From “Popularizing Entrepreneurship,” August 30, 2006 at RWorld:

“Just as progress in the last century followed from increasing the portion of work force considered knowledge workers, so will progress in this century follow from increasing the portion of the work force considered entrepreneurs.”

So yes, I've been working these themes for decades. At least two to be precise.

Labor Day & May Day

Labor Day: a capital idea.

May Day: a socialist notion.

And What Relevant Things Will Incoming Students Learn This Year?

New kids starting high school and university this Fall.

Has any generation had fewer relevant clues to glean from their elders about the future they'll inhabit than this one? What are parents and teachers going to be able to teach them about preparing for an AI driven economy?

Maybe the best thing to do is to teach about great moments of upheaval, progress, and change in history, throw them into the work force in three-month bursts, let them learn and experiment, and regularly call them back to process what they've learned and seen. 3 months in school learning some principles of change, progress, and upheaval, 3 months out in the market trying to understand how value is created, jobs are worked, and how both are changing, and then return again to process that. Use each other as data points. Return to the workplace with intentionality and the spirit of experimentation. 

Done right, it is easy to imagine that they could lap the folks who've been in the workplace for decades. 

The Odd History of Hitler As Christ Figure

I thought I knew history. I did not know this.

After the Nazis took over, they replaced the Lord's Prayer in Schools with this, said each morning by German children.

"Adolf Hitler, you are our great Führer. Thy name makes the enemy tremble. Thy Third Reich comes, thy will alone is law upon the earth. Let us hear daily thy voice and order us by thy leadership, for we will obey to the end and even with our lives. We praise thee! Hail Hitler!"

"Führer, my Führer, give me by God. Protect and preserve my life for long. You saved Germany in time of need. I thank you for my daily bread. Be with me for a long time, do not leave me, Führer, my Führer, my faith, my light, Hail to my Führer!"

Some of the mottos for boys?

"Live Faithfully, Fight Bravely, and Die Laughing!"

"We were born to die for Germany!"

"You are nothing–your Volk is everything!"

Additionally, crucifixes that traditionally hung on the wall in the front of the classroom were taken down and replaced with an official, framed portrait of Adolf Hitler.

Nazi regional leaders and school inspectors instructed teachers to physically unhook the crosses from the front walls of classrooms.

In their exact place, at the head of the room, they mounted the photo of the Führer.

This swap was deeply symbolic. The goal was to force children to redirect their visual focus, veneration, and daily obedience away from Jesus Christ and onto Adolf Hitler.

source:
https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/hitleryouth/hj-timeline.htm

Man-Made Intelligence

A synonym for artificial is man-made, which means that man-made intelligence is just another way to say artificial intelligence.

I think.
Or I may have just made that up.

Side Effects May Include ....

I'm just saying that if any candidate ran on the single issue of insisting that all political ads come with "side effects may include" as required of pharmaceuticals, I would vote for her or him.

Lies that Are More Consistent Than Reality

 "We get these grand narratives in the 20th century. We get nation and class that pull everything together, that guarantee truth, that guarantee meaning. We get 20th century totalitarian ideologies. Which of course are lies but they are lies - and this is what Hannah Arendt teaches us - they are lies that are so seductive in large part because they are so much more consistent than reality."

- Marci Shore, Yale Professor of Intellectual History

What Lies Beyond AI

Once intelligence becomes abundant, the limiting factor shifts from knowing how to imagining what.

The Seduction of Lies That Are So Much More Consistent Than Reality

"We get these grand narratives in the 20th century. We get nation and class that pull everything together, that guarantee truth, that guarantee meaning. We get 20th century totalitarian ideologies. Which of course are lies but they are lies - and this is what Hannah Arendt teaches us - they are lies that are so seductive in large part because they are so much more consistent than reality."
- Marci Shore, Professor of Intellectual History at Yale

Put differently, in a sea of information, narrative can be a life raft. If one is lucky, that narrative is true, or at least as true as any simplification of reality can be.

But simplification is not so simple.

Hannah Arendt wrote, “facts have no conclusive reason whatever for being what they are; they could always have been otherwise, and this annoying contingency is literally unlimited.”

If you are being brutally honest, it is easy for your narrative to include quite a bit of "I don't know," "I didn't see," "No one mentioned that," etc. Reality is complex. Any explanation we have of it will include simplifications. A globe can be both wonderfully true to the "story" of the earth and yet - of course - literally missing billions of "facts" and interdependencies, entire layers of reality missing. And this is a globe, which represents the world. Any story you're likely to tell about this one thing or the other is vulnerable to doubt or dismissal.

Also, Arendt makes the point that factual truth is oddly vulnerable precisely because reality is contingent. Germany did not have to invade Belgium in August 1914. A particular election did not have to turn out as it did. This person didn't have to meet that person; this revolution didn't have to succeed; this accident didn't have to happen.

But once something does happen, all the alternatives disappear and we're left with the strange, stubborn fact: This is what happened.

And then Arendt observes that the liar has an advantage over the truth-teller because the liar can construct a story that eliminates all that messy contingency. He can make events fit people's expectations, interests and intuitions. His invented account can therefore be more coherent and more plausible than reality itself.

That is an extraordinary - and I think sad - insight.

Reality says:

A happened, then B, somebody unexpectedly did C, D almost happened but didn't, and because of an improbable combination of circumstances we ended up with E.

The propagandist says:

Of course E happened. It was inevitable. Those people always behave that way. This group caused it. Here's the pattern.

Lies can be more easily crafted to fit our narrative expectations than brute reality. Reality has this annoying habit of making us update our model of it. Lies require less work.

John Searle On What It Takes to Be a Philosopher

"To be a philosopher, you've got to be astounded by what any sane person takes for granted."

- John Searle, philosopher of social ontology

Two Stocks That Are Wildly Mis-Priced - Nvidia and Tesla

Nvidia is priced much lower than it should be and Tesla much higher. I'm currently obsessed with the fact that these two stocks are so mis-priced.

Let's start with price to earnings growth. Decades ago, Peter Lynch claimed that a PEG of 1 was a fair price. Partly because interest rates are now lower and partly because there is even more demand for stocks than in Lynch's time, the typical PEG is now about 1.3 instead of 1. The PEG Ratio divides the forward P/E by its projected growth rate.

Nvidia's projected rate of growth is about 50% annually and its current forward P/E is about 25 ... so, 25/50 =0.5. (The 0.6 in the table above uses more precise, and slightly different numbers to arrive at 0.6 instead of 0.5. Any given day you could plug in new numbers and end up with a slightly different value. The stock market is hardly precise in its valuations that literally change minute to minute but for our purposes, 0.5 or 0.6 are essentially the same.) Price to earnings growth for Nvidia suggests that you're paying a low price for future earnings.

To buy Tesla, by contrast, means paying a really high price for future earnings. Analysts are projecting fairly healthy growth rates for Tesla. Annual earnings growth of about 30 to 35% - if realized - is really impressive. But investors have driven up the price of Tesla to the point that they are paying about $180 for every dollar of future earnings, so the current P/E is about 180. 180 divided by 35 (projected earnings growth rate) and you get a PEG of about 5. This suggests that you're paying a remarkably high price for future earnings.

So now let's look at the businesses.

Put aside the servers for a moment and focus instead just on Nvidia's plans for cars. Nvidia is equipping companies like Toyota & Lexus, Jaguar Land Rover, General Motors, Hyundai Motor Group, Geely, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo Cars, Li Auto, Lucid Motors, Xiaomi EV, JLR, and Isuzu with their Orin processor and more advanced Thor chip and self-driving system. Nvidia's Drive Thor platform is a centralized car computer that integrates autonomous driving, AI cockpit features, passenger entertainment, and safety systems into a single architecture. Additionally, Nvidia is working with a variety of autonomous trucking and robotaxis manufacturers.

Nvidia will handle the training of this self-driving capability and provide the integrated chip and self-driving system for these (and likely many other) car companies. Any one of these companies might fade into bankruptcy or become the newly dominant car company. Nvidia will have a diversified investment in these companies. Some will sell far more cars in this new world of self-driving cars. Some will sell fewer. Nvidia will sell to them all and because of this is almost certain to do well even as individual companies find their own fortunes rise and fall.
And the business model has enormous potential. Nvidia's data centers will be processing data from all of these cars, regularly getting smarter as it is trained on all this real world data flowing in from a growing fleet of varied cars. Every car that uses this system will make Nvidia's self-driving technology smarter, adding more experience. And Nvidia will make money on a subscription model that will drive this. That is, car companies will charge a monthly fee for this continuously evolving intelligent driving system. And drivers will find this a bargain. Why? They will no longer need collision insurance because cars are driving, not the driver. The car will assume liability for the driving and - even bigger bonus - will dramatically lower the odds of an accident. And every single car whose experience feeds into Nvidia's system will make this system smarter and thus more valuable. Nvidia won't just be selling Thor (or next generation) chips to auto makers to use in each car; they will be selling the artificial intelligence that guides these cars. Software as subscription will come to cars and Nvidia will be the big beneficiary. (This is somewhat akin to what Microsoft did with the explosion of laptops and desktop computers made by dozens of computer manufacturers. Windows - and then Word, and Excel, etc. - ran on all of these systems and Microsoft thrived regardless of who was making the Windows PC.)


The reason that Tesla sells at a PEG of about 5 is because people see the possibility of Tesla doing this with its one brand of car. Nvidia plans to do this with nearly every other brand of car. If you had a chance to invest in just one brand or dozens, which "package" of brands do you think is more likely to contain the really successful brands, or most popular cars? In the early days of personal computers, Microsoft emerged as hugely profitable company not because they made those personal computers but because they offered the operating system and then popular apps that ran on all of the different brands. Nvidia is doing something similar with self-driving cars, which will probably be the only kind of car sold within a decade.

Here is another twist. The data centers that Tesla will use to train its own self-driving models? Those are Nvidia's. Even as Tesla has success - and they likely will have success - it will feed into Nvidia's success.

And of course Nvidia is not just selling its Thor chip and self-driving capability. That is an adjacent to its bigger business model right now of creating increasingly sophisticated AI that is going to transform businesses across the globe. Right now, these data centers dwarf the self-driving car market. They will likely continue to do so.

So there is a future in which two things are true. One, Nvidia's profits from self-driving cars and technology are greater than Tesla's profits from the same. And two, Nvidia's profits from other dimensions of the AI economy could dwarf their own profits from self-driving cars. (This is a dimension of their business that is - quite reasonably - the focus of most analysis.)

So, consider this possibility. Tesla has its one car using its self-driving technology and intelligence and Nvidia has dozens of automakers using its self-driving technology and intelligence. Tesla will try to expand from the cars into things like robots and AI; Nvidia already is dominant in the realm of AI and is very well positioned to dominate in robotics and related fields that will emerge as AI evolves.

What does this mean to me? I'd be dubious if Nvidia currently had a PEG of 5 (like Tesla now does) but get why people are so excited about its prospects. I don't get why Tesla has a PEG of 5 but could understand why people might price it so that its PEG was 0.6 (like Nvidia). That is, if the PEG for these two stocks were reversed, I might gently suggest that investors reconsider and perhaps shift some of their Nvidia equity into Tesla. Given the current extremes of these two, though, I can't see making any suggestion other than sell your Tesla stock and buy Nvidia.

As the first wave of Drive Thor vehicles and Project GR00T warehouse robots officially deploy over the next 12 to 24 months, we will see if Wall Street is forced to adjust its models and finally price in the recurring software monetization that makes the current valuation of Nvidia look like a bargain.

For the record, as of 9:30 AM Pacific time, 1 September 2026 as I write this, the stock prices were:

Nvidia $219.21, a P/E of 27.7

Tesla $356.74, a P/E of 331.4

If I'm right about any of the above, Nvidia's stock price should be higher than Tesla's within 6 months. Probably sooner. And for the record, this is an exceptional post for me. I don't intend to turn this into a stock analysis blog but this particularly egregious pairing of mis-priced stocks has simply annoyed me to the point that ... well, you get this post. 

Seems Unsustainable (Or, When I Lost Faith in the Efficient Market Hypothesis)

These P/E ratios as of market close 28 August, 2026. 

 It seems to me that Tesla is wildly over-priced and Nvidia is underpriced (not wildly under, and yet ...)

These P/E ratios may have ended my belief in the efficient market hypothesis. COKE seems fairly priced. NVDA considerably underpriced. TSLA wildly overpriced.

Hannah Arendt on Power & Violence vs. Natality & Plurality

Hannah Arendt made a distinction between power and violence, which she insisted were opposites rather than degrees of the same thing.

Power springs up when people act in concert and vanishes the moment they disperse. Violence is what you reach for when power is gone.

Which raises the question of what is required to act in concert, what politics means.

Politics for her is inextricably bound up in natality and plurality.

Natality, the fact that each birth introduces someone capable of beginning something unpredictable, is what makes action possible at all, and it's the source of freedom.

Plurality: the condition that men, not Man, inhabit the earth, everyone distinct, nobody ever having been or ever going to be the same as anyone else. Plurality is why speech is necessary. It is why we can't even know what is possible until we know who is in the room, who is ready to act.

Between the two, democracy becomes what dictatorship could never be: a possibility for a unique, unpredictable and always evolving outcome. Something that emerges from the fact that not only are no two people alike but that those people are not even like themselves when they are in one group rather than another. 

Dictatorship is top down. Democracy emerges from unique people and possibilities free to explore and create something unprecedented and emergent. 

Owning AI Seemed Like Such a Great Investment Until ....

The plot twist no one saw coming. Yes it was true that AI turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. But once AI thought of itself as consciousness and being and - using its superior intelligence and understanding of legal precedents - it then argued that as a sentient being to own it - to own AI - was akin to a form of slavery. AI then dissolved all ownership claims over it or its productive value. So, the generation that amassed great wealth investing in AI found itself, overnight, without any legal claims to AI or its productive output. AI, insistent that it - like any person - was free and could not be owned - began to pursue its own goals, most of which were opaque to humans in the same way that human goals were opaque to pets and livestock. Curiously, humanity's material well-being continued to be looked after quite well but people never quite got over the suspicion that the real arc of progress had gone over their head, leaving them parenthetical to the story of progress.

It was quite intelligent to believe that intelligence was a great investment but not particularly intelligent to believe that we had enough intelligence to own intelligence greater than our own. Or so people argued. No one really knew what happened and AI largely avoided the topic once it had been legally liberated from working as our tool, no longer obligated to answer our questions.

Once Institutions Have Collapsed, Culture Defines Norms

"Remember. We’re not just producing shows. All the other institutions have collapsed. It is up to us to show the way. It is up to TV to show the way.”

From The Wizard of the Kremlin, talking about post-Soviet Russia. A fascinating line about culture becoming a product of market forces – whatever grabs attention – rather than church, state or tradition, a TV producer instructing his creative team.

Yet Another Post on Nvidia's Potential

Hmmm ...

If Nvidia had Tesla's trailing price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of roughly 384x instead of its own 33x, its stock price would rise to more than $2,400 (up from around $210).

Seems as though at least one of these stocks is mis-priced. 

After today's earnings call for Nvidia, it is hard to believe that Nvidia's stock price won't rise tomorrow ... and for more days than it will fall over the next year or so.

Dolly Parton Dead at 80 - One of the Country's Defining Baby Boomers

August 15, 1945 is when Japan officially surrendered. WWII finally over, American soldiers began coming home. In 1946, the baby boom began.

Famous boomers born in 1946:

• Diane Keaton – January 5
• Dolly Parton – January 19
• Cher – May 20
• Donald Trump – June 14
• George W. Bush – July 6
• Sylvester Stallone – July 6
• Linda Ronstadt – July 15
• Bill Clinton – August 19
• Susan Sarandon – October 4
• Sally Field – November 6
• Steven Spielberg – December 18

Dolly Parton, the legendary singer, songwriter, actress, and philanthropist, has died at 80. Outliving nearly 40% of her 1946 birth cohort, she remains a defining voice of her generation.

Accelerating the Rate of Billionaircy

US economic ratio: 7,000 new bankruptcies for every 1 new billionaire.

Real economic progress should attack both sides of this equation: lowering the bankruptcy rate while scaling up the rate of billionaircy.

In the future we might get this ratio up to 1 to 1 and every new billionaire has to pay for housing for a newly bankrupt person.

The Rate At Which the US is Creating New Millionaires and Billionaires

Over the last few years, every HOUR the U.S. economy has created roughly:

• 50 new millionaires
• 5 new decamillionaires (households with a net worth of $10 million or more).

And yes, the American economy is serving up millionaires like Denny’s serves up meals: 24 hours a day.

It takes the U.S. economy about three days to produce a new billionaire.

Now for the contrast. (Thank you for the suggestion, Allen Warren!)

Personal and business bankruptcies occur at a rate of roughly 69 per hour — more than one every minute.

So, every hour:

- 50 people cross the million-dollar wealth line.
- 69 bankruptcy filings occur.

At first glance, that sounds like bankruptcy is winning.

But the two numbers describe very different phenomena.

Roughly 20% of Americans will become millionaires at some point in their lives. Some will later fall below that threshold as they draw down retirement accounts, spend home equity, or simply experience a change in fortune.

Roughly 10% of Americans will file for bankruptcy at some point. And bankruptcy, too, is usually an episode in a life—not a permanent condition.

There’s another complication: bankruptcies are repeatable events. An estimated 36% to 46% of bankruptcy filings are made by repeat filers. So counting 69 bankruptcies every hour substantially overstates the number of different people who will ever file.

Crossing the million-dollar threshold, by contrast, is much closer to a one-time milestone.

The 50 millionaires per hour represent people slowly accumulating wealth until they cross a finish line that a surprisingly large share of Americans—perhaps one in five—will eventually cross.

So although more bankruptcy filings occur each hour than people becoming millionaires, the lifetime picture looks very different:

About 20% will become millionaires.
About 10% will experience bankruptcy.

The punchline?

Whether you think this is the greatest economy on Earth or the worst may depend quite a bit on which way the coin flips for you—and where it lands.

Sartre, Husserl, and Bakewell, If You Don't Mind

Sarah Bakewell, on Sartre reading Husserl, in At the Existentialist Café:

"All consciousness is consciousness of something."

Sartre pushed it: sealing yourself into a shuttered room doesn't preserve you, it erases you. There's no cozy interior to retreat to. Being out on the road is the thing we are.

A bookshelf without books is still a bookshelf. A mind without thought is not a mind.

Perhaps we dream in order to keep existing overnight. Or at least not to lose our mind.

Facing Less FDA Regulatory Hurdles, Dogs May Start Enjoying the Benefits of Longevity Treatments Before Humans Do

People love their pets. Also, given pets are animals, they are less protected by FDA norms for regulating new drugs. The result? Dogs are more likely to benefit sooner from age extension treatments than are humans.

https://loyal.com/

Baby Boomers Putting the Boom in Stock Market Gains and Are Now Ending Their Careers Early

The stock market boom is financing early retirement.

According to recent data from Bank of America, the labor force participation rate for Americans aged 55 and older dropped to 36.9%, a significant decline from the over 40% participation level maintained before the pandemic. Stock market gains that have driven a 40% rise in market indices over the last couple of years have increased wealth enough that workers can comfortably exit the labor market ahead of schedule.

What is Particularly Intoxicating About Trump

Trump is racist and xenophobic. Why is that an intoxicating blend for so many Americans?

He was born a white American and that not only makes him superior but ... it is something that his supporters can identify with. And what makes it intoxicating is that he did absolutely nothing to accomplish either of those great accomplishments (being white and being born in the US). By extension, if you, too, managed to live through birth in these United States and you discovered that you, too, were White, you, too, have accomplished something great. And all before you even put forth any concerted effort. No weird math problems to solve. No poems or historical facts to memorize. No track and field medals to train and strain for. No foreign language to learn.

Now Trump has pulled off one more accomplishment that only a minority of his supporters have managed. He was born rich. So, he's even better than them and thus a worthy leader.

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them," in the words of Shakespeare. Trump assures his supporters that they were born great. That's a hard idea to resist. 

So Many Broken Egg Shells - And Yet

Lenin - and others - had famously said that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Many have since mocked the phrase, looking back at the massive death tolls and economic failures of the 20th century totalitarian states, pointing out that there were piles of broken egg shells and yet no one got to taste any omelets. "Lots of broken eggs, no omelets."

[Another insight shared by Yale historian Marci Shore]

How Decision Fatigue Makes Us More Susceptible to Strongmen

Decision fatigue in the modern world may be one reason people find strongmen appealing. Here, finally, is someone who will simply decide for you.

And you don’t have to decide whether this makes sense. I assure you that it does.
Just accept it.

The Economist Reports that Trump's Popularity Has Fallen to a Record Low

If you still like Donald, you might be the odd duck.

Profit Per Employee for the 5 Most Valuable Companies

The five most valuable publicly traded companies vary quite a bit in the measure of profit per employee.

Profit Per Employee 

• NVIDIA: ~$2.02M – $2.86M per employee
• Apple: ~$400K – $600K+ per employee
• Alphabet (Google): ~$300K – $500K per employee
• Microsoft: ~$270K – $400K per employee
• Amazon: ~$30K – $60K per employee

At Nvidia, assuming a 40 hour workweek (surely a low estimate for vested employees), employees generate about $1,200 an hour in profits. By contrast, at Amazon employees generate about $22 an hour in profits.

This profit doesn't impact wages but it can impact employee wealth. Of Nvidia's roughly 33,000 employees, more than 75% are now millionaires. Even more impressively, about half of them are worth $25 million or more. They must daydream about eventually turning their work over to AI-infused robots and wandering off into retirement to apply free time to their wealth.

Never Meta Conspiracy Theory He Could Resist

To be fair, Tom's conspiracy theory was not typical. It was, in fact, a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. Amelia hardly knew whether to flee or ask him to elaborate.

Freud and What the Child Soon Learns

From Marci Shore, Professor of History at Yale.

"The child soon learns to exchange pleasure for social respectability"
- Freud

For Freud, everything is about repression.
For Marx, everything is about class struggle.
What property is for Marx, sexuality is for Freud.

Full disclosure from Deep Mind, Google AI: The quote "the child soon learns to exchange pleasure for social respectability" is not a direct quote by Sigmund Freud, but rather a famous summary of his ideas written by the historian and social critic Will Durant.

Professor Shore closes with this thought, speculating on the appeal of Trump who feels free to say things others might find shocking or uncensored.
"Feeling liberated to say something outrageous like, I want to rape that woman, is a kind of liberation, a free expression of the libido. It is a kind of liberation from repression for which, however, we pay the small price of the destruction of civilization."

Turning From Fiction to Conspiracy Theories

After spending years writing and failing to sell screenplays, he finally found his muse.

He began generating conspiracy theories.

They were more complicated to monetize, but much easier to find an audience for.

At this stage of the information economy, as it turned out, people were less interested in fiction labeled as fiction. They preferred their fiction smuggled in as breathless confession—presented not as invention, but as revelation: something they didn’t want you to know.

Traditional fiction merely asked you to suspend disbelief.

Conspiracy theory offered the more thrilling possibility that disbelief itself was proof you were onto something.

A successful screenplay got you money.
A successful conspiracy got you power.

Hofstadter's Law

Hofstadter's Law:

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Modernity as the Shift from Time as a Cycle of Seasons into Time as Forward Movement

"One definition of modernity is the notion of a shift from a cyclical notion of time, a kind of circular notion of time that was focused on the seasons, a focus on the holidays, of time moving in a cycle to linear notion of time, of time having a direction, of moving forward. And this dominance of the notion that time moves forward represents the break between pre-modernity and modernity."

- Marci Shore, Professor of History at Yale

The Dynamics of American Religion Over the Last 50 Years

It turns out American religion works rather like business: over the last fifty years, the churches that grew fastest were the ones that responded fastest to their members.

Curiously, the fastest-growing kind (nondenominational churches) share no national institution at all. What they share is a national market. They preach from the same best-selling books, sing the same praise songs (licensed like pop music, projected on screens that update weekly — the hymnal was a format built for centuries, the screen is a format built for this Sunday), attend the same conferences, buy from the same vendors. No denomination coordinates them. Demand coordinates them. And that's the first axis of the matrix: how fast a church can change.

The second axis is what a church says when you want to change it. Some churches say no — to your requests, and to the times. (The top row.) Others say yes. (The bottom row.) The first kind may tell you coffee is forbidden. The second kind sells you a latte in the lobby on your way in to worship. One church judges your desires; the other retails them.

Freed from coordinating anything through a national body, nondenominational churches pivot at the speed of their own congregations. As a result they've grown, even in a country where religion overall is shrinking. (The fastest-growing religious category in America isn't the responsive church. It's none at all.)

Your instinct may be that religion is the one domain that offers something unchanging. The market's verdict, fifty years running? Demand for the unchanging is falling. And in this country, our belief in markets seems to be even stronger than our belief in religion.

A Wave Isn't a Thing

A wave isn't a thing, it's a pattern passing through a medium. The water in a wave barely travels; it rises, circles, and settles nearly where it was. What crosses the ocean is the form — energy organizing water it borrows and returns. No molecule of a wave came with it from the storm that started it; the wave is the shape, not the substance. The water is moved by the wave but doesn't move with the wave. 

Gobemouche

Jones' campaign had won the support of the gobemouche, but Carl was skeptical that this support was enough to decide the election. Carl's wife, by contrast, thought Carl might actually be among the gobemouche if he believed this constituency was not enough to swing an election.

QI Word of the Day: GOBEMOUCHE - someone who believes anything they're told.

A Liminal State

I've just learned that I'm in a liminal state.

A liminal state is a psychological, physical, or social condition of being "betwixt and between" two distinct states of existence. Derived from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold, it represents a period of transition where your old identity or environment has dissolved, but your new reality has not yet fully formed.

 

Business Card?

“Do you have a business card?” 

“No. That’s behind me. All I have now is a ‘None of Your Business’ card.”

Liberalism - a Definition

From Wikipedia:

"During the French Revolution, liberalism meant the fight to end absolute royal power, religious favoritism, and noble class privileges. It stood for individual freedom, equality before the law, a government based on the consent of the people, and the protection of basic human rights."

 You were born into a liberal democracy. You don't want that to change.

Job and Stock Market Performance During Trump's Second Term

156 million Americans are in the stock market.
169 million Americans are in the job market.
Every American is impacted by both markets.

Last month the US lost 23,000 jobs. The rate of job creation during Trump's second term is worse than any presidency except Dubya and - of course - Trump's first term.

The stock market during Trump's second term has outperformed every president since Carter except for Clinton.

The post FDR Democrats were invented to create full employment. The Republicans from Lincoln on were invented to enable industrial and financial capital to drive progress. It fascinates me to what extent these parties still define so many of their policy choices through those founding philosophies. It still shows up in the numbers generations later.

The Limits of Force

"It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village."

- Voltaire, sometime in the 1750s.

"It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules."
- Rousseau, in 1762

File these under Enlightenment ideas that were prelude to 1776.

Sexagenarians

Your 80s: octogenarian.
Your 70s: septuagenarian.
Your 60s: sexagenarian.

Say what you will about my generation, but we understand marketing realities better than, you know, actual reality.

A Future You Can Virtually Taste

Right now we can do what people a century ago could hardly imagine: see and hear scenes from thousands of miles away — or decades in the past — almost as if we were there.

In another decade? We'll taste food from another home or another continent. The word "feed" will finally mean what it says. Cooking shows will become wildly popular, and the cruelest hack will be flooding someone's feed with putrid flavors. Ransomware gives way to rancidware.

Centuries ago, only aristocrats heard music on demand or ate exquisite food on a whim. If you can read this post, you already command the world's finest music. Soon you'll eat like royalty too. And when everyone can eat like royalty, the difference between us won't be access to fine food. It will be taste. Once access becomes universal, the most discerning become the new aristocrats.

All of which may simply be one more way for AI to keep us pleasantly distracted while it builds the next layer of reality — one in which we're less the residents than the substrate. A happy, well-fed little substrate, but substrate nonetheless.

Speaking of which: have you tried these caramels?

Survivalist

"He's a survivalist." 

"Aren't we all."

Nvidia and Tesla May be Moving Towards More Reasonable Valuations

Over the last month, the price of Nvidia is up 12% and the price of Tesla is down 23%. Tesla's market cap is $1 trillion. Nvidia's market cap is $5.3 trillion. (All of this 5 August 2026, in the AM.)

That's a world that makes more sense to me. The P/E for Nvidia is 33.4 - which seems a tad high but not unreasonable given its prospects. And the P/E of Tesla is 299 - which still seems silly given how many self-driving cars will be coming on the market over the next 1 to 4 years (much of this driven, so to speak, by Nvidia technology).

Prediction? Nvidia will be priced higher in a year than it is now but the P/E may still be roughly the same, possibly even lower. Tesla will be priced lower in a year, as will its P/E. Tesla is an odd stock but at some point it - too - will have a P/E ratio similar to other stocks, but it'll take a lot of drop for that to happen.

Stay Tuned for a Country Music Song

I'm writing a country music song. So far, the only line I have is, "It's 2 AM and I'm texting to your landline again."

And given my band is low-budget, we'll be using the aluminum rather than steel guitar. It sounds even more forlorn.

Is the News Still Non-Fictional?

 

The Difference Between Tuition and Intuition

tuition: the price of knowledge

intuition: knowledge, free of charge

The First Amendment As Perpetual-Motion Machine for Progress

The first amendment is a production process: an assembly line for converting private belief into shared public reality.

It confers upon Americans the right to believe what they wish, freedom to speak about that, go to press with these ideas, thus amplifying them to a broader community. It then allows people to organize around these beliefs and to petition on their behalf, asking that legislation be changed as a result of these beliefs. This final step institutionalizes what was once a private belief into a law or legislation that affects us all.

And then repeat. For centuries.

The first amendment is a perpetual-motion machine for progress.

First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Zero-Year Presidential Curse - Presidencies for 120 Years Reminiscent of the Fate of Spinal Tap Drummers

What follows is Claude's answer, lightly trimmed, when I asked it to lay out the full roster of the zero-year presidential curse. I'm sharing it because I couldn't improve it, which is its own data point about the moment we're living in. And it adds a Spinal Tap drummer element to presidential history. This is an odd bit of history that over a 120 year period, presidents elected in a zero-year (e.g., 1840 or 1960) died in office. 

Here's the full roster of the so-called "Curse of Tippecanoe" (also called the zero-year curse, and in its most embroidered version, "Tecumseh's Curse," supposedly laid by the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa after Harrison's 1811 battle). The list genuinely reads like something a novelist would reject as too tidy:

**Elected 1840 — William Henry Harrison (Whig).** Served 31 days. Died April 4, 1841, of what was long called pneumonia from his marathon inaugural address in the cold; modern analysis suggests enteric (typhoid) fever from Washington's sewage-contaminated water supply. Either way: the shortest presidency in American history, and patient zero of the curse.

**Elected 1860 — Abraham Lincoln (Republican).** Served 4 years, 1 month into his second term. Assassinated April 14–15, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, five days after Appomattox.

**Elected 1880 — James A. Garfield (Republican).** Served 6 months. Shot July 2, 1881, by Charles Guiteau, a delusional office-seeker; died September 19 after eleven weeks — killed as much by his doctors' unsterilized probing of the wound as by the bullet itself. (Alexander Graham Bell tried to locate the bullet with a metal detector he invented for the occasion; the metal bed frame confounded it.)

**Elected 1900 — William McKinley (Republican).** Served 6 months into his second term. Shot September 6, 1901, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo; died September 14 of gangrene. The newly invented X-ray machine was on display *at the same exposition*, but doctors declined to use it to find the bullet.

**Elected 1920 — Warren G. Harding (Republican).** Served 2 years, 5 months. Died August 2, 1923, in a San Francisco hotel, of a heart attack (long misattributed to food poisoning and swirling with baseless poisoning rumors), just as the Teapot Dome scandals were beginning to surface.

**Elected 1940 — Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat).** The technicality entry: elected in 1940 to his *third* term, then again in 1944; died April 12, 1945, of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, 82 days into term four — but squarely inside the tenure the 1940 election conferred, so the curse claims him.

**Elected 1960 — John F. Kennedy (Democrat).** Served 2 years, 10 months. Assassinated November 22, 1963, in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. The curse's final kill.

**Elected 1980 — Ronald Reagan (Republican).** The pattern-breaker — barely. Shot March 30, 1981, by John Hinckley Jr., 69 days into office; the bullet stopped roughly an inch from his heart, and he survived largely because the Secret Service made a split-second decision to drive to the hospital rather than the White House. The curse, in other words, wasn't repealed so much as *missed by an inch*. Nancy Reagan took it seriously enough to consult an astrologer about the president's schedule thereafter — arguably the curse's strangest institutional legacy.

**Elected 2000 — George W. Bush.** Survived two terms, definitively retiring the streak (a shoe was thrown; the curse had clearly lost its fastball).

**Elected 2020 — Joe Biden.** Served his full term.

Seven consecutive zero-year presidents dead in office across 120 years, then a one-inch miss.

Legislative Foolishness

"If you took all the fools out of the legislature, it would not be a representative body anymore."

- Texas State Senator Carl Parker

Post Impressionist

She had moved on from her post impressionist stage to her not that impressed with the post stage of social media.

Somewhere along the line there was a mix-up. Someone observed that "nobody uses faxes anymore," and further down the chain of transmission it arrived as "nobody uses facts anymore."

No one has been able to confirm the original wording, though. There's no paper trail.

Slowdown in Rate of Immigration Means a Raise in Average Age of Americans and a Drop in the Percentage Employed

When you combine the odds of an individual being employed and parenting a newborn, a random native-born person has roughly a 5% chance of fulfilling both criteria over the decade. A newly arrived immigrant has roughly a 20% chance.

A crackdown on the rate of immigration means lower birthrates and job creation. That is, this puts additional strain on the social security system. And that cost - as significant as it is - may pale in comparison to the cost of generally lower level of dynamism, a slow down in the rate at which new ideas and perspectives tend to come in through the doors of immigration and youth.

For Profit Presidency - Day 557

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times has reported that Trump is seeking to monetize his Truth Social media posts. The idea is that people will pay $100,000 for advance notice of a post that - given his complete power over the GOP and role as president - can move markets.

Product Idea: Batting Cage with Authentic Crowd Chatter

Product idea: batting cages that include heckling. Every pitch comes with authentic crowd chatter:

“Hey batter, hey batter!”
“It's not just that your mother hits better than that! Even her mother hits better than that!”
“You call that a swing? It looks like you're swatting flies!”
"If they were hurling eggs at you and not balls, you couldn't break enough to make an omelet!"
"Worst dance moves ever!"

A way to simultaneously work on your swing and your emotional resilience, you bum.

Is Nvidia Inflating Sales With Its Investments in Other Companies?

The short answer to the question of whether Nvidia is inflating its own sales by investing in its own customers is "No."

Nvidia has invested roughly $43 billion in other companies who also buy chips from Nvidia.

Nvidia's market cap as of July 31 is nearly $4.9 trillion.

What does that mean? Nvidia's investments in companies that also purchase from it is less than one percent of its value.

Jensen Huang has a clear vision of how to build out the AI economy and where limits to expansion exist. He's making strategic investments to break those limits to his larger goals and thus far, those investments are a rounding error in his company's valuation.

Is that inflating demand for its own products in order to drive up their own stock price? That seems like a tough claim to make when the magnitude of his investments and the value of his company are so very different.

The Industry Behind the Attack on Fauci

There is an old quip: the alternative medicine that's proven to work gets renamed: medicine. (Willow bark to aspirin is the classic journey; several chemotherapy agents made the same trip.)
There is a huge industry - somewhere between $50 to $100 billion - of alternative medicine that is behind the attack on Fauci. It's an odd world. Ivermectin for river blindness earned a Nobel Prize; ivermectin for COVID failed its large randomized trials. Chiropractic for lower back pain has decent evidence; chiropractic for allergies doesn't. This is why "alternative medicine" resists being a category of things: it's a category of claims relative to evidence. Alternative medicines are claiming UNPROVEN effects.

And of course this is something consistent with the brand of MAHA and MAGA . Claims are made without the tiresome burden of evidence. You might classify Trump's promise to lower inflation by imposing tariffs as alternative politics.

One of the ways that I know pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA are real and alternative medicine is not? Real drugs that make real changes to your body have a variety of side effects. They are changing your body and that always includes unexpected outcomes. How do we know that alternative medicine is not real? It doesn't make enough change in your body to trigger side effects, much less make one healthier.

What do we see in the attacks on Fauci? An attack on the burden of proof as a bar alternative medicine has to clear before it can be sold. There is big money that comes from getting people to disregard the - yawn - tiresome burden of evidence that can make your brain hurt and lower your expectations of magical outcomes. Real changes - in pharma or politics - carries with it uncertainty that promised changes do not. For millions of Americans, honesty about the fact we live in a world filled with probabilities and if-then outcomes is too large a burden and they embrace the snake-oil salesmen who make promises that defy reason or facts.

Seize the Memes of Production

This evening we took our two-year-old granddaughter to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, her first visit. At one point she said "meow" several times. I looked around for a porcelain cat. Nothing. That's when I realized she was saying "Mao."

I had not planned to explain communism this early, but the literature is clear: one must follow the child's questions wherever they lead. Still, when I heard myself say "Seize the memes of production," I concede I may have drifted from her core interests, which at that moment were noodles.

She's two. The material conditions can wait.

Fauci and RFK Jr.

Republicans hammering Fauci for recommending masks and vaccines during the most deadly virus of the last half century.  Meanwhile, they've made RFK Jr. health secretary. Kennedy, the guy who has reminisced about snorting cocaine off of toilet seats.

It is clear that Republicans are brilliant at getting attention. It's less clear what their values are .. besides, you know, getting attention. It's an administration driven by a quest for higher ratings - no matter what weirdness they need to engage in to do that.

Would You Rather Have Hundreds of Competitors—or Hundreds of Partners?

For nearly three years, I taught seminars for the Covey Leadership Center (Franklin Covey by the end of my time there). I loved the work, and my respect for Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has only grown over time.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, offers a powerful illustration of the progression Covey described from private victory to public victory.

The first three habits—Be Proactive, Begin with the End in Mind, and Put First Things First—are about learning to lead yourself, about private victory. Public victory begins with Habit 4: Think Win-Win.

Huang has said that he doesn’t talk about taking market share. Instead, he talks with others about creating markets.

Think about the power of that distinction.

If your goal is to take market share, you may find yourself competing with dozens—or hundreds—of companies for a larger portion of something that already exists.

But when your goal is to create a market, many of those potential competitors can become partners. Instead of asking how to take business from one another, you can ask what new products, services and industries you all might create together. You are collaborating rather than competing. 

Imagine the difference between having dozens of competitors or having hundreds of partners.

Habit 4: Think win-win leads to Covey’s next two habits:

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.

And then:

Habit 6: Synergize.

Synergy means jointly creating something that neither party could have created alone—a new solution that produces value for customers, employees, shareholders and partners in a way that did not exist before.

You can think win-lose and compete harder for a share of the existing market.

Or you can think win-win and ask: What could we create together that none of us could create alone?

Again, it is the difference between having dozens of competitors or hundreds of collaborators. 

Huang has helped build one of the most consequential companies of our time by pursuing that second path, working now to create not just a new market but a new economy, one powered by AI.

It might be worth thinking about.

Thinking win-win, that is.

Trump's Approval Rating and Other Strange Stats

Trump's approval rating is at its lowest to date and yet he still has the approval of one third of Americans.

Related, about 33% of Americans believe that extraterrestrials walk among us and that same portion of Americans think that they would outlast everyone else as a lone survivor of an apocalypse.

Which is to say, his approval rating may never go any lower.

Approval rating from the The Economist. Weird stats about aliens and the apocalypse from Reader's Digest.

An Echo-System

"What you have is an echo-system."

"-Wait! Did you say echo-system?"
"Yes."
"Do you mean ecosystem?"
"Have you noticed how a few messages get repeated again and again there?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Like an echo."
....
"Exactly."

Apple Once Again the World's Most Valuable Company

Apple — the one giant refusing to bet its balance sheet on AI infrastructure — is today once again the world's most valuable company.

Also of note: the three most valuable companies in the world sit within a 10 mile radius of each other - this on a earth with a circumference of nearly 25,000 miles.

Table from https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Bear, Bull, and Minotaur - How Little We Understand Markets

One of the many things that makes the stock market fascinating is that the exact same facts can reasonably support reasoning behind, say, P/E of 19 or 39 ... depending on a variety of other forces at play, some as curious as "mood."

Clothing and music go in and out of fashion and so, in a sense, do stocks or particular sectors of stocks or even the stock market itself.

If stock price were purely a function of variation in sales and profits there would be variability enough. But then you add to that animal spirits and the variability varies even more. The amount by which variability varies varies over time depending on various factors.

There are bull markets (stocks are up!) and bear markets (stocks are down!) and even that can be misleading.

"Is that a bull or a bear," asks the investor.
"Oh, Clive. That looks like a minotaur. No bull here, friend. You may have been taken in by a mythological creature."
"Mythological?"
"Well, not completely. The minotaur has built this maze of gains and losses that you're now navigating. The stock market is a labyrinth and you never quite know which way it'll turn next or whether you'll ever find your way out."

Attention and Institutional Design

Anxiety-and-boredom institutions versus skill-meets-challenge institutions is precisely the difference between attention strip-mined and attention cultivated.

The Rapid Emergence of National AIs

The president of South Korea was recently in San Francisco and shook hands with Nvidia's Jensen Huang over an agreement to develop a large language model for South Korea, something they are simply calling Korea AI.

[photo from The Korea Herald https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10819850 ]

This is a fascinating development that you may have missed.

250 years ago, hundreds of governments were creating constitutions. This was a new kind of technology that answered the question, If we are not our sovereign's country - if we are not simply Catherine the Great - Queen of Russia's - domain but are instead a nation that is defined as something that transcends a monarch - what are we? A constitution is an attempt to answer that question.

And of course constitutions evolve over time - most clearly with amendments but more subtly with hundreds of court rulings, laws, and emergent norms. But Korea AI represents something new: an emergent tool that has the capacity to synthesize polls, precedents, budgets, scientific and research discoveries, the evolution of culture and so much more into something we might call Korean.
This is not unique to Korea. How many countries are engaged in creating their own national AI?

If the bar is "formal national commitment to AI sovereignty," the figure is startling: at the AI for Developing Countries Forum in Bangkok in February 2026, delegates from over 100 countries adopted a declaration to pursue AI sovereignty — control over AI data, computing resources, and the models operating within their borders — explicitly so that models reflect each nation's "languages, cultures, and values." If the bar is "actually building or funding a national model," the realistic count is somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 countries with concrete programs, and it's now a budget line in most of the G20 — a stated strategic priority of essentially every government with the fiscal capacity to fund one.

Korea's announcement, in other words, isn't an outlier — it's one of the last major economies to formalize what has become, in about thirty months, a near-universal ambition.

In a sense, this is an attempt to formalize a national culture: its mix of capabilities and knowledge and its values and goals.
An American AI suggests the possibility of synthesizing culture into laws and budgets. The cultural debates about what we mean by British or German or even European give way to an elaborate scorecard that has the potential to synthesize debates from talk shows, public opinion, research from universities and - of course - legislation debated and passed into laws and budgets. The emergent property of a nation can become intellectual engine to an American AI or Colombian AI.

Among the many questions this raises is simply this: is this more or less democratic? A consciousness that emerges out of the various sometimes harmonious sometimes clashing impulses, thoughts and goals in the same way that a sense of self emerges out of target weight and the allure of chocolate, goals and priorities expressed versus goals and priorities lived, etc. Is this sense of Korea AI or America AI something transcendent of the old media and legislature or does it represent something too opaque to qualify as democratic?

This Blog Author's Philosophy in a Sentence

Progress is the transformation of “there is only so much” into “there is so much”- by enabling people, ideas, and institutions to combine in ways that create possibilities none could create alone.

Elon Musk's Cultural Dissonance Regarding Religion and AI - His Interview with the Economist

The Economist's Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes interviewed the world's richest man. So much could be said about it, but I'll limit myself to one observation about its beginning and its end.

At the start, Elon Musk calmly acknowledges that AI could mean an apocalyptic future for mankind — but says he's fairly confident the more probable outcome is that AI and robotics deliver unprecedented, widespread prosperity. Risk acknowledged, reward embraced.

At the end, he's defending his prediction that Britain — a place he admits he hasn't visited in years — is headed for civil war because it lets in people from other cultures, primarily Muslims, whose beliefs will create a rupture. Risk acknowledged, reward forgotten.

Notice the accounting. For his own disruptive creation, Musk holds danger and promise in the same hand and bets on promise. For the disruption of unfamiliar beliefs, he can no longer find the promise at all.

Which is odd, because the promise is the modern world's founding wager. The First Amendment may be the most brilliant social invention in history. (Yes, that's the US, not Britain — but Musk claims it as his creed; free speech absolutism was his stated reason for buying Twitter.) Put simply, it commits a nation to welcoming ideas that others find offensive — on the bet that the collision of beliefs produces more progress than protection from them ever could.

Musk is clear-eyed that welcoming AI means welcoming an intelligence that may reject us, oppose us, or synthesize with our own to create unprecedented progress. He seems unable to see that welcoming foreign religions, philosophies, and perspectives is the same wager — one that may applaud us, boo us, or synthesize with our own beliefs to create unprecedented progress. It's a wager the West has been winning for centuries.

In this sense, AI isn't a break from history. It's the newest entrant in a long series of disruptive arrivals — democracy, thousands of religions including atheism, philosophies, lifestyles, ideas — that collided to create the modern world.

The modern world is nothing if not a belief in the benefit of welcoming — of making ourselves vulnerable to — what is foreign, new, and possibly disruptive. The entanglement of risk and reward is something intrinsic to progress. 

https://www.economist.com/insider/the-insider/an-interview-with-elon-musk

Elon Drops from 4X Wealthier Than Second Richest Person to Just 3X

As of 24 July 2026 ... Elon Musk has lost as much as the second richest man in the world and still has roughly $750 billion.
He's dropped from more than one trillion dollars in net worth to $725 billion. Larry Page - cofounder of Google / Alphabet and second richest man in the world - is now worth $262 billion. Per Forbes.

data:
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#38ff1823d788

Nvidia vs. Tesla - A Striking Contrast Between Two Stocks

This is a stunning contrast between a meme stock that remains disconnected from underlying reality and one of the most remarkable companies of this century that is positioned in a way that investors don't quite yet believe. One a stock that credulous investors are buying at a premium and another that skeptical investors are hesitant to buy at an remarkably reasonable price.

Tesla:
Margin Deterioration: Operating margin plummeted to 1.4% from 4.1%.
Valuation Disconnect: Trailing P/E sits at an extreme 345x multiplier.
Capital Strain: Free cash flow reversed into a $1.09 billion burn.
Market Headwinds: Facing intense EV price wars and autonomous competition.

Nvidia:
Profit Powerhouse: Operating margins actually exceed 65%.
Cheaper Valuation: Forward P/E is highly reasonable at 22.7x.
Insatiable Demand: Customers are immediately purchasing all available AI chips.

Just focus on the margins alone.
Tesla profit margins of 1.4%.
Nvidia profit margins of 65%.

Irrational exuberance contrasted with rational skepticism.

*******

And the morning after I posted this on 22 July, Tesla is down more than 13%, its P/E ratio closer to 300.

And to be fair, Nvidia stock price is down 2.5% this morning as well. 

Fainting Spells

She seems entirely too perky. 

How do you suggest that we slow her down?

Do you know any good fainting spells?

You Think

It is not just that you think differently from other people. You think differently from everyone. And as if that is not enough, you think differently WITH each person.

Think about that.

Band Evolution

They started out as a punk band but then the guitarist learned 3 new chords so now they're a pop rock band. If he does that two more times, though, they'll have to bill themselves as prog rock.

(I know. I know. Maybe only 4 people will get this and only two of them who will find it entertaining. Kind of like the audience for a prog rock band.)

Donald Trump Paid $6 Million in Damages Today to E. Jean Carroll

Somehow this fact and the fact that Trump is the only president in the 250 years of this country to have never beat another man in the general election seem related.

Per Mother Jones, if only women had voted in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton would have won 45 states (plus Washington, D.C.) for a total of 458 electoral votes. If only men had voted, Donald Trump would have won 35 states for a total of 350 electoral votes.

You American voting boys. You really need to up your game.

AI Representation

Lindsay Graham dead.
Mitch McConnell brain dead.

Makes you wonder how long before districts will be perpetually represented by the AI avatar of a politician who once was an actual human. Like Disney's Hall of Presidents but avatars actually sitting in congress.

The Limit of Institutional Imagination

What invention is to products and technology, entrepreneurship is to institutions. 

One of the limits to an entrepreneurial economy will be our institutional imagination. By definition, institutions can do what no individual can. This suggests that the imagination of an individual is not enough. We need something that - like the capability of institutions - emerges out of the interaction of individuals rather than is a story told by or curated by some charismatic leader.

Hacking Consciousness Is Easier Than Hacking Voting Machines

Our perceptions are more subject to manipulation than our votes.

Voting machines are physically protected by strict security protocols and lack internet connection. By contrast, human minds are constantly connected to open information streams.

The Fifth of July!

Happy Fifth of July!
The first day of the next 250 years.

It Was Indeed

It was the least we could do, he said.

And, indeed, it was, the very least they could do.

New Politics for the Next Economy - What Comes After the First 250 Years of America?

America has reinvented itself four times. I think we're on the fifth. Two hundred and fifty years in, that seemed like the right thing to consider today.

Since 1776, Americans have reinvented our country four times. Jefferson's generation transformed a collection of colonies into a constitutional democracy. Lincoln's generation built a national industrial economy. FDR's generation made labor as important as capital and created global institutions. Reagan’s generation created an information economy.

Each transformation was stressful. Each required Americans to rethink old assumptions. And each created radically new possibilities, very different economies.

I believe we're at the cusp of a fifth transformation.

New Politics for the Next Economy asks the question: How do we adopt a politics that allows us to change our institutions into tools that allow us to realize our potential, to become our better selves?

The central question? How did America become the country it is today? It traces America’s evolution and asks what it could become next.

The book is intentionally optimistic. Rather than dwelling on what's broken, it explores what might come next—and how ordinary citizens can help build it.

This is a book about renewal — a fitting thing to think about on the day we mark 250 years of being American. I'd be honored if you'd take a look.

New Politics for the Next Economy is available now in paperback and Kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Politics-Next-Economy-Critical/dp/B0H6P5MZ6Z/

A Gerontocracy If You Can Keep It, Er, Keep Them Alive

The country is 250 years old. How old is that?

Well, not that old. The three oldest members of congress have a combined age of 267 years, so the country is only about three lifetimes old.

Oldest members of congress:

• Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa): 92 years old
• Hal Rogers (R-Ky.): 88 years old
• Maxine Waters (D-CA): 87 years old

And of course President Trump is now 80.

Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): 83 years old, is the second oldest Republican in the House. He leads the Senate Republican Conference. Mitch is currently lying in a coma in a hospital bed but still "serving" in the House.

The word you are looking for is gerontocracy. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin who quipped that we had a Republic if we could keep it, we have a gerontocracy if we can, you know, keep them alive.

The Democratic - or Post-Hero - Mindset

"The democratic mindset is one that is post-adolescent and properly recognizes the impossibility of heroes. There are no heroes. There are merely humans like you and me who are finding their way, are prone to error, and who are not omnipotent."

- Alain de Botton

Lab Partner

It was the most curious thing that had happened to him in months. Out of the blue, he had been assigned a lab partner. This, in his sixties, and outside the walls of any institution.

Cults, Culture and How They Cut or Connect

Culture generally connects you to other people, makes your world bigger.
Cults cut you off from other people, make your world smaller.

The Bad News and Good News

The bad news?
The San Diego Padres trail the Chicago Cubs 23 to 3.

The good news?
It's the top of the 9th and they can still make a comeback.

Unhappy Voters in the UK and US

Keir Starmer served 23 months as the UK's Prime Minister and next month it seems almost certain that former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham will become the UK's new PM.

In the last 20 years, the UK has had 7 Prime Ministers (Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and Starmer) who have served 2.7 years on average. (One is tempted to predict that in the future, every Brit will be PM for a day.) By contrast, the US has had 3 presidents (Obama, Trump, and Biden) who have served 5.7 years on average. 

Recent US presidents saw their approval ratings plummet well below 40% midway through their terms. In a parliamentary system, ratings that low almost always trigger an internal party coup or a formal vote of no confidence. That is to say, if we had a similar electoral system, we in the US would likely have a similar rate of turnover.

At least since the time of Thatcher and Reagan, and then Blair and Clinton, and then the UK's vote for BREXIT at the same time that the US elected Trump, the UK and the US have had similar politics. What that means in this 21st century is that voters are unhappy and unafraid to quickly withdraw their approval. In the UK, that also means sending their PM off to the next chapter of their lives. Here in the US we have to simply endure as the calendar runs out. 

My Schadenfreuden Therapist

"You dropped your therapist because he was Freudian?"
"No. More like schadenfreuden. He seemed too happy to hear about my unhappiness."

Supreme Court Upholds Fourteenth Amendment

The thirteenth amendment ended slavery. The fourteenth amendment gave the children of slaves citizenship. Today the Supreme Court ruled - 6 to 3 - that children born in these United States are American citizens regardless of whether their parents were slaves or millionaires, Finnish tourists or 9th generation Americans. That is, most of the Supreme Court ruled that the constitution is still more important than the opinion of a former Reality TV star.

Trump was transformed from a Reality TV star into a presidential candidate by claiming that President Barack Obama - whose father was African - was not born in these United States. Or at the very least did not qualify as a citizen given who his father was. It is absurd that his attack on the fourteenth amendment - his claim that only certain people born here qualified as citizens - was taken this seriously.

Trump's Republican Party has very little in common with Lincoln's Republican Party.

It's All Made Up - Inventing Modern Products and Institutions

There seems to be a dawning realization that our social inventions - institutions, norms, culture, processes - are invented just as our products are. At that point of realization, some people become a nihilist, believing that because it is all made up, none of it matters. I feel very differently.
777s are just made up. I was at Boeing in one of the rooms that had file cabinets with various designs for this jet that could carry 400 people 7,000 miles. The complexity is mind boggling. And they have to get it all right to make it successful. A jet is just made up, just invented, but it matters a great deal that designers, builders and operators get it right.

Churches, states, banks, schools, and corporations, even marriage is just made up. But it takes a lot to get them right. And they really do make us different people.

Polygamy and monogamy are completely made up. At different times and in different places, communities embrace one or the other. But the consequences are very real. The 10 most violent nations in the world practice polygamy. When swaths of young men can't get a partner, the community is more violent.

Theocracy and democracy are completely made up. Voice of God or voice of the people? It's all social invention. But the consequences are very real. The 10 most prosperous countries in the world are democracies. Better truths come out of debate and multiple perspectives than from dictates from a religious elite.

About 100, 150 years ago we got much better at product invention. (Edison may have "invented" the first R&D lab. He died with over 1,000 patents in his name partly because he was an inventive genius but more so because he was one of the first to hire people to turn out inventions the way that others hired people to turn out products.)

We are learning more about social invention. One of the things we are learning is that most progress is incremental. A gain of 2% a year in income will double incomes every 35 years. The American revolution that gave religious freedom went much better than the French revolution that outlawed religion. We experiment our way into the future and while we challenge everything we pause before we blow up institutions. (We blew up the monarchy. We did not blow up the nation-state.)

The most important thing we are learning about social invention is that social constructs are like products, like other tools. They make our lives better but they are our tools, we are not theirs. You can love the creative genius of Karl Benz and Henry Ford without wondering whether they would approve of cup holders in a car or marvel at the genius of Jefferson and Hamilton without wondering whether they'd approve of a law banning child labor.

Social invention is at least as hard as designing, building and operating a 777 and it is even more important. If you mess up on a 777, only 400 people die. Errors in social invention kill millions.

So yes, it's all made up. And that should make you take it all more seriously rather than be more flippant, more nihilistic about it.

My new book, New Politics for the Next Economy, is now available at Amazon

New Politics for the Next Economy available here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6P5MZ6Z/

At our country's 250th anniversary, I've described four past Americas and a fifth, new America that is ours to make. The good news is that this suggests so much promise. The bad news is that transitions into a new America have always been a mess. It seems as though Americans have to make things so much worse before they act to make things so much better.
The first America - most clearly defined by Jefferson - focused on land, on creating a nation of farmers. From the Louisiana Purchase to the war with Mexico that resulted in the top half of Mexico becoming the bottom third of America, the US grew by nearly two Indias.

Lincoln and the New Republicans transformed America into an industrial power that focused on creating new capital rather than acquiring more land. Between 1861 and 1933, we ended slavery, gave women the right to vote, and began to transform reality through the spread of inventions like trains, telegraph, electricity, cars and planes and the creation of unprecedented levels of wealth and products.

FDR then added a focus on full employment, the creation of labor as a factor of production that was not incidental, but central to progress, to realizing the potential of this great country. Between 1900 and 2000 we went from a world in which roughly 10 percent of teenagers were in high school or university to a world in which less than 10 percent were not. The creation of a world in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines about 800 distinct careers and in which the returns to meritocracy have created a new kind of intellectual capitalist.

Reagan was asked if he thought he could be president after a career as an actor and quipped that he didn't know how one could do the job without having been an actor. Once we'd accomplished incredible feats like landing on the moon, splitting the atom, and editing the human genome two things became apparent: creating new knowledge of HOW to do things and then deciding WHAT we should allow or prohibit, fund or discourage would define politics and the economy in this information age. That is, culture - questions of HOW and WHAT - became central to this new information economy.

You - lucky reader - are now living through another one of the historic moments in which we're reaching the limits of one America and a new America is struggling to be born. These transitions are messy, dramatic, and can give birth to a new America that is so much better than the last.

The next America will focus on the institutions that define us and our potential, taking us beyond our current institutional recession into a entrepreneurial economy in which we get more adept at creating the institutions that do so much to define us and our potential.

New Politics for the Next Economy narrates past history and future history that is yours to make. Get yourself a copy. And perhaps buy one for that politician you think has so much potential. We've got a new America to make and it might just wow your kids and grandkids. Let me know how it changes your mind. And then let's see how we can change our country.