All Episodes
The Diff — 299 episodes
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?
Exposed! Your Torrid Love Affair With Airline Fees
Building for Power Users
Antithesis: Debugging Debugging
AI-Based Disinformation Will Not Be An Especially Big Deal in the 2024 Election
Is "Social" an Enduring Category or Just a Phase?
Being Not-a-Tech-Company
Momentum, Intellectual Humility, and Missing Pieces of the Model
A Theory of Grift
Why Does Any Company Own its Corporate Headquarters?
How Many Trillion-Dollar Companies Should There Be?
How Should Higher Education Be Financed?
Graduating to Parallelized Strategies
In Investing, and in Life, The More Timeless the Discovery the More It's a One-Off Gain
Can Argentina Dollarize? Should They?
Risk: Too Much, Too Little, the Wrong Kind, or the Wrong Measure?
What Do Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake Really Prove?
LLMs and Communicating in More Dimensions
The Long, Long View of Interest Rates
The Economics of Startup Swag
A Bull Market in Facts; A Bear Market in Narratives
Predicting, and Knowing What to Predict
Paradoxes of Productivity Growth
"Capital Light" is a Trait of the Cycle as well as the Industry
Making A Match
Price-First or Thesis-First Research?
The Supply Chains of Bits and Atoms
Instacart is the Best and Worst Grocery Business Imaginable
Should We Expect Valuations to Mean-Revert Over Time?
Inside the Decline of Stack Exchange
Information as a Universal Complement and Universal Substitute
You Hate The Products You're An Early Adopter Of Because of Invisible Base Rates and Anthropic Bias
Don't Get Addicted to Fantasy Economics
It's Hard to Build a Durable Business Selling Durable Goods
Was it Worth it for Facebook to Become Meta?
AI Turns UGC into a PVP Zone
The Economics of Engineering Blogs
Reddit and Platform Politics
Where Does Stripe Go From Here?
Unavoidable Drawdowns
In Defense of Made-Up Metrics
Data, Prices, and Central Planning
Cava: One Brand, Many Channels
Why Do Equities Build So Much Wealth?
The Relationship-Transactional-Relationship Business Cycle
SVB in Retrospect
Why The Answer Is So Often Ads
Working with a Copilot
Dueling Over Platforms
Bet-the-Company Ideas
A Short 100-Question Diligence Checklist
The Banks: What's Next?
Financial Institutions and Franchise Value
Airlines: Unit Economics, Served Four Ways
Empiricism Disappears into the Black Box
Internal Software as a Competitive Advantage
History Begins Again for Big Tech
Companies and Entropy
Equity as an Option on Future Reinvestment
Where Fraud Lives and Why
In a Stable Career Track, Where Does the Risk Go?
Is AI More VBA or Steel?
Closing Industry Frontiers
How Companies Think About Layoffs
"A Solution in Search of a Problem" is a Low-Rates Phenomenon
The Uses of Friction
Why Finance is Hard to Decentralize
What Part of the System Needs to be Smart?
Money, Credit, Trust, and FTX
The Beloved Regional Grocery Store Chain Model
Kroger / Albertsons: Buying Data in Bulk
Is Mental Math Part of the Current Meta?
Snowflake Revisited
The Rise of Single-Result Search Products
Newsletter Economics in 2022
The Counterintuitive Economics of Hiring
The Porsche IPO and Mass Luxury
How Does Upwork Work?
The Other "MoviePass Economy"
A Taxonomy of Drawdowns
Turning Non-Tradables Into Tradables
Hand-Crafted Artisanal Liquidity Provision
The Economics of Noncompetes
Inventing Demand
Moderna's Bets: Moonshots and Platforms
Tegus and the Research Stack
Understanding Jane Street
Is Everything Getting Old?
Correlations go to One, in Good Ways and Bad
The Perks of the Recent Keynesian Tech Boom
The Network Before the Internet
NextEra Energy's Green Growth
Data's Limits and the Judgment Gap
Clean Trades and Dirty Hedges
Valuation Metrics: A Cross-Examination
AWS for Industry, But Better: The Railroad Investment Case
Snap: The Relentless Quest to Own the Interface
$1 Trillion Worth of Risky Loans Packaged Into Highly-Rated Securities is not the End of the World
Buy Now, Pain Later?
Cars Manufacture the Modern Middle Class
Refactoring Restaurants
A Future Where Most Media Is Produced for an Audience of One
The Gym Business: Usage, Slacking, and the Duel Between Margins and Lifetime Value
Regulating Big Tech is a Product Problem
NFTs and the Money/Status Exchange Rate
What Works in SaaS Pricing
HelloFresh: Mealkits Can Work After All
Plaid: Data Layer to Payments Layer
Match Group and Managed Dissatisfaction
How Would You Run a 10,000-Year Endowment?
VC and the Systematic Search for Outliers
The Factorio Mindset
What Happens When You Buy at an All-Time High?
Learning from Overdetermined Failure
Reflexivity in Tech Returns: Talent Chasing Money Chasing Talent
Keeping Options Open: The Equity Compensation Story
Facial Recognition as a Pareto Technology
Daloopa: Data-to-Information Accelerant
AndCo Remixes Commercial Real Estate
The Liberty Complex: Cash Flow Today, Taxes Eventually
Drone Delivery: Accelerating to Inevitable
BuzzFeed and the Platform Squeeze
What Happened to all the Diamonds in the Rough?
Defensive Monopolies
The Coming Carbon Short-Squeeze
The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization
What's a Ponzi Scheme? What Isn't?
Blimps, Bots, and the Future of Cargo
FedEx: Two Bets on Network Effects
Discourses on Big Tech
Your Life is (Almost) a Call Option
Identity and the Login: Who Owns "Who's That?"
Yandex: Google Through the Looking Glass
Modern Financial History Begins in 1998
Globalized Talent and the Brand Grab
Freshworks' Efficient Frontiers
Warby Parker and EssilorLuxottica: Irresistible Force, Immovable Object
The Dividend Futures Disaster Revisited: Anatomy of a Very Bad Trade
Magalu: Inside Brazils' Omnichannel Powerhouse
You And Your Investment Research
Taking Strategy Seriously
Newsletters Can Move Markets
Illumina: "View Source" for Life
The Robinhood Challenge
Chumboxes or Trust-Busters? Taboola and Outbrain
We are All Buffettologists Now
Shifting the Global Kuznets Curve: Why Climate Matters More
A Normal Country?
Prediction Markets and Worse is Better
Paradox Interactive, The Little Big Media Conglomerate
The Economics of Pseudonymity
Building Parallel Financial Systems
Crypto as an Overheated Emerging Market
Stripe and Solid-State Economics
The 2x2 Inflation Debate
Surviving a Combinatorial Explosion
Cloudflare's Intelligent Design
Decoupling, Digital Currency, and the Consumer of Last Resort
Partial Deregulation as an Antipattern
Electrocloud!
Where Apple Can Own I/O
The Value of Time Rounds to Either Zero or Infinity
What Salesforce is Selling (and Buying)
Understanding Coinbase
IBM: The Center of Gravity
What Happened in Texas
Three Bull Cases for Starlink
Why Did One Internet Subculture Spot Covid-19 So Early?
An Airline IPO? In This Economy?
Four Refoundings
Messaging Wars, Round Two
The Road Not Taken: Stripe, Ant, PayTM & Defi
The Technocrats' Recovery
Homesteading Mental Models
What's Happening in Logistics
DoNotPay: The API for IRL
Sharing and Owning Standards
Taiwan and Supply Chain Frenmity
Just One Thing or Every Single Thing?
Wish: E-Commerce, Fast and Slow
Roblox: Tweenage Mutant MMT-ers
What’s Gold For?
Understanding Airbnb
How Bubbles and Megaprojects Parallelize Innovation
Big Tech Sees Like a State
Media Refragmentation and Funnel Capture
Hardware-as-a-Service
Engineering a Conglomerate
The WeWork Arc
How the Pandemic is Fixing Some of the Real Estate Market's Flaws
Inside the House Report on Big Tech and Competition: Part II
The Gamer/Arbitrageur to Generalist Pipeline
Surfing the Right S-Curve
Big Tech at the End of History
Banking When You Can't Bank on Anything: Part 2
Banking When You Can't Bank on Anything: Part 1
Ant Group and China's Fitful Convergence
Business Model Meta-Models
Palantir: On Business, Cults, and Politics
Amazon: A New Kind of Antitrust Risk
Newsletters and New Media Economics
Working in Public and the Economics of Free
To Understand Jio, You Need To Understand Reliance
The Bullwhip Effect
SPACs as a Call Option on Hype
The Hack: When Crime Pays Fractions of a Penny on the Dollar
The Depressing Bull Thesis for Rocket Mortgage
In Defense of Hiring Based on Side Projects
Software, Full-Stack, and Sumo Startups
Free Press vs Free Expression
The Invention of Postwar Europe
Communications, Commerce, and Money as the High-Order Bit
Lemonade: Solving the Market for Lemons
Incumbents, Not Startups, Are Regulatory Arbitrageurs
The Bloomberg Terminal Shows How to Create Virtual Economic Cluster
You Learn From Good Businesses and Bad Trades
Bretton Woods Revisited
The Future of Remote Work is not That Remote
VC and Public Choice: Logo-Hunting and Optionality
V-Shaped Recovery for Me, L-Shaped Recovery for Thee: The Aftermath
The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Airline Fuel Hedges
Sparta, LARPs, and Ivies