It’s Possible Only ONE Of These Amazing Stories Is Fiction March 8, 2026March 8, 2026 AND IT MAY NOT BE THIS ONE. FBI 302 Claim Trump Assaulted Teen Girl In Epstein File It seems ever less plausible that, after sending us Jesus, God sent us Trump. (See: US commanders say Trump “anointed by Jesus” to attack Iran.) FICTION, FOR SURE — AND MAYBE THE BEST SHORT STORY I EVER READ (Admittedly, I don’t read a lot of short stories.) The Last Question by Isaac Asimov . . . written in 1956! That was around the time (maybe a year before) a handful of us sixth graders were taken to an after-school workshop where we were each given a pegboard, some wire, switches and flashlight bulbs and shown how to make a computer that could add 1+1. The lesson — let alone the significance — was largely lost on me, but the teacher was really excited trying to explain the significance . . . and now, a few short decades later, boy, do I ever. I feel so fortunate to have grown up before so many of the astonishing things we now take for granted — before “Novocain,” before laparoscopic surgery, before the measles and polio vaccines (I contracted the measles and still remember my parents’ concern and care in my darkened little room; a couple of years later, just turning 8, I got the polio vaccine along with every other kid in New York) . . . before microwave ovens, air conditioning and jet planes . . . before Uber and on-demand commercial-free TV . . . and — mainly — before the Internet, GPS, A.I., and smart phones. So all those things remain astounding and marvelous to me. For better or worse, we all have Microvacs — in our pockets! Enjoy the story.
Leaving MAGA / More A.I. / Dreaming of Treble Damages March 7, 2026 JOBS . . . Apparently, ADP’s estimate of anemic gains I posted yesterday was wrong. February saw a loss of 92,000 jobs. And inflation? Trump constantly says he inherited “the worst inflation in history.” In fact, it was 2.7% and heading down. Now, with his tariffs and his war, it’s headed back up. The economy he inherited, he constantly says, was “a disaster.” In fact, it was the envy of the world. Now we face stagflation. He would end the war on Day One, he said (presumably by giving Ukraine to Putin). Instead, he started another one. Which might wind up achieving great things quickly, as I dearly hope it does. But some MAGAns are losing faith. Their lives have gotten harder even as, in a single year, he’s picked up $3 billion. (And could we please see an unredacted version of the 38,000 times he appears in the Epstein files? And the files that have not been released?) Leaving MAGA is gaining traction. I love these gentle billboards: “Having doubts? You’re not alone. Welcome home.” A.I. First I posted Matt Shumer’s scary must-read warning. Then I posted Alex Wissner-Gross‘ and Peter Diamandis‘ upbeat visionary (sci-fi?) view. In response to which one of you (with three M.I.T. degrees) — Howard R. — wrote to say: As to the lead author of the piece you posted yesterday, I have been following Dr. Alex for a while. He is definitely quite a visionary. I don’t mean that in a complimentary manner. But he is compelling. Amongst the mysterious claims he makes is that AI is going to eliminate want/limits on what we can have. I am always perplexed by this as there is only so much land out there to build on, only so much metal to make cars etc. In other words, he has AI as the ultimate silver bullet. If you read his list of distinctions in his CV it is a bit over the top (from the mundane to the amazing). Anyway, HERE IS MY POINT: He says that he graduated first in his class at MIT. Politely, it is not clear what he means by this, less politely it is a lie. MIT does not rank students in the graduating classes! (I know I went there.) I find Alex entertaining, but I have a lot of trouble separating possibility from impossibility with him. → This is all so over my head, but I know this much: A.I. is rapidly changing everything — and it’s just begun. Shumer’s piece really is must-reading. In the meantime, I find myself now using A.I. constantly. Trouble replacing my printer cartridge? A.I. instantly grasped the problem and offered a solution that no normal person would ever have come up with. (See the little white wheel on its side? It needs to be turned clockwise. Sometimes the factory ships it without doing that — and without any instructions telling you to do so. After several wasted hours — don’t ask — I turned to A.I., and a minute later was printing up a storm.) Have a medical question? With appropriate disclaimers, A.I. instantly addresses your concerns. Want to find a terrific speech you saw some V.C. legend give to a group of MBAs . . . but can’t remember his name? With the scantest of information, asking questions like, “do you remember there being a slide with concentric circles in his presentation?” . . . it found it! Yes, A.I. sometimes fails. It sometimes says things that are wrong. But it’s March of 2026. Imagine where it will be in a year. Let alone five. Humanity is entering an entirely new era. We need — urgently — to figure out (a) how to protect humanity from a superior species; (b) how to avoid economic catastrophe and, instead, harness A.I. for the benefit of all. I’m not certain that FOX News hosts, Mike Johnson, and Stephen Miller are the talent pool we should rely on to lead the way. YESTERDAY’S POST Stephen W.: “Been with you from the beginning. It’s been a great ride. In your first column you wrote, ‘for most of us it’s hard to remember that just 20 years ago ATMs barely existed.’ Now, 30 years later, it is hard to imagine who even uses cash aside from those involved in the underground economy? For me, I never carry it and the only time I use it is when I employ, shall we say, ‘small businesses,’ like plumbers, waiters, cleaners, mowers, etc. Here’s to another 30 years!!!” I’m game. PRKR One of “our” speculations — ParkerVision — has jury selection coming up in two weeks in a trial against MediaTek. Anything could happen, ranging from it’s all being just a big bust . . . to a last-minute settlement . . . to a small verdict in our favor . . . to a large verdict . . . to — conceivably — a large verdict with treble damages for “willfulness.” The outcome could foreshadow some of the several other pending cases further down the road. I asked Copilot for a list: another against MediaTek; three against RealTek; one against Texas Instruments; and, of course, the big kahuna . . . ParkerVision’s lawsuit against Qualcomm (with Apple and Samsung as co-defendants). In that one, if you ask this layman’s biased opinion, treble damages for willfulness are totally warranted. So there’s a lot here — or maybe nothing. If patience is a virtue, we’re all going to heaven.
Billions! How This Column Got Started. But first . . . March 6, 2026March 5, 2026 $10 IF YOU CAN NAME THE SECRETARY OF LABOR How’s this for a 30-second ad? In the blue wave that’s coming, Talarico could beat Paxton or Cornyn in Texas. Alex Vindman could win Florida. Mary Peltola will win Alaska. Scott Colom could win Mississippi. Roy Cooper will win North Carolina. Sherrod Brown will win Ohio. We will win Maine. We will win Iowa. And who knows — Montana? All of these would be flips. And there could even be others. Or not — but I’m all in to help make it happen. (On the off chance you have $5,000 to do something very cool in New York April 13, me-mail me.) So, Musk is out, but only after having done so much damage . . . and now Kristi Noem is out, but only after having done so much damage . . . and soon Pam Bondi and Kash Patel . . . and eventually Trump . . . will be out, but only after . . . And these are just the high-profile disasters. RFK. Jr. is another. But they’re everywhere. E.g., the Secretary of Labor. Do you know her name? Of course not. Here is former Labor Secretary Robert Reich to fill you in. THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE Here reimagined, with a ballroom large enough to seat all 935 of the country’s billionaires (though not their spouses, so they’ll have room to invite only the rich ones). JOE RICKETTS AND THOSE BILLIONAIRES Welcome to Wyoming, the Frontier of America’s New Gilded Age: A New York Times analysis shows the stunning velocity at which the fortunes of the 1 percent have increased since President Trump first took office in 2017. Across the country, the 2017 tax cuts minted hundreds of new billionaires. The richest Americans saw their net worth soar 120 percent between 2017 and 2025, a colossal leap from the 45 percent growth they had seen over the previous nine years. Many if not most of those billionaires are generous, honorable people — commentators too frequently neglect to mention that — contributing greatly to our society. They should, however, all join the Patriotic Millionaires and lobby for higher tax rates . . . . . . because (a) it is the patriotic (and moral) thing to do; (b) inequality is killing our social compact; and (c) so long as all their peers are competing by the same rules (they tend to be a competitive bunch), the game will still be fun! Once you have your first billion, after all, yes, you definitely want more (this dirtbag billionaire being the rare exception); but the truth is, you and your heirs will get by just fine even if loopholes are closed and tax rates hiked. The Times begins its piece with the story of Joe Ricketts, which is actually how this column began. (Here was the very first one, 30 years ago.) Now worth $8 billion (nothing compared to my friend Steve Schwarzman, credited in the piece with $45 billion, but still), Joe called me from a modest hotel room in midtown (the Sheraton?) and asked me to come talk about writing a daily column for the on-line discount brokerage firm he was launching. He was in from Nebraska putting it all together. “I’m sorry, but I’m a journalist,” I said (or words to that effect), “and it would be perceived as an endorsement. Journalists don’t do that.” “I understand,” he said, “but you’re right up the street. Come for half an hour and hear me out. It’s room 614 [or whatever].” I came with a list of requirements I knew he couldn’t accept. When I got to the room, the door was purposely ajar — he was on the phone, smoking a cigarette (little did he know) — and waved for me to come sit. When it was my turn, I explained that if I did the daily post he envisioned, every one of them would have to begin with a disclaimer that I didn’t endorse his firm and was, indeed, a “buy and hold” kind of guy — exactly not the kind of active trader he would most like to attract. To my surprise, he agreed. And agreed I could write about anything I wanted . . . that my columns would not be edited . . . that they could be as long or as short as I wanted (“Even just, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’?” I asked him. “Fine,” he said.) And a couple of other things, the only one of which he couldn’t accept was the preposterous daily fee I tossed out. “I can do half that much,” he said, which was still kind of crazy — and was what made me realize that he wasn’t paying for my work, he was paying for my photo in all the ads he planned to run the month of the launch. He really only needed me for a month! So in a rare moment of clarity I added a final requirement: that the contract be for three years. He agreed to that, too, and to his considerable credit honored the contract to the letter. Ameritrade (as it came to be called) — now Schwab — launched nicely; customers (of whom I remain one) saved fortunes on commissions and got good service; and for three years I wrote about everything from ATM’s (that very first post) to gay and lesbian equality (as it was then known) to lord knows what. As the three years were coming to a close, we agreed it would be insane for them to extend it, so I asked whether I could start my own little website (this one) and tell my readers where to find me. They graciously agreed, and I have been annoying you all ever since. (Interestingly, when I was being showered with cash, I didn’t always love the work — because it was work. Once I was doing it because I wanted to, not because I had to, I found myself putting in more effort and enjoying it more. Funny how that goes.) Anyway: Thanks, Joe Ricketts, for launching this column, and for providing great value and service to so many investors. But you really should knock everyone’s socks off and join the Patriotic Millionaires. That would be extraordinary. Same for you, Steve. Read Welcome to Wyoming. It just might persuade you.
A.I.: An Upbeat View March 5, 2026March 4, 2026 HEADLINE: Private companies added 63,000 jobs in February, January revised to just 11,000. OF NOTE: Since 1989, 96%, have been created under Democratic presidents. WHAT’S NEW: The A.I. tsunami described in that must-read Matt Shumer piece I posted last Thursday. (You read it, right?) Executive summary: A.I. and robots will eliminate most jobs. (See also: Jack Dorsey laying off more than 4,000 of his 10,000 employees, not because business was bad — it’s good — but because they’re not needed.) BUT WAAAAAAIT! Rob B.: “You might enjoy this upbeat treatise on the looming/at hand “Intelligence Explosion”. Fairly impressive CV of the lead author.“ Oh, wow: SOLVE EVERYTHING.ORG The following three scenarios are extrapolations based on the “Industrial Intelligence Stack” and the economic physics described in this essay. . . . We are dropping you directly into the deep end of the timeline to let you feel the texture of the acceleration. This is what it feels like when the exponential progress curve turns vertical. We are living in the vertical asymptote now. . . . The old guard is still holding press conferences about “AI safety guidelines” but the Rails are already winning. The shift is visceral. You can feel it in the panic of the boardrooms where the metric of survival has shifted overnight. . . . Agents aren’t just chatting anymore. They are executing. In a cluttered dorm room overlooking the Charles River, an MIT sophomore is currently out-competing a global defense prime. He just used a Compute Escrow account to rent a localized swarm of engineering agents. He didn’t write the code. He wrote the “intent.” He specified a new guidance system for orbital debris removal that handles trajectory optimization and collision avoidance simultaneously. The agents swarmed the problem, wrote the software, and most importantly generated a Replication Pack. This is a downloadable and cryptographically signed file proving that the code is bug-free and mathematically safe. This is a project that would have taken a government lab three years and fifty million dollars in 2024. He did it in four hours for the cost of a late-night pizza. . . . Hunger is now recognized as a logistical error rather than a resource limit. It’s LONG, and (obviously) speculative. But is it science fiction? If you start reading, it may just suck you in. And if you understand it all, you’re way smarter than me. But I get the gist. Rob B. also sent this entirely unrelated but dazzling rendition of House of the Rising Sun. Which led me down the rabbit hole to this equally unrelated but dazzling While My Guitar Gently Weeps. And since we’re all thinking the same thing, I saved you the trouble of finding the clip: “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.” Tomorrow: Isaac Asimov.
Mr. Popularity March 3, 2026 EACH CUP EQUALS $10,000,000! Three minutes to share with wavering MAGAns who might be starting to doubt. YOU KNOW WHO’S NOT AS POPULAR AS HE THINKS HE IS? That’s right. And this poll was taken weeks before it was known that he appears more than 38,000 times in the Epstein files (plus however many thousands more redacted and in the millions of files not yet released). Note that the two least popular leaders are: > A man about whom he never says an unkind word; > A man with whom he has exchanged love letters. Both, murderous dictators. His popularity among the world’s non-Americans (96% of all humans) is lower still. MORE PHONE SAVINGS Randy W.: “Here’s how WE have money we can afford to lose — Ting Mobile.” Even less expensive than the Noble Mobile I plugged yesterday. Indeed, a quick query to A.I. led me to Affordable Unlimited Data Plans Worth Switching To. The main takeaway: ask your A.I. for the pros and cons of leaving your current carrier. You’re likely to switch. THE NON-SURGEON GENERAL Mary from the Swarm: The Senate is preparing to vote on Casey Means for U.S. Surgeon General — and the stakes could not be higher. Multiple news outlets, including the Associated Press and The Guardian, report that Means does not hold an active medical license, is not board-certified, and does not plan to reactivate her license if confirmed. Instead of a background in public health leadership, she has built her profile as a wellness influencer and entrepreneur with financial ties to wellness and health-tech ventures, raising serious questions about conflicts of interest. During her confirmation hearing, she declined to clearly commit to promoting routine childhood vaccinations. At a time when measles outbreaks are resurging and public trust in health institutions is fragile, ambiguity from the nation’s top health official is dangerous. The Surgeon General must defend evidence-based care — not undermine it. And if you have time . . . > THE DRAPES OF WAR Charlie Sykes: So much here! > HOMELAND INSECURITY Rachel Maddow (audio only) — listen to the first 17 minutes about Kash Patel gutting the FBI’s elite Iran counter-terrorism unit, plus Pete Hegseth, plus Kristi Noem, guarding our homeland security. Join Indivisible! Support the opposition!
Save Money: Give Me $100 March 3, 2026March 2, 2026 SAVE MONEY I switched from AT&T to Andrew Yang’s Noble Mobile (which is really the T-Mobile 5G network) and have been saving more than $50 a month. You get unlimited talk, text, and data for $50 or less — and, if you use this link, your first month free. Then, if you’re happy and don’t cancel, they pay me $100. All this time you’ve wondered how I have so much money “I can truly afford to lose.” Now you know. DEMOCRACY VERSUS DICTATORSHIP Joyce Vance White: The first time President Obama met with his US Attorneys, he told us, “I appointed you but you don’t serve me. You serve the American people. And I expect you to act with independence and integrity.” None of us ever forgot that. His words meant the world to us, even at the time. Enough so that people wrote them down, kept them on their desks, and talked with people in their offices about what they meant, over and over. Imagine: an oath-allegiant, Constitution-respecting president. What a concept. A.I. Thursday, I posted Matt Shumer’s scary piece about the rapid — accelerating — pace of A.I. Professor Cal Newport argues that Shumer’s alarm was overdone: Has AI Changed Work Forever? Not Really (15 minutes). Yet maybe not that much overdone. Business Insider checked to see how smart people in tech are reacting to Matt Shumer’s viral essay about what AI means for jobs. Their reactions were varied but hardly dismissive. A friend at dinner said he has five people on his analytical team and is being encouraged daily by the higher ups to look for ways to use A.I. He recently asked A.I. to do something that would normally have taken one of his team three days to complete. A.I. did it in six minutes. He fears he may wind up having to let his team go . . . and that at some point his higher-ups will find a way to let him go. Yesterday, I posted Jack Dorsey’s letter letting more than 4,000 people go, nearly half his work force. As previously noted, we need — urgently — to figure out (a) how to protect humanity from a superior species; (b) how to avoid economic catastrophe and, instead, harness A.I. for the benefit of all. Not sure how to do (A). (B) is as simple as learning to get along with each other. “Isn’t it amazing,” Bill Clinton would frequently observe near the end of his presidency. “We’ve split the atom; we’ve landed men on the moon; we’re mapping the human genome” — now long-since mapped — “and yet the one challenge that’s eluded us is the oldest one of all: how to get along with each other.”
Two Things Can Be True At The Same Time March 2, 2026 For example: A.I. is little short of a miracle, infinitely useful. A godsend. <– True. A.I. will cause massive disruption, if not worse. <– Also true. (See below.) Or: The Trump regime is making us healthier. True, if you look solely at their encouragement of exercise and weight loss. The Trump regime is bringing back measles and has devastated medical research and slashed health care funding. Even more true (and a million times more important). And: Trump’s aggression may have wonderful results for Venezuelans, Cubans, and Iranians and maybe even for us, the Middle East, and the rest of the world. I certainly hope so. It’s great that the terrorism of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis has been dealt such a blow. Also true: Even if his actions do have wonderful results — and they may not — they are the actions of a dictator, not a president constrained by the rule of law and the Constitution. “He alone can fix it!” All hail! Gladiators on the South Lawn for his birthday! His face everywhere! It’s intoxicating. He’s the king of the world! (5 seconds) It’s exhilarating! (30 seconds). It’s not going to end well for him. Join Indivisible. Invite friend to join you for No Kings #3 March 28. Support the opposition. AI COLLAPSES THE ECONOMY Jack Dorsey writes to his 10,000 employees, 4,o00 of whom he’s letting go): today we’re making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we’re reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i’ll be straight about what’s happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you’re one of the people affected, you’ll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you’re being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we’ve done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we’ve pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we’ve built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we’re not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i’ll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i’d rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that’s a fact that i’ll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i’ll own it. what i’m asking of you is to build with me. we’re going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we’re going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that’s what i’m focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack HOW IT MIGHT LOOK IN 2028 A Thought Exercise in Financial History, from the Future by Citrini Research and Alap Shah Feb. 22, 2026 What if our AI bullishness continues to be right…and what if that’s actually bearish? What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction. The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored. . . . Hopefully, reading this leaves you more prepared for potential left tail risks as AI makes the economy increasingly weird. This is the Citrini Research Macro Memo from June 2028, detailing the progression and fallout of the Global Intelligence Crisis: The Consequences of Abundant Intelligence February 22nd, 2026 June 30th, 2028 The unemployment rate printed 10.2% this morning, a 0.3% upside surprise. The market sold off 2% on the number, bringing the cumulative drawdown in the S&P to 38% from its October 2026 highs. Traders have grown numb. Six months ago, a print like this would have triggered a circuit breaker. Two years. That’s all it took to get from “contained” and “sector-specific” to an economy that no longer resembles the one any of us grew up in. This quarter’s macro memo is our attempt to reconstruct the sequence – a post-mortem on the pre-crisis economy. The euphoria was palpable. By October 2026, the S&P 500 flirted with 8000, the Nasdaq broke above 30k. The initial wave of layoffs due to human obsolescence began in early 2026, and they did exactly what layoffs are supposed to. Margins expanded, earnings beat, stocks rallied. Record-setting corporate profits were funneled right back into AI compute. The headline numbers were still great. Nominal GDP repeatedly printed mid-to-high single-digit annualized growth. Productivity was booming. Real output per hour rose at rates not seen since the 1950s, driven by AI agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance. The owners of compute saw their wealth explode as labor costs vanished. Meanwhile, real wage growth collapsed. Despite the administration’s repeated boasts of record productivity, white-collar workers lost jobs to machines and were forced into lower-paying roles. When cracks began appearing in the consumer economy, economic pundits popularized the phrase “Ghost GDP”: output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy. In every way AI was exceeding expectations, and the market was AI. The only problem…the economy was not. . . . It goes on at length from there. How is humanity going to organize itself to harness all that’s good about A.I. without its destroying us? Should this be left to the Epstein class and Elon Musk to decide?
Operation Epstein Fury February 28, 2026February 28, 2026 TIMOTHY SNYDER: HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND THE WAR? [The] facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States. . . . Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies. . . . [W]e have multiple examples of this from both modern and ancient [history] . . . Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis. . . . [W]e are using military force to take the side of precisely the countries who have enriched Trump and his family. This backdrop must at the very least be stated in the reporting of the war. Along with the subversion of democracy, personal corruption provides a second interpretive framework. . . . This war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both. These are presumptions, not proof — but they provide the solid lines of inquiry as we learn more about the war. War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it. On the contrary, war provides the opportunity to see the core of the absurdity and the destruction that is being offered to us. OPERATION EPSTEIN FURY Rick Wilson’s take (19 minutes) as of 11am yesterday. (Co-founder of The Lincoln Project, Wilson is the former Republican operative who wrote Everything Trump Touches Dies.) THE RICH GET RICHER It’s not fair; but if you do happen to have a $5 million net worth, it may be of interest that the tiny Kentucky-based hedge fund that has been compounding my IRA at 15% a year for the past 18 years has recently re-opened to accept a new tranche of money. And — of possible relevance in these uncertain times — is truly hedged, unlike most “hedge” funds. Me-mail me if interested and I’ll have them tell you more. BELATED BONUS Jimmy Kimmel’s segment on Trump’s State of the Union. Funny and insightful.
Of Freedom And Pedophilia February 28, 2026February 27, 2026 If you missed yesterday’s post, I make bold to suggest you go back and read it. I think it may affect the way you think about your investments and, more broadly, the future. More on AI tomorrow. Today: FREEDOM Anne Applebaum: Europe Now Sees Us As A Danger (70 sobering seconds). It’s everything Putin could ask for. I can understand sacrificing countless lives fighting for freedom. We did that in 1776. We did it in World War II. We did it to free the slaves. As misguided as the Vietnam war was, we fought it not for conquest or oil revenue but to stop the spread of freedom-destroying communism. Fighting and dying for freedom is noble. Fighting and dying to subjugate others — as Putin is forcing his people to do while living like a king — is pure evil. How have we come to switch sides? We used to be (at least mostly, when we were at our best) on the side of freedom. Now we alienate our long-time allies, embrace dictators, shut down USAID, and change “Defense” to “War.” We used to be the good guys. I was so proud of that. PEDOPHILIA Similarly, both parties used to be against corruption, against vulgarity, against dishonesty, against incompetence, and — surely — against protecting pedophiles. Does the Republican Party really believe Hillary Clinton is the one they should be forcing to testify? As Andy Borowitz put it yesterday: In one of the greatest cases of mistaken identity since Donald Trump thought E. Jean Carroll was Marla Maples, House Republicans sent a subpoena to the wrong First Lady. Instead of Melania Trump, who spent untold hours with the child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, they summoned Hillary Clinton. They’d soon regret it. The former Secretary of State demolished Donald Trump and his GOP toadies during her closed-door interrogation on Thursday. This is the sort of coverage you won’t see when MAGA completes its takeover of CNN. With that in mind, here is Secretary Clinton’s amazing opening statement (I haven’t changed or cut a word). Every word worth reading. Can you imagine how different the world would be today if Trump and Putin had not succeeded in thwarting her bid for the presidency? Anyone who doesn’t believe Putin played a role in the hair-thin outcome should watch the first 2 minutes of this. OPRT On news of continued progress — Oportun Delivers Strong Fourth Quarter, Increases Net Income by $104 Million in Full Year 2025 — the stock closed down Friday. If I didn’t already own so much, I would buy more . . . though only with money I could truly afford to lose.
The Intelligence Explosion February 26, 2026February 26, 2026 A.I. is going to eliminate most jobs. That’s not news. (See, e.g., Andrew Yang’s 2018 best-seller, The War On Normal People.) We need — urgently — to figure out (a) how to protect humanity from a superior species; (b) how to avoid economic catastrophe and, instead, harness A.I. for the benefit of all.* What’s new is how fast it’s happening. Matt Shumer writes: . . . I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave. Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect. I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week. But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn’t just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter. The last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely. And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech . . . The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely. . . . [T]he gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing. Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. . . . Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that’s hardest to believe if you’re not watching it closely. In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54. By 2023, it could pass the bar exam. By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science. By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI. On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era. If you haven’t tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you. . . . Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.” Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started. You need to read this in full. He has suggestions on practical steps you should take right now. BONUS Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That. Since its peak last fall, Bitcoin has lost almost half its value. We have one question. What took so long? Worth reading in full. *Imagine if we could provide all the things humans actually need — food, shelter, clothing, health care, etc. — without having to work much at all. With largely-free energy from the sun powering automated factories and robots to do most of the physical work humans now do, and A.I. to do the rest. Leaving us free to pursue hobbies and passions and social interaction and, well, more or less anything we want. As some retirees already do. This raises myriad practical, political, and philosophical questions — none of them original with me. And a lot of questions about the best way to invest. All suggestions welcome.