Tag Archives: business

Fantasy Sports as Preparation for Investing

Investing is the greatest game in the world. All previous games I played were preparation for financial investment—such as collecting baseball cards, fantasy sports, poker, chess, and Monopoly. Investing is the ultimate game because it is a combination of all other games. Investing has the strategic thinking of chess, the research and tracking of fantasy sports, and the monetary stakes of poker—except investing is better than all of them, because it combines those aspects together into one omni-game.

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The Future One-Man Business

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The best companies in the world are led by a genius founder with a vision. This founder envisions how the company can become successful, then delegates that vision to subordinates. Lower-level employees are essentially like drones. The founder/CEO tells them exactly what to do to fulfill his vision, then they do it.

Take Jeff Bezos and Amazon for example. Bezos has specific detailed protocols for all his managers (now including his successor CEO), telling them what to do, then they tell their lower-level employees exactly what to do, so on and so on, to the lowest-level warehouse worker and delivery driver. It’s all designed by the leader at the top. Essentially what all great business leaders like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk really want (or what they wish they could have) is an entire company made of clones of themselves.

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Are We in an AI Bubble?

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It seems fairly obvious at this point that AI is going to have a massive impact on the future. I wrote about this seven years ago, and it has only become more evident since then.¹ However, financial “experts” are saying the stock market is in the midst of an AI bubble akin to the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s. They think AI companies are overvalued and advise selling off your AI investments. But the lesson from the dot-com bubble was not to NOT invest in internet companies. It was quite the opposite.

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Indie Publishing is Free Market Publishing

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Professional publishing is fiat publishing, while indie publishing is free market publishing. The professional publishing industry, which consists of the “Big 5” book publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster) and literary agencies, are like central banks in the economy: they manipulate the market and create artificial scarcity by limiting which authors and books can be published. Indie publishing (self-publishing and small independent presses) is the free market for books, as it has a more natural flow of supply and demand. Everyone has the same opportunity, and success is more closely correlated with merit—or how much readers actually enjoy a book.

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Plan Your Creative Career Like Evolution

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Planning your life can be difficult because there are so many possibilities. It may be best to take a lesson from nature and choose your career path like evolution. DNA evolves by reproduction with random mutations. Many variations are created, not knowing which will succeed. When one trait does succeed, it replicates and builds upon that mutation. This system of evolution clearly works—it produced us, humans, from a single cell of bacteria.

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AI Songs: The History and Future of Music

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First there was AI images, then there was AI text. It was only a matter of time until AI music came along—and with Suno, it is here. The AI music generator (and others such as Udio) has become my latest obsession. It is simple to use with surprisingly good results. Just enter a text prompt with a subject matter and/or musical genre, and it will quickly produce a 2-minute song of professional quality. Of course the results vary—some songs are better than others. But in a short amount of time I have already created a few gems, such as this 1980s-style electronic anthem for “Time Zone Weird” that I can’t get out of my head:

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Hollywood Thinks They Know Everything

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The great screenwriter William Goldman had a famous quote about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” His full quote elaborated: “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” Goldman meant that, beforehand, nobody (neither the producers, studio executives, directors, actors, or critics) could accurately predict which movies would be breakout hits or which would be box office duds. There are always surprises in both directions: movies everyone thinks will succeed end up bombing, while surefire flops become smash hits. At least that’s the way the movie industry used to work. Now Hollywood thinks they know everything.

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Algorithmic Fiction is Not For Me

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Welcome to the age of algorithmic fiction. Thanks to tools like GPT-4, a human writer with a library of previously written books can simply write a one-page outline for a new novel, and AI can write an entire novel in their style. In many cases the book will be good enough to pass as if it was written by the human authors themselves, allowing writers to publish more frequently. However, GPT fiction will only work with formulaic writers whose books are all similar. In other words, those writers who were already writing algorithmic fiction before the aid of AI.

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The Success of Succession

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Since Succession premiered in 2018, I repeatedly heard so many people I respect say how great the show was, but I hesitated to start watching. It wasn’t that I doubted them; I was just waiting to find the time to dive in. (Too much content.) With the final season airing this year, I thought it would be a good time to catch up before the finale. Part of the reason I hesitated to start Succession was fear of getting absorbed in yet another series that would go on indefinitely—or get canceled prematurely. Knowing there was an end in sight allowed me to begin. Long story short, it turns out all those people were right: Succession is a great show. It is highly dramatic with surprising twists and turns, but it is also extremely funny—funnier than most sitcoms, full of classic one-liners. It ranks up there with The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad as one of the top television series of all time.

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Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2022

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1. Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious (2018) by Eric Wargo

This is a fascinating book about the type of precognition often experienced in dreams, built off the work of J.W. Dunne. Author Eric Wargo provides numerous famous examples of precognitive dreams, often about traumatic events such as plane crashes or the sinking of the Titanic. Wargo claims such cases of precognition are actually “prememory”: your unconscious mind remembering a future memory, not of the event itself, but of your emotional reaction to learning news of the event. Both the author and I are aware of how crazy and “woo” this all sounds, but Wargo’s research is scientifically rigorous, and he walks a fine line of being both skeptical about paranormal claims but also open-minded to their possibilities (something I wish more on both sides of the paranormal/skeptical debate were willing to do).