About 50% of American workers use AI. They report, by the way, three times productivity gains on the tasks they use AI for. They're just not giving that to companies, right? Because why would you? Like you're worried you'll get fired if AI shows you that you're more efficient.
When you go to the supermarket and you look at two packages of meat, there's no way for you to tell which one may be completely contaminated with bacteria and which one is relatively clean. And what that does is that benefits the companies who cheat, the companies that are sloppy because it's more expensive to produce food without these pathogens in it.
The promise is that they can beat the experts at predicting inflation, elections, and FDA approvals. But right now, roughly 90 percent of the action is sports. Is this a future we want to bet on?
obeying bad incentives--shading a headline for clicks, keeping the found wallet because no one's watching--is "loser behavior," a surrender of the hardest and most human task: figuring out right from wrong for yourself.
These uh these math models have discovered the the hardest problem of advanced mathematics which is authorship uh contribution. Who actually did the work? Who gets lead left on the paper?
The best way to increase your stock price in America today isn't to improve your product or to sell more goods and services. It is to have your stock anointed by the high priest of American markets, aka the president. If you can do that, great things will occur.
financial incentives, professional identity, and language itself ("bone-on-bone," "the widowmaker") conspire to push patients toward interventions that can do more harm than good.
It's not a conflict of interest. It's a business model. And essentially what you have in America is slowly but surely we're monetizing everything. We monetize healthcare. We monetize education. We monetize uh enragement online. And now the president is monetizing the full faith and credit and power of the White House.
financial incentives, professional identity, and language itself ("bone-on-bone," "the widowmaker") conspire to push patients toward interventions that can do more harm than good
The beauty of permanent capital is that you can say no to a lot of things. You don't have a fundraising cycle, you don't have to worry about returning capital to LPs, you can take a very long view. And that long view is actually a massive competitive advantage because most of the investment world is driven by relatively short-term incentives.
The most dangerous thing in a company is when people start managing up instead of managing the truth. Once that happens, you lose your ability to course correct, because the information flowing to the people who need to make decisions is filtered through what people think those decision-makers want to hear.
Most people think about incentives as financial. The real incentive is truth. If you create a culture where people can tell you the truth, you will make better decisions than your competitors. And making better decisions than your competitors over a long period of time is the only sustainable advantage.
Most people think about building a company as building a product. I think about it as building a system of people and incentives and culture that then builds the product. The product is an output, not the thing you're actually building.
When we look at the gap, what we recognize is a lot of the C-suite have the ability to shape the transformation or the change. And they have a lot to gain from it typically. So there's sort of built-in incentive for them to be excited about change and historically they've usually done well in change. That's how they've gotten to where they have. When you look at sort of the employee base, they have a lot less agency in it. So they aren't necessarily deciding on the change or part of the process. They're sort of the receivers of it. And anytime we don't have agency then we start to sort of buy in less to the change.
Smith emerges as a penetrating psychologist who understood that our deepest hunger isn't for wealth but for respect--and that this hunger, left unexamined, leads individuals and societies alike into serious trouble.
When people have to pitch a story, not a fifty page business case, and justify why their ideas deserve another few million dollars, they suddenly start thinking like founders instead of managers.
Alan thinks about the financial system the way a historian would, studying the incentives, guardrails, and market structure that determine how things play out.
The 0.1% have their own transportation. They don't give a shit about 4-hour TSA lines. They have their own police forces. They live in buildings in neighborhoods that are of incredible security. They have their own health care. So what is their vested interest?
I think wanting to make money and help people are not mutually exclusive. I think there are a lot of people who do really good work and make a really good living doing it.
The lesson out of that which is sort of a textbook lesson which is that you don't want government picking winners and losers cuz a it's not very good at it and b even if it is good at it like to whom does that benefit a crew?
Prediction market players want to be the news, and they've even devised new, frankly unconvincing frameworks for why they should be considered legitimate sources of information — instead of just anything-goes casinos.
Fights sell ratings. And so you see that, I think, on the media oftentimes. Talking heads are on radio. But the reality is the collegiality that exists between members.
If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out and hunt. You actually don't go out and bring back the the the big deer or whatever you're hunting the bacon. You don't bring home the bacon in the first place. You don't even try because you're so worried about this tall poppy syndrome in your society.
Formula One is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-plus person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one listener put it — the Real Housewives of the Garage, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama.
Just beneath the surface of the global economy, there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom war, chaos, and sanctions can be a great business opportunity.
8mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
