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The Diff — 320 episodes · page 1 of 4
The Super-Rich as Financial Sin-Eaters
Life with Nonzero Interest Rates
How Far in the Future Should You Be Trying to Live?
Forward Deployed
The Economics and Politics of Pacing the Frontier
Staying Calibrated
The Surprisingly Weak IPO-Housing Effect
Ad-Supported Platforms are a Unique Antitrust Problem
Financial Entrepreneurship in the Indexing Era
FP&A as the Telemetry and Counterespionage
Who Hedges Where?
What We Periodically Relearn About Rent Control
The Lots-of-Low-Satiety-Calories Business Isn't What it Used to Be
The Bad Apple Problem
Cultural Stasis? Or Just Rising Budgets, a Limited Supply of Good Movie Release Dates, and the Kelly Criterion?
The Mythical Agent-Minute
Blind Extrapolation as a Powerful Force in Finance
What Does it Mean to Have a Trillion Dollars?
It's Maturity Transformation All The Way Down
Using AI for Writing like a Responsible Adult
The Rocketship
What Can You Learn from a Deterministically Chaotic Market Simulation?
Why does Resource Extraction Produce Such Concentrated Wealth?
Dead Airlines
Are the AI Labs Ready for the AI Backlash?
Ad-Based Platforms Have Mostly Solved Optimal Taxation
Ring, Cloudflare, and the Supply Chain of State Capacity
Uncanny AI
Handy Robots
Apple, Occasionally a Commodities Trading House
Are We Already Building a Piecemeal AI Data Royalty Model?
America Has a Comparative Advantage in Handling Global Disorder
The Year of Convergence
Routers, Apps, AGI
In Defense of Generative Video Accelerationism
Technological Progress is a Stack of S-Curves; Diffusion is a Stack of J-Curves
Media Gluts Happen at the Level of Distribution, not Content
A Sense of History
On Faking It 'Til You Make It
The Autistic Half-Century
Rumor Markets
Figure and the Crypto Mullet Strategy
Corporate Populism
Concentrate
What Would the Aftermath of the AI Bust Look Like?
Strip-Mining the Maybesphere
The Finance of Alchemy
Compensation as Game Design
What We'll Lose With AI
In Defense of the Ad Economy
Gonzo Startups
What Happened to Working Your Way Up from the Mailroom?
Search Remains the Best Business in History
Democratizing Complicated Financial Products is Inevitable, but Fraught
Adversarial Attacks in Statistical Arbitrage
Competing Elite-Selection Mechanisms
Arbs Close, Infrastructure Remains
When Step One is to Light Money on Fire and Measure How Fast it Burns
Thinking-Things-Through Privilege
Information Economies and Institution Economies
Finance as a Scale-Invariant Global Computer
"Do Firms Need Juniors?" Might be the Wrong Question
There's More Than One Efficient Market Paradox
Klarna and the Two Pivots of 2022
Text and Telos
Tools, Agents, Interfaces, and Synthetic Luck: AI Interaction Models
Tokenomics, Revisited
Offshoring and AI Agents
Money and Legitimacy
Auto-Paternalism
Look for Boring First
Will The EU Choose to Compete?
On Currencies
What, Exactly are we Trying to Tax?
Mission and Variance
Building the Oracles
Our Surprisingly Capital-Abundant World
P&L Beta: How Much You Keep out of How Much You Make
Meta's Open-Source AI Economics, Re-Revisited
Software is the new Hardware
The Quality Factor
“Bullshit Jobs” is a Terrible, Curiosity-Killing Concept
The Supply Chain of Talent
Fertilizer and Toxins
"Nobody Knows Anything": Backtests are Hard
The Bid/Ask View of Who Gets to Raise and What Gets Traded
Details!
Get Used to a More Hallucinatory Search Experience
One Edge or Many? Reflections on Renaissance Technologies
Invisible Efficiencies
Martingale Beliefs
AI Ruins Education the way Pulleys Ruin Powerlifting
Who's Afraid of Index Funds?
Most Market Phenomena are Older than they Look
The Data Business, At Three Resolutions
Algorithmic Collusion
The Duolingo Disaster That Wasn't
The Case for Marking More to Market
Death Spirals
Should You Hedge It All?