The thing that's really interesting about the AI moment is that, unlike prior technology cycles, the hyperscalers themselves are the ones funding the build-out. So you don't have the same risk of a capital cycle bust that you had in, say, the fiber buildout of the late '90s, where it was funded by debt and then the whole thing collapsed.
The biggest risk for Uber is actually AV technology working perfectly and Uber not being a part of it. Because if AV technology works perfectly and Uber's not a part of it, then you essentially have players who have a lower cost structure than us who can come in and compete with us and essentially make our service irrelevant.
The formula that I used was when the company is doing well, double down. When the company is doing not so well, double down. I think that's actually the right formula because the greatest risk for Uber was irrelevance. If you slow down, you get lapped.
Drones enable us to have a complete digital picture of the grid to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And if it does happen, we can know about it sooner and faster and mitigate the response.
You have what is in my opinion the greatest degree of manufactured scarcity ever in an IPO and this is about to be the greatest transfer of wealth from retail investors since crypto
As natural disasters are getting more extreme and less predictable, this series makes sense of that tangle, and provides a prescient peek into FEMA's future.
The thing about activism is that there's a forcing function. You've done all this work. You own the stock. You think there's value. But the management may be destroying value or not realizing the value, and at some point you have to do something about it or you're just going to sit there and watch your investment go to zero.
Your PR team will have many heart attacks uh because you're not in the world of deterministic outputs anymore. So that's going to be a big cultural shift for Apple I think in this uh non-deterministic stochastic uh AI era.
I think the biggest lesson I've learned is that the market is a discounting mechanism for the future, not the present. And what that means is that when things look the darkest, that's often when the best opportunities exist, and when things look the brightest, that's often when the risk is highest.
The biggest risk for Uber is that we actually don't lean into AV enough, that we're not aggressive enough in terms of our partnerships, that we're not aggressive enough in terms of building product. Because I think AV is going to happen, and I want Uber to be the biggest beneficiary of AV, not the biggest victim of AV.
People who die from Ebola remain highly infectious. That's why burial teams are trained to handle them in protective gear, to disinfect the body and keep families from touching the dead. But those rules are breaking down.
I think the most dangerous thing is to think that you've mastered the markets. The markets are going to teach you a lesson just when you get most confident. And so the most important thing is to maintain a kind of intellectual humility and a curiosity and to never stop learning.
I think the most important thing in investing and in life is having the right temperament to deal with uncertainty and the unknown. Most people, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowing, they become fearful, and their decision-making is impaired. The best investors I know are actually energized by uncertainty because they see it as an opportunity.
People are really comfortable with the number of people who die on the roads. 40,000 people dead, 1.2 million globally and avoidable in many cases, isn't something upon which we share collective outrage or even moderate discomfort.
The problem is what you don't see on the box, the resilience, sovereignty and competition risks that come when a growing chunk of rural New Zealand's connectivity, including some mobile towers, schools and businesses, depends on a single foreign owned satellite provider.
Outside of defense and a few security sensitive corners of government, there's been remarkably little strategic thinking about what happens if Starlink stumbles, changes its business model, or simply decides New Zealand isn't a priority market anymore.
Litigation finance is simply treating litigation claims as financial assets. You know, when you think about what litigation is, stepping back, it's just an effort for the most part to get money to move from one party to another.
If you think you're a stock picker, just keep in mind you're competing against an algorithm that looks at millions of points of data designed by a ton of PhDs making a lot of money all in a room who do nothing but try and pick up on signals. And you're watching CNBC or deciding because you see a long line outside of Chipotle that you're somehow informed on the markets.
The first year or two will look a lot like you know, kind of early.com companies, some of which were complete flame out and some of which were enduring institutions. Amazon being an example.
Many pilots rely on self selected enthusiasts, vendor methodologies, and rough time saved calculations rather than robust measures of service quality or error rates.
I have almost like this superstitious thing that if I were to actually do an elective surgery to look younger, I would immediately get, my cancer would come back, or I would get Parkinson's, or it's almost like, recently I was thinking about, my dad loved that ancient fable, Appointment in Samara.
Zemblanity is when something unlucky, unwanted or undesired happens by design because it's already built in. It seems unexpected and like bad luck, but in hindsight it was to be expected and avoidable.
Investors who participate in the IPO will essentially be financing Musk's unproven AI ambitions in order to get a piece of uh high performing commercial space and telecom firm.
I think right now the crypto industry is to be honest is too transparent. It's actually extremely easy to track crypto funds. Um like the blockchain is a public ledger and then if you couple that with a a few centralized exchanges KYC information, you can track most of the transactions pretty accurately.
What I realized what she was doing was she was kind of testing my conviction, right? And she probably got a lot of calls from people who said, "Oh, I want to do this. I want to do that." And she's like, "Well, if you have the conviction in yourself to move out with no job, that shows you really kind of want it."
the bank is just benefiting from my misfortune, from the misfortune of people who can't afford to make any mistakes, from people who have no margin of error.
When you're really kind of starving for accurate information uh you know out of out of both sides in terms of what is the condition of the straight of Hormuz uh how is it you know what what is the traffic look like? What is the potential for that to get back online? what is the the knock-on effect going to be for the global economy? all of these, you know, unanswered questions. Um, I think that just makes markets, uh, you know, a little bit more aggressive and volatile when you get any snippet of good news
Billions of Saudi dollars were already reshaping the US economy. And now many of those tech companies are vulnerable as Iran targets their infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries in the ongoing war.
Against I would be worried about unknown unknowns. Pro. While there isn't much human data, the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong. Against anecdotes are not enough for me. Pro. Fair. It is for me.
A lot of these mega mergers over time don't prove valuable. I remember I first started covering media in the year 2000. That was the year that AOL acquired and ate Time Warner. And it was disastrous for both halves of that.
By banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSMC chips anyway, it's a lot less risky to go to war.
For everyone in London, whether you lived through the night was, therefore, a matter of luck. The odds were long, only one in 20,000 chances of being hit, said the papers. But still, every bomb landed somewhere. Each bomb might be that one. You couldn't know it wasn't till it hadn't fallen on you.
If you look at history, there's as much danger of an autocrat coming from the far left as from the far right. I believe the far left is as dangerous as the far right. It's the extremes that present a threat to society.
The speed of which AI is changing we're not adapting our society fast enough... the biggest issue confronting our country today and other countries is the speed of which this change is occurring is society moderating that fast enough?
It's becoming increasingly untenable for prediction markets to sit in the middle of the tension between gambling on the news and trying to self-regulate such that they don't encourage insider trading.
if this war is extended if it if if we see um no offramp for for for the US and Israel and it has to continue and therefore that choke point stays closed. At some point we're going to see you're going to see a supply crunch and that's what that that's really the the major fear.
there are about 20 million barrels of oil that transit the straits of Hormuz every day. That's almost three times as much as Russia exports. So, you know, this is a problem three times as great as the problem that created the panic on global oil markets at the start of the Ukraine war.
