What's My Age Again?
w.308 | Call Options, Underclass, Services, & Texas Triangle
Dear Friends,
One of my favorite things about writing this newsletter is the responses. When Richard responds, it’s often about the music. This time, though, it was that I had not given due credit to the author of last week’s AI article. The author, Tom Slater, is the highly successful manager of Scottish Mortgage, a publicly traded fund with ~£15.54 billion in assets invested in high-growth opportunities. And 15% of Scottish Mortgage is invested in SpaceX. If you've been wanting exposure, you didn’t need to go through SPV. The annual management fee is 0.30% p.a! Nice.
My Berkshire friends (Billings, Gallagher) have been telling me the story of Scottish for years, but I hadn’t followed Tom Slater in particular. Always nice to learn something new and see an example of British excellence.
Today's Contents:
Sensible Investing: Trends
Weeklies: Selfie & Song
Sensible Investing - Trends
This is an explanation of recent stock market movement dynamics, with the rapid rise of call options trading in a single session yesterday, as the system has devolved into full-on gambling.
If you take nothing else from this post, understand that $2.6 trillion in daily call volume is not a sign the market is healthy, it is a sign that speculation has overwhelmed investment, and historically that pattern resolves in ways that hurt the people who came late to it.
“Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass,” from the NYTimes, was shared with me this week. David George from a16z had a data-driven rebuttal of sorts with The 'AI Job Apocalypse' is a Complete Fantasy.
George's strong points are his data-backed economic examples and theories. But it’s not a full rebuttal of the NYTimes, which focuses more on the transition.
"The doomers are wrong about the destination, the optimists are wrong about the journey,” a remark made in the comments, is the right synthesis.
The biggest issue isn’t if the job apocalypse is true, or on what timeline. It’s that a large and growing group of people feels strongly that ‘a sliver of a segment is getting stupid rich and I’m not.’ This creates a deep emotional appeal from otherwise smart and rational people for bad economic policy ideas and a belief that ‘behind every great fortune there is a crime’. Alternative definitions of crime are where opinions diverge.
Services are still services. And that’s fine. There’s still a lot to be done. Seeing the announcement of partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, including PE and banking partners, for AI deployment makes me more skeptical about the job apocalypse, as it’s an admission that last-mile implementation is tricky. And, my friends, that’s where the story is the same as it’s ever been.
Blackstone’s operations group is led by Rodney Zemmel, who spent 30 years at McKinsey and was a runner-up in the last MD election. Again, it’s all the same stuff, packaged differently.
One thing I’ve learned about ‘change management’ is that people don’t upskill themselves en masse unless there is an explicit threat of removal. That includes entry-level consultants. I learned that through pain at my own consultancy, trying to get people who’d spent a few years at Deloitte or Accenture to use Airtable instead of Excel. Finding talent to be ‘forward-deployed’ will require training, and the difficulty of that doesn’t change.
Texas Triangle
I’m going to hand the Selfie slot this week to Vivian Maier, so for my personal picture here is a group shot of a tour I co-led, visiting The Boring Company and Proto Town with a group of investors. People are increasingly bullish on the Texas Triangle, and that is for good reason. More to say here, but not today.
Weeklies: Selfie & Song
Selfie: Vivian Maier, Authenticity, OG Selfie Queen
Vivian Maier was a street photographer who worked as a nanny in Chicago. She took over 100,000 photographs but never showed them publicly. Her work was only discovered in 2007 at a storage locker auction and stunned the art world.
She pursued creativity on her own terms, outside institutions, without permission or validation. Her photos are deeply observant, attuned to gestures, social realities, and people others overlooked. Her self-portraits use reflections, shadows, and fragments rather than direct poses, showing a quiet, ongoing exploration of identity.
Vivian Maier inspires authenticity over recognition. A rare quality today and a sign of maturity.
Song of the Week: “What’s My Age Again?” by Blink 182
Here on YouTube. The band is running naked through town.
The working title for the song was originally “Peter Pan Complex,” which has a certain allure. Blink-182 and this song were popular, and it reminds me of a world and time that’s gone forever. Many Blink songs center on maturity.
I’ve been enjoying the rush of 40th birthdays recently. At the last one, the host facilitated a session where friends sat in a circle and shared their feelings. Tears were shed. Intimacies were revealed. Bonding occurred. Afterward, everyone put themselves back together with a hot shower and dressed up for a nice dinner. I’m absolutely on board for this activity.
During the ritual last weekend, I shared my biggest takeaway from hitting 40, which crystallized last year during a weekend T-Group workshop I attended.
Early on in the session, a guy who was a typical SF profile - ex-YC-founder, 10x engineer, cute guy, etc. - meekly asked what everyone’s impressions of him were.
So I told him straight: all of the above, but I was now surprised by his question, which seemed to indicate he lacked self-confidence and came across as insecure.
What his share prompted me to realize was that I didn’t care what anyone in the group thought of me, because I know who I am and believe I presented myself accurately. I’m happy with who I am and, yes, there is always work to do to be the best version of yourself, but (at least for me at 40) it’s not moving that much.
The implication thus is that I view relationships as a matching process rather than a convincing exercise. In this frame, you don’t have to prove your worthiness to the right people. They’ll get it. Or not. And if not, then you move on, and it’s fine. Great and better even.
After I expressed this view, half the people in the circle thought it was an ideal worth aspiring to. The other half found it threatening and upsetting because they believed I would deem them unworthy of my time.
On the Sunday morning of that weekend, I was feeling emotionally fatigued and still looking forward to another 8 hours in the T-group.
Someone said, “I didn’t think you’d come back.” But I did, and achieved the goal of being present and keeping an open mind.
You never get the full benefits of any process unless you see it to the end. Vipassana, T-Group, The Annapurna, a marathon, whatever. Just finish.
Thanks for reading, friends. Please always be in touch.
As always,
Katelyn
I'm reading The Way of the Gladiator by Daniel Mannix (most fun read of all time). And it's had me thinking - At the end of the day, all people really want is Circus Maximus (death, blood, sex, etc) - So it's no surprise that this now applies to the markets.