when smarts are as cheap as sunshine

I’ve been burying you with investment material, including an analysis of the TIPs + oil portfolio I strapped on this week. There’s also a tail option piece to it that I’ll write about this coming week. Remember I share what I do for educational purposes only, and while the pieces are detailed, they also make for great seeds to put in an LLM for you to augment your learning by discussing the risk and execution with your favorite bot.

This is the epitome of random, but after I wrote my piece, I called 2 friends who run commodity funds before I executed the trades I laid out. Both of them told me that, independently, a couple of their trader friends who only reach out when something gets interesting raised the idea on the same day. I don’t independently know the people who reached out (one of them is both famous- he was played in a movie- and anonymous, so I know of this individual).

Both managers took it as a sign to look a bit closer.

In AI

I feel like I’m getting a big hug when my readers tagged me in the replies to this amazing post by Noah because this is the exact kind of wishlist item I wanted in Socrates 2026: how to use highlights

Noah hacked this together for ~$100:

Why the experience of AI feels so different between people

This puts some numbers on it.

I’ve said it in a number of posts this year, but I’m in the camp that you won’t recognize knowledge work as you’ve come to know it soon enough. I dislike fear as a marketing tactic, but I also think this is true. And if you feel FOMO, you are right to be rethinking how much of your work will be automated and what you would do to move up the value-creation chain in the role.

I’d be very concerned about any well-paying job that looks like a computer jockey, particularly if you can’t immediately name what makes you uniquely special at it.

This doesn’t even account for how much work will be outright commoditized or immediately copied. My friend Fonz was over this week and playtesting a game I’m developing called Market Maker.

If it’s any good, it will be instantly copied. It’s a discouraging thought, but there’s no point in lingering on such a helpless feeling. Instead, you have to identify and orient towards what stays scarce and therefore valuable in the future: trust and distribution. Plus costly signals, like spending time with people in person and all the things that come with that.

[And of course essential attributes like courage, reliability, and self-efficacy or discipline or whatever you want to call it. That thing where, when you need to get something done, you do it excellently and instill confidence amongst other high performers. In a way, I think this is just the plainest advice to give to a young adult. Point to someone who’s like that as a model for quality and tell the young adult that you must become someone who would have a similar reputation. Stick to your word and be accountable. This is what betting on yourself looks like.]