powell - and every reasonable economist - is still arguing for Fed Independence, something Trump is eager to compromise for the sake of short-term economic stimulus (the cost of which would be long-term inflation).

Powell had some weird events to navigate. The most obvious being COVID and then Trump and his tariffs and then of course Trump's attacks on Powell in the form of criminal charges against Powell - another first for any president by Trump and his boys.

Powell's term coincided with the most tumultuous economy in modern times, largely thanks to COVID. The jump in unemployment from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.7% in April 2020 was a 10.3 percentage point increase in two months, which has no precedent in the seventy-plus years of modern data collection. (The number of the unemployed surged to 23.1 million, a jump of 15.9 million in a month.)

Inflation, too, was wildly volatile - going from roughly 2% to nearly 0% before spiking to 9% during the peak of the COVID stimulus and supply chain shocks. It is still more than 3%. (Had Trump not imposed tariffs and then invaded Iran, inflation would have likely hit 2% or lower by now.)

Finally, here are two tables. One shows numbers at the start and end of his time as Fed Chair. The other shows the dramatic extremes during his time as Fed Chair. It was a crazy time for the economy and Powell likely navigated this as calmly as anyone might have. And that calming influence during serious stress tests might be his most important legacy.

The World Belongs to Optimists

"The world belonged to optimists; pessimists were only spectators."

- The Economist, capturing the philosophy of recently deceased emerging markets investor Mark Mobius

We Stand United King Charles Claims

Headline: "We stand united": King Charles praises US-UK ties in rare address to Congress amid political tensions

Commentary: To be fair, both countries do have the word in their names. 

Roger Bacon and the Worst Kind of Ignorance

The analyst Robert Fox recounts Roger Bacon, writing in 1267, identifying what he considered the worst form of human error: "men blinded in the fog of their errors do not perceive their own ignorance, but with every precaution cloak and defend it so as not to find a remedy."

That is, men ignorant of how ignorant they are fight to protect that ignorance from any perceived attack or real change.

Free Will

 Just published: Free Will Is an Illusion (I had no choice but to write this)

From Impersonal Bureaucracy to the Politics of Theater

FDR-era programs treated coverage as a right of citizenship. You were entitled to help because you were  a citizen, not because you had made yourself a sympathetic character.

GoFundMe operates on a different theory of justice. You receive help if you can make the proper appeal, hold attention, move strangers. If you cannot perform — or will not — you do not get help. The illness is the same. The capacity to win an audience is what changes the outcome.

The Information Economy requires us to perform. To get attention. To provoke emotions. To compete on the stage of politics as theater.

FDR and LBJ's bureaucracies were impersonal but reliable. Those generations did not have to perform. They were citizens, and citizenship was enough. Now you have to be more than a citizen. You have to be a story worth telling.

What Makes Us All the Same? The Fact That We're All Different

Hannah Arendt, on what makes political life possible: "Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live."

Curious claim. What is it that makes us all the same? The fact that we are all different. I'm sure that claim will strike you differently than it did me.

Harry Frankfurt and the Desires We Have (and the Desires That Have Us)

Harry Frankfurt argued that what makes someone a person - rather than just a wanton creature of impulse - is the capacity to have preferences about one’s preferences: to want to be different from how one is.

We don’t just have desires; we have desires about the kind of desires we have and and even about the desires that have us.

A Theory About Conspiracy Theories

Generating and sharing conspiracy theories — like a rain dance — gives people something to do while they wait for systems that are too opaque to understand or petition. And it builds community — even if, in contrast to a rain dance, it does less for fitness and cardio.

Get Rich Quick

Get-rich-quick schemes are structurally similar to get-poor-quick schemes.

The Odds of Fame and Friendship

"Everyone we hear of is famous. Which wildly skews our sense of how probable success actually is. Of the 8 billion people on this planet, 99% are not famous."

"Well, not everyone we hear of is famous. Most are friends."

Pause.

"Well, that wildly skews our sense of how friendly people are. 99.9999% of people don't even know we exist."

The Economist Forecasts Probable Democratic Win of House in 2026 Election

 The Economist’s new statistical forecast of the 2026 Congressional elections gives Democrats a whopping 95% chance of gaining at least the three seats needed to flip the 435-seat lower house. More surprisingly, despite a Senate map that looks nearly impregnable on paper, the model estimates that the party has a 46% probability of taking over the upper chamber as well.

Information More Important Than Government?

Thomas Jefferson deplored "the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed." And yet he believed it was better to have "newspapers without a government" than "a government without newspapers."

Perhaps that's unsurprising from a man whose personal library became the founding collection of the rebuilt Library of Congress. A man of books understood that if you had to choose between information about the world and a government to govern it, information would do more to shape how people actually lived.

A man who deplored the press still trusted it more than he trusted power.

(Quotes from John P. Kaminski's The Quotable Jefferson.)

US GDP and Wealth of Top 0.1%

US GDP last year: $30.5 trillion.

Wealth held by top 0.1%: $24.9 trillion.

The Possible Revival of Defenestration

In the Defenestration of Prague, Protestants settled a religious dispute by picking up three Catholic officials and throwing them out a third-story window. They survived the seventy-foot fall by landing in a pile of dung. (Catholic accounts at the time credited angelic intervention, and this may have been the first recorded instance of one side calling the other's claim bullshit.)

It leaves me wondering why we traded this for memes and marches.

Artificial Intelligence - Created to Navigate the Information Economy

The Information Economy is unusually hard to condense. It has the potential to sprawl into gigabytes of observations, accounts, stories, mediums, and tactics — magazines and radio, billboards and pop songs, talk shows and movies, documentaries and fantasies, memes and research.

The intelligence in our heads is no longer enough to process all this. We are now manufacturing artificial intelligence to handle the sprawl — the gigabytes of noise and narrative the Information Economy produces faster than any human mind can sort.

In The Lincoln Lawyer, a character delivers the line: "Whoever controls the media controls the mind." A companion asks, "Did you just quote Stalin?" "Um," she replies. "Jim Morrison."

The exchange is funny because both answers are almost right. Stalin didn't say it, but the regime he built behaved as if he had. Morrison did say it — around 1969 — but variations were already circulating for more than a decade before he used it. In 1961, a Baptist editor named E. S. James told the Southern Baptist Convention that "those who control the media of communication will ultimately control the minds of the people." And a 1967 newspaper advertisement in Ohio declared that "our country is run by men who control our wealth; who control our news media and thus control our minds."

Just as Americans once staked claims on a continent, a host of interest groups now stake claims on attention — defining terms, controlling narratives, racing to plant their flag in your mind before someone else does. Advertising, marketing, politics, investor sentiment: in every one of them, the good things go to whoever captures your attention first.

Attention: the last zero-sum domain.

So what do we do in a world with this much information — most of it made rather than found? We make intelligence to match.

Natural intelligence evolved to navigate the natural world. Artificial intelligence is built to navigate the worlds we've built — machinery and code, social norms and institutions.

Archimedes said: give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world. Artificial intelligence is that lever — not for moving the physical world, but for moving the ones we've built inside it: the private worlds of our imaginations, the shared worlds of our institutions.