Crypto is one big annoying glorified Pokémon card that life is too short for.

You should be eating more fermented carbs. Almost every major civilization had a fermented carbohydrate. Europe: sourdough bread India: Idli and dosa (fermented rice dal) West Africa: fufu (fermented cassava) East Africa: injera (fermented teff) Central America: pozol (fermented maize) Interestingly, China and Japan, don't have fermented carbs. And they also seem to handle the modern diet better than the rest of us. Maybe the reason why is that we're eating unfermented carbs...

If you want to figure out which team is which and you're struggling, look at the goalkeeper. It's (usually) not an immigrant.

This line of thinking could be used to justify any form of granting citizenship. If someone’s parents committed fraud to make their child a US citizen and that child became a great person should we legalize fraud? If someone who crossed the border illegally did something good, should we open the borders? If someone won money on a lottery ticket, should we buy 1 million lottery tickets? The discourse quality on this app is so low, from SpaceX to garbage like this.

In 10-20 years India may well have better infrastructure than the United States. I’m not kidding/rage baiting. A lot can happen in 10-20 years. Maybe we should spend more time building infrastructure instead of mocking Indians because we’re so superior.

Guess how many employees Facebook (Meta) has. 78,000. (Estimated 45,000 to 55,000 in the USA) Guess how many employees instagram had when it was bought. 13. For 30 million monthly active users (MAUs). Now do WhatsApp. 55 employees for 450 million active users. So instagram had 3 million MAUs per employee and WhatsApp had 10 million MAUs per employee. Facebook has 4 billion MAUs which comes out to 50,000 MAUs per employee. So the businesses they run, instagram and WhatsApp, were 60x and 200x more efficient when MAUs should be inversely correlated with employees because of efficiencies of scale. When Elon bought Twitter he cut roughly 80% of the staff. After that they are sitting at 550 million MAUs and about 2,750 employees. 200,000 MAUs per employee for Twitter/X, just about 4x as efficient as Facebook/Meta. I understand that Meta and X maintain a sales organization whereas WhatsApp and Instagram did not but is that really necessary? I’ve spent mountains of money advertising with the big tech megacorps without interacting with their sales people or being sold. In fact, I avoid them as much as I can, as I’m sure many others do. Okay, so what explains this? Why are these companies so massively over staffed? My uninformed speculative guess is it’s all politics. The owners would get politically targeted if they didn’t create jobs and the fact that they do gives them political power because the jobs are staffed by voters. I understand how preference cascades work (look them up) but this is probably the underlying economic incentive engine behind why you get political monoculture at these companies. It’s not just human social dynamics. It’s because the jobs are fake because they’re just about government politics and that only works if the company votes all for the same party. Explain X then. How did they slash 80% of the jobs? It was all politics. Buy the DMs, fire the other side’s employees, and then turn the platform into the first right leaning major social network. Think about which advertisers they lost in the process. It was all the companies that generally oppose X’s politics right? Why do governments hire so many people to do nothing? Mainly votes. You’re paying someone to vote to keep their job. So you get to keep yours at government and maintain access to tax and money printing revenues. The press is the fourth estate. It is part of the government. And social media and big tech is the press today. So why would the same principles not apply? All this stuff is fake. Government is 40% of GDP. An unelected body of bankers decide how much money to print every month. We think of the country as this bastion of free market capitalism but in reality, while there are pockets of it at the low and medium scales, as soon as you get big you become enmeshed with the government. Because it’s crazy powerful and has, effectively, infinite or nearly infinite resources. Sorry guys buts it’s all a bunch of bullshit and probably has always been, and of course, was made much worse in 1971. If I can say one more thing in this sleep deprivation induced, probably wrong and illogical, rant: People do not understand how the machine works. From economists to lawyers to business people. There is a huge disconnect between people’s concepts of our system and how they actually work. A top 1% in skill person will understand their niche but nothing outside of it and they cannot zoom out and understand the big picture. Our brains were not set up to do that. Anyways, have a nice day everyone.

My SpaceX IPO take: 1. SpaceX’s near 100% reliance on government contracts before Starlink makes the company’s success less cool 2. Reusable rockets are amazing. Such a powerful moment when that was demonstrated for first time. 3. Starlink is amazing too and now accounts for most of their revenue. 4. Tesla is more impressive as an accomplishment because it was a consumer driven success from beginning to end that was less dependent on government money (though still was) 5. Most people don’t understand that you need to allow people to become rich. Otherwise there is less incentive to work hard and invent. If your country blocks this, these talented people will otherwise leave your country or channel their talents into being a mob boss or corporate/government cronyism. It’s better to explain this to people who don’t understand it than to shame them. 6. Cool that so many employees became rich at the same time. It’s an amazing human accomplishment and a testament to America’s greatness but, I dunno, it feels overrated and fake somehow, so I can’t celebrate it as much I might’ve a few years ago.

Someone on X said that he had acromegaly (long-term exposure to human growth hormone, or HGH) which I rejected but now that I see his teeth, it may be true. HGH makes your jaw enlarged, but not your teeth so you get big gaps between them. PS “racked” means intoxicated.

Just a couple of days after I tweeted that real estate brokers primarily use their persuasion skills to convince you to take a bad deal rather than to negotiate with the opposing party, the senior broker accidentally copied me on an email to his junior broker doing just that. When I replied, instead of apologizing, he just doubled down. Not all brokers are like this but many are because that’s how the incentives work. Many service providers have bad incentives as part of what is considered “market” or generally accepted terms. When that happens, you can partially solve this problem through a mutual reference or sourcing the service provider through a community they share with you. That forces them to think more long-term than transactionally.

“U.S. forces disabled an unladen oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, June 8, after the vessel violated the ongoing blockade against Iran by attempting to sail to an Iranian port.”

Amazing things are happening in America every day. You just gotta know where to look.

In May 2026, 54% of our sales on Amazon went to Amazon. On top of that, we paid them advertising. 8% of our sales were not FBA, meaning that Amazon never touched the product. It's very complicated to sell on Amazon. You need to keep an eye on all these fees and more I'm forgetting I'm sure: 1. Fees for customer service 2. Commission fee 3. Monthly storage fee 4. FBA pick and pack fee 5. Shipping products into Amazon 6. Amazon's placement fees (them distributing it across their network) 7. Deal fees 8. Coupon fees 9. Fees for reviews 10. Anti-counterfeiting fees 11. Fuel surcharge 12. Return processing fees 13. Too much stock at Amazon fees 14. Not enough stock at Amazon fees 15. Monthly Professional Selling fee 16. Fee to removing products from Amazon 17. Fee for sending in wrong size products to Amazon 18. Fee for throwing things away 19. Fee for granting a refund 20. Credit card processing fee (they're forcing us to pay with bank accounts now) for paying for the fees with a credit card 21. Amazon advertising fees 22. Amazon warehouse distribution fees 23. Amazon global logistics

I am completely stuck on a Us highway right now. Common car accidents and fake made up construction where they close 3 of 4 lanes and exits because … you can’t even tell when you finally get past it. On safe public transport, I can get work done. I am not enraged and depleted by a heightened stress response for things flying off a trailer in front of me. Full self driving doesn’t solve this because full self driving can’t tell the truck in front of you is swerving because the driver who was a refugee from a country without war is now eating a sandwich. And full self driving doesn’t come with a helicopter.

School choice and vouchers work better than a bad public school system for kids with educated and interested parents. A good public school system works better for everyone. People forget that we live in communities. Your child will work with and interact with their poorly educated peers whether they like it or not. Spending all your time at private schools, country clubs, and in gated communities seems cool until you realize that that’s South Africa and dysfunctional Central and South America.

Very bearish for quality of life in the United States and any country influenced by our social media. You don’t hold a door open for someone you don’t trust. It raises the cost of doing business. And people will live more solitary sadder lives, because they don’t trust. The demographic trends in the US are much worse than people realize. Not only are high trust people being replaced by low trust ones, Zoomers (Gen Z) are measurably dumber than their preceding generations (no school for 2-3 years, cell phones in class, etc). I’ve written before about super Zoomers, kids who used AI and YouTube to outpace preceding generation’s best so I’m saying this applies to all Zoomers, but the data on average is the data on average. These changes aren’t noticeable year to year but over 10 years, you reflect and think “whoa things are different”. Education can fix both these problems but the US’s current solution is to give up, to get as many kids out of the system as possible. I’m not kidding. We as a nation think it’s so unfixable, many states are moving to a voucher program where instead of going to a local public school, they get money that would have been allocated to that school which parents can spend on the child. Unthinkable in most countries I think. Must get worse before it gets better I think.