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.

Wake Up Call

Me: I guess nobody needs a wake-up call anymore, now that everyone has a phone.

Hotel desk clerk: Oh, people still need a wake-up call. They just don't think to ask for one anymore - which suggests they're now at least two calls away from self-awareness.

The Strange Debate About God and Presidents That Persists

It is so bizarre that in 2026 we are still debating whether religion is a private or public matter.

Our founding fathers would likely marvel at our technology and be aghast at our medieval take on politics and religion. "What strange intersection of intellect and superstition gives you a culture that can use AI to generate a picture of your president as Jesus?"

The Unexpected Consequence of Great Advances in Self-Driving Technology

Within a few years, self-driving cars will likely reach a point where "drivers" enjoy the same experience as train passengers — simply watching the landscape roll by while the car handles direction and speed.
I wonder if there's a catch.
We have family we love 200 miles north of us through thick traffic in LA and Orange counties. The stress of driving through those often congested areas is as big an obstacle to simply jumping in the car to visit them as is the time. But what about a world in which the stress isn't any greater than sitting at home in your living room? How many more trips will people suddenly be willing to make?
Yes, the cars will drive more efficiently — but there could be vastly more of them.
A prediction: the great advances in self-driving technology could create record congestion until we get to the next level of autonomous cars when they communicate and coordinate with each other in ways that enable them to drive faster and closer together than they ever could in situations in which traffic depends on human skill.

JD Vance Told Hungarians What God Wants for Their Future

"Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the God of our fathers?" JD Vance asked the crowd who attended his rally for Orban in Hungary.

"Then, my friends, go to the polls in the weekend. Stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you, and he stands for all these things".

The level of hubris with this former Hill Billy. Trump, Vance and the corrupt Orban's politics focuses on personal enrichment while claiming that this is God's will. To be fair, it is a centuries old scam, variants of which sound something like "God wants you to give me power and wealth. Please don't disappoint God"

We Have Reasonable Expectations

Most of us just want to be above average. That doesn't seem like too much to ask but as it turns out, only about 60-some percent of us can be, statistically speaking. Which feels rigged.

$600 Billion Gain In Net Worth From a Year Ago for 10 Richest Americans

The ten richest Americans are now worth nearly $2.7 trillion, up about $600 billion from a year ago.

An Economic Stat Perhaps Deserving of a Short Story

Carter County, Montana had the highest GDP growth of any American county in 2024: 76%.Its total population? 65.

Possibly related: small Baca County, Colorado had the lowest GDP growth of any American county — its GDP shrinking 46%.

Perhaps someone with a thriving online business simply moved from Baca to Carter County.

Information on GDP growth by county here:

https://apps.bea.gov/itable/index.html?appid=70&stepnum=40&Major_Area=4&State=XX&Area=XX&TableId=533&Statistic=1&Year=2024&YearBegin=-1&Year_End=-1&Unit_Of_Measure=PercentChange&Rank=1&Drill=1&nRange=5

Daryl Morey and 76ers Play-In Game Against Orlando Magic

First with the Houston Rockets and now with the Philadelphia 76ers, Daryl Morey has systematically applied more rigorous analysis to managing an NBA franchise. He and his staff model the use of stats.

Cut to scene.
Mr. Miyagi: are you ready for your test?
Daryl: Yes. What is the first test of our statistical models?
Mr. Miyagi: Magic.
Daryl: WHAT!?!
Mr. Miyagi: What are the odds, right?
Daryl: ...I can calculate that, actually.

Cheering for Daryl and the 76ers in their play-in game today against the Orlando Magic.

JD Vance - Catholic Since 2019 - Is Already Offering Advice to the Pope on How to Be a Better Catholic

Fascinating how confident the MAGA boys are. Their poster boy for this level of confidence this week? JD Vance.

JD Vance converted to Catholicism in August 2019 at age 35. His conversion marked a return to Christianity after previously identifying as an atheist.

This week, JD Vance - whose Catholicism is younger than an altar boy - offered advice to the Pope on how to be a better Catholic.

And to think that some of you questioned whether he is ready to follow Trump as president.

Refugees Admitted to the US Since Trump Took Office

Since Trump took office in 2025 4,499 total refugees were admitted to the U.S.
4,496 of these refugees were from South Africa (specifically white Afrikaners, based on the administration's policy).

Hmm.

How Busy am I?

I’m a busy man. I’m important. I love sports, though. I really do. But the only sport I have time to watch is the 100-meter dash.

An End to Orban's Illiberal Democracy in Hungary

Liberal democracy.

The democracy part means a majority determines which candidates and proposals win.
The liberal—as in free—means that regardless of who wins, minorities (and even majorities, you know, like women) retain their rights.

Viktor Orbán once described his government in Hungary as an “illiberal democracy.” And that is the model JD Vance has publicly praised and traveled last week to Hungary to support.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

Bold prediction ...

The term Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) that the MAGA crowd coined to dismiss outrage about Trump ... will in the future describe the odd blend of narcissism, delusion and impulsivity that defines Trump's personality. It will morph from a slur aimed at his foes to a psychological condition that describes people like him.

Did You Say Communist?

I didn’t mean to pile on with the accusations, but when they called him a communist, I heard “comment-ist” and simply agreed.

The Strongman Trap

An excerpt from the new book, New Politics for the Next Economy.

The notion of self is a fictional device we use to maintain a sense of continuity across space and time, a way to pretend that we don't greatly change at different ages and in different circumstances. It would be overwhelming to just show up new to the world and our possibilities even once a year much less each morning. So — like a plot device that strings together otherwise disparate events and feelings — we sustain a sense of me that might actually be a crowd of related but hardly identical people all crowded into the parade of years and moments that constitute a life.
Institutions do something similar for societies. They are the plot device a people use to maintain coherence across generations — smoothing over the discontinuities, giving strangers a shared script, making it possible to wake up each morning into a world that feels, if not familiar, at least navigable. The Constitution, the local school, the company you work for, the church you attend or don't — these are the narrative scaffolding that lets a society of 335 million people function as though it were one story rather than millions of unrelated ones.
When institutions decay, people are showing up to a world that feels unfamiliar — and it is overwhelming. The anger in the country right now is partly the anger of people whose plot device broke. The story they were using to make sense of their lives — the job, the church, the party, the neighborhood — stopped working, and they're left with the raw, unnarrated experience of change. That's what strongmen exploit. They offer a simpler story.
The promise is seductive. The record is dismal. Consider the Korean peninsula: divided since 1948, sharing race, culture, and language. One side crushed its institutions under dictatorship; the other nurtured them under democracy. Today, the average South Korean produces in a couple of weeks what a North Korean produces in a year. Twenty percent of Russians still lack indoor plumbing; the country has defaulted on every 30-year bond it has ever issued. Strongmen capture attention but destroy prosperity. Strong institutions may be boring, but they are the only way complex societies thrive. Trump is a symptom of this institutional recession — and a warning of what happens when people lose faith in the institutions that have done so much to define this country and enable its progress.
The strongman's simpler story always has the same ending. Given a choice between a strongman atop weak institutions, or modest leaders within reliable, democratic institutions, bet on institutions every time.

JD Vance's Support for Hungarian Leader Orban Backfires

JD Vance went out to Hungary to rally support for Hungary's Orban (who, like Trump, is a friend of Putin's and regularly seeks to undermine the EU).
Orban fell in the polls after Vance's rally for him.

Eventually, affiliation with Trump will be toxic even for American politicians. Or so one might hope.

If You Build It, They ....

"When you build something new like CUDA, if you build it, they might not come. And that's always the cynic's perspective. However the optimist's perspective would say, but if you don't build it, they can't come."

- Jensen Huang, Nvidia co-founder and CEO

Today's Horoscope ... Sort of

If you are an Aries, your Chinese horoscope today ... does not compute. The cultural intersection of these two is null and void. You'll have to find your own way in this world in which cultural norms have given way to some strange and liberating mix of individuality and global possibilities. It's no longer paint by numbers ... it's paint AND numbers.

Three Possible Outcomes of Trump's Madness

Anyone else see three scenarios?

1. Trump's madness takes him - and his staff - down.
2. Trump's madness takes down the GOP - essentially making it a pariah party for a generation.
3. Trump's madness takes down the US, relegating it to a second-rate economy and country for a generation.

And how would you split 100% probability between these three and some other alternative or set of alternatives? It feels to me like the third scenario has a 10 to 20% chance.

MAGA Core Principles

MAGA core principles:
- never vote for women,
- deport brown people,
- drop bombs on Muslims,
- cut subsidies to the poor while enriching the Trump family.

What am I missing?

Travel Notes from 2010 London - What I’ve noticed about England

Twice we walked down from street level to the underground at Covent Garden. As it turns out, it’s 193 steps – the equivalent of a 15-story building. We walked so many steps in a tight circle that it began to feel absurd.

London is Europe’s biggest city, with 6 million people. At any given instant, 11.4 million of them are on busses or subway cars. Brits are, as near as I can tell, chronically discontent, seemingly unhappy where they are and constantly on the move to somewhere else in the city.

The subway trains can be very crowded and along comes another in 3 to 8 minutes – buses run a little farther apart but depending on your destination you might be able to take any of a number of buses, so it would be typical to wait two minutes for your subway in the tube and then wait only 3 or 4 minutes for your bus. And remember – these are double-decker buses. with Brits and tourists stacked on top of each other. Of course if you have 193 steps between the subway and the bus, you might need to add an hour to your travel time even with walls of buses on the street.

I just assumed that Ricky Gervais’s success was at least in part due to his comedic looks. As it turns out, he doesn’t have comedic looks. He’s just British.

Just living in England would be the equivalent of 18 units of history. You can’t escape history any more than you can escape the rain.

The British Library was amazing. We got to see two Bibles from the 300s; the Magna Carta (in various versions); diary entries by Lewis Carroll about meeting Alice and then agreeing to write down the fairy tale (Alice Underground? Or Alice in Elfland?) for her after having told it to her; an untitled song lyric by the irreverent and disenchanted teen John Lennon; a handwritten speech by Freud; and a letter from Darwin apologizing to a religious friend for how upset he was made when reading the draft of his Origin of Species. I was so delighted by the special treasures room that contained all this that I wanted to experience the library more. It turns out, though, that a person needs a reading pass to get into the reading rooms. One can’t just saunter into the racks to see what they have. So, I went into the room where passes are (rather reluctantly as it turns out) granted. What follows is an only slightly exaggerated version of the conversation between me and the man who grants a pass to the reading rooms.

“What do you want to research?”

“I want to go to the social sciences room to read economic books,” I said, pleased that I could think this fast and actually come up with something that struck me as incredibly specific.

“Do you have the title of the work you want to read?”

“What?”

“You’ll have to write down the title you would like to see. And then we’ll think about giving you a reading pass.” With that, he hands me a form to fill out and points me over to their computer terminals linked to their catalog.

“What if I don’t know yet what titles I want to read?”

“You can’t ask for something to read unless you know what it is.”

“Well how would I know what it is if I haven’t yet read it?”

“Don’t be dense.”

Suffice it to say that I did not get into the reading rooms but I have to imagine that it was conversations with British bureaucrats like this that inspired so many of Lewis Carroll’s daft exchanges between Alice and the odd characters she encountered.

Any two items in the British Museum would be enough to make the reputation of a single museum in the States. It’s just an embarrassment of riches – from Rosetta Stone to wonderfully well preserved statutes from 3, 4, and 5 thousand years ago.

I loved Oxford. It’s is wonderfully British. John Locke went to school here, which basically means that if none of the other students learned a thing, whatever the British have invested in Oxford for the last few centuries has more than paid off.

Oxford University owns Oxford Street in London and leases to the many shops along its route (one of best shopping areas). This should mean that Oxford could afford to provide an Oxford-like education to every child north of London.

We stayed in the McDonald Randolph hotel in Oxford. Sandi counted 18 changes in height or direction on the way from reception to our room. It was comical. Imagine that Oxford student Charles Dodgson (as we insiders refer to the man who wrote as Lewis Carroll) had collaborated with the architect for the Winchester Mystery House and you get some idea of its layout.

I have to wonder if the Brits exploration and conquest of the world wasn’t just a search for better-tasting food. It’s not that their food is inadequate. It is, in fact, adequate. Just. But it’s hard to believe that it would hold one’s attention for more than five days, much less five centuries and might be one of the big reasons that they held onto India for so long.

Of course it might just have been the promise of warmer weather that was enough to drive the Brits into ships. It’s wet and cold here. Well, to be fair sometimes it is just cold.

The average Brit seems both shorter and more polite than the average American. Or perhaps they’re just polite to taller Americans.

Our guide around Oxford shared interesting tips like the origin of the term "eaves dropping" (listening to a conversation from an upper story that “dropped” down the eaves) and the fact that there is no difference in wines past the price of £10 because the only purpose of wine is to get a young woman into the arms of a young man or to remind an old man of when he once held a young woman. We subsidized an older man for an hour to opine away as if he were talking back to the TV.

Oxford could be where JK Rowling got the model for Hogwarts. Apparently the Japanese come by the millions to England to pay homage to the other Island Empire and come to Oxford to pay homage to Harry Potter, where scenes from the movie were filmed.

Down the block from our hotel was a thousand year old tower, the oldest building in Oxford. This makes it four times as old as our country, albeit considerably smaller.

It wasn’t just English culture we’ve been exposed to. We grabbed a drink at a little Scottish restaurant - McDonald’s.

We ate a pub where future prime ministers once ate. Or so I assume. The pub was on the river very close to Christ Church, the college at Oxford that’s graduated about a dozen Prime Ministers in the last couple of centuries.

The Five Americas of New Politics for the Next Economy

 American political history looks messy up close. Zoom out and a pattern emerges.

From Jefferson to Lincoln, Democrats dominated — organizing the country around land, expanding the nation's territory threefold, building an economy of farmers and settlers. From Lincoln to FDR, Republicans dominated — organizing around capital, building railroads and factories, transforming raw materials into industrial wealth. From FDR to Reagan, Democrats dominated again — organizing around labor, creating full employment, then expanding who got to participate in the economy through education, civil rights, and inclusion.

In each era, one party identified the defining resource of its time, built institutions to unlock it, and governed for a generation.

 

Since Reagan, neither party has dominated. Power has split, and the focus has shifted from material problems - land, capital, labor - to cultural ones. Government has become less the architect of great national projects and more the arena for tribal conflict.

That pattern is not an accident. It is a consequence of how parties – and Americans – have thought about their economy and progress. A fifth America is possible.

Truly Confusing Basketball Tattoo

Bald ref creates courtside confusion with head-sized basketball tattoo.

President Trump's Bizarre Easter Message 2026

Or as more boring, past presidents have often called out to fellow Americans on this day: "Happy Easter."

How To Cut Your Odds of Dying in the Next Year in Half

"Your odds of dying in the next year are cut in half if you join one new group."

- Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone

Why Are We Going Back to the Moon?

Why are we going back to the moon?

What did they leave up there last time?

When Mental Illness Becomes Policy

If you read this and conclude either,
1. This man is a political genius, or
2. This man is godly,

You may not understand politics, religion, or mental illness.

Open Presence

On your birthday, the world is opened to your presence.

The Consistently Erratic Pattern of Job Gains and Losses During Trump's Second Term

May of 2025 through March 2026 the pattern for job creation literally alternates between positive and negative every month.

The most consistently erratic president has a most consistently erratic pattern of job gains and losses.

John Wick 21

 2053 — John Wick 21. It's just Keanu Reeves in a motorized wheelchair with a Gatling gun. He spins for 45 minutes, continuously firing, achieving his highest body count yet — with mumbled, vague assurances that at least some of them had it coming.

Perhaps.

Post Information Economy Emergent Potential

The emergent properties of 8 billion people collaborating, with millions of technologies potentially coming together in some kind of synthesis, are just so rich in potential.

We were single-celled organisms — and entirely new possibilities emerged when that reality evolved into multicellular life. We were little tribes — and entirely new possibilities emerged with the rise of nation-states. I still don't think we properly appreciate what new realities have yet to unfold from the emergence of the internet, which literally opens up the possibility of collaboration between anyone, anywhere, with anyone else.

Things like nationalism are pushbacks against this move toward global coordination — but that resistance is likely temporary.

The potential here defies any reasonable calculation. It's as if single-celled organisms were trying to predict what multicellular life would become.

Random Walk Theory Paradox

Abendroth: If we take the random walk theory seriously, we can't take it seriously.
Me: What?
Abendroth:. The idea behind the the random walk theory is that everything we know about a stock is reflected in today's price ... so the only thing that can change that price is new information which we don't yet know. Stocks will randomly move - or walk - up or down, by a lot or by a little, based only on that new information.
Me: So you're saying that even conspiracy theories are as effective as financial analysis?
Abendroth: No. I'm saying that in finance, they are all conspiracy theories. Even the random walk theory.
After a long pause.
Me: So you're saying that the random walk theory could be true if it is false but must be false if it is true?
Abendroth: Yes.
Me: Because the random walk theory suggests that any theories about the stock market - including the random walk theory - are nonsensical?
Abendroth: Yes.
Me: That sort of makes sense.
Abendroth: But mostly doesn't.
Me: Did Lewis Carrol manage an investment fund?
Abendroth: Why do you think the Rabbit was so smartly dressed? He was the fund manager.