ScienceIO has been acquired by Veradigm Together, we are going to build the intelligence provider for the future of healthcare.

from Thiel in the Free Press

it won’t happen but my favorite outcome to imagine from the AI decade is that strong AGI is achieved but due to a series of poorly negotiated debt agreements it’s owned entirely and exclusively by Apollo Global representing the interests of thousands of American retirees

if you write a good enough lesswrong post about how lenders repossessing data centers after default is actually an existential risk and massively increases the chance of unaligned private credit owned AGI I’m sure one of the labs would pay you a few billion a year at this point

you can learn everything you need to know about a city by seeing if its highest and best form is revealed when you bike it, or when you walk it. new york only makes sense on bike, it’s a horrible walking city. boston can only be walked. london is split balk/walk east/west

downstream of these ideas as well

“cyclonopedia” is a good on this, but it’s unbelievable how much the core of modern human activity is taking disordered energy out of the ground, ordering it, and finding increasingly large holes in the ground to put it back into so everyone gets rich

I don’t mean this derisively, this flywheel of high financialization has made the entire world wealthy, and made us equity holders unbelievably wealthy. it’s fundamentally a good thing. but you need to understand the tail is wagging the dog; all of human behavior is downstream

the fundamental drum beat is simple: a boutique high fee asset class emerges, and then the long march begins to expand from UHNW, to endowments, to soviergns, and finally to retail. along the way we go from simple equity to complex derivatives of the thing. then it restarts.

it’s easy to laugh at a venture platform putting a billion dollars into the ground behind some asinine software, but this is no different than when Apollo originates another trillion of float. every piece of human activity is now downstream of the origination of feeable dollars

until the trumpet blows and the sky rolls up like a scroll: “stocks go up” is a much more concrete and universal rule of the universal than gravity. I don’t think you all understand: as long as there’s a new capex trade that’s bigger than the last, this machine must continue

the essential function of the post-war global consensus is to make US equities go up. every government, big or small, has the same job: generating liquidity to financialize or finding places to put US dollars into the ground the business of the entire world is american business.

there’s a reason pharma r&d has been the Pascal’s wager arena for many emerging new technologies that are not independently economically viable “pharmabux” ignore the realities that 99% of the costs of a drug program are hardcore flesh and blood, they’re not computational

one of the load bearing fictions of the AI megacycle is that the fundamental constraint on pharma is “discovering new drugs” and that if you can help them “discover drugs” you’ll be able to demand billions pharma has too many candidates, they have no interest in finding more

the right and the left have different forms of this message— the left will enrich the downwardly mobile through spending, the right will through hacking down government spend— the message is the same. the way to grow wealth in this country is to gamble or take it from the state

hard to find other examples of a politician whose core message is that society can create upward mobility again both american parties have adopted the aesthetics and morals of their most downwardly mobile contingents— sports betting, welfare expansion, and crime

what’s the best truly banned book? not “1984” banned: I mean PDFs that are literally unprintable, truly esoteric and illegal knowledge

Napoleon's observation on war that morale is 75% of winning is one of the most important lessons for startup CEOs. (Morale should be understood broadly here -- it's something like "a sense of destiny".)

People across the country are getting ruined by insane health insurance premiums and wondering how they’ll get by. They are not wondering who is stopping us from solving this problem, but I will tell you that it is the AMA, which has hundreds of ideas for slowing down healthcare AI and none for making your life better as a working class family in America. While the titanic sinks they rearrange deck chairs opining about HIPAA

if you draw a line running from where we were 5 years ago, through where we are today, all the way out to 10 maybe 20 years from now. the economy will just be 100x perp futures and slot machines. bankruptcy will be trivial, the state will eat your debt and let you roll again

Maybe a very prosaic observation, but I've been reflecting on just how much the pandemic changed the world in ways that are completely unrelated to the pandemic itself. I think I've underestimated it 'till now. In a recent interview, I was struck by the comment that so many of the shops that we associate with the best of France—the poissonneries and the fromageries—closed during the pandemic, to be replaced by take-out pizza shops and the like. College professors almost uniformly describe big changes in student behavior: lecture attendance and willingness of students to complete reading assignments are both way down. A UK government official recently told me that British economic statistics have become much less reliable since the pandemic: data on trade, employment, and population is suspect. (The true GDP per capita figures are probably worse than what is indicated by the published data, since the 2021 census is believed to be an undercount.) In the West, there are far fewer bustling workplaces than there used to be. In recent conversation with a well-traveled friend, he bemoaned how so many cities—places like Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Bali—have lost so much of their erstwhile vibrant nightlife. Immigration accelerated enormously across many countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. In China, I hear descriptions of how fear, caution, and conservatism have persisted since the COVID lockdowns. (And Western travel to China remains massively depressed.) Lots of the changes are neutral, or even good. Retail participation in the US stock market almost doubled overnight, say, and has persisted at that elevated rate. Firm creation in the US increased by around 50%, which is probably a very good thing. Overall, the number of time series (either literal or figurative) that jumped discontinuously during COVID and then didn’t return to baseline is just very striking. Which are the best historical analogs? Are there any apart from major wars? I want to read this book!