Nasim Taleb on the need for individual business failure

For the economy to be antifragile and undergo what is called evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile, exposed to breaking - evolution needs organisms (or their genes) to die when supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid reproduction when they are not as fit as someone else.  Accordingly, the antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility - and sacrifice - of the lower one.

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Now, by disrupting the model, as we will see, with bailouts, governments typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to require being saved in order to avoid contagion to other business.  This is the opposite of healthy risk-taking; it is transferring fragility from the unfit to the collective.

~ Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder, pp. 74-75

 

Steve Eisman on the AI ecosystem

I think about it like a chain.  So you've got Nvidia selling the chips.  Nothing wrong with selling chips.  You've got the hyperscalers buying the chips.  Nothing wrong if somebody buys the chips.  Where it starts to get squishy is something like 70% of AI revenue of the hyperscalers is just from OpenAI and Anthropic, and that's about 25% to 35% of their entire cloud revenue.  So basically, if you follow the entire chain down, the entire ecosystem is dependent on two companies - to say that they lose billions is a euphemism - and one of them I think is in trouble, which is OpenAI.

~ Steve Eisman, "Stock Picking in Difficult Times with George Noble," The Real Eisman Playbook, 16:40 mark, September 21, 2026 

 

Jacob Hornberger on how FDR provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

By now, the evidence overwhelmingly establishes that President Franklin Roosevelt wanted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to take place.  He desperately wanted to intervene in the war against Nazi Germany, but he faced a virtually insurmountable obstacle — the American people, most of whom firmly opposed U.S. entry into a second world war. 

Of course, this was during a time when presidents were still abiding by the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of a congressional declaration of war before a president could wage war against another nation-state.  FDR knew that he had virtually no chance whatsoever of securing such a declaration from Congress.

FDR knew that his only chance for getting the U.S. embroiled in World War II was to provoke Germany or Japan into attacking the United States.  In that case, he would be able to exclaim, “We’ve been attacked!  We’re innocent!  We were just minding our own business!  We have no choice but to defend ourselves!  Now, give me my declaration of war.” 

That’s what FDR’s oil embargo on Japan was intended to do — to provoke Japan into attacking the United States.  By preventing Japan from securing enough oil to fuel its war machine in China, FDR aimed to have Japan attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet so that Japan would have a free hand in securing oil in the Dutch East Indies without U.S. interference. 

When Japan attacked military ships at Pearl Harbor, FDR got what he wanted … and more.  Not only did he get his declaration of war against both Japan and Germany, he also got an aroused populace that immediately dropped its opposition to entry into World War II, rallied ’round the flag, and became enthusiastic supporters of the war. 

~ Jacob Hornberger, "Was 9/11 a New Pearl Harbor?," Power & Market, September 15, 2026

 

Dan Wang on the U.S. vs. China

I start my book, my very first paragraph, to say that Chinese and Americans are more alike than any other people...  They're the two great founts of entrepreneurial dynamism in the world.  It is Shenzhen and Silicon Valley that are inventing the future and not so much Europe and Japan any longer.  There's kind of a hustle energy, there's a hastiness... [25:30]

That's another similarity between the U.S. and China: They're often very future-oriented.  They have a sense of optimism, much more so than the Europeans who have a sense of optimism only about the past. [27:45]

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Maybe we can say that China right now has some of the control paranoia of the Soviet Union, some of the manufacturing excellence of Japan and some of the American entrepreneurial hustle.  You combine all of that and that is part of the reason that I think that China is going to be a pretty formidable power going forward.  [1:05:50]

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I think that China will not become anything like a cultural superpower in part because the engineers are so censorious.  They're so thin-skinned, they censor everything they can't understand, which is a lot.  If you take a look at a lot of aspects of cultural prediction, whether that is books, novels, films, China really has become much more constricted over the past 12 years of Xi's rule.  I think that China will not become anything like a big financial superpower in part because the control tendencies of the engineers is to impose a lot of capital controls and that makes it much more difficult for foreigners to want to hold RMB.  [1:10:20]

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I want the U.S. to be 20% more engineering and I want China to be 50% more lawerly.  I think that it would be amazing if the Chinese state actually respected the creative impulses of its own people... if individual rights would actually be respected.  [1:30:00]

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We can and should recognize both of these things, that repression can grow worse while technological dynamism grows richer.  I always feel myself that I have to fight this two-front war against people who think that China will collapse because of all the repression or that, because China's economic growth has been so impressive at lifting so many millions of people out of poverty, that gives the Communist Party a free pass on all of the sorts of violations that it has inflicted upon the people.  I think we can acknowledge both things are true, that the Communist Party has grown oppressive in more novel ways over the past 10 to 30 years; at the same time, it has grown richer and more technologically capable.  [1:37:20]

~ Dan Wang, "Dan Wang - The US vs China in the 21st Century," Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, October 16, 2025

 

The Wall Street Journal on Leopold Aschenbrenner’s meteoric rise

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s forecasts about the future of artificial intelligence earned him a cult following on the internet, where his investment firm’s routine regulatory filings are studied like scripture. 

The parabolic performance of his hedge fund has given the 24-year-old Aschenbrenner a fan club on Wall Street, too. 

Aschenbrenner had no professional investing experience when he launched his AI-focused firm, Situational Awareness, less than two years ago, with a few hundred million dollars. 

Prescient stock picks and whooshes of inflows have vaulted its assets under management to more than $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, approaching the size of Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square and Dan Loeb’s Third Point.

~ "The 24-Year-Old AI Wiz Who Counts Jane Street as an Investor," The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2026

 

 

Dwight D. Eisenhower on the costs of the arms race with the Soviet Union

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.  It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.  It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.  It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.  We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat.  We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people...  This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.  Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Chance for Peace" speech, April 16, 1953 

(Eisenhower delivered the address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. - broadcast nationwide - shortly after Joseph Stalin’s death and early in his presidency.  The passage highlights the human and economic costs of the arms race, comparing military spending to resources that could instead fund schools, power plants, hospitals, housing, and food.)

 

Kevin Duffy on the Austrian case for free trade

The Austrian (praxeological) method involves deductive reasoning, thought experiments, methodological individualism.  The only way to refute a logical argument is with better logic.  In trade, party A trades with B. Both do so because they benefit.  More accurately, because they expect to benefit.  Both expect to get more through the trade than they give up.  This doesn't mean in a week or a year neither will have regrets, but they do so because they expect to benefit. 

Now party C comes along and wants to interfere.  There are several problems: 

1. Knowledge - Does party C know something that A and B do not? 

2. Objectivity and altruism - Is party C above self-interest? 

3. Motive - By interfering, is party C benefiting at the expense of A and B?

4. Morality - What right does party C have to interfere?

Compounding this problem is that the state (a territorial monopolist on the use of force) acts as agent for party C.  It uses violence to interfere.  The state itself is not above self-interest; it has its own motives.  It benefits by being a broker in political favors.  Finally, there is the cost of maintaining the state, which is paid through violence (taxation). 

It's crystal clear who benefits from free trade (the people) and who benefits from attacking it (the state and special interests seeking protection and privileges).  This is where the intellectuals come in: They are needed in order to blind people to being fleeced.

~ Kevin Duffy